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The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here. We haven't automated driv

by egh 5y ago

The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here. We haven't automated driving; we haven't automated picking tomatoes; we haven't automated bricklaying; we can't automate cooking a fucking hamburger. But they are completely convinced that it's just around the corner, because they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people. Frank Bardacke in his book, _Trampling out the Vintage_ describes the great skill that agriculture workers bring to the job that they do, from knowing whether something is ripe enough to pick to the dexterity required to pick it without destroying the fragile fruit or vegetable. Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not and most likely never will be. Please, learn some humility and try to understand the skills that every human possesses and that they bring to their work.

pasquinelli 5y ago
the best part is programming has been getting automated since it began. the assumption that since that process of automation hasn't cut into programmers' salaries and job prospects yet that it won't ever, like making software is something special.
- IdiocyInAction 5y ago
  I think many programmers do assume that their job could be automated. I showed GPT-3 to coworkers and they immediately took that into consideration.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  Automation of a field: (1) increases the value produced per unit of labor input in the field at the low end of quantity, but potentially resulting in reaching the point of rapidly diminishing returns faster. (2) and, increases the domain in which creating/maintaining automation has value, increasing the value of automation work and pushing out the point where automation work reaches diminishing returns. Which is why programming (viewed broadly)—itself part of automating any field—keeps being resilient against adverse impacts from automation. Because as long as we are increasing the scope of automation generally, we’re pushing out the diminishing returns point for programming, and automation of programming isn't pulling that point down fast enough to offset that effect. And automation—both of programming and of everything else—keeps pushing up the starting value of programming work. (It also makes it more abstract and about providing input to higher-level automation tools.)
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
I don't have contempt for the skills; I have great respect for the skills. I have contempt for the prices of things. If construction costs are cheaper than ever (are they really?) why can't I buy a box to live in without spending $300,000? Why is the permits process nationally broken? And despite being skilled, that doesn't mean they're informed: why do contractors not know what they're supposed to do? Why do the people handing out permits not know what they're doing? See also: trying to renovate or buy a home in Arizona.
- pvorb 5y ago
  Construction costs are cheaper than ever? The prices have skyrocketed in the past year. Is this something special to Germany? I would've expected that the pandemic shows equal effects elsewhere.
  - andrewmcwatters 5y ago
    I'm just saying this because every but-actually poster says something like this, but I think homes come with more amenities now than they did in the 70s, so buying a home isn't really any cheaper adjusted for inflation.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      Yes, bigger houses for fewer people means costs still go up.
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  Because people have great skill in exploiting other people as well.
- version_five 5y ago
  I used to work in a family construction business and now I do machine learning contracting. When I compare the value you get for 300k worth of construction to what 300k of ML specialist time buys you, it's hard to agree with your comment. I understand the reasons, but generally I'm blown away by how cheap most labor intensive things are, compared to how much people will pay for software projects.
pradeep_m 5y ago
I think this is a rather harsh take. Most of the people working on automating it understand how hard it is and are striving through it. You need some of these irrational believers for progress!
- cratermoon 5y ago
  Robots that can identify and pick up things in the environment haven't materially improved since the 60s. What has changed is how factories and warehouses are built, so that the 'environment' and the 'things' are strictly constrained to enable robotic arms to grab and move them. But let one thing get a little out of place, or worse, let a human get between an industrial robot and the thing it's trying to pick up and.. well. RIP.
  - Nasrudith 5y ago
    That simply isn't true - the machines of the past were pretty much blind but safety interlocks are able to detect an approach. The reason for the constraints are efficency in manufacturing is preferrably reducing the process to simple repetitive actions for improved throughput and reliability.
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      > simple repetitive actions Exactly, and those actions are able to be simple and repetitive because the machines don't have to try to identify objects in the environment, they just reach X meters, open their grappler Y centimeters, close it until it reaches Z Pascals of pressure, move, repeat. No real "AI" required, just programmed to handle expected conditions. But get just a little bit outside the pre-programmed constraints and... https://www.engadget.com/2018-12-06-amazon-workers-hospitalized-robot.html https://www.engadget.com/2018-12-06-amazon-workers-hospitali... As a result, the humans are now forced to accommodate the failings of the machines. https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/8346932/amazon-factory-workers-stop-robots-killing/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/8346932/amazon-factory-workers...
- LanceH 5y ago
Permit 5y ago
> But they are completely convinced that it's just around the corner, because they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people. Can you think of any other reasons that people might believe something like automated driving is right around the corner? Or is "contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people" the only reason one might believe this?
- ghaff 5y ago
  You can phrase it more nicely. But it boils down to things like: "How hard can it be?" "Humans suck at it (though they really don't)" "We do great at 90% of the problem" and so forth. Computers can do really well in controlled, specced situations. Not so well in a complicated environment where humans live and operate.
somenewaccount1 5y ago
I agree with you in general, but not about the hamburgers. https://www.creator.rest/ https://www.creator.rest/
- OnlineGladiator 5y ago
  That thing is well-known to break all the time. You can even find people on Yelp talking about how the robot is broken. It's mostly old technology anyway; it's still a fundamentally mechatronic system similar to what AMF made several decades ago. https://youtu.be/FmXLqImT1wE https://youtu.be/FmXLqImT1wE That one didn't make money either, and it also broke a lot, and had all sorts of other problems. Believe it or not, the core technology has improved a lot less than you might think. They may have put a prettier skin on it but it's still the wrong approach.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
neutronicus 5y ago
Trying to grow plants outdoors is a humbling experience for sure
Someone 5y ago
> we haven't automated picking tomatoes I wouldn’t know whether their claims hold water, but http://www.automatorobotics.com/autonomous-single-tomato-harvester/ http://www.automatorobotics.com/autonomous-single-tomato-har...: A robot that can reliably detect ripe tomatoes and harvest them with consistent quality at a rate of 10-12 tomatoes per minute. […] reducing the harvest costs by 50% (The videos give me the impression that “10-12 tomatoes per minute” is best-case)
- deltarholamda 5y ago
  I can see an automated tomato picker working well for tomato varieties that are uniform and grow on largely uniform plants. But those tomatoes are bland. Heirloom tomatoes look like a topology project gone horribly wrong, and the colors aren't found in any Pantone catalog. They are also the most delicious. There's definitely a place for both. We have to get ketchup ingredients from somewhere, and gourmands will always want the ugly heirlooms.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > I can see an automated tomato picker working well for tomato varieties that are uniform and grow on largely uniform plants. But those tomatoes are bland. Throughout history, our main trick when solving a problem with technology was to constrain the problem to something that's much easier to solve, by changing the environment. For example, all-terrain mechanized transport is hard, and to this day, nobody except hobbyists and militaries even bothers to try tackling it. Our solution was to flatten the terrain into roads, so that we could just use wheels. We've been iterating on that idea ever since.
Guest42 5y ago
I see this pretty frequently in manufacturing. Oftentimes, larger products will have curves, design changes, layering complexities, and judgment calls that simply can’t be performed via machine, further, the parts will come in at different times and assembly lines themselves will have to be flexible and optimize for the given real estate.
colordrops 5y ago
Having respect for the skills of a worker and also believing that they are possible to automate are not mutually exclusive. It's no different from people saying the same thing about chess and chess players, or go and go players, before the problem was solved. And it's not just blue collar workers that are a target of this idea. We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and into the commercial realm, e.g. GitHub copilot.
- Grakel 5y ago
  Programming will be automated long before brick laying. We can barely print a document with confidence.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Printing is hard primarily because of misaligned business incentives, which form a bubble of suck that's eerily resilient to market optimization. Automating programming definitely seems like an easier target in comparison.
    - XorNot 5y ago
      Printing works really well. It's print drivers (software) that are an utter and complete mess. I've never had a printer that didn't work: I've had plenty that wanted the correct offering to the HP website to be made and several hundred megs of adware installed before a postscript file made it to the actual hardware.
  - Overton-Window 5y ago
    Programming is the conversion of ambiguous human requirements into machine readable instructions. To automate, computers would need to understand ambiguous human requirements. This is AGI. By comparison, brick laying is trivial.
    - munk-a 5y ago
