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DrSunshine posted:Oh to be certain. There will be plenty of jobs for those who mind the machines -- technicians and the like -- as well as people engaged in creative labor to take advantage of machinery, or develop new automation technology. But will the jobs created in these industries, and small/self-owned business models like Uber, Lyft and AirBNB, and work-from-home systems like the Mechanical Turk, be enough to replace the ones that are lost? Not only that, but what about the relative quality and pay of those jobs? Most of the people who build and maintain the machines are third-world workers working for a fraction of what the people who were replaced by machines were making (which leads into another oft-overlooked factor - technology and automation also make offshoring and outsourcing easier), and Uber and Lyft and MTurk are notoriously lovely jobs that pay poorly and base their business models around abusing employees. Vermain posted:Front counters, maybe, but anyone in the back is entirely disposable. The "security" (if one can call it that) which they enjoy right now is only a consequence of the price of a burger flipping machine not being low enough. Get the technology to the point where you can assemble a hamburger in 15 seconds at a high rate of accuracy and they're toast. Cost isn't the only factor keeping humans in employment in low-skill jobs. One advantage of human labor over automation is versatility. You can't tell that burger-flipping machine to go mop the floor or clean the toilets during a slow period, and even adding a new burger recipe can be troublesome for a purpose-built machine if it wasn't carefully designed to have that customizability (which costs money) in the first place. An Apple exec, talking about their use of low-wage Chinese labor, claimed that the reason they use Chinese workers was for the versatility rather than the low cost. They even gave an example of a time when the design of a new iPhone had gone through a last-minute change the night before it entered production - with machines or US workers they would have had to push the launch back, but with Foxconn they could just send the foreman to the employee dorms to go wake everyone up in the middle of the night and start training them on the change right away. TwoQuestions posted:How about we dispense with the stupid notion that everyone deserves a living. If someone can't make it, get rid of them. so edgy...hope no one cuts themselves
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Nov 26, 2015 15:27
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DarkCrawler posted:Look at where the robots are now. Look at where they were hundred years ago. Imagine where they will be hundred years from now, while also remembering that barring some incredibly damaging scenarios, technology grows exponentially, not on a straight line. Technology does not "grow" exponentially, nor does it "grow" in a straight line. To be honest, it's incredibly naive to try to boil down the advancement of all human knowledge and technology to a line on a bar graph.
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Nov 26, 2015 23:49
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mobby_6kl posted:I'm not entirely sure if you're being serious here. Because there totally is software that helps automate engineering as well as other technologies like CNC machines and 3D printers, yet engineering is still in high demand and is very well paid. This is because in many engineering fields it is illegal to do certain things without a real certified engineer signing off on them, and if those things end badly then that engineer is typically liable for the results. Engineering is generally tightly regulated and subject to significant liability, its not something any idiot with a piece of software is legally allowed to do. It's government regulation protecting engineering jobs by requiring trained and licensed engineers to do engineering jobs. Software can't take the place of a licensed engineer, and the software companies aren't interested in doing so for fear of also inheriting that liability.
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Nov 27, 2015 19:41
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computer parts posted:Licensure is generally only required for public works, although certain fields do require it as well (for example, after the BP Oil spill certain designs related to oil drilling now require a Professional Engineer to sign off). The main limiting factor is that engineers are trained to do what people do best and machines do the worst - design creative works. They fit a practical purpose, but the designs are also usually novel in a way that you can't just plug into an algorithm and get a good result. Are they, really? I thought engineering was more about turning other people's creative works into reality. Obviously there's some latitude for creativity, but if you asked me to list creative fields, neither "engineer" nor "programmer" would be anywhere near the top of my list. Paradoxish posted:You can already buy a Mercedes that can drive itself in low-speed highway traffic, and Mercedes has said they'll have a fully autonomous car within the next decade. It sucks that another thread is getting overrun by self-driving car talk, but a lot of people with a narrow focus on Google's progress in this particular arena are going to end up being blindsided by how quickly automated systems are rolling out in production cars. It's kind of shocking how many people I know who don't realize that semi-autonomous parking systems are already a pretty commonplace feature in many new cars. Autonomous systems that automate certain specific tasks under certain specific well-defined conditions are easy - so easy that they hardly even qualify as steps toward autonomous driving. Driving in a traffic jam on a highway? That's a trivial task. Drive down a twisty, turny backroad in bumfuck nowhere with tons of blind driveways, road paint so worn-out even a human can barely see it, and it's currently snowing? It's so different from simple tasks like automatic cruise control, traffic jam driving, and automatic parking that the same skills aren't even remotely applicable. We might have cars that drive themselves some of the time, but genuinely "driverless" cars are not coming anytime in the foreseeable future.
