Robots Good. Ai Bad.

Morning Musing on the Differences Between Ai & Automation

Luvlies, Good morning. I was watching a mediocre podcast the other day (don’t want to tell you which one because it really wasn’t very stimulating), and one of the hosts shared a story about how Waymos were semi-kidnapping people, by not allowing them to exit the car during an emergency. What makes this story even funnier, it was revealed that Waymo is not exactly ‘driverless’ as they claim. In fact Waymo cars are driven by remote drivers in the Philippines. So someone in metro Manilla decided to lock the doors, and entrap the riders until cops came in the US?!? HAHAHAHA that is very funny business.

Someone decided to leave a sweeping comment about how these companies are producing things we don’t need like ‘Waymos and dancing robots’. They also stated that ‘they are stealing jobs from people’, to which I responded ‘Gworl, you want it and you need it’.

Let me explain. Robotics and AI are not the same thing, but people are conflating the function of the two all the time. Robots don’t steal our jobs, AI does. Robots (robotics – automation) make the work place safer. Periodt. Manpower doesn’t need to lift 3-4 tonnes of cargo anymore, due to the use of robotic technology. Robots – like Kukas – are crucial in industries involving harmful chemicals, and heat (think automobile assembly and food production).

But here’s the thing, for every robot that exists, there are 3 humans that have to manage it. Robots do not have the ability to correct or manage themselves. They cannot Q&A their own work without human verification. During my master’s study, we used to tour and analyze large-scale textile production mills throughout Switzerland, to understand how technology could optimize production. This is where we learned that robotics and human labour go hand in hand.

Now with AI, companies are absolutely trying to use this technology to replace human roles. They are actively attempting to eliminate the person monitoring what the ‘robot’ has to do. But it’s backfiring because AI is really a special needs imbecile, with no short term memory . Ai now needs constant surveillance because of the egregious errors it makes, on top of having to monitor the manual labour of the robot in the production process, which the companies did not account for. Essentially doubling the cost of labour (cuz now you need two people to monitor the robot and Ai) instead of reducing it. (NOTE: I plan on doing a longer piece on the subject, but I have to emotionally detach myself from it, before I write about it.)

So when people are getting upset about dancing karate-kicking MMA fighting robots taking our jobs, they’re right and wrong. Right because there was no market demand for robotics to be used as a form of entertainment, or as the wishful ninja alter-ego of an incompetent incel. Rather society requested this tech be used as a supplementary support tool for production and advancement. Right now this technology is in the hands of men with arrested development, so they will continue putting out dumb things like meta glasses or robot delivery dogs, because they have no vision of the future without enslavement or surveillance.

But if there were more women in the field of robotics and even AI, then we might get somewhere.

Until then, stay mad at Ai and leave the robots out of it.