      This plays exactly into the OP's comment - but if that is your sincerely held belief there are ~4,000 bricklayers~[1] in America today and you could make a whole boatload of money if you could automate their work. 1. According to the BLS link below it's actually closer to 50,000.
cogman10 5y ago
It's always a little weird the jobs that are easy to automate vs the jobs that are hard to automate. Jobs that require interaction with the physical world and people will almost always be a hard to automate thing. There are simply too many variables. The real problem is when we make the results of a job worse to aid in automation. The prime example here is tomatoes being breed with thick skin, picked before ripened, and then squirted with some chemicals to make them red so people will buy them. All while sacrificing taste.
- MontyCarloHall 5y ago
  Your observation is closely related to Moravec’s paradox of artificial intelligence: “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
bsder 5y ago
People also seem to always miss that we always engineer the product in order to be able to automate it. The most automated things have been designed by engineers with robotic assembly in mind.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  > [mortor] it’s a non-newtonian fluid, and it’s viscosity increases when it’s moved or shaken. Which is why the points about non-Newtonian fluids like mortor changing viscosity seems right on the money. Anyone trying automation with normal mortor gives me zero confidence. I like the robot truck idea, seems like a winner compared to others. Exo suits / better humans in the meantime, purpose built machines later.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    Bogus reason. Plastic melt is also a non-Newtonian fluid and yet plastic parts production is thoroughly automated.
    - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
      I’m not sure that tracks exactly. I think the issue is the stacking of very heavy things on top of a nnf goop.
      - bsder 5y ago
        The issue is that "buildings have been engineered to be built by humans". So, the building tasks are set to be a compromise of materials and human skill. If we want machines to build them, then we need different systems and materials.
grandmczeb 5y ago
> The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here. I'm confused - based on your Github profile I assume you'd fall under the category of "computer people". Are you saying you feel this way? Because I certainly don't.
spideymans 5y ago
When you have a hammer, everything look like a nail. Technology is our hammer.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Technology is a generalisation of a hammer. Technology is the domain of means to ends. It's literally how things are done, and includes such factors as skill, training, technique, organisation, and logistics. As such, your comment is self-negating.
cgrealy 5y ago
> We haven't automated driving Yeah, we pretty much have... it just hasn't been widely adopted yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjztvddhZmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjztvddhZmI And honestly, from a business perspective, most people really don't care about the skills ordinary people have. Look at the wine industry for example. Top shelf wine is hand-picked, for exactly the reasons you outline, and some people are willing to pay top dollar for that end product. But the vast majority of grapes are harvested by very simple machines, because scale and profit, and most people just want a $10 bottle of decent-ish wine. We absolutely can automate cooking a fucking hamburger, and as soon as it's cheaper than the cheapest labour, McDonald's, Burger King, etc, WILL automate cooking a fucking hamburger. Will it be as good as a "hand made" burger? Maybe.. maybe not? Will the people paying a few bucks for a burger care? Nope. This isn't an issue with "computer people"... this is an issue with economics.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > We absolutely can automate cooking a fucking hamburger, and as soon as it's cheaper than the cheapest labour, McDonald's, Burger King, etc, WILL automate cooking a fucking hamburger. Curiously, McDonald's is probably as close as you can get to automating burgers and fries without crossing that final step of removing human labor entirely. It's not really cooking anymore, it's process chemistry[0], with some final assembly required. -- [0] - Which I actually consider to be a good thing.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    This is the pattern you'll see repeated if you go looking for jobs that have been "automated away" - they get the dumb bits removed. No longer does the mail room call your desk to inform you that a package has arrived - scanning a barcode does that. The jobs in those sectors slowly shrink down (until eventually they just get rolled into the gigantic umbrella of responsibility that is IT) but the work never completely disappears. Once upon a time I'm sure some dude had to constantly monitor the temperature of the cellar that holds the wine casks and occasionally call into town for a block of ice to keep things cool. Now we have refrigeration - and that mind-numbingly tedious portion of running a winery can now be conveniently avoided (except for the occasional maintenance) so you can concentrate on more important things. Eventually it might be that McDonalds automates it's POS and menu to such a degree that for every ten franchises there's just one dude in a car that drives around responding to error codes and, ideally, the people who worked there will find something more creative and fulfilling to do with their lives. I don't hold those people with contempt - I feel like their skills (and everybody has skills) are being underutilized.
paxys 5y ago
And yet the list of jobs that have been successfully automated over the decades is considerably longer. Everything you mentioned will eventually be conquered as well (driving, farming and cooking are probably the worst examples you could have used – we are well on our way to automating all of them).
- throwaway17_17 5y ago
  Driving and farming I can agree with having automation potential. But the issue I have with cooking is that automation for the culinary area is limited to McDonalds’ type assembly of uniform pre-made food items that require the absolute minimum in terms of culinary ability. I can comprehend robotic prep machines, slicing, dicing, maybe even butchery. But it is a significant step from there to a robot following even a well written recipe for demi-glacé or for a custard, let alone being able to tell when potatoes are roasted to the right fineness and have a sufficiently browned appearance. Maybe my kids won’t work at Burger King in high school, but I can’t see line cooks at any real restaurant being replaced any time soon.
soheil 5y ago
Why not both? You make it sound like only as long as we don't have an automated hamburger maker we should respect the people who cook our hamburgers, but not afterwards. Progress in any field is usually a function of amount of money poured into it, if the margins for hamburgers were large enough, ie. no cheap labor or higher food prices we would have invested more engineering effort into making smart enough robots that make hamburgers and probably by now have them being made automatically.
chias 5y ago
Laying brick is hard. I bricked up a small gap in a two-foot-tall brick wall in my back yard recently. It took me literally all day, and looks exactly as messy as someone who lays bricks might expect from someone who uses a computer for a living. Watching those people on youtube who make tutorial videos that go super fast and make it look really easy... You can record yourself writing a python script and make it look easy. Those people are pros, and have skills and experience to back it up. It isn't easy.
philwelch 5y ago
I don't think this is it. Computer people tend to work in office settings. The reason the old joke about threatening to replace people with shell scripts works is because a lot of office jobs can be replaced with shell scripts. This is because, rather than physically working in the real world, most office jobs entail manipulating symbols, which is easy for computers but hard for humans. (That's why we invented computers). A lot of work in the real world entails some decision-making component that can be expressed in terms of symbol manipulation. This overlaps with the part that many people find difficult, because people are naturally good at physically manipulating the real world. So when we talk about automating driving or picking tomatoes or bricklaying, we are only accounting for the difficulty of automating the symbol-manipulation abstraction of that task. (This is basically the conceit of "Manna", a science fiction story where a ton of jobs are "automated" by a computer that just gives a continuous stream of verbal instructions to a poorly paid human being.) If you're measuring the skills of manual workers against the standard of how hard it is to build a robot that replaces them, they are surprisingly hard. The same is true for the skills of trained animals. Maybe we should start worrying about replacing human beings with robots after we've managed to figure out how to replace dogs with robots. Once we have enough bomb-sniffing robots, drug-sniffing robots, livestock guardian robots, police pursuit robots, search and rescue robots, and so forth, to the point where we don't need dogs, then maybe we can start to worry about the human jobs. (Or maybe not--dogs have a really good sense of smell that might be harder to replicate than some human capacities.)
- danhor 5y ago
  > ton of jobs are "automated" by a computer that just gives a continuous stream of verbal instructions to a poorly paid human being. Isn't that basically amazon warehouses today? (though text based)
jelliclesfarm 5y ago
Please stop. The only ‘skill’ human beings bring to picking fruit or vegetables is their willingness to work for minimum wages because we as a society have failed to keep up with tech even as our population’s food needs exploded.
munk-a 5y ago
I have done some workplace automation (building support tools to automate away stupid paperwork) and I've never ever felt contempt for the people I'm building tools for. These people do extremely intelligent work and make evaluations on complex scenarios - my tools only help them minimize the silly BS that slows them down, building layered tools on top of poorly designed assistive tools or breaking out greenfield solutions to help tackle problems that need to be done entirely manually. I really disagree that almost anyone who has built tool assistance into someone's workflow will view their workflow as simple and view the employee with contempt - actually getting to know the BS they have to put up with on a daily basis actually deepens my appreciation for what they're doing. Sure I can cherry-pick examples that make folks look bad - employees today, even millennials, are for some reason allergic to learning keyboard shortcuts and will use right-click to paste. That's somewhat on them, but more on the company for not providing training time to teach better data entry habits. If one of these highly skilled agricultural workers was given a robot that used scent to determine which fruit trees likely had ripe fruit that needed to be harvested - I'm sure they'd appreciate it for what it is, a tool that lets them concentrate on more important things. And, if we as a society are moving into a era where automation becomes so widespread that jobs are much fewer and far between 1) we'll waste a lot more time building freemium games or whatever BS labour sink society comes up with next and 2) we should realize that taxes need to go way up on the people still employed and UBI or other social services are needed to keep us functional as a society. Having too much productivity is such an easy problem to solve - you just don't do what America is doing and let it all coagulate into the pockets of a few hundred billionaires... and then everyone gets to live a good life.
