5 ms·

I think your analysis is based on shallower automation than we'll actually see. Let's assume your robot arm example is about a frycook at a burger joint. I agr

I think your analysis is based on shallower automation than we'll actually see. Let's assume your robot arm example is about a frycook at a burger joint. I agree a robot arm isn't an effective way to replace the frycook, but a specialized system like Momentum Machines is developing[1] will be. The automated fast food joint isn't a regular one with robot arms instead of people, it's a box the size of a small office that takes raw ingredients from a stockpile inside of it and creates fully assembled burgers, fries, chicken strips, and onion rings without any human interaction. Automation hardware will strike a middle ground between specialization and reuse. Eg the deep fryer will be able to cook several different meals, but it will still only have 1-2 degrees of freedom for putting stuff in and taking it out. Similar story for the grilling surface, veggie chopping system, and the plating / packaging mechanism. This is much cheaper, faster, and more reliable than truly general purpose robot arms. More importantly though, it takes dramatically less space than a conventional restaurant, so you can plop your company's food-making-box down in Times Square and actually make a profit, while everyone else is stuck four blocks away to break even on the real estate. The stories will be different in different sectors, but in general I think the coming automation wave is a bunch of quantitative changes coming together to form qualitative ones like this. You could probably build a burger-maker a decade ago too, but the hardware and design know-how necessary have gotten orders of magnitude cheaper and more abundant, and so now it's actually happening. [1]: http://momentummachines.com/ http://momentummachines.com/

robalfonso 10y ago
I keep telling people the Mcdonalds of the future isn't going to be the same large box with robots running around - it will be much smaller, because robots can use every inch of the kitchen area unlike humans. I think this also has some interesting implications for real estate long term - if every mcdonalds needs 50% of the space they currently occupy over time that real estate will be put back in the market, multiply that by every organization doing that and it has some follow in implications that I can't forsee but find very interesting.
- K0SM0S 10y ago
  Very true, never thought of it this way. Add to that the fact that robots don't have the same needs (can operate with little air/heat/light, don't even need to get out of the room, much less safety concerns in general and practically 0% comfort). You could build kitchens in basements or beneath roofs and save 100% of the floor surface for customers.
  - abakker 10y ago
    You could also have much better safety systems - I.e. total oxygen evacuation for grease fires. No need to worry about people getting hurt. In fact, you might be able to make food in a 100% neutral environment (N2?) and have no fire risk at all. Then, you can use closed-loop air filtration and not exhaust grease and combustion byproducts into the atmosphere. OTOH, the nice dining experiences will be done by people who can improvise and improve day-to-day based on their own tastes. eventually, the stuff people do will be the "good" stuff, and the stuff robots do will be the "bad" stuff. Hopefully. A more negative viewpoint says that robots will do the "high value" stuff and the people will only do the "low value" bad stuff.
    - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      No need for total oxygen evacuation. You actually just have to drop oxygen content in the air down from 21% to 15% to make most substances (including oil and grease) inflammable, and this air is perfectly safe to breathe for humans. In fact, if you consider the partial oxygen pressure (which is what matters for your lungs), this air is no worse than the air you find inside an airplane, or at a 2500m (8200 ft) mountain peak; Wikipedia says 140 million people live permanently at above 2500 m. Now, this already exists and is called a hypoxic air fire prevention system, and is used e.g. in some data centers and in archives of valuable documents. It's not used in fast food restaurants though, because they have better ways of preventing and extinguishing fires at lower cost.
      - microcolonel 10y ago
        By the way, "inflammable" is a synonym of "flammable". Try non-flammable, or "no longer flammable at that level".
K0SM0S 10y ago
I think the biggest change, functionally, between past automation and today's going forward is the actual ability of the system to "know" what it is doing and correct/adjust accordingly. We're moving past "dumb" automation essentially, and from a historical (technology) perspective it's every bit as fascinating as we'd hoped it to be, and then some. I mean, real-time voiced-over translation on Skype? Eventually even mimicing the other person's voice? Yes please! All thanks to this shallow form of AI that Nick Bostrom coined as "artificial narrow intelligence" (as opposed to "general" intelligence, i.e. human-like; and "superior" beyond ours). It's becoming possible for businesses of all kinds and all trades, thanks to the drastic cost reduction of deep learning since we moved these tasks to GPUs (and these bad boys keep improving at +25% performance per generation roughly every 18 month). And what AI does, sometimes is order of magnitude better than what any human individual/team could do (think Spotify's recommendations, anything with "big data" and "subjectivity" in it). Which leads to the same conclusion as your last sentence.
- kmicklas 10y ago
  > order of magnitude better than what any human individual/team could do (think Spotify's recommendations It's orders of magnitude more scalable but you're music nerd friend will beat Spotify's recommendations any day.
semi-extrinsic 10y ago
So I looked at Momentum Machines. First of all, as you say it's completely unrelated to AI, all the technology is decades old. I'm not sure I'm buying that the hardware and design knowhow is so much cheaper today; people started seriously automating car production lines back in the 1960's, so I can't see how this would've been orders of magnitude more expensive in the 1990's when the tech had matured for 30 years. Second of all, following their links we find that in 2012 they had a full scale machine built that had a 95% success rate, and they projected 11 months until they could launch the concept in a restaurant. What has happened since? No word, AFAICT. Happy to be corrected if I missed it somewhere and they have actually launched. But otherwise, it doesn't exactly convince me this is "the next industrial revolution" if they can't polish out that last 5% of a single-purpose burger-making machine in almost half a decade.
- nickparker 10y ago
  Yeah I don't know what they're up to. I've used them as a useful shorthand example for automation for awhile, but you're right I should perhaps find a new one because they seem to be in some sort of limbo, crunchbase has nothing after their seed funding. A more concrete if less evocative example is Amazon's warehouse automation. Relatively simple robots with 3 DOF (2D planar movement + a container jack) are wiping out enormous numbers of jobs, both in obvious immediate effects (less fulfillment center jobs) and by decimating conventional retail. edit: Momentum still has 19 employees on LinkedIn, so they're not completely dead it seems.

