The documentation aspect of any project is very important, as it can help people to both understand it and track changes. Unfortunately, many developers aren't very interested in documentation aspect, so it often gets neglected.
That's putting it mildly. For any kind of engineer documentation is crucial and when you are Doing It Right actually accounts for the majority of the job. An engineer's job is to figure out a plan to solve a problem AND then to generate documentation informing/instructing other people in the clearest possible way what to do to execute that plan. The documentation actually accounts for the majority of the work in most cases and is every bit as important as the solution because if you cannot communicate your solution then it is useless. Far too many engineers do documentation really poorly, and I'm not just talking about programmers. When they can be bothered they tend to forget that the documentation isn't for themselves - it's so other people can readily understand their solution to a problem and execute that solution reliably. I receive product drawings all the time that are missing critical details, fail to convey expectations, are written in a confusing manner, or are obviously reminder notes rather than instructions. Engineering is a team sport and communication and documentation are how the team collaborates.
I've heard a lot of programmers make the claim that good code should be self documenting and while there is truth to that, most of the time it's just an excuse to blow off the humdrum work of doing proper documentation fully. Code should be clear but documentation needs to make it even more so. Expecting your solution to be obvious and complete in every detail is a false economy. You are saving your time at someone else's expense. Good engineers write good documentation. If your documentation sucks then you are bad at engineering no matter how elegant your technical solution might be.
I think you are absolutely right today, but that you're perhaps forgetting that tech doesn't move linearly.
I'm not forgetting that at all. Economics isn't linear either. I think you might be confusing the economics of microchips and software for the economics of manufacturing which is very different. It is REALLY hard and expensive to make general purpose manufacturing devices produce non-trivial special purpose products in (relatively) small batches. The limitations aren't typically technical - they are economic and they are extremely hard to overcome in a vast number of cases.
Robot solutions that today cost millions will at some point cost thousands.
Some will. A lot will not. You are under the misapprehension that economies of scale are in play here that are not in actuality. You are arguing that we can develop an extremely inexpensive, safe, easily programmed, general purpose robot. Cheap enough that it can displace humans in low labor cost countries. We aren't in any danger of reaching such a state of affairs any time soon. (as in within the lifetime of anyone reading this) Yes robots and automation will get cheaper and more capable but they have a loooooooong way to go before humans aren't needed to build stuff. Nobody I know who works in manufacturing is worried at all about robots making humans in manufacturing obsolete.
In my country, a company started selling cheaper and safer robot arms a few years ago. They can't carry as much as the robots at car manufacturing plants, and they aren't as fast. But they don't require a cage, they cost a fraction and the UI for programming them is much, much easier to work with.
And yet they haven't taken the world by storm. Yes there will be progress but humans aren't going to disappear from the equation. Even at a few thousand dollars they still are too expensive for a lot of low volume production. There is a very long tail for how cheap automation has to get before it can bump people out of the equation. It's also hard to achieve economies of scale with automation if you don't have large unit volumes because setup and engineering costs don't enjoy economies of scale at low unit volumes.
Yeah, robotic tech today is still primitive compared to humans. But the future belongs to those who can figure out how to take advantage of these primitive robots.
Automation is anything but primitive even today. The problem isn't the technology but in making the technology cheap. You seem to be grossly underestimating the difficulty of that task. You are quite right that there are riches to be had for those who can control future automation and technology but that is nothing new. There will be impressive progress but I have near as makes no difference zero concern about mass unemployment from automation in my lifetime.
You can't stop progress, robots are so much better and cheaper (in the end) than using humans for a lot of things (especially factory/warehouse stuff).
HA! If that were actually true then my job would be a lot easier. My day job is to run a manufacturing plant. I'm an industrial engineer as well as a cost accountant and I make these sorts of decisions regarding automation daily. Your estimation of the cost/benefit of automation is not even close to reality for all but a few corner cases. Robots only make economic sense when you are talking about relatively large unit volumes or certain types of high value precision work or very dangerous jobs. They are not always faster or better and they sure as hell are not always cheaper. Yes that includes "factory/warehouse stuff".
Simple example. My company makes wire harnesses. There isn't a machine in existence that can automate a substantial portion of what we make for anything remotely resembling a reasonable cost. The machines that do exist to make some limited portions of what we manufacturing are either limited to fairly narrow jobs like lead making (cutting, stripping, and crimping wires) or ones that can do wider numbers of jobs cost literally millions of dollars each. Some specialty jobs they do faster or better but not nearly as many as you are probably imagining. To replace humans in general you will have to come up with a robot that is as trainable, as dexterous, and cheaper than a human. Good luck with that because we are no where close to that level of automation much less getting there for economically reasonable cost.
With the current rate of automation we are actually already to late do handle the loss of jobs and how to figure out how we could give those people a better live.
There is no data to support this assertion. Unemployment is well within normal ranges and showing no signs of changing. There has been no measurable long term displacement of workers by robots. What data there is shows that worker displacement is a result of poor economic and education policy, not automation. In places like the US the losses in manufacturing jobs are in reality a function of labor costs, not automation. What happened is the labor intensive jobs went to places with low labor costs. When politicians talk about bringing manufacturing jobs back what they are really promising (though they don't know it) is to lower wages to compete with places like China because that is the ONLY way those jobs are coming back. Do you really want people working for $1-2/hour?
After WWII when the rest of the world was rebuilding for a few decades folks in the US had a remarkable run of economic prosperity in large part due to a lack of competition. Those days are gone and now the US and other prosperous countries are going to have to compete globally. If you think automation is the biggest threat to your economic prosperity then you are delusional. The biggest threat is the 50% of the world's population in Asia (esp China and India) who have been sitting on the economic sidelines for over a century. Now that China has woken up and India is threatening to do so the game is different. You can worry about automation killing jobs in the short run if you want but you are worrying about the wrong thing.
