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| 5/26 |
| 2004/8/28-29 [Computer/Theory] UID:33200 Activity:high |
8/28 Hey, someone posted a vaguely interesting scifi story that some
socialist wrote. It started with the computers taking over
management at Mickey Ds and then the world. Anyone have the
URL? tnx.
\_ I think the author was Cory Doctorow.
\_ That guy had a breathtaking understanding of economics. -- ilyas
\_ It was Marshall Brain. Here's the URL:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
I'm interested to hear rebuttals of his economic ideas, if only
for the sake of having an argument. This is the motd, right?
As I understand it, the problem with his argument is that if robots
caused 50% unemployment, the economy would evaporate and no one
would have any money to buy robots.
\_ In a nutshell: any increase in efficiency is a good thing, not
a bad thing. That's why the industrial revolution and the
computer revolution made us better off. -- ilyas
\_ Actually, I think this is the URL requested:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
\_ It depends on how smart the robots are and how easy they are
to make. If you could create a system where robots make more
robots from harvesting the raw resources through final
construction then why would it be necessary to charge money
for a robot? Anyone who didn't want to work wouldn't have to.
Farm robots, digging robots, maid robots, builder robots. This
is one version of social utopia. Everyone would have all the
time they wanted to pursue art & leisure instead of slaving
away a large fraction of their life doing a job they don't like.
I see nothing wrong with that. I'm for 100% unemployment.
\_ I think we're already at the point where people can spend
as much time as they want on art. What we get for this
is a whole lot of really crappy art. I think 100%
unemployment would just lead to even more rampant
hiedoism. And more motd trolling.
\_ And poor spelling. |
| 5/26 |
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| marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm We go to McDonald's to eat about once a week because it is a mile from the house and has an indoor play area. Our normal routine is to walk in to McDonald's, stand in line, order, stand around waiting for the order, sit down, eat and play. When we walked in to McDonald's, an attractive woman in a suit greeted us and said, "Are you planning to visit the play area tonight?" "McDonald's has a new system that you can use to order your food right in the play area. The woman walks us over to a pair of kiosks in the play area. She starts to show me how the kiosks work and the kids scream, "We want to do it!" So I pull up a chair and the kids stand on it while the (extremely patient) woman in a suit walks the kids through the screens. David ordered his food, Irena ordered her food, I ordered my food. Interestingly, the kiosk only took cash in the form of bills. Then you take a little plastic number to set on your table and type the number in. We put our number in the center of the table and waited. In less than two minutes a woman in an apron put a tray with our food on the table, handed us our change, took the plastic number and left. The only improvement I would request is the ability to use a credit card. I will make this prediction: by 2008, every meal in every fast food restaurant will be ordered from a kiosk like this, or from a similar system embedded in each table. As nice as this system is, however, I think that it represents the tip of an iceberg that we do not understand. This iceberg is going to change the American economy in ways that are very hard to imagine. On that same day, I interacted with five different automated systems like the kiosks in McDonald's: * I got money in the morning from the ATM. Home Depot using their not-as-well-designed-as-BJ's self-service check out line. All of these systems are very easy-to-use from a customer standpoint, they are fast, and they lower the cost of doing business and should therefore lead to lower prices. All of that is good, so these automated systems will proliferate rapidly. The problem is that these systems will also eliminate jobs in massive numbers. In fact, we are about to see a seismic shift in the American workforce. As a nation, we have no way to understand or handle the level of unemployment that we will see in our economy over the next several decades. These kiosks and self-service systems are the beginning of the robotic revolution. When most people think about robots, they think about independent, autonomous, talking robots like the ones we see in science fiction films. C-3PO and R2-D2 are powerful robotic images that have been around for decades. Robots like these will come into our lives much more quickly than we imagine -- self-service checkout systems are the first primitive signs of the trend. Here is one view from the future to show you where we are headed: Automated retail systems like ATMs, kiosks and self-service checkout lines marked the beginning of the robotic revolution. Over the course of fifteen years starting in 2001, these systems proliferated and evolved until nearly every retail transaction could be handled in an automated way. Five million jobs in the retail sector were lost as a result of these systems. The Jobless Recovery The "Jobless Recovery" that we are currently experiencing in the US is big news. The