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Andy Rubin Is Heading a Secret Robotics Project At Google
sfcrazy writes "The creator of the most sought after 'Android' of the world has been secretly working on creating a robotics division within Google. The search engine giant has acquired over seven robotics companies recently to create the robotics unit which is being headed by none other than Andy Rubin himself. Andy made the disclosure in an interview given to the New York Times."
Their initial goal is to automate the woefully manual process of electronics manufacturing.
It's not long. And I don't think people will be ready to cope with the change.
They haven't thought about what a tool which completely replaces a human and which costs less than a human salary means.
At least a generation of severe disruption and even after that very likely structural unemployment over 25%. You will need to change society in some fundamental ways. Basic income is one possibility.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Is it woeful that humans are still paid to accomplish some tasks?
I guess it's not so secret anymore...
In C++, your friends can see your privates.
Electronics manufacturing uses tons of robotics and has for quite some time. I assume that was meant to be assembly? But even that isn't accurate either.
That is why the project manager made the disclosure to NYT. That is how you keep things secret. If you really want people to know about it, he would have tweeted it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
apple spent almost $10 billion on machinery and robotics last year. foxconn might make the phones but apple owns all the machinery at all the levels of manufacturing and invests a lot of money to automate the process
2014 expect apple to spend close to $13 billion on capital expenses
have an allergy to anything that resembles socialism even if that's what they really want and don't know it (speaking as an American here). I just read an article somewhere yesterday that both Applebees and Chili's restaurant chains are replacing all of their waiters with a tablet based systems.
When there is no work for anyone left and we're all under total 24/7/365 surveillance then what? I can't have Amazon delivering packages to my non-existent residence since robots took our jobs ;) (I'm in IT but it's not like we're immune; no one is).
I was working in industrial automation in that area 20 years ago. Primarily the circuit board industry, although we did build a custom truck bumper chrome plating line for a company in Oklahoma.
Best Slashdot Co
"The search engine giant has acquired over seven robotics companies recently"
Eight?
Yeah, the views of the corrupt rich are pumped like baby food through the media, and ridiculous opulence is not compatible with socialism, and rightfully so.
I often imagine a crablike or bigdog-like machine that can roam within a perimeter, Roomba style, but outdoors, in possibly poor weather, gathering or flagging anything unnatural, for the purpose of gathering litter from roadsides, around buildings, etc. A beach version would have some sand-sifting capability.
Of course, unless I'm talking about a communist dictatorship or oligarchy.
(arguably it was never really successful. I'll reference Bill Hicks for that)
"Now I'm no bleeding heart, okay? But, when you're walking
down the streets of New York City and you're stepping over
a guy on the sidewalk who, I don't know, might be dead...
does it ever occur to you to think 'Wow, maybe our system
doesn't work?' Does that thought ever bubble up out of you?"
One thing I've wondered for a while is, why don't we have robots making clothes? I realize that clothes robots, more than any other kind of manufacturing robot, would be the most job-destroying robot (and on a global scale), but are there technical reasons why nobody has done it?
I mean, putting together cellphones is not too far away from putting together circuit boards, which is already automated to a high degree.
Woefully for whom? The last few manufacturing jobs in the industry and the people who work them are woeful?
Where the hell is anyone going to get a job other than cleaning rich people's toilets? Hell, there's probably a robot for that.
Shantytowns are illegal most everywhere, so people can't even squat in the mud and eat trash in peace when they lose their livelihoods. Should we just suggest 90% of the planet's human population just get it over with and off itself?
Self-driving cars, now robotics more generally? Maybe this sort of exploration is the right thing to do when you've got so much cash. It sure as hell beats those companies that have stopped investing in R&D, but considering how disparate this stuff is from search engines and whatnot, it does strike me as being a bit of a dilettante.
I feel like the editorial comment in the summary is woefully inaccurate. I remember reading an article (probably on Slashdot) a year or two ago about the Apple outsourcing - and someone in electronics manufacturing in the US was talking about how they could do it with robots for the same price as China. The speculation was that they decided to go with China instead because they can make design changes (tell workers to do things differently) in a matter of hours - robot assembly lines aren't quite as flexible.
