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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Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Dead Reckoning posted:

We cannot sustainably support 7.5 billion people living at what we consider a high level of development.

Eh, I think we can, with some adjustments. What do you see as the fundamental problems with doing so?

# ¿ Mar 28, 2017 11:38

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 14:37

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

That's a good idea. The one time I picked something up from Walmart that I ordered online (a sim card) I had to wait in line for like half an hour.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2017 14:11

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

CommieGIR posted:

McDonald's is making a huge success of the automated kiosks:

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/20/mcdonalds-hits-all-time-high-as-wall-street-cheers-replacement-of-cashiers-with-kiosks.html

I'm kind of surprised they didn't start a widespread rollout of these earlier. When I worked at Amazon, one of the local deli chain branches (Specialty's) used iPads for ordering and it seemed to work great. That was 2013.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2017 14:37

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Lightning Lord posted:

Legalize gunning down the poor you mean

Automating people out of their jobs is already legal though?

# ¿ Jun 23, 2017 16:40

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Malcolm XML posted:

Fast food places have been using kiosks for decades and automats are older than you are

Computerphones existed for a a while as a dumb niche until suddenly they were actually practical. VR was utterly useless until suddenly it got decently competent.

You have correctly deduced that technology usually exists in a half-baked, debatably-useful form until it advances far enough to be indisputably useful.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2017 08:44

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

New tech emerges

Goons: Who cares? It's too expensive and impractical, this'll hardly do anything

Tech matures and deployment increases

Goons: Who cares? This stuff has been around forever

# ¿ Jun 26, 2017 08:50

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Malcolm XML posted:

Uh dude its a pure roi thing its still cheaper to deal with humans than kiosks and the human

If that's true then why is McDonald's deploying them to thousands of restaurants in the US now?

quote:

The tech isn't new its old as heck and the cheap cost of labor has kept it from spreading. Look at automated checkouts -- they are barely functional and usually need a human to kick them into shape

But some local fast food places have been successfully using tablet kiosks for ordering for years so it's nothing new to the industry

I know it's technically been around for a long time, I remember using a kiosk to order at an Arby's as a little kid. But they weren't common, let alone the norm, at least in the US. It now looks like they're becoming so.

My point is that it's weirdly common here for people to pooh-pooh new technology because it sucks, then pooh-pooh it when it becomes mature and useful because it's already been around a long time.

edit: also I agree that self-checkout tech is still mostly in the 'suck phase'

Cicero fucked around with this message at 12:58 on Jun 26, 2017

# ¿ Jun 26, 2017 12:54

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Eventually we're run out of jobs, I think it's impossible to predict exactly when though. We won't know it until it's already been happening for a while.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2017 13:51

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Tei posted:

A union is a tool, and like all tools exist to solve one problem and only one. Unions give bargaining power to workers, so they can get a just salary for their hard work.

Unions don't do gently caress all to help fix the end of capitalism caused by automatization.

I mean sometimes unions do stand in the way of automation to preserve jobs, and while it's somewhat understandable, it's not a great thing.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2017 17:12

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Volkerball posted:

No it's not. Computer programming is still just in its infancy, so you still have a lot of people doing "manual labor" of sorts. That job market will shrink as things get simpler and more intuitive. Manually writing code is going to become obsolete. What you'll have instead are a couple proofreaders and people who diagnose issues, but the bulk of the work will be done by computers, and the job market will reflect that in time.

In the very long run you're right (and arguably recent advances in machine learning are a step in that direction), but programmers have been attempting to automate themselves out of a job by making things 'simpler and more intuitive' since the first assembler, and so far it's only made demand stronger.

Like yeah it's gonna happen, but probably not until around the same time that AI becomes capable of doing most white-collar jobs.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2017 19:52

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Volkerball posted:

It's not really star trek level. What it will end up involving is some sort of drafting process, where a model is created, and then that digital model is exported to a program that creates the code.

And He said "Lo, and I shall call it, a 'compiler'."

quote:

And as the database of softwares becomes more fleshed out, and the modeling becomes easier, it will take significantly less people to create something than it takes today. We're already seeing this in machining, and the result is code that would take weeks for a skilled manual programmer to write, being done in a matter of hours.

"I call it, 'Web Development Framework'."

Like seriously, it just sounds like you don't really know how programming works, or its history.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2017 22:59

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Rastor posted:

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.

