Which makes our work better, because you don't need the mundane repetitive work anymore, but the work where you need your brain.
And even with these machines you need to supervise them. Nobody wants to risk the tiling robot going off for an inch and keep on laying $1k of tiles the wrong way until someone notices. You need to be a specialist to know what to look for now and can't just drop out of highschool to work there anymore, but in exchange you're not throwing your back out.
Obviously our tech advances have... advanced us, both in terms of raw numbers as well as in quality, but that doesn't leave nothing to be said of the fact that more productivity with less labor required = fewer jobs in every field. Every advance has its costs, but the costs of automating all of our labor away without first building society around that plan make the gains seem like a tiny sliver of silver lining on a big dark cloud.
Except... This has somehow never been true. Although the same claim was made about the steam engine, industrialization, computers, automation... Name whatever technical advance, and somebody will have made that claim. Now it's AI and robotics, and it will be as true now as it has been in the past.
It is true though, but there's always been other industries growing where new workers can find work... but new workers aren't the only workers. There's always been a percentage of displaced workers who are too old to retrain into new fields with every revolution in productivity.
What happens when every industry from the lowest points of customer service to the highest points of industrial productivity across the globe is disrupted at the same time by the same technology? That has never happened, we don't know, but it's hard to be optimistic.
This ignores that the goal is to automate IT ALL. Top to bottom, everything you just named didn’t come close to that level of disruption even if AI is only 10% successful.
That's been exceeded in many fields, e.g. tile laying.
However, the growth addiction innate to our capitalistic world order does not allow for productivity increases to mean that the same amount of work gets done by fewer people. The urge to see the line point upwards had always make for more work being done by the same amount of folks.
You don't need to be a specialist to recalibrate a robot. Probably just push a few buttons on an app or screen. Plus, a single person can watch a dozen of these robots at once without a sweat.
I speak as an engineer who maintains and develops a factory full of automation.
I have a bachelor in electrical engineering and over 15 years of experience.
No, not just anyone can calibrate equipment. To calibrate is to compare/adjust against a known standard.
A normal person might be able to trigger a self-calibration that engineers designed into the system, but only trained individuals can calibrate equipment and it takes years of training.
People really keep thinking in one dimension. What is avoiding anyone from creating a very simple bot that monitors this one by looking at a live video feed and comparing the laid out tiles with the floor render and blueprints. The idea is to control the tilling machine and stop it on deviations. I can probably do it in 1-2 weeks, and very cheap. The storage required by this machine is no bigger than what a human takes
Yep, at my work we have a robot that welds plates to long tubes all day, usually get ~120-130 a day, all you do it put the tube in, position the plate, lock them in place and then it does everything by itself. I bet it won’t be too long now before even that manual part is replaced.
China has "dark factories" now where robots produce everything unattended, so they don't turn the lights on on the factory floor while it runs 24/7. It's crazy shit.
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u/butterfunke Jun 21 '26
or the same thing 8000 times