You also have high level automation in places like the Amazon warehouses, so unless they're just talking about driving down costs I suspect it's far more innovative. Robotic delivery systems to go along with self-driving cars delivering your packages, stuff like that. "manufacturing and logistics markets" has a very broad meaning.
So this will be an improvement: we'll have robots to cart the dead people off the streets, so we won't have to step over them.
The first mistake is assuming that we have "a system", something designed from the ground up or at least tweaked by people with a complete and accurate picture of the situation. Not even communist China or the USSR had that. Secondly, many of our attempts to fix "the system" have failed spectacularly, and not because of ill will or sabotage from those with vested interests.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Exactly what part of electronics manufacturing needs to be automated? The cheap prices and mass production of electronics we currently enjoy is partly due to widespread use of pick-and-place machines and wave soldering machines. I'm sure there are some manual steps in the assembly, but that is only the last 10 - 20% of the labor involved in manufacturing. The bulk of it has been automated for decades.
This is why we need to get books on the law now that make robot rustlin' made a misdemeanor.
That way, it's less hassle to build a replacement robot than it is to recover one hijacked by the disaffected.
Actually, drive the price of robots down low enough, and people won't bother to secure them. You could just have a free global pool of robots, and just find one nearby when you need one.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Or maybe they'll find other ways to make money, like they did since tractors replaced 90% of the people in farmwork? It's not like the robot revolution will happen overnight......
If you're going to claim that capitalism will fail because machines will replace jobs, they are going to have to explain why this time is different than the last many times machines replaced jobs.......
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
But what if they're getting better? What happens if they want to go for a walk?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
which is the reason that everyone knows about that they have one ...
I hope that the automation systems they'll also consider is waste management and disposal. Sure everything can go into an incinerator if you'd like, but disassembling old electronics en-masse would be more suitable than mechanical/chemical separations if we'll still need the eight 9's of purity we want in the next generation of electronics. The ethics of robots harvesting old robots may need to be considered though when robots' rights start coming into play....
Because it's happening at a much faster rate to a much greater degree and in every facet of life.
Captcha: capita
The first link in the summary to muktware is 90% ads, with a cheesy Photoshopped headline image and a blurb shorter than the Slashdot summary. That link should be removed.
Even better: Add that site to a blacklist so that Slashdot never links to it again. This is just a blogger trying to make money by getting hits from Slashdot.
(arguably it was never really successful. I'll reference Bill Hicks for that)
"Now I'm no bleeding heart, okay? But, when you're walking down the streets of New York City and you're stepping over a guy on the sidewalk who, I don't know, might be dead... does it ever occur to you to think 'Wow, maybe our system doesn't work?' Does that thought ever bubble up out of you?"
The guy on the sidewalk will be there regardless of the economic system, because with few exceptions the homeless aren't homeless because of economic reasons. Nearly all of them are where they are because of various forms of mental illness, and the fix for that isn't dumping capitalism, it's reinstating the system of state hospitals to care for the mentally ill, treating them to the degree we know how, and just keeping them reasonably comfortable where we don't. Of course, we need the hospitals to be much, much better than they were; the reason they were largely shut down is because they were houses of horror and it was easier for activists in the 70s to get courts to shut them down and put the patients on the street than to actually get them cleaned up.
Not coincidentally, those hospitals also used to hold a fair number of people who are still in state care, but at much higher cost because they're in prison.
I will grant that state hospitals and similar systems are socialist, so to that extent perhaps socialism is the solution to the guy on the sidewalk. That doesn't mean socialism is the right answer for those who aren't mentally ill.
With respect to people whose jobs are automated away, IMO the right level of socialism isn't to give them a basic living stipend, but instead to help retrain. One thing that most people worried about automation removing jobs don't consider is that the cost reductions due to automation go primarily to reduce the cost of goods, and therefore to lower the cost of living and raising the standard of living, which opens up all sorts of new opportunities for work, in two ways. First, by lowering the cost of living, the disposable income of the (working) masses increases and they start buying services that were previously out of reach, thereby increasing the demand for -- and jobs in -- those services. For example, in the 18th century there were very, very few professional hairdressers. In the latter half of the 20th century it became a very common profession.