- coding123 5y ago
  I don't understand UBI personally. In general it will have the net effect of dropping even more people out of the labor pool. Even with increasing population over the last 50 years the number of people participating is going down. Not as a percentage, but a number. With that, things like getting a plumber will skyrocket in price. I mean why should I fix your toilet if I can be at home playing video games right now? I'm going to have a roof over my head and food in my mouth either way. Current UBI experiments don't have the experience of going 100% of the population, so there's no way to know what will happen.
IdiocyInAction 5y ago
I have absolutely no contempt for the skill. Why would I? But I do recognize that building costs are expensive and that building stuff could be faster and safer and thus think that automation would be good. Same goes for my job, really. Automation has so far been a net good for humanity and if we ever transition to a true post-scarcity society, it will be through automation. Also, if you speak with people in ML/AI, they will not tell you it's around the corner. They know that physical stuff and robotics in general is hard. Also, builders and the like often have a great amount of contempt towards any desk job - is that OK? Why?
8note 5y ago
My dad automated cooking meatballs ages ago. I can't imagine a hamburger would be too much harder. There's folks on YouTube already who can automate the assembly of a hamburger using Lego. It's just slower than having a person do it in a semi automated manner. Per the article, we have automated some of bricklaying (for roads), and I've definitely had ads show up for tools that reduce the skills needed to do bricklaying. We've also automated parts of driving - staying the same speed, parking, etc. The automation all changes which skills are important, and steadily makes high skilled jobs into less skilled jobs.
ashtonkem 5y ago
It’s not contempt computer people have for manual labor; it’s the contempt that bosses have for paying wages.
Meandering 5y ago
People also tend to ignore that automation minimizes craftsmanship and art to a MVP. I know a few masons and they are literally artists. Sure, you can lay bricks and have a wall but it's not the same as a mortar-less stone wall crafted with artistic skill. They are completely different objectives and render completely different impressions. Automation eliminates the humanity of a task by existence. We will lose those unspoken qualities when automation breaks into the mainstream and no one will know everything they have lost in the process.
nsonha 5y ago
> they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people. Where do you get that? While you focus on the "skill" and "intelligence", automation is about productivity and freedom (from labor) > learn some humility and try to understand the skills What do you think automation is, if not to try to understand the skills, then turn it into the program?
drivingmenuts 5y ago
How much does a bricklaying system cost vs the cost of a human? Seems to me that humans are just way cheaper and lower maintenance.
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  It isn't the cost of one human vs one machine - that is a harder point to get to. Instead it is about the number of humans and their cost vs the machine adjusted equivalent. Scale is where industry takes its crown.
rowanG077 5y ago
You must interpret everything people say in the worst possible way to have this viewpoint. Besides that It's not my experience at all that "computer people" think that these things will be automated in a short time frame. It's the opposite. The "computer people" are highly skeptic because they know much better then anyone what a computer is capable of. It's almost always the managers and marketing people parading automation around.
mrshadowgoose 5y ago
I can only speak for myself, but I can assure you that on my end it's not contempt in the least bit. Rather, it's excitement at the hope of an amazing future; one in which people who work do so because they choose to, and not because they have to. A future in which we can celebrate life, creativity, hobbies, friends and family, without having to toil away the majority of our waking life to obtain the means of survival. One can absolutely admire the skill of a bricklayer, while celebrating the eventual fact that bricklayers will not be forced to perform that labor if they don't want to. Those are not mutually exclusive things. "We haven't automated driving" One can, today, fly to Phoenix Arizona, download the Waymo app, and summon a self-driving vehicle. Although it would be disingenuous to claim that self-driving is a completely solved problem for ALL use cases, it absolutely is "good enough" for very many of them, and will be scaled out faster than you expect. "but many more have not and most likely never will be." Unless there's some yet-to-be-discovered supernatural process at-work inside the human brain, this is just plain false. The human brain is an incredibly complicated machine, and nothing more. It's only a matter of time until we understand, or in the worst case, simulate it with sheer computational power.
robomartin 5y ago
I don't think it is contempt. I truly believe most people --event technical folks-- who don't work in robotics and AI lack an understanding of just how difficult it is to build and program a robot that can do what "simple" insects (fly, ant, spider, worm, cockroach, etc.) are able to accomplish. Most of the "impressive" robotics videos we are treated to on YouTube are highly staged, choreographed sequences where one out of N attempts is used as some kind of a PR showcase not even remotely linked to real-world useful capabilities of the robot in display. I remember how people were amazed when robots like Asimo could not be used during the Fukushima disaster. Anyone who works in these fields, even peripherally, has a very different perspective of reality vs. fantasy and knew the score as it pertained to robots like Asimo, their actual utility and capabilities.
dukeofdoom 5y ago
These jobs are usually slow torture for humans to do. Do them long enough, and your body will break under the sun or you will look like a prune, get back pain or a hump and possibly skin cancer. Let the robots do them as soon as possible.
- NoPicklez 5y ago
  And sitting in an office chair in front of a computer all day doesn't bring its own health problems? Weight gain due to limited daily movement, forward posture due to sitting and looking forward all day, RSI due to typing and mouse movement.
  - sharkweek 5y ago
    A question for the crowd, then: what is the “best” job for the human body? Because sitting at a desk all day for me definitely isn’t it.
    - esailija 5y ago
      Well unfortunately it doesn't get better than that, except when working as remote you can lie on a sofa or bed. After a full day you still have full energy to do optimal amount of physical exercise, just enough (which is relatively little) to stay in optimal condition without destroying your body.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    Sitting in an office chair you can do despite numerous problems. But crawling through attics, lifting heavy items - once your injured that's it, you won't be doing anymore, potentially permanently.
  - dukeofdoom 5y ago
    Some Suggestions if I was having this problem: 1. Get a standing desk, so you can alternate between sitting and standing. 2. Learn to use a mouse with both left and right hand. And/or ball wheel mouse. 3. Try Speech to text software 4. Try an Ergo keyboard. Logitech makes an ergonomic keyboard (Ergo k860) 5. Get up and Stretch every hour 6. Go the the bathroom as much as you're allowed to 7. Go for a Walk during your lunch break 8. Go for a walk after work 9. Do some yoga. It's totally free. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWN2FPlvg9r-LnUyepH9IaQ
gibolt 5y ago
'Most' and 'never' are strong words. I'd imagine many people thought that in the past about modern automation (and it's well documented). Things will become automated. That is the natural human progression. We are creative, and their are 7+ billion minds with new giants to stand on the shoulder of every day. AI, soft/compliant robotics, and globalization are strong unrelenting factors/motivators.
- caf 5y ago
  Yes. For example, see this video of a Continuous Tamping Machine in operating, tamping railway ballast: https://fb.watch/79KwlAt2Fz/ https://fb.watch/79KwlAt2Fz/ You probably wouldn't have to go too far back to find people sceptical about the possibility of automating that.
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
Reminds me of a $BIGTECH project with a one armed robot on a wheeled base they thought could do house cleaning. I mean the damn thing couldn’t operate a windex bottle. I don’t think the executives who made this pitch actually clean their own homes.
alfalfasprout 5y ago
It's funny that the other comments here prove your point, egh. They miss that the contempt is not directed at those doing the work but instead directed at the skills-- this is evidenced by how they tend to trivialize the skills that are trying to be automated. This is especially true when looking at the spectrum of quality of human work for a given field. Take, for example, masonry. There is simple bricklaying for the front of the house. Then there is intricate stonemasonry that requires a lot of careful planning, know-how, and knowledge of historical techniques. There is machining a piece of metal in a simple way. Then there is intricate hand-finishing of that metal at the other extreme. I suspect that over time we will see the less artisan, less "skillful" aspects of manual work be replaced but that fine craftsmanship won't really disappear. The more you learn about what goes into making certain things by hand the more you appreciate how foolish it is to claim that it can all be automated easily.
