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The juncture of peak oil and automation

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General interest discussions, not necessarily related to depletion.

Re: The juncture of peak oil and automation

Unread postby radon1 » Fri 05 Sep 2014, 17:11:42

KaiserJeep wrote:Robots became more affordable, not only because they got cheaper, but because human labor got more expensive. Nor will you catch those robots picketing outside the factory gates, screaming at scabs and being interviewed on the MSM.


Absolutely.
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Re: The juncture of peak oil and automation

Unread postby radon1 » Fri 05 Sep 2014, 17:30:20

Pops wrote:
"Any growing system of the division of labor causes advancing specialization,"

LOL, one doesn't cause the other because they are the same.


The growth of the system of the division of labor causes advancing specialization.

Maybe you should to explain to me again the difference between the "system" and the population because it just isn't sinking in.


Suppose that an island is inhabited with a 100 men. 10 out of this 100 men trade to each other goods that they produce. Everyone of the other 90 men lives on his own, does not trade with anyone and consumes everything that he produces himself.

The population of the island is 100.
The 10 people that trade with each other constitute a system of the division of labor. The size of this system is 10.

10<100.

In relation to specialization and technology and unemployment, increasing specialization has the benefit of continually reducing the knowledge and skill required to do any particular task. That simplicity increases speed and ease of training and is a boon to productivity (read: profit) - a great benefit to employers but also has the effect of reducing the overall worth of the employee - they are easily replaced, just a cog in the wheel.


Absolutely. Isn't it what is called "commodification of labor".
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Re: The juncture of peak oil and automation

Unread postby Pops » Fri 05 Sep 2014, 17:46:35

Ah ha! I get it now.

So your thought is jobs are bound to expand to employ the other 90 men simply because they're there.
The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.
-- Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on Government (July 1, 1854)
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Re: The juncture of peak oil and automation

Unread postby radon1 » Fri 05 Sep 2014, 17:58:38

Pops wrote:Ah ha! I get it now.

So your thought is jobs are bound to expand to employ the other 90 men simply because they're there.


Not necessarily, depends on the specifics of the situation that they have there on the island, the things may stay unchanged forever.

But if the any of the other 90 will be joining the 10 men's system for whatever reason, than this system will be growing.
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Re: The juncture of peak oil and automation

Unread postby Graeme » Fri 05 Sep 2014, 21:00:27

Robots unlikely to take big bites out of employment, expert says

Advances in artificial intelligence and robotics mean that machines will soon be able to do many of the tasks of today's workers. And not just blue collar jobs in areas such as manufacturing, but even in such white collar occupations as lawyers, doctors and – gulp – journalists.

A new viral video titled "Humans Need Not Apply," which has garnered more than 2 million YouTube views in just over two weeks, says that the new robots will be smart enough to take jobs even in occupations normally thought of as being incompatible with automation.

But David Hummels, a professor of economics at Purdue University, says humans still have a unique advantage that machines may never be able to emulate: our ability to respond to other humans.
"We have evolved over 100,000 years to be exquisitely perceptive to visual and aural cues from other people around us, which is an important skill that machines may never be able to match," Hummels says.

In addition, Hummels says evolutionary adaptation has created in humans extraordinary sensorimotor skills that are key components of many occupations. Elevating machines to the point where they could perform jobs, like construction work, that require manual dexterity would require a great deal of innovation.


More here
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Re: The juncture of peak oil and automation

Unread postby Pops » Sat 06 Sep 2014, 09:12:41

Graeme wrote:"We have evolved over 100,000 years to be exquisitely perceptive to visual and aural cues from other people around us, which is an important skill that machines may never be able to match," Hummels says.

That made me laugh, not much of an argument when you consider it is posted on an internet forum.
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Re: The juncture of peak oil and automation

Unread postby Graeme » Sat 06 Sep 2014, 18:48:02

Have a chuckle over this development too:

World-first experiment achieves direct brain-to-brain communication in human subjects

For the first time, an international team of neuroscientists has transmitted a message from the brain of one person in India to the brains of three people in France.