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Nov 28, 2015 18:02
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Doctor Malaver posted:I don't agree that types of driving present a meaningful difference to the machine (OK a dirt road is another thing, the AI car probably won't see them as part of navigable system). You attribute human flaws to electronic brain. For me and you when we were learning to drive, a long straight road was easier to navigate than a busy intersection because it gave us fewer things to keep in mind at the same time. A machine that knows how to treat individual elements in traffic won't have problems with many such elements appearing at the same time. The difference between dealing with one truck vs dealing with 2 trucks + 1 scooter + 6 pedestrians + 4 cars + yellow light + night + ice on the road will be negligible. Like a calculator that can calculate 6511.18 x 902.77 as easily as 7+8. "Stop if an object is in your path" is not a particularly impressive programming task, nor is it a representative showing of the potential difficulties involved in self-driving cars. Once you have sensors capable of clearly distinguishing objects in the surrounding space, it's relatively easy. That's why the "snowstorm" was a particularly important part of his post that you glossed over - whether it's a calculator or a self-driving car, it can only do its job properly if it is getting clear and reliable input that the processing unit can make sense of. Try pushing the buttons on the calculator with a beach ball and you might find it becoming a whole lot harder to get it to accurately perform the calculations you want. Likewise, poor weather conditions or unusual road conditions may impact the ability of the sensors to provide clear input to the processing unit, rendering it unable to accurately respond to its surroundings. The inability of a self-driving car to tell what am object actually is can cause serious problems, like slamming on the brakes in 70mph highway traffic because a plastic bag caught by the wind drifted across its path. Anosmoman posted:Not really. For some tasks it comes down to nothing but convenience and cost - nobody cares that your bank teller has been turned into an ATM or the toll booth operator turned into an automated kiosk. People are increasingly shopping online and are perfectly happy to forego the interaction with salespeople simply because then they don't have to get off the couch. People have computers glued to their hands these days so saying they don't like interacting with them is a little too broad. As long as poo poo goes right, people are fine with pushing a button to make things happen with no human interaction. But when things go wrong, people want to talk to a human about it. If you press the button that says "cheeseburger" and a cheeseburger comes out, you're happy. But if you pressed that button and a salad came out, you're going to be demanding the attention of a real human to get that problem fixed - the closer, the better.
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Dec 10, 2015 21:18
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Tezzor posted:Or look at this: They're called "ideal conditions" for a reason - they're the easiest conditions anyone could possibly think of, where the fewest possible potential problems exist. "Drive straight, stop when the car in front of you stops" is not complex - but self-driving cars will not be a thing until the actually complex problems are solved.
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Dec 11, 2015 23:48
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Doctor Malaver posted:We saw that car changing lanes too so it doesn't just drive straight. And what do you actually want it to do? I'm perfectly fine with a car that will drive me "straight" from A to B and slow down or stop for obstacles. That's how I drive too. If you can't use it in a snowstorm, so you won't. You can't really drive a BMW convertible in a snowstorm either and yet convertibles are "a thing". Convertibles didn't destroy the professional driver industry. Neither did cruise control. There will be steps to automate the easy but boring drudgery and grunt work of driving, but until cars can reliably self-drive the last mile, which isn't happening anytime soon, they won't put much of a dent in driver employment. Paul MaudDib posted:Humans are also not particularly good at driving in zero-visibility situations. I didn't say "zero-visibility". Self-driving cars don't see using a pair of human eyes mounted on a head that can be rotated, parked comfortably behind a gigantic windshield which is equipped with several different methods of snow removal. They use lasers, LIDAR, radar, ultrasound, and tiny cameras, and the trend for all of those is toward smaller and smaller. It takes a lot less snow to block a pinhole camera or confuse a low-power LIDAR image than it does a pair of human eyes, and these sensors are not nearly as well-equipped for clearing snow. Even rain is still a serious obstacle for self-driving cars with a quite visible effect on effectiveness - sensors, particularly LIDAR and cameras, are simply much more affected by conditions that impact visibility even slightly. Current autonomous driving features don't fare well in Michigan winters: quote:“We’re a lot farther from general use self-driving cars than those in Silicon Valley would like you to believe. The radar sensor in the front and the rear camera are completely covered. While the snow was falling, I had to turn off the parking assist because the falling snow was triggering the ultrasonic sensors causing the system to beep continuously while there was nothing around the vehicle.”
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Dec 13, 2015 17:06
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Nevvy Z posted:Is there any reason why self driving cars wouldn't limitedly connect to one another anyway? Things would start getting crazy fast and efficient, especially for complicated high intersections in rush hour. Because it requires the entire industry to cooperate and come up with a comprehensive universal standard and protocol so that they can all handle behaviors that are an order of magnitude more complex than solo self-driving in the exact same way, while all using the same algorithms and behaviors and such? It's not like you can just slap a Wi-Fi router on the top of every smart car and watch cooperative behavior emerge out of thin air.
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Jan 5, 2016 06:31
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some sort of fish posted:Ya an entire industry forced to create communication standards across disparate devices with different capabilities we've sure never done that before lol Yeah, just look at how quickly and seamlessly industries have cooperatively come up with entire communication standards from scratch, with full and reliable interoperability and no problematic vendor-specific bugs or misbehaviors or extensions, and the stability necessary to ensure that hardware will not be rendered obsolete over a timeframe measured in decades. It's certainly possible, but it's not easy, especially when there's currently not much cooperation between prospective smart car vendors. Compatibility isn't something we can just assume will happen, and even if it does, it's not like proper behavior will just arise out of thin air. Spontaneously designing cooperative behavior through ad-hoc peer-to-peer communication requires the car to understand an order of magnitude more about its surroundings, and requires far more complex decision-making. Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Jan 5, 2016 |
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Jan 5, 2016 23:00
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| # ¿ May 18, 2024 05:20 |
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Paul MaudDib posted:Yes, there will be standards that emerge over time. Your phone doesn't refuse to talk to an access point just because it's a different brand. Actually, it does! Due to competing and incompatible technologies and protocols in the cellphone industry and a lack of standardization throughout the industry, most US phones are outright unable to talk to many access points because they use a different communication technology from the access point. some sort of fish posted:Ya and we did that with virtually no government regulation or oversight in an industry that has a vested interest in creating walled off ecosystems of products. Wait, what? Are you talking about the internet? Cellphones? "No government regulation or oversight" indeed!
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Jan 8, 2016 15:28
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