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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. I don't really disagree with anything you're saying here, except maybe on how long it'll take to get there. What I have been saying, however, is that this is pretty much the end game for most white collar "cognitive" work. Most programmers still spend a huge amount of time solving very trivial problems. Being able to have a single programmer or extremely small team build and maintain an application that solves a highly complex business problem is a game changer on par with the introduction of computer spreadsheets.
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Jul 3, 2017 17:09
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Dead Reckoning posted:Instead of automating it, companies will just shift programming chores to anonymous teams in India and Pakistan with an American front man who will take the fall if they gently caress up. Since programmers produce nothing but code, they are ripe for offshoring. This has been a boogeyman since at least the late nineties. It's actually fairly common, but it turns out the quality of work you get from extremely cheap offshore teams tends to be absolute poo poo in a lot of real, measurable ways. My last job was like 90% maintenance and cleanup of a codebase that was produced this way and in the end the whole thing was more or less scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up. Basically, what we have now is what the labor market for programmers looks like when the industry is already making heavy use of outsourced labor.
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Jul 3, 2017 18:26
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I love how all the stories about this have a "hah! not so smart now, eh robots?" tone to them. It's great.
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Jul 19, 2017 03:18
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Wells Fargo to shut down 450 branches quote:Wells Fargo ( has long been known among analysts and commentators as one of the nation's most efficient banks. As a result, when its efficiency started to slip recently, the bank responded by announcing an initiative to cut annual expenses by $2 billion by the end of 2019. Only tangentially related to robots I guess, but I think it's meaningful to the topic of replacing in-person services with online services.
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Jul 19, 2017 17:43
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You can't really function in society without internet access right now. You don't strictly need a smartphone I guess, but if you don't have some kind of internet access (at the very least through a library or something) you are completely hosed.
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Jul 19, 2017 18:12
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Rastor posted:WaPo article examining automation at a single factory in the rust belt: I love that the administrators here are complaining that they can't find anyone who wants to work for $10.50/hour. Maybe that's actually pretty high for the part of Wisconsin the factory is located in, but in my area that's less than you'd be offered for decent retail work. I'm sure factory jobs offer drastically more reliable hours than most retail work, but it shouldn't be surprising that nobody wants to do monotonous, physically demanding work for near poverty-level wages.
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Aug 8, 2017 00:33
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call to action posted:gently caress surveys, I guarantee you you'd fill a self-flying airline that was consistently 10% cheaper than its competitors 30% actually seems high enough to convince someone to try this, so my guess is we'll find out soon enough. Even if only 10% of your passengers are willing to fly without a crew, that's still 10% of your fleet that you get to realize those savings on. I suspect acceptance for this kind of thing will go way the gently caress up once it's operating for a while too.
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Aug 8, 2017 03:30
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GEMorris posted:Just because human error causes more accidents than mechanical failure DOES NOT MEAN that "no humans would lead to safer planes". The data we don't have is "how many mechanical failures would have resulted in crashes had a trained human not intervened." It strongly suggests that the role of humans in the system should be reduced, however, at least if safety is a goal. For example, maybe we don't need pilots. Maybe what we need is an onboard technician who can properly identify certain failure modes and take corrective action, but without the ability to ever directly fly the aircraft.
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Aug 10, 2017 23:17
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Hot Dog Day #82 posted:Won't there always be a need for a redundant human pilot, though, in case of a lightening strike or something that temporarily fries the system? Anything that severed the ability of the computers to fly the aircraft would also prevent human pilots from doing so. There are more failure points between the human pilots and the physical control surfaces than there are between the plane's computers and the physical control surfaces.
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Aug 11, 2017 00:28
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Solkanar512 posted:The other thing that folks seem to be missing here is that malfunctions don't have to be complete - they can be partial. Also, it's pretty standard to have the pilot fly the plane manually if there are problems. You don't want the computer flying things if their sensors are receiving bad or no data. You're essentially saying that you wouldn't want a pilot to fly the plane if he suddenly went blind, which is obviously true. Why should I be more concerned about sensors failing than I should be about the human crew somehow becoming disabled? Especially when you can have far more backup sensors than you can have backup pilots on any given flight.
