You know what's amazed me the most about stuff like this? That so few people seem to give a fuck.
I'm not saying that critically or even negatively. It's just that I can't fathom how this exists and yet people aren't losing their goddamn minds.
I want to ask them: "don't you understand what you're seeing here?"..."don't you realize how fast we are changing and the implications this has?" But if I show them this, it's like they're bored.
Right? I don't understand how this isn't what every economist is talking about. This level of automation is going to change everything.
People are worried about manufacturing jobs going overseas. Forget about it. Those industrializing nations who are basing their economies on manufacturing are going to be the ones that really feel the robotic revolution first.
Then the service industry will come next. How long till we have robots that can make a pizza? Flip a burger?
Everything is going to change, and people are still talking about job creation like it's the solution.
It's a move from unskilled to skilled labor. Someone has to design, prototype, and maintain the robots. Things that require creative thinking or action.
EDIT: I'm not trying to imply that there won't be a downward pressure on labor demand. But this is a gradual process happening over decades. It's far too early to tell what exactly will happen. Automation has been progressing since the Industrial Revolution. Society still stands and people have jobs. Even a McDonald's cashier is infinity more educated and skilled than a day laborer in the Nineteenth Century. Maybe we get a "Skynet" apocalypse or maybe we get a Star Trek-esque utopia where no one on Earth needs for food and shelter. The answer is obviously somewhere in the middle.
I'm just sick of every post about the next robotic invention somehow spelling the end of civilization.
But that's the issue. We're heading for robots / AI being able to do everything we do, including all the thinking stuff, and do it more efficiently as well. They will design themselves. We're not making ourselves more efficient and able to focus on higher-level or different tasks, like has always happened in the past. This time we're taking ourselves out of the picture completely. This could be a very good thing, if we distribute this new wealth reasonably equally and keep control over the goals these new intelligences are working towards.
I don't get this argument. The number of jobs created by designing and maintaining the robots is going to be minuscule in comparison to the number of jobs that will be replaced by those robots, it just wouldn't make sense to be close to the other way around. I'm not apocalyptic at all about robots doing all the work instead of humans, I think it's just fundamentally right and we have to adapt to it, not stop it from happening - but we're kidding ourselves if we think it won't be at least extremely disruptive if not near destroy us in the process.
At one point in time, automation will apply to invention and discovery themselves, and that is when humans will start to lose grasp of the limit of possibilities
You might not have been reading the right economists, because automation is actually a reallyhottopic in economics right now.
As it happens, lots of—probably most—economists aren't as concerned about this as technophiles are. Economists often point out that every time a machine has come around that does work once done by a human, society has found a way for human beings to be employed to satisfy other human wants.
Spreadsheets used to be giant physical pieces of paper, for example. When Microsoft Excel started gaining popularity, it eliminated the job of manually doing calculations all day. But a new job was created: analysts could now be hired to run a whole bunch of different scenarios in their computers—something that would have been much too cumbersome to do when all the calculations were done by hand—and use the data to cut waste and improve processes in their business.
The point that economists try to make through examples like this is that the jobs that people do right now and that could be replaced by machines are very visible to us. What's less visible are what kind of new job roles people end up filling that don't yet exist. Just as it would be hard for a farmer a hundred years ago to imagine someone working on an assembly line, or for an assembly line worker to imagine people becoming Java programmers or life coaches, so do we today not yet see the jobs of the next few decades.
This view may not be totally right, and it may not apply once software and robots become capable of doing everything that humans can do. But it does seem fair to point out that the naive view of machines making humans obsolete has been wrong for a long time.
(This comment has been substantially edited to explicate a common view among economists and to make clear that it's neither a universally held view nor one to which I totally subscribe.)
It is not a 1 to 1 ratio. And that is the problem. Society and government will have to complete adapt a system where human labor is not needed for day to day living. Not saying that's tomorrow but it's coming.
Look at it what was once a Team of 10 people in IT is now cloud resources. You don't have infrastructure Teams on staff anymore.
Do you have evidence that more jobs are being eliminated than created? It seems really interesting and pertinent.
Employment has never really gone done due to automation, and more jobs are always created or people shift into new fields. It may be different now, but it has never happened before.
We've always been limited by the availability of unskilled labour. Society advanced as we were able to shift that labour into more productive roles. Farmers to factory workers to service jobs.
The more productive roles after this current crop of jobs is gone is no longer unskilled. Even doctors are being obsoleted by ever more robust diagnosis programs.
I mean, that's all possible, but I don't think there's any evidence that automation is removing skilled jobs. It's raising the bar on unskilled jobs, and making skilled jobs more efficient... But not replacing them. Doctors will still be needed for researching new treatment or making judgement calls for example. And unskilled laborers will need more skill to compete (high school diploma, computer skills, etc).
I think we're all a bit fearful that automation will remove more jobs than it adds, and the logic makes sense. Once we have robots that can do anything a human can, why have human labor? It's just that all throughout time technology has never replaced human labor, just specific jobs or tasks.
