This will probably result in very few jobs. The number will decline as the technology gets better, too. The USPS's first machine sorting system had tens of thousands of people keying in the ZIP codes as envelopes went by. Then that was automated for machine-addressed mail with specific fonts. Then for all typed and printed ZIP codes. Then for all typed and printed full addresses. Then for clearer handwritten addresses. Now there's just one national center where a few people look at images of illegible addresses.[1]
Right, but in industries that are not replaced (like mail), you're forgetting about the effect increased efficiency will have on demand. A counterexample would be when looms increased employment in textiles. Less people were needed per item, but it was so much cheaper to make textiles that the increased demand ended up employing more people in textile mills than ever.
I hope they do not start using remote controlled cars on highways.
A car going at 60mph (~100kmh) travels at 26m/second. 4G has a ping of ~70ms* on top of the time from the cell tower to the operator's computer.
However, I found quite a variance in pings when browsing on the phone, anywhere from 200-300ms at times (maybe due to changing the tower).
So round trip might be at 600ms. Then we account for variance in bandwidth, human reaction time etc.
All in all we might be looking at a delay of at least 1s. Guesstimating, of course. That's still 26m of a 2 ton vehicle going at 100kmh without oversight.
If you need to have enough people that someone can intervene "instantly" then there's not likely to be much of a saving anyway.
Instead imagine a system that is "good enough" that at it's most risk averse configuration it will drive itself in normal conditions, but occasionally it will seem to slow down for now good reason, or even stop, while it waits for a human to intervene because its not sure if its correctly reading the environment ahead.
It would need to be good enough to be able to work well enough of the time to be able to reliably come to a safe stop, but it would mean you'd be able to have one person monitor many vehicles.
Latency could be significantly reduced with 5G, but would still be a problem if the operators are in other countries.
But, I think the bigger problem is coverage and reliability. Relying on mobile networks for this type of life-or-death functionality strikes me as extremely dangerous, and that would remain true even if we increased reliability by a factor of three.
I don't think realtime control will be much of a thing; keep in mind that companies don't actually want to pay people, that's why they're investing so heavily in automation and robots. At best it's going to be humans that will direct, tell a vehicle how to handle a situation it doesn't know yet. But all of the basics - driving, steering, avoiding obstacles - should and will be automated.
This is why connected cars are hoping for a quick spread of 5G. A fully-fledged 5G network would have transmitters placed on every other lamp post with a stable connection to the backbone. With such a system, the rtt should come down to sub-50ms for high priority traffic if properly set up. The obvious downside is the amount of transmitters and fiber you need to set up for this, but the smart vehicle people are seemingly quite confident in their ability to convince operators to install such a network.
A 200ms round-trip would still be comparable to some drivers on the highways right now, but it's certainly suboptimal.
That almost sounds like what happens when you look at a text message while driving. Your eyes are off the road for only a second. We already know the dangers of texting while driving.
But, I there are scenarios where remote operation is safe. Maneuvering in a tight alley. Any scenarios that don't require speed and where a failure scenario is bricking an already stationary vehicle. It could also be identifying obstacles (car thinks steam venting from the sewer is a solid object) or approving rule-breaking (allowed to place a wheel on the sidewalk.
When Shuri was basically live-driving cars in South Korea from her home base in Wakanda in Black Panther, I thought, "wow, those Wakandans must really be advanced! They got the latency on a transcontinental wireless link down to nothing!"
It's a lot easier to dehumanize a person when you are sitting behind the screen of Twitter / Instagram / UAV (unmanned air vehicle), pushing buttons...
When you rob someone of their humanity, then you too lose your humanity, making us all robots that can be disposed of anytime...
When have we not been seen as disposable. The common man has been reduced to just a cog in the machine, with the exceptions being our concerted fights for what little protections we have.
The modern person in a developed country seems to me more human than ever.
Think about the pin makers at the beginning of John Adams' "The Wealth of Nations." Atomation of meanieal tasks like these means the pin makers are replaced by educated generalists (at least to some extent) who operate and maintain machines.
...remote operation could allow companies to outsource driving, construction and service jobs to call centers in cheaper labor markets.
This terrifies me. The speed of light RTT from the west coast to India and back again is around 100msec. This is on the order of human reaction time. Real world latency we are talking way more than that. I get wacky routes to India traversing most of the world, so I get pings >400msec from the US to India. 400msec is more than enough latency to kill you. Teleop is a silly idea for big fast death machines on wheels (cars), especially if there’s significant latency in the teleop.
Not that I think it'd necessarily be a great idea, but you could probably get a decent bounded latency by using dedicated / leased lines, which is e.g. good enough for remote robot-assisted surgery in some places.