Mystery of the 'jobless recovery': "Consider these facts: Employment growth at the moment is the lowest for any recovery since the government started keeping such statistics in 1939. The labor force shrank in July as discouraged workers stopped seeking employment. The number of people employed has fallen by more than 1 million since the "recovery" began in the fall of 2001." ref The article also notes, "The vast majority of the 27 million job losses since the 2001 recession began were the result of permanent changes in the US economy and are not coming back." There is no mystery -- the jobless recovery is exactly what you would expect in a robotic nation. When automation and robots eliminate jobs, they are gone for good. But it is much harder to do that now because robots can quickly fill the new jobs that get invented. Over the course of two decades, engineers refined this hardware and the software controlling it to the point where they could create humanoid bodyforms with the grace and precision of a ballerina or the mass and sheer strength of the Incredible Hulk. Decades of research and development work on autonomous robotic intelligence finally started to pay off. By 2025, the first machines that could see, hear, move and manipulate objects at a level roughly equivalent to human beings were making their way from research labs into the marketplace. These robots could not "think" creatively like human beings, but that did not matter. Massive AI systems evolved rapidly and allowed machines to perform in ways that seemed very human. Humanoid robots soon cost less than the average car, and prices kept falling. A typical model had two arms, two legs and the normal human-type sensors like vision, hearing and touch. The humanoid form was preferred, as opposed to something odd like R2-D2, because a humanoid shape fit easily into an environment designed around the human body. A humanoid robot could ride an escalator, climb stairs, drive a car, and so on without any trouble. Once the humanoid robot became a commodity item, robots began to move in and replace humans in the workplace in a significant way. The first wave of replacement began around 2030, starting with jobs in the fast food industry. Robots also filled janitorial and housekeeping positions in hotels, motels, malls, airports, amusement parks and so on. The economics of one of these humanoid robots made the decision to buy them almost automatic. In 2030 you could buy a humanoid robot for about $10,000. That robot could clean bathrooms, take out trash, wipe down tables, mop floors, sweep parking lots, mow grass and so on. The owner fired the three employees and in just four months the owner recovered the cost of the robot. The robot would last for many years and would happily work 24 hours a day. The robot also did a far better job -- for example, the bathrooms were absolutely spotless. It was impossible to pass up a deal like that, so corporations began buying armies of humanoid robots to replace human employees. The first completely robotic fast food restaurant opened in 2031. It had some rough edges, but by 2035 the rough edges were gone and by 2040 most restaurants were completely robotic. It was a startling, amazing transformation and the whole thing happened in only 25 years or so starting in 2030. In 2055 the nation hit a big milestone -- over half of the American workforce was unemployed, and the number was still rising. Nearly every "normal" job that had been filled by a human being in 2001 was filled by a robot instead. At restaurants, robots did all the cooking, cleaning and order taking. At construction sites, robots did everything -- Robots poured the concrete, laid brick, built the home's frame, put in the windows and doors, sided the house, roofed it, plumbed it, wired it, hung the drywall, painted it, etc. At the airport, robots flew the planes, sold the tickets, moved the luggage, handled security, kept the building clean and managed air traffic control. At the hospital robots cared for the patients, cooked and delivered the food, cleaned everything and handled many of the administrative tasks. At the mall, stores were stocked, cleaned and clerked by robots. At the amusement park, hundreds of robots ran the rides, cleaned the park and sold the concessions. Companies like Fedex, UPS and the post office had huge numbers of robots instead of people sorting packages, driving trucks and making deliveries. By 2055 robots had taken over the workplace and there was no turning back. You are thinking, "This is impossible -- there will not be humanoid robots in 2055. Imagine that you could travel back in time to the year 1900. Imagine that you stand on a soap box on a city street corner in 1900 and you say to the gathering crowd, "By 1955, people will be flying at supersonic speeds in sleek ... |
| marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm Burger-G was a fast food chain that had come out of nowhere starting with its first restaurant in 2001. The Burger-G chain had an attitude and a style that said hip and fun to a wide swath of the American middle class. The chain was able to grow with surprising speed based on its popularity and the public persona of the young founder, Joe Garcia. By 2010 the chain had 1,000 outlets in the United States and showed no signs of slowing down. If the trend continued, Burger-G would soon be one of the Top 5 fast food restaurants in the United States The robot installed at this first Burger-G restaurant looked nothing like the robots of popular culture. It was not hominid like C-3PO or futuristic like R2-D2 or industrial like an assembly line robot. Instead it was simply a PC sitting in the back corner of the restaurant running a piece of software. Mannas job was to manage the store, and it did this in a most interesting way. There was a group of employees who worked at the store, typically 50 people in a normal restaurant who rotated in and out on a weekly schedule. The people did everything from making the burgers to taking the orders to cleaning the tables and taking out the trash. All of these employees reported to the store manager and a couple of assistant managers. The managers hired the employees, scheduled them and told them what to do each day. In 2000, there were millions of businesses that operated in this way. Circa 2000, the fast food industry had a problem, and Burger-G was no different. They had courteous and thoughtful crew members, clean restrooms, great customer service and high accuracy on the orders. Since one bad experience could turn a customer off to an entire chain of restaurants, these poorly-managed stores were the Achilles heel of any chain. To solve the problem, Burger-G contracted with a software consultant and commissioned a piece of software. The goal of the software was to replace the managers and tell the employees what to do in a more controllable way. Manna was connected to the cash registers, so it knew how many people were flowing through the restaurant. The software could therefore predict with uncanny accuracy when the trash cans would fill up, the toilets would get dirty and the tables needed wiping down. The software was also attached to the time clock, so it knew who was working in the restaurant. Small signs on the buttons told customers to push them if they needed help or saw a problem. There was a button in the restroom that a customer could press if the restroom had a problem. There was a button near each cash register, one in the kiddie area and so on. These buttons let customers give Manna a heads up when something went wrong. At any given moment Manna had a list of things that it needed to do. There were orders coming in from the cash registers, so Manna directed employees to prepare those meals. There were also toilets to be scrubbed on a regular basis, floors to mop, tables to wipe, sidewalks to sweep, buns to defrost, inventory to rotate, windows to wash and so on. Manna kept track of the hundreds of tasks that needed to get done, and assigned each task to an employee one at a time. Manna had a voice synthesizer, and with its synthesized voice Manna told everyone exactly what to do through their headsets. Manna micro-managed minimum wage employees to create perfect performance. The software would speak to the employees individually and tell each one exactly what to do. Or, Jane, when you are through with this customer, please close your register. The employees were told exactly what to do, and they did it quite happily. It was a major relief actually, because the software told them precisely what to do step by step. For example, when Jane entered the restroom, Manna used a simple position tracking system built into her headset to know that she had arrived. When Jane completed the task, she would speak the word OK into her headset and Manna moved to the next step in the restroom cleaning procedure. Once the restroom was clean, Manna would direct Jane to put everything away. Meanwhile, Manna might send Lisa to the restroom to inspect it and make sure that Jane had done a thorough job. Manna would ask Lisa to check the toilets, the floor, the sink and the mirrors. That was a long time ago, but when I was a kid I lived right in the middle of Cary with my parents. We lived in a typical four bedroom suburban home in a nice neighborhood with a swimming pool in the backyard. I was a 15 year-old teenager working at the Burger-G on May 17 when the first Manna system came online. I can remember putting on the headset for the first time and the computer talking to me and telling me what to do. It was creepy at first, but that feeling really only lasted a day or so. Manna simply asked you to do something, you did it, you said, OK, and Manna asked you to do the next step. You could go through the whole day on autopilot, and Manna made sure that you were constantly doing something. Then you took off your headset and put it back on the rack to recharge. The first few minutes off the headset were always disorienting - there had been this voice in your head telling you exactly what to do in minute detail for six or eight hours. The job at Burger-G was mindless, and Manna made it easy by telling you exactly what to do. You could even get Manna to play music through your headphones, in the background. Every single minute, you had something that Manna was telling you to do. If you simply turned off your brain and went with the flow of Manna, the day went by very fast. My father, on the other hand, did not like Manna at all from the very first day he saw me wearing the headset in the restaurant. I knew they were coming, so I had timed my break so I could sit down with them for a few minutes. Its not the drive-thru, I replied, its a new system theyve installed called Manna. He looked at me for a long time, A computer is telling you what to do on the job? |