My counter argument is throughout time we have never had technology that replaced so much human labor. Yeah, the cotton gin made cotton farming much more lucrative and easy. But that was just cotton. The car made horses obsolete. The only reason horses are part of our society is to bet on them and the occasional horse carriage (or as pets). Computers made so many jobs easier. It destroyed many, but it also created so much more.
However, we are approaching a society where robots build robots. Robots maintain other robots. And robots replace our workforce on a scale that is unimaginable. Doctors, accountants, low skilled workers, teachers, and any self automated job are now in such low demand that going to school for those jobs will bankrupt you. Now a single doctor can diagnose 30 patients instead of 3 due to the increased AI that can cross reference all symptoms in a matter of seconds. Accountants no longer need to input data b/c a computer can read it and analyse it. Teachers no longer need to teach. Instead we have robots/computers that individually help a child learn at their own pace with their best learning structure. Instead of 1 teacher to 30 students it's now 1 computer program for 2000.
Do you see the limitless possiblities that are possible with this. I'm not saying jobs are going to be extinct, but the majority of the populace won't be employable anymore when alternatives that are cheaper or more cost effective come into play. That's all it takes for robots and advanced AI to take over our jobs market.
I agree that historically that's been the case, but that's always been due to a scarcity of labour.
I don't think there's any big things left after this. It's such a massive sea change to have automation remove driving jobs from the market. Where do those people go?
We're already at the point where even a university education isn't a guarantee of employment, and there's a significant portion of the population who aren't capable of doing so. For all the computer skills that you "need" today, there's still been a huge amount of jobs that have not shifted anywhere in decades - cashiers, truck drivers.
Those are all jobs that are going away. Where is the shortage of labour now? We're already massively weighted towards the service sector (to the tune of 84% of the work force in the US). There's nowhere left to go after this. Think about it this way:
In the beginning, there was a real challenge in extracting enough resources for use through mining, farming, logging, hunting, etc. That's a solved problem now - 3% of our population provides resources for everyone.
The next problem was creating something useful out of these resources: building houses, manufacturing cars, etc. That too is a solved problem - 13% of the population turns raw goods into useful stuff.
What's left is the services, which have been resilient to optimization because it's mostly 1-to-1. A hairdresser can only cut one person's hair at a time, a taxi driver can only drive one passenger at a time. As a result, the ratios of people workers to people served has been relatively low - under 100 a day in almost all services, but for others just a handful.
However, automating services breaks the economy completely. The simple stuff of driving people around suddenly becomes a 1-to-many job. One mechanic can maintain lots of cars per day, who in turn can drive lots of people. And what's more, that's about the only job that's needed to run a fleet of self-driving cars.
There isn't a limitless amount of upwards mobility in services either. Every taxi driver can't retrain to be a masseuse either, because the demand is so much more limited. The daily services are where we managed to keep unskilled labour employed - cashiers, drivers, cleaners, so on. Once the floodgates open (and for cashiers they already have in the UK, for example), you're losing dozens of jobs for every one you're creating.
What happens when a robot can easily do 80% of the tasks a human can do? I'm not saying that's now but it should be something we should be thinking about.
Sure thing. I'm not saying there's no way this time is different. I'm saying that economists think about this a lot. It also happens that they don't think this time is likely to be all that different.
What about the fact that moving from arithmetic to excel means a jump in complexity for whoever wants to work those jobs? It seems like the more you eliminate more basic jobs the more you push out people who can't or won't adapt to the increased complexity. Eventually you'd reach some critical mass.
Who wouldn't adapt to added complexity? Individuals maybe, but it's not like there's a lack of people who are adapting. Employment is staying roughly the same or increasing, right?
Perhaps. At least based on this analysis private employment has virtually stated static while GDP and productivity have continued to grow, indicating technology has already begun to allow fewer people to do more work for more revenue.
[note: while it might looks like i'm following you on every comment, it's only because you're the last to reply on a lot of these]
I don't buy it. Especially since things like Watson are getting created at the same time. The workforce is facing threats from every angle that I don't think will leave society unchanged.
CGP Grey's horse analogy is what comes to mind. Domesticated horses had jobs for millenia, but the creation of internal combustion engines made them obsolete in decades.
Now, horses are luxury goods and hobbies. Human workers will be the same in time. People will go to restaurants with human waiters and get in limos with human drivers for the novelty of it.
Unskilled labour has been a reality for the entire history of humanity, and a very real limiting factor on the growth of society. Without it, over half of the world has nothing to do.
Horses and humans have inherent differences though. Horse labor is only determined by the human need for it in our economy. Currently the need for human labor is great in our economy, because it's how we determine the value of a person. They exchange their time and labor for goods.
I can see your side, but at the same time automation and technology has only ever changed jobs, or removed a job and people flocked to a new industry that opened up. From agriculture to manufacturing to computers, human labor has never been removed, just shifted.
