Tag Archives: robots

Covid and automation

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Pew has an update on activities that might be automated in the near to medium term. Covid might be speeding this up – there’s not much hard evidence offered in this article, but one expert interviewed said he thinks it has been accelerated by five years. Sadly, the articles does not contain any videos of robots at work, which are always fun.

  • taking orders in restaurants – seems like a no-brainer, most of us have probably done this
  • flipping burgers – I haven’t seen this yet
  • delivering meals and towels in hotels and hospitals – The first place I saw this was a hospital in Singapore. I played a (very low speed) game of chicken with the robot. The robot won – or I won, if winning means walking away with all my limbs. It was a children’s hospital so if I lost a limb I would have had to go to a different hospital.
  • cleaning hospital rooms – I’d really like to see this one! If they can clean hospital rooms, can they clean my house?
  • welding in factories – I don’t spend much time in factories
  • meatpacking – no, I haven’t seen a robot rip a chicken open but it seems like the kind of thing that makes sense for robots, if we are all going to continue ripping open and eating animals (which I do myself, and would be a hypocrite if I said I didn’t think we should continue doing this)
  • “Jobs also could be automated for better-educated knowledge workers, including some computer programmers, medical assistants and sales professionals.” The logic here is a little tenuous – replacing travel and convention industry jobs with online meetings. I guess, but is that really the same job being automated, or is that just a job that went away? Did refrigerators “automate” the job of delivering blocks of ice to our homes? If you were the ice man (and now you no longer cometh – I couldn’t resist), I guess that distinction doesn’t matter much to you. Refrigerators do have to be designed, manufactured, delivered, maintained, repaired, and eventually recycled or disposed of, however.
  • customer service – I think this is true, although the computers aren’t necessarily doing a good job and our expectations may have just been lowered to the point where we accept this.
  • “low wage gigs in stores and restaurants” – When I was a teenager I checked out and bagged groceries. That job has been “automated” by making the customer do it themselves. So again, is eliminating customer service the equivalent of automating it, or do we just not remember what customer service was? Not that it was ever perfect.
  • “low skill jobs in mining or factories” – I don’t spend much time in mines
  • “department stores dropping off automated orders at the curb” – a couple years ago, I would have called the police if people were banging on my door and leaving things in front of my house at odd hours. Now it’s the norm.

You can see how all this could lead logically to the idea of a universal basic income. If automation is increasing the productivity of the economy as a whole, but displacing some workers, you can take a portion of new wealth created (this is called taxes) and redistribute it. Or you can set up a sovereign wealth fund and distribute dividends from it, while saving some of the money to redistribute on a future rainy day (you don’t need to do this if you can just print as much money as you want and people will accept it worldwide, but then again maybe you should be planning for a day when that will no longer be the case). Set the tax rate right and you can help everybody at least a little while maintaining the incentive to innovate. Or you can try to be more targeted and use the money for unemployment payments, education and training. This should all be a no-brainer, but the people making the profits don’t want to give up even a small share, and they have spent decades manufacturing a toxic anti-tax culture that makes this politically very hard to do.

October 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

  • The Trump administration has slashed funding to help the U.S. prepare for the next pandemic.
  • I read more gloomy expert opinions on the stability and resilience of the global financial system.
  • A new depressing IPCC report came out. Basically, implementing the Paris agreement is too little, too late, and we are not even implementing it. There is at least some movement towards a carbon tax in the U.S. – a hopeful development, except that oil companies are in favor of it which makes it suspicious. There is a carbon tax initiative on the ballot in Washington State this November that the oil companies appear to be terrified of, so comparing the two could be instructive, and the industry strategy may be to get a weaker law at the federal level as protection against a patchwork of tough laws at the state and local levels.

