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If it can be designed on a computer, it can be built by robots
- ChatGTP 3y ago“Thirty years from now we will laugh at our generation of humans, putting products together by hand,” I guess people never thought the titanic would sink, or Japan would be going backwards (they have robots), but here we are.
- jareklupinski 3y agoi read it more as a "horses -> cars" thing, like people still riding on horses will be soon eclipsed by people in cars, for all the efficiency reasons cars ultimately won in the end place your bets? i went horseback riding once and had a great time...
- brucethemoose2 3y agoThis is a weird jump. Usually technology bumps out the lowest class workers, but genAI is taking a bite right out of the middle to upper class... certain executives, office salespeople, some programmers, actors, and such will be replaced by robots before garbage workers, lawn services or roofers.
- nullc 3y ago> This is a weird jump. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
- ronsor 3y agoRobotics is significantly harder and more expensive than algorithms, both in development and deployment.
- SoftTalker 3y agoAnd you still need people to maintain and repair the robots, at least for now. Software doesn't need maintenance in that sense; it doesn't have moving parts that need lubrication, adjustments, and that eventually wear out.
- slashdev 3y agoAs anyone who’s ever maintained software can tell you, software does suffer bitrot over time. Dependencies need updating and replacing. Deprecated functions have to be replaced. Systems and software change over time, breaking your software. It’s not as high maintenance as most physical things with moving parts though.
- LeonB 3y agoAgreed. It’s really astounding how much maintenance “modern” software needs. A lot of the maintenance is to do with the dependencies, and/or with the discovery of vulnerabilities, but also with obsolescence in the tool chain used for building the software, or the APIs that the software depends upon, or simply the continual replacement of tokens/certificate and so on that have built in expiry. It’s not glamorous work, but it is absolutely relentless, endless, tedious stuff.
- Ekaros 3y agoAlso it doesn't murder itself and what is around it in case of bad inputs or failure. The failure modes of software are pretty tame, specially in cloud. With proper sized robots killing someone or damaging itself and other things is entirely real possibility.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoIn hindsight it seems that way, but until recently, getting a robot to generate a movie or act as a creative therapist seemed impossible, not a matter of engineering resources.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoYeap. The VA commissioned Dean Kamen to build the Luke Arm, a practical prosthetic arm for disabled vets. It took years, million$, determination, and extensive testing to achieve. Not impossible, but it's not something that can be thrown together in a weekend hackathon. https://mobiusbionics.com/luke-arm/ https://mobiusbionics.com/luke-arm/
- qingcharles 3y agoThat's fascinating. I'd not thought of it that way, but it is absolutely true. When DALLE2 came along last year I was stunned as it seemed like we had skipped the part where AI did the drudgery and jumped right to the bit where it emulated human emotion and imagination. I know many people using AI to write vast swathes of content, to create marketing materials, to write code and to create stock images. Some of the people AI has replaced were taking $150K salaries and now are earning zero. That's a harder lump to swallow than your working class person who might have gone from $20K to zero.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair It's my experience that coders, software engineers, accountants, and other STEM professionals regularly dismiss that their jobs are threatened by the encroachment of advances in AI such as deep learning and LLMs. And, unfortunately, the standard optimistic, hand-waving refrain of "There will be other jobs." denies reality that they may well make less money elsewhere, be under/unemployed, or not be able to retrain. I foresee a widening excess supply of skilled individuals who will face difficulties finding any job that either: pays enough OR where a potential employer doesn't deem them "overqualified." (In addition, almost all of the professional class bets against their own interests by being predominantly anti-union, even when they're under/haphazardly paid or overworked.) It will take more decades, but even nursing and care will be automatable when AI and mechatronics advance sufficiently. I look forward to the kitchen and bathroom cleaning robots. These are moonshot projects that require 100M-1B and multiple decades to attain. https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_terrifying_implications_of_computers_that_can_learn https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_te... (2014)
- julianeon 3y agoI am optimistic for all those professions you listed, because those are all knowledge workers. I like that term because the vagueness is actually helpful. Ultimately these people work to become experts in various knowledge systems. And the other thing that’s happening while AI is advancing, is that the educational system is borderline collapsing. So what that means is that, even if AI automates a ton more coding, even if it’s capabilities keep improving, the net effect of that will still be to add more complexity: and that means the jobs of people who are doing that type of job now, are going to get more complex. Someone has to make sure the AI data lake processor is feeding data into the chat room that displays daily metrics, for example. Now take that example and multiply it by 100, for all the new capabilities AI will create. So maybe you don’t write the app necessarily, because AI does, but because of the fragmented nature of various vendors and services, someone still has to make sure the app talks to the DB, which talks to the AI chat bot, which does a new kind of real time metrics analysis made possible by AI. I really don’t think the demand for the type of well educated worker it takes to manage all that is being met, and won’t be for a long time to come. If you can do that work, your job will be safe.
