Automation Thread: Imagine johnny 5 squashing your job, forever

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Automation Thread: Imagine johnny 5 squashing your job, forever

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Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Cicero posted:

Amazon just announced a checkout-less retail store: https://www.amazon.com/b?node=16008589011

Surprised that it doesn't use either barcode/QR scanning or RFID tags, apparently.

edit: It seems like the main weakness of checkoutless stores is still loose goods like produce, where they don't come in pre-made discrete quantities. Although I guess you could have a store like this and just treat loose goods as a special case where you have to go to a station to weigh them.

Amazon wants to eventually take over huge chunks of the retail economy, and it's going to be heavily automated.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/5/13849008/amazon-go-grocery-convenience-stores-retail-expansion

# ¿ Dec 7, 2016 20:51

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 06:54

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Postmates and DoorDash are testing delivery by robot

# ¿ Jan 18, 2017 18:51

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Im still not convinced that the horseless carriage is actually happening. Go into any city street or out to any farm, it's still the same. There may be a few horseless carriages but the technology is still very primitive. A self starter doesnt exist. They are still loud and unreliable. People are still going to be drawing trucks and taxis, plowing fields to grow food, racing, etc with horses for a long time to come. I go into the tavern and its OMG automobiles, but when i go outside into the real world, it's the same as its always been. So it seems like this histeria over machines putting horses out of work is just bunk.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2017 05:01

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Blue Star posted:

It still took decades and decades when cars were invented before they became common enough to make a difference for most people. And right now, the technologies havent even been invented yet. We're not even in the 1880s yet, to go with your metaphor.

Most people work service jobs, not manufacturing. Most people are going to be working retail, food service, delivery, sales, etc. for the rest of their lives. And Kmart,Sears closing has nothing to do with automation. Amazon is just another company that employs humans, though fewer of them because they dont have physical stores. But that isnt applicable to most businesses where you need humans to do stuff.

At peak horse there were 25 million horses in the USA. Now there are 4 million.

The claim isn't that jobs are going to go to zero. The claim is that you need to figure out how to deal with a number that shrinks to 40% smaller, maybe more, in just a few decades.

Note: 25% unemployment is a massive, crushing depression.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2017 05:25

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Tesla's crash rate dropped 40 percent after Autopilot was rolled out.

One aspect not everyone may have thought about is that if there are fewer car crashes, there are also fewer organ donations.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2017 19:12

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Uber opens its network to self-driving cars

# ¿ Jan 31, 2017 18:36

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Tei posted:

I don't think "selling bread and milk" will be automatized soon.

Part of the reason people buy to people is because we don't trust the people selling us milk and bread.

We have the technology to have the refrigerator order more milk when the milk bottle is empty. People don't want to lose control over these things. I imagine that people want to take the food products in their hands before they take the decision to take these products home. Maybe is some instinct and how our brain is wired.

Having the refrigerator automatically refill the milk bottle is against some of our instincts. You will not eat or drink something without looking at it at least once. Is a miracle that people trust soda companies like Coca Cola, but I think is because every coca cola taste exactly the same and you have not heard of anybody finding a dead rat inside his cola bottle and dying for that.

So these automatic machines that deliver food. They can deliver soda bottles. That works. Milk, no so much (you have to trust the machine to not mix water or served outdated milk). Bread, need to be fresh too, but the way these machines work, the product may wait months before is sell. So anything you buy from one of these machines is usually filled with chemical products to delay corruption.

We have the technology to automatise buying and selling food, but I don't think is what people want at the moment. The exception can be made for "standarized food". Usually trash food. So you know what (poo poo) you are buying without looking at it.

I'm pretty sure that Amazon automated grocery store where you just grab your items and walk away will stock bread and milk.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2017 13:51

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Paradoxish posted:

You understand that the groceries aren't delivered by a robot, right

These six-wheeled robots are about to start delivering food in the US

# ¿ Feb 7, 2017 02:12

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Well you see that's why minimum wages are too high, there will always be a demand for cheap labor in places like China,

Chinese factory replaces 90% of human workers with robots. Production rises by 250%, defects drop by 80%

# ¿ Feb 7, 2017 18:16

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Washington DC city council has unanimously approved a test deployment of delivery robots.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2017 19:31

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Interesting article about the man behind the @HumanVSMachine twitter feed.

https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/02/how-being-replaced-by-a-machine-turned-this-graphic-artist-into-an-activist/

# ¿ Feb 11, 2017 22:36

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Carvana sells used cars online. They were doing home delivery, but recently introduced vending machines for cars.

quote:

"We can do four deliveries per day, and there's a cost of doing that," says Keeton. An employee devotes work time to be on the road, and the company must purchase larger delivery vehicles as necessary. But the vending machine sites remove the delivery logistics, and they need less staff and infrastructure than traditional dealerships. Keeton says customers save an average of $1,500 on a used car thanks to such aspects of Carvana's smaller overhead.

"Delivery requires an employee driving to you, but we can do a pickup every 20 minutes each day here," he says. "It's another lower cost, and because of that we can build stuff like this to ramp up the fun."

# ¿ Feb 12, 2017 23:21

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Robotic studio takes fashion photos without a camera crew

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLABw4sCQbw

# ¿ Feb 22, 2017 19:44

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Burger-flipping robot has its first day on the job

# ¿ Mar 9, 2017 03:14

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO5x9x5WGtY&t=25s

# ¿ Mar 14, 2017 22:27

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Sensors and a computer play umpire in a pro baseball game

# ¿ Apr 4, 2017 22:08

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

The Japanese Volleyball Association is now using a robot volleyball player to help out during training drills

# ¿ Apr 12, 2017 17:05

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Drunk man arrested for knocking over a security robot

# ¿ Apr 26, 2017 15:41

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/10/15596810/c-learn-mit-robot-training-coding-optimus-atlas

quote:

The system aims to mimic how humans learn, and even allows robots to teach what they�ve learned to other robots. That could allow machines to one day be trained more quickly and cheaply.

quote:

After the information is moved from one robot computer to the other, the second robot can use this learned information to accomplish the task

# ¿ May 10, 2017 16:30

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Berkeley researchers teach computers to be curious

quote:

Each "branch", or decision, in that tree has a weighted value that's determined from previous experiences and the relative rewards associated with them. This is known as "reinforcement learning" and is basically the same way you train a dog: rewarding effective behavior and discouraging the ineffective.