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Aug 14, 2017 22:06
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Ocrassus posted:In both these cases, the flight envelope protection system prevented the pilots from pulling up sharply (because in normal flying conditions this would cause a stall). The 'intelligent' systems failed in this respect. Aren't these both cases of the autopilot just specifically encountering situations that it wasn't designed for and wasn't equipped to handle? I'm not at all familiar with China Airlines Flight 006 so I'm only basing this on a cursory googling, but everything I can find seems to indicate that the autopilot just wasn't built to handle this kind of failure. From the wikipedia article on it: quote:The airspeed continued to decrease, while the autopilot rolled the control wheel to the maximum left limit of 23 degrees. As the speed decreased even further, the plane began to roll to the right, even though the autopilot was maintaining the maximum left roll limit. By the time the captain disconnected the autopilot, the plane had rolled over 60 degrees to the right and the nose had begun to drop. Ailerons and flight spoilers were the only means available to the autopilot to keep the wings level as the autopilot does not connect to the rudder during normal flight. To counteract the asymmetrical forces created by the loss of thrust from the No. 4 engine, it was essential for the pilot to manually push on the left rudder. However, the captain failed to use any rudder inputs at all, before or after disconnecting the autopilot. The resulting uncontrolled flight path is depicted in the diagram. This doesn't sound like a case of too much automation causing an issue to me, but if you're more familiar with the incident maybe you can explain why you think it is. From a layman's point of view there's nothing here to make me think that this was something that was overlooked in the design of the autopilot so much as it was something that was specifically outside of its design parameters.
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Aug 16, 2017 16:29
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I'm not even clear how you think kids in silicon valley would even get to work on airplanes? The people that would work on airplanes would be engineers that work at airplane companies. Yeah. The companies that are putting the most money and effort into autonomous cars are... automakers and suppliers. The company that's mulling over autonomous passenger aircraft is Boeing. This idea that Silicon Valley techbros are out to disrupt all these industries is a weird strawman that doesn't seem to have any basis in reality. Are "tech" companies investing in this stuff? Yeah, but they're not the ones that are likely to actually bring it to market at this point.
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Aug 21, 2017 04:25
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Trabisnikof posted:I like the idea that if the risk of murder is high enough we have to send human employees on delivery routes and can't use automation because of the risks to the robot. The usual line here is that people would be more willing to rob an automated vehicle than hold up or hurt/kill a human driver. Which, yeah, kind of implies that the primary value of the human in the process is to act as a human shield for the property.
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Aug 23, 2017 00:10
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:That seems like a dumb metric to measure cost. Like of course it was going to cost a ton if you bought a whole new tractor for a tiny test crop. That doesn't seem to tell anything at all about the price. Which metric are you talking about? The article specifically points out that the majority of the cost was capital and that the next harvest will be cheaper. There's also this, which is something that doesn't get brought up all that much when people start pearl clutching over robots taking our jerbs: quote:While it’s possible that at some point there might be significant labor savings by fully automating farming like this, there are lots of other, more immediate benefits. With fully autonomous farm vehicles, you can use a bunch of smaller ones much more effectively than a few larger ones, which is what the trend has been toward if you need a human sitting in the driver’s seat. This means higher precision, minimal soil compaction, cost savings, and increased flexibility to deal with mechanical breakdowns. Without the need for daylight, you could also keep a farm active 24/7 with a very small human workforce just there (or even checking in remotely) in a supervisory capacity. A lot of times we automate stuff because the robots are actually better at it than we are.
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Sep 14, 2017 16:59
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In the US, I think it depends an awful lot on how bad the winters actually get in your area. People are idiots when it comes to switching out tires in parts of the US where it snows every winter, but where you can also theoretically get by on summer/all-season tires (ie, more southern parts of the northeast). It's rare for a single winter to go by where one of my idiot friends doesn't end up stuck or in a ditch because they decided a few inches of snow isn't that bad and they can totally get to work on their old rear end summer tires. People seem to be better about it in areas where the weather gets bad enough that you probably aren't getting out of your driveway without proper tires for your car.
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Oct 28, 2017 19:33
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I hate the way that post is written, but the author is right that there’s something creepy and off about the way a lot of these videos are being produced.
