5 ms·

In general, I don't understand the push of humans to want to replace everything we do with machines. What's the point? What's the end goal? We just sit in a vat

by bmitc 4y ago

In general, I don't understand the push of humans to want to replace everything we do with machines. What's the point? What's the end goal? We just sit in a vat of embalming fluid consuming media with a feeding tube while machines whir about? Why can't enough ever be enough for humanity?

AndyMcConachie 4y ago
It's simply about avoiding labor costs and for the capitalist class to make more money. That's it.
gnopgnip 4y ago
About 1/3rd of the cost of an airline ticket is labor. Many people in the travel industry would rather be at home with their families, traveling themselves, pursuing other hobbies instead of working
- tartoran 4y ago
  > Many people in the travel industry would rather be at home with their families, traveling themselves, pursuing other hobbies instead of working But they’re not because they need the paycheck. You’re fooling yourself to think the fruits of automated labor will not end up simply laying them off with basically no other benefits than the general population: slightly cheaper air travel (if nobody else gobbles up the differential). In the end excessive automation it’s a bad proposition for labor in general.
- TomSwirly 4y ago
  Most people I know would stop working in an instant if that didn't mean they ended up living on the street. But we will never get that choice. Once all our jobs are destroyed, there isn't going to be any help coming. We will simply be classed as inferior workers, and society will brush us off in favor of the 0.1%
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  The number one reason why people work is because they need the money. Even if you enjoy your job there are still days you'd rather stay in bed.
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Becase if we didn't, there'd be 95% of us still producing food manually and the other 5% would be blacksmiths and other supporting roles for food production. Now, only a tiny percentage of people produce food, and the rest can be community managers on twitter.
- justahuman74 4y ago
  > and the rest can be community managers on twitter. I now understand just how much progress we've made as a civilization
- ezconnect 4y ago
  Don't forget the influencers.
- krustyburger 4y ago
  Let us not forget the anarcho-syndicalist communes. They would take turns to act as a sort of executive-officer-for-the-week. But all the decisions of that officer had to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting. By a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority, in the case of more major matters.
- bmitc 4y ago
  When humans transitioned from hunting and gathering to agriculture, people actually had less leisure time, worked longer hours, and had worse health. We just keep repeating this ad nauseam. The research shows that even over the last couple hundred years, leisure time has greatly reduced in so-called developed countries.
csydas 4y ago
Automation doesn't need to have The Matrix as the end result; it could be a Star Trek utopia. If automation was truly in the spirit of freeing people from having to struggle to survive, imagine a system build around an automated future where because everything is so efficient and there's no need for menial labor, you can just kind of do whatever you want; art, research, gardening, you name it. Freeloaders in the system sum up to a rounding error for the resources needed to support them because the system is efficient. Enough people like the system that they willingly work to maintain it and improve it (it's even exciting for them to study and build new and better ways of providing the resources than the existing way), but ultimately you just have time to do the things you tell yourself right now you can't do because you need to take meetings/clean up the house/work 8+ hours a day to sustain a basic living, etc. It's likely going to be a tough transition as long as we still think in terms of "I as a person must maximize my gains and protect them from everyone else", but automation could easily provide such a life for everyone if it advances enough. That transition is gonna be a hard one though as the habit of personal gain is a tough one to break after living in it for so long.
- TomSwirly 4y ago
  > Automation doesn't need to have The Matrix as the end result; it could be a Star Trek utopia. In some alternate world, perhaps. In the real world, developing AI is costing capitalists a lot of capital, and they fully expect to capitalize on this technology, at the expense of all the rest of us. > That transition is gonna be a hard one though as the habit of personal gain is a tough one to break after living in it for so long. This is ridiculous. 99% of us simply have no choice. We keep working, not because of "personal gain" but so we can continue to eat food and have shelter over our heads. Our relationship to "personal gain" is simply irrelevant in this equation because we have no power. Only a tiny number of people who are already incredibly rich because of obsessive attention to personal gain will have any say, and of course, they will decide in favor of MORE personal gain. Blaming the rest of us for this is simply victim-blaming.
  - csydas 4y ago
    I'm not sure why you're taking this as victim blaming. _Everyone_ needs to change, including the corporations and the very society we live in to make it a goal. If it wasn't implicit in my fantasy world, there is no more class difference. Everyone has a very good baseline, like _VERY_ good. Clothing, food, transportation, energy, housing. When this is all taken care of in a great way, what exactly will corporations have to sell anymore to have the power they have now? Personal gain doesn't just mean exorbitant wealth, it means the entire style of life we've built modern society around. Yes, I work for personal gain because I want to travel, eat cool food, and get nice things to make my life better. Everyone does this because they have to. That's not victim blaming, it's a fact of life that everyone does this. Many have to work harder and struggle more because of the inequality of the system that forces the only means of living as "work towards personal gain." Now just try to imagine for a moment what your life would be like if you didn't have to focus on personal gain, you just implicitly had a guaranteed stable and nice and comfortable life; what would you do? Would you still try to chase only ventures that secure your future further, or would you maybe start to consider more passion projects? To be perfectly clear, I absolutely understand that this is not as simple of a matter of "hey everyone, let's just be nicer" and then we will have utopia. Far from it, I understand there are deeply entrenched systems that force this way of consumption and struggle on the entire planet. The first step towards something better however is to accept that it can be possible; as long as we're telling ourselves it can never be better, naturally it's going to be stuck this way. You can see small examples of this everywhere; municipal ISPs versus the incumbent ISPs are a perfect example of a community saying "hey, the corporation is bullshit, let's do our own thing", and this works out pretty well, results in better and cheaper service for communities, and ultimately weakens corporations as they have to play nicer in order to play at all. What other elements in your life could be improved like this? That is all I'm asking you to think about.