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  There's also machining a piece of metal in an incredibly complex way, but with the right automation can be turned into a comparatively simple process. If you showed someone 100 years ago what we could do with a block of metal and a 5-axis CNC machine it would blow their mind. That's the type of area where automation can do great things. Look for places where "simple for a machine" and "simple for a human" diverge. I could do the job of every logic gate in my computer, but I wouldn't want to try and boot a copy of Windows with a pad of paper and a pencil. As an example, not something you'd want to make on a hand operated milling machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnIvhlKT7SY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnIvhlKT7SY But to look at something that's easy to do for people and think "That's easy, a machine could do it!" It's always going to depend on why it's easy. Handling situations that differ from one job to the next is a pretty strong point for humans, especially when those differences are handled by grabbing and moving things. But then, five years ago we would've put "playing Go" on there with grabbing and moving things, so you never know.
zamalek 5y ago
> The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here. Agreed. My mother was involved in my local city theatre, and always told us kids that "there would be no show without someone to lift the curtains." These people had their cameo in every finale. That has always stuck with me. Ever wondered what would happen if there wasn't someone flipping burgers to satisfy your 2AM craving? You, no matter your riches or power or fame, would have to do it yourself. The most innovative thing you could do is shut the fuck up and start listening. Instead of trying to replace the bricklayer with robotics, how about asking them how robotics could help them? They are the SMEs, they do a job considered easy to automate daily (and that job isn't easy to automate). They can tell you how they are wasting time on inefficiencies. The job of technology is to allow the human to stop worrying about the rote. It is not to replace the human, or to solve imaginary problems. That's when problems arise: Facebook, racist/sexist AI, etc.
ddoolin 5y ago
You've got enough replies at this point, but I guess I really am curious who you're talking about? You seem to have a chip on your shoulder so it sounds personal or nearly so. If I had to guess, most attempts to automate things, whether they go poorly or not, are begun by people who have that expertise or skill which you're claiming "computer people" scorn so much (which I also don't think is a very common opinion).
nitwit005 5y ago
> computer people The article suggests efforts go back over 100 years, so it seems bizarre to suggest this has something to do with "computer people". There is a commercial burger cooking machine north of me in SF (https://www.creator.rest/ https://www.creator.rest/), and there are similar machines for pizzas and other fast food. That isn't an unsolved problem.
coderjames 5y ago
Automated hamburgers at https://theroboburger.com/ https://theroboburger.com/ and https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/16/business/white-castle-flippy-robot/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/16/business/white-castle-flippy-... and https://sf.eater.com/2018/6/21/17489084/creator-robot-burgers-san-francisco https://sf.eater.com/2018/6/21/17489084/creator-robot-burger... Automated cement-pouring in place of brick laying at https://www.nbc12.com/2021/06/24/virginias-first-3-d-printed-home-going-up-richmonds-southside/ https://www.nbc12.com/2021/06/24/virginias-first-3-d-printed... The robots have arrived. Unskilled labour needs to be concerned.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  We'll see if / when they hit scale. From what I recall your 2018 example was a flop and the machine did not produce burgers any cheaper and needed a lot of maintenance from the staff in order to operate. EDIT: Yes, they didn't last long: https://hackaday.com/2018/10/11/i-ate-a-robot-hamburger-before-the-restaurant-went-out-of-business/ https://hackaday.com/2018/10/11/i-ate-a-robot-hamburger-befo...
lumost 5y ago
Alternately, The problem may be that human labor is "cheap" for the activities which still require brick laying and in cases where it's "expensive" alternate materials can be used. In order to make automation economically viable there would need to be a niche for "cheap" brick powered by automation. It's unclear to me that this niche exists and can't be similarly achieved by scaling up the blocks or switching to more labor efficient building materials.
dylan604 5y ago
I totally see/hear your position, and mostly feel the same way. Devil's advocate asks, what about the skill of the devs that can automate that kind of stuff? The types of things that might be learned in building articulating robotically controlled apendages to pick tomatoes without crushing them or the entire plants, the skill of a robot to cook the perfect burger to the perfect temp, etc. It would be impressive. Sending people to the moon and building atomic weapons brought us some very cool and useful unintended things. So who knows what could come from some other boondoggle type of projects?
shreyshnaccount 5y ago
it's not just computer people. it's everyone. we haven't automated most jobs which require skill, precisely because they aren't easy to- and yet, teachers, agriculture workers, and construction crews are some of the lowest paid sectors. and then there are complaints about these people being lazy and there not being enough people who want to pursue these professions. wel guess what? pay them a decent wage for a change!
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Complaints that there aren't enough workers in the labor market are equivalent to complaints that wages are too high. Your proposed solution is really just a restatement of the problem.
deleted 5y ago
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morpheos137 5y ago
Actually it really reflects poorly on their intelligence when they fail to conceptualise the complexity of the real world.
BurningFrog 5y ago
There is great contempt for "computer people" in this post.
pottertheotter 5y ago
I find this comment so out of touch with the history of the world. Would you have us stuck back at the art of knocking rocks together to create fire since the people who created matches and lighters had so much contempt for the rock knockers? If anyone has contempt, it's this line of thought. What are we if we aren't trying to move forward--solve problems, invent, and improve lives? A few weeks back I came across Hadrian, one of the machines profiled in this piece. The idea of building with higher accuracy, lower cost, greater speed, all while allowing people doing backbreaking labor to do something else, excited me. There was no contempt for anyone. I like woodworking. I'm currently thinking of purchasing an industrial-grade CNC router. I think it's analogous to robotic bricklayers in many ways. I have to design a piece before I make it whether I cut it with a hand saw, use a table saw, or have the CNC router do it. The reason I use a table saw instead of a hand saw is the same for using a CNC router instead of a table saw--it's faster and provides me with a more consistent and accurate outcome. If that's not a good enough justification, you should look into how much skill is required to operate a CNC router. You can use different bits, rpms of the router, speed the machine is moving at, entry speeds, depth of cuts, etc. There is a lot of skill involved. And when a lot of that is taken away so I can focus on what matters most--creating beautiful furniture--I'll be so very happy and won't feel the least bit bad about it.
- eru 5y ago
  Had OP removed the last part of this sentence: > Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not and most likely never will be. To read: > Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not. Or > Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not and most likely will take a while. You would have nothing to complain about. As often with AI / automation, the things that seem simplest to humans are the hardest to automate and vice versa. As another example, look at translation: take an average English speaker and ask them to translate Japanese texts. They will take lots and lots of training to get good. But provide them with a literal word-for-word translation of the Japanese text into English as cheat sheet, and after a few hours of practice, she will become pretty good at rewriting those into fine English translations. Given long enough text snippets, she'll mostly be able to figure out from context how to resolve ambiguities. (She won't be perfect, of course, and professional translators bring additional skills to the game. But she'll become pretty proficient pretty quickly.) Try to do a machine to translate between human language, and you'll notice that doing the literal translation part is what's really easy for the computer, but all the context is hard. (Incidentally, that's why in the stone age of AI, people thought translation would be easy, but playing chess well would be hard.)
danielodievich 5y ago
My grandfather spent his entire working life after the war in the cement and brick factory, and built 3 houses and various sub-buildings out of brick. Since very young age my brother and I were tasked with helping, starting with just sieving sand via mesh to remove rocks, and then once we got just a bit older and stronger, actually mixing mortar out of cement and sand and carrying the mixture to the job site. I think I laid my first brick before the age of 9, but first just a couple here and there. Bricks are heavy! I think was 12 when I was given a straight stretch of the wall close to foundation to, and after review of my work I had to take everything apart, it was saggy, uneven and ugly. Eventually I learned to do straight walls, but the corners eluded me until at least a year doing it with very qualified masons coaching. I don't think my joints were ever pretty enough with that lovely groove that some people do, and avoiding mortar onto the brick is devilishly hard. Where I live there is little brick construction but I love seeing what is there, it is always so pretty. Based on my experience of the changing by the minute mortar, heavy bricks, continuous looping feedback, I don't believe it is something that will get automated.
richardw 5y ago
> because they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people No. They just don’t know what makes it hard. I don’t know where the robot train drivers are. We’re doing cars and planes but it seems trains have fewer things to worry about. I don’t feel contempt for train drivers, the limitation is mine. I don’t understand. I still think I deserve to live. I love this guy’s videos. He’s a fantastic insight into a world I barely know: https://youtu.be/qP1AmDRhoas https://youtu.be/qP1AmDRhoas
rendall 5y ago
> The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here. Kind of an unfair generalization, I think. I see far more comments in defense of the skill of masonry and masons, insisting that automation may be too difficult, and almost none that "display contempt" as I see it. But I could be missing something. Would you be willing to expand on what you see here?

