Comment on Robot dogs priced at $300,000 a piece are now guarding some of the country’s biggest data centers
Million@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
I may be ignorant, but from my experience Boston Dynamics is cool and if they were able to sell these things to the AI guys good for them!
I know these robots are used to do maintenance vhecks on big factories, where a dude can tell it to walk to a valve to look at it through a camera, and i think thats fine.
Instead of having 50 cameras you have one walking one.
barnacul@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I work in big factories and this is a stupid fucking idea.
Scenario 1: you have 6 trained maintenance guys on shift. One of them goes to check out the questionable valve and fixes it because they are trained to do so. The 5 other guys also work on stuff.
Scenario 2: one of the maintenace guys sits in the office because someone needs to coordinate with the robot dogs. They call the person who controls the dogs to go check out the valve. It is broken. A couple hours later they call a maintenace tech to check it out for real. Unfortunately the company can only afford 3 maintenance techs now because of the dogs, and one of the techs is on tech duty to communicate with the dog team. The other two are busy so the incident is recorded in the logs for an engineer to hire a contractor to fix at a total of three times the price, in six months’ time.
Million@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Yes it would be stupid to fire staff for a robot dog. Like you said there would be even more staff needed to maintain those dogs.
But it is case sensitive. Like you said, someone gets a call to go check out a questionable valve. Maybe that call was made by the robot who patrols a long corridor with 70 valves day and night, snapping pictures of the valves and sending them to the control center or something like that. And then again, who goes through those pictures to determine a questionable valve? AI? And if the valve needs constant surveiling, a robot dog and AI is not the tool for the job, its a wrong valve at that point.
But if a plant has a gabillion dollar and non critical infrastructure, why not let john maintenanceman drive a robot dog?
But yes they are expensive toys at the end of the day. I would hire a human every time if the labour was suitable for a human.