This obviously works well for dogs (all of whom are good) but it does present a significant shortcoming when training neural networks: the AI will only pursue high reward actions no matter what, even to the detriment of its overall efficiency. It will run into the same wall forever rather than take a moment and think to jump over it.

The UC Berkeley team's AI, however, has been imbued with the ability to make decisions and take action even when there isn't an immediate payoff. Though, technically, the researchers define curiosity as " the error in an agent's ability to predict the consequence of its own actions in a visual feature space learned by a self-supervised inverse dynamics model."

To train the AI, the researchers taught it to play Super Mario Bros. and Doom.

I'm sure Main Paineframe will soon explain that this "appears to be about as AI as an old Lego Mindstorms set".

# ¿ May 24, 2017 21:08

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Legal sector facing disruption from 40 AI companies, new report finds

# ¿ Jun 27, 2017 19:16

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Zume automated pizza delivery

# ¿ Jun 28, 2017 17:27

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

I mean, it is kinda true that the story of Computer Science is the story of creating new levels of abstraction.

But on the other hand, the fact that it is getting more and more abstract and high-level is an argument against it being highly automatable.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2017 23:01

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

To put it simply Computer Programming will be one of the last remaining jobs because it constantly drives itself to automate and go to higher-level thinking / abstractions. To automate it will require Artificial General Intelligence.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2017 12:48

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Automated robo police car with 360-degree cameras that �scan for wanted criminals and undesirables�

# ¿ Jun 29, 2017 18:19

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

The first computers were programmed by moving patch cables around. Then software-programmable computers were created.
Then there were people who operated the card punches.
Then there were assemblers.
Then there were teletypes.
Then there were compiled languages.
Then there were magnetic media, and electronic terminals.
Then there were high-level languages.
And networking.
And application frameworks.
And cloud.
And containers.

The computer programming industry is one that has continuously worked to automate itself, to eliminate any repetitive effort. It is not in danger from the new wave of automation. It *is* the new wave of automation.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2017 17:11

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Automation isn't going to eliminate computer programming any more than computer generated proofs is going to eliminate math PhDs.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2017 18:47

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Putting processors in things is only increasing and increasing and soon there will be 802.11ah wireless and it will get really crazy

# ¿ Jul 9, 2017 18:27

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Cicero posted:

How many years until we have the government/charities buying smartphones for the poor because without one you can't really function in society?

Much like color televisions and refrigerators, smartphones have been driven down to cost points where even the poor have them in their houses. They just aren't as nice as the ones the other economic classes have.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2017 19:25

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

WaPo article examining automation at a single factory in the rust belt:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/rise-of-the-machines/2017/08/05/631e20ba-76df-11e7-8f39-eeb7d3a2d304_story.html

You don't need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to add a robot to your factory now, you can just lease one for $15/hour.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2017 19:03

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

First the self-driving cars, then the self-flying planes.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2017 02:59

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

That's true, but the stepping from 3-person crew (with a Flight Engineer) to 2-person was a while back; additional reductions now are noteworthy. Especially if the industry seriously pursues cargo flying around with no flight crew at all.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2017 13:06

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Doctor Malaver posted:

That happens to human pilots too.

I don't think an AI would have screwed this one up either.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2017 19:58

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmQ-BZ3eWxM

# ¿ Aug 9, 2017 14:33

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

As humans we all want to think we would be better at driving a car or flying a plane but the fact is an AI can process more inputs simultaneously and respond faster than any human while having 100% perfect alertness at all times and eventually those jobs are all going to be automated

# ¿ Aug 13, 2017 02:22

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

The AIs don't have to be infallible, merely demonstrably safer than humans. And such demonstrations are happening.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2017 02:06

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Maluco Marinero posted:

Read the post fully, this isn't just about cars. Aircraft can't settle for demonstrably safer and then eschew the pilot. They have to have enough defense against failure to recover fallibility in a system for unattended autopilot to be considered.

Yeah, I know this isn't about cars. The only bar the AIs have to cross is "better than a human". That's the hurdle. That's it.

And if you think they aren't going to clear it you haven't been reading this thread.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2017 02:43

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Ford and Domino's Pizza testing self driving pizza delivery cars

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/08/ford-and-dominos-are-experimenting-with-automated-pizza-deliveries/

For the test phase there will be a driver hidden behind tinted windows in the driver's seat, it's about monitoring the customer reactions.

quote:

Domino�s will monitor everything from delivery times and customer satisfaction, to where customers touch the vehicle, how easy it is for them to remove the pizzas from the insulated compartment, how quickly they�re able to punch in the code, and if they�re able to keep their hands off the car�s valuable lidar systems spinning atop the vehicle.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2017 16:12

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Ars reporter tries on the car seat costume:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/09/i-sat-in-the-seat-suit-of-fords-fake-self-driving-car/

# ¿ Sep 13, 2017 23:09

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 06:54

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

Self operating excavation equipment:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16502868/built-robotics-autonomous-bulldozer-excavation-google

# ¿ Oct 19, 2017 15:49

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Automation Thread: Imagine johnny 5 squashing your job, forever

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