Japan Introduces Enormous Humanoid Robot To Maintain Train Lines (theguardian.com) 33
An anonymous reader shares a report: It resembles an enormous, malevolent robot from 1980s sci-fi but West Japan Railway's new humanoid employee was designed with nothing more sinister than a spot of painting and gardening in mind. Starting this month, the large machine with enormous arms, a crude, disproportionately small Wall-E-like head and coke-bottle eyes mounted on a truck -- which can drive on rails -- will be put to use for maintenance work on the company's network. Its operator sits in a cockpit on the truck, "seeing" through the robot's eyes via cameras and operating its powerful limbs and hands remotely. With a vertical reach of 12 metres (40ft), the machine can use various attachments for its arms to carry objects as heavy as 40kg (88lb), hold a brush to paint or use a chainsaw. For now, the robot's primary task will focus on trimming tree branches along rails and painting metal frames that hold cables above trains, the company said. The technology will help fill worker shortages in ageing Japan as well as reduce accidents such as workers falling from high places or suffering electric shocks, the company said.
Vs. AI (Score:3)
This is far more capable of replacing humans than the AI nonsense going around. This is more along the lines of what happened when computers replaced calculators and their operators.
Why not both? (Score:5, Interesting)
Years ago at my job I had the support some VB6 apps. It required a tremendous amount of work every week and it was relatively skilled work to keep the damn thing running. In its Hay Day it was state-of-the-art and all that for the market.
Eventually the company switched the web-based software. Even added some programming APIs. But with all that it required less support because everything that needed attention was server-side and dirt cheap Indians in data centers did all that support and you didn't even need that many of them.
There's an old phrase, software is going to eat the world. Folks they don't think really understand what that means. They don't really understand this full scope of what 40 years of non-stop automation has done. There are entire career paths that are just gone.
In the '90s the clintons and their economists saw this coming. That's why they were always talking about a service sector economy. The problem is service sector economy jobs tend to pay like shit. It's difficult to unionize them and it's easy to break them down into smaller automatable processes for anything sufficiently complex.
I guess what I'm saying is, we are running out of work and we aren't replacing it with anything. But we're still very much a if you don't work you don't eat kind of people. Something's got to give and I'm not sure what
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I guess what I'm saying is, we are running out of work and we aren't replacing it with anything. But we're still very much a if you don't work you don't eat kind of people. Something's got to give and I'm not sure what
Society can continue just fine (private jets and yachts operational, soldiers with full mags) with the lower class starving.
The problem isn't killing old industries (Score:2)
Our civilization is not ready for a world where people only need to work a few hours a week. We want people to be busting their asses and miserable because we're miserable and busting our asses and we don't question why we're miserable and busting our asses. We all just take it for grante
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The problem is nothing is replacing those industries.
Industries are fading away, yet we have near record low unemployment, so obviously, new jobs are being created.
So we increasingly have a larger and larger and larger class of people who are completely unemployable
That sounds terrible. Fortunately, it is the exact opposite of reality.
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so obviously, new jobs are being created.
The new jobs are mostly in advertising, scamming, and other industries that pump out bullshit.
Re: The problem isn't killing old industries (Score:2)
Not this fucking myth again (Score:2)
I get it. No one respects you. And you can't do anything to get respect because you're at the limits of your capabilities.
So you make a deal. You will give all the money and power and all the good stuff in life to the people at the top. In exchange you get to shit all over some people under you. They have to give you res
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"we are running out of work and we aren't replacing it with anything"
What is different this time as compared to all the previous times when someone said we are running out of work and we did not run out of work?
AI is almost here (Score:3)
This is far more capable of replacing humans than the AI nonsense going around. This is more along the lines of what happened when computers replaced calculators and their operators.
We're just about to have an AI revolution in production capacity worldwide.
The current AI revolution involves prediction from large-scale training on word sequences. It's various levels of "not very good", but clearly has value and can perform a set of simple functions. If you already know what you want to write but don't have the skill at putting words together, ChatGPT is pretty good. You can use it like a sort of an advanced spell-check to amplify your text writing abilities. It's really good at composin
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The next step will probably be the same technology applied to robotic movements. Instead of predicting the next word or generating a matrix of future word positions (the transformer model), a robot can predict the next movement. All that's needed is a large corpus of situation/movement examples to train on.
The "motion hallucinations" are going to be downright terrifying. When chat-bots go berserk it is just words.
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It's really good at composing essays.