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Nov 7, 2017 13:38
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Tei posted:I dont think these videos are fully computer generated. They look to me like created with some crappy authoring software from scripts. They are generated by somebody with autism or by some production popeline designed to generate has many videos has posible has fast has possible has a farm method. They aren’t fully computer generated. One of the points the author makes is that there have to be a bunch of studios with multiple people churning out videos based entirely on algorithmically generates titles designed for a kind of hyper-focused SEO. Some of the articles linked from that medium post are interesting too. quote:“It just doesn’t feel right,” one parent — let’s call her “C” — admits to me. Her 2-year-old is mesmerized by surprise-egg videos. Many parents, she suggests, start off handing their child the coveted iPhone or iPad in order to steal a few hours for themselves, and then the egg-opening takes hold. I’m not going to say this is bad and terrible and the modern world is hosed, but it is... weird. The anecdote further down about the kid that will watch endless unboxing videos of toys while having no interest in the toys themselves or the shows the characters are from is weird too. This stuff all fits into a kind of uncanny valley of disturbing where it just seems wrong and exploitative without there being anything about it that’s obviously harmful.
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Nov 8, 2017 15:35
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Guavanaut posted:People have been making "they're more interested in the box than the toy" comments since toys have come in boxes and been given to children like that. Okay, but I'm not saying anything about unboxing in general. I'm saying it's weird for a kid to sit for hours a day watching someone silently open kinder eggs.
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Nov 8, 2017 18:47
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Yeah, I don’t buy that backing up was even the right move here. Beeping would have been, but just because you can back up to potentially avoid another driver doing something dangerous doesn’t mean that you should. Seems especially bad for something big and slow like a bus.
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Nov 9, 2017 16:22
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What's interesting to me is that most of the headlines about the accident look like this:quote:Self-driving bus involved in accident on its first day quote:Self-driving bus launches in Las Vegas, gets into accident two hours later quote:Self-driving bus in crash just 2 hours after entering public service None of them are strictly wrong, but they're really misleading given that what really happened here is that the bus was hit. While stopped.
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Nov 9, 2017 19:00
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Doctor Malaver posted:I'm currently evaluating an automation product for work - Amazon Polly. It's a text-to-speech service that might help with producing audio books. It's not quite there yet, but it comes with a Markup Language so you can alter individual words and phonemes that didn't turn out right. We probably won't use it after all but it's close - a year from now we probably will. Huh. I actually had to do an evaluation like this for a client a couple of months ago and came to a similar conclusion. Text-to-speech is way, way closer to "good enough" than I think a lot of people realize right now. It's going to be interesting to see where it is in five or ten years.
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Dec 5, 2017 23:48
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Magius1337est posted:So companies want to automate forklifts now This is a weird way to talk about something that's already here and has been in real commercial operation for years now. Automated vehicles in warehouses and factory floors are 100% already a thing, they just aren't widely adopted (yet). This is from 2015: http://www.wsj.com/video/constellation-brews-a-fully-automated-factory/93A60C0E-B75E-4D37-9D3C-30BF794D9ABB.html It's easy (relatively speaking anyway) to automate this kind of stuff when you have total control of the workflow from beginning to end and you can design your physical space in a way that's more suitable for machines than humans. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Dec 6, 2017 |
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Dec 6, 2017 23:36
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Like "the original star trek" is pretty much everyone's only touchstone for talking about anything hopeful, but everyone can rattle off brainlessly 50 movies about how bad every aspect of everything that exists is going to be soon. Are you really surprised that science fiction writers favor settings that create natural conflicts? You don't set your book/movie/tv show in the future or near future if your setting is going to be "well, I guess everything is basically fine but better and more advanced." Your point here is also kind of weird and offbase, because 90s Trek was a lot more optimistic than the original series while also being more popular and culturally relevant. Its writers also struggled constantly against Gene Roddenberry's need for the future to be perfect and good because that cut off most of the interesting stories. Dark and gritty sci-fi didn't become commonplace until after 9/11, and likewise economics-focused dystopian stuff started getting more common after 2008. Popular sci-fi is pretty reactionary and likely reflects how people are feeling rather than the other way around.
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Dec 19, 2017 01:20
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I think people like the idea they sat on a near complete miracle game but it's way more likely the tech demo never worked or was fun like you would expect for a game based on procedural interactions more advanced than ever seen now that came out in 2008 Spore's gameplay is really, ridiculously simple. I'm not even saying this as a value judgment on the game or anything, it's just that mechanically every part of the game is incredibly basic. There were and are games that are drastically more complex in every way and still extremely popular, so it's not exactly a wild claim to say that Spore's simplicity was a design choice and not a technological limitation.
