You have guaranteed supply and in fact in the mine does not have to be that profitable you can futz with supplies to screw your competitors and still get it at the original price, the capital return on your mining investment.
That's only true if your competition cannot get the product elsewhere. Roughly half the world's supply comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And it's generally a bad idea to buy an asset that isn't profitable unless you have no other choice for strategic reasons. Its the same reason you can't buy an oil well and charge whatever price you want.
Mines are not that expensive
Where on Earth did you get that silly notion? Operating a mine is VERY expensive, Huge capital costs and even with a lot of automation a lot of labor costs too. Not to mention the danger involved. Now Apple has the money to afford it but owning and operating a mine isn't a trivial proposition.
Your basic premise that Apple should consider buying a mine is reasonable enough but your supporting arguments aren't good ones. If cobalt is a strategic resource for Apple then buying a mine to ensure a supply is an idea worth considering even if they have to do it at a (modest) loss. The country that is the primary producer (DRC) is politically unstable and corrupt so it could make a lot of sense. There also is the fact that Apple has a huge war chest of cash that sooner or later they will need to do something with. Vertically integrating is an idea that can make a lot of sense if properly done.
Are we sure it is miners and not minors? (also, one does not exclude the other)
Depending on where they mine it it might be a distinction without a difference.
That said I'm pretty sure Apple would be sensitive to the PR shit storm that would erupt if they were found to be directly buying from child labor slaves. I'm also sure at some level they care about the problem but caring doesn't equal solving. Apple does have the resources to deal with it (they could buy the mine) if they are so inclined but it will be interesting to see how much they really care.
Your example of delivering stuff is a good one. How do we do it today? We hire some bag of meat to pick up boxes (we use boxes so bags of meat have conveniently shaped objects to deal with) and move them where they need to go. It's not exactly a cognitively challenging task.
You think that is all there is to moving stuff around? Picking up boxes and moving them around? It's rather more complicated than that. You have to have a lot of standardization of material handling equipment to make high levels of automation feasible. Plus there is a LOT more that goes into moving cargo than just picking up boxes and moving them from one place to another.
Barely any AI beyond basic navigation required.
Unless you care about things like security for the cargo, loading, unloading, bills of lading, damaged goods, unexpected circumstances, and all the other things that drivers do. A fully automated delivery system isn't nearly the trivial endeavor you make it out to be.
Not really, no. I work in a manufacturing plant. Even if you sent an autonomous truck to deliver something it still would need a person on board. Why? Exactly how do you plan to unload the delivery? Who is going to keep someone from stealing stuff off the truck? How do you plan to exchange paperwork and sign for delivery? These are not trivial matters and people are going to be involved in transporting goods for a long time. The just might not be the ones actually steering the wheels.
However, even if they couldn't replace 100% of uses cases for 100% of jobs, they can still replace a number that is large enough to have catastrophic economic consequences.
We have hundreds of generations of evidence that people are very good at adapting to new technology. I'm not especially worried. And anything that becomes a genuine economic threat to enough people will find itself at the pointy end of either a new law against it or a mob ready to destroy it.
I hate to be the one to tell you, but it happened already. Scroll to the top of this very page. See those ads? They're schmoozing you.
What ads? Seriously, what ads? Oh that's right, I blocked them. If that is your idea of "AI" schmoozing then I'm more confident than ever we have nothing to worry about.
They're cleverly designed, previously by psychologists, now by machine learning models, to schmooze you. And they're getting rapidly better.
If it can beat humans, humans can't compete against it and humans can't do work on that area anymore.
Spoken like someone who doesn't understand comparative advantage. There are robots that can weld more precisely than any human. That hasn't eliminated the need for human welders. The reason is comparative advantage. It's really hard to develop a technology that renders humans completely economically useless for a given task.
Now lets say that it takes only 10 minutes of doctors time to find this and their accuracy is 50%.
I can make up absurd hypotheticals that make people look bad too. Don't waste our time with more of them.
We don't need the perfect AI, even a small cron script has the power of replacing people.
You talk about that like it's a bad thing. In reality that small cron script ENHANCES people. It helps us do more than we could otherwise. The machine you are using to read this post is a perfect example. It didn't replace you, it enhanced you.
No, I'm saying automation and AI will displace 10% of human employment quicker than anyone can predict, and Greed won't give a fuck about your pay or your ability to survive. Greed never has.
Greed doesn't get to vote. People do. Machines start replacing people too fast and people will destroy the machines. Politically and/or violently. To pretend otherwise is to ignore human nature.
Past performances may not be representative for future results. There's no guarantee that people will find ways to make money in the new world juste because it happened before
Technically true but there is a lot of evidence to suggest people are pretty good at adapting to new technological realities.
There's no guarantee that people will find ways to make money in the new world juste because it happened before; and we have never had fully autonomous machines before our times.
We don't have "fully autonomous machines" now (whatever you define those to be) and aren't likely to any time soon.
In fact the number of jobs is already going down
Demonstrably false unless you are talking about specific corner cases. If you want to support this provide appropriate citations.
Your example of automobiles shows that new technology may have a huge impact in the amount of individuals who can survive in the post-adoption world: the number of horses and mules dropped to merely a 14% of the original amount during the first half of the 20th century, as there were no jobs where those beasts could be employed with at a price that sustained their existence.
Horses don't get to vote. Horses cannot start protests. Horse can't pass laws. Horses don't have firearms to use if they get sufficiently unhappy. Do you seriously believe that to be a reasonable comparison?
Are you OK with that happening to workers unable to adapt to jobs that pay enough?
Your argument implicitly ignores politics and assumes that humans have no say in what jobs are available. You also are assuming humans have a very limited capacity to adapt. If machines take too many jobs the political reality is that people will shut those machines down - violently if necessary. But that is very unlikely to come to pass because the economics of automation simply don't support that argument. The notion that some sort of general purpose AI driven machine will be developed that is economically cheaper than most of the work force is more than a little preposterous. You are arguing that we will develop a machine or group of machines with human or better intelligence, human levels of flexibility, and that is cheaper than a human worker. Frankly I'm not worried about that happening any time within my lifetime or that of my child.