The team, which includes researchers from Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the Starlab Barcelona in Spain, and Axilum Robotics in France, has announced today the successful transmission of a brain-to-brain message over a distance of 8,000 kilometres.

"We wanted to find out if one could communicate directly between two people by reading out the brain activity from one person and injecting brain activity into the second person, and do so across great physical distances by leveraging existing communication pathways,” said one of the team, Harvard’s Alvaro Pascual-Leone in a press release. "One such pathway is, of course, the Internet, so our question became, 'Could we develop an experiment that would bypass the talking or typing part of internet and establish direct brain-to-brain communication between subjects located far away from each other in India and France?'"

The team achieved this world-first feat by fitting out one of their participants - known as the emitter - with a device called an electrode-based brain-computer (BCI). This device, which sits over the participant’s head, can interpret the electrical currents in the participant’s brain and translate them into a binary code called Bacon's cipher. This type of code is similar to what computers use, but more compact.

"The emitter now has to enter that binary string into the laptop using her thoughts,” says Francie Diep at Popular Science. "She does this by using her thoughts to move the white circle on-screen to different corners of the screen. (Upper right corner for "1," bottom right corner for "0.") This part of the process takes advantage of technology that several labs have developed, to allow people with paralysis to control computer cursors or robot arms."

Once uploaded, this code is then transmitted via the Internet to another participant - called the receiver - who was also fitted with a device, this time a computer-brain interface (CBI). This device emits electrical pulses, directed by a robotic arm, through the receiver’s head, which make them ‘see’ flashes of light called phosphenes that don’t actually exist.

"As soon as the receivers' machine gets the emitter's binary message over the Internet, the machine gets to work,” says Diep. "It moves its robotic arm around, sending phosphenes to the receivers at different positions on their skulls. Flashes appearing in one position correspond to 1s in the emitter's message, while flashes appearing in another position correspond to 0s.

Exactly how the receivers are recording the flashes so they can translate all those 0s and 1s isn’t clear, but it could be as simple and writing them down with an actual pen and paper.

While it’s not clear at this stage what the applications for this technology could be, it’s a pretty incredible achievement. Oh, and the messages they transmitted? The conveniently brief and friendly, “Hola” and “Ciao”.


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Re: The juncture of peak oil and automation

Unread postby JV153 » Sun 07 Sep 2014, 02:59:23

Pops wrote:
Graeme wrote:"We have evolved over 100,000 years to be exquisitely perceptive to visual and aural cues from other people around us, which is an important skill that machines may never be able to match," Hummels says.

That made me laugh, not much of an argument when you consider it is posted on an internet forum.


This may even lead to people who are perceptive of people who spend a lot of time posting on internet forums.
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Re: The juncture of peak oil and automation

Unread postby ennui2 » Sun 07 Sep 2014, 13:25:38

I haven't read through all the posts since my last reply, but I think there is too much emphasis on physical robots (hardware) and not enough on software. We live so much of our lives virtually as it is, and the actual value of US GDP is in large part driven by intellectual property.

I just read that the new Destiny game by the makers of Halo is costing a half a billion dollars. Why would Activision and its backers put up so much money for a single game? Because there's enough people out there willing to pay for it. What worth does the game has for society vs., let's say, 500 million worth of permaculture projects? Not much. But this is where our value-system is today. It's in bits and bytes and the commodities that make it all hum is taken for granted.

So if you look at a pie-chart of desirable (i.e. not McDonald's burger-flippers) jobs in the industrialized world, odds are it's going to involve manipulating computers in a way computers themselves can't do. There have been attempts for computers to write their own software for decades. I don't think it can be done. And attempts by computers to make art from scratch is not that successful either. And we already know that they can't act in soft skills that well. Siri can bring you real-estate search-results but can't function as a real-estate agent with real sales skills.

There's been all this ecotopia discussion about singularity and getting jacked into the matrix and it's kind of happening in a more mundane way, by us being wired 24/7 via smart-phones and tablets and Facebook buying Occulus Rift for a billion (BTW, in my new job, despite it being medical-related, I'm going to be asked to develop an app for Occulus). There is a tremendous need for content to fill up this space that we're spending most of our time in. That's where the demand for workers is EXPANDING rather than contracting.

