you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 54 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (8 children)

Robots do, there is anlot of automation now in big mines, Copper be extracted in El Teniente mine in chile, in the middle of the andes and the "miners" can sit comfortably in a control room in the city of rancagua with a cup of coffee.

EDT: Altough part of the mine is still manned.

  • source
  • hideshow 8 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (7 children)

    Those machines are not robots in the sense that they can do stuff at least partially autonomously. Everything is remote controlled, i.e. There's a human in the loop at all times. Present day robots can't even do the simplest tasks without being teleoperated.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 7 child comments
  • [–] 14 points 1 day ago (4 children)

    Who cares as long as thr dangerous work in the mines is not handed out to children and other victims of capitalism anymore?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] -2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    I wasn't saying automation is a bad thing, i just said it's not the same as robotics.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 22 hours ago

    Automation of robotics in an uncontrolled physical environment is so, so hard to program for.

    This is why we got advanced language, music, art, speaking models first. There's SO much of that data (they stole and pillaged every scrap, but the fact is that it exists) that models can be trained on.

    There isn't vast stores of raw sensor data that maps physical environments to servo, hydraulic, pneumatics correlated with optical, heat, tactile feedback etc.

    If you think about how uncoordinated toddlers are, and how many years it takes to map all the inputs humans receive and learn how that translates to our environment so we can move around without much thought, you'll kind of get what I mean. That information just hasn't been collected on a large scale in a way that machine learning can train on it.

    This is the underlying challenge of autonomous robotics. We'll get there, but for now we still need humans controlling pretty much everything that doesn't have an ultra-controlled space like factory floors.

    I was in a grocery store the other day and they had some sign on a Roomba looking thing that was struggling to navigate the produce section. I can't imagine how hard it would be to create a machine that can reliably and safely mine ores autonomously.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 20 hours ago

    That's just not true. I can't speak for mines, but warehousing and collecting garbage from the ocean and other domains do have fully autonomous systems.

    Humanoid robots aren't really used anywhere, but that's cause they aren't really a functional product yet.

  • source
  • parent