
The growing need for human robot-minders could juice the remote workforce - phront
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-next-hot-job-pretending-to-be-a-robot-11567224001?mod=rsswn
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Animats
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]

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-
illegi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegible-
addresses-goes-to-be-read.html)

~~~
rthomas6
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.

~~~
MegaButts
This is fascinating. Can you please point me somewhere I can learn more about
automation increasing employment? When I google it I just get a bunch of
highly political pieces about robots stealing jobs.

~~~
Animats
There's a classic book from almost a century ago, "Chapters on Machinery and
Labor", which lists the three usual outcomes from mechanization. It's still
relevant.

The "good case" was typesetting. The introduction of the Linotype enormously
increased the volume of material printed and created more printing and
typesetting jobs.

The "medium case" was bottle making. Hand-made bottles were expensive, taking
a trained group of about five people to blow a bottle. Machine-made made
bottles were cheaper, and required far fewer people to make. Cheaper bottles
increased demand for bottles, but, overall, employment in bottle making was
about the same or less. Also, much of the labor was now low-skill machine
tending - putting in sand, taking out bottles. Only a small number of bottle-
making machine experts were needed.

The "bad case" was the stone planer. Brick buildings used to have stone
lintels over doors and windows, and there was an industry of big guys with
chisels hammering out those things. The stone planer was simply a big steam
powered planer for stone slabs. This required far fewer people. But it didn't
increase demand for stone lintels, because they were a minor building
component, not significant enough in cost to increase demand for brick
buildings.

~~~
dredmorbius
Link: Chapters on Machinery and Labor George E. Barnett

[https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674280892](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674280892)

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cleansy
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.

* According to [https://www.4g.co.uk/news/4g-injecting-new-lease-life-online...](https://www.4g.co.uk/news/4g-injecting-new-lease-life-online-gaming-mobile-broadband/)

~~~
Wowfunhappy
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.

~~~
grogenaut
quick internet search says 5g is mainly a range of 1K, usa is 9.834 square km,
yes this doesn't cover areas that have no roads but lets call it 1/4, that's
still around 2.2M towers you'd have to add to make this feasible. Plus all the
support infra. But hey at least we'll have power everywhere so we can put
super chargers at every one of these towers!

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mothsonasloth
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...

~~~
ClutchBand
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.

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noodlesUK
_...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.

~~~
jsty
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.

~~~
a-priori
The Earth is 134ms around at the speed of light. That's how long it takes to
communicate in real time with the other side of the world (your antipode). No
technology or routing policies can change that.

This sort of real-time control would probably have to be done on the same
continent at most, because of purely physical limitations.

~~~
1_person
I think it's worth introducing to the discussion that human reaction time to
an unanticipated stimulus is somewhere around 150-250ms. The ~140-150ms
practically achievable latency over a hemispheric arc in real world IP
networks is already fairly close to the limit imposed by the human element.
However, latency in IP networks is measured as RTT while human reaction time
to a stimulus is given as the one way path latency. The more accurate
comparison would be between the ~70ms one way path latency of the optical
terrestrial network with the same 150-250ms of one way path latency for the
human to react to a directly applied stimulus. At the extreme of the range of
human factors and accounting for the differing scale, human factors are
responsible for up to 80% of the reaction latency.

~~~
a-priori
But if you're talking about having human operators in the loop then any
communications latency would be in addition to the reaction time of the
operator.

~~~
TomMarius
What if you make it an anticipated stimulus? E.g. have operators grouped by
event kind.

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pnutjam
What if it saves a ton of money (for me) and only kills afew not me's.

//The real argument

~~~
TomMarius
I strongly believe no one has to die.

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msantos
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.

~~~
simonswords82
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.

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8163511.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8163511.stm)

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bcx
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, ...).

~~~
skybrian
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.

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Jedi72
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.

~~~
Swizec
i agree, it’s ridiculous that not all subway trains are automated yet

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Why is it ridiculous? If you look at Transport for London as an example, the
organization employs 25,000 people, of which 3,000 are train operators, with
600+ trains. The salary + indirect wage costs for those people is on the order
of $250 million per year. Which I think is pretty cheap, compared to what
you'd guesstimate for CAPEX and OPEX for an automated system.

Now they are actually in the process of automating the trains, which has been
criticised by many as a vanity project. Certainly it has not been shown that
it makes financial sense. And it has been decided that they will retain a
"captain" aboard the train, for safety reasons, as someone has to lead
passenger evacuation in case of an emergency. So the total salary savings will
be essentially zero.

Fully level-4 automated may makes sense for new builds. But for retrofits, you
can't satisfy the overall requirements without a human physically present.

~~~
Bombthecat
Germany is thinking about automation, but for cost saving. (it might increase)
but to be able to put more trains on one track and behind each other..

~~~
Scoundreller
Yes, by always stopping in the same place, lines can be painted at entries and
exits to speed up station flow.

If you want to erect barriers to increase safe station capacity, you need that
too.

Finally, the automated trains will have smoother acceleration and braking,
reducing wear and tear on the trains and tracks.

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jileczech
That remote controlled car idea is stupid. So many things can go wrong. What
if the connection gets interrupted?

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
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.

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dalbasal
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."

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nkrisc
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"?

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sebringj
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.

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JoeAltmaier
I don't see how replacing dozens of people with one robot and a human 'minder'
is at all, _juicing the workforce_. Its just more automation.

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i_am_proteus
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.

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test6554
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.

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pytester
It appears the automation/AI revolution that was going to render millions
jobless was smoke and mirrors after all.

~~~
RobertDeNiro
They just realized it’s not that much more expensive to give these jobs to
foreign workers instead.

~~~
dlphn___xyz
which is worse over time - developing automation to take over certain jobs or
staffing certain jobs with offshore contractors?

~~~
cosmojg
That depends on where you want the money going: everybody involved in
developing and maintaining automated systems at home and abroad (high-skilled
labor) or everybody involved in controlling drones from afar (low-skilled
labor). Of course, the amount going to either group will be drastically
different depending on a multitude of factors.

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buboard
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.

