Meet "Baxter" the Robot Out to Get Your Minimum-Wage

[tastymannatees]

Re: Robots are replacing humans

Its all about the numbers. Sure, there will always likely be jobs robots cannot do as well as humans. But there will be more and more they can do, often better. People lament the loss of manufacturing in the US but its not all China's fault, or bankers. A lot of jobs have simply been replaced by robots and other technology. They can certainly weld nicely. There is always a job gain in some areas and a loss in another when you are talking about a subject like this. No one argues that.

I'm not at all convinced a nation of creative thinkers, with all this time freed up by robots, will rise up and create more unheard of crap for us to make, sending us forward into a brave new world. I think despite gains in some areas, there will be a net loss in terms of the number of humans needed to work. I think the post WWII boom has ended, and it can no longer hide the fact that more people are becoming superfluous in economic terms. We can't continue to grow our way out of this one. We don't need more ranch hands, more farmers, more factory workers, carpenters, etc like we did in the post WWII boom. Sure we need better skilled workers. But certainly not more than we've lost in other fields. And what about those incapable of performing higher skilled work. Perhaps some of whom used to be the factory workers, etc? Or are we supposed to believe all of us are created equally and have the same capacity for learning new skills, despite IQ. Pure fantasy.

Rather than hope for the best, we should be thinking about how the world will handle those lower on the skill chain who will become hopelessly unemployable. Not always through their own fault. ( Seen college costs these days?) Perhaps the day will come when everyone just gets a check to cover basic life expenses. Its coming. To a degree its already here. Without massive wealth re-distribution the US would look like something out of a Dickens novel. People should not be surprised nor angry that the growth of the welfare state has paralleled the growth of technology.

I'm not anti-technology, just pointing out that its like a game of musical chairs. Unfortunately we tend to look at economic periods of 50-100 years as some sort of long term proof of success, when if fact its a blip in history terms. Take the robot/technology thing out another few generations, past your own life, and if you are honest, you will come to the same conclusions I have. People will not be as necessary in economic terms as they once were. That doesn't mean we should fire up the Soylent Green factory. It just means we need to look at other options in how we measure worth.

Great points, while you do have efficiency increases you end up with some amount of surplus in labor, take the postal employees for example you can not retrain all of them for robotic maintenance so the excess get pushed into the pool of unskilled labor or subsidized by the government at a loss, a win for business but a net negative for the economy.

Having spent some time in Yale New Haven hospitals in the last year I had occasion to walk the floor late at night with a bad reaction to some medication and noted that they were at least 50% over staffed and employees were surfing the internet, reading books openly just killing time. This is one way the excess labor is managed as a kind employed welfare.

The big joke I think is that a service economy is generally a third world economy, try going through customs in Egypt It took hours to get through with dozens of government agents and without the government they likely would not have a job or one that payed as well. Our waiter at the hotel had a degree in engineering but the degree was useless in Egypt so was forced to do service work.

A service economy is a poor economy, if you are farming, mining, manufacturing you are producing wealth, if you are sitting around cutting each others hair or doing each others taxes you are dithering around and going nowhere.

The bottle problem - Just use an RFID tag

Care to dance?

[Polish_Silver]

Re: Robots are replacing humans

Rather than hope for the best, we should be thinking about how the world will handle those lower on the skill chain who will become hopelessly unemployable. Not always through their own fault. ( Seen college costs these days?) Perhaps the day will come when everyone just gets a check to cover basic life expenses. Its coming. To a degree its already here. Without massive wealth re-distribution the US would look like something out of a Dickens novel. People should not be surprised nor angry that the growth of the welfare state has paralleled the growth of technology.

I'm not anti-technology, just pointing out that its like a game of musical chairs. Unfortunately we tend to look at economic periods of 50-100 years as some sort of long term proof of success, when if fact its a blip in history terms. Take the robot/technology thing out another few generations, past your own life, and if you are honest, you will come to the same conclusions I have. People will not be as necessary in economic terms as they once were. That doesn't mean we should fire up the Soylent Green factory. It just means we need to look at other options in how we measure worth.

