I do industrial automation for a living, and I just want to point out that automating things that exist purely in the digital domain is far easier than automating things like ship breaking.
Cant imagine how it even could be automated without advanced robotics. Those ships are freakin HUGE! Maybe a collection of robotic snakes with cutting lazers attached to their heads and some little scuttle bots to pick up the pieces the snakes knock off? Just cut the whole thing into 1’ disks or maybe hexagons is better
Maybe a collection of robotic snakes with cutting lazers attached to their heads
Just make a huge version of those supermarket bread slicer machines and feed the ships through it.
Or better yet, build a bigger ship and use it to smash the smaller ship to pieces
I just read The Three Body Problem, and I have some ideas on how it could be done.
It can be automated it would just never be worth the cost. Every ship is different and has its own requirements.
If they were all 100% exactly the same, using the same hardware in all the same places then it would be cost effective to automate their disassembly. Otherwise every single ship is a one-off edge case.
Even if they’re mostly the same many will have had upgrades, repairs, and changes over time that could literally throw a wrench (that someone accidentally left inside an interior area) into the whole (automated) operation.
I think the best case scenario is to enforce shipbuilding standards and deny ships entry if they don’t follow them (for loading/unloading, anyway). Then you setup standardized dry docks with robotic arms that are already preprogrammed to disassemble these standard vessels. They may need human guidance for some areas that are allowed to be non-conforming but as long as the majority of the ship adheres to the standard it’d make the whole process much smoother and more environmentally friendly.
From an environmental standpoint the real issues from these vessels isn’t even the difficulty of (environmentally friendly) disassembly. It’s their emissions over their working lifetime and super toxic things like anti-fouling coatings that where we have no good way to remove or dispose of them. Like, even if you rip off the outside of a ship what do you do with that toxic waste? It’s nasty stuff.
[…] I just want to point out that automating things that exist purely in the digital domain is far easier than automating things like ship breaking.
Not that you’re saying otherwise, however isn’t that even more of a reason more developers and resources should be allocated toward automating complex and risky physical processes?
Honestly, I don’t see how you would do it without general AI, which is something that will be solved in the digital domain first anyway.
Eh, it could be done with non-general AI. There are a finite number of different types of things to handle, so as long as it’s not thrown off by some bent steel or some missing consoles, I’d be amazed if they couldn’t automate at least specific ship designs.
Not that you’re saying otherwise, however isn’t that even more of a reason more developers and resources should be allocated toward automating complex and risky physical processes?
You’re solving for the wrong problem from the perspective of people with money investing money to solve these problems.
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Shipbreaking, while dangerous for the workers, isn’t expensive because it is done in far flung countries with workers that have low wages, few protections for safety, and long term health consequences.
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Art and writing (for western consumption) requires educated and talented people which are expensive to employ.
People with money, looking for a return, want that return their spending, not reduce human suffering.
Processing the digital world is just the first step. You can’t just build a safe autonomous ship disassembly robot without making sure your algorithms are actually sound. Look at self driving cars, they’re far from being safe and acceptable. Jumping straight into this problem without testing the shit out of your code in a virtual world is a mistake.
I mean automating it would certainly be a challenge but the first step would be building tools and robotics to allow human operators to more safely and effectively manage the tasks. Then you streamline the industrialized processes. Then you think about automating things.
But this is all really an economic problem, not a technical one. Software tools have minimal resource costs (compared to building/destroying a ship) but require skilled (expensive) laborers to operate. So to cut costs in any digital field you need to get rid of the expensive laborers. Thus the push for AI to replace any computer-bound work. Physical labor is already considered dirt-cheap in our fucked society, and no one is rushing to add expensive tools in fields where disposable people will suffice.
I sympathize immensely with the OP image’s final point, but “working for the right company” isn’t going to fix it. Reorganizing society is necessary, rethinking what we culturally value and uphold.
I think the solution for ship breakers is for the job to be a highly paid respectable job with protections. In other words the technology that desperately needs to disrupt this industry is probably… unions
Yeah I think that’s the point. Ship breaking is apparently poorly paid so they need unions.
I also not sure how much scope there is for automation on tasks like this as each shit will be different there isn’t going to be a huge amount of repeatable action
Yeah exactly, I work in AI and robotics for medicine, and im so goddamn sick and tired of these people and their absolute god-awful uneducated takes on AI.