Spooky23 4y ago
MBA types would remove the wings if they could. It’s all about greed and money.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  I swear they must be running some cult machinery inside MBA schools. Practically every MBA I’ve met parrots the same language and has the same beliefs and approaches.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    Institutionalization in action. You might me interested in the book Disciplined Minds.
projektfu 4y ago
Reminds me of the story of the fisherman and businessman. https://paulocoelhoblog.com/2015/09/04/the-fisherman-and-the-businessman/ https://paulocoelhoblog.com/2015/09/04/the-fisherman-and-the...
- bmitc 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing! That’s exactly it. I really do think that we have the technology and ability to return to a sort of technological advanced system of hunting and gathering with some agriculture. In that, we could apply just enough automation to simplify our lives but then go about just living. Today, life is a never ending grind and to what end? We work and work and work towards the goal of only retiring when our bodies and minds are spent. Capitalism is a failure in this aspect. Humans become a machine to grow more capital at the cost of quality of life and the environment.
LeifCarrotson 4y ago
As a controls engineer building factory automation, it's about letting humans do human things and robots do robotic things. You don't want to have a human sticking their fingers in a grinder, or handling red-hot castings, or trying to install a washer on a dial table every 2.5 seconds for 8 hours straight, or attending the movement of a sewing machine within 1/8" for literal miles of seams sewn each day... those are all mind-numbing or dangerous things I've automated. But the machines can't efficiently understand when they're wearing out, they fault in a myriad of ways and need troubleshooting, they need someone to monitor the quality of incoming and outgoing product, keep them fed with parts, and to do other common-sense human tasks. There are certainly things that people have tried to automate that didn't make sense. But there are a lot of things that haven't yet been automated which should be.
- CarbonCycles 4y ago
  Adding a bit more context to this good post, the control algorithms are designed and developed around assumptions and an operational envelope deemed to be "normal". An airplane is much more complicated from a systems perspective (but yet can be more easily automated from an operational POV). To make an airplane fly, there are dozens of control surfaces, very complex mechanical systems, and not to mention a greater degree of danger (i.e., explosions) and loss of life should these systems fail. Yet, when everything "works" within their engineered/designed parameters, we can construct control algorithms around these operational envelopes. Also, at 10k feet in the air, there are rules that govern flight paths (overseen by controllers); radar and beacons that help keep planes on track; and most importantly much less traffic/congestion (as opposed to a bus or car). This provides the pilots (and also sailors) the ability to automate their flight at steady-state. This is where it gets interesting. If a plane loses a control surface or a critical system fails, these controls systems will be pushed outside of their operational envelopes, and this is where a human takes over. It's not a question of "if" but "when" things will fail....
  - LeifCarrotson 4y ago
    The low-hanging fruit of straight and level flight is, I'd argue, appropriate for automation, but they need to get out of the way when the plane goes outside the normal operating envelope. Whether these tools are just analog trim tabs that allow the stick to be adjusted so that a stable aircraft basically holds itself in straight-and-level flight, or complex fly-by-wire autopilot algorithms that keep an unstable aircraft in straight-and-level flight, taking the mundane, repetitive, mind-numbing workload of closing the loop between the six-pack of instruments and the sticks for hours on end. A pilot who has been watching the VSI and heading for three hours on a cross-country flight, tediously keeping the plane within 300 feet of its assigned flight level and ensuring that the passengers don't even perceive tiny changes in heading and attitude, or a trucker who has been driving their tractor-trailer cross-country for 60 hours in 7 days, holding an 8.5-foot-wide vehicle between a pair of 12-foot-wide lane lines, and adjusting the throttle up and down hills to keep their speed within a couple MPH of the speed limit, is going to be fatigued and when it comes time to deal with an emergency on landing or a sudden, unexpected brake check from a small car pulling in front of the truck, that fatigue has a cost. There's a point where cruise control and autopilots can make these tasks safer, allowing pilots to keep ahead of the needs of aircraft, and allowing drivers to keep their eyes scanning the other vehicles, their mirrors, and the road ahead, rather than going back-and-forth between the speedometer and the lane lines. I absolutely acknowledge that there's also a point where this automation gets in the way or causes operators to tune out and be unprepared when asked to take over when the envelope is exceeded. Right-sizing that level of automation is critical!
avidphantasm 4y ago
From a business point of view, I think has to do with the coercive law of competition [1]. [1] https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_coercive_laws_of_competition https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_coercive_laws_of_compet...