--flintlock

That is my thinking. The less skilled may be employed as leaf rakers or hair stylists, but their salaries and social status
will be relatively low.

[leegs]

Re: Robots are replacing humans

Rather than hope for the best, we should be thinking about how the world will handle those lower on the skill chain who will become hopelessly unemployable. Not always through their own fault. ( Seen college costs these days?) Perhaps the day will come when everyone just gets a check to cover basic life expenses. Its coming. To a degree its already here. Without massive wealth re-distribution the US would look like something out of a Dickens novel. People should not be surprised nor angry that the growth of the welfare state has paralleled the growth of technology.
--flintlock

That is my thinking. The less skilled may be employed as leaf rakers or hair stylists, but their salaries and social status
will be relatively low.

Interesting segment on NPR on Monday, link to transcript below
http://www.npr.org/2013/03/25/175293...-on-disability
talking about how SS disability is acting as a stealth security net for 'unemployable' people.

[DSpencer]

Re: Robots are replacing humans

A service economy is a poor economy, if you are farming, mining, manufacturing you are producing wealth, if you are sitting around cutting each others hair or doing each others taxes you are dithering around and going nowhere.

Really? The entire service economy is just a complete waste of time? So in your ideal economy:

No healthcare
No education
No repairmen
No police officers
No firemen

Sounds great...

and lets not forget: No itulip! In fact, why do you waste your money on subscribing to a service such as financial/economic advice/commentary?

[c1ue]

Re: Robots are replacing humans

Is parking a car really that high on most people's list of problems?

For much of the US, it isn't.

For the top 30 metro areas, and especially for the top 6 - it is.

$20 billion a year in parking tickets across the entire US, with $1.6 billion just in the top 6: SF, NY, Chicago, Philadelphia, DC, and Boston. Philly parking also has its own reality cable show.

In SF - I talk to a lot of people about parking. Some give up their cars because of parking problems. Some move out of the city because of parking problems. Some don't care because they have rich spouses who give them a fat allowance, or are wealthy enough to just pay.

Parking in these areas is thus a real problem.

Auto-driving cars - there is a benefit should it work. Every day someone dies because of carelessness or impairment while driving, but the problem is extremely diffuse. People rarely die in the City of SF due to driving; the streets are such that high speeds are difficult or impossible to attain, but people do occasionally get killed by getting hit by a bus. Outside SF in the Bay Area, however, there is a fatal accident just about every day.

The question, however, is if auto-driving will work at all - and even if it does work, whether it is affordable, and even if it is affordable, whether it will fix the problems it is supposed to. Far from clear on any of those fronts.

For parking - what I do is merely one piece of the puzzle. Putting sensors on every spot is completely out of the question - the companies who do so charge $20 per spot, per month. The hardware is expensive, and so is maintaining the service - which includes putting in repeaters, wireless networks, monitoring systems, servers, and so forth.

Companies like Inrix, for example, are making a huge business out of traffic monitoring. With traffic, you can put sensors in a relatively few places because you're monitoring flow. A similar setup for parking, however, isn't terribly useful when you're trying to find an open spot.

The eventual parking solution will look something like this:

A consumer will list up the places he plans to visit via an appointment calendar type setup, or one destination at a time via navigation. The parking service will know if the destination has parking on site. If not, then off and on-street parking can be directed to depending on user's preferences.

For calendar based travel, a computerized concierge can be employed which will look at the consumer's present location, status vs. next appointment (i.e. distance plus traffic to yield a transit time) and provide parking options and reminders in accordance with early or late status, or preference.

For navigation based travel, consumers would be presented with options as they near the destination: a modified route to look for street parking or a modified route to go to a parking garage or block with confirmed availability. The consumer might also get offers: buy a coffee at the hotel Starbucks and get free parking for 1 hour.

The ultimate objective is to have all possible and relevant parking options made available to the consumer at a touch of a button - no more trying to read signs while driving or frantically circling because you're late for an appointment. Before that can happen, though, a whole lot of work has to be done - hopefully including my parking data.

