When I was in middle school, one of my teachers enrolled us in a local robotics program We hooked up our computers to wheels and lights and servo motors and different kinds of sensors Then we had our robots compete to perform tasks (sorting marbles, moving blocks, etc.)
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This was really neat, and definitely got a lot of us thinking about the possibilities with robotics I remember being really into Boston Dynamics YouTube videos for a while
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At 11-12 years old, we were bad at coding for sure, but it felt like most of our limitations were hardware related The little electric pistons and motors were only so strong, the sensors only so sensitive
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But obviously, with better hardware, it became easy for us to imagine the inner workings of industrial scale robotics (e.g. forklifts, construction cranes, elaborate high-volume assembly line machines from How It’s Made)
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You got a sense that the difficulty/expense of fabricating a suitable machine increased dramatically according to the complexity of the task at hand Past a certain level of task-complexity, it wasn’t ‘worth it’ anymore to attempt the robot—you might as well just do it yourself
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This is basically how automation and the ‘below-the-API’ gig economy works in my head As our capacity to make robots increases (cheaper computing, larger data sets, better software/hardware), the frontier of ‘Too Complex: Not Worth It’ continues to recede
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Most workers live on or near this frontier, which is often referred to as service/gig work Humans do tasks that, given our current ability to automate, are not yet worth automating Uber drivers, TaskRabbits, cashiers, farmers—the cheapest available robots for the tasks at hand
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