by bmitc 4y ago

AndyMcConachie 4y ago

It's simply about avoiding labor costs and for the capitalist class to make more money. That's it.

gnopgnip 4y ago

About 1/3rd of the cost of an airline ticket is labor. Many people in the travel industry would rather be at home with their families, traveling themselves, pursuing other hobbies instead of working

tartoran 4y ago
> Many people in the travel industry would rather be at home with their families, traveling themselves, pursuing other hobbies instead of working But they’re not because they need the paycheck. You’re fooling yourself to think the fruits of automated labor will not end up simply laying them off with basically no other benefits than the general population: slightly cheaper air travel (if nobody else gobbles up the differential). In the end excessive automation it’s a bad proposition for labor in general.
TomSwirly 4y ago
Most people I know would stop working in an instant if that didn't mean they ended up living on the street. But we will never get that choice. Once all our jobs are destroyed, there isn't going to be any help coming. We will simply be classed as inferior workers, and society will brush us off in favor of the 0.1%
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
The number one reason why people work is because they need the money. Even if you enjoy your job there are still days you'd rather stay in bed.

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

Becase if we didn't, there'd be 95% of us still producing food manually and the other 5% would be blacksmiths and other supporting roles for food production. Now, only a tiny percentage of people produce food, and the rest can be community managers on twitter.

justahuman74 4y ago
> and the rest can be community managers on twitter. I now understand just how much progress we've made as a civilization
ezconnect 4y ago
Don't forget the influencers.
krustyburger 4y ago
Let us not forget the anarcho-syndicalist communes. They would take turns to act as a sort of executive-officer-for-the-week. But all the decisions of that officer had to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting. By a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority, in the case of more major matters.
bmitc 4y ago
When humans transitioned from hunting and gathering to agriculture, people actually had less leisure time, worked longer hours, and had worse health. We just keep repeating this ad nauseam. The research shows that even over the last couple hundred years, leisure time has greatly reduced in so-called developed countries.

