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OT - the future of work?

I see your sarcasm and understand it. But given the fact that artificial intelligence is already in a rather deep stage of development, ...

I think you have to define AI. Mostly, its currently used to mean pattern recognition, and well, marketing. Hardly Any current tech business plan hoping to get funded has to position itself as _______ + AI, that doesn't make y=mx+b artificial intelligence (as programmers are noted to joke about). Physicist and futurist Michio Kaku is his book Physics of the Future cites AI as one the least likely things to happen in the next 100 years and notes current best efforts are dwarfed by the intelligence of a beetle.

Based on so much of what is described as AI...me thinks too many are accepting the marketing departments definition. Not to say there aren't some great programming accomplishments, but that makes it really good programming, no necessarily AI (as say Kaku would define it)
 
AI delivering as desired will be a very powerful thing. Depending on who’s hands AI will find itself in remains to be seen however conventional opinion is that the Government will control it and direct it’s use.

Automation of say trucking has been predicted as happening quickly which does not appear to be happening. Too the dreaming and promotion of that is rather prosaic even using Electric vehicles to be favored vs gas and diesel powered.

We are likely to see more autonomous things like perhaps drones used which rove about supporting law enforcement and even border enforcement against illegal immigration. Just think the discussion on farming and automation has been discussed for decades and there have been machines made for harvest and planting yet they are not extensively used because they do not deliver superior to human collection.

I have never seen a Automated Oil rig drilling under th4 Gulf of Mexico for oil and with fracking all of the huge reserves there are not yet gaining the investment. Understandably so. There are many vast oil reserves and also natural gas all over the world as yet not promoted or invested in and as yet undiscovered. The major know places with reserves are fixed as investment zones and in fact like the world to depend on their oil. That will continue.

Does anyone know what major automation we will see? What I see are general part loaders for our business. Bar feeders for lathes running production works well. I think this happens by degrees starting with less complex things. To some persons they may see the future with many many people being replaced by machines. It is hard to see that because with all those people standing around it only needs someone to walk up and say come work with us and we will build something ourselves because people are less investment than over automation. The key word “over” automation. Right now automation is feasible when it has a good ROI and currently I see no major effort taking place except in Trucking.

Trucking being automated is not proceeding as discussed within the last two decades. Too bad if anyone invested in those industries. TR might know much more about such trends. TR do you have any insights to give us on the feasibility on the future of work?
 
There have been automated trucking test runs, automated drone package deliveries, etc. The industry is in the debugging phase, and could hit release any month now. Remember not so long ago when people laughed at Tesla trying to sell electric cars? Now every major auto manufacturer has plans to switch over to electric and is playing catchup. Exponential change is deceptive; you see a tiny bit of progress, a tiny bit more, then wham, all of a sudden it's revolutionary.

Now to me the big question is, after we find alternative employment for all those truck and delivery van drivers, what about the industries that grew up to support them? The truck stop diner, the truck stop motel, and the little town that grew up supporting those? It's a whole economic house of cards. They can't all become computer programmers and automation techs.
 
Big problem I see with any AI is the lawsuits if something goes wrong. Say a AI drone crashes in the forest and starts a fire, kills a few people etc. who pays? Maybe the a battery was not charged all the way and it just ran out of juice. maybe something broke, maybe the ai failed etc. sue them all. I do not think many programmers carry liability insurance like engineers and doctors have to.. . What about the intern programmer? sue him too. If the patient died they would sue the student doctor and anyone else in the operating room.
What happens if someone decides to kill themselves by driving over a cliff or into an abutment. Prove it was not faulty AI. Someones family sued the grand canyon when they hopped the fence to get a closer look and fell in. They said the fence should have been taller. I bet trumps wall would not have stopped all the looky loos.
Yes the case was thrown out but the park service had to pay several thousand dollars to have a lawyer go to court and present their side of the story.
Bill D
 
Big problem I see with any AI is the lawsuits if something goes wrong. Say a AI drone crashes in the forest and starts a fire, kills a few people etc. who pays? Maybe the a battery was not charged all the way and it just ran out of juice. maybe something broke, maybe the ai failed etc. sue them all. I do not think many programmers carry liability insurance like engineers and doctors have to.. . What about the intern programmer? sue him too. If the patient died they would sue the student doctor and anyone else in the operating room.
What happens if someone decides to kill themselves by driving over a cliff or into an abutment. Prove it was not faulty AI. Someones family sued the grand canyon when they hopped the fence to get a closer look and fell in. They said the fence should have been taller. I bet trumps wall would not have stopped all the looky loos.
Yes the case was thrown out but the park service had to pay several thousand dollars to have a lawyer go to court and present their side of the story.
Bill D

Who pays-good question. The answer usually is to legislate a hard exception in the law forbidding lawsuits for lost income and/or criminality. That clears a path. See how they want Congress to absolve employers from any liability during covid for sickness or death of employees. Any law written will be sold as fair and yet there usually is language which removes standard protections we hold valuable in general. Until it reaches the point everything is fair game things will keep moving that direction.