Consider the progress of Google DeepMind's AlphaGo software, which beat the best human players of the board game Go in early 2016.
Computers are good at doing tasks that require a lot of computation. News at 11. Forgive me if I disagree that this is somehow evidence of the Apocalypse.
Now imagine those improvements transferring to areas like customer service, telemarketing, assembly lines, reception desks, truck driving, and other routine blue-collar and white-collar work.
Ok I'm imagining it. AI managing customer service? Hoo boy that sounds like an absolutely terrible idea. Some bits of customer service can be automated. Many others cannot. Automating the ones that can simply helps us do a better job on the other things we don't have time for. I'm dying to see someone trying to program an AI to do telemarketing. That should be a hoot to watch crash and burn.
It will soon be obvious that half of our job tasks can be done better at almost no cost by AI and robots.
We are a species of tool makers. It's what defines us. Advances in technology and automation come with some discomfort at times but its not something to fear. It makes life better and lets us do bigger and more interesting things. There are concerns about AI but they are manageable. Do you really think wasting a human brain on something as mundane as driving a truck is a good thing? I'm pretty sure we can find something more economically valuable and satisfying for those people to do.
you provide wiring, you do not actually see the work being done witin the modules.
Sigh.... Actually I do see quite a lot of it because we don't just do the wiring but thank's for the insult. We also do a lot of engineering for the ECUs and for several of our customers we provide program management for the entire electrical system of a vehicle. But you go ahead with being condescending to someone you know nothing about.
So your opinions on the wiring hold weight but I can tell that you have no idea how the modules actually send packets and interact on the network
Since I've told you virtually nothing beyond the fact that my company makes wiring products that's quite a leap you made there. Maybe you should find out what I actually do before telling me what I know?
Anyways, your defeatist attitude is mostlikely because you do not understand how canbus actually works on the protocol layer as yopu are only exposed to the physical wiring layer. I can tell you that removing and/or reprogramming modules from a car is not impossible and is already done.
Defeatist? Not at all. Just realist. I know exactly what is involved, how hard it is, and how expensive because I'd done it. If you think it is trivial you either lack perspective or you are utterly clueless because you've never really done it. I also know how ad hoc much of the programming that goes into a lot of it is because I work directly with the engineers doing it.
I am already replacing certain modules in high end cars and replacing them with small SOC's that talk on the canbus, it is not impossible it just takes time and effort.
It is impossible for most people. Yes you can reprogram all this stuff. Doing so is expensive, time consuming and requires specific technical expertise. You aren't going to get a CANbus for Dummies book from Amazon and start reprogramming ECUs over a weekend. You can hire people to do it for you but they don't come cheap.
You may work for an automotive supplier, but that doesn't mean that you understand automotive engineering.
Really? Glad you set me straight. I thought the fact that I AM automotive engineer with over 20 years in the industry might have given me some insight but clearly an AC on slashdot knows all.
Can we please just keep making cars that have NO built-in screens?
Short answer? Probably not. Not in the long run anyway. The cost savings from doing as much as possible with a touch screen are probably going to overwhelm any other options not required by law. This despite the fact that touch screens are a terrible interface for many things.
If and when I need a navigator, I'll mount my phone, but I generally don't need a bright glowing rectangle blowing out my night vision.
Since that doesn't really happen I'm not sure what your complaint there is. I can turn the screen off in my truck if I want to but even when it is on it isn't all that bright unless I want it to be.
I will avoid buying cars equipped with one, if all cars go this way I will pull the fuse on infotaiment system.
Which in all likelihood will result in a car that does not start. I work with these sorts of system in my day job because my company provides wiring for them. These are (generally speaking) not well designed modular systems that can be easily disabled piecemeal. Car companies have virtually zero concept of modularity or security and all the systems tend to be tied into all the others WAY too closely. CAN bus is a hot mess. The way wiring is done in most vehicles would make the head of most slashdot readers explode with rage. It's the most scatterbrained ad-hoc thing you can imagine.
We just did a set of harnesses for a vehicle being prototyped right now and the notion that you could disable the infotainment system on that vehicle with no further problems is laughable. You'd basically have to reprogram the whole thing and possibly replace a lot of the ECUs which for all practical purposes would be nigh impossible.
One aspect people fail to consider is that if your car reports your location to advertisers, it also can be compelled to report your location to law enforcement, creditors, lawyers.
The weird part is that net neutrality is good for everyone and everyone wants it (except ISPs).
That's true but everyone other than ISPs profits from it indirectly whereas ISPs have a direct incentive to kill net neutrality. Direct incentives almost always seem to win out over indirect ones at least in the short term because those with direct incentives are willing to fight harder for them. Google probably benefits from net neutrality but the benefits are hard to point to on a profit and loss statement so it's harder to get them to fight for it.
Suppose you were 15 years old, had never heard about the 6-day war, and you saw a superhero movie set in the backdrop of that war. Whatever happened in that movie, even if you knew it was fiction, would become your first impression about the war and the people.
Grow up. It is not and should not be the job of fictional superhero movies to educate people on world history. Stop being such a kill joy.
The writers should take some caution when using a historical or cultural event as a backdrop.
That's not their job and expecting it to be their job is irrational. Their job is to write an entertaining story and to make money doing so. Historical accuracy only matters insofar as it results in more people paying to see their work. Their job is not and never will be to educate 15 year olds about history. That is the responsibility of parents and teachers.
I haven't seen Wonder Woman or Black Panther, but even the supposedly good Marvel movies have been a disappointment.
You're entitled to your opinion but I (and millions of others) don't agree with it. Literally every marvel movie I've seen in the last several years has been reasonably well done and fun to watch. Some better than others but none of them sucked and I've considered the time spent watching them time well spent.