- diydsp 3y agohttps://archive.is/Zt9oI https://archive.is/Zt9oI Much of this discussion is swallowed up in two differing definitions of "design." They contrast chip design with leafblower design. Chips are very fussy and require lots of patience and intellect to be useful to people, while the latter's success is more rooted in the aesthetics, ergonomics, user needs of everyday families. This isn't saying they're wrong, just a sloppy way to talk about it. What they're really saying is the path from CAD to CAM is shorter than ever, and more integrated. It sounds pretty great. It does make me curious about where the tooling cost outstretches the gap between family and factory owner. Probably making lots of Temu-grade consumer goods, such as a disposable lawn mower, or a coffee maker that's good for 6 months. Which is of course horrific for long-term ecology. It would be nice to see this amount of cleverness directed at extracting usable materials from landfills :) :) :)
- iancmceachern 3y agoThis article completely misses the point. Places like China assemble stuff by hand that would be automated in higher wage countries not because they don't know how, or higher wage countries have developed some new software they haven't. It's because wage costs are low. As soon as it makes economical sense to automate, companies do. It's not specific to geography, or technology, or anything of other than economics of thr world labor market.
- femto 3y agoAgree, in that if the cheapest way to do process is automated and the capital cost of the automation is reasonable there is no advantage to offshoring that process. An example is pick and place assembly of circuit boards. For large quantities, meaning the loading of the feeders is not a big part of the cost, a local company can match or undercut the price of an offshore company. A counterexample is chip fabrication, where the capital cost dominates (and even if it didn't wafers are often manually handled).
- hedora 3y agoThe percentage unit cost and environmental impact of shipping electronics from China (or between any two points on earth near a major harbor) on a cargo vessel is zero. If the labor in China is cheaper than the robot + the person that operates the robot, then it is cheaper to build it there. Building it locally only makes economic sense if the design is changing frequently (e.g., using local pick and place for prototyping), or if it is built to order, so the time it spends on the boat actually matters. As an extreme example, giant Italian windows cost about the same, delivered, in the US as inferior domestic ones do. The main downside is the lead time. In particular, thanks to a drought, traffic through the panama canal is all screwed up these days, so getting them to the west coast is hard. If the economics tilt this way for shipping giant panes of glass, they certainly also do for tiny, high priced electronic devices. Of course, externalities (e.g., environmental impact of Chinese manufacturing, human rights, national security and xenophobia) could change the tradeoffs.
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- dv_dt 3y agoThe economist is approaching this with the same outright hubris that Elon Musk did with his factory automation. Years later the Tesla manufacturing lines seem to be going backwards on precision and reliability.
- gatkinso 3y agoThese articles are written by people who have no idea what they are talking about and have never built anything, much less anything in the physical world before.
- JimtheCoder 3y agoBut, they will mainly be read by people who have no idea what they are talking about and will never build anything, much less anything in the physical world...so, it all balances out I guess?
- toss1 3y agoCan confirm both. I have a composites design & fabrication biz, and while I always seek good automated solutions, and indeed some parts can be automated, we are soooo far away from what that article propounds that it is a ridiculous fiction for any serious product development & mfg. Maybe might work for some cheap Chinese-junk type stuff, but nothing real, at least soon. The problem is that some of the ignorant writers and readers don't recognize their own ignorance, and are in a position to make corp & govt policy based on that ignorance. Then, we all pay.