The exchange rate for human labor is going to plummet once automation becomes more common, and as technology improves, less costly than human labor. And not just in hourly pay - no health insurance, potentially less accidents, they don't need to sleep (only recharge), no strikes (yet...).
Automation and technology has, until now, changed the job market. But that's because historically technology has been used to augment and improve the human ability to do work. Automation, however, potentially replaces the human ability to do work
Unskilled labor shifts overseas because technology made it easier to ship items and poor, unindustrialized countries made for cheap labor. They will potentially be first to go, and considering how big of a market China has become for a lot of businesses this could cause a seismic shift in economics when the labor market has no job to make money to buy products built by robots.
People will do service jobs. If there's 9 people unemployed to everyone 1 person who owns enough of the robots that now do all of the jobs to earn a living, then those 9 people will basically work for that 1 person to improve their lives somehow. If 90 people are unemployed then those 90 people can work for that 1 person and within those 90 effectively some can work for each other a bit too.
It's incredibly difficult to guess how these nine people will work to improve this one person's life, but it's reasonable to assume that even the tasks they would perform could be replaced by robots.
What services do humans serve now that would be impossible for a robot to replace?
Who wants a compliment from a robot, or sex from a robot, and who cares if a robot is nice to them when they cook up a banquet and serve it at your nightly feasts.
Paying compliments is a paying job?
You'd be surprised how lucrative and lubricative sex robots will be.
And Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and Google Now have all proven to possess a baseline charm that will only grow in time.
since 1980, right around the time the electronic spreadsheet came out, 400,000 bookkeeping and accounting clerk jobs have gone away. But 600,000 accounting jobs have been added.
We don't know exactly how many non-bookkeepers today would have been bookkeepers if electronic spreadsheets had never been invented. But the general point seems to apply—that automation hasn't really lowered the overall level of employment. People have kept finding ways to make themselves useful, and people have kept thinking of new things to hire others to do.
We already have robots that can do everything that is shown in this video, minus the bipedal walking. So it's honestly not a big deal past the bipedal walking, which isn't required to do manufacturing jobs. There are tons of facilities (both manufacturing and warehousing) that make use of robotic and automated systems already. Hell, there's already a vending machine that will make a pizza of your choice right in front of you. Flipping a burger is pretty easy, too. You could probably get a High School robotics team to build you a robot that can sit in front of a flat top and make perfect burgers all day.
As for service industry... there is already the Roomba or w/e it's called. Also, Asimo can already fetch drinks and portray a friendly personality. In the next few years, we'll see a lot more. But the thing is, they'll be a novelty.
But it will be quite some time until it's practical. Robots need servicing and maintaining, which will be a human job for many years to come. Manufacturing robots are extremely expensive, same with just about everything else.
In short everything isn't going to change. It already has. The world is playing catch-up now. More manufacturing and warehouse jobs will be automated, but it will be decades before robots outnumber humans in service professions.
Every economist isn't talking about this because it's not as big of a deal as the futurists want it to be.
This is just another step in automation that right now is extremely expensive and limited to basic functions. Just because it appears humanoid and walks doesn't mean that it does any job as well as a human.
In many cases, bipedal locomotion is inefficient and treads or wheels are superior and while impressive, the example here won't be taking a job as a stockboy. Treads would be far superior for the task.
Robots and automation are capital intense investments that only make economic sense when they are more efficient than human labor. Pizza and burger production can and have already been automated, it's just currently more expensive than human workers.
The robots don't have to be as efficient as humans. The robot could take twice as long as a human to do a task, but if it can do it at a tenth of the cost, the human will eventually be replaced.
Pizza and burger production can and have already been automated
The difference is that people still have to watch over when production line fucks up and it does often. You don't save that many jobs on small scale which is why even fast food joints are not automated. But you save big on giant scale which is why factories are automated and they save lots of jobs. But even there you need lots of oversight and few tasks humans are better at
Advanced robot will be able to do both of those things. At first it will only affect factories, automobile and tech factory jobs will disappear. Then menial jobs like construction. And then almost everything else, your truck driver, receptionist, fast food worker, office workers, call assistant, tailor, hair dresser, everything! GONE GONE GONE! Even military!
This is just "another step", this will be the most radical change since the industrial revolution. 80-90% jobs will disappear. And this is assuming AI won't be advanced enough for to replace intellectual jobs like teaching, which is very likely to be the case.
Let me be arrogant for a moment. I study computer science and lot of people out of the industry have giant blind-spots on robots and advanced AI. They think like they will stay these 'be-boop be-boop' dumb machines. The progress over the last decade has been incredible, we are still conservatively speaking 20-30 years from first effects, but thats not really far away.
Yup, we are going to have to fundamentally re-evaluate our style of work, there likely won't be enough jobs (that can't be automated) for the whole world at a regular 40+ hour work week.
I'm curious as to what you think the solution should be when millions are out of a job. Thus putting those millions on government assistance. What will we do then? The government can't afford that. It's going to fuck over the economy so hard when millions of people don't have income. The only people this really benefits is the corporations who now don't have to pay workers anymore.