So you end up with Jackie Chan fighting an unarmed guy with a ladder being 100% more entertaining because you know he's really doing it and can get hurt and the stakes are realistic.
So there has to be real risk of bodily harm to the actors and stuntmen for you to find it entertaining? Wow, that's kind of barbaric of you. How about you just go watch some MMA fights if you want to actually see someone get hurt.
I think a better question to ask is why anyone over the age of 15 goes to watch this sort of cookie cutter content free derivative crap with people in silly costumes doing not even suspension of disbelief believable stuff in the first place.
Who peed in your cereal this morning? If you don't like it don't watch it. Nobody cares if it isn't your particular brand of vodka and I don't agree with your assessment of it's artistic merit either. You aren't convincing anyone so I'm puzzled why you would hang out in a place like slashdot that clearly and overwhelmingly does not agree with you.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't a get off my lawn rant,
So, I started watching "Wonder Woman", and stopped in disgust - not because of the woman empowerment, whatever that is, but because of how it shat all over World War I history, because of how ignorant it was of any historical martial arts, and because of how plot-hole-riddled it was.
You are watching a movie with a woman who can fly, fights gods, and has a magic truth telling lasso and THAT is what bothered you? Maybe you need to lighten the hell up and just enjoy the movie for what it is. Or try to up your dose of whatever medication you are on so you stop taking things that aren't important too seriously.
It's a popcorn super hero movie, not a historically accurate period drama. Try to figure out the difference. You'll enjoy life a lot more when you don't take everything so damn seriously.
Maybe I am just an old fart, unable to enjoy the lighter things in life?
Space mining and ore processing has major advantageous over earth bound processing.
It POTENTIALLY has advantages. It also has a lot of disadvantages. We know some of each and there undoubtedly are a lot of advantages and disadvantages we have yet to learn about. Most of the conjecture I read here on slashdot is the sort of uninformed musings you get from a science fiction story rather than evidence based engineering. What is 100% clear however is the economics of doing this which are hideously expensive and will remain so for a long time to come. There are technical obstacles that probably can be overcome but the biggest obstacles to doing space based mining will be economic ones and those are very well understood. Seriously, if we decide space based manufacturing is worthwhile (and it might be) it's going to be hugely expensive to bootstrap that industry because we have to build entire supply chains with technology we haven't yet developed in the most hostile environment imaginable for purposes we have barely begun to imagine.
Put that way though it sounds like a fun challenge.:-)
The first is the ore's aren't all oxygenated from earth's atmosphere, this means iron can be found in its raw form rather than the iron oxide that exists on earth.
Which is nice but it saves you some steps but adds others. Maybe you skip some (not all) of the refining but you have problems of material handling, heat dispersion, and more that are FAR easier to deal with on Earth if for no other reason than we have a lot of experience doing it and a lot of tools and methods to work with that we've had centuries to develop.
Another major advantage is that you can melt that ore with essentially a big magnifying glass and you have much longer to shape it because you don't' have air messing everything up.
That's not necessarily an advantage depending on what you are trying to do. A great deal of how materials perform is dependent on how their molecular bonds arrange. A lot of properties of materials we depend on actually come about precisely because of how they interact with oxygen and other molecules in our atmosphere. How we manage the heat and remove heat from materials matters a lot in what we get as a final product. Having longer to shape a material is not universally a positive trait though there are many cases where that would be helpful.
The hard part is getting metal-rich asteroids into earth orbit, not the actual mining or processing.
Two thoughts on that. 1) Getting asteroids into earth orbit is a TERRIBLE idea if it is anywhere close to Earth. If we have the ability to move asteroids around like that we also have the ability to drop them on to earth on a target of our choosing. They are de-facto weapons of mass destruction and we do not need more of those. 2) Your presumption that getting to the asteroids being the hard part is belied by the fact that we've already done that. We also already know how to build equipment to move them at least in principle. What we haven't done is develop ANY commercially viable equipment to transform an asteroid into useful products. We barely have a few research projects that are no where close to being able to turn raw iron into functional products. Your attempt to hand wave that as the easy part clearly indicates you don't work in manufacturing (I do) because if you did you'd immediately realize it is FAR harder than you are supposing.
We're probably further along on this than people realize, I expect private space companies will make this happen long before a government could probably entirely for space tourism to begin with.
No we most assuredly are not very far along with space based manufacturing. Our manufacturing prowess in space amounts to a few very small scale research projects. We are so far from commercially viable space mining or space manufacturing
There's definitely evidence of that, but only really in the sense of diversity of skills and ideas, not current day meaning of "diversity" which of race, gender, sexual orientation and other superficial traits.
"Superficial"? Race, gender and sexual orienation are not superficial traits.
The benefits of the type of diversity most commonly talked about these days is actually on pretty shaky ground, with most studies finding no benefit or a very minor benefit/detriment.
Only if you are cherry picking your "evidence" to support your confirmation bias and/or getting it from Fox News.
No they give you the chance to read their content either by showing ads or by allowing them to use some processing resources.
I vote none of the above. I'll block their ads and shut down any scripted attempt to hijack my processors. Their shitty business model is no my problem. Offer me content I find valuable enough to consider as subscription and then we can talk. I already subscribe to other sites. But they don't get to profit just because I visit their site. I have no way to know if the article is worth my time in advance so I'm not about to agree to give away data about me in exchange for worthless information. Their offer is a bad deal.
But you don't need to go to their website and read content that _they_ pay money to produce and serve.
Spare me. They want to have their cake and eat it too. I'm not going to let advertisers track me and try to sell me shit just to read an article. I'm not going to run up my power bill and peg my processor just because they feel entitled to profit whether or not they actually provide real value to me.
Ah yes, the big bad tracking beast. Accumulating demographics on how many people searched for new cars on Tuesday in my town is something I consider totally normal and unobjectionable.
