Interestingly, these robots aren't that smart. It just goes to show how much you can build by engineering a whole system, and not expecting a single robot to be that intelligent.
For example, the vision system is essentially built with fiducials (markers like QR codes) on the trays.
These robots could do nothing in your basement. I'm not saying this is bad - it's actually awesome to see more real robotics companies selling products. My point is that I really look forward to robots that can perceive their environment better and manipulate objects in it with dexterity. That will really knock your socks off.
Amen. Proper computer vision would revolutionise .. well, an awful lot of things. Let's just hope it doesn't turn out like Manna, though .. http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Let's just hope it doesn't turn out like Manna, though
Wikipedia has an article section on the sociological and cultural aspects of Down syndrome. It basically describes life for humans in a world with advanced AI. Here is that section, altered with the phrase people with Down syndrome, and related words and phrases, replaced by the word humans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_Syndrome#Sociological_and_...
Sociological and cultural aspects of Manna (advanced AI)
Advocates for humans point to various factors, such as additional educational support and parental support groups to improve parenting knowledge and skills. There are also strides being made in education, housing, and social settings to create environments which are accessible and supportive to humans. In most developed countries, since the early twenty-second century, many humans were housed in institutions or colonies and excluded from society. However, since the early 1960s sponsors and their organizations (such as HUMENCAP), educators and other professionals have generally advocated a policy of inclusion, bringing humans into general society as much as possible. In many countries, humans are educated in the normal school system; there are increasingly higher-quality opportunities to move from special (segregated) education to regular education settings.
Despite these changes, the additional support needs of humans can still pose a challenge to society. Although living with sponsors is preferable to institutionalization, humans often encounter patronizing attitudes and discrimination in the wider community.
The first World Human Day was held on 1 May 2146. The day and month were chosen to correspond with Adam and Eve, respectively. It was proclaimed by European Down Syndrome Association during their European congress in Palma de Mallorca (febr. 2145). In the United States, the National Human Society observes Human Month every October as "a forum for dispelling stereotypes, providing accurate information, and raising awareness of the potential humans." In South Africa, Human Awareness Day is held every October 20. Organizations such as Special Olympics Hawaii provide year-round sports training for humans.
I think this scenario is highly unlikely because society will not allow robots to make mistakes. A robot pilot might fly perfectly 99.999% of the time. 100 times better than human pilots but the first time a robot plane crashes, people will go nuts and adopt a "ban them all" mentality. With a human pilot, they just shrug and say "pilot error". People make mistakes. Robots aren't allowed to.
I think this is due to a sense of control and fear of the unknown. People shrug it off because they think they could conceivably do better, or have helped the situation. But, the higher the barrier to entry the less accepting people are of error. Look at the discrepancy between about of airline deaths and car deaths, and the respective fear it engenders in people. Just about everyone knows about driving a car, but very few know what it is like to fly a plane.
Marshall Brain has some interesting ideas, and I actually agree that there might be some disruption from lots of jobs getting roboticized. That said, Manna is completely implausible. He takes some trends in political correctness, like banning smoking, to a ridiculous distopian degree of somehow justifying prison for almost every human because they can't find jobs.
I don't think there is an upper bound on the number of people working in creative fields. It is a question of how fast the people can move to them.
I don't think there is an upper bound on the number of people working in creative fields.
What proportion of the world's chimpanzees work in creative fields? You don't think that humans would be in competition with AI's in the creative marketplace of the future?
I think you're glomming together "the future" without being precise about the level of AI.
You don't need human level intelligence to replace drivers, factory workers, etc.
Human dexterity and vision are two aspects that are really hard to replicate that have nothing to do with strong AI. They will be solved first.
So when I talk about robots displacing jobs, I mean robots that are more capable than today's generation, but not necessarily a super AI. That's why the comparison with chimps was confusing: we were talking about different kinds of robots.
As for strong AI, I don't think it is going to be an "us" vs. "them". Humans will not only demand the best intelligence advancement medicine will offer, but will also try to merge with computer intelligence seamlessly.
It isn't going to be humans with guns vs. super smart robots with lasers. It is going to be strong AI with humans that are machine enhanced. The creative professionals in that future are all going to be part machine.
This isn't going to happen very soon. At least a few decades. The disruption from capable robots will start within 10 years.
gravitycop is talking about the future's potential, no matter how distant. He thinks at some point our level of competition with AI will be equivalent to chimps and us, therefore the same societal roles apply, but between us and AI.
You are just talking about the foreseeable future, and don't foresee this happening anytime soon, which gravitycop doesn't necessarily disagree with.
"They compete in today's society against humans in creative fields."
No, they don't. To compete, they must be in the same market. Chimps aren't in the same market as humans until you face a serious choice between Tom Hanks and a chimpanzee for your next dramatic role.
Frankly, "we have AIs that can build the next Casablanca" is on the other side of the singularity. There's so many possibilities at that point that we can't speculate. "Humans are reduced to twiddling their thumbs" is only one possibility of many, and I'd rate it pretty low for a number of reasons.