And yet, people do… https://www.leviathan.eu/
That is really cool job description I haven’t seen pop up before! Would you mind sharing what type of things you need to automate? It sounds so interesting, I never really understood why factory line jobs should exist for example * because the work is dangerous, the opposite of stimulating/engaging (works for some sure), and just generally overall depressing unpleasant places to work. We SHOULD be striving for a world where humans don’t have to do such menial unfufilling work.
*very superficially, all the nuance that makes it continue to be necessary and exist I understand)
I work in the auto industry, so programming the machines that make the car parts. Humans are still involved because getting machines to handle changing conditions is very slow, expensive, and still winds up unreliable in a lot of cases. The simple process of picking a randomly oriented part up out of a bin and placing it accurately on a fixture is actually very difficult for a machine to do, when compared to how easily a human can accomplish the exact same task.
This is kind of a dumb argument, isn’t it?
I have to imagine someone centuries ago probably complained about inventors wasting their time on some dumb printing presses so smart people could write books and newspapers better when they could have been building better farm tools. But could we have developed the tractor when we did if we were still handwriting everything?
Progress supports progress. Teaching computers to recognize and reproduce pictures might seem like a waste to some people, but how do you suppose a computer will someday disassemble a ship if it is not capable of recognizing what the ship is and what holds it together? Modern AI is primitive, but it will eventually lead to autonomous machines that can actually do that work intelligently without blindly following an instruction set, oblivious to whatever might be actually happening around it.
The argument isn’t against the technology, it’s against the application of that technology.
Path of least resistance. It is harder to build a robot who can disassemble ships with its hands than it is to pattern match together pictures.
This XKCD comes to mind: https://xkcd.com/1425/
This isn’t even close to what they’re saying. It’s closer to complaining about how the Yankees replaced their star pitcher with a modified howitzer.
It’s not about people “wasting their time on some dumb invention,” it’s about how that useful invention is being used to replace jobs that people actually like doing because it’ll save their bosses money. It’s not even like when photography was invented or Photoshop came out and people freaked out about artists being put out of work, because those require different skill sets and opened up entirely new fields of art while also helping optimize other fields. This stuff could improve the fields that they’re created for by helping people optimize their workflow to make the act of creating things easier. But that’s not what they’re doing. It’s being used to mimic the skills of the people who enjoy doing these things so that they don’t have to pay people to do it.
Even ignoring the ethical/moral aspect of this stuff being trained without permission on the work of the people it’s designed to replace, the end goal isn’t to increase the quality of life of people, allowing us more time to do the things we love - things like, you know, art and writing - it’s to make the rich even richer and push people out of well-paying jobs.
The closest example I can think of is when Disney fired all their 2d animators and switched to 3d. They didn’t do it because 3d was better. In many ways, the quality was much worse at the time. But 2d animators are unionized and 3d animators aren’t, so they could get away with paying them much less. The same exact thing happened with the practical effects vs. digital effects guys in Hollywood right around the same time.
Society has always been losing jobs, the population just pivots to other specialisations. The only reason we fear it is because of our economic system that preys on it and turns it into profit, but that’s an other conversation entirely.
On the subject of losing creative venues, both your examples(photography and Photoshop) show how technology didn’t detract from the arts but add to it, letting the average person do much more. The same will be true for AI, I can see an inevitable boom happening in the filmmaking and animation industry, not to mention comic books and most of all indie gaming. It’s in the long run empowering for the individual imo.
The economic system is what he’s talking about here. That was my point. The entire conversation from the side against this stuff has always been about the economic situation of it. Without that factor, I think the only thing people would care about is whether or not their work is being used without their permission/maliciously.
As for Photoshop and photography, that’s actually why I brought those up specifically. Because they were feared as things that would destroy artists’ jobs and actually brought about entirely new fields of art - and also because they’re the two people bring up when people argue against LLM replacing people’s jobs, acting like they’re just some Luddites afraid of science.