That would be fine if that was all they do. But it isn't. They track what YOU do and the information is traceable to you specifically. Maybe you are fine with that but I am not. Certainly not without them paying me in cash money for that information.
I’m being surveyed without having to stop what I’m doing to fill out surveys.
Do you normally stop to fill out surveys? I don't and I'm not about to automate the process for someone else's convenience and profit. If anyone is going to profit from information about me I insist that I be the first one to profit. After I get paid then we can have a discussion about other people profiting from information about me.
And the personal tracking? Either I see ads for specific items I recently searched for and already bought or I see ads for specific items I searched for but did not buy.
And with an ad blocker I see none of that and they have no opportunity to track where I am across websites (or at least find it harder to do).
There's considerable evidence to suggest that there's plenty of asteroids out there that are nearly pure iron - as in all we have to do is chop it up, hammer it out, or melt it down and cast/print with it.
Oh is that all?
Do you have even the vaguest idea how hard and expensive what you just proposed actually is? What equipment do you plan to use? Because literally none exists or is even in development to do that. We don't have more than even the vaguest idea how we could possibly do industrial scale mining in the vacuum of space. We don't have the technology and won't for some time to come.
Even if 10% of the material is some sort of vacuum-hardening epoxy bonding agent made on Earth, you can still get 90% of your material from space.
Got any more made up statistics you'd like to cite?
Or they're just working on one part of the overall problem - the printer.
Which is fine but then don't give me a bunch of ridiculous PR about building giant structures in space when that isn't likely to happen within the lifetime of anyone reading this. Just say they are working on 3D printers in space which is sufficiently cool by itself.
How it gets supplied with raw material is another issue for someone else to solve, but there are multiple options there.
No there are not. There is precisely one option currently and for the reasonably foreseeable future which is to supply from Earth via rockets. The notion of mining resources that didn't come from Earth simply isn't going to happen for many decades to come even under the most optimistic of assumptions. I'd love to see it happen but I don't honestly expect to see it before I die. Maybe a few research projects and some clever automation to take the first early steps. There isn't enough funding right now to rationally expect more than that.
you could say that about a lot of things we now take for granted because someone persevered with their part of the problem and relied on others to sort out the rest.
Persevered for centuries. It literally took centuries for our technology to get where it is. There is no rational reason to believe it will not take more centuries to get to the point where space based manufacturing is economically viable. It's a worthy goal but the destination is a long way away without a clear path to get there.
I fail to see what's the gain between launching a rocket with 1 ton of preassembled componned or 1 ton of materia used by a space 3D printer to build those component.
The 3D printer doesn't require you to decide what to make with it prior to launch and it allows you to skip the delivery lead time for a product which could be substantial. Otherwise you are correct. You probably would need some sort of 3D printer like technology to manufacture a lot of stuff in space simply because a lot of the manufacturing techniques we use on earth simply wouldn't be viable due to supply chain issues and the need for compact and flexible production equipment.
The only way I can see a real gain is if most of the materia weight come directly from space. For instance, asteriod mining.
Asteroid mining is an idea that won't happen for a very long time. There are several huge obstacles to it including: 1) The fact that we don't have any mining or refining equipment that is space worthy nor any reasonable prospects of getting such equipment anytime soon. 2) The extravagant cost of getting the equipment (which again we don't have) to the asteroid and doing useful work with it. 3) Most useful products require multiple materials/components which cannot be sourced from a single asteroid even if it were financially viable to do so. For a long time to come it's going to be a lot cheaper to launch stuff from earth than to mine it from an asteroid.
Also the biggest obstacles actually are not material weight. We just haven't addressed the hard issues because it's SO expensive to get to orbit that they haven't been worth worrying about. But even if you drop cost to orbit to zero, the cost of building the technology and infrastructure to manufacture in space will likely dwarf even the current launch costs. Think of it this way. Ford builds cars and one of its assembly plants costs north of a billion dollars to create. That is just for final assembly. The cost of the production facilities and parts to build the product in its supply chain easily costs 100 times more than that (there are about 30,000 parts in a typical car). And we have proven and well developed sources of raw materials. All that to build a product we know how to make with proven technology we can manufacture with economies of scale. Making something the cost and complexity of cars in space at any sort of scale would cost a large fraction of the world GDP for the foreseeable future.
Space based manufacturing is arguably a worthwhile goal but we need to be realistic about how long it will take to make it economically viable.
When rockets can no longer hold oversize payloads, building in space might be the best way to go.
Naturally but kind of skipping an important step there. You also have to be able to supply materials in space including raw materials and the production equipment and the power source(s). Whether shipped from earth or mined from other planets/asteroids, you don't get to skip the step of having rockets deliver the machines and power source and the materials to be able to manufacture in space. It's going to be a lot more complicated than shipping even a very clever 3D printer. Actual assembly work is the "easy" bit.
Nearly everyone who has fanciful ideas about manufacturing and mining in space overlooks the supply chain problem. You cannot do useful manufacturing until you have a supply chain established which here on earth we tend to take for granted. Want to build a truss in space? Great. You at minimum need machine(s) that can make it, the tooling for that machine, material handling equipment to move everything around, a source of the right type of metal and other materials in a form factor usable for production, and a power supply. And those are just the broad categories each of which has a bill of materials a mile long of stuff that has to be made and delivered to the production site. 3D printers can mitigate some of the problems but far more remain. And it's going to be VERY expensive to build the supply chain and it's likely to take a very long time.
Don't get me wrong I'm all for manufacturing in space but it's going to be a LOT more complicated than shipping up a 3D printer and some powdered metal and/or plastic. I'm very glad to see people working seriously on the problem but it's going to be decades under the best of circumstances before we see space based manufacturing as more than a research project. There simply isn't enough funding currently to build meaningful off planet infrastructure for manufacturing any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
You have guaranteed supply and in fact in the mine does not have to be that profitable you can futz with supplies to screw your competitors and still get it at the original price, the capital return on your mining investment.
