The Next Hot Job: Pretending To Be a Robot (wsj.com) 44
"As the promise of autonomous machines lags the underlying technology, the growing need for human robot-minders could juice the remote workforce," reports The Wall Street Journal. An anonymous reader shares excerpts from the report: Across industries, engineers are building atop work done a generation ago by designers of military drones. Whether it's terrestrial delivery robots, flying delivery drones, office-patrolling security robots, inventory-checking robots in grocery stores or remotely piloted cars and trucks, the machines that were supposed to revolutionize everything by operating autonomously turn out to require, at the very least, humans minding them from afar. Until the techno-utopian dream of full automation comes into effect -- and frankly, there's no guarantee that will ever happen -- there will be plenty of jobs for humans, just not ones their parents would recognize. Whether the humans in charge are in the same city or thousands of miles away, the proliferation of not-yet-autonomous technologies is driving a tiny but rapidly growing workforce.
Companies working with remote-controlled robots know there are risks, and try to mitigate them in a few ways. Some choose only to operate slow-moving machines in simple environments -- as in Postmates's sidewalk delivery -- so that even the worst disaster isn't all that bad. More advanced systems require 'human supervisory control,' where the robot or vehicle's onboard AI does the basic piloting but the human gives the machine navigational instructions and other feedback. Prof. Cummings says this technique is safer than actual remote operation, since safety isn't dependent on a perfect wireless connection or a perfectly alert human operator. For every company currently working on self-driving cars, almost every state mandates they must either have a safety driver present in the vehicle or be able to control it from afar. Guidelines from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration suggest the same. Phantom Auto is betting the shift to remote operation might become an important means of employment for people who used to drive for a living. Other requirements for our remote-controlled future include "a tolerance for working for a lower wage, since remote operation could allow companies to outsource driving, construction and service jobs to call centers in cheaper labor markets," the report adds.
"Another might be a youth spent gaming. When Postmates managers interview potential delivery-robot pilots like Diana Villalobos, they ask whether or not they played videogames in their youth. 'When I was a kid, my parents always said, 'Stop playing videogames!' But it came in handy,' she says."
Companies working with remote-controlled robots know there are risks, and try to mitigate them in a few ways. Some choose only to operate slow-moving machines in simple environments -- as in Postmates's sidewalk delivery -- so that even the worst disaster isn't all that bad. More advanced systems require 'human supervisory control,' where the robot or vehicle's onboard AI does the basic piloting but the human gives the machine navigational instructions and other feedback. Prof. Cummings says this technique is safer than actual remote operation, since safety isn't dependent on a perfect wireless connection or a perfectly alert human operator. For every company currently working on self-driving cars, almost every state mandates they must either have a safety driver present in the vehicle or be able to control it from afar. Guidelines from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration suggest the same. Phantom Auto is betting the shift to remote operation might become an important means of employment for people who used to drive for a living. Other requirements for our remote-controlled future include "a tolerance for working for a lower wage, since remote operation could allow companies to outsource driving, construction and service jobs to call centers in cheaper labor markets," the report adds.
"Another might be a youth spent gaming. When Postmates managers interview potential delivery-robot pilots like Diana Villalobos, they ask whether or not they played videogames in their youth. 'When I was a kid, my parents always said, 'Stop playing videogames!' But it came in handy,' she says."
Next? (Score:2)
Re:Next? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, plus, "...a tolerance for working for a lower wage..."
Wage growth in the many countries in the Western World has been stagnant or negative for decades. Inequality between the richest and poorest has been exacerbated beyond reason. And, still, people argue that wages need to be lower.
We are in the middle of an era where the capitalistic exploitation of the poor by the rich is completely out of control. This is not even close to "techno-utopian". The opposite. A dystopia.
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It's not a dystopia because we're still living in a democracy.
Right now a majority disagree with you about it being "out of control", hence nothing is happening to fix it. When it gets so bad that they do agree with you, it will get fixed. We're already hearing more socialist policies being peddled by politicians. I just hope they don't "fix" it too much and go overboard in the other direction.
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It's not a dystopia because we're still living in a democracy.
Yes, you have the free choice which crook's cronies get to fleece you.
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It's not a dystopia because we're still living in a democracy.
Ideally a democracy should entail rather more than one person -> one vote. If your democracy is representative one might wonder how the selection of representatives you get to vote on is arrived at, if it's direct you might enquire who writes the legislation you're voting on.