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Dec 26, 2017 04:55
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Teal posted:Guys you're reading too much into the thing I said about dropping, I just really wanted to make a post where I get to say both tomato and automation You missed your opportunity to say tomatomation. Or automatoes. I'm morbidly curious to see what's going to happen if automation starts picking away at low wage jobs primarily done by migrant labor. That's the kind of thing that most Americans aren't ever going to notice because they already don't understand (or care) how their tomatoes or whatever get to them so cheaply. gently caress with the jobs of noble truck drivers and huge swathes of the country will go into a panic, but it's hard to imagine anyone actually caring about crop pickers.
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Jan 1, 2018 19:46
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Bates posted:I always figured the first stores to change the paradigm would be something like a café or bistro where you fill your grocery bag on a tablet while robots do the actual picking in a warehouse while you drink coffee. If you are just getting a few things I suppose this is faster though. I mean, it depends largely on how well a system like this scales up and what the goal is. If your only objective is to not pick your own groceries then you can already do that and it's not even an uncommon thing. I think just about every major chain grocery store near me offers delivery with a relatively low (generally $5 + tip for the delivery guy) fee. Your order isn't being picked by a robot, but you still order your groceries online and not have to do anything. Something like Amazon Go is strictly an improvement over the regular shopping experience, though, at least if your goal is just to get in and out more quickly. It's just normal grocery shopping without the checkout.
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Jan 23, 2018 02:34
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I like how few pages this is from people declaring self driving cars seventy years or more away. Someone is going to make the (completely accurate and reasonable) assertion that Arizona is pretty close to the spherical cow of the self driving world, but the fact that real, completely autonomous taxis will soon be operating commercially is kind of nuts and it doesn't really matter if they require perfect conditions. If they're at all commercially successful then there's no way they don't rapidly end up just about everywhere feasible, even if they only run seasonally or can't operate on the US east coast.
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Feb 19, 2018 01:39
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mobby_6kl posted:but the fact that we're just months away from loving Johnny cab is pretty mindblowing. Unless this just bombs completely, which is possible but unlikely, I certainly expect them to slowly expand it to more challenging locations. This is why it's frustrating to see people make the "ten years away!" joke when it comes to self-driving cars. If anything they've been operating on the exact opposite principle. Ten years ago they were still multiple decades from ever being commercially viable, even on a small scale. Five years ago they were still at least a decade away, if not longer. Even a year ago most people were sure that autonomous cars without safety drivers wouldn't be on the roads and taking passengers before 2020 at the earliest. Now it seems like the only argument left is that they won't be available literally everywhere by tomorrow. I get being skeptical of breathless claims about new technology, but self-driving technology has been advancing very, very quickly over the last five years.
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Feb 19, 2018 15:46
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Solkanar512 posted:Furthermore, I'm getting tired of being told to take the cheery picked release of privately gathered data or whatever Elon Musk says as gospel rather than waiting for a government regulator to perform or otherwise certify testing. When the NHTSA or similar organizations perform extensive testing, I'll happily change my opinion. I don't think that's unreasonable. It's not unreasonable and I'm usually on the skeptical side with this stuff, but the reality is that there are going to be commercial implementations of this technology on the road before 2020. It's possible that the initial rollouts will be a disaster and this is only happening because these companies are taking advantage of a weak regulatory environment, but whatever the case it is happening and it's happening now. edit- I also think that even mentioning Elon Musk here is part of the problem that I find frustrating. This isn't a technology that's being pursued by Musk and a handful of SV startups, it's something that every major player in the industry is rushing towards. Tesla is only worth mentioning because they're pushing partial implementations onto the road while other companies are preparing to drop fully autonomous vehicles with no intermediate steps at all. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Feb 19, 2018 |
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Feb 19, 2018 18:54
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Raldikuk posted:You don't necessarily need to be an EMT to drive the meatwagon, this depends on company and state. And why would they put the extra guy in back versus eliminating the position entirely? In a lot of places EMS personnel are primarily volunteers, so it's not like there's any great need to eliminate "extra" positions.
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Mar 21, 2018 00:42
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Raldikuk posted:I imagine there are costs associated with it even if they aren't paid. Extra insurance springs to mind, but even without cost saving factors involved, there is a limit to how many paramedics is effective and at what point adding more is detrimental. At a certain point people are just getting in the way. There are two people on the truck because you can't really have a single person doing the kind of heavy lifting that often needs to be done with patients who require an ambulance. A fully autonomous ambulance would still need two people onboard. The second person is getting in the way when the first person is wearing some kind of crazy lifting exoskeleton or you have robotic stretchers that self load patients.
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Mar 21, 2018 02:22
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