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There is no point made here that robots won't take over the world, he just belabors the point that it is hard to make robots replicate exactly what humans do.

There is no point made here that robots won't take over the world, he just belabors the point that it is hard to make robots replicate exactly what humans do. Automation will eat everything, it's just a matter of time. Even his problem of 'visually identifying weeds and uprooting them' does not come across as a massive problem, but one that can probably be solved with enough time and demand. Platitudes like these give false hopes to workers who should be training and preparing for the next phase of industry, and IMO serves people like the author who need complacent workers to give them time to come up with their money-making solutions.

ianbicking 6y ago
I think this underestimates the incredible engineering of the human body. It runs at 100W, while retaining the ability to execute both very high torque actions and fine motor actions, with self-healing grip, and an ability to engage increasing numbers of muscles and the weight of the machine itself to accomplish tasks. One thing I didn't quite realized needed teaching until I taught my daughter: how do you tell when a screw is going in right? It might have resistance because of gunk or rust, or it might be misaligned. Determining the right action is incredibly sophisticated, the difference between the slight easing of resistance with old oil or the springiness when the threads are pushing against each other and deforming. In response you might draw out and try again, or push harder, all while still trying to feel out what's really happening. Automation is great for screws in factories. We don't have anything on the horizon that has the physical flexibility and power of a human. To the degree we can reconfigure problems to match a robot's capabilities, then yes, automation may be inevitable. A lot of problems aren't like that.
- blacksmith_tb 6y ago
  Along these lines, I still think Marshall Brain is likely to be proved correct, he predicted automation would instead replace middle management, and then direct unskilled labor in his novel Manna[1]. 1:http://marshallbrain.com/manna.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna.htm
  - krasin 6y ago
    Manna is a very underrated story. And it's already happening to some degree: Uber/Lyft drivers don't have managers; they are being directed by a phone app.
    - Digit-Al 6y ago
      Taxi apps don't replace middle managers, they replace dispatchers.
      - clairity 6y ago
        dispatchers are the middle managers. but i'm skeptical; it would be more convincing if GP/GGP provided some of the rationale for why middle managers would be automated away rather than simply referencing a book.
        blacksmith_tb 6y ago
        Ha, to encourage more reading, naturally! But I'll bite, and flesh out the premise a little more - like the Uber example, in Manna the story begins with software being used to micromanage the employees in fast food joints, through their headsets. It tracks their locations, and walks them through the steps of doing any tasks it predicts will require attention wherever they happen to be - in the restroom? Does the trash need to be emptied y/n? If yes, step one, remove bag and tie closed... etc. Making robots capable of doing all those different tasks would be hard, but making a system to tell low-paid humans to do them is not so difficult.
        clairity 6y ago
        ok, i'm still skeptical then. dystopian novels typically feature (overt or covert) coercion centrally because it's required to force people to do things they'd not naturally do (the dystopian stuff). those kinds of jobs would have to be coercive in nature (desperation qualifies), and would be beyond the threshold of autonomy that most people will tolerate. most jobs, even those rigidly regulated, have enough latitude that workers can find some level of esteem in it, enough to create the intrinsic motivation to keep doing it. people wouldn't tolerate such jobs without extreme coercion, implying nothing less than a collapse of our democratic republic to achieve.
- t0mmel 6y ago
  Wouldn’t a robot be capable of seeing and measuring if the screw is misaligned? There are more than one way to ensure that a screw goes in correctly. You are compensating for your inaccuracy by using sense of touch and kinaesthetic sense
snowwrestler 6y ago
> Automation will eat everything, it's just a matter of time. > Platitudes like these give false hopes to workers who should be training and preparing for the next phase of industry These seem incompatible to me. If automation will eat "everything," what exactly is the next phase of industry that we should all be preparing for? What's left after everything has been eaten? My resolution to this conundrum is: automation will not actually eat everything. It's not like automation is a new concept; we started automating things over 100 years ago, and contrary to fears back then and along the way, automation drove tremendous job creation. There are far more human beings with well-paying jobs (even in May 2020) than there were 100 hundred years ago.
TaylorAlexander 6y ago
Hah. Visually identifying weeds and uprooting them is exactly what I’m working on. I’m designing a farming robot for work. Funny that he says it’s a massive problem. At least in a commercial farming context it seems pretty tractable to me.
- abdullahkhalids 6y ago
  Any idea how effective farm.bot's weeder is? https://genesis.farm.bot/docs/weeder https://genesis.farm.bot/docs/weeder
  - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
    I’m not sure! We’ve thought about getting a farmbot but haven’t done it.
Barrin92 6y ago
The fact aside that you just brought up another platitude, actual data suggests that this is wrong. Automation is slow, has been getting slower as is clearly visible in labour productivity and employment statistics and there's really no indication of a large change in that trend. Billions of dollars are invested annually in technologies with marginal productivity improvements, and it looks like there are more and more diminishing returns. If there was any indication that automation would 'eat everything', unemployment would be high (corona-pandemic aside), and labour productivity would be growing fast, none of which is happening. Robert Gordon gives an expansive, evidence-based account of the development of American economic development in The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War, and there's virtually no evidence for the grandiose claims made by the tech industry that we're living in some sort of era of rapid change. That for the most part ended in the late 70s.