Right now, the way I see it with AI is that there are 2 distinct groups benefiting from it: those whose workflow has been improved from the use of AI, and those who think AI can get them the result of work without having to either do the work themselves or pay somebody else to do it. And thanks to the economic issues that are at the heart of this whole thing, that second group is set to harm the number of people who can spend time creating things simply because they now have to work a job that isn’t creating things and no longer have the time to put towards that. So I can see AI creating a whole new art boom or a bust in equal measure. That second group is of concern to the art communities as well because they only see the destination and don’t see that the journey is just as important to the act of creation, and that is already causing schisms between artists and “prompters” who think that they’re just as skilled because they used a generator to make some cool stuff. People are already submitting unedited, prompted work to art and writing competitions.
I get the sentiment, but it’s a bad example. Transformer models don’t recognize images in any useful way that could be fed to other systems. They also don’t have any capability of actual understanding or context. Heavily simplifying here, tokenisation of inputs allows them to group clusters of letters together into tokens, so when it receives tokens it can spit out whatever the training data says it should.
The only actual things that are improving greatly here which could be used in different systems are natural language processing, natural language output and visual output.
EDIT: Crossed out stuff that is wrong.
Well, this is simply incorrect. And confidently incorrect at that.
Vision transformers (ViT) is an important branch of computer vision models that apply transformers to image analysis and detection tasks. They perform very well. The main idea is the same, by tokenizing the input image into smaller chunks you can apply the same attention mechanism as in NLP transformer models.
ViT models were introduced in 2020 by Dosovitsky et. al, in the hallmark paper “An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale” (https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929). A work that has received almost 30000 academic citations since its publication.
So claiming transformers only improve natural language and vision output is straight up wrong. It is also widely used in visual analysis including classification and detection.
Thank you for the correction. So hypothetically, with millions of hours of GoPro footage from the scuttle crew, and if we had some futuristic supercomputer that could crunch live data from a standard definition camera and output decisions, we could hook that up to a Boston dynamics style robot and run one replaced member of the crew?
Could you give me an example that uses live feeds of video data, or feeds the output to another system? As far as I’m aware (I could be very wrong! Not an expert), the only things that come close to that are things like OCR systems and character recognition. Describing in machine-readable actionable terms what’s happening in an image isn’t a thing, as far as I know.
“AI” researcher here. The only reason there are models that can “write” and “create art” is because that data is available for training. Basically people put massive amounts of digital text and images on the Internet and the companies scraped all of it to train the models. If there were big enough datasets for ship building, that would happen too…
Besides, what the guy is yapping about it is 80% a robotics problem not an AI problem. It’s apples and oranges.
He’s essentially saying why can Will Smith finally eat pasta normally while we still don’t have the robotic workforce from the 2001 Will Smith movie “I, Robot”.
He’s a programmer, why doesn’t he stop working on aligning buttons on web applications and work on shipbuilding robots!?!?
Not really. You would still need to, you know, build drones or automated factories to actually perform the salvaging. But the point is that nobody DID, because capitalism values profit over human life. Nobody who “matters” is interested in solving that problem.
Actually that’s not true at all, there’s lots of interest in robotics (check out Boston Dynamic) but it’s a really really hard problem. The main issue is developing a controlling intelligence sophisticated enough to be able to use the robot to do a diverse range of tasks. The actual physical mechanical building of the robot isn’t that hard.
Of course the way you get that controlling intelligence is AI. So he is complaining about people developing a solution to the problem he’s demanding that they solve. He’s not happy because they’re not magically skipping steps.
This idiot wants fully sapient robots without developing AI in the first place, not sure how on earth he expects that to happen.
I think you’re underestimating the mechanical and chemistry problems that still need to be solved before autonomous robots that can perform a task like ship salvage effectively. There’s a very good reason that basically all industrial robots spend their lives plugged into a wall socket.
Not true. We have capable robots now. See Boston Dynamics like the other commenter said. Plus we have had industrial robots making cars and stuff forever now. To make robots that can handle a wide variety of things (every ship is bound to be different) is hard and we don’t have data to train such models (see reinforcement learning, imitation learning, “sim2real” problem etc)
I get the sentiment, but that is a really dumb take. Software automation is a hell of a lot easier than creating robotic automation to disassemble ships of all shapes and sizes. That’s why art automation has been done, and industrial freighter recycling automation has not been.
How would that even be possible? Presumably, you’d need to break the ships down into pieces first, and even then, you’ll be dealing with huge numbers of oddly shaped and sized components of varying materials. It makes a lot more sense to have people do that, though it is likely very dangerous.
