4 ms·

The whole "computers can do anything" theme in the original post and the comments is borderline retarded and describing a mythical state always one or two decad

by sqldba 10y ago

The whole "computers can do anything" theme in the original post and the comments is borderline retarded and describing a mythical state always one or two decades in the future. Teaching a computer to do anything is fucking HARD. And most of the time the problems are just unsolvable. Sure you see cool demos like one that can cook for you. That shit is awesome. So uhhh... where are they? They're demos and proofs of concept, so expensive, require maintenance and programmers (gasp!). Don't except to see real ones mass produced and taking over for a good 30-40-50 years. We can do a lot with computers and automation but IMHO every article that starts with, "If you don't agree then you're an idiot" is immediately sitting on a faulty foundation.

edblarney 10y ago
Ya. Whenever anyone talks about 'the singularity' (i.e. computer consciousness) I usually respond with "get your bot to make me a goddam ham sandwich and clean my toilet!" - then we can talk! But let's avoid calling people 'retarded', eh :)
- freehunter 10y ago
  Of course a robot could do those things. Those are very easy things to do. The problem is, you wouldn't want to pay thousands of dollars for a robot to make you a sandwich or clean your toilet because those are things you can easily do yourself for free. And there's no economy of scale to offset the cost, because it's just doing it for only you. How about "get your bot to build my microprocessors" or "get your bot to route my package through a warehouse" or "get your bot to weld a car"? There you can get robots to do amazing things, and they can cost whatever the company wants to charge because those robots are making money. If a robot can build a modern CPU, it could clean your toilet. That's not the problem. Even still, there are household robots that are fairly common. I've got one running upstairs right now. It's called a Roomba.
  - Cybiote 10y ago
    Making a sandwich or cleaning a toilet is certainly not an easy thing to do. Getting a robot that can understand a scene, any scene and plan motions within it has been very difficult to do. Far more difficult than playing Go at a superhuman level for example. This is known by various names, with one common being the Moravec Paradox. The problem of energy storage further multiplies this difficulty.
    - freehunter 10y ago
      I think we're getting confused on the definition of how the robot accomplishes its task. To clean a toilet like a human would, yeah that's difficult. To clean a toilet like a robot would, it's not. A toilet cleaning robot would have a spinning brush like a drill and would circle the bowl of the toilet a couple of times. Really, really easy thing to do. If a Roomba can clean my entire house, not fall down the stairs, and find its way back to its dock by itself, you can put it on stilts and attach a spinning brush to the bottom and let it find the toilet. Likewise for a sandwich, if the meat and cheese and bread are all in robot-compatible forms, it's just layering them together. Not much more complicated than a printer that can pull from multiple paper trays. You can even combine the two for maximum efficiency. What's hard is making a robot behave like a human, because even humans struggle at behaving like a human. IMO there's no purpose to making a robot have the same physical constraints as a human. Our bodies are pretty shitty when you think about it. Robots can be much more elegant. If you don't think there are sandwich-making robots that actually exist, I'd wonder how you think gas station ham sandwiches are made. Hint: it's a conveyor belt that drops bread, then cheese, then ham, then more bread. That's a robot that makes sandwiches. I'd sell you one for $1m, but you'd probably say "I can make my own for free, thank you!"
      - gregpilling 10y ago
        Here you go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPTwpLIpDWE&t=8s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPTwpLIpDWE&t=8s
      - adwn 10y ago