Yup, but even though the abstraction levels keep getting higher, for the most part it hasn't gotten easier. Oh sure, it's easier to do the same things people were doing 20 or 30 years; making a competent, scalable website in 2017 is WAY easier than making one in 1997. But that's no different than pointing out that it's easier to make a 30 mpg sedan in 2017 than it was in 1997. People's expectations are higher, so in practice the jobs people actually do coding are just as difficult.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2017 23:07

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Main Paineframe posted:

I'm not talking about a world where programmers are obsolete. I'm talking about a world where you need one programmer-hour to do an amount of work that currently takes ten programmer-hours. In that world, you'd better hope that ten times as much programming needs to be done, since otherwise that means a decline in the number of programming jobs.

Thanks to higher-level languages and frameworks and IDEs, you need like one programmer-hour to do the work of like a hundred programmer-hour from 50 years ago, and yet instead of demand for programmers going down, it went up, drastically, by at least an order of magnitude. So yeah it's entirely possible that'll happen, because it's happened before.

But yes, in the sufficiently long run, most programmer jobs will definitely go away. It probably just won't be until most white-collar jobs are under the same kind of automation pressure.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2017 17:13

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

BrandorKP posted:

I wonder how much of automation has been put off, delayed because of outsourcing.

Outsourcing quality is generally poo poo, so if you can somehow automate things that's probably better.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2017 22:02

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

call to action posted:

It's funded without raising taxes and relies on the principle of small government, therefore it's a bipartisan idea? What?

Usually UBI gets hyped up by lefties. That it can be done in a more conservative fashion ostensibly means it's a bipartisan idea or something.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2017 20:26

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

mobby_6kl posted:

Oh you have no idea dude, we're just getting started with IoT!

Yeah seriously, I acknowledge that it mostly sucks right now, but you're crazy if you think we're going backwards on how many things have computers in them.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2017 15:55

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Xae posted:

The Accessibility factor for IOT and smart home stuff is huge.

The first guy I know who jumped on it was my uncle. His wife his problems with fine muscle control. She doesn't need to fumble with switches anymore she can simply tell Alexa to turn on the lights she wants on. If she is too hot or too cold she can adjust the Temp. She can make calls with out dialing a number or fumbling with menus.

This seems to be a common pattern, where something that's a nice but unnecessary luxury for the rich is a huge life-saver for people with some handicap. E.g. for the average adult, buying a self-driving car will mostly be for convenience: now I can do something other than driving! Cool! But for a blind or very elderly adult, it means you go from not being able to drive to being able to drive, a huge lifestyle and productivity change for people in most of America.

edit: another example is ebooks. For most people, they're just like regular books but more convenient to carry around with you. For a blind person, it means being going from almost all books being inaccessible to being able to access the contents of most books through text-to-speech tools.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Jul 10, 2017

# ¿ Jul 10, 2017 15:56

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

People are more scared because IoT concerns physical things. Stuff like account logins or even bank account info feels more abstract.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2017 16:21

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Crazy psychos can burn your house down right now already. If they want. They can just throw gas and fire on it

Are you serious? Is this real life?

# ¿ Jul 12, 2017 17:12

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

LinYutang posted:

A former teacher of mine has Huntington's and Uber/Lyft has meant a world of difference for his mobility, especially since he lives in a lovely town with no public transportation.

I've also heard that Uber/Lyft is better for some minorities (especially black people) because traditional cabbies could be incredibly racist. (That doesn't excuse Uber's lovely internal corporate culture of course)

# ¿ Jul 14, 2017 11:02

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

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

# ¿ Jul 19, 2017 17:56

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Have there ever been serious suggestions/whisperings of a law that mandates compensation if a company leaks your personal information/gets hacked due to poor security?

# ¿ Jul 27, 2017 16:53

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

I could easily see a system in the near future that is capable of washing like 80-90% of dishes (basically anything that doesn't have something hard/crusty) and then detects the still-dirty ones with machine vision for humans to finish off. As people in this thread have frequently and correctly noted, you don't need to be able to replace 100% of what humans do on a task to start getting rid of jobs.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2017 21:53

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Long article on the Atlantic today about ~~Google's~~ Waymo's self-driving cars and specifically how they test: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/inside-waymos-secret-testing-and-simulation-facilities/537648/

quote:

Scenarios like this form the base for the company�s powerful simulation apparatus. �The vast majority of work done�new feature work�is motivated by stuff seen in simulation,� Stout tells me. This is the tool that�s accelerated the development of autonomous vehicles at Waymo, which Alphabet (n�e Google) spun out of its �moon-shot� research wing, X, in December of 2016.

If Waymo can deliver fully autonomous vehicles in the next few years, Carcraft should be remembered as a virtual world that had an outsized role in reshaping the actual world on which it is based.