Second, the lowered cost of living opens up possibilities for living doing work whose value previously simply wasn't sufficient to support life. It's not often that we think about cost of living decreasing. It seems like it's always going up, but that's because we measure it with devaluing currency, and because our standard of what constitutes an adequate lifestyle is constantly increasing. If instead we fix a particular standard of living and then look at how much time must be put in to earn it, the cost of living has been on a long downward slide for centuries, and automation is going to accelerate that.
I'm not saying that everyone is going to be a hairdresser, and I have no idea what all of the jobs of the future will be. I think the major growth will be in the service sector, because people do like receiving service from people not machines, no matter how competent the machines become. It wouldn't surprise me if the biggest growth areas are all around non-essentials, like art and entertainment. What I am certain of, though, is that as long as people have disposable income they will find things to spend that money on, and that will involve paying other people for goods and services. Many of those goods and services will seem ridiculous fripperies to us today, but much of what we spend our money on today would seem silly to people 100 years ago.
Oh, one other thing I'm certain of: people need to feel that they're earning their own way. Life earned is better than life given, regardless of how it is earned. Welfare is a fast road to unhappy dependency. That's not to say that providing short-term support to people who are transitioning isn't a good idea, but long-term unearned subsistence is a recipe for angry, unhappy people.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Now we are proper fucked.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
They have no one to copy so therefore it will fail................
The problem is you're stepping over the guy without checking to see if he needs help. If you see a guy who looks like he might be dying, why would you not at least look at him? People not helping others is the problem with society, hoping the 'system' will fix it.
When you have people without compassion, it doesn't matter what kind of system you have, it's not going to work.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
With respect to people whose jobs are automated away, IMO the right level of socialism isn't to give them a basic living stipend, but instead to help retrain.
Okay, you seem fairly aware of the issues surrounding mental health and poverty... but you're missing a fairly crucial piece of the puzzle. A large number of people are working at the limit of their abilities. I have a friend who works in a 'special education' program. She stays in contact with most of her students throughout their lives. Many of her students never advance beyond a 5 year-old mental capacity.
Many of our janitors, kitchen staff, assembly line workers, etc. are doing as much as they possibly can. They can all be replaced by robots. They will all be replaced by robots, all in the name of the allmighty buck. These are people who are living happy, productive lives. Take those jobs away from them, and they will become unhappy, agitated... and according to you, the right level of socialism for them is to be institutionalized. That's not 'social'. That's monstrous.
It's unfortunate that this is being done by google, as a company that specializes in information will no doubt hasten the process of the terminators becoming self-aware.
Never underestimate what a factory worker can do with a chopstick:
The sheer dexterity is mind-boggling. And the low pay most probably too :-(
Believe the true intent is to have a ground force that can repel Amazon's copters.
Manufacturing jobs are easy to replace. Just watch Mike Rowe's Dirty Jobs and you will see there are plenty of jobs left that can't be replaced until robots with human form factor and agility are available. That day will come, but its still decades off.
It will truly get ugly for the current economy when robots can mine ore, smelt it, run factories that build robots, and assign them tasts.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
You mean he's building a real Android?
Commander Data here we come!
Too bad I'm so late to the debate.
If all farming were done by robots, but nobody could afford food, then why would the robots be farming?
Unless these overt-covert scare tactics are planned in order to Streisand-effect and dispel some hidden fears in the public consciousness?
Too bad I'm so late to the debate.
Most of the technology needed to automate electronics manufacturing has been available for years, if not decades. See "The Macintosh Factory", showing Apple's factory in Fremont over 20 years ago. Robot assembly, mobile robots, very few people doing direct labor. Products were designed for cheap automated assembly. The Macintosh II family was noted for that - everything, including the power supply, was inserted into the case with a simple straight-down move. Everything snapped together. No wiring harnesses. "Design for manufacture" was big back then.