The question going forward is: What happens when the future generations of robots arrive?
The same thing that happens with every other kind of automation. The people will be more productive and some will find new jobs. What is it with all the chicken-little articles about automation? There is plenty of valuable work to be done no matter how much automation we have. Yes some people will be displaced in the short term and for some that will be uncomfortable. It is highly unlikely to occur at a rate detrimental to the economy at large. Most of the automation will simply make workers more effective at their jobs. The very device you are reading this on (a computer) is nothing more than a form of automation which has made you more productive and increased opportunities. This dystopian notion that automation will cause mass unemployment is just nonsense spouted off by people who don't actually understand automation or the problems surrounding it. Automation is not going to be the grim reaper for jobs. Bad economic policy and bad education policy is what you should worry about. A second rate education system or a poorly controlled economy will kill jobs FAR faster than any amount of automation you could possibly imagine.
VR's advantage is immersiveness. Multitasking isn't the point.
True but immersive to do what exactly? That's the problem with VR and has been since its inception. Aside from a few vertical simulation use cases (like flight simulation) and more recently some niche gaming it simply don't have that killer application to make to go mainstream. It's not that the technology is bad or anthing like that but it's hard to imagine any use cases where your grandmother is going to be strapping on a VR headset either. I think the main use of VR will be as a technology test bed for AR applications which is actually pretty useful - just not in the way people imagine. AR has FAR more and more obvious use cases than VR and a lot of the technology will likely be shared. I used to have a day job working on VR technology and it's cool stuff but people imagine it to be more useful than it really is in the real world.
I'm still not convinced that the decision to go with Windows Phone was particularly bad.
The decision was fine. How they executed it was profoundly idiotic. They announced that they were switching to Microsoft in February 2011 but didn't have an actually product with Microsoft's system until November 2011. Basically they told everyone they were killing off their current offerings nearly a year before they had the replacement ready to ship. That's just weapon's grade stupid especially given how little traction Microsoft had managed to achieve against Apple and Google.
If they'd gone with Android, they'd have been stuck in a race-to-the-bottom in a market with razor-thin margins were Google is the only company that makes serious money.
Google doesn't make serious money off of Android and never really has. Look at their financial statements if you need proof. Samsung does ok but Android for Google is more of a defensive play to keep competitors from locking them out of the mobile ad market where they actually make their money. Kind of like Amazon's tactics with Kindle, they don't have to make money on Android directly to have it be worth their while. That's why Android phones can be done on the cheap because Google doesn't need a big markup unlike Apple or Microsoft. (the downside being that they have every incentive to track you closely and sell your information to advertisers)
The surprising thing was that Microsoft, a company that achieved a monopoly position by doing everything in its power to encourage third-party development for their platform, completely failed to attract third-party apps to Windows Phone.
I don't think it's so shocking since they were really years late in getting something competitive with iOS or Android to the market. I don't care how dominant you are, you cannot give competitors like Google or Apple that much of a head start. And the market dynamics in mobile are different than the ones in PCs where Microsoft achieved their dominance so it was never going to be an easy translation for them.
Nokia proved that being first mover isn't always an advantage.
That was well understood loooong before Nokia but your point is quite correct.
Nokia never really was very good at certain types of software, specifically the user facing parts of it. I owned a series of Nokia phones for several years and the interfaces on their phones were poor for anything but the most basic of phone operations. They routinely build phones which technically had features like email or web browsers but they were so awkward to use as to be useless. It's what I call checkbox marketing - they could claim they had that feature without lying but the actual feature was nothing more than the most minimal version of it imaginable - useless in the real world. I bought a Nokia "smartphone" around the same time as the early iPhones. On paper they were roughly equivalent but in actual use there was no comparison. The email and web browser on the Nokia were effectively useless. Eventually they started making phones more in the model of the iPhone but by then it was too little and too late.
I think the problem was that Nokia thought their customers were AT&T, Verizon, etc. Apple (and later Google) understood that the real customer to worry about was the end user, not the wireless phone companies. Nokia designed phones that physically were solid or at least interesting hardware-wise but they never made the investments (until too late) to do the same for the software. At the end of the day that is what killed them along with some weapon's grade stupid management decisions relating to Microsoft. The hardware in the iPhone and comparable Android phones isn't anything Nokia couldn't do. The secret sauce is the software and the network effects (ecosystem) that go along with it. There wasn't room in the market for more than 2 or 3 platforms once the network effects took hold and Nokia didn't figure out the right formula until it was too late to matter.
Waiting makes even more sense if you're not buying the latest.
True but people often don't care that much and need a phone right now. If you aren't concerned about whatever is in the next one and you need a phone today then you are probably going to buy a phone today even if you could save a little by waiting. I'm not saying it's the most sensible course of action but a lot of people simply aren't that concerned with their smartphone.
Why would most people and Apple fans purchase an iPhone in June or July, provided that the new iPhone is to be announced a few weeks later?
Millions of people (including Apple customers) don't actually give a shit about having the latest and greatest. My father has an iPhone and it's a fine choice for him but he's never been on the latest version. He's always 1-2 editions behind whatever the latest is and he's fine with that. There are millions of people just like him. For someone like me or presumably you, you are correct - I would not buy a new iPhone three weeks before a new version is released because there is a reasonable chance I might upgrade if I like what I see.
It's "easy" (for lack of a better word) to sell lots of units if you don't give a shit about making a profit. The tough bit is to make a lot of profit while still selling a lot of units. So far only Apple and Samsung seem to have figured out that trick in the smartphone era.
