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[Neonivek]

Given that I can write 1000 words in an hour... a thousand characters... isn't so much a challenge.

As for Job Killing Robots... Hmmm... Truckers are certainly on the Docket but frankly... With what I hear about the profession, I am not feeling so bad about it... as it sounds atrocious and corrupt.

[Graknorke]

It's WTF because it's on the low end, not high.

[Calidovi]

we shorthand discussion now

[BlackFlyme]

Are you kidding? These babies practically pay for themselves! In fact, in just a few short decades, once these are paid off, you should start to see a massive boost to your earnings (note: claim does not factor in repairs, maintenance, or warranty)!


Stayed at my dad's for a week, because my mom was on holidays, and decided to spend it at her ex-boyfriend's. Why, I'll never know.

My room is totaled. It is in the basement. Which is prone to sewage backups. Pleasant. Didn't sleep down there at all, because that would be just horrifically unhealthy. Slept on the couch for a few days instead. Stiff, uncomfortable, too many lights and noise at night to sleep well. So my dad set up my sister's room for me to sleep in. Again, stiff, uncomfortable, too many lights and noise at night. Plus a hyper-active cat, sheets that won't stay on the bed, and what I think was crumbs all over the bed.

Plus the heat. It's been boiling all weekend. Hot and humid.

[EnigmaticHat]

Relevant CCP Grey video.

Hate to tell you, but that video is full of shit. The "job killing robots" that he goes on and on about would cost thousands of times as much as human workers.

Even though half of them are software not hardware?

[Lord Shonus]

As for Job Killing Robots... Hmmm... Truckers are certainly on the Docket but frankly... With what I hear about the profession, I am not feeling so bad about it... as it sounds atrocious and corrupt.

That's one of the only ones that really sounds likely.

Basically, automation is only cost effective if at least three of these is true:

1. It does the job better
2. It does the job faster
3. It does the job more safely
4. It does the job more cheaply

The vast majority of jobs don't match 4 due to the cost of the automation alone - even if it does the job of a 25,000/yr worker for only pennies a day, if the machine costs $1,000,000 (far from unlikely, given the cost of precision manufacture), then it will take 40 years to break even. This can be worked around if it puts out product five times as fast, makes no errors, and nobody gets hurt, but it is actually very rare to hit all three. Much automation is either a lot slower (the robot CCP Grey gushes over in the video takes ten times as long to do the job as a human would), has a very high error rate if the job requires judgement in any way, shape, or form, or (worst of all worlds) needs just as many people to do the job as before, except they're more specialized and have to be paid more (the best example would be the automated forklifts praised in the video - most industries that move a lot of heavy material around would still require a person to provide destination codes (because most applications don't just move things from the same source to the same destination over and over again, that's what conveyer belts are for), probably someone to load/unload it at either end, and instead of a basic mechanic to fix it you'd need a robotics expert in case the logic failed). Automation systems are useful, but there will never come a time where they replace humans entirely in the workforce unless they become just as smart and versiatile as people - at which point they'd probably immediately go on strike.

[Bauglir]

Relevant CCP Grey video.

Hate to tell you, but that video is full of shit. The "job killing robots" that he goes on and on about would cost thousands of times as much as human workers.

Well, yeah, until the prices fall. If you can assemble a machine that can do enough jobs to be worth mass-producing, the cost goes way the fuck down, and I think that's the situation he was getting at with everything other than cars. And the creative ones can be software, which means you only need to invent them once and replication costs pennies as long as it can run on commercially-viable hardware.

The more significant problems with that are his emphasis on First World employment, which relies on less automation than he implies and on more essentially-slave labor that's still not economical to replace (and when it is it will be the one of the greatest moral improvements in the condition of humanity that have ever occurred), and a huge emphasis on "This is different from all the things that were different that we've seen before". He might be right about that, but he makes no effort to demonstrate it, presenting instead only arguments that would work as well in past revolutions ("Computers will make accountants obsolete!").

Still, I do largely agree that at some point "Jobs are good" needs to go away as a mentality, but I'm not sure if that's what he was actually getting at.

[Sirus]

-snip-

I don't see truckers getting replaced by robots any time soon. An automated truck would face a vastly more complex job than any automated car and would need to be able to make snap decisions any time, anywhere. Even a truck given a simple point-A-point-B route can still encounter any number of complications inherent with trying to get a 60-foot-long vehicle from place to place.

Truckers often need to get out of their vehicles in order to walk around the environment and judge the best course of action. This is especially true when backing up. No matter how many cameras you stick on every surface of a robotic truck, there will come a time when a different perspective will be needed and the truck will fail.

A robotic truck would also require entirely new equipment. Most trucking companies get by because they use equipment that has been in service for years, even decades. A company wanting to give automated transport a shot would not only need a purpose-built tractor but also trailers equipped with cameras, motorized doors, any amount of monitoring equipment, and I don't even know what else. How will a robotic truck get fuel? Pumping attendants are a thing of the past. And then of course, when things go wrong they become a lot harder and a hell of a lot more expensive to fix.