So what went wrong? Outsourcing for cheap labor. "If your orders decrease, you can lay off workers. You can't lay off robots." - Tim Li, Quanta Computer. It's not so much that people are cheaper. It's that they are disposable. So are subcontractors. Everybody in the supply chain is working on low cost margins with no guarantee of future orders, so they can't invest in automation.
This is not a technical problem.
This sounds like a move to cut Quanta out as a hardware supplier, considering the amount of servers and network switches they make for the big G. Also, it would allow pulling manufacturing back to the US, ostensibly as a security measure while loudly proclaiming domestic job increases. Foxconn is going the same route for different reasons though; wage increases in Chinese labor increasing total costs enough that purchasers are starting to head elsewhere, and owning a realtime reconfigurable manufacturing facility will effectively give them a Von Neumann machine/seed factory capability that no one else has the scale to match. Why else is Foxconn going for a million robots? Google can see this coming, and at least wants to hold their own for themselves. If Google happens to save the US in the process, so be it.
Have you not noticed how similar to Android this guy's name is? Our future (and possibly time-travelling) robot overlords are mocking us in plain sight. All Hail Them!
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms
Of course, "protest" may not be very effective against robots programmed to ignore it, where the 1% live in gated "Elysium" communities shut off from all the noise etc... The window may be closing for fixing our society before these trends otherwise overwhelm most of us.
As I say on my site: "Eventually, the balance will change in one of several ways. Here are three possibilities. People might engage in a political struggle leading to broad changes and broader equity in global resources (which is what is going on in some parts of Europe right now, as in the past). Or, some compromise might be achieved where lots of make-work is created (through needless wars-of-choice, endless bureaucracy, endless schooling, expanding prisons, or widespread avoidable sickness) that props up the income-through-jobs link (which seems to be the path the USA is going in part). Or poor people might essentially be starved to death or worked to death, and the remaining wealthy people will, among themselves and their robots, essentially produce a new society of the remaining people that is based on a new paradigm of broadly shared wealth (there are aspects of this that have been going on for a long time in the globe). That last option would be ironic because the robots, in combination with the material resources of the solar system, could just as easily produce wealth for quadrillions of people as for millions of people, and a bigger society is probably going to be more interesting. In practice, we seem to be seeing a mix of all three of these approaches. Which one will dominate long-term remains to be seen. Also, there may be other possibilities, of course."
Glad to see so many insightful posts on this topic!
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Age_Ahead
"Dark Age Ahead is a 2004 book by Jane Jacobs describing what she sees as the decay of five key "pillars" in North America: community and family, higher education, science and technology, taxes and government responsive to citizen's needs, and self-policing by the learned professions.[1]:p24
She argues that this decay threatens to create a dark age unless the trends are reversed. Jacobs characterizes a dark age as a "mass amnesia" where even the memory of what was lost is lost.[1]:p4"
You're right that climate change makes everything harder. Yet, we have so much abundance, and so much land, and the oceans can support artificial islands and habitats, and we can build in Antarctica and space. So, as a global society we have plenty of wealth to help everyone adjust well to change climates. The question is a political one of how much of that wealth will be made available for that purpose. Since much of that wealth was made using fossil fuels, the question is also, do countries that burned the most in the past have a moral obligation to help? Even ignoring the deeper moral obligation to help other humans and all living creatures (while respecting the past). For example, we could build self-replicating space habitats that wold support trillions of people in style. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether it will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race tothe very end...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Wow, looking that up, on Applebees and Chili's: http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-waiters-and-waitresses/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/12/02/applebees-tablets-table-top-devices-restaurant-technology/3698561/
I think people overestimate the "human touch" need in service (like mentioned as a reason everything won't be automated in other posts). While it is true humans need other humans to be human, and physical human touch is important, interactions with "strangers" can be stressful for many, and they also expose people to a risk of disease. And example if banking, where many people now prefer using an ATM machine to talking to a bank teller. Same with many automated phone systems for routine transactions. It may depend in part on a person's personality of course. At some point thought, "more sanitary" and "more personalized and interactive" may become arguments for more automation. For example, who likes to wait around for the wait staff to bring you a bill when you are ready to go at the end of a dinner out?