Most hopeful stories:

  • There is no evidence that kids in U.S. private schools do any better than kids in U.S. public schools, once you control for family income. (Okay – I admit I put this in the hopeful column because I have kids in public school.)
  • Regenerative agriculture is an idea to sequester carbon by restoring soil and  protecting biodiversity on a global scale.
  • Applying nitrogen fixing bacteria to plants that do not naturally have them may be a viable way to reduce nitrogen fertilizer use and water pollution.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • New tech roundup: Artificial spider silk is an alternative to carbon fiber. Certain types of science, like drug and DNA experiments, can be largely automated. A “quantum internet” could mean essentially unbreakable encryption.
  • Modern monetary theory suggests governments might be able to print (okay, “create”) and spend a lot more money without serious repercussions. What I find odd about these discussions is they focus almost entirely on inflation and currency exchange values, while barely acknowledging that money has some relationship actual physical constraints. To me, it has always seemed that one function of the financial system is to start flashing warning lights and make us face the realities of how much we can do before we are all actually starving and freezing in the dark. It could be that we are in the midst of a long, slow slide in our ability to improve our physical quality of life, but instead of that manifesting itself as a long slow slide, it comes as a series of random shocks where one gets a little harder to recover from.
  • I read some interesting ideas on fair and unfair inequality. Conservative politicians encourage people not to make a distinction between alleviating poverty and the idea of making everybody equal. These are not the same thing at all because living just above the poverty line is no picnic and is not the same thing as being average. There is a strong moral case to be made that nobody “deserves” to live in poverty even if they have made some mistakes. And simply “creating jobs” in high-poverty areas sounds like a nice conservative alternative to handouts, except that there isn’t much evidence that it works.

robots taking over…Amazon warehouses

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According to Quartz, Amazon hired 120,000 seasonal workers in 2016 and 2017 vs. only 100,000 this year. Since consumer spending is up at the moment, this may be a sign of increased automation at their warehouses.

Now, given my own experience with Amazon Fresh, if they can find a way for a robot to inspect a bag of lettuce and make sure it isn’t rotten, it will be a great advance for robot-kind.

applying the latest data science to intimate acts

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WARNING: I never promised this would be a 100% family friendly blog. Nevertheless, it’s been awhile since I checked in on the latest sex robots. Well, this is a blog about the fabulous science fiction future, and we all need to face up to the fact that sex robots are likely to be a part of that.

Anyway, I offer this paper first of all because it’s funny, and second of all because even if it turns out to be a joke, the technology to analyze videos of thousands of hours of sexual acts, analyze them using the latest data science techniques, and program the results into a robot almost certainly all exist. Yesterday’s “phone sex” will almost certainly evolve into tomorrow’s virtual brothel. I think it is more or less harmless although it means the way real human beings interact with each other will continue to evolve. But that has been going on for a long time and there is no reason to think it should stop now.

 

September 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

  • The Suzuki and Kodaly methods are two ways of teaching music to young children that may actually help them think later in life. Training in jazz improvisation may also be good for young brains in a slightly different way.
  • There are some bright ideas for trying to improve construction productivity, which has languished for decades. Most involve some form of offsite fabrication.
  • In energy news, there’s a big idea to produce half the world’s electricity from sunlight in the Sahara desert. Another idea for collecting solar energy in otherwise (ecologically) wasted space is solar roadways, and there are a few prototypes around the world but this doesn’t seem to be a magic bullet so far. Another big idea is long-term storage of energy to smooth out fluctuations in supply and demand over months or even years.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

August 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

  • In certain provinces with insurgent activity, the Chinese government is reportedly combining surveillance and social media technologies to score people and send those with low scores to re-education camps, from which it is unclear if anyone returns.
  • Noam Chomsky doesn’t love Trump, but points out that climate change and/or nuclear weapons are still existential threats and that more mainstream leaders and media outlets have failed just as miserably to address them as Trump has. In related news, the climate may be headed for a catastrophic tipping point and while attention is mostly elsewhere, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is still one of the more serious risks out there.
  • The U.S. government is apparently very worried about a severe cyber attack. Also, a talented 11-year-old can hack a voting machine.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

forestry robot

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Here’s a robot that can help forestry scientists collect data in the field.

Mikhailov is a 16-year-old student atITMO University, the renowned science and technology institution in St. Petersburg, Russia. As a member of the school’s Youth Robotics Lab, he was perfectly positioned to bring his idea to life. With a full team working on the the project, the robot won the gold medal at last year’s World Robot Olympiad; it can record tree locations within a forest, identify their species, measure the widths of their trunks, and even identify if a tree is healthy or not.

Its name is Forester, and most of its job is to explore forests and hit trees with its mallet. It’s a robotic adaptation of a technique that human tree experts often use, called “sounding,” to help their appraisal of a tree’s health.