It's really good at composing verbiage. But the stuff it writes isn't generally worth reading. It's this sort of bland, samey mush of words. It's grammatical, and spelled correctly, and coherent, but it coherently makes absolutely no points at all beyond the most surface level stuff.
The next step will probably be the same technology applied to robotic movements. Instead of predicting the next word or generating a matrix of future word positions (the transformer model), a
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Oh also going back and doing post corrections because it's never right first time.
For example, I get a small number of big bubbles when I paint it on these particular walls. High end primer didn't help. Two different high quality trade paints, one applied by a pro didn't help. Its something funny and might be the old paint. The pro solution is to paint, whack the bubbles, sand and repaint those bits.
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Well of course they would say that⦠(Score:2)
but West Japan Railway's new humanoid employee was designed with nothing more sinister than a spot of painting and gardening in mind
Yeah, right! Iâ(TM)ve seen the movie. I know how this is gonna end! Get your EMP weapons ready; youâ(TM)ll need them!
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I've got Klaatu on speed dial.
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but West Japan Railway's new humanoid employee was designed with nothing more sinister than a spot of painting and gardening in mind
Yeah, right! Iâ(TM)ve seen the movie. I know how this is gonna end! Get your EMP weapons ready; youâ(TM)ll need them!
I don't think EMP works on gundams. Gonna need a beam saber or high energy particle cannon to take 'em out.
No all you need is a big enough stick (Score:2)
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Is Iron Blooded Orphans part of the Gundam series, or an offshoot? I am hardly a nerd when it comes to the entire Gundam series, but I thought IBO wasn't part of the canon.
Regardless, it is my favorite, even with a few plot holes. Can't stand Gundam Wing. Bunch of whiny emo brats. The only good part is when Hiro does his famous, "I will kill you" line. Other than that, he's the worst gundam pilot ever. Fight me.
avoids the worst part of giant robots (Score:3)
I saw a video of this yesterday, and the best part is how they avoid the worst thing about giant mecha robots: legs. It's like the top half of a mech, with a (stereo!) camera head and arms, welded onto a cherry picker arm.
painting metal frames
Now I'm thinking of a mecha Bob Ross with a big fluffy afro, painting happy little trees.
Yes looks really practical! (Score:1)
the best part is how they avoid the worst thing about giant mecha robots: legs. It's like the top half of a mech
Yes this looks like a great idea as it's on a solid platform that can move easily to where it's needed, seems like a very useful and practical device.
You could base something like this on a truck bed and drive it around for lots of work where you had higher things to reach that needed a lot of strength applied, awesome for dealign with large trees where you can imagine the arms could really help t
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Even the guy who made Gundam said you couldn't really ever have gundams because gravity would just crush them at their size. That life-size Gundam is actually just a crane with a Gundam shaped box around it. It's still cool as fuck and I wish I could have seen it in person
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Defense network computers. New... powerful... (Score:2)
That Japanese Robot stands no chance... (Score:2)
Something's not right here (Score:2)
Okay, that sounds really great. I'm feeling very chill about this.
Wait a minute WHAT'S THAT AGAIN?!
Controlled by a kid (Score:2)
Aren't robots supposed to be automatic? (Score:2)
Its operator sits in a cockpit on the truck, "seeing" through the robot's eyes via cameras and operating its powerful limbs and hands remotely.
That doesn't sound quite like a robot to me, more like a remote-controlled machine.
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That doesn't sound quite like a robot to me, more like a remote-controlled machine.
Indeed. It's a Waldo [wikipedia.org], not a robot.
News is 3 years old! (Score:3)
Click the below to search for JR (Japan Rail) and robot in Japanese.
You can see a video of this robot at work in April 2022.
That said, this is awesome. I knew we would get giant humanoid mechs from Japanese robotics engineers as soon as the tech and money got there. This isn't the first, but it seems likely to be a good testbed for semi-automation of tasks and having no humans messing around with whippy tree branches and electrified overhead lines sounds good to me too. All the slashdotters bemoaning loss of jobs. Sheesh! If it gets cheaper to do railway maintenance you get bullet trains faster!
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
Norimono (Vehicles) news 11/2023
https://trafficnews.jp/post/12... [trafficnews.jp]
4/18/2022 - Says JR plans to bring the robot into daily operations in Spring 2024. On time! W00t!!
https://www.watch.impress.co.j... [impress.co.jp]
And now it begins (Score:2)