Slashdot Mirror
Now Hiring For a Fascinating New Kind of Job That Only a Human Can Do: Babysit a Robot (wired.com)
From a report: Book a night at LAX's Residence Inn and you may be fortunate enough to meet an employee named Wally. His gig is relatively pedestrian -- bring you room service, navigate around the hotel's clientele in the lobby and halls -- but Wally's life is far more difficult than it seems. If you put a tray out in front of your door, for instance, he can't get to you. If a cart is blocking the hall, he can't push it out of the way. But fortunately for Wally, whenever he gets into a spot of trouble, he can call out for help. See, Wally is a robot -- specifically, a Relay robot from a company called Savioke. And when the machine finds itself in a particularly tricky situation, it relies on human agents in a call center way across the country in Pennsylvania to bail it out. [...]
The first companies to unleash robots into service sectors have been quietly opening call centers stocked with humans who monitor the machines and help them get out of jams. "It's something that's just starting to emerge, and it's not just robots," says David Poole, CEO and co-founder of Symphony Ventures, which consults companies on automation. "I think there is going to be a huge industry, probably mostly offshore, in the monitoring of devices in general, whether they're health devices that individuals wear or monitoring pacemakers or whatever it might be."
The first companies to unleash robots into service sectors have been quietly opening call centers stocked with humans who monitor the machines and help them get out of jams. "It's something that's just starting to emerge, and it's not just robots," says David Poole, CEO and co-founder of Symphony Ventures, which consults companies on automation. "I think there is going to be a huge industry, probably mostly offshore, in the monitoring of devices in general, whether they're health devices that individuals wear or monitoring pacemakers or whatever it might be."
Where's WALLY ?
If they're monitoring pacemakers, that's great, but I really hope they use some kind of data diode!
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
What if it's the short-term solution? Robots remotely operated by humans?
And if you're able to game-ify the job, you'll get people paying you to do your work!
#DeleteFacebook
for a project once. Basically train the AI that would replace him. He got right on that.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The job comes with a very comfy modern chair and a big red button you push very occasionally, probably getting there on a moving sidewalk. If only we old timers had some kind of preparation for this day. Oh well.
"I think there is going to be a huge industry, probably mostly offshore, in the monitoring of devices in general, whether they're health devices that individuals wear or monitoring pacemakers or whatever it might be."
Let's not try and paint the illusion that this is some massive job creator. There will probably be ten jobs replaced by automation for every one job added to the automation monitoring.
A huge industry is being replaced by something more the size of a cottage industry.
This is just an extension of every automated job in factories since day one. The operators sit there monitoring the machines for problems and only intervene when there is a problem - and the process has been engineered the hell out it to minimize problems.
The "novel" approach being gushed over here seems to be that:
1. It's a robot that is being monitored.
2. The operator is working remotely.
neither of which are particularly novel, or new.
Now git off my lawn.
----
Although I recently did read a sci-fi story where some US company was touting AI home help service robots which were actually being tele-operated by ex-DACA kids who had been deported from the US back to Mexico (and were hence fluent in US English and mannerisms)
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
IBM mainframes "phoned home" for tech help back before most of today's college students were born.
Robotic tape drive malfunction? Phone home and a technician was dispatched.
Even prior to the computer age, unattended automated industrial equipment had fault sensors. When a fault was detected, a remote alarm was raised and a technician was dispatched.
Same principle as 50-100+ years ago, but with 21st century sophistication and a 21st century application.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
What do you think the modern airline pilot does? Don't worry, even the "babysitting" job will be automated soon enough.
*Who'll babysit the babysitters?*
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This is an improvement, since now when a robot becomes depressed, there is someone it can call, who will try to talk it out of plunging suicidally into the nearest mall fountain.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They are not monitoring, they are just being notified of problems and asked to intervene to rescue the robot. That's one thing. We can be sure a human can solve these kinds of problems. But monitoring health devices is best left to machines, I don't trust human attention to detail.
...they told us in the 3rd millennium we would have robot servants, not that we would become a robot's servant.