So it would fail points 3 and 4, and whether it would be better would be a matter of opinion. I'm willing to admit that a robotic truck might be faster, if only because it would likely not require breaks, but that's it.

[Bauglir]

what if we put the cameras on extensible poles for different perspective-getting and stuck a robot arm on for getting fuel

But, yeah, it's going to be a lot longer than "This stuff exists" to get to "This stuff is affordable, in the sense that it would actually be cheaper to implement". Because, yeah, not only have you got the fact that most businesses are not equipped to replace their entire equipment supply, they'll also have to have the liquid cash to do this in addition to their ordinary expenses during the transition, and so on and so forth. Most likely you'll see the supergiant businesses do it in small chunks as a gimmick and/or union-breaking scheme until it gets to be a big enough business that the little guys can afford to pick up one of the new units when they were going to get something replaced, anyway. And even that first phase will, I assume, take place over a decade or two. Even at the ever-accelerating pace of progress, I legitimately expect the first person who will outlive the Sun to be born before jobs become obsolete. And I consider myself an optimist >____________>

But I do see that being a thing that happens one day.

[Loud Whispers]

Mechanical turks stronk

[EnigmaticHat]

I was going to argue this point but we're getting to the point in B12 where the specialists come out.

I will just say this: the video wasn't quite as dramatic as some people are saying.  He wasn't saying they're going to replace humans, he was saying they're going to put an unprecedented amount of people out of work.  His stated number for at risk jobs (jobs that would lose part but not all of their workers) was 45%.  He also clearly did a lot more research than he bothered to express in the video.  The stuff on neural nets alone goes way beyond common knowledge, and from what I know is accurate.  He also made a point of showing many vehicles that self-driving cars, a tech that already exists, would put out of business.  He just didn't bother to list them all verbally.

Besides, software automation is already creeping in on the edges.  I work in retail (shitty low level job till I can get some better, hopefully), and I can see it from there.  Our store has predictions for how much money we'll make every day, how many cashiers we need, which products need to be pulled for stocking.  It even hands out coupons based on predictions of what customers will buy in the future*.  These things are not done by human analysts.  All of our inventory, expiration dates, even employee productivity are all tracked by programs.  Sure, some of these are things a human never would have done, but plenty of them ARE, and once these programs are written they can be copied infinitely at theoretically no cost.  This sort of specialized, not-sci-fi-dramatic AIs are in their infancy; with neural nets much crazier things will be possible.

There's the counterargument, of course, that people like me aren't there 100% for the sake of doing the job, we're here in case something goes wrong like a spike in business, a confused/angry customer, something breaking, to discourage shoplifters, ect.  And yeah, the bots won't have those kinds of troubleshooting abilities.  But some day someone is going to try to replace a McDonalds or an Ikea or a similar store with what is effectively a giant vending machine, and if they succeed a bunch of retail jobs are going to be replaced by a small number of security guards.

*this one is a guess but I know from external knowledge my employer does this kind of thing already in other ways

[Bauglir]

In another news, I am the best at programming.

Code: [Select]

class dummy_object():
    '''This is stupid.'''
    def __init__(self):
        self.value = dummy_value()

class dummy_value():
    '''Just so stupid.'''
    def __init__(self):
        self.value = None

    def decode(self):
        return None
what the fuck did i do this for

i could comment it out to find out but

do i really want to know

i mean i guess my docstrings are technically correct

[Lightningfalcon]

So, the labs for my Comp Sci course are only given to us at the beginning of the week we do them. Which kind of sucks for me since I have a Monday lab, and as such cannot work on it in advance. I just go the grade back for the second lab, and I still have the web page for the third lab up. Instead of going through our universities entire online homework system thing, which requires logging back on and navigating through about fifteen pages in between, I decided to just change the URL in hopes that it would take me back to a directory with the previous lab in it. You know, changing the programming/lab/lab3.html thing to programming/lab. But it turns out that ALL the labs were on that list. You see, being lazy DOES pay off.

[Bauglir]

You mean including the labs you haven't got yet? Hehehe, I guess professors really haven't learned since 1997. I wonder what nuggets of beauty you might find in the page comments - maybe links to the solutions to last year's labs!

[Lightningfalcon]

You mean including the labs you haven't got yet? Hehehe, I guess professors really haven't learned since 1997. I wonder what nuggets of beauty you might find in the page comments - maybe links to the solutions to last year's labs!

There was a folder in each lab that wasn't there on the normal labs but I don't have the creditionals to access it.
I doubt they are really concerned about us having access to it early. What are we going to do, the assignments? Even if they don't want us to do it early, it is kind of hard to. Just looking at this next assignment, I have to do something with building tuples for our ray tracer project (Something we'll be building throughout the semester). I only have one class between now and when I will be required to do the project, and I have no idea what the fuck a tuple is.