I've been watching a show called How It's Made on the Science Channel. I hear the words "computer controlled" frequently. How in the world did man manage to make anything without computers? The Egyptians built pyramids, France has the Eiffel Tower etc. Orville and Wilbur flew. People built cars, tanks, stoves, toasters,and all sorts of things in factories. Now we sit on our butts, stare at screens, and get fat. Coincidence?
Slowly and with much less *repeatable* precision.
Those things are still being built in factories.
That depends entirely on what you do for a living.
Dean Hoffman snipped-for-privacy@windstream.net wrote
By doing harder.
And some got real radical and wrote letters to each other and did other funky stuff like use smoke signals etc.
Then we worked out how to do it much better with computers.
I'm not fat and can still wear the clothes I wore as a teenager.
Nope, that devil fella did it.
Xeno snipped-for-privacy@optusnet.com.au> wrote
That’s bit accurate with plenty of making.
And that isnt either.
And what you shovel into your mouth.
The things that had controllers and not human operators used a far more expensive proprietary design with discrete components. The computer allows an off the shelf processor and some software. An example would be the $100 multi contact mechanical timer in a washing machine and the little ten cent PIC they run on now. It is good for the manufacturer but since these are still proprietary boards that are virtually impossible to fix, the part is still over $100
Computer controlled stuff is more complicated than the procedures that don't use computers.
For example, a continous caster for steel. It's like a a frosting cone, which you fill with frosting and sqeeze out the nozzle at the bottom, to ice a cake.
But the caster has an opening at the bottom that's 10 feet across and about a foot thick. A continous rectangle of steel comes out the bottom vertically and then bends to be horizontal. If the steel is too cold it won't bend and maybe other problems. If it's too hot, it will just spill out the bottom and go all over the place. The outer layer has be a crust to contain the molten inner layer. This can only happen with temperatur sensors in the right places feeding a computer that controls how fast the steel is let out.
When the steel is horizontal and moving sideways on rollers, a computer controlled acetylene torch cuts it into pieces about 20 feet long. The torch moves across the slab and moves forward at the same speed as the slab, so that it cuts a straight line. This could probably be done by a person controlling the torch manually, but if you spend a few hours writing the program, then it will do it automatically for years. The guy who was goign to control the torch can do something else.
Increases in productivity mean that employees can be paid more and that products are still cheaper.
Partly yes, partly no. There are plenty of people who do hard work even wehere computer control is in use, but one or three guys per shift can accomplish a lot more than 20 guys coudl without the computer.
Are you opposed to tractors with ploughs, planters, reapers, combines also? They took jobs that were physcially strenuous and enabled a guy to sit on his tractor for hours doing the work of 20 men who had been doing hard work before farm machinery was invented.
Yes, the use of machinery created a whole slew of new jobs - the tradies who *fix* them. Computerisation has done the same thing but you now also have *programmers*.
There's way too many luddites in the world.
I still remember someone at a DECUS in the early 70s saying that debugging a computer controlled steel rolling mill involved monkeys with oxy torches having to cut up the fuckups that bugs produced.
Yabbut that was back when they were running Windows75.
The employees that still have jobs after the automation...
In the '70s I remember being in a GE electric meter plant where one of the steps was die casting meter bases. What fascinated me were the Unimate robots:
At the time I was designing automated plastic molding systems like the ones used for the phenolic part of the meters. Again I was helping to replace unpleasant jobs, but jobs nevertheless.
Kurt Vonnegut's first book, 'Player Piano' was written in 1952 and pictured a dystopian future with a wide gap between those with value to the modern society and those that had no purpose and were supported by welfare projects.
Minor problem. The arc of my career has been creating those new technologies whether hardware or software. Many 'tradies' like plant electricians who could maintain relay controlled systems were out in the cold when simple solid state controls were introduced. There is a whole class of controllers that where the programming interface tried to mimic the traditional ladder diagrams of relay logic:
And what would you have the govt do? Ban automation? What you described is technology advancing, not graft or corruption.
The "tradies" who fix computers got laid off in the 90s. Now they just get replaced as assemblies or perhaps as the whole FRU.
It doesn't take a highly skilled person to cut open a box and plug in a new one. The product in the box is made in some offshore sweat shop and the programmer might be there too. Occasionally we will import them on an H1B visa and fire the American who was writing that code
Steve Balmer <steve.balmer@microsoft.$$$> wrote
Nope, RSX.
You are never going to ban automation but I am not sure how you continue to create good, well paying jobs when the object of this automation is to cut payroll costs. There simply are not that many jobs in maintaining computers and computer controlled equipment and the jobs that do exist are not as technically challenging. The whole computer is on a card and you just throw them away when they go bad.
Nothing to do with govt.
And govt is irrelevant.
There are plenty of good, well paying jobs which can't be automated.
But there are plenty of good, well paying jobs which can't be automated.
They are working on that. We have brick laying robots now that lay perfect lines of brick or block, don't need a break, they go faster than a crew, they don't have to pay employment tax or insurance and don't care if it is 140f in the sun. Certainly there are still good jobs to be had but they are chipping away at them every day.
With a robotic chipping hammer - - - - -
On 7/26/2019 1:27 PM, Rod Speed wrote: ...
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"Plenty???"
What are just some of these, pray tell, in large numbers?
There are lots of jobs, "good" is not so certain in what I'm aware of, anyways...
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