If a cart is blocking the hall, he can't push it out of the way.
...and the remote operator, sitting in a cubicle hundreds of miles away, somehow moves the cart out of the way? Maybe the robot should just call the front desk and ask for help.
Wish there was a service I could call when I get in a jam.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
Creimertard. Mod down.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well... no. But hotel owners wouldn't care about that.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
so if my domestic butler-bot can't figure out how to get the dog outside, some dude in a foreign country might remote pilot it around my house?
haha! nope.
But when will you have time while gorging yourself at buffets all over town?
Must be sad being the only creimertard left on Slashdot. Maybe you should get a Google certificate and do something better with your life?
Roko's Basilisk reserves a special place in cyber-heaven for people that help robots. They will get a break from torture every Tuesday. Waaaay better than what those cyber-mule bulliers over at Boston Dynamics are gonna get.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Our new robot-run factory employs just one human and a dog.
What does the human do?
He feeds the dog.
What is the dog for?
To stop the human interfering with the robots.
ROFL thinking every AC is creimertard.
What could be better than studying the last living member of your species? The North American Toothless IT Sasquatch is going extinct because they don't reproduce in captivity.
Although to be fair, they don't do so great in their natural environment either...
Will not work for cars or airplanes due to lag time and lack of a good network link (bandwidth for multi camera live video + low lag) all the time.
That soon there will also be clueless robots calling the help-desk.
So it won't be long until we will be asked as first question when we call:
"Are you a human or a robot?"
and the second one will be:
"Are you sure?"
Joshua what are you doing.
we need to keep men in the loop!
David Poole, CEO consultant, says the operators will be "mostly offshore", but that sounds like turn-of-the-millennium thinking. As American workers continue to be impoverished, in the global "race to the bottom" for labour markets, it will be unnecessary to look for "offshore" workers, or set up offshore remote-operation facilities. Soon, American workers will be just as cheap as workers in India or Asia, and they can double as the onsite service people. Thanks, neoliberalism.
Actually, robots can still get into a great deal of trouble. But this is more like "How long can we expect the customer to wait for service?". The example problems described aren't really problems for the robot, they're problems for the person asking for service...and people are often very unhappy about unreasonable wait times.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment." Warren Bennis
Due to robots/automation the factory of the future will be manned by only one man and his dog.
The man is there to feed the dog.
The dog is there to make sure the man doesn't touch anything.
Is there a place that's hiring for in-house robot assistant?
Does it have support of on-call code modification, so that real life situations can be added to the 'bots code base, and reduce the amount of intervention needed?
Sign me up? Those co-workers will be a lot less troublesome that flesh-and-blood ones!
Aren't you legally prohibited from working as a babysitter?
Wrong. Rolls Royce monitor the performance of all their engines in real-time as they're flying over satellite links. They're able to both recognise when there's a problem before the pilots and notify them, and tune the engine to make corrections while it is in the air. It also means that if there's a problem they can arrange for a replacement part to be waiting at the destination airport (or at least already on the way) to minimise the plane's downtime. P&W do the same.
There's actually quite a lot of bandwidth available to them, even latency isn't as bad as it used to be; and live video might not be necessary if sensor data is sufficient.
Scaling that up to every car on the road might be a little too much though - the network might have enough bandwidth for every plane in the air but there are several orders of magnitude more cars.
I'm not saying this would be a GOOD job, but the summary (I only read the summary) seems to be way more sarcastic than I'd put it.
Of course at first humans are "babysitting" them. Don't you think many of the people at modern car plants are essentially "babysitting" the robots/machinery actually doing tons of the work to build cars?
Heck, you could even compare it to driving a car.. You no longer have to turn over the engine with a crank at the front. Not exactly related but this also made me think of a recent Adam Carolla episode I was listening to today. Either his or his guest's kid was seriously surprised by scenes from the 1970s movies of cars not being able to start.
As things in the factories, or driving cars, get better, you need less and less of the babysitting..
Only for humans. He can still babysit sasquatches.