Note that "cheaper labor markets" doesn't have to mean overseas. Mexico is only a few hundred miles from many US population centers. And US federal minimum wage is still only $7.25. "Cheaper labor market" for California city jobs could just be Nevada or Utah.
Isn't that what some companies claiming to be AI/ML champions are doing when they are actually "employing" real humans through MTurk and the likes to do the work.
Yep. One of the earliest examples of this I can recall is the VoxSci voicemail to text message fiasco that unfolded over ten years ago.
They fraudulently claimed that they had some kind of machine learning system that enabled them to quickly, accurately and privately convert voice mail to text. The reality was that they had a call centre in India manually transcribing.
There is some version of this that creates a dystopian future where AI software companies shed liability by outsourcing ethical decisions to armies of contractors.
With AI currently set up as the "next big thing" this article is just another version of the "Natural Language Processing" and human augmented AI, that is being used by almost everyone to "fake it until you don't need humans any more" (see Apple, Amazon, Google listening to our audio as a backup for Siri, Alexa, and Now). A necessary stop gap.
I think there is a big opportunity to look past the stop gap and talk about technologies that are going to 10x the things humans are already good at (creativity, empathy, intuitive problem solving, ...).
I don't think "the contractor did it" will get very far, either in court or as PR?
Though, there is legal indemnification which could be used to get a contractor (the company) to pay when there is a screwup. But that's a matter of contract negotiations between companies.
My 2c, instead of building autonomous cars/robots which work in our current cities, we should just redesign our cities to cater for these new ideas. We could have an autonomous delivery system with current technology if we just put aside some dedicated space for them to operate. No fancy AI, just good old fashioned sensors and control systems. Put roughly pallet sized tunnels under the roads, and it doesnt even have to encroach on public space. Way less problems in the long run IMHO.
Yeah, it's not a far-fetched idea either. It's already been proven that dedicated lanes for buses improve road performance overall (especially improving bus performance) so at that point it should be easy to use autonomous operation as a way to justify more dedicated space.
You might look at Elon Musk's The Boring Company. It's based on the ideas that self-driving electric vehicles permit smaller and simpler (and thus cheaper) single-lane highway tunnels, with simpler cheaper surface access, constructed rapidly at large scale (and thus cheaper), using mainstream vehicle tech, in a dedicated environment (permitting full automation, greater-than-highway speed, and vehicle coordination), woven in spacious 3D underground, with blended surface operations to whatever extent driverless driving becomes available. And thus traffic volumes/access/costs competitive with highways, buses, and subways. Perhaps picture something vaguely like Tesla passenger vans doing 100+ mph under bus routes, with van-is-the-cab elevators or ramps in parking lots.
I don't think anyone is recommending remote controlled cars. It's about having a fallback to handle edge-case scenarios (e.g. toll ways, construction zones), likely at slower speeds, as AI is already quite good at reacting rapidly to sudden movements. The collusion avoidance will still be enabled while operated remotely, so a failed connection, can just result in the car pulling over and waiting.
It's interesting the effect that uber, amazon a gig working have had. Where "traditional jobs^" are created, the immediate expectation is that this will be uberified... More like selling icecream during summer tourist season than working in trucking.
^Traditional in the "standardized job that 5k people do for us."
Who will be held accountable when one of these robots inevitably harms or injures someone? Since these sorts of robots seen to be semi-automated, does this effectively abstract away any real responsibility? Can robots only be responsible for nothing more than an "unfortunate accident"?
This reminds me of "god of the gaps" idea where the receding domain of things doesn't show a clear line of stopping. It seems more like a limitation of the current implementation as the opportunity but watch out for the next version.
Concerns about ping assume all tasks will require real-time control by the human. Realistically, a supervisory system will have the human identifying hazards and gaps in the autonomous system's sensory capacity.
Quick-reaction collision avoidance will be controlled by radar (77 GHz etc.) or lidar.
It would be an interesting proposition to have the option to drive yourself or to seamlessly switch it over to autonomous driving monitored by a remote driver for $0.0X per minute.
It's an in-between step. Already they're reducing costs by making work simpler, reducing the workforce, etc. One person can operate a dozen delivery robots, vs a dozen delivery people doing the same work. It's the common trend in automation and industrialization.
we have identified what could be automated but we haven’t taken any real steps to implement it. there is a lot of resistance when it comes to automation in the workplace.
There are actual startups that are "pretending to be robots", so the title is off: This article is about legitimate remote-operations work, and it's a really great thing, not something to be ridiculed as the title makes it. Some of them like postmates or remote driving seem like typical VC silliness but others could be lifesaving, like , imagine a remote-controlled da-vinci surgical machine.
[+] [-] Animats|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegi...
