5 ms·
Which year did we use steel to replace human workers and automate decision-making?
by JoshGG 5mo ago
Which year did we use steel to replace human workers and automate decision-making?
- carlosjobim 5mo agoThe entire industrial revolution was steel replacing human workers. And that is still the backbone of the world today. We are still living the industrial revolution. Just like the invention of fire happened ages ago, but is still a crucial part of life today.
- almostdeadguy 5mo agoFamously Andrew Carnegie spent years trying to get the steel to stop talking about goblins.
- someguyiguess 5mo agoFamously Andrew Carnegie dodged the point
- almostdeadguy 5mo agoThat the industrial revolutions use of steel to augment or replace labor was similar in every way to using LLMs to do the same? Seems on point to me.
- pixl97 5mo agoIt was Frick who did not dodge so well.
- gus_massa 5mo agoSteel is almost magic. Stainless steel is beyond magic. I had a specialization in Chemistry in High School. For some analysis, the fist step is to dissolve everything in boiling Nitric Acid. But stainless steel has Chrome is like a spell of protection, so you must use boiling Hydrochloric Acid instead. I have no idea why. It's just like magic. It may have Nickel, Molybdenum, and other metals, that give it more magical properties. A few years ago there was a nice post about copying a normal steel alloy for knives to get an equivalent made of stainless steel. You need to reduce the the Carbon content to make it less brittle. And they had to add Vanadium so it keeps the sharpness of the knives. I have no idea why. It's just like magic. If you have half an hour, it's worth reading, but beware that it has too many technical details that are close to magical https://knifesteelnerds.com/2021/03/25/cpm-magnacut/ https://knifesteelnerds.com/2021/03/25/cpm-magnacut/ (HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29696120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29696120 | 375 points | Dec 2021 | 108 comments)
- kmeisthax 5mo agoThat's not magic, that's alchemy!
- red-iron-pine 5mo agoCarnegie Mellon has an entire building dedicated to eradicating the goblin threat. Also eliminating unions.
- surgical_fire 5mo agoNo, it was actually engines. The mechanism behind engines were fully understood, any experiments with engines were reproducible and measurable. You could get an engine and create schematics by reverse engireening it. LLMs, useful as they may be, are not that.
- carlosjobim 5mo agoAnd what might an engine be made of? And a power plant? And a locomotive? And a ship?
- surgical_fire 5mo agoReally? jfc. If that's your rationale we have been replacing humans with atoms. But humans are also made of atoms. Nothing was ever replaced with anything.
- canjobear 5mo agoThe mechanics of engines was understood at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and they were fully reproducible: all of which is true of LLMs today. An LLM is a bunch of floating point numbers and simple operations on them, all of which are fully known. But the way that steam engines emergently transformed heat into work was not understood at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Figuring this out led to an entire new branch of physics, thermodynamics. Figuring out how big next-token predictors give rise to interesting systems is likely to lead to similarly new ideas.
- saltcured 5mo agoSee, now that was a good abstraction. Centuries later, we still learn new tricks for predicting and controlling the chaos of combustion, but those early engines already wrapped it up in a black box that we could more or less ignore.
- someguyiguess 5mo agoAround 1928ish
- red-iron-pine 5mo agoexplain