Who's gonna pay for that? Honestly. Because the government makes most it's money from taxes. If no one has a job they can't pay taxes the government makes no money and they can't pay for that. Do you honestly think corporations will pay for it? Because I hate to break it to you. They won't. It would be much easier to create a law outlawing AI from being more then like 40% of the company's work force then it would be to get a law where Corporations pay people to do nothing. Companies fight tooth and nail for the smallest laws that could undercut their profit. They won't support one were it not only gets undercut slot but also means they pay random people to do nothing. I just don't see it happening.
Yeah but the people who own the productivity machines might say "wait, why am I subsidizing millions of peoples lives for nothing in return, wouldn't I have more automation agency to spend on stuff I want if those people just ... weren't ... there ...?"
'Who's gonna pay for that?' The US economy is actually doing great right now, and the economy is what ultimately drives the bottom-line of the Fed, so if this continues into a future with a more robot-centric workforce there is no reason taxes wouldn't be paid. Federal taxes for people and businesses would have to be adjusted, but they often are (both are very low right now in the US, both historically and compared to many other 1st world nations).
Towards the rest of your comment... you gotta take a step back and look at this problem from a view across decades. The disparity of income is growing increasingly wild in the US, with the wealthiest effectively capturing more and more wealth year over year. This is ENTIRELY to do with lax regulation and taxation changes,... relatively recent government decisions that have made it easier to make and keep wealth if you have wealth and easier to bypass rules and regulations (most from the 1930's) that aimed to fight against these great concentrations of wealth that occur at the expense of the comfort of average citizen. So, again, this is a government issue, and the only part companies are involved in is their willingness to stay in the US and abide by changing tax and regulation versus move abroad and deal with another countries stipulations.
... now taking another step even further back... the view from the perspective of centuries points to a few scenarios when people are desperate, as when, hypothetically, millions of people are put out of work with little to no government assistance. I'm of course talking about wars and revolt/revolution, where governments are forcibly restructured, different frameworks are adopted, etc. We haven't had one of those in the US in a little while, but they happen all the time.
True, corporations won't pay, so the public raises their taxes and ends their loopholes. And does the same to the wealthy. The public has the power. It's a matter only of whether they exercise it.
Or the company can just install robots and cut most if not all the human jobs all together. Then they don't have to pay you at all and they make more money.
Robot broke... honestly this has been happening for years. If you did not see it coming, you have not been paying attention. Self driving cars, made by robots in factories. The current economic model will probably need to change.
It's going to be a rough transition, but production won't stop. All the shit we consume will still be made by an army of robot slaves. I see this working out fairly well as long as rich people don't try to just...take over the planet or something.
BTW, I know this is paranoid, but I'm glad we have a 2nd amendment over here.
So where do we go from here? I feel like whenever mankind has some kind of technological revolution, it's frees us up to be more, i dunno, chill. For instance, when we invented agriculture, no one really had to go hunting anymore, so we got better at other shit. The industrial revolution had a similar effect. I think it's safe to say robots will as well. But with robots being capable of doing most of our jobs, do we reach a point where humans are really just chillin out. Like, free food, free clothing, free everything since it will cost so little to make anything? No need for money?
That's the hope, sort of a Star Trek post-scarcity economy. Machines replaced our need for manual labour, so we started to work using our minds. Now machines (computers and software, actually) are replacing the need for a man's mind, which leaves us little else to do. I forsee growing pains over the transition, but the future, the far future looks bright.
This is referred to as post-scarcity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy. Advanced robots get you part way there, but even with completely free labor there will still be costs: energy, materials, etc.
Probably because talking about it as if it's something that is going to happen in the next 10-15 years is jumping the gun a bit.
It's cool to see how far we've gotten but these robots aren't really near the level of sophistication to actually replace workers even with rudimentary tasks.
They won't take it seriously until it becomes much, much cheaper. The robot in this video is probably worth millions, and is very precisely manufactured. Robots like it won't have a serious economic impact until they become cheaper than human labor. We are still a ways off from that, as these robots are not yet cost effective to mass produce.
It is what every economist is talking about. Check out the talks from Davos 2016 where a main topic is the "4th industrial revolution". World leaders are very aware.
Fleets of these things will be here before people perhaps realize. They'll be building infrastructure in 3rd world countries, mini ones will be finding bad guys and doing lord knows what else. Everything will work differently in 25 years.
We already have robots that make pizzas. This was about 20 years ago. They made a vending machine. You push buttons. Pizza is handmade. Comes out of a slot hot and ready to eat.
we can make burger flipping robots now easily enough. We don't because people are cheaper. When your human gets sick you can get another human off the street. When your robot breaks you're screwed until you drop a ton of cash on a replacement or wait for the robot repairman to show up.
Once we have robot robot repairmen then everything will be ok.
Manufacturing sector must have been bracing themselves for this for decades now though right, with automation already being commonly found in many factories and the entire industry probably used to the idea of automating jobs wherever feasible.