No nokia ignored the smartphone market and clung to a dying OS that nobody wanted way too long to the point they were reliant almost completely on dumb phone market,
Not correct. Nokia very much did NOT ignore the smartphone market. The problem was that their product offerings were not well aligned with what it turned out customers actually wanted. Nokia was for a long time the number one seller of "smartphones" even before Apple introduced the iPhone. The problem was that once people saw the iPhone the game was different after that and Nokia wasn't able to catch up. They were selling smartphones the whole time but the problem was that they weren't selling the smartphones that people actually wanted post-iPhone.
Then Nokia made the asinine decision to announce the switch to Microsoft's OS close to a year before they actually had a product ready to ship. Basically they announced that their current products that they were selling were dead on arrival so who is going to buy a phone with an OS you know isn't going to get updated or supported?
If you think the market potential for custom-fit clothing is unknown and risky, talk to just about any female about what it's like to shop for jeans.
It IS unknown and risky. Any time you are investing millions of dollars into automation that is inherently risky, especially when people's buying habits are accustomed to a different process. Customer education is expensive. Nobody has done custom clothing on a large scale because the technology to do so at a low cost does not exist and isn't likely to exist any time soon. In fact it is easy to show that it is nearly impossible to make a one off custom product at a price point competitive with mass produced goods even if the quality is better no matter what technology you use. The reason for this is simple. There are fixed costs to ANY manufacturing process that have to be amortized across the number of units produced. These costs are the same whether you produce one unit or a million. It is virtually impossible to amortize the fixed costs of a custom product over a large enough number of units sold to make them at a cost similar to mass produced products. It is almost always cheaper to make a standard product (or a range of standard products) than it is to make custom products even with flexible automation.
People who think custom products can be made cost competitive with mass produced products simply don't understand the costs involved once you are talking about large unit volumes. There are some corner cases and I'm certainly not arguing that there isn't a market for custom apparel. That such a market exists is obvious. What I'm saying is that it's unclear how bit that market can ever become or how close the delta between mass produced and custom apparel can become. I work with this sort of calculations all the time and my opinion is that the delta is going to remain large for the foreseeable future.
True but this is well understood among those of us who work in manufacturing.
A lot of people would be willing to pay somewhat more for quick delivery of custom-made clothing.
While there is a market for quickly made custom clothing, it's unclear exactly how big it is and it is clear that the technology to make it happen on a large scale is not yet economically viable. I design assembly lines and production systems for a living. The economics of automating what you describe require rather substantial scale to become viable. It's kind of a chicken and egg problem. Nobody is willing to invest in the expensive automation because it isn't clear that the market exists and the market doesn't exist because nobody is willing to take the risk on building the automation for an unproven market.
I expect it will get sorted out in due time but it seems certain that either someone is going to have to take a VERY big risk or we will have to wait for the automation to become more economically viable. And it won't displace traditional mass production unless it can get very close to it on price which is a much harder thing to do than many people appreciate. It's kind of like 3D printing. It's very useful and a great technology but the unit cost of producing a single unit that way generally is higher than other mass production techniques aside from a few corner cases.
True, but note that this factory might very well be able to run 24/7. Factories with large numbers of human workers tend to lie idle 10-12 hours a day, and I imagine that is even true in Bangladesh.
Not sure where you got this idea but you are misinformed. My day job is to run a (small) manufacturing plant. Three shift factories using human labor are incredibly common everywhere in the world. Factories that don't run multiple shifts only do so because they don't have enough work to justify multiple shifts. You do not need high levels of automation to run multiple shifts effectively and never have. If anything automated factories are LESS able to run three shifts because of the need for maintenance (scheduled and unscheduled) on the additional production equipment. Robots and automated equipment break and need servicing routinely. Anyone who thinks they run with perfect reliability has never worked in a manufacturing plant.
I've never seen a company the size of Telsa with so much short interest, and I've learned to never ignore short interest.
Plenty of companies the size of Tesla have copious short interest and I've seen several who were larger than Tesla over the years. The reason for the short interest obviously is that Tesla's market cap is wildly out of line with the underlying fundamentals of the company. The company simple does not kick off enough profits or free cash flow to justify the current valuation and has no reasonably short term prospects of that happening. There is simply a lot of irrationally enthusiastic speculation going on with Tesla but it's hardly the first company to experience that.
Tesla might become profitable but I'm VERY dubious that anyone investing at the current stock price will ever realistically see the fundamentals catch up to the stock price in a short enough time to make it a good investment. I like Tesla as a company and I like their products but there is no way in hell that I think the company is a good value at anything even close to the current market price. It's a arguably good company but probably not a good investment currently. The short interest merely shows that I'm not the only one who thinks that
. SoftWear Automation's big selling point is that one of its robotic sewing lines can replace a conventional line of 10 workers and produce about 1,142 t-shirts in an eight-hour period, compared to just 669 for the human sewing line.
That depends ENTIRELY on the costs involved and you'll notice costs were not mentioned at all here. It's possible to automate all sorts of things but it doesn't matter if the costs don't work out favorably. Faster does not automatically equal economic efficiency. You have to do a minimum efficient volume of work and the cost of labor has to be sufficiently high to make the capital investment worthwhile. Most textile work is done overseas in countries with VERY low labor rates. It doesn't matter if it is 10 times faster if it is 20 times more expensive.
It takes change control out of the hands of the end user.
Yeah I can't count the number of Mac users I've heard complaining about not being able to control which file system they use....
Yes that was sarcasm.