- mojomark 6y ago
  Automation will not eat everything in time, but from my work on unmanned shipping, I'm pretty sure that autonomy + automation will. Automation - handles deterministic situations. Autonomy - handles uncertain situations. In my industry (ship design, construction and operation), based on what I'm seeing and have seen evolve over the past 20 years, it feels likely that this paradigm shift to a majority of ships being autonomous will probably happen in the next 50 years. This is my gut feel, not a scientific conclusion, so take that for what it's worth. I also don't see why other industries will be any different. For my money, reinforcement learning (in some form) appears to be the key enabler.
  - agustif 6y ago
    Totally off-topic, but how viable would be to build a slim circle-shaped ship? Is it absurd, could it be submarine-like in case of bad sea weather and go underwater to avoid high waves impacting on it?
    - mojomark 6y ago
      tl;dr - yes, you can make a surface ship submersible, but it's done at the expense of typically increased construction cost and reduced dynamic performance when operating in either domain (i.e. surface or submerged). I'm not sure what you mean by 'circlular', but I think it's safe to assume you mean a circular hull cross section vice a round circular deck (like a floating helo pad or SpaceX launch barge). First, there have been some examples of surface ships that transition to submarines (e.g. 1). China is apparently working on a large Surface ship/submarine for their Navy. Surface and submersible vessels have very different hydrodynamic and hydrostatic properties and forces to contend with, which drive them to have different shapes. I actually did work on a recent project that explored this topic a bit. Generally, for any vessel, the shape depends on what you want the ship to do and hull form/type selection is very much a science-backed art form of Naval Architects. You can certainly build a ship to fully submerge, the question is, particularly at larger scales, is it worth the added cost, risk, and hydrodynamic compromise - or are you better off just building two different vessels that are specifically designed to operate in one domain (I.e. on the surface or submerged). That answer is highly dependant on what you intend to use the vessel for. It may be worth it for your application, but in general the answer has been that it's more cost-effective to just optimize vessel design for one operational domain rather that two. Regarding hydrodynamic trade, while both ships and subs strive to minimize total hydro resistance (drag), hydro resistance has subcomponents that affect vessels differently when operating on the surface versus submerged. Surface ship shapes strive to be hydrodynamically 'optimized' to minimize form, skin, wave (critically), and even air resistance, whereas submarines aren't generally subject to wave action or wind and thus typically focus on minimizing the dominant form and skin drag forces. Surface ships are generally more power efficient than submarines at equal displacement and speed through water. If you want to make a ship submerge, you also need to add significant structure to withstand hydrostatic forces at depth. Submarines are inherently structurally sound enough to operate at the surface, but function hydrodynamically poor at the surface because of their shape. Surface ships and submarine shapes primarily differ in structure due to the significantly different pressure forces they need to contend with. Submarines have a circular cross section because, next to a sphere, cylindrical hulls are the most structurally stable pressure hulls. Surface ships can actually have relatively structurally 'weak' main decks, operating almost like floating buckets that are mostly designed to stay right-side up. The weaker main deck makes the ships cheaper to build, but probably more critically, allows easy access to whatever payloads the vessel is carrying. 1. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/9726/the-usmc-is-interested-in-this-crazy-speedboat-that-transforms-into-a-submarine https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/9726/the-usmc-is-inter...
lm28469 6y ago
> Automation will eat everything, it's just a matter of time Yes and no, people are predicting that for 70 years, if not more. It seems that once you automated all the easy things it gets exponentially harder and more expensive to pursue automation. > does not come across as a massive problem Sounds like Musk telling you "self driving cars will be there in 6 months" every 6 months since 2013. Nothing is as easy as you think it is, even more so if you have 0 experience in the domain. And then you have to solve all the societal issues. If everything truly gets automated at some point, who will benefit from it? how do you remunerate all the people who used to have low skill jobs? &c. "Automation, which is both the most advanced sector of modern industry and the epitome of its practice, obliges the commodity system to resolve the following contradiction: The technological developments that objectively tend to eliminate work must at the same time preserve labor as a commodity, because labor is the only creator of commodities. The only way to prevent automation (or any other less extreme method of increasing labor productivity) from reducing society’s total necessary labor time is to create new jobs. To this end the reserve army of the unemployed is enlisted into the tertiary or “service” sector, reinforcing the troops responsible for distributing and glorifying the latest commodities; and in this it is serving a real need, in the sense that increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy increasingly unnecessary commodities." - Guy Debord, 1967
- nikofeyn 6y ago
  even in software development, even simple automation is very, very difficult. to automate a thing in the scenario that everything works is easy. to automate a thing in the more likely scenarios of everything not working is really challenging.