- Animats 3y agoI get that feeling too. The article doesn't distinguish between making parts and assembly. Making parts was mostly mechanized decades ago. The article talks about 3D printing in metal, which is a nice technology but way too slow to be used to bang out consumer products. Assembly is still tough to automate. If you want automated assembly, you usually have to design things so that the parts go into place with little or no fuss. Vertical assembly is common, where everything is placed with a straight-down move. This goes way back, to the first cheap mass-produced clocks, where there's a baseplate with pins sticking out of it, you just drop on the gears in the right order, and it all comes together. They mention Bright Machines. Their site is heavy on the hype, weak on the machine specs.[1] They sell some kind of robotic assembly cell. So do many other companies. Sony had a nice one thirty years ago for making the Walkman. It's not clear what Bright brings to the party. More software integration, probably; they talk about that a lot. There are some new results from MIT on assembly planning.[2] This is kind of cute. They start with a game-type physics model of the assembled item and figure out how to take it apart. That's reversed into an assembly plan. Joint work from MIT, Texas A&M, and Autodesk. It's surprising how much manual work is involved in assembling a mobile phone. It's a high-volume product with a modest number of parts, the ideal case for automation. Many early US-made mobile phones were assembled automatically. They were stacks of boards that just had to be dropped onto alignment pins and pressed together. Newer phones have tiny flat cables and connectors all over the place. Most automated assembly lines involve a huge amount of custom tooling. It's not a few robots with standard tools. The state of the art in robotic assembly is far worse that you'd think it would be. And that's after half a century of work on the problem, all the way back to McCarthy in the 1960s. [1] https://www.brightmachines.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/BrightMachines_brochure.pdf https://www.brightmachines.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Br... [2] https://news.mit.edu/2022/automated-way-assemble-thousands-objects-1207 https://news.mit.edu/2022/automated-way-assemble-thousands-o...
- sn41 3y ago> “Thirty years from now we will laugh at our generation of humans, putting products together by hand,” I never laughed at humans thirty years ago even if they were programming on antiquated machines with only megabytes of RAM over dialup internet connections. As a matter of fact, I think some of them are legends and we should try to emulate them. I don't know why humans thirty years from now will laugh at us, even if it happens that robots do more of the jobs we do take for granted.
- elcritch 3y agoRight and assembling things by hand will probably become a niche hobby like retro computing. For small scale startups assembling things by hand may still even be a valuable skill in some cases. Thoygh with the way AI is progressing we may still have cheap humans doing tedious tasks while the AIs make art, program, and manage companies for the benefit of AI wallstreet and digital AI avatars of dead billionares. :p
- notbeuller 3y agoI saw some snark on mastodon that applies here: I don't need AI to write essays or synthesise art, I need it to stand in line at the DMV for me.
- coldtea 3y agoAs an aside, I don't know why the Americans make the DMV sound like it's so much bother. I've read so many complains about this. In other countries I know periodic car inspection is like a few hours at most, every couple of years or so (and that only starts after the car is a good few years old already).
- brewdad 3y agoIt’s one of those rare government offices that pretty much every American adult has to deal with at one time or another. I agree that it really isn’t a big deal. In the past decade, I’ve had to visit the DMV office twice for a combined total of about two and a half hours. I’ve also had to get my two cars emissions tested about three times taking about 30 minutes each time. 4 hours of my time over a decade isn’t worth getting worked up about. It’s annoying but so are about 1,000 other things in life.
- kwar13 3y agoThe Economist has for years lost the plot and become an out-of-touch publication.
- taneq 3y ago<visible confusion> That's... why we do it.
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y agoall they need now, is that some other computer buys it and consumes it.
- TheLoafOfBread 3y agoGive robot a box of Ikea furniture. Even when it is designed by computer and most of the pieces are built by CNC machines (technically robots) I don't think that there is any robot in the world, which will be able to build the furniture together.
- amelius 3y agoDo we now have an autonomous system that can assemble a LEGO model, given the instruction booklet?
- xbox99 3y ago[flagged]
- cyanydeez 3y agoP = NP
- Scalene2 3y agoMost clothing can be designed on a computer but we aren't even close to having a machine that can sew a pair of pants.
- seydor 3y agoThat's a big if