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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

We're not seeing full automation for things that ought to be automatable now. Customer service chatbots still aren't very good. Salesforce ought to be taking over entire marketing operations, not just supporting sales but replacing it. The medical office side of insurance ought to be automatic now. The pick and place side of warehouse operations should be robotic. Shelf restocking in stores ought to be robotic. All of those things have been demoed, but didn't go to production.

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The thing is with a lot of the world, you could say about the same in 1950 about why isn't everything automated by now. A lot of the technology needed to do most of everything we do was already there. They had vending machines selling cigarettes back then and today people buy their geekbars from a person in the 7/11, and we think we've progressed. Factories today still mostly only semi automated. You'd think mcdonalds would just be a single unit deployable crate burger factory by now, but it looks the same as it did in 1950 for the most part with humans doing all the work.

No one is actually given the agency in any company to set about and engineer and implement an automated solution that replaces existing business units. They also have to be given slack to fail and iterate. Easiest to just run mcdonalds mostly as you ran it the last quarter lest you rock the boat too much. Rinse and repeat and people still bag fries today, and the deep fryer remains probably the most dangerous part of the kitchen.

That's an interesting point. Vending machines never became a big deal outside of Japan. Fast food was automated in 1964, with AMFare [1], but that was never deployed beyond one prototype.

Whether general purpose robots will change this is interesting. It looks like they're going to cost about as much as a car. (There are at least 18 makers of humanoid robots. The hardware situation looks good.) That's cheaper than humans. There are already companies that set up industrial robots and charge for them by the working hour, with all maintenance and setup included.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xop9py8zBY

I’m surprised at that stopgap tbh. Seems like it would be better to skip the robot in humanoid form step and develop a factory plan that just doesn’t require a human shaped operator at some step on the line. Maybe a little flapper or a conveyer belt will do.

> All of those things have been demoed, but didn't go to production.

There's probably a good reason for this. Demos usually just show the happy case, whereas in practice you have to deal with all the nasty edge cases of reality.

Yes, AI is still not particularly prevalent in the customer-facing / consumer-facing things you described. But internally, I think these companies are up to their eyeballs in AI automations. At the company I work for, the customer-facing side of our business has not really been changed by AI (except for faster iteration of website design, and a somewhat limited customer service chatbot - not particularly good like your experience). But internally we are using it for so many things, for example we have brought 3rd party analytics tools in-house (cost reduction and ownership over our data) by writing our own internal tools, we have setup custom systems to give ourselves better visibility over the business to try catch issues earlier, we use it to produce internal reports, etc.

I don't have much experience in robotics but I've heard that machine vision models have absolutely been changing the industry. And I imagine they are also using AI to write a lot of software too. But not my area, just what I've heard / been reading.

> But internally we are using it for so many things, for example we have brought 3rd party analytics tools in-house (cost reduction and ownership over our data) by writing our own internal tools, we have setup custom systems to give ourselves better visibility over the business to try catch issues earlier, we use it to produce internal reports, etc.

How much of that is automation of "bullshit jobs"?

Fair enough. It's a mix. But for the most part it's a net positive.

We have replaced external tools with in-house tools written by largely AI. These are not one-prompt tools made in a day. We have built our own analytics stack which non-technical coworkers use everyday - they are not interested in "bullshit", they need real, accurate data and visualisations. And we had a cross-over period where our internal tooling was compared to our (now legacy) 3rd party analytics tools. It was done properly.

At least where I work, I don't think there is much automation of "bullshit jobs" - people don't typically just waste time chasing fairy tales (for the most part). But for things like report generation or tracing issues or generating presentations or infographics, there is certainly a much higher volume of these things getting pushed around which may or may not actually achieve anything, or be at all correct. So I reckon a large chunk of these would fall under into the "bullshit" bucket.

Because everyone can produce so much more "stuff" with AI assistance / automations, a good portion does end up spewed straight out of the slop factory. How much / what proportion kind of differs person-to-person tbh.

Yes, that's because the tech sucks, unlike what the AI supporters claim.

And my car should fly

EHang keeps demoing their flying cars, without getting much attention. [1] They're scaled-up quadcopters. Their newest model transitions to winged flight to get better range. They've been testing versions with expensive solid-state batteries to increase the range.

Archer Aviation has been flying their electric air taxi over the SF bay this week.[2] Cost is about $5 million, though.

The big event for flying cars will be the 2028 Olympics in LA. VIPs will be shuttled around in Archer craft. That's about the right demo market - trips are short, but congestion on the ground is a problem.

[1] https://www.ehang.com/

[2] https://www.archer.com/news/archer-completes-historic-electr...

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