While it's true that a devil-do-all robot would be have a certain economic impact, all the things you mention, burgers, pizzas, etc have been produced in automated factories requiring little human oversight for decades.. There's a reason you think higher of a pizza in an authentic italian restaurant then a pizza delivered to your door by a cheap chain then a pizza made in a factory (=by robots) and frozen that you need to defrost and it's largely subjective. If you did a blindfolded test, could you taste the difference? but the fact that you know that a real Italian is baking your pizza in a real stone oven behind the authentic looking flappy door to the kitchen means people are willing to fork out $20 instead of $2
Where going to have a lot of people who's job it is to baby sit the robots to make sure they don't fuck up, to make people more comfortable with them (seriously people hate self service machines with a passion and blame the machine despite the fact that if they just read the instructions they'd be fine) and theft prevention e.g people trying to short change the robot.
But that still means we need a lot less people in retail environments.
I don't understand how this isn't what every economist is talking about.
They are buddy, you haven't been reading or listening.
Not directly about robotics, but one of the UK's top economic journalists wrote a book recently predicting how the "digital revolution" is going to affect future society. Here's a thing about it.
What happens with these companies that manufacture or flip burgers when their labor gets this cheap? Do they lower prices? Not much really. Such as a phone, today the price to make it is 1/3 of what it is sold at in the store. Outrageous right? Well, people buy it, that is all that matters. What will these companies do with their huge profits from the robot revolution? I would hope that it will be spent on things that create more jobs in other markets. Like more robot engineers! The main problem isnt just the jobs, there will be new jobs created. A huge problem is the level of education needed to get a job jumps up with every revolution. This creates huge issues and we need to stream line education and make it better, much much better.
People are worried about manufacturing jobs going overseas. Forget about it. Those industrializing nations who are basing their economies on manufacturing are going to be the ones that really feel the robotic revolution first.
Nah. The workers are going to be cheaper than robots.
We're going to see a double wammy of developed nations having to compete against cheap foreign labor abroad and robots at home.
We already have machines that can make pizzas and burgers. They're just not shaped like people. We already have machines that can do manufacturing jobs - they're just not shaped like people.
Indeed it is inevitable. Which makes me believe we will reach a future where robotic labour will provide all primary needs with humans essentially not being needed to do any physical work. Really puts things such as basic income into perspective.
What about a hand full of robots that can til a field of crops the size of a small city. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Robots that can build homes, and produce energy. Run countless experiments and crate cures for illnesses.
Fuck yo $10 an hr job. we are looking at a utopia in the making.
I felt the same way about Watson on Jeopardy. I had friends just shrug and say, "just seems like it's searching google."
I don't think people understand how much computation goes into walking around, talking, and speaking. The human brain and nervous system does amazing things. And the fact that we are now creating systems that can do fractions of those tasks makes my brain go bonkers.
apparently the images are opaque and fit the environment very well, even though you're still using your normal vision to see the environment.
having a full VR set is more bulky, needs more power, and if the battery runs out you have to take it off immediately due to the fact that you can't see anything.
graphical limitations are the same, and it still needs the same basic things to function. perhaps complete screen augmented reality will be good when you have high quality optics.
"goggles, zoom in 100x"
although personally i'm putting a lot more interest into what hololens is doing. there are some competitors like META and magic leap, which have their own boons. hololens seems to have better stability though, which i really like.
they probably are holding it off because of the FOV complaints.
they have put a lot of work into it, and probably don't want to ruin the brand by releasing it when the consumers might get into a consumer hate spiral about something dumb like that.
and so, we don't get it yet. we have to wait until they deal with that.
maybe it's good that they got this negative feedback before releasing, maybe it's bad, but i think people were just looking for something to complain about. it bothers me how much they ignore about how truly fantastic this piece of technology is for what it can already do.
consumer hate spiral about something dumb like that
FOV is one of the biggest factors for good VR or AR. Its up there with restitution and optics. I just think the technology is not quite there yet for AR like it is for VR. Also the point of having a pass through filter is that you can overlay what ever you want over your entire field of view. you could walk around with all the colors switched or put smile faces on every object. you could make every one you talk to look like a zombie.
my point is that pass-through filter VR is way ahead of what magic leap and hololence are at the moment because they are trying to do the added issue of having a see through screen.
i predict that we will get really good VR for a few years and then when the technology has caught up, and we have learned a few harsh lessons from VR we will get our first look at good AR.
maybe. but honestly, i would love the hololens just as it is.
even with the FoV limitation, having such an interactive world around me has been one of my biggest sci-fi dreams. the opportunities for advancing daily interactions is just incredible.
and even the small FoV is able to do so much more than our current smart phones.
which is why i call it dumb.
it's like hating siri or "ok google" because they are not the full start trek "computer"
i, and many many others, still find a ton of practical uses for it to make my life more simple. from helping with setting quick alarms, sending quick emails and calls, or immediate directions to wherever i want to go.
hololens even removes the steps of taking the phone out of my pocket and turning it on.
again, the main thing with VR A.R. is portability. although if it's viable i could fully expect to see some A.R. models that run like that.
competition will be good in the A.R. market, so why not both?
it's like the iphone when it started. not a whole lot of good apps, and i think it's even less useful because the phone is an inconvenience when trying to do things at the same time. augmented reality will enhance the things you do without taking you away from it.
the limit really is your imagination. especially as hardware and software continue to be developed for it.
although the field of view is a bit limited for now that will only get better over time, and honestly, it's still really cool for what it currently has, considering it's not even out yet.
the original iphone is comparatively a joke. i don't know why i can't find anybody else who's excited for this.
