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Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

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Re: Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

#81

Post by redisman »

guerrilla wrote: post #76
foogazi wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did that happen when washing machines became available? Everyone owns washing machines now - people just move on to do other things

Washing machines didn't eliminate all demand for labor. It was pretty niche like most applications so far. And yeah, most of the world still doesn't have them, so those positive feedback loops have been there the whole time.

And if your town doesn’t have washing machines, they sure as heck aren’t going to have 100x more expensive robots

Re: Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

#82

Post by caskstrength »

ModernMech wrote: post #71
nbardy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone is going to build the robots. You have gall to suggest seizing them all. It would require lots of violence and force.

Yes, I agree the people who build the robots should share in the wealth of the things they create. I said nothing about seizing or violence. I said democratic ownership. That would be a process of everyone coming together and agreeing on how things work.

> Yes, I agree the people who build the robots should share in the wealth of the things they create.

Good! I hope you also agree share people who actually produce the goods are entitled to bigger share?

> I said nothing about seizing or violence. I said democratic ownership. That would be a process of everyone coming together and agreeing on how things work.

I assume "people who create robots" will be tiny minority, so what you are describing is exactly what OP said: bunch of people who create nothing vote to seize the robots (from their creators) and redistribute it (to themselves). All through democratic means, of course!

Re: Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

#83

Post by nbardy »

ModernMech wrote: post #71
nbardy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone is going to build the robots. You have gall to suggest seizing them all. It would require lots of violence and force.

Yes, I agree the people who build the robots should share in the wealth of the things they create. I said nothing about seizing or violence. I said democratic ownership. That would be a process of everyone coming together and agreeing on how things work.

How do you get from an individual owning something to everyone owning it?

You have to take it from the individual.

Re: Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

#84

Post by Spoom »

howaboutnope wrote: post #8
epberry wrote: post #6

How can you not think this is great? Freeing humans from menial tasks is the way forward. Remember when people (mostly women) would spend hours washing? Machines and automation freed them.

> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality. -- Stephen Ha…

Manna[1] is a good short story that talks about these two potential futures. I agree that in particular, it seems more likely that the unemployment welfare hellscape might be more likely, unfortunately.

1. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

Re: Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

#85

Post by falcolas »

willis936 wrote: post #59
falcolas wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automation solves problems that can be addressed by people in poverty. Automation funnels that money away from people in poverty to property owners. There is no support today, nor is any on the horizon, for people poised to be displaced by automation (in the US). Combine all of these, and you're going to end up with a class of people with an inability to meet their basic needs, and with no support from the government…

Then those are problems to solve with social policy. Solving poverty by walking technology backwards isn't a solution. Technology is too powerful. Whichever society would be the first to renounce technology would also be the last because everyone else would say "Oh, that's why we like washing machines and self-driving cars". And let's just say we lived in a unified society somehow. The net suffering of all peoples co…

Automation is here. The policies aren't. There's no reasonable policies anywhere on the horizon.

The problem is going to hit us all in the face soon, no matter how much we shout "but social policies will fix it" from the rooftops.

Re: Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

#86

Post by airstrike »

amelius wrote: post #42
lnsru wrote: post #22

I wish, we will not create world with robots as shown in movie Elysium. I wish we could create a world with universal basic income where warehouse slaves are replaced with robots and people can do something better than picking orders in constant fear of being too slow.

Sadly, unlike technology our social structures will never advance.

I'd say we've come a long way from chiefdom

Re: Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

#87

Post by falcolas »

FredPret wrote: post #73
falcolas wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automation solves problems that can be addressed by people in poverty. Automation funnels that money away from people in poverty to property owners. There is no support today, nor is any on the horizon, for people poised to be displaced by automation (in the US). Combine all of these, and you're going to end up with a class of people with an inability to meet their basic needs, and with no support from the government…

Remove all automation we already have and civilization goes to zero immediately. We already have a ton of automation. And yet, the jobless rate is at record lows, despite the pandemic.

Basic unemployment rates are at 4.6%, which is not an all time low. A 20 year low would be Oct '19, which was 3.5%

Also, if you dig beyond the basic rates (for example, into the "not in the labor force, but want to be"), you will see that it's around 6M, whereas the 20 year low is closer to 4M.

I'm not advocating for removing automation. I'm warning that rolling out the automation of even more jobs is going to cause societal problems. Perhaps I'm hoping the right person will read this and start doing something about it, since I'm not that person.

https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...

Re: Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

#88

Post by FredPret »

falcolas wrote: post #87
FredPret wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remove all automation we already have and civilization goes to zero immediately. We already have a ton of automation. And yet, the jobless rate is at record lows, despite the pandemic.

Basic unemployment rates are at 4.6%, which is not an all time low. A 20 year low would be Oct '19, which was 3.5% Also, if you dig beyond the basic rates (for example, into the "not in the labor force, but want to be"), you will see that it's around 6M, whereas the 20 year low is closer to 4M. I'm not advocating for removing automation. I'm warning that rolling out the automation of even more jobs is going to cause…

The point is it’s not 99%, even though 99% of the population from 100 years ago would be unemployable today due to automation. Technology and culture change each other

Re: Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

#89

Post by yourapostasy »

lnsru wrote: post #70
yourapostasy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A current fully-automated restaurant uses 46 different types of robots [1], costs $29M USD [2] to deliver a 600 seat venue serving a 200 dish repertoire. The opex costs on that alone are going to draw out the capex payback quite a bit, before even getting into how the startup cost was around 5-10X conventional restaurants' startup costs. There isn't a Moore's Law for robots and their opex costs that lets us wait arou…

I can only speculate, but the 40 robots does not like to cost more than $4M: https://cobotsguide.com/2016/06/universal-robots/ The software can be reused in 2nd restaurant reducing the cost dramatically. And then buying another 10 set of robots reduce unit cost by another ~30%.

In the video, they showed a conveyor system with lots of elevator stations, and pull-up dumb waiter stations. Conveyor systems with precise controls like that in general get spendy in a BIG hurry. I also see they don't show how the cleaning robots work; that would be news to me if there is a generalized cleaning robot that does as well as a fast food bus person. I can believe a huge chunk of change was dropped on real estate alone, but there were some pretty specialized robots in that video instead of the universal robots you were pricing out.

I'd like the pricing story to change, as I know a ton of households would pay for a general cleaning robot for their homes.

Re: Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

#90

Post by true_religion »

guerrilla wrote: post #76
foogazi wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did that happen when washing machines became available? Everyone owns washing machines now - people just move on to do other things

Washing machines didn't eliminate all demand for labor. It was pretty niche like most applications so far. And yeah, most of the world still doesn't have them, so those positive feedback loops have been there the whole time.

Robots are just portable computers with hands. They will not eliminate all demand for labor anytime soon.
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