[+] [-] rthomas6|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cleansy|6 years ago|reply
A car going at 60mph (~100kmh) travels at 26m/second. 4G has a ping of ~70ms* on top of the time from the cell tower to the operator's computer.
However, I found quite a variance in pings when browsing on the phone, anywhere from 200-300ms at times (maybe due to changing the tower).
So round trip might be at 600ms. Then we account for variance in bandwidth, human reaction time etc. All in all we might be looking at a delay of at least 1s. Guesstimating, of course. That's still 26m of a 2 ton vehicle going at 100kmh without oversight.
* According to https://www.4g.co.uk/news/4g-injecting-new-lease-life-online...
[+] [-] vidarh|6 years ago|reply
Instead imagine a system that is "good enough" that at it's most risk averse configuration it will drive itself in normal conditions, but occasionally it will seem to slow down for now good reason, or even stop, while it waits for a human to intervene because its not sure if its correctly reading the environment ahead.
It would need to be good enough to be able to work well enough of the time to be able to reliably come to a safe stop, but it would mean you'd be able to have one person monitor many vehicles.
[+] [-] breakintheweb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|6 years ago|reply
But, I think the bigger problem is coverage and reliability. Relying on mobile networks for this type of life-or-death functionality strikes me as extremely dangerous, and that would remain true even if we increased reliability by a factor of three.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeroenhd|6 years ago|reply
A 200ms round-trip would still be comparable to some drivers on the highways right now, but it's certainly suboptimal.
[+] [-] pjc50|6 years ago|reply
- awkward roads with cones, tricky parking etc
- high speed collision avoidance where the car transfers legal liability to an offshore contractor immediately before impact
[+] [-] 14|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalbasal|6 years ago|reply
But, I there are scenarios where remote operation is safe. Maneuvering in a tight alley. Any scenarios that don't require speed and where a failure scenario is bricking an already stationary vehicle. It could also be identifying obstacles (car thinks steam venting from the sewer is a solid object) or approving rule-breaking (allowed to place a wheel on the sidewalk.
[+] [-] bitwize|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aglavine|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mothsonasloth|6 years ago|reply
When you rob someone of their humanity, then you too lose your humanity, making us all robots that can be disposed of anytime...
[+] [-] ClutchBand|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swiley|6 years ago|reply
Think about the pin makers at the beginning of John Adams' "The Wealth of Nations." Atomation of meanieal tasks like these means the pin makers are replaced by educated generalists (at least to some extent) who operate and maintain machines.
[+] [-] mikelyons|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pytester|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noodlesUK|6 years ago|reply
This terrifies me. The speed of light RTT from the west coast to India and back again is around 100msec. This is on the order of human reaction time. Real world latency we are talking way more than that. I get wacky routes to India traversing most of the world, so I get pings >400msec from the US to India. 400msec is more than enough latency to kill you. Teleop is a silly idea for big fast death machines on wheels (cars), especially if there’s significant latency in the teleop.
[+] [-] jsty|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdorazio|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] walshemj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msantos|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonswords82|6 years ago|reply
They fraudulently claimed that they had some kind of machine learning system that enabled them to quickly, accurately and privately convert voice mail to text. The reality was that they had a call centre in India manually transcribing.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8163511.stm
[+] [-] bcx|6 years ago|reply
With AI currently set up as the "next big thing" this article is just another version of the "Natural Language Processing" and human augmented AI, that is being used by almost everyone to "fake it until you don't need humans any more" (see Apple, Amazon, Google listening to our audio as a backup for Siri, Alexa, and Now). A necessary stop gap.
I think there is a big opportunity to look past the stop gap and talk about technologies that are going to 10x the things humans are already good at (creativity, empathy, intuitive problem solving, ...).
[+] [-] skybrian|6 years ago|reply
Though, there is legal indemnification which could be used to get a contractor (the company) to pay when there is a screwup. But that's a matter of contract negotiations between companies.
[+] [-] Jedi72|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevingadd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] q3k|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mncharity|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Swizec|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kd5bjo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jileczech|6 years ago|reply
And perhaps the most important thing - when there is a human driver, he is also responsible for his own life, so he will drive very carefully.
This is a shit idea and it will fail.
[+] [-] stri8ed|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dalbasal|6 years ago|reply
^Traditional in the "standardized job that 5k people do for us."
[+] [-] nkrisc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebringj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] i_am_proteus|6 years ago|reply
Quick-reaction collision avoidance will be controlled by radar (77 GHz etc.) or lidar.
[+] [-] test6554|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pytester|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RobertDeNiro|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qkls|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] md8|6 years ago|reply
In order to render millions of people jobless, we have to achieve Artificial General Intelligence.
[+] [-] dlphn___xyz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Haga|6 years ago|reply
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