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I have spent far too much of my life in a warehouse doing this robot's job. A job that according to every pundit from the "smart" to the stupid was supposed to
by harmful_stereo 8y ago
I have spent far too much of my life in a warehouse doing this robot's job. A job that according to every pundit from the "smart" to the stupid was supposed to be gone tomorrow. Mostly I'm just disappointed in how clownish all those futurists look.
Completely retooling the society after 70 years of postwar infrastructure is going to take more than anyone would willingly sacrifice. You would have to bomb everything more than a few years old flat. At no point will it be feasible to keep leaving major investment in business and industry tied to the promises of modernizing through bleeding edge technology. The world is so vast and involves such a colossal distribution of existing resources. So many of the systems here are only functioning through broad and cheap standards, like containers, rail gauges, ship sizes.
I don't want my job. I want a machine built to put me out of it for good. I have been saying that along with a generation of workers told robots were coming for their jobs since the day i was hired. That was fifteen years ago.
We need a Manhattan project for the basic tools of industry. Now. There are thousands of novel or unproven methods of doing the most basic forms of labor our economy is based on, and we are leaving the creation of things that need to be ISO standard across the surface of the earth in order to succeed to entrepreneurs and startups and scholastic vanity.
The modern technological landscape across all disciplines looks terrifyingly similar to the cambrian explosion, which produced so many things, at such a cost of living suffering, that did not survive what came after. I'm afraid our civilization might have run out of low-hanging fruit.
To me that is the line of demarcation between the "developed world" and whatever precedes it. I don't think what is beyond that is peaceful. It necessarily undermines the infrastructure the whole society is founded on.
- petermcneeley 8y agoSerious question. What would you do for work if we did get a robot to do your job?
- mabbo 8y agoWhat would I need to work? Look, we're rapidly approaching a point where all human needs (food, shelter, etc) can be handled by automation. If we reach that point, why do people need to have jobs? Why can't we turn our lives towards something better?
- yazaddaruvala 8y agoTechnologically maybe, politically most countries are still very very far away.
- krapp 8y ago>If we reach that point, why do people need to have jobs? Why can't we turn our lives towards something better? Because we will likely still be living in capitalist societies in which people increasingly unable to provide value to the marketplace due to automation will still need income to survive, and no one implementing that automation has any intention of doing so in order to usher in some kind of post-scarcity collectivist utopia. Automation exists to allow the ownership class to reap the benefits of labor without the burden of compensating human employees, not to free the labor classes from having to work.
- TaylorAlexander 8y agoWell, I’m a working robotics engineer in the Silicon Valley area and I am trying to design robotics for a post scarcity collectivist utopia. At home I do research in to functional 3D printed robotics and I operate a YouTube channel and discussion website [1] to pull people together so we can discuss collectively owned automated communities. I’m a fan of Murray Bookchin and want to live in a collectively owned automated farming commune. I’ve just taken a new job on an actual farm as a robotics engineer, and we’re going to try to build automation for farming. I’m also a writer and I study the intersection of automation and society. So while it’s true that most automation engineers don’t think this way, some of us do. :-) [1] http://reboot.love http://reboot.love
- krapp 8y agoIt's not the engineers I'm talking about so much as business owners, stockholders and politicians, the people actually writing the laws and making the decisions about how automation is going to shape the future. The problem with seeing automation as a means to liberate people from capitalism and free them for intellectual pursuits (a noble and laudable goal) is that it exists to serve capitalist ends. Amazon, for instance, is definitely not automating for the benefit of humanity. They just don't want to pay people. Although it is good to know someone is thinking about it. I really worry that, at scale, mass employment won't be addressed until it actually threatens the status quo.
- Symmetry 8y agoAS/RS systems have been making steady inroads into warehouses despite the lack of bombing runs and those require a lot of disruption. The rolly bots Boston Dynamics is trying to put forward don't really seem to require any infrastructure replacement at all. I really think this is an area where ad hoc experimentation is working and we'd be mistaken to try to create a single standard without trying everything first.
- Noumenon72 8y agoYour desire for premature standardization would have left our automobiles with one common standard of hand crank. Everything that died in the Cambrian explosion would have died anyway if they had all been the same species; but having that variety available allowed the best designs to be selected. We wouldn't have humans without it.