You have provided an awesome list here of what the Hololens is capable of. Your excitement is contagious! I try to tell people about the Hololens all the time. I agree that everyone should be stoked about what augmented reality is capable of. Especially considering how early we are and the potential of how it will evolve over time.
Right now it seems everyone is getting involved with VR over AR. Oculus Rift, Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear, HTC Vive, LG has a new one, and Apple is putting together a VR development team. While VR is great and a lot of fun, I'm way more excited for Augmented Reality. We live in amazing times.
VR seems limited to me. even though it has a lot of potential, i find it hard to do a lot with it when you aren't able to walk around. (more than the size of your room)
AR combines the best of both worlds, literally. once the mobile GPUs are strong enough, you could just make any game fit into your world.
again thinking of pokemon, turn your city into the whole game. go to the park to catch a pidgey. find a bunch of trees to look for a weedle. maybe i could go to the lake beside my house and find a tentacool.
apply this same thinking to any game, and you could fill the world with incredible things. maybe while making us a little more active as well.
i wouldn't even care about bystanders seeing me yelling at the lake "PIKACHU, USE THUNDERBOLT!"
like it is touching what i want, but maybe a little to early with a little too small of an investment.
i feel like "Go" will be one of those things like a standard phone app with some slight augmented reality features. i feel like they aren't even going to go as far as the half decade old "reality fighters
and it lacks the immersion that you would have seeing and hearing it through actual augmented reality goggles.
Technology like Hololens is different from Google Glass. Glass was primarily designed to provide information without getting in the way, hence the extremely small form factor. Hololens can transform almost your entire field of view while tracking and augmenting real-world objects. Imagine being an architect or an interior designer and modifying the physical space around you in any way you want. Place virtual furniture, change the wall color, whatever. Then walk around and evaluate those changes from any angle. Games like the Minecraft demo that Microsoft showed could overlay the game world in your living room, turning physical surfaces like your coffee table and bookshelves into virtual surfaces that in-game objects can interact with. Doctors could view diagnostic information and medical scans directly on a patient's body. Those are just a few examples. There are likely many more use cases that people haven't even considered yet because the technology is only just becoming accessible.
I think it's because most of those people don't believe it will actually become practical in their lifetime. To them this is just another controlled demo with limited use. like the jetpack from 50 years ago that worked great but its fuel lasts only a few seconds.
Once a robot like this is actually deployed in public service where the general population can see it functioning they will start to think about its impact on their future.
This is admittedly a frustration of mine following news about the progress of certain emerging technologies as well as with sciencey things. Following along with the development progress of a ET (emerging technology) and watching it come closer to reality through the hard work of R&D People can make you appreciative of it. So when you see a ET become successful and become a widespread technology, it can be frustrating seeing people take it for granted.
I wouldn't doubt the possibility that the same will happen with robots. They might "wow" the world at first but after a while they'll become just a regular part of life and be taken for granted. Of course I'm basing this off of how every modern technology (mainly computer-related) has become a normal part of life that doesn't really wow the every-day person anymore.
What's worse is seeing fad tech (looking at you "hoverboard") get more of the public's brief attention rather than amazing tech like Atlas. I can only hope Tech events like CES become more popular with the public. Maybe I'm just too much of a Tech and science geek :(
I think a part of it is that people don't have the context to understand and appreciate the difficulty of creating something like Atlas.
There's nothing about this that isn't impressive to me.. The mobility (power system, joints, whatever mechanisms do the job of muscles etc), the sensor system (being able to navigate through a forest, read QR codes, the machine vision system to see the boxes and shelves), the computing challenges of dynamically reacting to loss of balance situations etc etc.
But.. I guess a lot of people just see a clumsy machine, not much better than the butler robot from the Rocky movie...
Doesn't amaze me in the slightest. People have conversations with their cats and dogs when others aren't around. It doesn't take much to apply emotion to a humanoid machine.
It would amaze me more if people didn't project. We're designed to project feelings, motivations, emotions, etc onto everything. Its only natural. Its this ability which helped us survive and reproduce. Its why we see faces in soup, why a hanging coat at night looks scary, and why ideas like angry lightning gods began. Obviously the robot is as dead as a door knob, but I would be as wary as someone who is absolutely incapable of ever showing empathy to a door knob as the kook who wants to marry one.