by egh 5y ago

pasquinelli 5y ago

the best part is programming has been getting automated since it began. the assumption that since that process of automation hasn't cut into programmers' salaries and job prospects yet that it won't ever, like making software is something special.

IdiocyInAction 5y ago
I think many programmers do assume that their job could be automated. I showed GPT-3 to coworkers and they immediately took that into consideration.
dragonwriter 5y ago
Automation of a field: (1) increases the value produced per unit of labor input in the field at the low end of quantity, but potentially resulting in reaching the point of rapidly diminishing returns faster. (2) and, increases the domain in which creating/maintaining automation has value, increasing the value of automation work and pushing out the point where automation work reaches diminishing returns. Which is why programming (viewed broadly)—itself part of automating any field—keeps being resilient against adverse impacts from automation. Because as long as we are increasing the scope of automation generally, we’re pushing out the diminishing returns point for programming, and automation of programming isn't pulling that point down fast enough to offset that effect. And automation—both of programming and of everything else—keeps pushing up the starting value of programming work. (It also makes it more abstract and about providing input to higher-level automation tools.)

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

I don't have contempt for the skills; I have great respect for the skills. I have contempt for the prices of things. If construction costs are cheaper than ever (are they really?) why can't I buy a box to live in without spending $300,000? Why is the permits process nationally broken? And despite being skilled, that doesn't mean they're informed: why do contractors not know what they're supposed to do? Why do the people handing out permits not know what they're doing? See also: trying to renovate or buy a home in Arizona.

pvorb 5y ago
Construction costs are cheaper than ever? The prices have skyrocketed in the past year. Is this something special to Germany? I would've expected that the pandemic shows equal effects elsewhere.
- andrewmcwatters 5y ago
  I'm just saying this because every but-actually poster says something like this, but I think homes come with more amenities now than they did in the 70s, so buying a home isn't really any cheaper adjusted for inflation.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Yes, bigger houses for fewer people means costs still go up.
nickthemagicman 5y ago
Because people have great skill in exploiting other people as well.
version_five 5y ago
I used to work in a family construction business and now I do machine learning contracting. When I compare the value you get for 300k worth of construction to what 300k of ML specialist time buys you, it's hard to agree with your comment. I understand the reasons, but generally I'm blown away by how cheap most labor intensive things are, compared to how much people will pay for software projects.

pradeep_m 5y ago

I think this is a rather harsh take. Most of the people working on automating it understand how hard it is and are striving through it. You need some of these irrational believers for progress!

cratermoon 5y ago
Robots that can identify and pick up things in the environment haven't materially improved since the 60s. What has changed is how factories and warehouses are built, so that the 'environment' and the 'things' are strictly constrained to enable robotic arms to grab and move them. But let one thing get a little out of place, or worse, let a human get between an industrial robot and the thing it's trying to pick up and.. well. RIP.
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  That simply isn't true - the machines of the past were pretty much blind but safety interlocks are able to detect an approach. The reason for the constraints are efficency in manufacturing is preferrably reducing the process to simple repetitive actions for improved throughput and reliability.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    > simple repetitive actions Exactly, and those actions are able to be simple and repetitive because the machines don't have to try to identify objects in the environment, they just reach X meters, open their grappler Y centimeters, close it until it reaches Z Pascals of pressure, move, repeat. No real "AI" required, just programmed to handle expected conditions. But get just a little bit outside the pre-programmed constraints and... https://www.engadget.com/2018-12-06-amazon-workers-hospitalized-robot.html https://www.engadget.com/2018-12-06-amazon-workers-hospitali... As a result, the humans are now forced to accommodate the failings of the machines. https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/8346932/amazon-factory-workers-stop-robots-killing/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/8346932/amazon-factory-workers...
LanceH 5y ago

Permit 5y ago

> But they are completely convinced that it's just around the corner, because they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people. Can you think of any other reasons that people might believe something like automated driving is right around the corner? Or is "contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people" the only reason one might believe this?

ghaff 5y ago
You can phrase it more nicely. But it boils down to things like: "How hard can it be?" "Humans suck at it (though they really don't)" "We do great at 90% of the problem" and so forth. Computers can do really well in controlled, specced situations. Not so well in a complicated environment where humans live and operate.

somenewaccount1 5y ago

I agree with you in general, but not about the hamburgers. https://www.creator.rest/ https://www.creator.rest/

OnlineGladiator 5y ago
That thing is well-known to break all the time. You can even find people on Yelp talking about how the robot is broken. It's mostly old technology anyway; it's still a fundamentally mechatronic system similar to what AMF made several decades ago. https://youtu.be/FmXLqImT1wE https://youtu.be/FmXLqImT1wE That one didn't make money either, and it also broke a lot, and had all sorts of other problems. Believe it or not, the core technology has improved a lot less than you might think. They may have put a prettier skin on it but it's still the wrong approach.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

neutronicus 5y ago

Trying to grow plants outdoors is a humbling experience for sure

Someone 5y ago

> we haven't automated picking tomatoes I wouldn’t know whether their claims hold water, but http://www.automatorobotics.com/autonomous-single-tomato-harvester/ http://www.automatorobotics.com/autonomous-single-tomato-har...: A robot that can reliably detect ripe tomatoes and harvest them with consistent quality at a rate of 10-12 tomatoes per minute. […] reducing the harvest costs by 50% (The videos give me the impression that “10-12 tomatoes per minute” is best-case)

deltarholamda 5y ago
I can see an automated tomato picker working well for tomato varieties that are uniform and grow on largely uniform plants. But those tomatoes are bland. Heirloom tomatoes look like a topology project gone horribly wrong, and the colors aren't found in any Pantone catalog. They are also the most delicious. There's definitely a place for both. We have to get ketchup ingredients from somewhere, and gourmands will always want the ugly heirlooms.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > I can see an automated tomato picker working well for tomato varieties that are uniform and grow on largely uniform plants. But those tomatoes are bland. Throughout history, our main trick when solving a problem with technology was to constrain the problem to something that's much easier to solve, by changing the environment. For example, all-terrain mechanized transport is hard, and to this day, nobody except hobbyists and militaries even bothers to try tackling it. Our solution was to flatten the terrain into roads, so that we could just use wheels. We've been iterating on that idea ever since.

Guest42 5y ago

I see this pretty frequently in manufacturing. Oftentimes, larger products will have curves, design changes, layering complexities, and judgment calls that simply can’t be performed via machine, further, the parts will come in at different times and assembly lines themselves will have to be flexible and optimize for the given real estate.

colordrops 5y ago

Having respect for the skills of a worker and also believing that they are possible to automate are not mutually exclusive. It's no different from people saying the same thing about chess and chess players, or go and go players, before the problem was solved. And it's not just blue collar workers that are a target of this idea. We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and into the commercial realm, e.g. GitHub copilot.

Grakel 5y ago
Programming will be automated long before brick laying. We can barely print a document with confidence.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Printing is hard primarily because of misaligned business incentives, which form a bubble of suck that's eerily resilient to market optimization. Automating programming definitely seems like an easier target in comparison.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    Printing works really well. It's print drivers (software) that are an utter and complete mess. I've never had a printer that didn't work: I've had plenty that wanted the correct offering to the HP website to be made and several hundred megs of adware installed before a postscript file made it to the actual hardware.
- Overton-Window 5y ago
  Programming is the conversion of ambiguous human requirements into machine readable instructions. To automate, computers would need to understand ambiguous human requirements. This is AGI. By comparison, brick laying is trivial.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    This plays exactly into the OP's comment - but if that is your sincerely held belief there are ~4,000 bricklayers~[1] in America today and you could make a whole boatload of money if you could automate their work. 1. According to the BLS link below it's actually closer to 50,000.

cogman10 5y ago

It's always a little weird the jobs that are easy to automate vs the jobs that are hard to automate. Jobs that require interaction with the physical world and people will almost always be a hard to automate thing. There are simply too many variables. The real problem is when we make the results of a job worse to aid in automation. The prime example here is tomatoes being breed with thick skin, picked before ripened, and then squirted with some chemicals to make them red so people will buy them. All while sacrificing taste.