robalfonso 10y ago

I keep telling people the Mcdonalds of the future isn't going to be the same large box with robots running around - it will be much smaller, because robots can use every inch of the kitchen area unlike humans. I think this also has some interesting implications for real estate long term - if every mcdonalds needs 50% of the space they currently occupy over time that real estate will be put back in the market, multiply that by every organization doing that and it has some follow in implications that I can't forsee but find very interesting.

K0SM0S 10y ago
Very true, never thought of it this way. Add to that the fact that robots don't have the same needs (can operate with little air/heat/light, don't even need to get out of the room, much less safety concerns in general and practically 0% comfort). You could build kitchens in basements or beneath roofs and save 100% of the floor surface for customers.
- abakker 10y ago
  You could also have much better safety systems - I.e. total oxygen evacuation for grease fires. No need to worry about people getting hurt. In fact, you might be able to make food in a 100% neutral environment (N2?) and have no fire risk at all. Then, you can use closed-loop air filtration and not exhaust grease and combustion byproducts into the atmosphere. OTOH, the nice dining experiences will be done by people who can improvise and improve day-to-day based on their own tastes. eventually, the stuff people do will be the "good" stuff, and the stuff robots do will be the "bad" stuff. Hopefully. A more negative viewpoint says that robots will do the "high value" stuff and the people will only do the "low value" bad stuff.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    No need for total oxygen evacuation. You actually just have to drop oxygen content in the air down from 21% to 15% to make most substances (including oil and grease) inflammable, and this air is perfectly safe to breathe for humans. In fact, if you consider the partial oxygen pressure (which is what matters for your lungs), this air is no worse than the air you find inside an airplane, or at a 2500m (8200 ft) mountain peak; Wikipedia says 140 million people live permanently at above 2500 m. Now, this already exists and is called a hypoxic air fire prevention system, and is used e.g. in some data centers and in archives of valuable documents. It's not used in fast food restaurants though, because they have better ways of preventing and extinguishing fires at lower cost.
    - microcolonel 10y ago
      By the way, "inflammable" is a synonym of "flammable". Try non-flammable, or "no longer flammable at that level".

K0SM0S 10y ago

I think the biggest change, functionally, between past automation and today's going forward is the actual ability of the system to "know" what it is doing and correct/adjust accordingly. We're moving past "dumb" automation essentially, and from a historical (technology) perspective it's every bit as fascinating as we'd hoped it to be, and then some. I mean, real-time voiced-over translation on Skype? Eventually even mimicing the other person's voice? Yes please! All thanks to this shallow form of AI that Nick Bostrom coined as "artificial narrow intelligence" (as opposed to "general" intelligence, i.e. human-like; and "superior" beyond ours). It's becoming possible for businesses of all kinds and all trades, thanks to the drastic cost reduction of deep learning since we moved these tasks to GPUs (and these bad boys keep improving at +25% performance per generation roughly every 18 month). And what AI does, sometimes is order of magnitude better than what any human individual/team could do (think Spotify's recommendations, anything with "big data" and "subjectivity" in it). Which leads to the same conclusion as your last sentence.

kmicklas 10y ago
> order of magnitude better than what any human individual/team could do (think Spotify's recommendations It's orders of magnitude more scalable but you're music nerd friend will beat Spotify's recommendations any day.

semi-extrinsic 10y ago

So I looked at Momentum Machines. First of all, as you say it's completely unrelated to AI, all the technology is decades old. I'm not sure I'm buying that the hardware and design knowhow is so much cheaper today; people started seriously automating car production lines back in the 1960's, so I can't see how this would've been orders of magnitude more expensive in the 1990's when the tech had matured for 30 years. Second of all, following their links we find that in 2012 they had a full scale machine built that had a 95% success rate, and they projected 11 months until they could launch the concept in a restaurant. What has happened since? No word, AFAICT. Happy to be corrected if I missed it somewhere and they have actually launched. But otherwise, it doesn't exactly convince me this is "the next industrial revolution" if they can't polish out that last 5% of a single-purpose burger-making machine in almost half a decade.

nickparker 10y ago
Yeah I don't know what they're up to. I've used them as a useful shorthand example for automation for awhile, but you're right I should perhaps find a new one because they seem to be in some sort of limbo, crunchbase has nothing after their seed funding. A more concrete if less evocative example is Amazon's warehouse automation. Relatively simple robots with 3 DOF (2D planar movement + a container jack) are wiping out enormous numbers of jobs, both in obvious immediate effects (less fulfillment center jobs) and by decimating conventional retail. edit: Momentum still has 19 employees on LinkedIn, so they're not completely dead it seems.