Originally developed as a way to �play back� scenes that the cars experienced while driving on public roads, Carcraft, and simulation generally, have taken on an ever-larger role within the self-driving program.

At any time, there are now 25,000 virtual self-driving cars making their way through fully modeled versions of Austin, Mountain View, and Phoenix, as well as test-track scenarios. Waymo might simulate driving down a particularly tricky road hundreds of thousands of times in a single day. Collectively, they now drive 8 million miles per day in the virtual world. In 2016, they logged 2.5 billion virtual miles versus a little over 3 million miles by Google�s IRL self-driving cars that run on public roads. And crucially, the virtual miles focus on what Waymo people invariably call �interesting� miles in which they might learn something new. These are not boring highway commuter miles.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2017 21:29

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Makes sense, construction is a much more controlled environment than streets, and "obstacle in way, just stop where you are until it's gone" is a much more acceptable response for an excavator than it is for a car on the road.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2017 17:10

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Waymo's gonna start testing snow fo realz now in Detroit: https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/26/16552598/waymo-michigan-self-driving-car-test

quote:

Waymo is bringing its fleet of self-driving cars to Detroit, a city steeped in car history. The Alphabet unit announced today that it would begin testing its autonomous vehicles in Michigan just in time for an icy winter. The goal would appear to be twofold: teach self-driving cars how to handle slippery, unplowed roads; and thumb their nose at the legacy automakers who are scrambling to keep up to Alphabet�s big head start in autonomy.

Starting in November, Waymo�s self-driving cars and minivans will hit the road in and around Detroit, the company says. And like in other tests, a trained safety driver will be behind the wheel to monitor the car�s progress. But it won�t be Waymo�s first foray on dangerously snowy streets: the company has previously tested its vehicles in winter conditions outside Lake Tahoe.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2017 16:09

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Question: how good are people in snowy winter climes at switching to winter tires? I know it's a thing that gets recommended all the time, but I get the impression that many don't bother (I know I didn't when I was living in Utah). If so, that might be one advantage a self-driving taxi service could have over the average human driver when it comes to dealing with snow.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2017 16:18

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Walmart is now starting to use robots to find merchandise problems in the aisles: http://www.businessinsider.com/walm...lley+Insider%29

quote:

The robots scan aisles for out-of-stock items, items put in the wrong place by customers, incorrect prices, and wrong or missing labels. They continuously go up and down the aisles of the store, alerting human employees of errors it sees. That makes employees more efficient at correcting errors and automates a task employees say they don’t like.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2017 22:47

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Yeah my son has been watching some of those. Wife and I are concerned. A lot of the videos are just...weird, and disturbing in a way that is sometimes hard to put your finger on. And this is coming from a liberal guy who let his four year old play Overwatch.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2017 13:06

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Yeah if it was just "violence and adult themes" like what you see in old Looney Tunes episodes nobody would care. It's more alien than that.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2017 14:36

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/7/16615290/waymo-self-driving-safety-driver-chandler-autonomous

quote:

Waymo, the autonomous vehicle division of Alphabet, Google�s parent company, reached an important milestone recently: since mid-October, the company has been operating its autonomous minivans on public roads in Arizona without a safety driver � or any human at all � behind the wheel. And starting very soon, the company plans to invite regular people for rides in these fully self-driving vehicles.

The news that Waymo�s vehicles have been on public roads with no human in the driver�s seat was announced today by the company�s CEO John Krafcik at a tech conference in Lisbon. The announcement comes on the heels of Waymo�s decision to invite a group of reporters to visit Castle, a 91-acre facility in California�s Central Valley that it has been using as a training course for its self-driving vehicles. At the time, Krafcik declined to provide an exact timetable as to when it would begin testing fully self-driving vehicles on public roads. Little did we know at the time, they were already doing it.

There's a bunch of caveats (the biggest of which is "a suburb of phoenix is self-driving car easy mode"), but still this is a significant step forward.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Nov 7, 2017

# ¿ Nov 7, 2017 17:06

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

call to action posted:

It's not the same, if I got an empty n64 box I would have been pissed but kids these days would literally prefer to watch others play the game

That by itself isn't so weird. You've never watched a friend play through part of a single-player game? I mean, I don't really do it anymore, but when I was a kid with much more free time, it was great.

Or heck, when someone is a "into sports", what that usually translates to for an adult is "likes watching other people play sports", not playing so much themselves. And that's obviously highly socially accepted.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Yeah, unboxing seems like the most harmless thing imaginable and you really have to stretch to old man reasons for thinking it's bad.

