It’s certainly easier for most people to compute. Which is another sort of ironic element of this: an app like this could make 15% much easier for your average innumerate person to deal with.
Considering that it’s a touchscreen app with what’s basically a sideways dial (looking 90 degrees to the axis of rotation), showing percentages and a tip amount & total bill that changes as you rotate the dial around changing the percentages, I’d say that’s exactly so. It defaults to 20%, but moving it to 15% is just a matter of a swipe.
I know that I’m that dork who tends to dial in the nearest whole dollar above whatever tip amount I want to give, which isn’t something I tend to calculate if only provided with pen and paper.
Maybe the first listing here is the beginning of the end for all human manual labor:
Deep-learning technique that allows robots to learn manual tasks developed
Could be!
Video of BRETT the deep-learning robot in action.
I don’t think the robot will be taking over all manual labor in the immediate future. But maybe in five to ten years?
Funny that Brett seems to try screwing lids on counter-clockwise before doing it the right way.
On one of the recent Planet Money podcasts exploring this issue, they profiled a woman working at a South Carolina factory whose job could be done by a robot, but it’s currently cheaper to just pay a human instead of installing a robot. What a strange and tenuous position to be in: you just *know *that robot price is going to come down before long. And I’d imagine we’ll see this in a lot of fields: the jobs aren’t eliminated the moment a robot or AI can do them, but rather there is a period of overlap, during which John Henry still can compete on price but is ultimately facing the writing on the wall. (And how does it feel to have a job only because you are cheaper than a robot?)
Speaking of Planet Money, they just put out their final episode in the series, which basically explores the exact question we did in this thread, albeit much more superficially (I think I will tweet a link to this to them, in fact). Their subhead:
I do this. It centers the threads and makes it much less likely that it will be cross threaded. I wonder if the robot learned that with trial and error or if they taught it.
Huh! I had no idea this was a thing.
Looks like even those Ivy League guys are starting to catch on:
I like the term “tipping point” in the headline. I use the term “Robot Job Holocaust” because it appeals to my sensationalistic tendencies, but “tipping point” also conveys that sense that we are heading for a cliff and not noticing. Point is, not only will robots take over jobs progressively faster as time goes by, but the rate at which the robots take over jobs will increase as robot tech become cheaper and more flexible. But don’t expect complacent Americans to notice until it’s pretty much already happened.
If they don’t notice, that implies the transition will be pretty smooth.
While I do agree with many of the points, I have to say that there are many opportunities for new industries to appear and develop, IMHO the biggest stumbling blocks will be old fashion regulation and protectionism as in patent trolling. IMHO a lot of the technology that is appearing will allow people with little training to become effective workers for the new industries.
They’ll notice when unemployment spikes to unprecedented levels. Problem is, will they grasp the cause or can they be distracted by other causes?
Right, new industries will appear and develop and new robots and software will be developed to work in those industries, much faster and more cheaply than human beings.
Well, I’m more of a “bit of column A and bit of column B” kind of guy here.
In this case your point here is too optimistic/pessimistic, while it is true that a lot of new industries will also be taken by robots the speed of the change or application of them is not likely to be as fast as you think.
I think it will be a LOT faster than you think. Especially once they start designing restaurants, shops, etc. to be autonomous from the git-go.
AAAAND … it begins.Goodbye, transportation industry jobs …
I think you are missing the point, IMHO it will be fast in several trades and jobs, but the new jobs that will come thanks to advances in technology will still chug along for a while for many humans.
I expect there will at least for a while be lots of essentially makework jobs. Private industry isn’t going to fund those on their own, but the government can provide lots of them, New Deal style, plus create many more in the private sector through tax credits and other preferences for businesses that employ X number of people. Those should be pretty cushy “jobs”, I’d think.
OMG! Elevator operators will be next!
(I wonder how many people here have actually ridden in an elevator with an operator.)
There were still some of those around when I was a kid.