csydas 4y ago

Automation doesn't need to have The Matrix as the end result; it could be a Star Trek utopia. If automation was truly in the spirit of freeing people from having to struggle to survive, imagine a system build around an automated future where because everything is so efficient and there's no need for menial labor, you can just kind of do whatever you want; art, research, gardening, you name it. Freeloaders in the system sum up to a rounding error for the resources needed to support them because the system is efficient. Enough people like the system that they willingly work to maintain it and improve it (it's even exciting for them to study and build new and better ways of providing the resources than the existing way), but ultimately you just have time to do the things you tell yourself right now you can't do because you need to take meetings/clean up the house/work 8+ hours a day to sustain a basic living, etc. It's likely going to be a tough transition as long as we still think in terms of "I as a person must maximize my gains and protect them from everyone else", but automation could easily provide such a life for everyone if it advances enough. That transition is gonna be a hard one though as the habit of personal gain is a tough one to break after living in it for so long.

TomSwirly 4y ago
> Automation doesn't need to have The Matrix as the end result; it could be a Star Trek utopia. In some alternate world, perhaps. In the real world, developing AI is costing capitalists a lot of capital, and they fully expect to capitalize on this technology, at the expense of all the rest of us. > That transition is gonna be a hard one though as the habit of personal gain is a tough one to break after living in it for so long. This is ridiculous. 99% of us simply have no choice. We keep working, not because of "personal gain" but so we can continue to eat food and have shelter over our heads. Our relationship to "personal gain" is simply irrelevant in this equation because we have no power. Only a tiny number of people who are already incredibly rich because of obsessive attention to personal gain will have any say, and of course, they will decide in favor of MORE personal gain. Blaming the rest of us for this is simply victim-blaming.
- csydas 4y ago
  I'm not sure why you're taking this as victim blaming. _Everyone_ needs to change, including the corporations and the very society we live in to make it a goal. If it wasn't implicit in my fantasy world, there is no more class difference. Everyone has a very good baseline, like _VERY_ good. Clothing, food, transportation, energy, housing. When this is all taken care of in a great way, what exactly will corporations have to sell anymore to have the power they have now? Personal gain doesn't just mean exorbitant wealth, it means the entire style of life we've built modern society around. Yes, I work for personal gain because I want to travel, eat cool food, and get nice things to make my life better. Everyone does this because they have to. That's not victim blaming, it's a fact of life that everyone does this. Many have to work harder and struggle more because of the inequality of the system that forces the only means of living as "work towards personal gain." Now just try to imagine for a moment what your life would be like if you didn't have to focus on personal gain, you just implicitly had a guaranteed stable and nice and comfortable life; what would you do? Would you still try to chase only ventures that secure your future further, or would you maybe start to consider more passion projects? To be perfectly clear, I absolutely understand that this is not as simple of a matter of "hey everyone, let's just be nicer" and then we will have utopia. Far from it, I understand there are deeply entrenched systems that force this way of consumption and struggle on the entire planet. The first step towards something better however is to accept that it can be possible; as long as we're telling ourselves it can never be better, naturally it's going to be stuck this way. You can see small examples of this everywhere; municipal ISPs versus the incumbent ISPs are a perfect example of a community saying "hey, the corporation is bullshit, let's do our own thing", and this works out pretty well, results in better and cheaper service for communities, and ultimately weakens corporations as they have to play nicer in order to play at all. What other elements in your life could be improved like this? That is all I'm asking you to think about.