        > A toilet cleaning robot would have a spinning brush like a drill and would circle the bowl of the toilet a couple of times. But that robot can't refill its consumables, it can't mop up the floor, and it can't deal with the mess after your semi-demented grandpa missed half the bowl. This solution is useful for a large rest stop with a dozen toilettes and thousands of customers per day (and employees that do the above tasks), and utterly useless for your own home. > IMO there's no purpose to making a robot have the same physical constraints as a human. Our bodies are pretty shitty when you think about it. Robots can be much more elegant. Our bodies have a huge advantage: they are incredibly flexible, and surprisingly strong for their dexterity. No robot we have ever built even comes close. You can have lots of robots in your home (Roomba, toilet bowl cleaner, dish washer, sandwich maker, a kitchen machine, uuh, is there anything else you can automate?) and you'll still need a human doing a lot of work. Or you can have a single human working half-time in your home, and you don't need a single robot. Give me a robot that can do 90% of all household chores, and I'm sold.
  - edblarney 10y ago
    "Of course a robot could do those things. Those are very easy things to do. " Sorry, but no. Very, very hard. + Find my fridge + Open it + Find the meat + Find the bread + Open the mayo + Get a knife + Spread it etc. etc. etc. Even if you do it 'the machines way' it's extremely difficult. No way. Not for quite a while. Much harder than 'driving a car'. Without proving it directly - let me do it indirectly: Factories would love to have robots with such intelligence and dexterity. It's definitely worth '10's of thousands of dollars' per machine to do that. If machines could do that ... even Chinese labourers would be out of a job. We can barely make robotic arms that 'hold stuff' of any weight reasonably without getting out of balance. Go ahead and look at industrial grade robot-arms - you'll see these powerful steel machines - max load: 5 lbs (!). McDonald's would be having robots prep your burgers - even ina a controlled/machine setting - and they don't do it - because it's a ways off. There are so many issues with that one, it's a long way off.
    - gregpilling 10y ago
      If you get to do it "the machines way", then you get this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPTwpLIpDWE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPTwpLIpDWE I agree with the idea that we are 20 years away from a walking talking robot. One that could find the fridge, figure out which mayo is the good one, and which mayo has gone bad. The get the right ham, not the crap the kids like, and find the knives. Where are all the knives? And then put the stuff away, so nobody complains later.... I own 2 welding robots.(Miller-Panasonic Prefab Welding Cell) They are time consuming to program, and you do have to 'touch up' the program all the time. They are both 7 axis machines, with the capability of running another 13 axis each. The complexity of a setup is much much higher than a self driving car, which has go/stop/left/right as possible inputs. A self drive car is only 2 axis of movement. In order to deal with 900 types of sandwiches in another factory, humans are used, not machines . http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/sandwich-factory-workers-make-three-5844492 http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/sandwich-factory-worker... . They don't do it because they like paying humans. It is too complex to handle the high mix of products (900 sandwich types) for automation.
      - adwn 10y ago
- Animats 10y ago
  Ham sandwich. That would be Item #130001 from Integrated Food Services.[1] "Today IFS and their affiliates own and operate a state-of-the-art facility which includes two USDA processing plants, a wholesale bakery and a dry warehouse which total over 100,000 square feet on five acres. We are located in the greater Los Angeles area, almost equidistant from downtown, LAX and the Port of Los Angeles." Most of the prepackaged sandwiches in Southern California come from those plants. Here's an automated sandwich assembly line.[2] [1] http://integratedfoodservice.com http://integratedfoodservice.com [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8D9YE26QEs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8D9YE26QEs
  - asdfasdfa11112 10y ago
    Interesting point, I hadn't realized there were manufacturing/assembly lines for food. Makes sense. Do you think it's likely we'll see robots making high quality goods like this, or will they always be commoditized and (my opinion) fully disgusting? Robots clearly do well with mechanical items like cars. There doesn't seem to be any immediate reasons they can't make an artisan sandwich. Maybe it's a limitation of ingredient spoilage / exposure to air during the process? Curious what you think -- will robots making food continue to be McDonalds level, or will we have good food coming from machines?
j2bax 10y ago
Having worked at Mcdonalds in college I'm fairly certain that automation of food service would not be a major hurdle. I felt like a robot in that job.