That's only true if your competition cannot get the product elsewhere. Roughly half the world's supply comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And it's generally a bad idea to buy an asset that isn't profitable unless you have no other choice for strategic reasons. Its the same reason you can't buy an oil well and charge whatever price you want.
Mines are not that expensive
Where on Earth did you get that silly notion? Operating a mine is VERY expensive, Huge capital costs and even with a lot of automation a lot of labor costs too. Not to mention the danger involved. Now Apple has the money to afford it but owning and operating a mine isn't a trivial proposition.
Your basic premise that Apple should consider buying a mine is reasonable enough but your supporting arguments aren't good ones. If cobalt is a strategic resource for Apple then buying a mine to ensure a supply is an idea worth considering even if they have to do it at a (modest) loss. The country that is the primary producer (DRC) is politically unstable and corrupt so it could make a lot of sense. There also is the fact that Apple has a huge war chest of cash that sooner or later they will need to do something with. Vertically integrating is an idea that can make a lot of sense if properly done.
Are we sure it is miners and not minors? (also, one does not exclude the other)
Depending on where they mine it it might be a distinction without a difference.
That said I'm pretty sure Apple would be sensitive to the PR shit storm that would erupt if they were found to be directly buying from child labor slaves. I'm also sure at some level they care about the problem but caring doesn't equal solving. Apple does have the resources to deal with it (they could buy the mine) if they are so inclined but it will be interesting to see how much they really care.
Your example of delivering stuff is a good one. How do we do it today? We hire some bag of meat to pick up boxes (we use boxes so bags of meat have conveniently shaped objects to deal with) and move them where they need to go. It's not exactly a cognitively challenging task.
You think that is all there is to moving stuff around? Picking up boxes and moving them around? It's rather more complicated than that. You have to have a lot of standardization of material handling equipment to make high levels of automation feasible. Plus there is a LOT more that goes into moving cargo than just picking up boxes and moving them from one place to another.
Barely any AI beyond basic navigation required.
Unless you care about things like security for the cargo, loading, unloading, bills of lading, damaged goods, unexpected circumstances, and all the other things that drivers do. A fully automated delivery system isn't nearly the trivial endeavor you make it out to be.
Autonomous vehicles could handle a lot of that.
Not really, no. I work in a manufacturing plant. Even if you sent an autonomous truck to deliver something it still would need a person on board. Why? Exactly how do you plan to unload the delivery? Who is going to keep someone from stealing stuff off the truck? How do you plan to exchange paperwork and sign for delivery? These are not trivial matters and people are going to be involved in transporting goods for a long time. The just might not be the ones actually steering the wheels.
However, even if they couldn't replace 100% of uses cases for 100% of jobs, they can still replace a number that is large enough to have catastrophic economic consequences.
We have hundreds of generations of evidence that people are very good at adapting to new technology. I'm not especially worried. And anything that becomes a genuine economic threat to enough people will find itself at the pointy end of either a new law against it or a mob ready to destroy it.
I hate to be the one to tell you, but it happened already. Scroll to the top of this very page. See those ads? They're schmoozing you.
What ads? Seriously, what ads? Oh that's right, I blocked them. If that is your idea of "AI" schmoozing then I'm more confident than ever we have nothing to worry about.
They're cleverly designed, previously by psychologists, now by machine learning models, to schmooze you. And they're getting rapidly better.
The click through rates on ads says otherwise.
If it can beat humans, humans can't compete against it and humans can't do work on that area anymore.
Spoken like someone who doesn't understand comparative advantage. There are robots that can weld more precisely than any human. That hasn't eliminated the need for human welders. The reason is comparative advantage. It's really hard to develop a technology that renders humans completely economically useless for a given task.
Now lets say that it takes only 10 minutes of doctors time to find this and their accuracy is 50%.
I can make up absurd hypotheticals that make people look bad too. Don't waste our time with more of them.
We don't need the perfect AI, even a small cron script has the power of replacing people.
You talk about that like it's a bad thing. In reality that small cron script ENHANCES people. It helps us do more than we could otherwise. The machine you are using to read this post is a perfect example. It didn't replace you, it enhanced you.
No, I'm saying automation and AI will displace 10% of human employment quicker than anyone can predict, and Greed won't give a fuck about your pay or your ability to survive. Greed never has.
Greed doesn't get to vote. People do. Machines start replacing people too fast and people will destroy the machines. Politically and/or violently. To pretend otherwise is to ignore human nature.
Past performances may not be representative for future results. There's no guarantee that people will find ways to make money in the new world juste because it happened before
Technically true but there is a lot of evidence to suggest people are pretty good at adapting to new technological realities.
There's no guarantee that people will find ways to make money in the new world juste because it happened before; and we have never had fully autonomous machines before our times.
We don't have "fully autonomous machines" now (whatever you define those to be) and aren't likely to any time soon.
In fact the number of jobs is already going down
Demonstrably false unless you are talking about specific corner cases. If you want to support this provide appropriate citations.
Your example of automobiles shows that new technology may have a huge impact in the amount of individuals who can survive in the post-adoption world: the number of horses and mules dropped to merely a 14% of the original amount during the first half of the 20th century, as there were no jobs where those beasts could be employed with at a price that sustained their existence.
Horses don't get to vote. Horses cannot start protests. Horse can't pass laws. Horses don't have firearms to use if they get sufficiently unhappy. Do you seriously believe that to be a reasonable comparison?
Are you OK with that happening to workers unable to adapt to jobs that pay enough?
Your argument implicitly ignores politics and assumes that humans have no say in what jobs are available. You also are assuming humans have a very limited capacity to adapt. If machines take too many jobs the political reality is that people will shut those machines down - violently if necessary. But that is very unlikely to come to pass because the economics of automation simply don't support that argument. The notion that some sort of general purpose AI driven machine will be developed that is economically cheaper than most of the work force is more than a little preposterous. You are arguing that we will develop a machine or group of machines with human or better intelligence, human levels of flexibility, and that is cheaper than a human worker. Frankly I'm not worried about that happening any time within my lifetime or that of my child.