[tastymannatees]

Re: Robots are replacing humans

Really? The entire service economy is just a complete waste of time? So in your ideal economy:

No healthcare
No education
No repairmen
No police officers
No firemen

Sounds great...

and lets not forget: No itulip! In fact, why do you waste your money on subscribing to a service such as financial/economic advice/commentary?

All in how you allocate your employment/investment mix, an economy composed 80% of Itulips and firemen is a poor economy, somebody has to produce something somewhere to support those services along with their generous pensions and healthcare plans.

Add up the percentages/ numbers of people that receive food stamps, work directly for the state and local governments, collect on social security, medicare, unemployment etc. and you are pushing 50% of the population taking from the other half.

As flintlock pointed out the slack created in employment from displaced workers from technology is problematic so in third world fashion your services become diluted and they now hire 10 firemen when the job only needs 5 just so something is done to address the unemployment issue. IMHO

Increased efficiencies in technology has disturbed our normal balance and there is a cost to it and all the much touted enhanced eff. was/is not really free so the society and economy will pay some price for it.

I believe that in one of the Itulip articles it was suggested that where we would end up is that our middle class at some point would look like the Mexican middle class. I believe all this technology improvement will contribute some % pts. to that

Welcome to a third world service economy.

[DSpencer]

Re: Robots are replacing humans

All in how you allocate your employment/investment mix, an economy composed 80% of Itulips and firemen is a poor economy, somebody has to produce something somewhere to support those services along with their generous pensions and healthcare plans.

Add up the percentages/ numbers of people that receive food stamps, work directly for the state and local governments, collect on social security, medicare, unemployment etc. and you are pushing 50% of the population taking from the other half.

As flintlock pointed out the slack created in employment from displaced workers from technology is problematic so in third world fashion your services become diluted and they now hire 10 firemen when the job only needs 5 just so something is done to address the unemployment issue. IMHO

Increased efficiencies in technology has disturbed our normal balance and there is a cost to it and all the much touted enhanced eff. was/is not really free so the society and economy will pay some price for it.

I believe that in one of the Itulip articles it was suggested that where we would end up is that our middle class at some point would look like the Mexican middle class. I believe all this technology improvement will contribute some % pts. to that

Welcome to a third world service economy.

Well that's a big difference from what you originally said. I don't consider the welfare state to be the same as a service economy. In reality goods and services are both necessary and important for improving quality of life.

I can see how in the long term technology might create an underclass of people who don't have the skill level to work anymore. However, is there any evidence that this has happened already? If you look at an unemployment map of the world would you say there's any correlation between technologically advanced countries and high unemployment?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...employment.gif

Looks like if anything, there is the opposite correlation.

[tastymannatees]

Re: Robots are replacing humans

In my mind the fire economies subsidize employment like the post office or the hospital example, people are employed but not efficiently.

Same as welfare in a sense

Just in my immediate family - sister in law makes a couple hundred K working independent contracts for AIG -Would not have a job without the fire bailout.

Sister owns a company in D.C. employs 80 people and grosses 20 mil a year on contracts and studies from the government. Just my opinion but most are nonsensical, non productive efforts.

Another one makes 75K a year in education teaching teachers how to play with kids.

Another works as a security analyst on wall street would probably not have a job with out the fire bail out.

Brother in law is president of a toxic waste company most jobs are government paid for.

It may be just my statistical circle but my sense is that if you could separate out the government props on the labour force or productive from nonproductive work it does look third worldish total employed not withstanding just because we have the borrowed money now to support it does not mean it is a real thing.

[c1ue]

Re: Robots are replacing humans

Yes, that and cost are major issues. Research (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/c...ight-0109.html) is progressing, but I think the reason Daimler went with stereo cameras is that lidar (the 360 degree kind) is not commercially feasible.

