Dev.SN

Bill Gates: Prepare to be Assimilated

posted by janrinok on Monday March 17 2014, @08:03PM   
from the borg-revisited dept.

sl4shd0rk writes:

"Bill Gates says everyone needs to prepare to be out of work in 20 years due to Robots/software taking over most jobs. In preparation for this, Gates recommends people 'should basically get on their knees and beg businesses to keep employing humans' and reduce operating overhead for businesses by 'eliminating payroll and corporate income taxes while also not raising the minimum wage'. Bill Gates, you may recall, is the former CEO of Microsoft whose business acumen has brought the technology sector such things as Metro, Windows Phone and Xbox One.

BusinessInsider took a similar theme earlier this year."

• Re:no physical labor, eh? Re:no physical labor, eh? (Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday March 17 2014, @09:48PM

  by c0lo (156) on Monday March 17 2014, @09:48PM (#17890)

  Who's going to fix the machines WHEN they break?

  Within the assumption of a stron AI, other machines, of course.
  (partially valid) analogy: imagining they need a repair MAN to fix them is like imagining the humans need divine intervention when they get down with flu (instead of another human nurse/doctor).

  Besides, who is to say the machines will repaired at all when they break? Do you go to a repair shop with your broken HDD?

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• Re:no physical labor, eh? Re:no physical labor, eh? (Score: 1) by TK on Tuesday March 18 2014, @10:33AM

  by TK (2760) on Tuesday March 18 2014, @10:33AM (#18101)

  who is to say the machines will repaired at all when they break?

  I do. I say they will be.

  Say you have a welding robot. One of the servos that controls an axis of motion fails. You could either take the whole (several ton) apparatus off of its foundation and move it to the loading bay to be shipped back to the manufacturer to be repaired, refurbished or scrapped. Then you have to unbox a new robot (several million dollars per unit in inventory?), move it into position, secure it to the foundation (easy or not, depending on the tolerance of the holes for the foundation bolts/studs/j-hooks), calibrate its sensors, and do a test run to check its alignment. Keep in mind during this process the line is not running, so you are not producing on any of the machines that deliver parts to this robot or take parts from it.

  Or you could have a maintenance droid (or human) swap out one motor, check calibration, and do a test run (if necessary). Total downtime could be as little as a few hours.

  Now at smaller scales it may be become practical to swap out entire machinery assemblies, but that's more of a niche case. In the interest of reducing downtime, and minimizing your stock of replacement parts (lean manufacturing is all the rage right now), repairmen/repairwomen/repairbots are the way to go.

  --
  The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum

  Parent

  • Re:no physical labor, eh? (Score: 1) by Hombre on Tuesday March 18 2014, @01:53PM

    by Hombre (977) on Tuesday March 18 2014, @01:53PM (#18186)

    Thank you, and to further it in my specific field...
    
    The major manufacturers do not keep spare CT scanners sitting around waiting to be ordered. The ones that are made are already spoken for. If you run Toshiba, you cannot replace it with GE. Your techs, and doctors, have to be retrained for it. Even if the manufacturer does have one ready for you, it'll take close to a week to get it to you, then another week to install it and get it calibrated. During that whole time, the facility is likely on bypass, meaning no ambulance deliveries. So the hospital is losing an awful lot of money. All because you didn't want to fly me out with a part that I could've replaced in under a day.
    
    You guys really need to look at it as a larger picture. Thinking about everything required to get the part installed. A robot isn't going to do it.

    Parent

• Re:no physical labor, eh? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18 2014, @01:14PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18 2014, @01:14PM (#18168)

  Not even remotely accurate. With no due respect, you guys need to get out and see the real world. AI has nothing whatsoever to do with it. And I say this as someone who's worked with robotics. Among other things, I repair CAT scanners. Some of my customer sites are in the middle of nowhere. It is never going to make financial sense to get a robot out there instead of me. These are places that lease their CT because buying one doesn't make sense. OK, so they won't buy/lease the repair robot. My employee will, and replace me. So how does that work? They put it on a plane and fly to the nearest city? Coach or in the main baggage compartment? If coach, how are they getting to the airport, through ticketing, through security, down the concourse, onto the airplane, securely fastened in a seat? How do they get out again once they arrive? What about travel from the airport to the site? You need a pretty autonomous robot for all that, and a lot of people to handle it, or a lot of additional robots to handle it. But really, you're not going to have an iRobot. You're going to have something specialized. A lot of somethings specialized. Who's going to set them up and make sure they're calibrated to they're locale? Plus the logistics mentioned above? For the work itself, there are fasteners spaced high and low, all around. There are covers that need to be pulled up, out, then lifted, then braced. Others where the rails need to be pulled out, then apart, then out, then lifted completely off. That's just two of the five covers that HAVE to come off on any job and ignores the other nine (major ones) that might have to come off. Again, just outer covers. What about routing signal and power cables? Things that are behind things? Again, either an iRobot, or a bunch of specialized robots. There's a huge difference between a robot doing this on an assembly line and it doing it in the field. And if you'd ever actually been in a factory, you'd see how much work is still done by meat sacks because the robotics required would be overly cumbersome and costly to do it. Sorry, but that HDD comment was just plain...wrong. The machines I'm talking about are closer to a car in complexity than to a PC, except that they're not mobile. So, yes, that $30K board will need to be replaced and no, you're not going to replace the entire $2M system because of a bad board (which would take an additional week, at least, to get the old one out and the new one in and won't be done by robots either). Sure, someday there will be a robot (and it might need to be humanoid shape to have the range of motion, balance, reach, etc for these jobs) that can handle some of this. It sure as hell will not be in 20 years. Frankly, I doubt it'll be 50 years. Get off your Mom's couch and walk around her house. Refrigerator, microwave, stove, dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, TV, HVAC. Who's getting all this stuff to your house? Sure, a robot could load them up onto an AI-controlled delivery vehicle. How are they getting off the truck? Into the house? Into the proper location? Hooked up? It's just plain wishful thinking to believe that THE VAST MAJORITY OF JOBS will be taken over by computers and robots, especially in 20 years.

  Parent