Robots are coming fast

this has been going on for a long while

I used to share an office with a robotic measuring system.

it talked its way through its tasks as required and learned as you used it, writing its own software on the fly so it could do the work on its own next time around. It could measure down to a millionths of an inch reliably and checked its own calibration using hard gauge standards each morning while I had my coffee.

do to its ability to reverse engineer parts by creating highly accurate CAD models off of real components its movements had to be submitted to the UN during its importation so it didn’t end up in the wrong country ( or hands )

and that was over 15 years ago.
 
this has been going on for a long while

I used to share an office with a robotic measuring system.

it talked its way through its tasks as required and learned as you used it, writing its own software on the fly so it could do the work on its own next time around. It could measure down to a millionths of an inch reliably and checked its own calibration using hard gauge standards each morning while I had my coffee.

do to its ability to reverse engineer parts by creating highly accurate CAD models off of real components its movements had to be submitted to the UN during its importation so it didn’t end up in the wrong country ( or hands )

and that was over 15 years ago.
Who made that system?
 
Who made that system?
I don’t remember who was the bright little lizard behind that system, but it was nickname “the dragon” because of it’s prodigious appetite for really expensive drive motors and its ability to tick me off.

we figured I could digitize a simple object, a coffee cup was our usual suggestion, and download a complete CAD file to the machining Center in the other end of the building and have that unit starting to cut an exact replica in your choice of metal in about an hour. The machining Center could set up its own machining programs and choose its own cutting tools from an array of 36 it had stored internally based on the type of metal it was going to cut and the quality of finish you required.

when the system was new the machinist asked me to check the ID of a valve housing so he could correct its roundness. I asked how many points he wanted and he asked for 10 per degree of rotation or 3600 points around a roughly 2” diameter. ( the machine would happily do 10,000 points per feature. ) That took about 30 minutes for me to land in his inbox at his machine. He thought he was jerking me around asking for so much, not realizing the power I now had as in the past that was a couple of days work. His system wasn’t fully ready yet so he would have had to manually input it.

he came crawling back asking for a simpler file.

later the two systems talked directly, my CAD model output directly into his machining Center
 
Yeah, automation has been around in some form for centuries. AI is quantum leap in information technology, but is a continuation of what has been happening for 75 years. I remember the dream was to replace manual labor with robots, knowledge workers were believed to be safe from robotization. But surprise, surprise! They are now much easier to automate than an autonomous manual laborer.
 
I aporeciate that bot is just performing a movement script and if you pushed, it would just fall over, but it seems in twenty years thats all weve added, we are still a long, long way from a robot that can close to even a very low IQ human, maybe another ten years at least
 
Yeah, automation has been around in some form for centuries. AI is quantum leap in information technology, but is a continuation of what has been happening for 75 years. I remember the dream was to replace manual labor with robots, knowledge workers were believed to be safe from robotization. But surprise, surprise! They are now much easier to automate than an autonomous manual laborer.
I’ve worked with a few qualifies engineers who I would have happily replaced with a robot. They don’t teach practical engineering any more, just theoretical stuff, so I had one just out of university spend half a day assembling an IKEA Billy bookcase for his office and screw it up. I’ve seen that twice now, it’s a great way to spend your coffee break… watching someone get humbled my a hex key.

When I made fun of him he told me to give him a break because he’d never used one before!

I once spent a day wandering what was at the time GM’s most advanced assembly plant. Watching a robot place a complete dashboard, instruments, steering column, wheel and all, into a vehicle through the door opening in about 5 seconds without hitting anything was quite amazing. Same for the one that picked up and then put 60 pound windshield in from a dozen feet in the air like it weighted nothing. Robots like this are good.
 
Remember when Watson beat a chess master? The next level will be when an autonomous robot can carry its clubs to play golf way under par.
 
There's a reason that just about every production machine shop in existence has at least one vertical mill and at least one lathe. CNC is awesome, especially for complex pieces that have to be consistent in a run. However, tweaking things on a CNC machine often takes more time than doing it manually. Prototyping is done quite often on manual machines. There is a place for both, and I don't see the need going away anytime soon.
 
Marquess had just posted the reality of humanoid robots, the first household robot on sale can do practically nothing by itself

 
Hey! That's what I need! A robot that will ride my bike up and down the hill in front of my house!
That way, I can sit on the porch and watch it bust it's a$$ instead of me busting mine!

 
Last edited:
This is totally off topic. Forgive me. I am not into auto racing but Sonoma is not just an oval. It has hills and twists. And for free you can just walk around a see vintage cars race. They are beautiful and unique. Regular people have poured their time, treasure, and souls into them and then they race them. A great spot is from one of the pedestrian bridges over the track.
 
I have returned to 1984 after realising I never read the full book and have been relying on snippets, reactions and reviews.
So...something that isnt often picked up on..
In the dystopian world of George Orwell’s 1984, there is a machine called a “versificator.”

The versificator is one of the entertaining distractions made by the Party. A versificator generates songs , music and fiction that are “composed without any human intervention whatever.” The results range from insipid love songs like “Hopeless Fancy,” to the “savage, barking rhythm” of the “Hate Song”—designed to stir rage against political enemies.

But the Proles like it fine. The song “Hopeless Fancy,” takes hold among them and “haunts” London for weeks.
It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound.
In this case, the art of the machine seems adequate for consumption.

There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means.
The Proles make up the majority of society, and so the Party provides them with various sources of entertainment to keep them from getting too restless.

Orwell gets more terrifyingly accurate every year.
 
Elon apparently liked Iain Banks as a writer, probably because Banks gave his sentient spaceships fantastic names that Musk could nick. But weird to think about because Banks developed a utopian and clearly socialist future society called The Culture. Amazing books but I guess fascist Musk must not have understood what he was skim reading. Heaven forbid the likes of him ever read 1984, he would definitely see it as an instructional manual.
 
The mind expanding book I am currently reading has among other things an AI deity who works across millions of parallel universes but has taken a corporeal human bodily form. The Next are genetically 'human' but about nine times smarter. And people can jump between parallels earths using a hand-heald box unless they are adepts who can navigate worm holes called soft places. It is part of the Long Earth series. This is the Long Mars. At about 150,000 parallel earths out to the west, there is no earth, just a brick moon. So if you jump a ship there it is easy to get to mars. And to hop paralel mars'. That can only happen with sentience. That mission is to find a piece of a space elevator thread to emulate.
 
Back