MontyCarloHall 5y ago
Your observation is closely related to Moravec’s paradox of artificial intelligence: “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

bsder 5y ago

People also seem to always miss that we always engineer the product in order to be able to automate it. The most automated things have been designed by engineers with robotic assembly in mind.

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
> [mortor] it’s a non-newtonian fluid, and it’s viscosity increases when it’s moved or shaken. Which is why the points about non-Newtonian fluids like mortor changing viscosity seems right on the money. Anyone trying automation with normal mortor gives me zero confidence. I like the robot truck idea, seems like a winner compared to others. Exo suits / better humans in the meantime, purpose built machines later.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Bogus reason. Plastic melt is also a non-Newtonian fluid and yet plastic parts production is thoroughly automated.
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    I’m not sure that tracks exactly. I think the issue is the stacking of very heavy things on top of a nnf goop.
    - bsder 5y ago
      The issue is that "buildings have been engineered to be built by humans". So, the building tasks are set to be a compromise of materials and human skill. If we want machines to build them, then we need different systems and materials.

grandmczeb 5y ago

> The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here. I'm confused - based on your Github profile I assume you'd fall under the category of "computer people". Are you saying you feel this way? Because I certainly don't.

spideymans 5y ago

When you have a hammer, everything look like a nail. Technology is our hammer.

dredmorbius 5y ago
Technology is a generalisation of a hammer. Technology is the domain of means to ends. It's literally how things are done, and includes such factors as skill, training, technique, organisation, and logistics. As such, your comment is self-negating.

cgrealy 5y ago

> We haven't automated driving Yeah, we pretty much have... it just hasn't been widely adopted yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjztvddhZmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjztvddhZmI And honestly, from a business perspective, most people really don't care about the skills ordinary people have. Look at the wine industry for example. Top shelf wine is hand-picked, for exactly the reasons you outline, and some people are willing to pay top dollar for that end product. But the vast majority of grapes are harvested by very simple machines, because scale and profit, and most people just want a $10 bottle of decent-ish wine. We absolutely can automate cooking a fucking hamburger, and as soon as it's cheaper than the cheapest labour, McDonald's, Burger King, etc, WILL automate cooking a fucking hamburger. Will it be as good as a "hand made" burger? Maybe.. maybe not? Will the people paying a few bucks for a burger care? Nope. This isn't an issue with "computer people"... this is an issue with economics.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
> We absolutely can automate cooking a fucking hamburger, and as soon as it's cheaper than the cheapest labour, McDonald's, Burger King, etc, WILL automate cooking a fucking hamburger. Curiously, McDonald's is probably as close as you can get to automating burgers and fries without crossing that final step of removing human labor entirely. It's not really cooking anymore, it's process chemistry[0], with some final assembly required. -- [0] - Which I actually consider to be a good thing.
- munk-a 5y ago
  This is the pattern you'll see repeated if you go looking for jobs that have been "automated away" - they get the dumb bits removed. No longer does the mail room call your desk to inform you that a package has arrived - scanning a barcode does that. The jobs in those sectors slowly shrink down (until eventually they just get rolled into the gigantic umbrella of responsibility that is IT) but the work never completely disappears. Once upon a time I'm sure some dude had to constantly monitor the temperature of the cellar that holds the wine casks and occasionally call into town for a block of ice to keep things cool. Now we have refrigeration - and that mind-numbingly tedious portion of running a winery can now be conveniently avoided (except for the occasional maintenance) so you can concentrate on more important things. Eventually it might be that McDonalds automates it's POS and menu to such a degree that for every ten franchises there's just one dude in a car that drives around responding to error codes and, ideally, the people who worked there will find something more creative and fulfilling to do with their lives. I don't hold those people with contempt - I feel like their skills (and everybody has skills) are being underutilized.

paxys 5y ago

And yet the list of jobs that have been successfully automated over the decades is considerably longer. Everything you mentioned will eventually be conquered as well (driving, farming and cooking are probably the worst examples you could have used – we are well on our way to automating all of them).

throwaway17_17 5y ago
Driving and farming I can agree with having automation potential. But the issue I have with cooking is that automation for the culinary area is limited to McDonalds’ type assembly of uniform pre-made food items that require the absolute minimum in terms of culinary ability. I can comprehend robotic prep machines, slicing, dicing, maybe even butchery. But it is a significant step from there to a robot following even a well written recipe for demi-glacé or for a custard, let alone being able to tell when potatoes are roasted to the right fineness and have a sufficiently browned appearance. Maybe my kids won’t work at Burger King in high school, but I can’t see line cooks at any real restaurant being replaced any time soon.

soheil 5y ago

Why not both? You make it sound like only as long as we don't have an automated hamburger maker we should respect the people who cook our hamburgers, but not afterwards. Progress in any field is usually a function of amount of money poured into it, if the margins for hamburgers were large enough, ie. no cheap labor or higher food prices we would have invested more engineering effort into making smart enough robots that make hamburgers and probably by now have them being made automatically.

chias 5y ago

Laying brick is hard. I bricked up a small gap in a two-foot-tall brick wall in my back yard recently. It took me literally all day, and looks exactly as messy as someone who lays bricks might expect from someone who uses a computer for a living. Watching those people on youtube who make tutorial videos that go super fast and make it look really easy... You can record yourself writing a python script and make it look easy. Those people are pros, and have skills and experience to back it up. It isn't easy.

philwelch 5y ago

I don't think this is it. Computer people tend to work in office settings. The reason the old joke about threatening to replace people with shell scripts works is because a lot of office jobs can be replaced with shell scripts. This is because, rather than physically working in the real world, most office jobs entail manipulating symbols, which is easy for computers but hard for humans. (That's why we invented computers). A lot of work in the real world entails some decision-making component that can be expressed in terms of symbol manipulation. This overlaps with the part that many people find difficult, because people are naturally good at physically manipulating the real world. So when we talk about automating driving or picking tomatoes or bricklaying, we are only accounting for the difficulty of automating the symbol-manipulation abstraction of that task. (This is basically the conceit of "Manna", a science fiction story where a ton of jobs are "automated" by a computer that just gives a continuous stream of verbal instructions to a poorly paid human being.) If you're measuring the skills of manual workers against the standard of how hard it is to build a robot that replaces them, they are surprisingly hard. The same is true for the skills of trained animals. Maybe we should start worrying about replacing human beings with robots after we've managed to figure out how to replace dogs with robots. Once we have enough bomb-sniffing robots, drug-sniffing robots, livestock guardian robots, police pursuit robots, search and rescue robots, and so forth, to the point where we don't need dogs, then maybe we can start to worry about the human jobs. (Or maybe not--dogs have a really good sense of smell that might be harder to replicate than some human capacities.)

danhor 5y ago
> ton of jobs are "automated" by a computer that just gives a continuous stream of verbal instructions to a poorly paid human being. Isn't that basically amazon warehouses today? (though text based)

jelliclesfarm 5y ago

Please stop. The only ‘skill’ human beings bring to picking fruit or vegetables is their willingness to work for minimum wages because we as a society have failed to keep up with tech even as our population’s food needs exploded.

munk-a 5y ago

I have done some workplace automation (building support tools to automate away stupid paperwork) and I've never ever felt contempt for the people I'm building tools for. These people do extremely intelligent work and make evaluations on complex scenarios - my tools only help them minimize the silly BS that slows them down, building layered tools on top of poorly designed assistive tools or breaking out greenfield solutions to help tackle problems that need to be done entirely manually. I really disagree that almost anyone who has built tool assistance into someone's workflow will view their workflow as simple and view the employee with contempt - actually getting to know the BS they have to put up with on a daily basis actually deepens my appreciation for what they're doing. Sure I can cherry-pick examples that make folks look bad - employees today, even millennials, are for some reason allergic to learning keyboard shortcuts and will use right-click to paste. That's somewhat on them, but more on the company for not providing training time to teach better data entry habits. If one of these highly skilled agricultural workers was given a robot that used scent to determine which fruit trees likely had ripe fruit that needed to be harvested - I'm sure they'd appreciate it for what it is, a tool that lets them concentrate on more important things. And, if we as a society are moving into a era where automation becomes so widespread that jobs are much fewer and far between 1) we'll waste a lot more time building freemium games or whatever BS labour sink society comes up with next and 2) we should realize that taxes need to go way up on the people still employed and UBI or other social services are needed to keep us functional as a society. Having too much productivity is such an easy problem to solve - you just don't do what America is doing and let it all coagulate into the pockets of a few hundred billionaires... and then everyone gets to live a good life.

coding123 5y ago
I don't understand UBI personally. In general it will have the net effect of dropping even more people out of the labor pool. Even with increasing population over the last 50 years the number of people participating is going down. Not as a percentage, but a number. With that, things like getting a plumber will skyrocket in price. I mean why should I fix your toilet if I can be at home playing video games right now? I'm going to have a roof over my head and food in my mouth either way. Current UBI experiments don't have the experience of going 100% of the population, so there's no way to know what will happen.

