Psychomadeye

Psychomadeye t1_jayuru7 wrote

For me (and my family) it's because as Americans we walk around a lot in Europe when we find out something is just a 2 mile journey instead of a 20 mile journey. In addition we're there to see stuff and walk through streets in cities that aren't at all like ours. Every time I go to Europe I end up walking over a hundred miles a week.

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Psychomadeye t1_jatcq0w wrote

Eh I reserve judgement until the 137th offense. Though to be entirely fair, it's excessive bail due to the fact that there's 136 individual counts stacked on top of each other. A judge should probably schedule that bail hearing soon to avoid a civil suit. Good person or not they deserve civil rights.

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Psychomadeye t1_ja9pmai wrote

It seems that the industrial revolutions mainly benefit the countries that they happen in, and can be quite dangerous to others where it is not happening. Places that these revolutions see as raw materials to be consumed. The people who end up paying for the current digital industrial revolution would be in the places where it is not really taking place. And it is as you say, technology itself does not have agency. A common example is that the compass was invented by the Chinese but it would be another 800 years before they used it for navigation.

In the third revolution, it seems that there will be less imperialism. I'm not 100% certain as to why this is, as I'm an engineer, not a historian or economist. It's possible that the "colonies" are already established for the most part. It's also possible that the refinement of existing industry is the real issue. In the end though, I'm thinking this one is going to be mostly the same deal as last time but faster. That seems to be the pattern so far. Both of the previous revolutions brought about big social changes as well. The second industrial revolution gave us the 5 day workweek and the 8 hour day. The common counter that I've read about to technological unemployment is large scale public works projects.

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EDIT: I am also enjoying the discussion. It's nice to talk to someone who isn't full tilt doom.

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Psychomadeye t1_ja973sc wrote

No, they won't lower over time and those bearings and motors and reductions are extremely expensive for a reason. They are difficult to make.

>I also really doubt DHL just bought the robot arms with it just being a money sink, they wouldn't do it if they didn't think it would save them money.

It's probably not about saving money as much as it is about throughput. The engineers they'll have to bring on to maintain them, plus the cost in parts and power is going to cost more. Their hope is that they can take on more contracts because of this.

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Psychomadeye t1_ja960cu wrote

>The benefits are also that the robot works for no benefits, doesn't take sick days, doesn't complain, it doesn't take workers comp if an accident happens, it isn't late, ... you now have workers that will walk over and charge themselves and work in shifts nonstop reliably.

I can tell you've never worked with one. The ABB's that I've worked with were some of the most moody machines I've ever worked with. One of them was nice to me, kinda. One of them kept trying to take itself out with a plasma torch. That same one kept making direct attempts on my colleague's life. It requires engineers or machinists to train the robots right now. The code is quite annoying to work with but it's not the worst thing I've ever used I guess. The prices on these precision arms will remain pretty high, because the parts used to build them have already dropped in price decades ago. The robot dog, probably won't be going down in price soon and, being limited to a 90 minute runtime, isn't the most useful thing. You should take a look at the cost of the addons like cameras and arms and such. The prices are absurd and maintaining them is awful. You can find other machines that are more reasonably priced. But you get what you pay for.

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Psychomadeye t1_ja9013o wrote

And we've seen exactly this in the second industrial revolution. The quality of life and recovery time from technological unemployment improved dramatically right up until the great depression. The depression itself is where real financial technology killed banks that didn't know how to use it and the fallback was the gold standard causing the biggest monetary contraction in US history. In the third industrial revolution (now) we've seen multiple recessions but the great recession, which was approximately half as bad as the great depression, dissipated in just about two years. Then there was Covid quarantine that lasted one year. Now people are seriously considering a 4 day work week right after a bunch of corporations stick with WFH because trials have shown an increase in revenue even providing the same pay and benefits. In one or two generations they might be talking about a 3 day work week or short shifts. We're also seeing major issues being addressed like never before. We have unemployment insurance, medicaid, medicare, social security, section 8, snap and a few other things that I've definitely forgotten. The US could spend more on these things but isn't right now because political games. At the end of the day though, the best political strategy is good policy. Right now I'd imagine the biggest challenge we have is climate change and we will need to bring every worker and technological advancement we have to bear on that one for the next one hundred years if we want to make it.

