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I saw a How it's Made episode about cheeses like this the other day. They mix the ingredients in a giant electric mixer - but dump them in by hand. The inspecti

I saw a How it's Made episode about cheeses like this the other day. They mix the ingredients in a giant electric mixer - but dump them in by hand. The inspection is still done by ear with a hammer - but when then need to flip the wheels over every few weeks they have a robot grabber thing do it. Obviously, there's some balance in technology that is about right, but where do you draw the line? Because this could absolutely be done fully by hand or fully autonomously. The episode after that showed a machine to milk cows which was fully automated with no human involvement at all!

alnwlsn 2y ago
This reminds me of a news piece from my area about 10 years ago. A field was to be mowed, and they were considering options. They could get some high tech self guided lawn mower, or they could let a herd of goats graze on it. They went with the goats. It did not go over well with the former lawn mower operators, who found themselves no more employed than they would have been if the robotic lawn mower took their job instead.
- bluGill 2y ago
  With goats someone has to fix the fence, apply vaccines, and lots of other labor. Not as much as a lawn mower operator though.
  - some_random 2y ago
    Maybe there were indeed more jobs created by using the goats, but those jobs were likely filled by people other than the human lawn mowers.
bluGill 2y ago
the problem with automating inspections is humans are good at noticing things that are 'different'. I can make a machine see the common wrong things but if I miss one rare situation that passes bad product. many farmers don't use automated milking machines because you still need a human to inspect each cow and thus the machine doesn't save much labor.
- Night_Thastus 2y ago
  As much as I hate the "AI" trends, this is a case where machine learning would be perfect. They're extremely good at identifying patterns and returning if something does, or doesn't, fit the pattern. Try to generate something new based on that pattern, and they tend to have massive limitations. But just a pass/fail reply? They're amazing at that.
- AngryData 2y ago
  Also the labor is dirt cheap. Ive worked on dairy farms milking cows, 9/10 employees are drunk or addicted to meth, nobody else is going to volunteer to get shit and pissed on for $9 an hour. But the cows don't care if someone is drunk or high on meth.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Drunk, addicted to meth employees need jobs too, in order to buy meth/alcohol, and their vote counts just as much as yours.
beloch 2y ago
Let the machines do the hard mixing and lifting. Let the humans do the parts that are fun or may require a bit of artistry. It certainly sounds smarter than building AI to do our writing and art so that we can flip burgers for a living.
masto 2y ago
I always find the Italian kitchen a fascinating contrast between an appreciation for artisanal handmade food and the love of shiny stainless steel gadgets.
LeifCarrotson 2y ago
As a controls engineer, building automated manufacturing equipment, the general principle that we've found to work best is to let the humans do human things and the machines do machine things. A person with a spoon, tediously and laboriously stirring ingredients in a pot, is a poor way to make use of that person's intelligence, creativity, and flexibility. An electric motor just does the job better. On the other hand, by the Anna Karenina principle, cheese inspection is one of those tasks where there are a thousand unique and unexpected ways for a cheese to be wrong but only one way for it to be right. It's very hard to design an inspection that would catch everything and miss nothing that a human would trivially see, smell, or feel, while also minimizing false positives. The robotic wheel flipper is somewhere in the middle: humans are great at navigating complex environments, and while you can design a uniform, controlled environment that a complex AMR can navigate, and space the wheels out regularly, it seems like half the task (rotating the cheese) is something ideally suited for a robot arm and half the task (getting to the cheese) is something better suited for a human. Humans can maintain the environment and debug the process, the robots can flip the cheese. With respect to the cheese testing, I think a good middle ground is tool-assisted human inspection. Instead of/in addition to a hammer, give them an ultrasonic transducer and audio analysis toolset. Let them manipulate the cheese, but also give them objective numerical data on the frequency response and calculated porosity. It's easy for a person to recognize when a cheese is more hollow-sounding than the previous, but the first cheese of the day might be hard to for a human to recognize, and better tools than a primitive hammer can help with that.

alnwlsn 2y ago

This reminds me of a news piece from my area about 10 years ago. A field was to be mowed, and they were considering options. They could get some high tech self guided lawn mower, or they could let a herd of goats graze on it. They went with the goats. It did not go over well with the former lawn mower operators, who found themselves no more employed than they would have been if the robotic lawn mower took their job instead.

bluGill 2y ago
With goats someone has to fix the fence, apply vaccines, and lots of other labor. Not as much as a lawn mower operator though.
- some_random 2y ago
  Maybe there were indeed more jobs created by using the goats, but those jobs were likely filled by people other than the human lawn mowers.

bluGill 2y ago

the problem with automating inspections is humans are good at noticing things that are 'different'. I can make a machine see the common wrong things but if I miss one rare situation that passes bad product. many farmers don't use automated milking machines because you still need a human to inspect each cow and thus the machine doesn't save much labor.

Night_Thastus 2y ago
As much as I hate the "AI" trends, this is a case where machine learning would be perfect. They're extremely good at identifying patterns and returning if something does, or doesn't, fit the pattern. Try to generate something new based on that pattern, and they tend to have massive limitations. But just a pass/fail reply? They're amazing at that.
AngryData 2y ago
Also the labor is dirt cheap. Ive worked on dairy farms milking cows, 9/10 employees are drunk or addicted to meth, nobody else is going to volunteer to get shit and pissed on for $9 an hour. But the cows don't care if someone is drunk or high on meth.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- fragmede 2y ago
  Drunk, addicted to meth employees need jobs too, in order to buy meth/alcohol, and their vote counts just as much as yours.

beloch 2y ago

Let the machines do the hard mixing and lifting. Let the humans do the parts that are fun or may require a bit of artistry. It certainly sounds smarter than building AI to do our writing and art so that we can flip burgers for a living.

masto 2y ago

I always find the Italian kitchen a fascinating contrast between an appreciation for artisanal handmade food and the love of shiny stainless steel gadgets.

LeifCarrotson 2y ago

As a controls engineer, building automated manufacturing equipment, the general principle that we've found to work best is to let the humans do human things and the machines do machine things. A person with a spoon, tediously and laboriously stirring ingredients in a pot, is a poor way to make use of that person's intelligence, creativity, and flexibility. An electric motor just does the job better. On the other hand, by the Anna Karenina principle, cheese inspection is one of those tasks where there are a thousand unique and unexpected ways for a cheese to be wrong but only one way for it to be right. It's very hard to design an inspection that would catch everything and miss nothing that a human would trivially see, smell, or feel, while also minimizing false positives. The robotic wheel flipper is somewhere in the middle: humans are great at navigating complex environments, and while you can design a uniform, controlled environment that a complex AMR can navigate, and space the wheels out regularly, it seems like half the task (rotating the cheese) is something ideally suited for a robot arm and half the task (getting to the cheese) is something better suited for a human. Humans can maintain the environment and debug the process, the robots can flip the cheese. With respect to the cheese testing, I think a good middle ground is tool-assisted human inspection. Instead of/in addition to a hammer, give them an ultrasonic transducer and audio analysis toolset. Let them manipulate the cheese, but also give them objective numerical data on the frequency response and calculated porosity. It's easy for a person to recognize when a cheese is more hollow-sounding than the previous, but the first cheese of the day might be hard to for a human to recognize, and better tools than a primitive hammer can help with that.