Posts

Showing posts with the label Automation

The Key to Automation

Every day seems to see new reports about incredible robots being developed. Robots that carry stuff for soldiers, robots that perform surgery, and robots that play football. It's all very exciting, but what we really need are robots to make our lives easier. To give us more time to do what we want. To do the mundane jobs and free us up to take on more creative work that robots can't do. But how do we go about this? How do we bring robots and automation into our everyday lives, unless robot intelligence is significantly improved? Well, while this intelligence is improving at a rapidly accelerating pace, there is a huge potential for solving problems using simple, task repeating, programmable robotics. The key is to standardize everything . We have to "put it on rails". As an example, let's look at making an automated dish washing system. We have dishwashers, but we still need to load and unload them. We need to develop 2 things. Firstly, we need a robot tha...

Machines to Run Society?

Image
Sum of all Thrills Robot Arm by tom.arthur Many people have an aversion to automated machines and computers running things. There are likely two reasons for this. The first is due to the lack of trust we place in automation. This is mainly due to their track record. Machines have proved themselves to be unreliable in the past, and need to do a lot to regain our trust. Secondly, machines have been known to make mistakes that are "machine" in nature, exposing human qualities that we took for granted. In other words, they will miss seemingly obvious details, or make mistakes relating to the human experience. So it's not surprising that people don't really trust machines yet. They're not as good as humans in some areas yet they have superseded us in others. This also leads to discontent when humans see their jobs disappear as a result. It's a shame that machines have developed such a bad reputation, because they don't really deserve it. Most of their ...