Seriously, hardly anyone actually gives a shit. If it works then it is fine. As long as it doesn't cause problems 99.99999% of users aren't going to give a shit. The few that might are probably running linux anyway. Quite frankly you will have a hard time even finding Mac users who could tell you what the current file system used on the Mac is and even fewer that could tell you why it matters.
South Korea will be the first country to change its tax laws in recognition of the coming burden of mass robotic automation on low and middle-skill workers.
Just remember that this is the same society that thinks you will die if you run a fan in a closed room. Just because a society has an idea doesn't mean it is a sensible or sane one. I'm frankly rather disappointed that slashdot keeps trolling us with these articles about how automation is going to cause some sort of holocaust in the work place despite there being zero evidence for it either historical or current. It's just a paranoid dystopian theory unsupported by the facts. It's like people who think that GMOs are the devil's work despite there being zero evidence of them causing any actual real world health problems. It's just paranoia about something new that they don't understand. Automation is a good thing overall. Automation is the reason you can read this post on the internet. The ENTIRE industry around computers is a case study in automation making societies MORE productive and wealthy, not less. Most of you reading this owe your livelihoods to automation and will continue to do so. And yes that includes low and middle skilled workers too.
Thinking about the places we go to regularly, I can't imagine any of them data-mine. Why? Because they ask.
The reason is that it probably makes little sense financially. Data mining requires a large data set and unless you are a large chain most restaurants simply don't generate enough data to make the cost of getting it worth the bother. Their POS system captures plenty if it is reasonably modern and they should be having regular staff meetings to go over what happened each day. Data mining for a small local restaurant is like hunting sparrows with a howitzer. It's overkill and expensive overkill at that. It will just tell them stuff they ought to already know if they are paying attention.
If you're McDoonald's, big data might mean something. If you are a local joint, the personal relationship is going to crush that shit.
MMA events are irregular? the upcoming PPV schedule for UFC is 2 Sep, 7 Oct, 4 Nov, 2 Dec, and 30 Dec.
Yes that is irregular in this context. Regular in this context means weekly or more often. There are ~16 NFL games every week during the season. NASCAR has a race every weekend. MLB has games basically daily from May through October. MMA by comparison might happen at routine intervals but it is not at a standard or frequent time. It's just a different financial model. Not better or worse, just different.
No. I'll be honest, I don't understand why anyone would pay $99 to see that. Basically every other sporting event is free......why do you have to pay to see this one?
You must not watch many sporting events if you think most of them are "free". Almost none of them are actually free and those that are "free" are nothing but wall to wall advertisements. If you have a cable subscription in the US odds are you pay a lot of money to ESPN whether you intend to watch or not. Lots of games are not available unless you pay a subscription to specific channels.
You want to know why it was pay-per-view for $100? Because people are willing to pay it and because that's how boxing has made their money for decades. Boxing, MMA, and a few other events happen irregularly and the parties involved vary so a one time fee to watch the event makes sense. Rather than pay a subscription like you do to get ESPN, they simply charge a fee for the event itself. The price of the PPV depends on the interest it generates. A LOT of people wanted to see this fight so the price was relatively high. It's no different than the Super Bowl charging more money for ads than most other events. They know they have a big audience interested so they can charge more. Same thing just a different payment model.
Most sports are moving to some variation of a PPV model. Only a few can command the money to have space on dedicated television networks. The more niche the sport the more likely it is that some type of PPV makes sense. To be honest it's kind of refreshing to actually only pay for the sporting events you actually want to watch. I wish more televised entertainment was ala-carte like that.
Restaurants that serve good food and understand their customers and control costs and are in a sensible location will do fine. Restaurants that ignore these realities do poorly. Restaurants that chase the latest fad tend to die when the fad does. Running a restaurant in the best of times is a complicated, demanding, and low margin business. It's easy to get into but few last more than a year or two. Have food that people really like, cook and serve it competently, find a good location, and don't be stupid when it comes to costs.
Data mining will NEVER be a savior for a poorly run restaurant. People might try your place once but they aren't going to come back if they don't like the experience. At best it might help some chains identify poor performers and to compare between stores but to be frank, if the owner/chef of the restaurant doesn't already know this then they are pretty bad at their job.
Amazon can't put them all out of business, but they can certainly make them all feel some pain.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Amazon is forcing other companies to improve just like Walmart did and others before them. As long as it is to the benefit of people like you and me then bring on the pain.
Granted Wal-Mart and Target don't truly target the same people, and Amazon will be it's own niche, but it can certainly reduce those companies' profitability considerably.
There is a heck of a lot of overlap and any reduction in their profitability is only to the benefit of you and me most likely. Amazon is going to go head to head with Walmart in a big way. The largest threat to Amazon is probably Walmart getting their Internet sales up to Amazon's level. Combined with the store footprint Walmart has that is a potentially existential threat. That's why Amazon is putting warehouses everywhere and starting to get in bricks and mortar retail. Walmart stores are effectively warehouses and Walmart is VERY good at logistics. Amazon is trying to get local before Walmart figures out ecommerce.
Much better: buy locally produced stuffed, pay fair prices, eat less meat.
Locally produced is not always better nor is it always more environmentally friendly. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. It's also not always cheaper or better for the economy in general. Buying local isn't a bad thing but it isn't the cure all many pretend it is either. Not to mention the fact that a lot of locations don't produce a wide variety of foods locally. Good luck buying locally grown mangoes in Idaho.
Fair prices? That's such an open ended concept that it's hard to know where to start. What do you mean by "fair"? Fair to who? It's easy to say pay more if you are wealthy but a lot of people have a pretty hard time making ends meet. How is it fair to expect a single parent making a low wage to pay high prices in the interest of supporting people she's never met?
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The documentation aspect of any project is very important, as it can help people to both understand it and track changes. Unfortunately, many developers aren't very interested in documentation aspect, so it often gets neglected.