In a longer time-frame, if people wind up snapping back into their bodies and start worrying about the cost of gas or groceries, then maybe all this will come down like a house-of-cards. However, this is where I see things moving for the time-being. You get a job that is in some way directly related to IT, and odds are you won't be put out of work by a "robot". Maybe a 3rd worlder, but not some self-aware humanoid robot like out of a 1950s dystopian novel.

Now it IS true that robotics are getting more capable of simulating real conversations and more anthropomorphic. I just see this as mostly a luxury toy at this point and not something that will begin to converge onto any significant part of the workforce. The kind of work society wants to replace most that are still only doable by humans (like nursing-home workers who change bedpans) are not the kinds of things anybody should aspire to anyway.
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Re: The juncture of peak oil and automation

Unread postby Herr Meier » Tue 04 Nov 2014, 12:25:23

pstarr wrote:Driving in Circles - The autonomous Google car is finished.Automation has run its course, yet doesn't even know where the finish line it. It's bumbling around, running over garbage cans and bumping into old ladies. It can't even recognize a stop sign. Lost, running on vapors, it's now wheezing and bucking, far from the finish line, while the donkeys and mules clod on past to a glorious win. :razz:


:-D Yeah this AI business ain't easy. You can also tell when looking at computer games. Over the course of the last 30 years computer games hardly got any more intelligent. Just the graphics and sounds got an astonishing facelift, but the computer army general is as dumb as ever.
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Re: The juncture of peak oil and automation

Unread postby lpetrich » Sun 09 Nov 2014, 14:09:05

pstarr wrote:
Herr Meier wrote:Yeah this AI business ain't easy. You can also tell when looking at computer games. Over the course of the last 30 years computer games hardly got any more intelligent. Just the graphics and sounds got an astonishing facelift, but the computer army general is as dumb as ever.
That is so true. The key is/are the short video clips between levels (what are those called??). Those get more realistic looking with each improvement in graphic processing, and you get almost realistic action figures during the video clip.

Those are cutscenes.

They were originally prerendered video, but many of the more recent ones are in-engine rendered, using the software used to make the game world and render it.

Then the game returns, but now the kids brains have been programmed to imagine that the stupid stick figures are really those characters. The game is the same, the AI is still dumb, but the bait/switch con is brilliant!

Er, what? Many recent game engines can do 3D-model characters and very detailed environments. But I agree that the AI is still very dumb.

▶ Quake 1 Untwinked Walkthrough - E1M1 (Slipgate Complex) - YouTube It came out in 1996, though that video was with a version of the engine with improved rendering. It's rather primitive by present-day standards, but it's 3D-model everything and not "stick figures".
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Re: The juncture of peak oil and automation

Unread postby vox_mundi » Sun 09 Nov 2014, 15:27:42

AI is already past tense (It's here) and it runs on electricity ...

This is from 5 years ago ... Director of National intelligence: Quadrennial Intelligence Community (IC) Review 2009 (SECRET//REL TO USA, FVEY) (courtesy of Mr. Snownden)
• (C//REL) Sentient Enterprise creates a sensing and learning environment for humans and intelligent machines to analyze “exabytes” of data in near-real time to generate and test hypotheses, autonomously process and evaluate insights to cue collection, and self-update/self-correct.

• (S//REL) Self-Learning. The institutional knowledge of the Sentient Enterprise will increase the user’s ability to recall events and significant facts to build relational awareness. Simultaneously, the human-machine interface would enable the user to continuously refine the “algorithms” that translate human judgments into machine language so that the system actively learns.

(C//REL)The Sentient Enterprise will track and manage thousands of exabytes of data every day (1 exabyte is the equivalent of 100,000 times the Library of Congress, which holds 19 million books), enabling iterative assessments in real time, not days or weeks. The data it manages will be universally discoverable, accessible, and usable by humans and machines equally.