One can hope though that as we see more abundance from more automation, people may have more time to cook at home and entertain at home. That may be the bigger long term change here. Why go to a restaurant at all, where you have little control over the ingredients, the people around you, and so on? Or, alternatively, when a robot can fetch your meal for you, as in this video of a PR2 robot going to Subway to fetch a sandwich:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIYRQC2iBp
Marshall Brain's "Manna" explores two possible answers to your last question.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Regarding "socialism", here is a great graph on US perceptions, preferences, and reality regarding wealth distribution:http://danariely.com/2010/09/30/wealth-inequality/
"As you can see from the figure, participants rather badly estimated the current state of wealth disparity! Furthermore, they offered an ideal wealth distribution (under a "veil of ignorance") that was even more different (and more equal) relative to the current state of affairs.
What this tells me is that Americans don't understand the extent of disparity in the US, and that they (we) desire a more equitable society. It is also interesting to note that the differences between people who make more money and less money, republicans and democrats, men and women -- were relatively small in magnitude, and that in general people who fall into these different categories seem to agree about the ideal wealth distribution under the veil of ignorance.
Maybe this suggests that when there are no labels, and we think about the core of our morality in abstract terms (and under the veil of ignorance), we are actually very similar?"
Graph picture there seems broken; see it here:
http://ecologicalsociology.blogspot.com/2012/06/us-income-inequality-real-perceived.html
Still, you are right about the "allergy", and that is why planning through the market in the USA along with a basic income may be the easiest way forward:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_market.html
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/establish-basic-income-guarantee-all-americans-similar-what-being-proposed-switzerland/jF
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Raising children well can take about as much time as most adults can put into it. Our US society is currently suffering for too much parental time put into work and then other distractions. and not enough time spent with kids. The same goes for the effort reuired to maintain social relations with freidns and neighbors. That is historically way most human adults spent most of their time -- raising kids and being social. For reference on a hunter/gatherer lifestyle:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
I readily agree that people need a sense of "agency" -- that they are accomplishing things to make their life better. But whether that needs to be withing a structured system of economics we call "work" entailing bosses and customers and "wage slavery" is a different question (even if most of us practically have few other short-term alternatives to work).
http://www.whywork.org/
Related to you point, many people like playing a hunter/gatherer in an abundant Minecraft world a lot. Yet, maybe part of that is indeed because of the abundance and the possibilities? Yet, in US society, many people are arbitrarily shut out from all the abundance. This kind of stuff (or the need for it) is just wrong in such a wealthy society:
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2009/08/07/6958/appalachian-fairgrounds-charity-tries-fill-gaps-health-care
http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/us_hunger_facts.htm
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/22/demographic-shift-puts-american-dream-out-reach/
If "welfare is a fast road to unhappy dependency", then:
A. Why do rich people tend to give their children lots of expensive things including Ivy League educations, good cars, condos, trust funds, and so on?
B. Would you turn down a million dollar cash gift?
C. Do monthly "Social Security" payments to any citizen in the USA over age 65 cause enormous distress to the elderly?
If you think about these three questions, you may find a missing piece of the puzzle of a picture of the future.
However, your point about the cost of living going down is indeed true and needs to be kept in mind. On the other hand, decreasing costs also generally implies less money going to fewer people. But the marketplace only "hears" the needs of those with cash. If you have zero money, then you can't afford a place to sleep or put your stuff. And further, automation tends to concentrate wealth (at least initially).
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm
Productivity has doubled or triples over the last few decades in the USA, but real wages for most workers have remained flat (granted, health insurance benefits have increased, but it is not clear people are that much healthier for that). That is a political issue about fairness as well as power.
I'd agree humans want interaction with other humans (generally), but whether that is best in the context of payments (as opposed to gifts or family and friend interactions) is another question. For example, I prefer to have my wife cut my hair than to go to a barber or hair salon.
Another thing to consider is that perhaps all humans have some claim on some of the fruits of the commons?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit
BTW, on NYC homeless:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/10/28/131028fa_fact_frazier?currentPage=all
It sounds there like the "means testing" and uncertainty and constant changes create much
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.