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Psychomadeye t1_ja8tkgs wrote

I in fact, took classes on the history of technology for humanities requirements for my degree in robotics and AI and both industrial revolutions were covered heavily. The takeaway was that automation almost always results in more jobs, and technology doesn't really have any agency itself. These are concerns from the early industrial revolution that somehow have not gone away despite the opposite being proven repeatedly through all three industrial revolutions. For hundreds of years economists have disagreed with the idea that technological unemployment is a significant issue. It even has a name: The Luddite fallacy. This has come around again in the 21st century because of confusion about the limits of what correlation engines can do. They're really good at throwing darts but can't tell you any of the rules of the game.

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Psychomadeye t1_ja85kv4 wrote

Hey real quick, say I spent a years salary on a robot dog. What can it actually do? You'll need at least five for every worker to match the shift time. So I'm wondering what the point is between picking up five of these dogs when I can pay a worker for five years.

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Psychomadeye t1_ja851np wrote

>Besides, the workflow is designed for human hands and brains, not for AI.

If we want non human workflow we will need a massive amount of data on that for it to learn the correlation. But I'm at a loss of where anyone would even get data on a non human workflow. These specifically aren't thinking machines. They just know how to generate a point on a graph to look like the rest of the points. They're a really really good dart player. This is why I call them correlation engines. They can't replace workers on their own because the rules of the game change slightly and it'll be months or years of training before it's ready again.

>Humans are screwed then, for their brains are fairly limited.

Our neurons don't suffer the same issues because the sheer size of a human brain expressed as a neural network is larger than we can currently hope to compute yet somehow, training time is seconds and not years, and we have transfer learning at a scale that artificial networks don't have.

>It might be more reasonable to have no TPS reports at all as an example and come up with something that is better suited to AI capabilities.

We need data to train the AI on this new system. This means it will need millions of examples. Then it can spend a few years learning that data. We haven't even gotten into costs yet. Those instances will be costly to run. Newer models might be faster but they are not likely to invent time machines or sub atomic computers without examples of those things.

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Psychomadeye t1_ja796kk wrote

You'd be surprised how small the training space is and how far outside a human reaches. We're talking a litter box to a football stadium in difference. And humans know the difference between true and false vectors, but an AI won't. If there's a chance to policy, you'll need years to retrain that model and will need to somehow find a dataset to use for that. You can't just ask it to use new cover pages on the TPS reports. You need to show it a million TPS reports with those cover pages and hope it generates them properly. Even when you don't create something new, the ability of these models to give you exactly what you want and actually have it work is extremely limited. And again, in order to address these limits, we need infinite space in a finite space, a time machine, or computers that fit inside an atom.

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Psychomadeye t1_ja74jrp wrote

Not exactly. There are many limits to this. For instance, this would require Moore's law to continue to hold true. It will not (failing somewhere in the next couple years). These models can't really work outside of their training space (space as a physical concept will need to change to fix this.) Information can only travel so fast and that's not going to be fixed either (because that's technically time travel). Some might say quantum computers can help, but as someone who is in this field I couldn't imagine how chemistry simulations would help my model run better. Finally, Models don't really understand things like true or false, or cause and effect and there's no clear path to fix that. There are more issues but you've probably got the idea.

These things are at best tools that can help people go faster. Those that are trying to replace workers may have some success in certain things like call centers. But in reality it's not going to make sense to replace people. Especially when you remember how really massive these models are. You can buy five data centers to run one instance or hire five employees to handle calls. And remember, you're going to need to provide a training space for each job you plan to replace. You might not even have the data for that.

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Psychomadeye t1_ja6z382 wrote

This is why the UN banned autonomous weapons like this. It would be legal if the weapon had 100% accuracy in facial recognition but otherwise it's use would be a war crime.

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Psychomadeye t1_ja6yjuy wrote

As a person who works with these things, there's a lot of limitations to these technologies that are ignored by virtually everyone. These things are correlation engines. They're going to take jobs the same way the steam engine took jobs.

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