IdiocyInAction 5y ago

I have absolutely no contempt for the skill. Why would I? But I do recognize that building costs are expensive and that building stuff could be faster and safer and thus think that automation would be good. Same goes for my job, really. Automation has so far been a net good for humanity and if we ever transition to a true post-scarcity society, it will be through automation. Also, if you speak with people in ML/AI, they will not tell you it's around the corner. They know that physical stuff and robotics in general is hard. Also, builders and the like often have a great amount of contempt towards any desk job - is that OK? Why?

8note 5y ago

My dad automated cooking meatballs ages ago. I can't imagine a hamburger would be too much harder. There's folks on YouTube already who can automate the assembly of a hamburger using Lego. It's just slower than having a person do it in a semi automated manner. Per the article, we have automated some of bricklaying (for roads), and I've definitely had ads show up for tools that reduce the skills needed to do bricklaying. We've also automated parts of driving - staying the same speed, parking, etc. The automation all changes which skills are important, and steadily makes high skilled jobs into less skilled jobs.

ashtonkem 5y ago

It’s not contempt computer people have for manual labor; it’s the contempt that bosses have for paying wages.

Meandering 5y ago

People also tend to ignore that automation minimizes craftsmanship and art to a MVP. I know a few masons and they are literally artists. Sure, you can lay bricks and have a wall but it's not the same as a mortar-less stone wall crafted with artistic skill. They are completely different objectives and render completely different impressions. Automation eliminates the humanity of a task by existence. We will lose those unspoken qualities when automation breaks into the mainstream and no one will know everything they have lost in the process.

nsonha 5y ago

> they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people. Where do you get that? While you focus on the "skill" and "intelligence", automation is about productivity and freedom (from labor) > learn some humility and try to understand the skills What do you think automation is, if not to try to understand the skills, then turn it into the program?

drivingmenuts 5y ago

How much does a bricklaying system cost vs the cost of a human? Seems to me that humans are just way cheaper and lower maintenance.

Nasrudith 5y ago
It isn't the cost of one human vs one machine - that is a harder point to get to. Instead it is about the number of humans and their cost vs the machine adjusted equivalent. Scale is where industry takes its crown.

rowanG077 5y ago

You must interpret everything people say in the worst possible way to have this viewpoint. Besides that It's not my experience at all that "computer people" think that these things will be automated in a short time frame. It's the opposite. The "computer people" are highly skeptic because they know much better then anyone what a computer is capable of. It's almost always the managers and marketing people parading automation around.

mrshadowgoose 5y ago

I can only speak for myself, but I can assure you that on my end it's not contempt in the least bit. Rather, it's excitement at the hope of an amazing future; one in which people who work do so because they choose to, and not because they have to. A future in which we can celebrate life, creativity, hobbies, friends and family, without having to toil away the majority of our waking life to obtain the means of survival. One can absolutely admire the skill of a bricklayer, while celebrating the eventual fact that bricklayers will not be forced to perform that labor if they don't want to. Those are not mutually exclusive things. "We haven't automated driving" One can, today, fly to Phoenix Arizona, download the Waymo app, and summon a self-driving vehicle. Although it would be disingenuous to claim that self-driving is a completely solved problem for ALL use cases, it absolutely is "good enough" for very many of them, and will be scaled out faster than you expect. "but many more have not and most likely never will be." Unless there's some yet-to-be-discovered supernatural process at-work inside the human brain, this is just plain false. The human brain is an incredibly complicated machine, and nothing more. It's only a matter of time until we understand, or in the worst case, simulate it with sheer computational power.

robomartin 5y ago

I don't think it is contempt. I truly believe most people --event technical folks-- who don't work in robotics and AI lack an understanding of just how difficult it is to build and program a robot that can do what "simple" insects (fly, ant, spider, worm, cockroach, etc.) are able to accomplish. Most of the "impressive" robotics videos we are treated to on YouTube are highly staged, choreographed sequences where one out of N attempts is used as some kind of a PR showcase not even remotely linked to real-world useful capabilities of the robot in display. I remember how people were amazed when robots like Asimo could not be used during the Fukushima disaster. Anyone who works in these fields, even peripherally, has a very different perspective of reality vs. fantasy and knew the score as it pertained to robots like Asimo, their actual utility and capabilities.

dukeofdoom 5y ago

These jobs are usually slow torture for humans to do. Do them long enough, and your body will break under the sun or you will look like a prune, get back pain or a hump and possibly skin cancer. Let the robots do them as soon as possible.

NoPicklez 5y ago
And sitting in an office chair in front of a computer all day doesn't bring its own health problems? Weight gain due to limited daily movement, forward posture due to sitting and looking forward all day, RSI due to typing and mouse movement.
- sharkweek 5y ago
  A question for the crowd, then: what is the “best” job for the human body? Because sitting at a desk all day for me definitely isn’t it.
  - esailija 5y ago
    Well unfortunately it doesn't get better than that, except when working as remote you can lie on a sofa or bed. After a full day you still have full energy to do optimal amount of physical exercise, just enough (which is relatively little) to stay in optimal condition without destroying your body.
- XorNot 5y ago
  Sitting in an office chair you can do despite numerous problems. But crawling through attics, lifting heavy items - once your injured that's it, you won't be doing anymore, potentially permanently.
- dukeofdoom 5y ago
  Some Suggestions if I was having this problem: 1. Get a standing desk, so you can alternate between sitting and standing. 2. Learn to use a mouse with both left and right hand. And/or ball wheel mouse. 3. Try Speech to text software 4. Try an Ergo keyboard. Logitech makes an ergonomic keyboard (Ergo k860) 5. Get up and Stretch every hour 6. Go the the bathroom as much as you're allowed to 7. Go for a Walk during your lunch break 8. Go for a walk after work 9. Do some yoga. It's totally free. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWN2FPlvg9r-LnUyepH9IaQ

gibolt 5y ago

'Most' and 'never' are strong words. I'd imagine many people thought that in the past about modern automation (and it's well documented). Things will become automated. That is the natural human progression. We are creative, and their are 7+ billion minds with new giants to stand on the shoulder of every day. AI, soft/compliant robotics, and globalization are strong unrelenting factors/motivators.

caf 5y ago
Yes. For example, see this video of a Continuous Tamping Machine in operating, tamping railway ballast: https://fb.watch/79KwlAt2Fz/ https://fb.watch/79KwlAt2Fz/ You probably wouldn't have to go too far back to find people sceptical about the possibility of automating that.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

Reminds me of a $BIGTECH project with a one armed robot on a wheeled base they thought could do house cleaning. I mean the damn thing couldn’t operate a windex bottle. I don’t think the executives who made this pitch actually clean their own homes.

alfalfasprout 5y ago

It's funny that the other comments here prove your point, egh. They miss that the contempt is not directed at those doing the work but instead directed at the skills-- this is evidenced by how they tend to trivialize the skills that are trying to be automated. This is especially true when looking at the spectrum of quality of human work for a given field. Take, for example, masonry. There is simple bricklaying for the front of the house. Then there is intricate stonemasonry that requires a lot of careful planning, know-how, and knowledge of historical techniques. There is machining a piece of metal in a simple way. Then there is intricate hand-finishing of that metal at the other extreme. I suspect that over time we will see the less artisan, less "skillful" aspects of manual work be replaced but that fine craftsmanship won't really disappear. The more you learn about what goes into making certain things by hand the more you appreciate how foolish it is to claim that it can all be automated easily.