Consider the progress of Google DeepMind's AlphaGo software, which beat the best human players of the board game Go in early 2016.
Computers are good at doing tasks that require a lot of computation. News at 11. Forgive me if I disagree that this is somehow evidence of the Apocalypse.
Now imagine those improvements transferring to areas like customer service, telemarketing, assembly lines, reception desks, truck driving, and other routine blue-collar and white-collar work.
Ok I'm imagining it. AI managing customer service? Hoo boy that sounds like an absolutely terrible idea. Some bits of customer service can be automated. Many others cannot. Automating the ones that can simply helps us do a better job on the other things we don't have time for. I'm dying to see someone trying to program an AI to do telemarketing. That should be a hoot to watch crash and burn.
It will soon be obvious that half of our job tasks can be done better at almost no cost by AI and robots.
The sky is falling the sky is falling....
We are a species of tool makers. It's what defines us. Advances in technology and automation come with some discomfort at times but its not something to fear. It makes life better and lets us do bigger and more interesting things. There are concerns about AI but they are manageable. Do you really think wasting a human brain on something as mundane as driving a truck is a good thing? I'm pretty sure we can find something more economically valuable and satisfying for those people to do.
you provide wiring, you do not actually see the work being done witin the modules.
Sigh.... Actually I do see quite a lot of it because we don't just do the wiring but thank's for the insult. We also do a lot of engineering for the ECUs and for several of our customers we provide program management for the entire electrical system of a vehicle. But you go ahead with being condescending to someone you know nothing about.
So your opinions on the wiring hold weight but I can tell that you have no idea how the modules actually send packets and interact on the network
Since I've told you virtually nothing beyond the fact that my company makes wiring products that's quite a leap you made there. Maybe you should find out what I actually do before telling me what I know?
Anyways, your defeatist attitude is mostlikely because you do not understand how canbus actually works on the protocol layer as yopu are only exposed to the physical wiring layer. I can tell you that removing and/or reprogramming modules from a car is not impossible and is already done.
Defeatist? Not at all. Just realist. I know exactly what is involved, how hard it is, and how expensive because I'd done it. If you think it is trivial you either lack perspective or you are utterly clueless because you've never really done it. I also know how ad hoc much of the programming that goes into a lot of it is because I work directly with the engineers doing it.
I am already replacing certain modules in high end cars and replacing them with small SOC's that talk on the canbus, it is not impossible it just takes time and effort.
It is impossible for most people. Yes you can reprogram all this stuff. Doing so is expensive, time consuming and requires specific technical expertise. You aren't going to get a CANbus for Dummies book from Amazon and start reprogramming ECUs over a weekend. You can hire people to do it for you but they don't come cheap.
You may work for an automotive supplier, but that doesn't mean that you understand automotive engineering.
Really? Glad you set me straight. I thought the fact that I AM automotive engineer with over 20 years in the industry might have given me some insight but clearly an AC on slashdot knows all.
Can we please just keep making cars that have NO built-in screens?
Short answer? Probably not. Not in the long run anyway. The cost savings from doing as much as possible with a touch screen are probably going to overwhelm any other options not required by law. This despite the fact that touch screens are a terrible interface for many things.
If and when I need a navigator, I'll mount my phone, but I generally don't need a bright glowing rectangle blowing out my night vision.
Since that doesn't really happen I'm not sure what your complaint there is. I can turn the screen off in my truck if I want to but even when it is on it isn't all that bright unless I want it to be.
I will avoid buying cars equipped with one, if all cars go this way I will pull the fuse on infotaiment system.
Which in all likelihood will result in a car that does not start. I work with these sorts of system in my day job because my company provides wiring for them. These are (generally speaking) not well designed modular systems that can be easily disabled piecemeal. Car companies have virtually zero concept of modularity or security and all the systems tend to be tied into all the others WAY too closely. CAN bus is a hot mess. The way wiring is done in most vehicles would make the head of most slashdot readers explode with rage. It's the most scatterbrained ad-hoc thing you can imagine.
We just did a set of harnesses for a vehicle being prototyped right now and the notion that you could disable the infotainment system on that vehicle with no further problems is laughable. You'd basically have to reprogram the whole thing and possibly replace a lot of the ECUs which for all practical purposes would be nigh impossible.
One aspect people fail to consider is that if your car reports your location to advertisers, it also can be compelled to report your location to law enforcement, creditors, lawyers.
Yep. Scary ain't it?
The weird part is that net neutrality is good for everyone and everyone wants it (except ISPs).
That's true but everyone other than ISPs profits from it indirectly whereas ISPs have a direct incentive to kill net neutrality. Direct incentives almost always seem to win out over indirect ones at least in the short term because those with direct incentives are willing to fight harder for them. Google probably benefits from net neutrality but the benefits are hard to point to on a profit and loss statement so it's harder to get them to fight for it.
Suppose you were 15 years old, had never heard about the 6-day war, and you saw a superhero movie set in the backdrop of that war. Whatever happened in that movie, even if you knew it was fiction, would become your first impression about the war and the people.
Grow up. It is not and should not be the job of fictional superhero movies to educate people on world history. Stop being such a kill joy.
The writers should take some caution when using a historical or cultural event as a backdrop.
That's not their job and expecting it to be their job is irrational. Their job is to write an entertaining story and to make money doing so. Historical accuracy only matters insofar as it results in more people paying to see their work. Their job is not and never will be to educate 15 year olds about history. That is the responsibility of parents and teachers.
I haven't seen Wonder Woman or Black Panther, but even the supposedly good Marvel movies have been a disappointment.