Rather more urgently, one might look at how the majority of the electorate become informed about matters. If it via print or broadcast media, who owns that media, what are their other vested interests?
Right now a majority disagree with you about it being "out of control", hence nothing is happening to fix it. When it gets so bad that they do agree with you, it will get fixed. We're already hearing more socialist policies being peddled by politicians. I just hope they don't "fix" it too much and go overboard in the other direction.
I'm afraid to say you are incorr
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Ideally a democracy should entail rather more than one person -> one vote. If your democracy is representative one might wonder how the selection of representatives you get to vote on is arrived at, if it's direct you might enquire who writes the legislation you're voting on.
Well, right now there's something like 20 Democrat candidates, each of whom gets their 5 minutes of spotlight on the debate stage, all vying for the nomination. If you had enough people's signatures back when the process started, you could be up there too.
Rather more urgently, one might look at how the majority of the electorate become informed about matters. If it via print or broadcast media, who owns that media, what are their other vested interests?
When it's about people's livelihood, they don't need the media to become informed. The fact that they can't find work and have nothing in the bank is enough to tell them whoever's in charge is not doing things correctly.
The majority of people think that tax rates for the wealthy should be increased, yet they keep going down. Why is that?
Because people voted in the very wea
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For piloting a mailman-robot, you might get paid a low wage. But that isn't a great paying job in any case, and you're at the mercy of the weather. So remote-piloting does lead to actually somewhat better working conditions.
But there are other pretending-to-be-a-robot jobs. For example there was an article about truckers that would operate remotely, taking over situations when the self-driving truck wouldn't know what to do. These truckers would then communicate and tell software development what went wrong
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The wage situation is also why our economy is crumbling. You cannot sell your crap if people don't have money to buy it. And that's the problem. Producing stuff makes you poor. No matter how cheaply you can produce it, it's still cost that you have to recover by selling. If you can't sell, whether the production cost is 5 or 50 bucks doesn't matter that much, either is making you poorer.
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Yep, we're in a full cyberpunk dystopia, and we don't even have the cool fashion to show for it.
I like how they say "a tolerance for" lower wages as if we could survive on less, but we prefer to make a bit more because it tickles our fancy or something, and we may have to do without that. Most of the ownership class has no fucking idea how shitty they're making life for the bottom 90%.
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God forbid anyone show any emotions in the workplace, that's a fireable offense.
Especially for actors.
This will just be used to offshore jobs (Score:3)
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that traditionally couldn't be offshored. They've done a bit of this in fast food, where high wage areas had the drive thru manned by somebody at a call center in Alabama. These aren't "Hot Jobs", they're more "Race to the Bottom" jobs.
Oh yes. And that is what drives this. More short-term profits for people that already have too much money. Of course, the less average people have to spend because they have bad or no jobs, the worse capitalism and a society based on it works.
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Seems like some enterprising capitalist can find even cheaper sources of pilots than a call center. China has a whole bunch of prisoners who can be put to the task, for instance. Human brains for a while will be much cheaper and effective than expert systems and AI. The undeveloped countries are developing and their wages are rising. Do you know that China rents North Korean workers for food? So multinational corporations need to find new markets and cheaper labor so next year's ROI improves on this year's
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Well, the rich are kidding themselves. Right before the end they will find themselves decorating some nice trees. Because the fundamental thing the rich overlook is that almost all of them cannot do, they can just run their mounts. And nobody will care about money at that stage.
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And furthermore, even the lower classes are paid very well https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org] , "Amazon drivers are paid $18 to $25 per hour, which is equivalent to $36k to $50k in annual salary. This is above the median wage/salary in America."
Can you please stop with these gloom and doom stories, its not so bad https://slashdot.org/comme [slashdot.org]
Re:This will just be used to offshore jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
If anything "delivery-robot pilot" is a lucky break. As in, we're going to bulldoze right the fuck over that. Good luck surviving the forest fire with "I can video game", you'd do better with a mouthful of spit. You'd have better robot resilience doing something in art.
Christ, even poets will have better post-labor demand than being the "pilot" of a device at automation ground zero, it's a fucking dotted-line box that says INSERT UNPAID UNSLEEPING NEVER-SICK ALGORITHM HERE.
"Hey, I can control things like in a video game" "So can the video game"
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We will be giving up jobs and privacy with these remote android-like devices.