by sqldba 10y ago

edblarney 10y ago

Ya. Whenever anyone talks about 'the singularity' (i.e. computer consciousness) I usually respond with "get your bot to make me a goddam ham sandwich and clean my toilet!" - then we can talk! But let's avoid calling people 'retarded', eh :)

freehunter 10y ago
Of course a robot could do those things. Those are very easy things to do. The problem is, you wouldn't want to pay thousands of dollars for a robot to make you a sandwich or clean your toilet because those are things you can easily do yourself for free. And there's no economy of scale to offset the cost, because it's just doing it for only you. How about "get your bot to build my microprocessors" or "get your bot to route my package through a warehouse" or "get your bot to weld a car"? There you can get robots to do amazing things, and they can cost whatever the company wants to charge because those robots are making money. If a robot can build a modern CPU, it could clean your toilet. That's not the problem. Even still, there are household robots that are fairly common. I've got one running upstairs right now. It's called a Roomba.
- Cybiote 10y ago
  Making a sandwich or cleaning a toilet is certainly not an easy thing to do. Getting a robot that can understand a scene, any scene and plan motions within it has been very difficult to do. Far more difficult than playing Go at a superhuman level for example. This is known by various names, with one common being the Moravec Paradox. The problem of energy storage further multiplies this difficulty.
  - freehunter 10y ago
    I think we're getting confused on the definition of how the robot accomplishes its task. To clean a toilet like a human would, yeah that's difficult. To clean a toilet like a robot would, it's not. A toilet cleaning robot would have a spinning brush like a drill and would circle the bowl of the toilet a couple of times. Really, really easy thing to do. If a Roomba can clean my entire house, not fall down the stairs, and find its way back to its dock by itself, you can put it on stilts and attach a spinning brush to the bottom and let it find the toilet. Likewise for a sandwich, if the meat and cheese and bread are all in robot-compatible forms, it's just layering them together. Not much more complicated than a printer that can pull from multiple paper trays. You can even combine the two for maximum efficiency. What's hard is making a robot behave like a human, because even humans struggle at behaving like a human. IMO there's no purpose to making a robot have the same physical constraints as a human. Our bodies are pretty shitty when you think about it. Robots can be much more elegant. If you don't think there are sandwich-making robots that actually exist, I'd wonder how you think gas station ham sandwiches are made. Hint: it's a conveyor belt that drops bread, then cheese, then ham, then more bread. That's a robot that makes sandwiches. I'd sell you one for $1m, but you'd probably say "I can make my own for free, thank you!"
    - gregpilling 10y ago
      Here you go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPTwpLIpDWE&t=8s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPTwpLIpDWE&t=8s
    - adwn 10y ago
      > A toilet cleaning robot would have a spinning brush like a drill and would circle the bowl of the toilet a couple of times. But that robot can't refill its consumables, it can't mop up the floor, and it can't deal with the mess after your semi-demented grandpa missed half the bowl. This solution is useful for a large rest stop with a dozen toilettes and thousands of customers per day (and employees that do the above tasks), and utterly useless for your own home. > IMO there's no purpose to making a robot have the same physical constraints as a human. Our bodies are pretty shitty when you think about it. Robots can be much more elegant. Our bodies have a huge advantage: they are incredibly flexible, and surprisingly strong for their dexterity. No robot we have ever built even comes close. You can have lots of robots in your home (Roomba, toilet bowl cleaner, dish washer, sandwich maker, a kitchen machine, uuh, is there anything else you can automate?) and you'll still need a human doing a lot of work. Or you can have a single human working half-time in your home, and you don't need a single robot. Give me a robot that can do 90% of all household chores, and I'm sold.
- edblarney 10y ago
  "Of course a robot could do those things. Those are very easy things to do. " Sorry, but no. Very, very hard. + Find my fridge + Open it + Find the meat + Find the bread + Open the mayo + Get a knife + Spread it etc. etc. etc. Even if you do it 'the machines way' it's extremely difficult. No way. Not for quite a while. Much harder than 'driving a car'. Without proving it directly - let me do it indirectly: Factories would love to have robots with such intelligence and dexterity. It's definitely worth '10's of thousands of dollars' per machine to do that. If machines could do that ... even Chinese labourers would be out of a job. We can barely make robotic arms that 'hold stuff' of any weight reasonably without getting out of balance. Go ahead and look at industrial grade robot-arms - you'll see these powerful steel machines - max load: 5 lbs (!). McDonald's would be having robots prep your burgers - even ina a controlled/machine setting - and they don't do it - because it's a ways off. There are so many issues with that one, it's a long way off.
  - gregpilling 10y ago
    If you get to do it "the machines way", then you get this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPTwpLIpDWE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPTwpLIpDWE I agree with the idea that we are 20 years away from a walking talking robot. One that could find the fridge, figure out which mayo is the good one, and which mayo has gone bad. The get the right ham, not the crap the kids like, and find the knives. Where are all the knives? And then put the stuff away, so nobody complains later.... I own 2 welding robots.(Miller-Panasonic Prefab Welding Cell) They are time consuming to program, and you do have to 'touch up' the program all the time. They are both 7 axis machines, with the capability of running another 13 axis each. The complexity of a setup is much much higher than a self driving car, which has go/stop/left/right as possible inputs. A self drive car is only 2 axis of movement. In order to deal with 900 types of sandwiches in another factory, humans are used, not machines . http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/sandwich-factory-workers-make-three-5844492 http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/sandwich-factory-worker... . They don't do it because they like paying humans. It is too complex to handle the high mix of products (900 sandwich types) for automation.
    - adwn 10y ago
Animats 10y ago
Ham sandwich. That would be Item #130001 from Integrated Food Services.[1] "Today IFS and their affiliates own and operate a state-of-the-art facility which includes two USDA processing plants, a wholesale bakery and a dry warehouse which total over 100,000 square feet on five acres. We are located in the greater Los Angeles area, almost equidistant from downtown, LAX and the Port of Los Angeles." Most of the prepackaged sandwiches in Southern California come from those plants. Here's an automated sandwich assembly line.[2] [1] http://integratedfoodservice.com http://integratedfoodservice.com [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8D9YE26QEs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8D9YE26QEs
- asdfasdfa11112 10y ago
  Interesting point, I hadn't realized there were manufacturing/assembly lines for food. Makes sense. Do you think it's likely we'll see robots making high quality goods like this, or will they always be commoditized and (my opinion) fully disgusting? Robots clearly do well with mechanical items like cars. There doesn't seem to be any immediate reasons they can't make an artisan sandwich. Maybe it's a limitation of ingredient spoilage / exposure to air during the process? Curious what you think -- will robots making food continue to be McDonalds level, or will we have good food coming from machines?

j2bax 10y ago

Having worked at Mcdonalds in college I'm fairly certain that automation of food service would not be a major hurdle. I felt like a robot in that job.