Seems more like a job for unions and workplace safety regulations than for robots
more like a job for unions and workplace safety regulations
Yes. That’s why they do these things in third world countries. The people there are cheaper than robots will ever be.
I get the sentiment, but that is a really dumb take.
$13B invested in OpenAI feels more and more like malinvestment and graft, incentivized by our disastrous energy policy and enormous tech subsidies.
This isn’t purely software automation. Its also an investment in physical media and machines, new or renovated energy infrastructure, and enormous volumes of potable water.
Seems more like a job for unions and workplace safety regulations than for robots
In 2020, a leaked company memo detailed Amazon’s use of a new technology — the geoSPatial Operating Console (SPOC) — to analyze and visualize data sets pertaining to threats to the company, including unions. Reported by Jason Del Rey and Shirin Ghaffary at Vox, some of the data points related to unions include:
Amazon-owned Whole Foods’ market activism and unionization efforts.
Flow patterns of union grant money.
The presence of local union chapters and alt labor groups.
The approach is an obvious attempt by the company to use more passive means of identifying and neutralizing union sympathizers in the company.
“Amazon’s tracking of workers’ micro-movements, decision points and searches and then linking all of that data to that of unions, community groups and legislative policy campaigns is union busting on its face,” said Stuart Appelbaum, President of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) in a statement at the time.
That is very true, but my critique was more focused on the difference between automating software tasks vs mechanical tasks, especially with non-uniform inputs and not the economic investment required. Some tasks are better suited to automation - and plagiarizing art is far easier than deconstructing and recycling massive industrial freighters.
Not on the side of the AI art generators here - that was just low hanging fruit compared to something like was suggested in the original post. Definitely need extremely strong labor law to protect against AI union busting (and union busting generally)
my critique was more focused on the difference between automating software tasks vs mechanical tasks
Somewhat paradoxically, we’ve been much more successful automating mechanical tasks than digital ones. We’ve had steam looms and automotive assembly plants far longer than server farms and super computers.
And I might argue this kind of automation has been far more fruitful. I can point to a lot more in my daily life that has benefited from the industrialization of steel and plastic fabrication than what I’ve received from Google Search Results.
To say the millions of man-hours and trillions of dollars sunk into the advertisement and entertainment industries couldn’t be put to better use… Come on, man. The latest Marvel movie wasn’t so good that I wouldn’t have traded it for a globalized 1980s British NHS.
Software automation being easier seems like a reason to not have so many people doing it, then? Like, the harder problem is the one that could really use all of the focus?
But the harder problems aren’t as obviously profitable for a large number of tech CEOs, and they’re not ripe for being a “winning glittery ticket” for a large number of comp sci students looking to be the next big thing in Silicon Valley.
Making art and writing just happens to be easy to automate with neural networks and machine learning, neither of which was originally researched for the purpose of replacing artists and writers.
Good luck disassembling a ship with a neural network. And maybe do some research about the difficulties of application-specific robotics.
I think it is just a matter of where you put resources. I am sure if you put resources into improving recycling ships some advancements will be done (it won’t be done using neural network probably).
But that’s true of everything. This guy is explicitly angry about AI not being used in ship decommission, which is just weird.
It’s not about the ships.
Shipbreaking is the author’s example, but it’s not the author’s point.
He could have bemoaned the lack of tree-trimming robots or the vaporware nature of self-driving cars instead.
The key point is the heavy investment in automating away things that bring us joy while doing nothing about vast classes of unpleasant drudgery.
Hell, look at roofers. A lot of injuries there are from falls, easily preventable with fall harnesses. It doesn’t even require a big research investment! Our society simply doesn’t value those lives enough to protect them.
Define art, though.
As it stands neural networks and LLMs can’t do it, because they lack imagination. A human can use it as tool to make art though, and we don’t have these silly kinds of conversations about photoshop (anymore!).
As for the OP, you’ve taken it a bit more literally and reacted a bit more defensively than I think is warranted. The point is about our systems priorities, not so much the specifics.
I have a feeling if we performed a lobotomy-like surgery on someone that eliminated their imagination and told them to just put paint on a canvas, you’d still call that art.
I would, at least. There’s some subjectivity to the definition of art and what people think has artistic value.