That's putting it mildly. For any kind of engineer documentation is crucial and when you are Doing It Right actually accounts for the majority of the job. An engineer's job is to figure out a plan to solve a problem AND then to generate documentation informing/instructing other people in the clearest possible way what to do to execute that plan. The documentation actually accounts for the majority of the work in most cases and is every bit as important as the solution because if you cannot communicate your solution then it is useless. Far too many engineers do documentation really poorly, and I'm not just talking about programmers. When they can be bothered they tend to forget that the documentation isn't for themselves - it's so other people can readily understand their solution to a problem and execute that solution reliably. I receive product drawings all the time that are missing critical details, fail to convey expectations, are written in a confusing manner, or are obviously reminder notes rather than instructions. Engineering is a team sport and communication and documentation are how the team collaborates.
I've heard a lot of programmers make the claim that good code should be self documenting and while there is truth to that, most of the time it's just an excuse to blow off the humdrum work of doing proper documentation fully. Code should be clear but documentation needs to make it even more so. Expecting your solution to be obvious and complete in every detail is a false economy. You are saving your time at someone else's expense. Good engineers write good documentation. If your documentation sucks then you are bad at engineering no matter how elegant your technical solution might be.
I think you are absolutely right today, but that you're perhaps forgetting that tech doesn't move linearly.
I'm not forgetting that at all. Economics isn't linear either. I think you might be confusing the economics of microchips and software for the economics of manufacturing which is very different. It is REALLY hard and expensive to make general purpose manufacturing devices produce non-trivial special purpose products in (relatively) small batches. The limitations aren't typically technical - they are economic and they are extremely hard to overcome in a vast number of cases.
Robot solutions that today cost millions will at some point cost thousands.
Some will. A lot will not. You are under the misapprehension that economies of scale are in play here that are not in actuality. You are arguing that we can develop an extremely inexpensive, safe, easily programmed, general purpose robot. Cheap enough that it can displace humans in low labor cost countries. We aren't in any danger of reaching such a state of affairs any time soon. (as in within the lifetime of anyone reading this) Yes robots and automation will get cheaper and more capable but they have a loooooooong way to go before humans aren't needed to build stuff. Nobody I know who works in manufacturing is worried at all about robots making humans in manufacturing obsolete.
In my country, a company started selling cheaper and safer robot arms a few years ago. They can't carry as much as the robots at car manufacturing plants, and they aren't as fast. But they don't require a cage, they cost a fraction and the UI for programming them is much, much easier to work with.
And yet they haven't taken the world by storm. Yes there will be progress but humans aren't going to disappear from the equation. Even at a few thousand dollars they still are too expensive for a lot of low volume production. There is a very long tail for how cheap automation has to get before it can bump people out of the equation. It's also hard to achieve economies of scale with automation if you don't have large unit volumes because setup and engineering costs don't enjoy economies of scale at low unit volumes.
Yeah, robotic tech today is still primitive compared to humans. But the future belongs to those who can figure out how to take advantage of these primitive robots.
Automation is anything but primitive even today. The problem isn't the technology but in making the technology cheap. You seem to be grossly underestimating the difficulty of that task. You are quite right that there are riches to be had for those who can control future automation and technology but that is nothing new. There will be impressive progress but I have near as makes no difference zero concern about mass unemployment from automation in my lifetime.
You can't stop progress, robots are so much better and cheaper (in the end) than using humans for a lot of things (especially factory/warehouse stuff).
HA! If that were actually true then my job would be a lot easier. My day job is to run a manufacturing plant. I'm an industrial engineer as well as a cost accountant and I make these sorts of decisions regarding automation daily. Your estimation of the cost/benefit of automation is not even close to reality for all but a few corner cases. Robots only make economic sense when you are talking about relatively large unit volumes or certain types of high value precision work or very dangerous jobs. They are not always faster or better and they sure as hell are not always cheaper. Yes that includes "factory/warehouse stuff".
Simple example. My company makes wire harnesses. There isn't a machine in existence that can automate a substantial portion of what we make for anything remotely resembling a reasonable cost. The machines that do exist to make some limited portions of what we manufacturing are either limited to fairly narrow jobs like lead making (cutting, stripping, and crimping wires) or ones that can do wider numbers of jobs cost literally millions of dollars each. Some specialty jobs they do faster or better but not nearly as many as you are probably imagining. To replace humans in general you will have to come up with a robot that is as trainable, as dexterous, and cheaper than a human. Good luck with that because we are no where close to that level of automation much less getting there for economically reasonable cost.
With the current rate of automation we are actually already to late do handle the loss of jobs and how to figure out how we could give those people a better live.
There is no data to support this assertion. Unemployment is well within normal ranges and showing no signs of changing. There has been no measurable long term displacement of workers by robots. What data there is shows that worker displacement is a result of poor economic and education policy, not automation. In places like the US the losses in manufacturing jobs are in reality a function of labor costs, not automation. What happened is the labor intensive jobs went to places with low labor costs. When politicians talk about bringing manufacturing jobs back what they are really promising (though they don't know it) is to lower wages to compete with places like China because that is the ONLY way those jobs are coming back. Do you really want people working for $1-2/hour?
After WWII when the rest of the world was rebuilding for a few decades folks in the US had a remarkable run of economic prosperity in large part due to a lack of competition. Those days are gone and now the US and other prosperous countries are going to have to compete globally. If you think automation is the biggest threat to your economic prosperity then you are delusional. The biggest threat is the 50% of the world's population in Asia (esp China and India) who have been sitting on the economic sidelines for over a century. Now that China has woken up and India is threatening to do so the game is different. You can worry about automation killing jobs in the short run if you want but you are worrying about the wrong thing.