Spooky23 4y ago

MBA types would remove the wings if they could. It’s all about greed and money.

spaceman_2020 4y ago
I swear they must be running some cult machinery inside MBA schools. Practically every MBA I’ve met parrots the same language and has the same beliefs and approaches.
- bmitc 4y ago
  Institutionalization in action. You might me interested in the book Disciplined Minds.

projektfu 4y ago

Reminds me of the story of the fisherman and businessman. https://paulocoelhoblog.com/2015/09/04/the-fisherman-and-the-businessman/ https://paulocoelhoblog.com/2015/09/04/the-fisherman-and-the...

bmitc 4y ago
Thanks for sharing! That’s exactly it. I really do think that we have the technology and ability to return to a sort of technological advanced system of hunting and gathering with some agriculture. In that, we could apply just enough automation to simplify our lives but then go about just living. Today, life is a never ending grind and to what end? We work and work and work towards the goal of only retiring when our bodies and minds are spent. Capitalism is a failure in this aspect. Humans become a machine to grow more capital at the cost of quality of life and the environment.

LeifCarrotson 4y ago

As a controls engineer building factory automation, it's about letting humans do human things and robots do robotic things. You don't want to have a human sticking their fingers in a grinder, or handling red-hot castings, or trying to install a washer on a dial table every 2.5 seconds for 8 hours straight, or attending the movement of a sewing machine within 1/8" for literal miles of seams sewn each day... those are all mind-numbing or dangerous things I've automated. But the machines can't efficiently understand when they're wearing out, they fault in a myriad of ways and need troubleshooting, they need someone to monitor the quality of incoming and outgoing product, keep them fed with parts, and to do other common-sense human tasks. There are certainly things that people have tried to automate that didn't make sense. But there are a lot of things that haven't yet been automated which should be.

CarbonCycles 4y ago
Adding a bit more context to this good post, the control algorithms are designed and developed around assumptions and an operational envelope deemed to be "normal". An airplane is much more complicated from a systems perspective (but yet can be more easily automated from an operational POV). To make an airplane fly, there are dozens of control surfaces, very complex mechanical systems, and not to mention a greater degree of danger (i.e., explosions) and loss of life should these systems fail. Yet, when everything "works" within their engineered/designed parameters, we can construct control algorithms around these operational envelopes. Also, at 10k feet in the air, there are rules that govern flight paths (overseen by controllers); radar and beacons that help keep planes on track; and most importantly much less traffic/congestion (as opposed to a bus or car). This provides the pilots (and also sailors) the ability to automate their flight at steady-state. This is where it gets interesting. If a plane loses a control surface or a critical system fails, these controls systems will be pushed outside of their operational envelopes, and this is where a human takes over. It's not a question of "if" but "when" things will fail....
- LeifCarrotson 4y ago
  The low-hanging fruit of straight and level flight is, I'd argue, appropriate for automation, but they need to get out of the way when the plane goes outside the normal operating envelope. Whether these tools are just analog trim tabs that allow the stick to be adjusted so that a stable aircraft basically holds itself in straight-and-level flight, or complex fly-by-wire autopilot algorithms that keep an unstable aircraft in straight-and-level flight, taking the mundane, repetitive, mind-numbing workload of closing the loop between the six-pack of instruments and the sticks for hours on end. A pilot who has been watching the VSI and heading for three hours on a cross-country flight, tediously keeping the plane within 300 feet of its assigned flight level and ensuring that the passengers don't even perceive tiny changes in heading and attitude, or a trucker who has been driving their tractor-trailer cross-country for 60 hours in 7 days, holding an 8.5-foot-wide vehicle between a pair of 12-foot-wide lane lines, and adjusting the throttle up and down hills to keep their speed within a couple MPH of the speed limit, is going to be fatigued and when it comes time to deal with an emergency on landing or a sudden, unexpected brake check from a small car pulling in front of the truck, that fatigue has a cost. There's a point where cruise control and autopilots can make these tasks safer, allowing pilots to keep ahead of the needs of aircraft, and allowing drivers to keep their eyes scanning the other vehicles, their mirrors, and the road ahead, rather than going back-and-forth between the speedometer and the lane lines. I absolutely acknowledge that there's also a point where this automation gets in the way or causes operators to tune out and be unprepared when asked to take over when the envelope is exceeded. Right-sizing that level of automation is critical!

avidphantasm 4y ago

From a business point of view, I think has to do with the coercive law of competition [1]. [1] https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_coercive_laws_of_competition https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_coercive_laws_of_compet...