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Some companies find only humans can do the job
- robg 4y agoHumans have a minimum wage that makes employing them anti-competitive to the robotic workforce.
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- astrange 4y agoIf the robots were good enough to replace humans they’d be good enough to demand minimum wage laws and professional licensing requirements.
- black_13 4y ago
- iso1631 4y agoA higher human wage increases the incentive to automate with a robotic workforce, which is great.
- seydor 4y agoI would bet that robots will come with a subscription as well
- TrinaryWorksToo 4y agohttps://archive.ph/brpDv https://archive.ph/brpDv
- pcurve 4y ago...yet. I'm sure things will look very different 20-30 years from now.
- lnsru 4y agoWhat do you expect to be better in 30 years? We have NOW insane computing power, cool stuff like insane size FPGAs and super fast GPUs. Mechanical parts work with fraction of micron accuracy. And yet we have millions of workers picking simple shaped objects manually every day around the world.
- dataking 4y agoWe'll have increasingly more incentive if birthrates (and thus the size of the workforce) continues to shrink. Moreover, robots of all sorts will probably have come down in price which is one of the stumbling blocks mentioned in the article.
- jacooper 4y ago> We'll have increasingly more incentive if birthrates (and thus the size of the workforce) continues to shrink. This is currently being solved by migration, countries that aren't open for immigrants are the ones paying the price.
- jahnu 4y agoHumans still better at taking orders and making coffee too.
- bitwize 4y agoIt's still cheaper to exploit human laborers to pick those simple objects. There will be a reckoning once capitalism runs out of people to exploit.
- lelanthran 4y ago> There will be a reckoning once capitalism runs out of people to exploit. That's just a different way of saying there will never be a reckoning :-/
- EGreg 4y agoWhere are the best sexbots? Do they even come close to what humans can do?
- frozenport 4y agoProbably better?
- sgt101 4y agoIf getting jiggy with an industrial machine that could tear you in half is what floats your boat...
- lelanthran 4y ago> If getting jiggy with an industrial machine that could tear you in half is what floats your boat... People already get jiggy with other people who could easily bite off important bits. The issue is trust, and I think that even with the simplest of failsafes[1], the machine juggling your important bits can be made more trustworthy than the human currently doing it. [1] For example, failing in an off position, or using equipment that, even if overdriven at full force, will not have enough force to do damage. Having the clamping or piston mechanism driven off a spring can ensure that the maximum force applied depends on the stiffness of the spring, which gets softer with age, not harder. There's multiple ways currently being used to make machines that interact with humans safe for humans no matter what happens.
- gattr 4y agoEven if they make perfectly human-like, realistically acting sexbots with HW failsafes, there's the question of trusting the SW. It would be inadvisable to use such a black-box proprietary machine which is probably recording and sending detailed (and potentially embarrassing) telemetry. I'd expect a long wait for community-designed, open-source equivalents.
- toast0 4y ago> force applied depends on the stiffness of the spring, which gets softer with age, not harder But wasn't that the problem OP was trying to solve ;)
- sgt101 4y agoI spent a lot of time and effort deploying automation in customer service. The idea was to do it in ways that were really valuable, as opposed to spreadsheet positive. Our management had been toasted too many times by folks selling snake oil, but my god savings were needed. They just had to be real... So first issue: developing measures that measure real overall service productivity... this is hard, the gaming is intense. Second issue: automation generates work. Yup. When your service workers get time they use it to address difficult cases and to do the work that removes regulatory and safety risks. The rest of the time this stuff is ignored, building hidden risk for the enterprise. Relieve the pressure, and it reemerges. Third issue: peak demands. Ideally automation would help you deal with peak demands enabling human staffing at sensible levels to handle most of the traffic most of the time. Sadly it doesn't. Peak demand often seemed to be for the work that could least be automated. Forth issue: the tech is a castle of lies. Ok, that's not quite true... but there is a lot of lying. In the academic work the lying is of the form of what is left out of the experiments and evaluations - for example that the algorithm cost $100k to run or something. In the commercial world there is flat out lying - HAL I look at you, you bastard. How many RFI's were derailed by some regional President at a supplier ringing my CIO or CEO and explaining that I was "a problem" and had "an attitude"... well, all of them. The issue is that there is no sanction. HAL is still pushing Holmes and winning contracts, and not delivering what they promise, because it's all a lie. All that happens is that they move to the next sucker and wait for management churn at the old sucker to erase the corporate memory, and this does not take long. In reality they should all be drummed out of the business and no one should ever speak to them again. But, five years later I am still flogging my guts out and they are all on their boats and golf courses. One of the bastards had his own vineyard. So, sigh
- pydry 4y agoFor customer service I find that the real automation "gains" tend either to be in debugging the rest of the organization or in driving a customer to give up on finding a human to talk to.