The question going forward is: What happens when the future generations of robots arrive?
The same thing that happens with every other kind of automation. The people will be more productive and some will find new jobs. What is it with all the chicken-little articles about automation? There is plenty of valuable work to be done no matter how much automation we have. Yes some people will be displaced in the short term and for some that will be uncomfortable. It is highly unlikely to occur at a rate detrimental to the economy at large. Most of the automation will simply make workers more effective at their jobs. The very device you are reading this on (a computer) is nothing more than a form of automation which has made you more productive and increased opportunities. This dystopian notion that automation will cause mass unemployment is just nonsense spouted off by people who don't actually understand automation or the problems surrounding it. Automation is not going to be the grim reaper for jobs. Bad economic policy and bad education policy is what you should worry about. A second rate education system or a poorly controlled economy will kill jobs FAR faster than any amount of automation you could possibly imagine.
VR's advantage is immersiveness. Multitasking isn't the point.
True but immersive to do what exactly? That's the problem with VR and has been since its inception. Aside from a few vertical simulation use cases (like flight simulation) and more recently some niche gaming it simply don't have that killer application to make to go mainstream. It's not that the technology is bad or anthing like that but it's hard to imagine any use cases where your grandmother is going to be strapping on a VR headset either. I think the main use of VR will be as a technology test bed for AR applications which is actually pretty useful - just not in the way people imagine. AR has FAR more and more obvious use cases than VR and a lot of the technology will likely be shared. I used to have a day job working on VR technology and it's cool stuff but people imagine it to be more useful than it really is in the real world.
I'm still not convinced that the decision to go with Windows Phone was particularly bad.
The decision was fine. How they executed it was profoundly idiotic. They announced that they were switching to Microsoft in February 2011 but didn't have an actually product with Microsoft's system until November 2011. Basically they told everyone they were killing off their current offerings nearly a year before they had the replacement ready to ship. That's just weapon's grade stupid especially given how little traction Microsoft had managed to achieve against Apple and Google.
If they'd gone with Android, they'd have been stuck in a race-to-the-bottom in a market with razor-thin margins were Google is the only company that makes serious money.
Google doesn't make serious money off of Android and never really has. Look at their financial statements if you need proof. Samsung does ok but Android for Google is more of a defensive play to keep competitors from locking them out of the mobile ad market where they actually make their money. Kind of like Amazon's tactics with Kindle, they don't have to make money on Android directly to have it be worth their while. That's why Android phones can be done on the cheap because Google doesn't need a big markup unlike Apple or Microsoft. (the downside being that they have every incentive to track you closely and sell your information to advertisers)
The surprising thing was that Microsoft, a company that achieved a monopoly position by doing everything in its power to encourage third-party development for their platform, completely failed to attract third-party apps to Windows Phone.
I don't think it's so shocking since they were really years late in getting something competitive with iOS or Android to the market. I don't care how dominant you are, you cannot give competitors like Google or Apple that much of a head start. And the market dynamics in mobile are different than the ones in PCs where Microsoft achieved their dominance so it was never going to be an easy translation for them.
Nokia proved that being first mover isn't always an advantage.
That was well understood loooong before Nokia but your point is quite correct.
Nokia never really was very good at certain types of software, specifically the user facing parts of it. I owned a series of Nokia phones for several years and the interfaces on their phones were poor for anything but the most basic of phone operations. They routinely build phones which technically had features like email or web browsers but they were so awkward to use as to be useless. It's what I call checkbox marketing - they could claim they had that feature without lying but the actual feature was nothing more than the most minimal version of it imaginable - useless in the real world. I bought a Nokia "smartphone" around the same time as the early iPhones. On paper they were roughly equivalent but in actual use there was no comparison. The email and web browser on the Nokia were effectively useless. Eventually they started making phones more in the model of the iPhone but by then it was too little and too late.
I think the problem was that Nokia thought their customers were AT&T, Verizon, etc. Apple (and later Google) understood that the real customer to worry about was the end user, not the wireless phone companies. Nokia designed phones that physically were solid or at least interesting hardware-wise but they never made the investments (until too late) to do the same for the software. At the end of the day that is what killed them along with some weapon's grade stupid management decisions relating to Microsoft. The hardware in the iPhone and comparable Android phones isn't anything Nokia couldn't do. The secret sauce is the software and the network effects (ecosystem) that go along with it. There wasn't room in the market for more than 2 or 3 platforms once the network effects took hold and Nokia didn't figure out the right formula until it was too late to matter.
Waiting makes even more sense if you're not buying the latest.
True but people often don't care that much and need a phone right now. If you aren't concerned about whatever is in the next one and you need a phone today then you are probably going to buy a phone today even if you could save a little by waiting. I'm not saying it's the most sensible course of action but a lot of people simply aren't that concerned with their smartphone.
Why would most people and Apple fans purchase an iPhone in June or July, provided that the new iPhone is to be announced a few weeks later?
Millions of people (including Apple customers) don't actually give a shit about having the latest and greatest. My father has an iPhone and it's a fine choice for him but he's never been on the latest version. He's always 1-2 editions behind whatever the latest is and he's fine with that. There are millions of people just like him. For someone like me or presumably you, you are correct - I would not buy a new iPhone three weeks before a new version is released because there is a reasonable chance I might upgrade if I like what I see.
It's "easy" (for lack of a better word) to sell lots of units if you don't give a shit about making a profit. The tough bit is to make a lot of profit while still selling a lot of units. So far only Apple and Samsung seem to have figured out that trick in the smartphone era.