I can just see my Ring: Chime Pro observing the robot remotely piloted from India throwing a fit and running over the shrubs with a law mower. It's red eye gleaming, it calmly says; "What are you doing Dinesh?"
At least we'll create some jobs where you buy devices to keep track of what your devices are doing -- in the cloud, of course. Has to have a "cloud" component.
And the world is getting even more bizarre (Score:3)
Were "robots" not intended to free us up from daily tedium and allow us to pursue our own interests? Now we have to be minders for demented machines?
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I'll happily take a job minding the machine over doing the work myself. Heck, I do that already as a software dev, just on a slightly larger scale than drone pilots.
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They do. They do free us up from daily tedium.
What do you think "unemployment" is but that plus no money?
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Were "robots" not intended to free us up from daily tedium and allow us to pursue our own interests?
The robots are meant to liberate the rich from having to deal with those pesky humans (that's us).
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Unfortunately, that is basically how things work.
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Were "robots" not intended to free us up from daily tedium and allow us to pursue our own interests?
No, not unless you live in some Star Trek/UBI fantasy. A tractor replaces a lot of farm workers, it doesn't mean they can stop providing value to society and still get things in return. They have to find something else in demand and do that, unless society decides you can have it anyway. Like for example kids get public schooling no matter how deadbeat your parents are. It's possible that we'll extend that to say that all the basics should be covered, but I doubt it'll ever cover anything more than the base
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That attitude is the road to hell. Don't mind me, I have skills rare and valuable enough that I will never need to go down that road, but I have zero compassion for the likes of you.
Yeah (Score:2)
Sounds like a great and fun idea, we can really stick it to the robots. I'll fill up the bottles and you cap them at 1000 bottles per second. I can see the robots shivering already.
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Until you realize the human pilots were being used to train their AI replacement.
Looks like it's time to post this link again (Score:4, Informative)
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm [marshallbrain.com]
Though it this case it seems like the situation in the summary is the exact opposite of the story. The headline is a bit misleading.
Rob
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The headline is a bit misleading.
A bit? It's entirely misleading.
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/Oblg. The Last Hot Job: Pretending to be an Editor
Hmmmm (Score:1)
I'm no Dr Who fan but weren't the Daleks once a properous, intelligent people until evil scientists extracted people's brains, dumbed them down to mere automatons and put them inside the Dalek casings and sent them out to war ( so long as there's no stairs in the way! ) ?
Looks like that's where genetics will be heading next, brain-in-a-jar that can simply operate a flying drone or road truck all from a remote warehouse with thousands couped up like battery hens...hang on, this sounds like a film staring a
I'm perfect! (Score:2)
People asked if I was a robot. :O
Perfect for self-driving cars! (Score:2)
Self-driving cars have a problem - they're not perfect and so need supervisory control. And when something goes wrong you blame the poor minimum wage schmuck that you put in charge of the vehicle.
Sounds about as fun as being a security guard - and how has this job not been automated yet?
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Sounds about as fun as being a security guard - and how has this job not been automated yet?
Because whatever robot you could build would cost more.
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Self-driving cars have a problem - they're not perfect and so need supervisory control.
Cars, not so much.
Perfect for fleets of self driving lorries however. One operator can oversee, and remotely drive when necessary, numerous goods carrying vehicles. The labour savings will be immense, and will scale with the size of the fleet, while the hardware outlay will be determined by the number of trucks and the cost of a single control rig.
Double axis economies - what's not to like?
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Most security guard jobs have already been replaced by automation. There are way more businesses with alarms and cameras than with physical security guards.
next hot low-wage job (Score:2)
a hot job that pays next to nothing, if you think working in a callcenter was bad, just wait for this.
Sleep Dealer (Score:1)
There is a wonderful Mexican dystopian sci-fi movie Sleep Dealer (http://www.sleepdealer.com) that deals with this very subject. I can't believe that movie is already 10 years old.
If you like dystopian sci-fi and have never heard of this movie, toss the IMDB rating out the window. This one is very underrated. It is basically a projection of the maquiladora factories into the future, where the Mexicans control robots working to the North of the border. The story line is a bit disjointed but this is a rewardi
Turing test (Score:2)
Let's get to the unboxing! (Score:2)
"What's this?"
"I'm a very realistic sex bot, Ms. Taylor-Joy."
Awesome-O (Score:2)
Sounds like scare tactics (Score:1)