ianbicking 6y ago

I think this underestimates the incredible engineering of the human body. It runs at 100W, while retaining the ability to execute both very high torque actions and fine motor actions, with self-healing grip, and an ability to engage increasing numbers of muscles and the weight of the machine itself to accomplish tasks. One thing I didn't quite realized needed teaching until I taught my daughter: how do you tell when a screw is going in right? It might have resistance because of gunk or rust, or it might be misaligned. Determining the right action is incredibly sophisticated, the difference between the slight easing of resistance with old oil or the springiness when the threads are pushing against each other and deforming. In response you might draw out and try again, or push harder, all while still trying to feel out what's really happening. Automation is great for screws in factories. We don't have anything on the horizon that has the physical flexibility and power of a human. To the degree we can reconfigure problems to match a robot's capabilities, then yes, automation may be inevitable. A lot of problems aren't like that.

blacksmith_tb 6y ago
Along these lines, I still think Marshall Brain is likely to be proved correct, he predicted automation would instead replace middle management, and then direct unskilled labor in his novel Manna[1]. 1:http://marshallbrain.com/manna.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna.htm
- krasin 6y ago
  Manna is a very underrated story. And it's already happening to some degree: Uber/Lyft drivers don't have managers; they are being directed by a phone app.
  - Digit-Al 6y ago
    Taxi apps don't replace middle managers, they replace dispatchers.
    - clairity 6y ago
      dispatchers are the middle managers. but i'm skeptical; it would be more convincing if GP/GGP provided some of the rationale for why middle managers would be automated away rather than simply referencing a book.
      - blacksmith_tb 6y ago
        Ha, to encourage more reading, naturally! But I'll bite, and flesh out the premise a little more - like the Uber example, in Manna the story begins with software being used to micromanage the employees in fast food joints, through their headsets. It tracks their locations, and walks them through the steps of doing any tasks it predicts will require attention wherever they happen to be - in the restroom? Does the trash need to be emptied y/n? If yes, step one, remove bag and tie closed... etc. Making robots capable of doing all those different tasks would be hard, but making a system to tell low-paid humans to do them is not so difficult.
        clairity 6y ago
        ok, i'm still skeptical then. dystopian novels typically feature (overt or covert) coercion centrally because it's required to force people to do things they'd not naturally do (the dystopian stuff). those kinds of jobs would have to be coercive in nature (desperation qualifies), and would be beyond the threshold of autonomy that most people will tolerate. most jobs, even those rigidly regulated, have enough latitude that workers can find some level of esteem in it, enough to create the intrinsic motivation to keep doing it. people wouldn't tolerate such jobs without extreme coercion, implying nothing less than a collapse of our democratic republic to achieve.
t0mmel 6y ago
Wouldn’t a robot be capable of seeing and measuring if the screw is misaligned? There are more than one way to ensure that a screw goes in correctly. You are compensating for your inaccuracy by using sense of touch and kinaesthetic sense

snowwrestler 6y ago

> Automation will eat everything, it's just a matter of time. > Platitudes like these give false hopes to workers who should be training and preparing for the next phase of industry These seem incompatible to me. If automation will eat "everything," what exactly is the next phase of industry that we should all be preparing for? What's left after everything has been eaten? My resolution to this conundrum is: automation will not actually eat everything. It's not like automation is a new concept; we started automating things over 100 years ago, and contrary to fears back then and along the way, automation drove tremendous job creation. There are far more human beings with well-paying jobs (even in May 2020) than there were 100 hundred years ago.

TaylorAlexander 6y ago

Hah. Visually identifying weeds and uprooting them is exactly what I’m working on. I’m designing a farming robot for work. Funny that he says it’s a massive problem. At least in a commercial farming context it seems pretty tractable to me.

abdullahkhalids 6y ago
Any idea how effective farm.bot's weeder is? https://genesis.farm.bot/docs/weeder https://genesis.farm.bot/docs/weeder
- TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  I’m not sure! We’ve thought about getting a farmbot but haven’t done it.