As regards electric cars and fleet shanties. Do we see large fleets like the post office , UPS, and FedX changing? Tesla does not have the capacity to fill those orders nor is there infrastructure in place. I have seen a lot of hype regarding electric cars and trucks and also drones plus computerized trucking. Any day now invest and grow rich. Hey it will really happen in another five years and so on.


Seriously. I never considered electric as a huge breakthrough because oil product cycle has not truely peaked yet. Product life cycle is a proven thing. I do not see oil going away soon. Just some improvement in emissions while keeping horse power will set electric on its back. Just my opinion I know just as others have theirs. I do listen though and I am not close minded to change. To me it is not a slam dunk.

How about computerized air transportation short trips to work in the big city and shorter travel more affordable between cities? How about rapid rail-now there is one that has been discussed and never done here. Lots of bright tech ahead when what should be the focus is food and water.
 
The same people who pay now. The insurance company. And they'll be raking in the dough, charging similar rates to insure automated cars which have far lower accident rates than humans.

Well in Germany BMW have automated trucking on the highways after midnight and under certain monitored conditions.

The world is changing.
 
The forces in automated electric vehicle trucking are the Japanese ..Isuzu,Fuso,Hino ,Toyota......These changes happen quietly ,unknown outside the industry /govt regulatory sphere......The railways here are automated the last 20 years+.....strong unions ensure trains have the same staffing levels as when steam was the motive power......Container transit at the port is fully automated .....but a powerful union ensures there is still an operator for every forklift/crane ...... they sit in an office offsite and twiddle their thumbs at $500k p/a.
 
I'm actually in the planning stages of automating CEO's of big corporations. It operates like the old fashioned fortune teller machines except it only takes solid gold coins.

I figure I can also adapt the technology with sex robots to create an automated Congress. Just pop in a few gold coins, they bend over and you tell them how you want them to vote.

It's already been done. See below:

View attachment 309051
 
The forces in automated electric vehicle trucking are the Japanese ..Isuzu,Fuso,Hino ,Toyota......These changes happen quietly ,unknown outside the industry /govt regulatory sphere......The railways here are automated the last 20 years+.....strong unions ensure trains have the same staffing levels as when steam was the motive power......Container transit at the port is fully automated .....but a powerful union ensures there is still an operator for every forklift/crane ...... they sit in an office offsite and twiddle their thumbs at $500k p/a.

back in the late 90’s I designed a barge positioning system for a Burlington Northern - Protexa joint venture. When commissioning the system, I was still in my 20’s and naive about union stevedores. After having the tires slashed on my rental car and a number of odd tool disappearances, the contractor on the job hired a personal security guard for me until I completed the startup. Basically the system managed the coordination of 4 mooring winches and a draw bridge to automatically disengage the drawbridge from the barge and raise it, pull the barge away from the bridge, move it over two sets of rails, then move the barge back in and re-engage the drawbridge so more rail cars could be loaded or unloaded.

There were two sets of rails on the draw bridge and 8 sets of rails on the barge so had to navigate 4 different engagement positions. The control system could manage a fully automated transition in less than 10 minutes. Once the system was complete, they loaded 4 barges with it in auto mode for the acceptance test.

After that, it was rarely ever used in auto mode again and they had 4 winch spotters with radios and an operator position the barge manually using the rotary in / out switches on the control console. Positioning in manual mode regularly took half an hour or more and lots of damage to the bridge and winch lines as well.

This was the most ridiculous experience I have ever had with union labor.
 
This is your future as a machinist. Tell your wife to get her crappy exercycle out of the basement, because you need to make room for it.

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Robots. It also looks more like fun than serious development. For those who are worried about remote work: specialists are always needed. The most that can change is the purpose of your orders. If you are a good specialist, you have nothing to worry about. As a last resort, you can change your company. You can start making rocket parts. This is not mass production. And it cannot be automated at this stage.
 








 
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