You're entitled to your opinion but I (and millions of others) don't agree with it. Literally every marvel movie I've seen in the last several years has been reasonably well done and fun to watch. Some better than others but none of them sucked and I've considered the time spent watching them time well spent.
So you end up with Jackie Chan fighting an unarmed guy with a ladder being 100% more entertaining because you know he's really doing it and can get hurt and the stakes are realistic.
So there has to be real risk of bodily harm to the actors and stuntmen for you to find it entertaining? Wow, that's kind of barbaric of you. How about you just go watch some MMA fights if you want to actually see someone get hurt.
I think a better question to ask is why anyone over the age of 15 goes to watch this sort of cookie cutter content free derivative crap with people in silly costumes doing not even suspension of disbelief believable stuff in the first place.
Who peed in your cereal this morning? If you don't like it don't watch it. Nobody cares if it isn't your particular brand of vodka and I don't agree with your assessment of it's artistic merit either. You aren't convincing anyone so I'm puzzled why you would hang out in a place like slashdot that clearly and overwhelmingly does not agree with you.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't a get off my lawn rant,
Yes it is.
So, I started watching "Wonder Woman", and stopped in disgust - not because of the woman empowerment, whatever that is, but because of how it shat all over World War I history, because of how ignorant it was of any historical martial arts, and because of how plot-hole-riddled it was.
You are watching a movie with a woman who can fly, fights gods, and has a magic truth telling lasso and THAT is what bothered you? Maybe you need to lighten the hell up and just enjoy the movie for what it is. Or try to up your dose of whatever medication you are on so you stop taking things that aren't important too seriously.
It's a popcorn super hero movie, not a historically accurate period drama. Try to figure out the difference. You'll enjoy life a lot more when you don't take everything so damn seriously.
Maybe I am just an old fart, unable to enjoy the lighter things in life?
Gee, ya think?
Space mining and ore processing has major advantageous over earth bound processing.
It POTENTIALLY has advantages. It also has a lot of disadvantages. We know some of each and there undoubtedly are a lot of advantages and disadvantages we have yet to learn about. Most of the conjecture I read here on slashdot is the sort of uninformed musings you get from a science fiction story rather than evidence based engineering. What is 100% clear however is the economics of doing this which are hideously expensive and will remain so for a long time to come. There are technical obstacles that probably can be overcome but the biggest obstacles to doing space based mining will be economic ones and those are very well understood. Seriously, if we decide space based manufacturing is worthwhile (and it might be) it's going to be hugely expensive to bootstrap that industry because we have to build entire supply chains with technology we haven't yet developed in the most hostile environment imaginable for purposes we have barely begun to imagine.
Put that way though it sounds like a fun challenge. :-)
The first is the ore's aren't all oxygenated from earth's atmosphere, this means iron can be found in its raw form rather than the iron oxide that exists on earth.
Which is nice but it saves you some steps but adds others. Maybe you skip some (not all) of the refining but you have problems of material handling, heat dispersion, and more that are FAR easier to deal with on Earth if for no other reason than we have a lot of experience doing it and a lot of tools and methods to work with that we've had centuries to develop.
Another major advantage is that you can melt that ore with essentially a big magnifying glass and you have much longer to shape it because you don't' have air messing everything up.
That's not necessarily an advantage depending on what you are trying to do. A great deal of how materials perform is dependent on how their molecular bonds arrange. A lot of properties of materials we depend on actually come about precisely because of how they interact with oxygen and other molecules in our atmosphere. How we manage the heat and remove heat from materials matters a lot in what we get as a final product. Having longer to shape a material is not universally a positive trait though there are many cases where that would be helpful.
The hard part is getting metal-rich asteroids into earth orbit, not the actual mining or processing.
Two thoughts on that. 1) Getting asteroids into earth orbit is a TERRIBLE idea if it is anywhere close to Earth. If we have the ability to move asteroids around like that we also have the ability to drop them on to earth on a target of our choosing. They are de-facto weapons of mass destruction and we do not need more of those. 2) Your presumption that getting to the asteroids being the hard part is belied by the fact that we've already done that. We also already know how to build equipment to move them at least in principle. What we haven't done is develop ANY commercially viable equipment to transform an asteroid into useful products. We barely have a few research projects that are no where close to being able to turn raw iron into functional products. Your attempt to hand wave that as the easy part clearly indicates you don't work in manufacturing (I do) because if you did you'd immediately realize it is FAR harder than you are supposing.
We're probably further along on this than people realize, I expect private space companies will make this happen long before a government could probably entirely for space tourism to begin with.
No we most assuredly are not very far along with space based manufacturing. Our manufacturing prowess in space amounts to a few very small scale research projects. We are so far from commercially viable space mining or space manufacturing
There's definitely evidence of that, but only really in the sense of diversity of skills and ideas, not current day meaning of "diversity" which of race, gender, sexual orientation and other superficial traits.
"Superficial"? Race, gender and sexual orienation are not superficial traits.
The benefits of the type of diversity most commonly talked about these days is actually on pretty shaky ground, with most studies finding no benefit or a very minor benefit/detriment.
Only if you are cherry picking your "evidence" to support your confirmation bias and/or getting it from Fox News.
No they give you the chance to read their content either by showing ads or by allowing them to use some processing resources.
I vote none of the above. I'll block their ads and shut down any scripted attempt to hijack my processors. Their shitty business model is no my problem. Offer me content I find valuable enough to consider as subscription and then we can talk. I already subscribe to other sites. But they don't get to profit just because I visit their site. I have no way to know if the article is worth my time in advance so I'm not about to agree to give away data about me in exchange for worthless information. Their offer is a bad deal.
But you don't need to go to their website and read content that _they_ pay money to produce and serve.
Spare me. They want to have their cake and eat it too. I'm not going to let advertisers track me and try to sell me shit just to read an article. I'm not going to run up my power bill and peg my processor just because they feel entitled to profit whether or not they actually provide real value to me.
