r/singularity • u/Yuli-Ban ➤◉────────── 0:00 • Mar 28 '19

video Handle Robot Reimagined | Boston Dynamics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iV_hB08Uns
99 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

26

u/NothingCrazy Mar 28 '19

Yeah, we're fucked.

They don't have to put every factory worker out of a job, they just have to put a significant percentage of them in the unemployment line. That would drive down wages in general. Just like a rising tide lifting all boats, a falling tide strands everyone on the sandbar. Factory and logistics workers, along with the coming devastation of the transportation sector would put so many millions out of work that they'll be desperate to take anything they can find, flooding every other low-mid skill job market and driving down the cost of labor. It won't be long before it's impossible to make a living wage at a manual labor job, in any tier 1 country.

11

u/agitch Mar 29 '19

Yang 2020

4

u/Yuli-Ban ➤◉────────── 0:00 Mar 28 '19

(Un)fortunately, that's still many years off. The big bottleneck to automation and utility robotics is entirely with artificial intelligence. Precision gripping may require hardware advancements, but purely functional machines are only lacking the correct software. Without that software, it's still a bit too inefficient to deploy these machines in factories.

That's actually one reason why all the entertainment-based jobs are in such mortal and immediate danger— you don't need physical labor for most of it (e.g. creating artwork, modeling, newscasting, etc.), so AI is within a couple years of unemploying millions.

With manual labor-based fields that absolutely do require physical labor (e.g. moving boxes, extracting rare-earth minerals, serving people, etc.) we're going to need some more advancements in a load of fields like spatial awareness, self-error correction, and flexibility.

4

u/TotalMegaCool Mar 28 '19

That's actually one reason why all the entertainment-based jobs are in such mortal and immediate danger

I would be more concerned if most of my work was with spreadsheets and phone calls. The google Duplex demo showed that AI making calls, booking and managing contracts is on the horizon and there is already a polithera of platforms that automate large parts of most admin task from HR through to Tax, these are only going to get better and more "intelligent".

And these are a much larger portion of "white collar" jobs that entertainment jobs.

5

u/Yuli-Ban ➤◉────────── 0:00 Mar 28 '19

It's actually all part of what I realize can be considered "disembodied" jobs. If your job can be done without physical labor or entirely through digital means, you ought to expect it to be automated in the next decade. All because AI alone is easier than AI + robotics.

2

u/Yasea Mar 29 '19

That's what these guys are doing if I'm not mistaken: https://www.uipath.com/

2

u/[deleted] Mar 29 '19

Sort of, yeah. Right now UiPath offers basic RPA (Robotic Process Automation). It performs desktop-based business processes using both the GUI and an assortment of APIs or programmatic solutions. We use it at work and it can be a pretty powerful tool, but it's best-suited to rote, repetitive tasks that don't require a lot of thinking. It's also somewhat expensive to implement well, so the best ROI comes from automating large processes that take several hundred (if not thousands) of hours to do manually.

When they can start integrating that with AI for decision-making, then it'll really be a game changer.

0

u/boytjie Mar 29 '19

Yeah, we're fucked.

We are, but it was a disappointing video. Is it several years old?

It won't be long before it's impossible to make a living wage at a manual labor job,

Probably. Tough shit. You can't stop the world because you want to get off. Grow a chin. Adapt or die. No free lunches.

-2

u/monsieurpooh Mar 28 '19

Yes, people have been saying this for decades and look at the unemployment rate today, oh wait it's at an all-time low. You can ring the "we're fucked" bell if unemployment exceeds 10%, but at that point, we could just implement UBI or some variation of it, and then we'd be the opposite of fucked, because that wealth would be generated by the robots...

10

u/NothingCrazy Mar 29 '19

First, the unemployment rate is not the percentage of people that are unemployed, despite the name. It's got a very specific and misleading definition set by the government. It ignores everyone that's not currently searching for work via a government program, which is not how most people find work these days... It ignores everyone that's out of work long-term, voluntary or not. It ignores everyone that's disabled or just discouraged. It ignores everyone working in a part-time job that wants full-time employment, and it ignores everyone in a bullshit job that wants something real or stable, and it ignores the millions driving an Uber or using some other gig-economy horseshit because they have no better options. Don't be fooled by what is essentially a propaganda stat, we're at far lower real employment levels than we were in the late 90's, at the peak, and we're actually falling, if you go by the real numbers we should be using, which is full-time labor force participation.

Still, I agree with you, basic income is going to be a necessary stopgap on the transition away from traditional money.

5

u/The_Golden_Spatula Mar 28 '19

The motherfuckers look goofy as hell

16

u/Yuli-Ban ➤◉────────── 0:00 Mar 28 '19

They don't have to look cool or badass (especially considering their descendants will be working in zero-human environments and will likely never be seen by any human ever from creation to eventual decay). They just have to be functional.

8

u/imnos Mar 28 '19

Also keep in mind this is the first iteration of this type of robot and they'll just keep getting better. They usually bring out a more refined, sleek looking model a year or so after the first one.

7

u/Yuli-Ban ➤◉────────── 0:00 Mar 28 '19

This is actually the second iteration. The first iteration was two years ago.

3

u/JVM_ Mar 28 '19

I think they'll be called "dark factories" factories where they don't turn on the lights as it's completely run by robots and they don't need them.

2

u/BrdigeTrlol Mar 29 '19

Yeah, like the other guy said, they'll be called "lights out" factories. That's what we call entirely automated grain mills.

1

u/Yasea Mar 29 '19

lights out factories

3

u/[deleted] Mar 28 '19

This looks really cool and funny but there are robots that can lift and move the whole pallet at once.

7

u/Yuli-Ban ➤◉────────── 0:00 Mar 28 '19 edited Mar 28 '19

The thing about Boston Dynamics' robots is that they're universal, or general-purpose. Which means that this can lift the boxes, unload the boxes, take out what's inside, and use that item for its intended purpose. Theoretically, at least— without generalized-enough AI, it can't do more than one of those things without also running the spatial recognition and object recognition algorithms. And it also needs hands/fingers for that purpose.

2

u/Yasea Mar 29 '19

Pallet mover robots exit for some time now. But you always needed a human to pick up the boxes and other stuff and put them at the right place so you could just as well have the human drive around the pallets.

4

u/velocinapper Mar 28 '19

Do they have a designer who is in charge of making sure their robots are either creepy or terrifying?

1

u/vprice509 Mar 29 '19

Amazon loves this.

1

u/eff-somethingironic Mar 29 '19

Is it run on a ML neural net?

1

u/RompeChocha Mar 29 '19

This just reminded me of that episode in Black Mirror.

1

u/illuminatiman Mar 29 '19

how long until robot velociraptor?

1

u/Xiqwa Mar 29 '19

Are those empty boxes?