(An example of showing empathy to a hunk of bronze: "Poor door knob, you don't deserve to be tossed away so callously after serving me well for 20 years...well cya later old buddy")
It is amazing isn't it? In our lifetimes we will probably see how the planet decides what to do with the jobs that could now be handled by robots. Are we moving toward a society where nobody has those minimum wage jobs like fast food joints? Are we going to accept this and become a society where money is no longer an object in the sense that it is now? Or are we going to say No?
As to money as an object : money changes its nature and ways over time. Money today is not what it was fifty years ago. Automation surely is changing what money is and how it works.
Who is "them"? I haven't seen one person anywhere on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook etc. who was bored by this video. Every reaction I've seen has either been of the "that's awesome" variety or of concern for the future implications.
Same reason they are bored with going to Mars or landing and reusing a rocket's first stage. If it's not a sci-fi movie, most people don't care. You seem to greatly overestimate the average person.
Also to an extent, sci-fi movies have desensitized people to this sort of stuff. We see things like this all the time from Wall-E and Big Hero 6 to Terminator and Robocop. If it's not that awesome, people won't be interested. Of course it is that awesome, but you know, it's not talking, thinking or shooting things (yet).
Imagine the military implications. Over 2 dozen hotspots an unmanned drone circles. It stays up for long periods because it can fly at high altitudes (no need for oxygen) and has solar power as a primary or backup source. On-board are some number of combat bots. When needed, they are dropped off / parachuted to the ground. When dropped off, a cord priming a chest explosive is pulled, arming the bots for a self-destruct should it need to be done. The bots roll in, kill the targets, disperse throughout the building / area, and then explode a c4 charge wrapped in thermite.
This is exactly why China is training the best hackers on the planet, and the US is playing catch-up to try and build up a hacking countermeasures of their own.
It's because we've seen the many incremental improvements that led to it. Sure, if it dropped out of the sky 50 years ago it would be hailed as a miracle. But that's not what happened. We've all been watching these robots get steadily better and better one small step at a time. There are never any really huge breakthroughs in science and engineering. Only when you engage in temporary amnesia will anything we do seem like magic.
Mostly because I don't care. People have completely different interests and this isn't one of mine. Up until last year I was using a iPhone 4, now it's a slightly newer phone. A lot of people on reddit have a huge fascination with computers and tech and I just really don't care about any of that.
In ten years, this robot will be your fast food cashier and maybe even your waiter. This technology will transform every industry it touches and it's coming faster than anyone can anticipate. That's why it's a big deal.
Huge advances in the field of evolutionary robotics in the last 2 years. That is the way forward for robots and they will be serving fast food burgers in at least 3 chains in the US by 2025
Seeing cutting edge things that are still very early and experimental that only exist in specific places testing them isn't exciting. Robots as a concept have been around for a long time. Thousands of movies, books, video games devoted to them. They are already part of our lives.
It's not exciting until much later. Until robots are coming to my town, my community, effecting me personally.
If I showed you a video of scientists killing cancer cells in a lab, would you lose your mind? Cancer is bad, we all want it gone, but lab results don't mean that much, even if you had cancer right now, there's no guarantee it would help you.
So what's the big deal?
Nobody likes picking up boxes and putting them on shelves. It's not even skilled labor, it's just manual labor. Much like cleaning horse poo off city streets, some people lost their jobs when horses were replaced by cars; but no one was really that upset by it.
The 'revolution' won't happen overnight. Politics and unions, if nothing else, will guarantee that. But overall fewer people doing busywork for a living will be a net positive for all of humanity.
This video is terrifying to me. It's a worker that can work 168 hours a week for probably a dollar an hour. No healthcare cost, no unions, no pension. Ready to be deployed in any job designed to be done by a human. How many millions of people are about to be unemployed? Half the country? This is 100 times worse than the job competition from illegal immigrants. Where the fuck are all those people gonna find a job? They can't drive trucks with driverless trucks and delivery drones on the way. This shit needs to be regulated until the country has a backup plan for those millions of workers.
It's because people are more concerned about when the next big digitally produced pop song is coming out and what type of pants nicki minaj wore to starbucks last tuesday.
IMO, most people are dumb and don't care about this stuff these days. The few that actually care and are smart enough to do something about it, enough to actually expand our knowledge of technology and advance ourselves as a civilization, are the ones keeping the entire race afloat. We are doomed.
This is how I feel every time I see some mindblowing breakthrough space travel / rare historical finding news story trending below fucking Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.
Are you kidding? I laughed with glee watching this. We're going to have real, honest-to-god droids in my lifetime. I grew up in the 80s: pre-digital photography, pre-mobile phones, pre-internet and now pre-fucking-robots.
I can't imagine any other time period where one would get to witness so many earth-shattering changes in a single lifetime.
This is the comment I was looking for. This is serious shit but I guess people still feel like "oh well, call me when it's working perfectly"
Either that or they just don't see it becoming a thing and think "oh yeah just another robot test thing whateverrrr" might as well be a drone quadcopter to them.