Here's an example of the lidar in question - the maker is the one which generally provides the Lidar in the various auto-driving X prize-ish challenges:

A few notes

a) There is an actual image of what gets captured. Pretty cool. Pretty noisy too
b) This bad boy costs $75,000
c) This is what Nokia uses in their Nokia True service - which aims to one up Google's Streetview

http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/01/0...o-disassembled

Back on December 15th, we got a look at the internals of a SICK Laser Rangefinder (LIDAR), a $6k device that employs a single laser diode to produce ~6000 points per second (~600 points per scan at ~10Hz) over a 180° field-of-view. Now, we can compare that to the Rolls Royce of Laser Rangefinders -- the Velodyne Lidar, a $75k device employing 64 laser diodes to produce 1.3 million data points per second with a 360° horizontal field-of-view and a 26.8° vertical field-of-view. Below is a video of Bruce Hall, President of Velodyne LIDAR, demonstrating the HDL-64E in operation and taking a look at its internals. It may not be a complete disassembly (it does cost $75,000 afterall!), but it does provide some interesting insights into the Velodyne's internals.


You may recall that the Velodyne (below left) is a popular fixture on DARPA Urban Grand Challenge vehicles, producing the characteristic concentric laser scans (below right) that proved useful in everything from obstacle avoidance to curb and lane detection.

So let's dig a little deeper and show how this amazing sensor functions. First (below left) is an image showing the characteristic front lens assembly. Notice that there are two "blocks" -- a top and a bottom, which each contain 32 laser diodes (for a total of 64). The laser beams exit the device on the outer lenses and return to photo-detectors through the middle lenses, using time-of-flight (TOF) to determine distance. Below right is a view of the rear of the device.

There are a couple of interesting structures to note in the rear of the Velodyne. For example, there are four banks of laser diodes, each containing 16 lasers; in the image (below left), Bruce is pointing to the "top right" laser diode bank. The lasers are precisely (and painstakingly?) aligned with avalance photodiodes (a semiconductor approximation to a photo-multiplier tube) contained on a PCB behind the central lens. Bruce is pointing to the top avalance photodiode board in the image (below center). All of the timing, control, and reception signals are routed to a "main PCB" just under the top of the device. Finally, counter-balancing weights are employed to keep the entire (spinning) system stable -- they are being pointed to in the image (below right).

OK, enough chatter. You can watch the video if you like.

So, I have a few questions about the resiliency of these sensors... Among my questions:

• What is the mean-time-between-failure (MTBF)?
• How critical is the laser diode and photodiode alignment? What happens if the alignment drifts, and how often does this happen? (How about cost of repair or maintenance?)
• Obviously, mass-balancing is pretty important for something with so much rotational inertia. What happens if the device's balance is disrupted (say, it's hit and deformed with a ball) -- where does all that inertia go, and how dangerous is it to bystanders?

Anyway, it is a very compelling sensor -- I wish I could afford one.

[RebbePete]

Re: Robots are replacing humans

To me, this is simply not a practical solution for many reasons:

• Cost of the sensor. Even with mass production, it's still requires too much high precision alignment.
• Fragility of the sensor. As the article mentions, what happens in the event it gets hit with something, like a piece of gravel? How long will it work before it breaks on its own?
• Implications of that much laser light on creatures in the environment. Humans can't see it, but other things can.
• Possibility of interference between units. How will a crowded road stuffed with vehicles, each one with a laser sensor on the roof, interact?

Eventually, we have to get to AI that's smart enough to interpret the environment through one or two semi-stationary imagers, like humans do. That's a big hurdle to get over, requiring not only processing power, but also the world knowledge to recognize objects in different orientations and relative distances, and do it fast enough to navigate when moving at highway speeds. If anyone is interested, this paper, although a few years old, gives a good survey of the different strategies.

- Pete

[Woodsman]

Re: Meet "Baxter" the Robot Out to Get Your Minimum-Wage

It's been months and no answer. Given the presence of industrial robots in building cars and such, I expect they paid their scientists and engineers to go to work creating the mechanical slaves Wiener spoke of.

[reggie]

Re: Meet "Baxter" the Robot Out to Get Your Minimum-Wage

It's been months and no answer. Given the presence of industrial robots in building cars and such, I expect they paid their scientists and engineers to go to work creating the mechanical slaves Wiener spoke of.