No nokia ignored the smartphone market and clung to a dying OS that nobody wanted way too long to the point they were reliant almost completely on dumb phone market,
Not correct. Nokia very much did NOT ignore the smartphone market. The problem was that their product offerings were not well aligned with what it turned out customers actually wanted. Nokia was for a long time the number one seller of "smartphones" even before Apple introduced the iPhone. The problem was that once people saw the iPhone the game was different after that and Nokia wasn't able to catch up. They were selling smartphones the whole time but the problem was that they weren't selling the smartphones that people actually wanted post-iPhone.
Then Nokia made the asinine decision to announce the switch to Microsoft's OS close to a year before they actually had a product ready to ship. Basically they announced that their current products that they were selling were dead on arrival so who is going to buy a phone with an OS you know isn't going to get updated or supported?
Just when I think Facebook can't be more creepy and intrusive they manage to surprise me.
If you think the market potential for custom-fit clothing is unknown and risky, talk to just about any female about what it's like to shop for jeans.
It IS unknown and risky. Any time you are investing millions of dollars into automation that is inherently risky, especially when people's buying habits are accustomed to a different process. Customer education is expensive. Nobody has done custom clothing on a large scale because the technology to do so at a low cost does not exist and isn't likely to exist any time soon. In fact it is easy to show that it is nearly impossible to make a one off custom product at a price point competitive with mass produced goods even if the quality is better no matter what technology you use. The reason for this is simple. There are fixed costs to ANY manufacturing process that have to be amortized across the number of units produced. These costs are the same whether you produce one unit or a million. It is virtually impossible to amortize the fixed costs of a custom product over a large enough number of units sold to make them at a cost similar to mass produced products. It is almost always cheaper to make a standard product (or a range of standard products) than it is to make custom products even with flexible automation.
People who think custom products can be made cost competitive with mass produced products simply don't understand the costs involved once you are talking about large unit volumes. There are some corner cases and I'm certainly not arguing that there isn't a market for custom apparel. That such a market exists is obvious. What I'm saying is that it's unclear how bit that market can ever become or how close the delta between mass produced and custom apparel can become. I work with this sort of calculations all the time and my opinion is that the delta is going to remain large for the foreseeable future.
But there are other costs as well, like shipping.
True but this is well understood among those of us who work in manufacturing.
A lot of people would be willing to pay somewhat more for quick delivery of custom-made clothing.
While there is a market for quickly made custom clothing, it's unclear exactly how big it is and it is clear that the technology to make it happen on a large scale is not yet economically viable. I design assembly lines and production systems for a living. The economics of automating what you describe require rather substantial scale to become viable. It's kind of a chicken and egg problem. Nobody is willing to invest in the expensive automation because it isn't clear that the market exists and the market doesn't exist because nobody is willing to take the risk on building the automation for an unproven market.
I expect it will get sorted out in due time but it seems certain that either someone is going to have to take a VERY big risk or we will have to wait for the automation to become more economically viable. And it won't displace traditional mass production unless it can get very close to it on price which is a much harder thing to do than many people appreciate. It's kind of like 3D printing. It's very useful and a great technology but the unit cost of producing a single unit that way generally is higher than other mass production techniques aside from a few corner cases.
True, but note that this factory might very well be able to run 24/7. Factories with large numbers of human workers tend to lie idle 10-12 hours a day, and I imagine that is even true in Bangladesh.
Not sure where you got this idea but you are misinformed. My day job is to run a (small) manufacturing plant. Three shift factories using human labor are incredibly common everywhere in the world. Factories that don't run multiple shifts only do so because they don't have enough work to justify multiple shifts. You do not need high levels of automation to run multiple shifts effectively and never have. If anything automated factories are LESS able to run three shifts because of the need for maintenance (scheduled and unscheduled) on the additional production equipment. Robots and automated equipment break and need servicing routinely. Anyone who thinks they run with perfect reliability has never worked in a manufacturing plant.
I've never seen a company the size of Telsa with so much short interest, and I've learned to never ignore short interest.
Plenty of companies the size of Tesla have copious short interest and I've seen several who were larger than Tesla over the years. The reason for the short interest obviously is that Tesla's market cap is wildly out of line with the underlying fundamentals of the company. The company simple does not kick off enough profits or free cash flow to justify the current valuation and has no reasonably short term prospects of that happening. There is simply a lot of irrationally enthusiastic speculation going on with Tesla but it's hardly the first company to experience that.
Tesla might become profitable but I'm VERY dubious that anyone investing at the current stock price will ever realistically see the fundamentals catch up to the stock price in a short enough time to make it a good investment. I like Tesla as a company and I like their products but there is no way in hell that I think the company is a good value at anything even close to the current market price. It's a arguably good company but probably not a good investment currently. The short interest merely shows that I'm not the only one who thinks that
. SoftWear Automation's big selling point is that one of its robotic sewing lines can replace a conventional line of 10 workers and produce about 1,142 t-shirts in an eight-hour period, compared to just 669 for the human sewing line.
That depends ENTIRELY on the costs involved and you'll notice costs were not mentioned at all here. It's possible to automate all sorts of things but it doesn't matter if the costs don't work out favorably. Faster does not automatically equal economic efficiency. You have to do a minimum efficient volume of work and the cost of labor has to be sufficiently high to make the capital investment worthwhile. Most textile work is done overseas in countries with VERY low labor rates. It doesn't matter if it is 10 times faster if it is 20 times more expensive.
It takes change control out of the hands of the end user.
Yeah I can't count the number of Mac users I've heard complaining about not being able to control which file system they use....
Yes that was sarcasm.