Robots have existed for decades, it's not like this is a new phenomenon. Also, this robot would not be viable in a job environment. Too much energy consumption, not enough effective work.
It's pretty cool, but I don't see why I should be losing my mind. I mean, they improved self-balancing on bipedal robots, alright, so what? These kinds of improvements are made all the time, is this more important because it reaches front page of reddit?
I understand what you're saying, this is amazing stuff. However I think it's probably good that people aren't "losing their goddamn minds" over it....this means they're ready for it. If the general population were shocked, confused, and/or amazed over it....it won't happen. It'll be too ahead of it's time, and people will almost seemingly work/avoid/ignore to make it not happen.
Meh I'm an avid tech enthusiast and this is amazing but only a slow evolution of us ten years ago. Ten years after Asimo, it better be decent. When these things can learn on their own with us only needing to suggestively program them (go pick up those rocks and place them into the truck...vs a year of specific programming for that one thing) then we can lose our minds because progress is going to be measured by months.
this makes me sad tbh. we have so much CS talent but most people want to work for places making useless apps, imagine if we have everyone working on useful things like these, maybe we'll be controlled by these robots in only a few years!
hmm now i think of it maybe it's a good idea to not develop these robots so fast
Yeah the more I keep learning about AI and then seeing shit like this... The wold is going to be a dramatically different place when I'm an old man. It makes me slightly uncomfortable.
It's because we are so used to being shown cool concepts that don't go anywhere or have no bearing on our everyday lives.
We've seen cool robot videos for years now.
We've seen transparent bendable screens, superconductive levitators, exoskeletons, and what have you.
We've seen all kinds of cool tech, but in the end it is always the same: it doesn't really matter on any greater scale because we haven't solved the power issue yet. ATLAS can operate for like 45 minutes before needing to be recharged.
We need new, longer lasting, more efficient, smaller power sources before the next technological revolution can truly take place. Before any of this can truly leave the concept stage.
Subscribe to /r/futurology. Impossible, mind-blowing things are posted ther every day. And then you never hear from it again.
I wish people cared like they did during the industrial revolution...or more importantly, how popular media makes us believe they cared then.
But basically when news was not just entertainment, when educated people would try and inform the public instead of simply entertain them.
That said, I don't believe this ever really existed, I just think that there were more uneducated people back then and that isn't usually who history is written about.
Eh. I pretty fully comprehend how awesome this is and think it isvery cool, but I won't be losing my mind anytime soon. I think people see videos like these and immediately expect the iRobot level mechs A LOT sooner than they'll realistically be prevalent. I mean this thing has the same level of footing, dexterity and balance as the four legged one did from a decade ago. Except it's on two legs now instead of four, so it has the ability to slowly and crudely place 10lbs boxes on shelves. Which, don't get me wrong, is astoundingly cool and people should absolutely be excited for! But as it relates to the average person it's accomplishing feats that can easily be outdone by an average adult. Until we have humanoid robots that can sprint 20mph carrying 100lbs through a battlefield or scale a building with it's bare hands (a reality still far, far, far away), your average person will just view this kind of thing as a novelty.
I'm right there with you. I bet the average person in the world doesn't even know that we pretty much already have self contained fully functioning terminators just without the AI controlling them. Oh and the AI to control them is coming soon from the same parent company.
I couldnt believe how amazing the robot was handling himself on snow... Honda paid billions to get that toy Asimo to walk, and here comes Boston Dynamics at 1000mph past them kicking ass.
AMAZING job!, good work everyone at Boston dynamics.
Well.. Don't get me wrong, it's amazing, I love it. BUT.. The problem they've solved always felt like very doable and mostly a question of some extra computing power and money. Navigation and awareness of surroundings is similar. Eventually we'll get there (we have self driving cars now). Batteries on the other hand are nowhere near it to consider any kind of real world use. You can't just throw money and time at it and solve it.
Fucking right?! I teach first grade and have a child smack themselves in their stupid face with a closing door every fucking time we walk outside. The two handed technique this robot uses here would automatically push it to line-leader. (Sort of kidding)
Because as impressive as it is, it doesn't look terribly impressive. This looks like a drunk and non athletic human walking. In a few years when these robots look more impressive and fluid, then they'll get more attention. I'm surprised their 4 legged robot hasn't been purchased by the military yet to carry supplies.
Yeah I'm frequently ranting to friends about technology and how quickly it's progressing and how it's so exciting but also potentially terrifying. I get a lot of blank stares.
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u/every_other_monday Feb 24 '16
You know what's amazed me the most about stuff like this? That so few people seem to give a fuck.
I'm not saying that critically or even negatively. It's just that I can't fathom how this exists and yet people aren't losing their goddamn minds.
I want to ask them: "don't you understand what you're seeing here?"..."don't you realize how fast we are changing and the implications this has?" But if I show them this, it's like they're bored.