How big of a threat is automation?

[Red Squirrel]

Every time I get worried about AI taking over the world, I play with my Google Home for a few minutes and instantly feel better.

Google must have spent billions of dollars on R&D for that product by now, and it STILL can't understand what I'm saying about a third of the time. It totally fails on even basic commands regularly.

I think most of those things are basically just a front end to a search engine. 99% of the time all it's doing is converting what you said into a google search and then searching for it and reading you the first result.

I'm actually surprised they have not gotten smarter by now, where they essentially form their own local neural network, and where each one would have it's own personality and knowledge. Like it would basically know each person in the household individually and what not. I guess that could get really creepy as well so maybe that's why they don't do it that way.

 

[Dr. Detroit]

Honestly, there's tons.

Agriculture while being an easy first thing to see - another easy one is automated mowing/edging, etc. I think there is already a roomba equivalent for grass mowing.

Agriculture employs a huge portion of unskilled migrants, its labor intensive, pay is low, but necessary to feed our society. You can GPS plot your land and send out robo tractors to til and has been the norm for a decade. Its the labor intensive crops which are getting the full automation attention now and its a great thing that will pay huge benefits in the form of cheaper food, higher yields, and less spoilage.

StrawBot follows harvesters to improve strawberry picking productivity - The Robot Report

The new StrawBot from California-based Ag Pro Robotics promises 35% improvement in productivity for strawberry picking operations.

www.therobotreport.com

 

[Red Squirrel]

Agriculture employs a huge portion of unskilled migrants, its labor intensive, pay is low, but necessary to feed our society. You can GPS plot your land and send out robo tractors to til and has been the norm for a decade. Its the labor intensive crops which are getting the full automation attention now and its a great thing that will pay huge benefits in the form of cheaper food, higher yields, and less spoilage.

That's the dream, but the reality is food prices will still continue to go up, but there will be more profits for the big corporations because they don't need to hire anyone.

Automation will not make anything cheaper, it will just make it so the companies using it make more profit. That's why an Iphone still costs over a grand even when it's built by kids in China sweatshops. Apple are the one benefiting from child labour, not the consumers.

In a perfect world, nobody has to work and automation does everything for us, but the reality is we still need to pay bills etc and still need a job to live. Even if the utility companies, food companies, etc automate everything they're not going to give their services for free.