Perhaps humans, someday, will be living in zoos, providing spectacle entertainment for paying customers (AI) who vastly outclass them in terms of intelligence and creativity. Perhaps these humans will occasionally be given a role in a movie, and perhaps their "fine art works" will be commoditized based on their novelty value.
And there you go. You've exhausted the chimpanzee argument, and your third point is pathetic. Turtles do that too.
Meanwhile, I can't hardly even begin to summarize the human contribution to the arts in the same number of words.
You have anecdote-itis. You have no sense of scale. Your argument is so bad it's not even worth addressing any further. I hope for your own sake that you are trolling, because if this is what passes for a convincing argument in your world, you must make a lot of bad decisions.
Turtles do that [provide spectacle entertainment for paying customers by living in zoos] too.
Turtles are intelligent. Chimps are intelligent. Both compete against humans in the entertainment market. Both do not compete very well against humans. Chimps compete better than turtles.
Entertainment competitiveness:
turtles > chimps > humans
Entertainment competitiveness beyond some point in the future:
'If you tried, if any Mind tried, could you impersonate my style?' the Chelgrian asked. 'Could you write a piece - a symphony, say - that would appear, to the critical appraiser, to be by me, and which, when I heard it, I'd imagine being proud to have written?'
The avatar frowned as it walked. It clasped its hands behind its back. It took a few more steps. 'Yes, I imagine that would be possible.'
'Would it be easy?'
'No. No more easy than any complicated task.'
'But you could do it much more quickly than I could?'
'I'd have to suppose so.'
'Hmm.' Ziller paused. The avatar turned to face him. Behind Ziller, the rocks and veil trees of the deepening gorge moved swiftly past. The barge rocked gently beneath their feet. 'So what,' the Chelgrian asked, 'is the point of me or anybody else writing a symphony, or anything else?'
The avatar raised its brows in surprise. 'Well, for one thing, if you do it, it's you who gets the feeling of achievement.'
'Ignoring the subjective. What would be the point for those listening to it?'
'They'd know it was one of their own species, not a Mind, who created it.'
'Ignoring that, too; suppose they weren't told it was by an AI, or didn't care.'
'If they hadn't been told then the comparison isn't complete; information is being concealed. If they don't care, then they're unlike any group of humans I've ever encountered.'
'But if you can-'
'Ziller, are you concerned that Minds - AIs, if you like - can create, or even just appear to create, original works of art?'
'Frankly, when they're the sort of original works of art that I create, yes.'
'Ziller, it doesn't matter. You have to think like a mountain climber.'
'Oh, do I?'
'Yes. Some people take days, sweat buckets, endure pain and cold and risk injury and - in some cases - permanent death to achieve the summit of a mountain only to discover there a party of their peers freshly arrived by aircraft and enjoying a light picnic.'
'If I was one of those climbers I'd be pretty damned annoyed.'
'Well, it is considered rather impolite to land an aircraft on a summit which people are at that moment struggling up to the hard way, but it can and does happen. Good manners indicate that the picnic ought to be shared and that those who arrived by aircraft express awe and respect for the accomplishment of the climbers.'
'The point, of course, is that the people who spent days and sweated buckets could also have taken an aircraft to the summit if all they'd wanted was to absorb the view. It is the struggle that they crave. The sense of achievement is produced by the route to and from the peak, not by the peak itself. It is just the fold between the pages.' The avatar hesitated. It put its head a little to one side and narrowed its eyes. 'How far do I have to take this analogy, Cr Ziller?'
'You've made your point, but this mountain climber still wonders if he ought to re-educate his soul to the joys of flight and stepping out onto someone else's summit.'
'Better to create your own. Come on; I've a dying man to see on his way.'
Well, I agree, but I don't think he meant Manna to be taken as a realistic story - more like a hypothetical exploration of extreme best-case and worst-case scenarios. I found it pretty interesting and certainly thought-provoking.
I'd need a defintion of what a "creative field" is before I agreed with you on the second paragraph, but definitely concur with the general point - people will adapt, new industries will spring up. The robotic revolution might be more jarring than most but yes, we'll survive, and personally I can't wait.
If "Beth" spent 10,000 hours honing a creative craft instead of slogging away in a frigging box packing line, then maybe yes indeed.
The "Beths" of the world may turn out to have been a great lost human potential suddenly liberated from manual labor by robots. Instead of a bunch of Beths sitting around lamenting the loss of factory jobs, in a generation there will be no Beths at all, they'll all be JJ Abrams instead.
The "Australia Project" presented to the desperate protagonists in the Manna story sounds like a come-on. I can't help picturing the recruitment of indentured servants (i.e., slaves) for the colonies or the present-day recruitment strategies of prostitution rings.
These guys are a local company out in Boston, and I know a few fellow students who have interned with them. The beauty of the system, as many people mentioned, lies in the simplicity of it. It has two uncommon traits for robotics - reliability and affordability.
Another neat feature of the system that is not clearly shown is that when the shelf is brought to the employee to have the item picked, a laser pointer mounted at the human station points to the item on the shelf to be picked. Quite impressive!
not new. I spent a couple weeks in a HallMark warehouse in the mid to late 90s. The actual warehouse was about 4 football fields with shelves about 60 feet high. Automatic pickers running on rails would go along the aisles and up the shelving to grab boxes, and deposit them on conveyors. The conveyors read the bar codes(they were talking about rfid at the time) and delivered them to the proper loading dock. No one was actually in the warehouse and they had to turn up the lights to give us a tour. All run off of two three crappy tower servers.