Ah yes, the big bad tracking beast. Accumulating demographics on how many people searched for new cars on Tuesday in my town is something I consider totally normal and unobjectionable.
That would be fine if that was all they do. But it isn't. They track what YOU do and the information is traceable to you specifically. Maybe you are fine with that but I am not. Certainly not without them paying me in cash money for that information.
I’m being surveyed without having to stop what I’m doing to fill out surveys.
Do you normally stop to fill out surveys? I don't and I'm not about to automate the process for someone else's convenience and profit. If anyone is going to profit from information about me I insist that I be the first one to profit. After I get paid then we can have a discussion about other people profiting from information about me.
And the personal tracking? Either I see ads for specific items I recently searched for and already bought or I see ads for specific items I searched for but did not buy.
And with an ad blocker I see none of that and they have no opportunity to track where I am across websites (or at least find it harder to do).
There's considerable evidence to suggest that there's plenty of asteroids out there that are nearly pure iron - as in all we have to do is chop it up, hammer it out, or melt it down and cast/print with it.
Oh is that all?
Do you have even the vaguest idea how hard and expensive what you just proposed actually is? What equipment do you plan to use? Because literally none exists or is even in development to do that. We don't have more than even the vaguest idea how we could possibly do industrial scale mining in the vacuum of space. We don't have the technology and won't for some time to come.
Even if 10% of the material is some sort of vacuum-hardening epoxy bonding agent made on Earth, you can still get 90% of your material from space.
Got any more made up statistics you'd like to cite?
Or they're just working on one part of the overall problem - the printer.
Which is fine but then don't give me a bunch of ridiculous PR about building giant structures in space when that isn't likely to happen within the lifetime of anyone reading this. Just say they are working on 3D printers in space which is sufficiently cool by itself.
How it gets supplied with raw material is another issue for someone else to solve, but there are multiple options there.
No there are not. There is precisely one option currently and for the reasonably foreseeable future which is to supply from Earth via rockets. The notion of mining resources that didn't come from Earth simply isn't going to happen for many decades to come even under the most optimistic of assumptions. I'd love to see it happen but I don't honestly expect to see it before I die. Maybe a few research projects and some clever automation to take the first early steps. There isn't enough funding right now to rationally expect more than that.
you could say that about a lot of things we now take for granted because someone persevered with their part of the problem and relied on others to sort out the rest.
Persevered for centuries. It literally took centuries for our technology to get where it is. There is no rational reason to believe it will not take more centuries to get to the point where space based manufacturing is economically viable. It's a worthy goal but the destination is a long way away without a clear path to get there.
I fail to see what's the gain between launching a rocket with 1 ton of preassembled componned or 1 ton of materia used by a space 3D printer to build those component.
The 3D printer doesn't require you to decide what to make with it prior to launch and it allows you to skip the delivery lead time for a product which could be substantial. Otherwise you are correct. You probably would need some sort of 3D printer like technology to manufacture a lot of stuff in space simply because a lot of the manufacturing techniques we use on earth simply wouldn't be viable due to supply chain issues and the need for compact and flexible production equipment.
The only way I can see a real gain is if most of the materia weight come directly from space. For instance, asteriod mining.
Asteroid mining is an idea that won't happen for a very long time. There are several huge obstacles to it including: 1) The fact that we don't have any mining or refining equipment that is space worthy nor any reasonable prospects of getting such equipment anytime soon. 2) The extravagant cost of getting the equipment (which again we don't have) to the asteroid and doing useful work with it. 3) Most useful products require multiple materials/components which cannot be sourced from a single asteroid even if it were financially viable to do so. For a long time to come it's going to be a lot cheaper to launch stuff from earth than to mine it from an asteroid.
Also the biggest obstacles actually are not material weight. We just haven't addressed the hard issues because it's SO expensive to get to orbit that they haven't been worth worrying about. But even if you drop cost to orbit to zero, the cost of building the technology and infrastructure to manufacture in space will likely dwarf even the current launch costs. Think of it this way. Ford builds cars and one of its assembly plants costs north of a billion dollars to create. That is just for final assembly. The cost of the production facilities and parts to build the product in its supply chain easily costs 100 times more than that (there are about 30,000 parts in a typical car). And we have proven and well developed sources of raw materials. All that to build a product we know how to make with proven technology we can manufacture with economies of scale. Making something the cost and complexity of cars in space at any sort of scale would cost a large fraction of the world GDP for the foreseeable future.
Space based manufacturing is arguably a worthwhile goal but we need to be realistic about how long it will take to make it economically viable.
When rockets can no longer hold oversize payloads, building in space might be the best way to go.
Naturally but kind of skipping an important step there. You also have to be able to supply materials in space including raw materials and the production equipment and the power source(s). Whether shipped from earth or mined from other planets/asteroids, you don't get to skip the step of having rockets deliver the machines and power source and the materials to be able to manufacture in space. It's going to be a lot more complicated than shipping even a very clever 3D printer. Actual assembly work is the "easy" bit.
Nearly everyone who has fanciful ideas about manufacturing and mining in space overlooks the supply chain problem. You cannot do useful manufacturing until you have a supply chain established which here on earth we tend to take for granted. Want to build a truss in space? Great. You at minimum need machine(s) that can make it, the tooling for that machine, material handling equipment to move everything around, a source of the right type of metal and other materials in a form factor usable for production, and a power supply. And those are just the broad categories each of which has a bill of materials a mile long of stuff that has to be made and delivered to the production site. 3D printers can mitigate some of the problems but far more remain. And it's going to be VERY expensive to build the supply chain and it's likely to take a very long time.
Don't get me wrong I'm all for manufacturing in space but it's going to be a LOT more complicated than shipping up a 3D printer and some powdered metal and/or plastic. I'm very glad to see people working seriously on the problem but it's going to be decades under the best of circumstances before we see space based manufacturing as more than a research project. There simply isn't enough funding currently to build meaningful off planet infrastructure for manufacturing any time soon.