Barrin92 6y ago

The fact aside that you just brought up another platitude, actual data suggests that this is wrong. Automation is slow, has been getting slower as is clearly visible in labour productivity and employment statistics and there's really no indication of a large change in that trend. Billions of dollars are invested annually in technologies with marginal productivity improvements, and it looks like there are more and more diminishing returns. If there was any indication that automation would 'eat everything', unemployment would be high (corona-pandemic aside), and labour productivity would be growing fast, none of which is happening. Robert Gordon gives an expansive, evidence-based account of the development of American economic development in The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War, and there's virtually no evidence for the grandiose claims made by the tech industry that we're living in some sort of era of rapid change. That for the most part ended in the late 70s.

mojomark 6y ago
Automation will not eat everything in time, but from my work on unmanned shipping, I'm pretty sure that autonomy + automation will. Automation - handles deterministic situations. Autonomy - handles uncertain situations. In my industry (ship design, construction and operation), based on what I'm seeing and have seen evolve over the past 20 years, it feels likely that this paradigm shift to a majority of ships being autonomous will probably happen in the next 50 years. This is my gut feel, not a scientific conclusion, so take that for what it's worth. I also don't see why other industries will be any different. For my money, reinforcement learning (in some form) appears to be the key enabler.
- agustif 6y ago
  Totally off-topic, but how viable would be to build a slim circle-shaped ship? Is it absurd, could it be submarine-like in case of bad sea weather and go underwater to avoid high waves impacting on it?
  - mojomark 6y ago
    tl;dr - yes, you can make a surface ship submersible, but it's done at the expense of typically increased construction cost and reduced dynamic performance when operating in either domain (i.e. surface or submerged). I'm not sure what you mean by 'circlular', but I think it's safe to assume you mean a circular hull cross section vice a round circular deck (like a floating helo pad or SpaceX launch barge). First, there have been some examples of surface ships that transition to submarines (e.g. 1). China is apparently working on a large Surface ship/submarine for their Navy. Surface and submersible vessels have very different hydrodynamic and hydrostatic properties and forces to contend with, which drive them to have different shapes. I actually did work on a recent project that explored this topic a bit. Generally, for any vessel, the shape depends on what you want the ship to do and hull form/type selection is very much a science-backed art form of Naval Architects. You can certainly build a ship to fully submerge, the question is, particularly at larger scales, is it worth the added cost, risk, and hydrodynamic compromise - or are you better off just building two different vessels that are specifically designed to operate in one domain (I.e. on the surface or submerged). That answer is highly dependant on what you intend to use the vessel for. It may be worth it for your application, but in general the answer has been that it's more cost-effective to just optimize vessel design for one operational domain rather that two. Regarding hydrodynamic trade, while both ships and subs strive to minimize total hydro resistance (drag), hydro resistance has subcomponents that affect vessels differently when operating on the surface versus submerged. Surface ship shapes strive to be hydrodynamically 'optimized' to minimize form, skin, wave (critically), and even air resistance, whereas submarines aren't generally subject to wave action or wind and thus typically focus on minimizing the dominant form and skin drag forces. Surface ships are generally more power efficient than submarines at equal displacement and speed through water. If you want to make a ship submerge, you also need to add significant structure to withstand hydrostatic forces at depth. Submarines are inherently structurally sound enough to operate at the surface, but function hydrodynamically poor at the surface because of their shape. Surface ships and submarine shapes primarily differ in structure due to the significantly different pressure forces they need to contend with. Submarines have a circular cross section because, next to a sphere, cylindrical hulls are the most structurally stable pressure hulls. Surface ships can actually have relatively structurally 'weak' main decks, operating almost like floating buckets that are mostly designed to stay right-side up. The weaker main deck makes the ships cheaper to build, but probably more critically, allows easy access to whatever payloads the vessel is carrying. 1. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/9726/the-usmc-is-interested-in-this-crazy-speedboat-that-transforms-into-a-submarine https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/9726/the-usmc-is-inter...

lm28469 6y ago

> Automation will eat everything, it's just a matter of time Yes and no, people are predicting that for 70 years, if not more. It seems that once you automated all the easy things it gets exponentially harder and more expensive to pursue automation. > does not come across as a massive problem Sounds like Musk telling you "self driving cars will be there in 6 months" every 6 months since 2013. Nothing is as easy as you think it is, even more so if you have 0 experience in the domain. And then you have to solve all the societal issues. If everything truly gets automated at some point, who will benefit from it? how do you remunerate all the people who used to have low skill jobs? &c. "Automation, which is both the most advanced sector of modern industry and the epitome of its practice, obliges the commodity system to resolve the following contradiction: The technological developments that objectively tend to eliminate work must at the same time preserve labor as a commodity, because labor is the only creator of commodities. The only way to prevent automation (or any other less extreme method of increasing labor productivity) from reducing society’s total necessary labor time is to create new jobs. To this end the reserve army of the unemployed is enlisted into the tertiary or “service” sector, reinforcing the troops responsible for distributing and glorifying the latest commodities; and in this it is serving a real need, in the sense that increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy increasingly unnecessary commodities." - Guy Debord, 1967

nikofeyn 6y ago
even in software development, even simple automation is very, very difficult. to automate a thing in the scenario that everything works is easy. to automate a thing in the more likely scenarios of everything not working is really challenging.