wlesieutre 5y ago
There's also machining a piece of metal in an incredibly complex way, but with the right automation can be turned into a comparatively simple process. If you showed someone 100 years ago what we could do with a block of metal and a 5-axis CNC machine it would blow their mind. That's the type of area where automation can do great things. Look for places where "simple for a machine" and "simple for a human" diverge. I could do the job of every logic gate in my computer, but I wouldn't want to try and boot a copy of Windows with a pad of paper and a pencil. As an example, not something you'd want to make on a hand operated milling machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnIvhlKT7SY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnIvhlKT7SY But to look at something that's easy to do for people and think "That's easy, a machine could do it!" It's always going to depend on why it's easy. Handling situations that differ from one job to the next is a pretty strong point for humans, especially when those differences are handled by grabbing and moving things. But then, five years ago we would've put "playing Go" on there with grabbing and moving things, so you never know.

zamalek 5y ago

> The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here. Agreed. My mother was involved in my local city theatre, and always told us kids that "there would be no show without someone to lift the curtains." These people had their cameo in every finale. That has always stuck with me. Ever wondered what would happen if there wasn't someone flipping burgers to satisfy your 2AM craving? You, no matter your riches or power or fame, would have to do it yourself. The most innovative thing you could do is shut the fuck up and start listening. Instead of trying to replace the bricklayer with robotics, how about asking them how robotics could help them? They are the SMEs, they do a job considered easy to automate daily (and that job isn't easy to automate). They can tell you how they are wasting time on inefficiencies. The job of technology is to allow the human to stop worrying about the rote. It is not to replace the human, or to solve imaginary problems. That's when problems arise: Facebook, racist/sexist AI, etc.

ddoolin 5y ago

You've got enough replies at this point, but I guess I really am curious who you're talking about? You seem to have a chip on your shoulder so it sounds personal or nearly so. If I had to guess, most attempts to automate things, whether they go poorly or not, are begun by people who have that expertise or skill which you're claiming "computer people" scorn so much (which I also don't think is a very common opinion).

nitwit005 5y ago

> computer people The article suggests efforts go back over 100 years, so it seems bizarre to suggest this has something to do with "computer people". There is a commercial burger cooking machine north of me in SF (https://www.creator.rest/ https://www.creator.rest/), and there are similar machines for pizzas and other fast food. That isn't an unsolved problem.

coderjames 5y ago

Automated hamburgers at https://theroboburger.com/ https://theroboburger.com/ and https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/16/business/white-castle-flippy-robot/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/16/business/white-castle-flippy-... and https://sf.eater.com/2018/6/21/17489084/creator-robot-burgers-san-francisco https://sf.eater.com/2018/6/21/17489084/creator-robot-burger... Automated cement-pouring in place of brick laying at https://www.nbc12.com/2021/06/24/virginias-first-3-d-printed-home-going-up-richmonds-southside/ https://www.nbc12.com/2021/06/24/virginias-first-3-d-printed... The robots have arrived. Unskilled labour needs to be concerned.

chrisco255 5y ago
We'll see if / when they hit scale. From what I recall your 2018 example was a flop and the machine did not produce burgers any cheaper and needed a lot of maintenance from the staff in order to operate. EDIT: Yes, they didn't last long: https://hackaday.com/2018/10/11/i-ate-a-robot-hamburger-before-the-restaurant-went-out-of-business/ https://hackaday.com/2018/10/11/i-ate-a-robot-hamburger-befo...

lumost 5y ago

Alternately, The problem may be that human labor is "cheap" for the activities which still require brick laying and in cases where it's "expensive" alternate materials can be used. In order to make automation economically viable there would need to be a niche for "cheap" brick powered by automation. It's unclear to me that this niche exists and can't be similarly achieved by scaling up the blocks or switching to more labor efficient building materials.

dylan604 5y ago

I totally see/hear your position, and mostly feel the same way. Devil's advocate asks, what about the skill of the devs that can automate that kind of stuff? The types of things that might be learned in building articulating robotically controlled apendages to pick tomatoes without crushing them or the entire plants, the skill of a robot to cook the perfect burger to the perfect temp, etc. It would be impressive. Sending people to the moon and building atomic weapons brought us some very cool and useful unintended things. So who knows what could come from some other boondoggle type of projects?

shreyshnaccount 5y ago

it's not just computer people. it's everyone. we haven't automated most jobs which require skill, precisely because they aren't easy to- and yet, teachers, agriculture workers, and construction crews are some of the lowest paid sectors. and then there are complaints about these people being lazy and there not being enough people who want to pursue these professions. wel guess what? pay them a decent wage for a change!

exporectomy 5y ago
Complaints that there aren't enough workers in the labor market are equivalent to complaints that wages are too high. Your proposed solution is really just a restatement of the problem.

deleted 5y ago

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morpheos137 5y ago

Actually it really reflects poorly on their intelligence when they fail to conceptualise the complexity of the real world.

BurningFrog 5y ago

There is great contempt for "computer people" in this post.

pottertheotter 5y ago

I find this comment so out of touch with the history of the world. Would you have us stuck back at the art of knocking rocks together to create fire since the people who created matches and lighters had so much contempt for the rock knockers? If anyone has contempt, it's this line of thought. What are we if we aren't trying to move forward--solve problems, invent, and improve lives? A few weeks back I came across Hadrian, one of the machines profiled in this piece. The idea of building with higher accuracy, lower cost, greater speed, all while allowing people doing backbreaking labor to do something else, excited me. There was no contempt for anyone. I like woodworking. I'm currently thinking of purchasing an industrial-grade CNC router. I think it's analogous to robotic bricklayers in many ways. I have to design a piece before I make it whether I cut it with a hand saw, use a table saw, or have the CNC router do it. The reason I use a table saw instead of a hand saw is the same for using a CNC router instead of a table saw--it's faster and provides me with a more consistent and accurate outcome. If that's not a good enough justification, you should look into how much skill is required to operate a CNC router. You can use different bits, rpms of the router, speed the machine is moving at, entry speeds, depth of cuts, etc. There is a lot of skill involved. And when a lot of that is taken away so I can focus on what matters most--creating beautiful furniture--I'll be so very happy and won't feel the least bit bad about it.

eru 5y ago
Had OP removed the last part of this sentence: > Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not and most likely never will be. To read: > Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not. Or > Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not and most likely will take a while. You would have nothing to complain about. As often with AI / automation, the things that seem simplest to humans are the hardest to automate and vice versa. As another example, look at translation: take an average English speaker and ask them to translate Japanese texts. They will take lots and lots of training to get good. But provide them with a literal word-for-word translation of the Japanese text into English as cheat sheet, and after a few hours of practice, she will become pretty good at rewriting those into fine English translations. Given long enough text snippets, she'll mostly be able to figure out from context how to resolve ambiguities. (She won't be perfect, of course, and professional translators bring additional skills to the game. But she'll become pretty proficient pretty quickly.) Try to do a machine to translate between human language, and you'll notice that doing the literal translation part is what's really easy for the computer, but all the context is hard. (Incidentally, that's why in the stone age of AI, people thought translation would be easy, but playing chess well would be hard.)

danielodievich 5y ago

My grandfather spent his entire working life after the war in the cement and brick factory, and built 3 houses and various sub-buildings out of brick. Since very young age my brother and I were tasked with helping, starting with just sieving sand via mesh to remove rocks, and then once we got just a bit older and stronger, actually mixing mortar out of cement and sand and carrying the mixture to the job site. I think I laid my first brick before the age of 9, but first just a couple here and there. Bricks are heavy! I think was 12 when I was given a straight stretch of the wall close to foundation to, and after review of my work I had to take everything apart, it was saggy, uneven and ugly. Eventually I learned to do straight walls, but the corners eluded me until at least a year doing it with very qualified masons coaching. I don't think my joints were ever pretty enough with that lovely groove that some people do, and avoiding mortar onto the brick is devilishly hard. Where I live there is little brick construction but I love seeing what is there, it is always so pretty. Based on my experience of the changing by the minute mortar, heavy bricks, continuous looping feedback, I don't believe it is something that will get automated.

richardw 5y ago

> because they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people No. They just don’t know what makes it hard. I don’t know where the robot train drivers are. We’re doing cars and planes but it seems trains have fewer things to worry about. I don’t feel contempt for train drivers, the limitation is mine. I don’t understand. I still think I deserve to live. I love this guy’s videos. He’s a fantastic insight into a world I barely know: https://youtu.be/qP1AmDRhoas https://youtu.be/qP1AmDRhoas

rendall 5y ago

> The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here. Kind of an unfair generalization, I think. I see far more comments in defense of the skill of masonry and masons, insisting that automation may be too difficult, and almost none that "display contempt" as I see it. But I could be missing something. Would you be willing to expand on what you see here?