Seriously, hardly anyone actually gives a shit. If it works then it is fine. As long as it doesn't cause problems 99.99999% of users aren't going to give a shit. The few that might are probably running linux anyway. Quite frankly you will have a hard time even finding Mac users who could tell you what the current file system used on the Mac is and even fewer that could tell you why it matters.
South Korea will be the first country to change its tax laws in recognition of the coming burden of mass robotic automation on low and middle-skill workers.
Just remember that this is the same society that thinks you will die if you run a fan in a closed room. Just because a society has an idea doesn't mean it is a sensible or sane one. I'm frankly rather disappointed that slashdot keeps trolling us with these articles about how automation is going to cause some sort of holocaust in the work place despite there being zero evidence for it either historical or current. It's just a paranoid dystopian theory unsupported by the facts. It's like people who think that GMOs are the devil's work despite there being zero evidence of them causing any actual real world health problems. It's just paranoia about something new that they don't understand. Automation is a good thing overall. Automation is the reason you can read this post on the internet. The ENTIRE industry around computers is a case study in automation making societies MORE productive and wealthy, not less. Most of you reading this owe your livelihoods to automation and will continue to do so. And yes that includes low and middle skilled workers too.
Thinking about the places we go to regularly, I can't imagine any of them data-mine. Why? Because they ask.
The reason is that it probably makes little sense financially. Data mining requires a large data set and unless you are a large chain most restaurants simply don't generate enough data to make the cost of getting it worth the bother. Their POS system captures plenty if it is reasonably modern and they should be having regular staff meetings to go over what happened each day. Data mining for a small local restaurant is like hunting sparrows with a howitzer. It's overkill and expensive overkill at that. It will just tell them stuff they ought to already know if they are paying attention.
If you're McDoonald's, big data might mean something. If you are a local joint, the personal relationship is going to crush that shit.
Exactly. Well said.
MMA events are irregular? the upcoming PPV schedule for UFC is 2 Sep, 7 Oct, 4 Nov, 2 Dec, and 30 Dec.
Yes that is irregular in this context. Regular in this context means weekly or more often. There are ~16 NFL games every week during the season. NASCAR has a race every weekend. MLB has games basically daily from May through October. MMA by comparison might happen at routine intervals but it is not at a standard or frequent time. It's just a different financial model. Not better or worse, just different.
No. I'll be honest, I don't understand why anyone would pay $99 to see that. Basically every other sporting event is free......why do you have to pay to see this one?
You must not watch many sporting events if you think most of them are "free". Almost none of them are actually free and those that are "free" are nothing but wall to wall advertisements. If you have a cable subscription in the US odds are you pay a lot of money to ESPN whether you intend to watch or not. Lots of games are not available unless you pay a subscription to specific channels.
You want to know why it was pay-per-view for $100? Because people are willing to pay it and because that's how boxing has made their money for decades. Boxing, MMA, and a few other events happen irregularly and the parties involved vary so a one time fee to watch the event makes sense. Rather than pay a subscription like you do to get ESPN, they simply charge a fee for the event itself. The price of the PPV depends on the interest it generates. A LOT of people wanted to see this fight so the price was relatively high. It's no different than the Super Bowl charging more money for ads than most other events. They know they have a big audience interested so they can charge more. Same thing just a different payment model.
Most sports are moving to some variation of a PPV model. Only a few can command the money to have space on dedicated television networks. The more niche the sport the more likely it is that some type of PPV makes sense. To be honest it's kind of refreshing to actually only pay for the sporting events you actually want to watch. I wish more televised entertainment was ala-carte like that.
Restaurants that serve good food and understand their customers and control costs and are in a sensible location will do fine. Restaurants that ignore these realities do poorly. Restaurants that chase the latest fad tend to die when the fad does. Running a restaurant in the best of times is a complicated, demanding, and low margin business. It's easy to get into but few last more than a year or two. Have food that people really like, cook and serve it competently, find a good location, and don't be stupid when it comes to costs.
Data mining will NEVER be a savior for a poorly run restaurant. People might try your place once but they aren't going to come back if they don't like the experience. At best it might help some chains identify poor performers and to compare between stores but to be frank, if the owner/chef of the restaurant doesn't already know this then they are pretty bad at their job.
Amazon can't put them all out of business, but they can certainly make them all feel some pain.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Amazon is forcing other companies to improve just like Walmart did and others before them. As long as it is to the benefit of people like you and me then bring on the pain.
Granted Wal-Mart and Target don't truly target the same people, and Amazon will be it's own niche, but it can certainly reduce those companies' profitability considerably.
There is a heck of a lot of overlap and any reduction in their profitability is only to the benefit of you and me most likely. Amazon is going to go head to head with Walmart in a big way. The largest threat to Amazon is probably Walmart getting their Internet sales up to Amazon's level. Combined with the store footprint Walmart has that is a potentially existential threat. That's why Amazon is putting warehouses everywhere and starting to get in bricks and mortar retail. Walmart stores are effectively warehouses and Walmart is VERY good at logistics. Amazon is trying to get local before Walmart figures out ecommerce.
Much better: buy locally produced stuffed, pay fair prices, eat less meat.
Locally produced is not always better nor is it always more environmentally friendly. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. It's also not always cheaper or better for the economy in general. Buying local isn't a bad thing but it isn't the cure all many pretend it is either. Not to mention the fact that a lot of locations don't produce a wide variety of foods locally. Good luck buying locally grown mangoes in Idaho.
Fair prices? That's such an open ended concept that it's hard to know where to start. What do you mean by "fair"? Fair to who? It's easy to say pay more if you are wealthy but a lot of people have a pretty hard time making ends meet. How is it fair to expect a single parent making a low wage to pay high prices in the interest of supporting people she's never met?
Eat less meat? Agreed. Most people should.