I would like to point out that it is a novel solution because it uses what works well from a robot standpoint and what works well from a human one. The robots do the sorting, moving heavy things etc. The humans take the huge assortment of different items and package them. It also minimizes what changes you need to make to the warehouse so it should be a quick and cheep to retro fit.
While some warehouses specialize others hold 100,000+ types of items that are not in boxes ready to ship. These items range in shapes and sizes and can be grouped to save on shipping costs etc. Think a Ford warehouse that holds every part ever made over the last 10 years or Amazon.com not Netflix.
So yes, human costs are higher, but they should be (~15 seconds a box and 20$ / hour) > 15c a package which could be far less than the savings from grouping items. And the system should be far more fault tolerant than robots moving on fixed tracks that need to pickup a wide range of box sizes vs the same shelf system every time.
the robots, which look like massive orange Roombas, [...] locate the stack of shelves with the needed product on it, slide beneath the stack to pick it up and then find their own routes from the stacks of stuff to human operators. And they manage to find just the right time to get themselves recharged for five minutes out of every hour. [...]
Any worker (sometimes called "pickers" in the industry jargon) can ask for anything from anywhere in the warehouse and ship it out.
"Every worker has random access to every product in the warehouse," Wurman said. [...]
As the robots pick up loads of products and put them back, they adjust the warehouse for greater efficiency. [...]
"We find that it's two to four times more efficient [than the average warehouse]," said Wurman. [...]
they know where they are by using a simple and cheap grid system that's stuck onto the floor of the warehouse.
That allows warehouse operators to switch off the lights and climate controls in the large areas of the warehouse that are patrolled solely by robots, cutting energy costs by as much as 50 percent over a standard warehouse. One marketing trick the company uses is to bring people out to the center of a warehouse and switch out the lights: The robots keep working around the people, cruising around in the dark.
Between their demo and the youtube video in the wired article, Kiva couldn't ask for better PR.
It really is an interesting system. No RF technology used as far as I could tell. Simple solutions combine to make an efficient reliable scalable system. I'd love to talk to the programmers that got to build this system, what fun!
Amazon is eating their own dogfood. They have been beta testing a product called "Actual Turk". With Actual Turk, people show up at a defined location and perform menial tasks for a few cents each.
Any product you order from an Amazon warehouse has been picked and packed by an Actual Turk over the last 3 months. In between product pick/pack jobs Actual Turks also perform other jobs on demand, such as making hand-shadow puppets in front of a webcam, reading bedtime stories to children over the phone, or seeking out specimens to ship to a child for their school rock-collection project.
This offering was also alpha-tested in front of many Home Depot locations in the Southwest.
This is like Google for blue-collar workers. I love being able to think of something and have it appear magically, and this should let people that work with their hands do the same.
Ironically, taking the time and cost out of finding parts should make more room for creativity in manufacturing and distribution jobs.
My comment wasn't meant to apply to every business, but the most creative and enlightened ones would definitely take advantage of this and thrive (Zappos is a case in point).
We've been wanting to do this where I'm at for a while. While I hate to put human beings out of work, they really do make too many mistakes for shipping things perfectly.
That's understandable, but think that these people will probably find more fulfilling and productive jobs. As long as the layoffs are gradual, they will have time to retrain and find other jobs. Of course, if their skillsets are really obsolete and many are laid off at once, this can lead to structural unemployment. Eastern European countries went through that after the fall of communism. The transition was not pretty.
But smaller layoffs and career changes are just the cost of technical progress. Have a look at the Industrial revolution [1] and Luddites [2].
No, their debts will spiral and their ability to get any sort of loan for "retraining" will plummet, if they're in the U.S., that is. American households average something like $10,000 credit card debt these days. Unemployment compensation pays 2/3 or 3/4 what they had been earning. Hence their bills pile up and, with bad credit, they can't get "retraining." They're hosed.
> But smaller layoffs and career changes are just the cost of technical progress.
You assume that there are jobs to be had, that retraining is feasible, and that technological progress does not obsolete people as workers. Capitalism will not survive the intelligence singularity.
I know these are a lot of assumptions, but they held up until now. Actually, the most important assumption is that technological progress does not obsolete people as workers. As manual workers, the time will surely come. As white collar, intellectual, or knowledge workers, I dare say never. There are simply too many difficulties.
As white collar, intellectual, or knowledge workers, I dare say never [will they be obsoleted by technological progress]. There are simply too many difficulties.
Development of AI will simply stop before it reaches knowledge-worker-class strength? Why would it stop?
For example, the vision system is essentially built with fiducials (markers like QR codes) on the trays.
These robots could do nothing in your basement. I'm not saying this is bad - it's actually awesome to see more real robotics companies selling products. My point is that I really look forward to robots that can perceive their environment better and manipulate objects in it with dexterity. That will really knock your socks off.