Yes, History is wiped when it is inconvenient, isn't it. What's astounding is how the minds of millions works to help faciliate erasure of the inconsistent.

Please feel free to return to the authorized discussion.

[Polish_Silver]

Wiener both Right and Wrong

Father of Cybernetics Norbert Wiener's 1949 Letter to UAW President Walter Reuther, warning him about new technology and the negative impact it would have on manufacturing workers.
http://libcom.org/history/father-cyb...walter-reuther




Okay, so I'll give everyone ONE guess what the Industrialists did with Prof Weiner's information?

Wiener correctly anticipated that automation technology would replace many workers, reducing the demand for low skill workers. However, the next 20 years, 1949-1969, were quite good for UAW members. So he was 20 years ahead of his time, in a way. He does not mention the increased salary of those workers remaining, who benefited from the capital deepening. Another effect was that cars grew more complex, which somewhat offset the job reductions caused by automation. Factories still need workers, but less of them.

This is not fundamentally different from advances in agricultural methods, steam engines, transportation. If not for technology reducing the human labor needed for a given output, all of us would be starving or at a much lower standard of living. However, there is no guarantee that the workers made obsolete will be able to re-educate or adapt to the new situation. The automation reduces costs for the company, but it may increase costs to the larger society, due to the resulting unemployment.

Wiener correctly observes that a single engineer, or corporation cannot resist the trend because some competitor will adopt the technology.

You could oppose hunting with spears, and insistent on using only hand axes, but I'm not sure it's a very practical policy.

I admire that Wiener could see the social problems inherent in the ideas he was developing.

The auto industry hardly needed Wiener to undertake these changes though. The ideas of an assembly line, interchangeable parts, economies of scale, etc, were already in use when Wiener was in diapers.

[c1ue]

Re: Wiener both Right and Wrong

It's been months and no answer. Given the presence of industrial robots in building cars and such, I expect they paid their scientists and engineers to go to work creating the mechanical slaves Wiener spoke of.

I've mentioned this before, but I'll mention it again.

One huge gap in the way that most people view 'robotics' is that they fail to analyze the entire supply chain.

Yes, if technology were to improve, you could theoretically build robots that would take over practically any repetitive human work activity.

However, the parts which go into these robots are not created out of thin air.

A modern chip factory, for example, costs literally billions of dollars. That takes care of the land, buildings, machinery and HVAC. Throw in several hundred million more, and you get the workers, support systems, and incoming/outgoing infrastructure.

Of course, you haven't actually built anything yet. The computer chips require crystalline silicon. These have to be created by equally very expensive facilities. They have to be cut - fortunately a relatively cheap process, but the machinery to do so costs money. The wafers then have to be actually imprinted with something. The masks, the ion implantation devices, the myriad other machinery necessary to do so must also be created and maintained. The chips have to be designed - more people. The output has to be tested. It has to be designed into a system, which in turn needs to be assembled along with other stuff like boards. The boards then have to be assembled and programmed. The motive parts of the robot need to be designed, assembled, and programmed. The robot system has to be designed, assembled, and programmed. Once built, the robots need to be maintained. They need to be supervised. They will need repair at some point.

Thus for every factory line with few human workers - the primary difference is that the humans are no longer on the assembly line, but they're still in the supply chain elsewhere.

What then is the actual ratio of human hours to create a car using the Henry Ford method vs. with a robotic production line if the full supply chain is examined? I'm fairly sure at huge volumes (millions), there are fewer human hours. But how much fewer? Where is the breakaway point? What is the relative cost?

I'd also note that an iron rolling complex or steel production facility isn't free or cheap - the costs are dramatically lower with the complexity of the supply chain being dramatically simpler - and you can't do away with that either even if you've 100% automated the assembly line.

I'm not saying that the utopian idea of human labor will never come, but we're a long, long way from there right now IMO.

Of course there are exceptions to this: software for example. Once created, it can be duplicated with little cost. Thing is - software has to work through hardware to interact with reality. Sometimes you can substitute people for hardware, sometimes you can't.