Image


Rise of the machines? 'Dawn or Doom' probes A.I. future
http://www.jconline.com/story/entertain ... /15381899/
Around 2002, James Barrat, author of "Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era," was working on a documentary on artificial intelligence when he interviewed Kurzweil and roboticist Rodney Brooks, both of whom Barrat now describe as simply too optimistic. It wasn't until he met science fiction author and mathematician Arthur C. Clark that he saw the picture of impending doom.

"He said, we humans govern the future not because we're the fastest or strongest creature but because we're the most intelligent. When we share the planet with creatures more intelligent than we are, they will steer the future. That rained on my parade because I was much more in the Kurzweil camp," Barrat said. "I was talking to A.I. makers and people who work in A.I.. All of them agreed that, within 100 years, most of the decision in our lives will be made by machines. I was alarmed."

Purdue’s Dawn or Doom Conference: Will humanity pay a price for technology moving too fast?
http://techpoint.org/purdues-dawn-doom- ... ving-fast/
Questions asked ...

- What are the benefits and risks surrounding some of the technologies that are both the most disruptive to current practices and being adopted the fastest.
- Is technology moving too fast for effective governmental legislation?
- What are the risks and benefits associated with technologies such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, and do we know enough about each science to provide adequate answers?
- Will corporations replace universities and governments as the organizing platform for innovation and progress? If so, what does this mean for citizens?


The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of- ... elligence/
... At first glance, you might think that Google is beefing up its AI portfolio to improve its search capabilities, since search contributes 80 percent of its revenue. But I think that's backward. Rather than use AI to make its search better, Google is using search to make its AI better. Every time you type a query, click on a search-generated link, or create a link on the web, you are training the Google AI. When you type “Easter Bunny” into the image search bar and then click on the most Easter Bunny-looking image, you are teaching the AI what an Easter bunny looks like. Each of the 12.1 billion queries that Google's 1.2 billion searchers conduct each day tutor the deep-learning AI over and over again. With another 10 years of steady improvements to its AI algorithms, plus a thousand-fold more data and 100 times more computing resources, Google will have an unrivaled AI.

... By 2024, Google's main product will not be search but AI.
Last edited by vox_mundi on Sun 09 Nov 2014, 16:03:42, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The juncture of peak oil and automation

Unread postby dashster » Sun 09 Nov 2014, 22:57:55

SILENTTODD wrote:The decline curve for "Paper Boys" in the period you site was probably even steeper.

I was a paper boy for five years between 1966 and 1971. I delivered an afternoon paper ( The Fresno Bee) which gave me my first job, and taught me responsibility to my customers.

It is too bad a modern generation of Paper Boys (or Girls) will never have that chance.


Where I live in California the paper is delivered by adults in cars. I don't know how much of that is from less people getting the paper making the routes larger and how much is from concern about the safety of children doing that work as several were kidnapped and murdered while on their route.
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Re: The juncture of peak oil and automation

Unread postby dinopello » Mon 10 Nov 2014, 12:59:22

Guess who is coming for your job

Last year, a team in Oxford University performed a detailed analysis of over 700 occupations in the United States. They came to the conclusion that jobs constituting a staggering 47% of U.S. employment—well over 60 million jobs—could become automated in a decade or two.


The chance that we'll see a true thinking machine anytime soon is small. Yet, the magnitude of the disruption—and potential threat—that would result is so large that the prospect should not be ignored.

For now, though, the pressing question is: How do we adapt our economy and society to a future in which machines do much of the work now performed by people? Will humans go the way of horses?


I post this, not because I agree with most of the article, although I do think it is true that there is a never ending desire of the owners for greater productivity efficiency which amounts to needing less humans for many types of work. But the other thing I post this for is an example of the current mainstream thinking. They confuse efficient big data searching and correlation for intelligence (in a nutshell).
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Re: The juncture of peak oil and automation

Unread postby MonteQuest » Mon 10 Nov 2014, 21:46:24

Pops wrote: So anyway, what happens at the juncture of AI & PO?


"The decades to come will see many things that are now done by machines handed back over to human beings, for the eminently pragmatic reason that it will again be cheaper to feed, house, clothe, and train a human being to do those things than it will be to make, fuel, and maintain a machine to do them."-John Michael Greer.
A Saudi saying, "My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet-plane. His son will ride a camel."
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