- pjc50 4y ago> debugging the rest of the organization This is true of automated IT processes in general; for human-operated processes there's always a certain amount of "slack" between how the process is written and what needs to be done to make it actually work. The knowledge for the latter is concentrated in lower-ranking staff - the "NCOs" - and often unknown and unknowable to those running the system. Converting the system to automation only converts the known process, so it tends to fail hard until the slack can be taken up elsewhere or learned and incorporated.
- oxfordmale 4y agoStill the best solution is to combine robotics with humans. Humans are still infinitely flexible and much easier to dispose off than an expensive robot /sarcasm.
- sph 4y agoA new form a dystopian science fiction: one where robots have better labor rights than humans.
- taneq 4y ago...fiction? At the very least, robots have full coverage healthcare.
- mellavora 4y agoonly until retirement.
- Mordisquitos 4y agoBut only with regards to health issues that affect their workplace performance. I don't think they are covered for problems that may affect them outside of normal working hours. Speaking of which, I don't think their work/life balance is that great.
- sph 4y agoNot until the [redacted] laws, when they decided humans should work at least 10 hours a day and robots 1 hour a day, given that they produce 10x more work in the same amount of time.
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- loupol 4y agoThere's a 1959 Asimov short story where a futuristic government overrelying on automation realizes they can replace expensive computers driving ships and missiles with humans to save on expenditures. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power
- zackees 4y ago
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- paulpauper 4y agoAutomation is capital intensive to set up, so it may take years for it to pay for itself. This delays adoption considerably for smaller businesses. Hair cutting is one of those jobs that resists automation. Same for burger flipping. It's not as if salons and restaurants can afford expensive robots to automate those tasks. Customer support automation may mean lost business due to angry customers.
- elevaet 4y agoHah! Never mind the capital overhead, it might be a while before customers trust a scissors-wielding robot with their head!
- Robotbeat 4y agoIt occurs to me that buying a robot arm to literally flip burgers is highly anthropomorphizing the solution space. You want a machine that gives you a burger at the end. This is a pretty easy thing to automate if you had a huge, constant demand for burgers at one single location using standard factory automation strategies. Might not be feasible at all for the typical franchises with spikey demand and relatively low volume. I say we increase the minimum wage to about $20/hour, adjusted for productivity growth (per capita GDP) since the 1960s and see what happens.
- coredog64 4y agoThere’s not actually a need to physically flip burgers at McD. They use a clamshell grill that cooks both sides at once. Besides, the fry robot has a better ROI given the profit margin on that item.
- black_13 4y ago
- mathattack 4y agohttps://archive.ph/brpDv https://archive.ph/brpDv
- fuzzfactor 4y ago>I have not seen good examples of companies successfully deploying robotic systems in low-margin, public-facing settings. — Matt Beane, University of California, Santa Barbara Me neither, which has kept me at the opposite end of the spectrum for decades. To this day, good apps linger where it's still cheaper to use a human operator. Going to build me a robot anyway, as soon as it's complete it'll be doing an invoiceable job. That's a key. So it starts making money right away, admittedly not as much as having a human performing its tasks. Human's going to have to fill in when the robot is down anyway, plus serve the robot instead at intervals when it is running, just to keep it fully supplied and maintained. So it's going to require a higher-skilled human than before. That won't be cheap but I can then sell the higher skilled output for a better premium to clients most interested in the robot.
- monkeydust 4y agoI recently tried out some of the technology in this youtube video which looks VR controlled telerobotics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoyIVGB8OOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoyIVGB8OOk There is definatley something here in terms of using human intelligence to control physical actions, perhaps as a prelude to full automation for a given task. It also opens up interesting questions as to the future of the labour markets around the world where somebody in one country can control the unit of production in another, I mean we are comfortable with software outsourcing so perhaps this is not such a reach.
- jvanderbot 4y agoIn my experience, the best bits of automation are those set up by the people doing the tasks, once given autonomy (heh) to do it themselves. Then, of course, they get promoted, the tech becomes a "product" and they try to push it on other departments, but the original grassroots efforts by software engineers doing things other than software engineering (e.g., operating spacecraft) is solid gold.
- marcosdumay 4y agoOk for the cases where they found the robots weren't flexible enough. But the "people are cheaper anyway" that they add on nearly every anecdote isn't reassuring at all.