I think it's bad for the same reason I'm not a big fan of toys' advertising to kids in general. But I don't think it's seriously neurologically harmful or something.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2017 16:14

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

I mean, is it really that different from opening packs of magic cards? Or baseball cards or Xmen cards or whatever.

I think the ones that are potentially convertible into actual currency (CSGO/Dota2, right?) are bad, and like many gamers I hate ones that give pay-to-win advantages because everyone should be on an even playing field goddammit, but something purely cosmetic like Overwatch's system seems fine to me.

"But some people might still waste too much money even on cosmetics!" Yeah and some people will blow way too much time playing WoW because MMOs are designed to be addictive, but nobody seems to give a poo poo about those anymore.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2017 14:31

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Tei posted:

There are important differences:

Items in a F2P game can't be traded. So if I have 2 of the best heroes in the game, I can't give one to a friend. He have to buy a lot of packs and be lucky.

Yeah but that also means they're convertible to real money, which means they're closer to real gambling that way. Case in point:

Dr. Stab posted:

I've seen kids walk in to a store, buy a magic pack, sell what they open to the store then fish money out of their pocket to make the difference to get the next pack, hoping to pull some money card.

It's basically gambling.

quote:

Is very easy for a kid to get mom phone and click on "buy 19$ of ingame currency". Mom may not even notice.

Are they? By default you would need their Google/Apple password for this, right? Like, my son has definitely done his fair share of downloading awful scammy F2P games on our iPad, but it doesn't bother me that much because whenever he asks us to buy some dumb in-game currency because the password prompt came up, we just say no (he quickly learned to stop asking).

quote:

Kids of very young age are doing this. There are 8 years old and 11 years old doing this. While magic cards was more a teenager thing.
They are virtual items. If the game close, you end with nothing. If you buy a lot baseball cards as kid, you will still have a bunch of useless baseball cards after 20 years.
Is not kids playing with other kids, but adults manipulating people of all ages. No social interaction.

The list is longer, but I will stop here.

These seem like pretty trivial or wrong differences. Like I remember being into baseball and xmen cards in elementary school, and having a bunch of useless cards is...not much of an effective difference?

RandomPauI posted:

Is that a thing that happened? I don't remember that happening.

I dunno if they got banned for being gambling but I remember them getting banned at my school, I think for just being distracting in general. I think pokemon cards sometimes get banned at schools for similar reasons.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2017 15:40

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

mobby_6kl posted:

Another tragedy in Las Vegas!

https://youtu.be/u7pV4vxD1bs

The first autonomous shuttle only lasted an hour before crashing with a semi. It seems that the truck was technically at fault, but also that a human driver could've avoided the issue.

Just based on personal experience, driving perfect according to the rules will not always save you if others are being morons.

This seems like the inevitable result of a big gaggle of smaller companies trying their hand at self-driving cars, they just don't have the resources to handle all the different scenarios, and they can't test nearly as much. The Waymo ones supposedly will beep/honk in this kind of situation: https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/02/let-it-beep-googles-self-driving-cars-may-now-honk-hum-and-pip/

# ¿ Nov 9, 2017 16:06

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Raspberry Jam It In Me posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgaO45SyaO4

Looks like they might be working on an early prototype for a commercial version of Spot. I can't wait to see where these things end up being used

I can't be the only one who was reminded of

First they were right about manhacks, now hunters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExVocE2KXTA&t=49s

Maybe it's for the best that Valve has stopped making single-player games.

# ¿ Nov 15, 2017 14:41

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Or like that book where the AIs just play out the war in simulations and people then willingly step into an incinerator when they're "killed".

# ¿ Nov 15, 2017 19:45

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Yeah, maybe you're right.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2017 13:58

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Watch out, gymnasts!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRj34o4hN4I

# ¿ Nov 17, 2017 09:31

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 14:37

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

More of everybody's favorite, self-driving car news!

quote:

GM says it will have a ride-sharing service featuring its line of self-driving Chevy Bolts ready to go by 2019. That would place the No. 1 US automaker ahead of its main rival Ford, which has said it plans to unveil its own self-driving car without pedals or a steering wheel by 2021.

GM�s top executives made the announcement today during a call with investors. The company recently allowed reporters to take rides in its autonomous test cars through the congested streets of San Francisco. Most reported that the car handled most situations proficiently, with a few hiccups.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/30/16720776/gm-cruise-self-driving-taxi-launch-2019

# ¿ Nov 30, 2017 20:26

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

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