Automation
The broad promise of AI is to liberate people from repetitive mental tasks the same way the industrial revolution liberated people from repetitive physical tasks. — Charles Dixon
This word is quite terrifying right now. Say it 3 times in the mirror and a robot comes and kills you. The world is moving toward automation (Oxford University estimates up to 47% of jobs could be replaced with automation over the next 20 years) — people are afraid of being replaced.
But…isn’t this what we wanted??
I’m skeptical that we’ll be a jobless society despite the powers of automation. We will likely have to get creative with solutions like Universal Basic Income, but I have little worry that people will be left without jobs. When women started working, some people worried that male members of the workforce would be pushed out of employment. Instead, the arrival of more workers created a bigger economic pie and therefore more jobs for everyone. Employment is not a zero sum game. If I create a company, it creates jobs for others.
Although the invention of the printing press took jobs from monks handwriting books, it led to thousands of other jobs — book binders, ink specialists, press builders, and of course more writers. The sewing machine led to new types of clothes, creating jobs in fashion and design. Smartphones may have destroyed some camera companies, but created jobs for thousands of coders, graphic designers. As Tim O’Reilly writes in his book What’s the Future, “History tells us technology kills professions, but does not kill jobs.”
We invented automation for the sole purpose of making things easier for us.
We’re far too lazy to say “the big brown thing that lives in the forest and has claws and will eat you unless you stay still.” We just say “bear.”
We’re too lazy to say ‘5+5+5+5+5+5+5+5+5+5+5’ so we just say ‘5x11’ with the invention of multiplication.
We didn’t want to say, “that’ll cost you 15 cows, 10 geese and a wheel of cheese — we just say “that’ll be $1500”
We’ve achieved spectacular feats of engineering brilliance and ingenuity, simply so we don’t have to get off the couch.
Laziness isn’t the only human fault that has catapulted us to world dominance — our ability to make thousands of errors has been a primary driver of automation along with our fantastic slowness and lack of stamina. So, laziness, stupidity, slowness and lack of endurance are the 4 primary drivers for the creation of automation. Fortunately, we are smart enough to know how much we suck…so we have ironically spent millions of hours inventing systems to save us even more millions of hours working.
How do we get things to do work for us? If a caveman saw a car flying down the highway, he would crap his loincloth. We don’t see it as a big deal, but think about it for 30 seconds and just realize how absolutely amazing it is. This giant box of metal just shooting through space because we are bending our foot slightly. How is this possible?
Work, Energy & Force
When you think of energy, think of movement.
We need energy for one thing — to move stuff for us. Energy moves our planes, trains and automobiles. It moves our elevators, vacuums and fans. Light bulbs are just electrons trying to move through a resistant piece of metal.
If we can get something to move, we can generate energy. The water flowing down a river can be used to move turbines that can produce electricity. We can take advantage of wind and put turbines in the air that move with it. A nuclear explosion generates a ton of heat that rises and moves a turbine.
Lance Armstrong could theoretically power a small portion of a television sports network.
All the boring physics stuff you had to learn in high school boils down to movement.
Force
A force is any interaction that, when unopposed, will change the motion of an object.
Work
A force is said to do work if, when acting, there is a displacement (movement) of the point of application in the direction of the force.
Energy
Energy is the property that must be transferred to an object in order to perform work on — or to heat — the object, and can be converted in form, but not created or destroyed.
Mass
It’s a complex relationship explored by Einstein in his famous formula E=mc² (energy = mass * the speed of light squared), but it boils down to the idea that energy and mass are the same thing. If you have a physical body, then you are also made up of a huge amount of energy…enough to blow up the entire planet. Fortunately, extracting that energy is not easy, which is why we don’t go around spontaneously combusting all the time.
That’s all from Wikipedia (automation at its finest).
Simple Machine
We can cheat the system if we can change any of these things.
Archimedes described something called leverage. We are not necessarily making something out of nothing, but it feels like we are.
A simple machine is a mechanical device that changes the direction or magnitude of a force.
Leverage
Mechanical advantage is a measure of the force amplification achieved by using a tool, mechanical device or machine system
You are amplifying a force to using a tool to create more movement.
There a six classic simple machines that from the basis of our mechanization: Lever, Wheel and axle, Pulley, inclined plane, wedge, and screw.
From Wikipedia:
Simple machines can be regarded as the elementary “building blocks” of which all more complicated machines (sometimes called “compound machines”) are composed. For example, wheels, levers, and pulleys are all used in the mechanism of a bicycle. The mechanical advantage of a compound machine is just the product of the mechanical advantages of the simple machines of which it is composed.
Heat
Heat can be used to move things (such as a turbine) because heat itself is just movement (and rises).
Food
We humans use something called food to get energy. A calorie is a unit of energy — but it’s simply defined as the approximate amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius at a pressure of one atmosphere
Fossil Fuels
In 1859, Edwin Drake discovered oil in Pennsylvania which could be used for lamp oil, which had previously used whale oil. Coal has been in use since around 4000 BC and Natural Gas around 500 BC.
These substances share what makes them so powerful — they have tremendous amounts of energy stored within them that can be used to power machines such as the steam engine and the much more efficient gasoline engine.
Renewable Energy
In a similar way, we can move things using more renewable sources like wind, water, and solar power. A large hydroelectric dam built on a river can use the flowing water to move a turbine. Same with wind, and the sun’s heat can be used to move electrons in solar panels. This is not currently economical enough to replace fossil fuels— but as a point of reference, solar panels covering New Jersey could power the entire United States.
Electricity
Electricity is the movement of electrons.
It’s flexible. We convert nuclear fission into electricity because it’s hard to isolate and control nuclear fission within your bathroom to power your ceiling fan. But electricity can be easily generated, transported, stored and consumed in a variety of environments. That’s why it’s changed the world.
Computers
The concept of computing began with automating calculations. So that our dumb, lazy, slow asses didn’t have to do it.
The first of these machines is the abacus —the first calculator. It consists of beads in columns (each column representing digits in multiples of 10) and makes quick calculation of large numbers much easier.
Then came large log books. Mathematical tables were printed in page after page. In order to find the product of two large numbers, you could look them up in the log book and sum their logarithms. This meant you didn’t have to do the calculation from scratch every time.
Most of these innovations came about as a result of technical errors made by humans and the monotony of having to do complex calculations long-hand. Blaise Pascal’s father worked in the tax business so he created a mechanical calculator to ease the burden of those large calculations. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz took inspiration from this device and created his own version later in the 17th century.
Charles Babbage saw so many errors in nautical calculation, that he devised a mechanical machine to calculate the logarithms in nautical logbooks. He called it he Difference Engine and later improved this with the more powerful Analytical Engine.
The company you know today as IBM started in the late 1800’s as a company to make the calculation of the Census quicker and more error free. Instead of relying on humans, we got a machine to do it. This sped up the calculation of the census from 8 years to 1 with significantly fewer errors.
The Future
There is very little doubt that we have only scratched the surface of replacing any work that we have to do with work machines can do. Wired (in ‘The end of code’) predicts that soon we won’t even code, we will just train computers to code for us. Automated cars will replace human drivers and many things we do today will be automated. But that doesn’t have to mean anarchy.
