A History and Future of the Rise of the Robots (上)

来源: https://medium.com/@DaveDixon/a-history-and-future-of-the-rise-of-the-robots-cce0fe222a71


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We’re heading towards the final fulfillment of the Industrial Revolution.

[1] We take time for granted. Not in the “live like it was your last day on earth” kind of way (though likely in that way too). If you’re wearing a watch, look at it. Does it have a second hand? Why? Just in case you suddenly need to stand in as time keeper for an Olympic sprint? Does it have a minute hand? Almost certainly. Time, seen as such, is a relatively new and novel contribution to humanity. It wasn’t a technical issue. The ancients were no dummies when it came to coming up with solutions to their pressing problems. The Chinese and the Vikings figured out precise compass over 1000 years ago. Ancient Roman concrete was vastly superior to our own, and in China they had developed a surprisingly accurate and effective seismoscope to detect distant earthquakes by AD 132! In fact, even precise mechanical clocks had been invented by 725 AD, yet somehow didn’t catch on for another thousand years. Why?

  1. take for granted: 将....看作理所当然的
    Ex. Don’t take for granted how much your parents love you. You’re very lucky.

  2. pressing problems: 紧急的问题

  3. seismoscope n. : 地震仪

  4. detect v. : 察觉 发现 discover or determine the existence

[2] We take time for granted as seconds ticking away at 60 clicks a minute, 60 minutes per hour, 24 hours a day and so on. This hasn’t always been the case. Even when the technology was available for such accurate clocks, why didn’t it catch on for so long, and what changed? E. P. Thompson, the renowned historian who changed the field of social history with his seminal book “The Making of the English Working Class,” also explored how our view of time changed alongside our approach to work. The clock may seem like a rather mundane object of focus, especially when so many of us now keep ours in our purses and pockets. This isn’t just talking about clocks and watches. I’m not even primarily talking about clocks and watches. Much has been said about automation and the replacement of the human workforce for decades now. Lately it’s reached a new height. Autonomous driving is on the horizon. Donald Trump surprised the world, most critically via the votes of the rust belt “working poor” and underemployed, many of whom lost their jobs directly or indirectly to robots.

  1. catch on: 流行起来
    Ex. This idea has already caught on.

  2. mundane adj. : 世俗的

  3. automation n. ：自动化

  4. autonomous adj. : 自主的 自治的

  5. rust belt: 铁锈地带表示贫穷的地方（提喻手法）

[3] Our concept of time is inseparably linked with our careers as components, cogs, and tools in the larger systems which drive our economies, provide for our needs, and fulfill our wants. Since the industrial revolution, It’s been just long enough for us take our jobs, careers, and work for granted, and thus fail to see, baring any unforeseen catastrophes, the unsustainability of such an arrangement. Put simply, the last few hundred years have been an anomaly in the history of working humans. It’s vital to explore the past, present, and future of work shifting from humans to machines, how it has impacted our view of time, and take a glimpse into our future.

  1. inseparably adv. : 不可分地
  2. bare v. : 暴露
  3. unsustainability n. : 不可持续性
  4. anomaly adj. : 反常的

Before the Machines

[4] Thompson describes a world, before the industrial revolution, where work primarily functioned under what he refers to as “task-oriented” time. The task-oriented approach to time essentially sees time through the lens of the natural work-rhythms of the tasks the individual is attending to. Sheep must be herded, cows must be milked, shoes must be made, the hot coals must be tended and so forth. He describes there being very little demarcation between “work” and “life” at this time. Pause and think about that for a moment. Much ink has been spilt and money spent in the pressing quest to find the ideal “work/life balance,” or to keep work from “encroaching” on our personal lives.

  1. demarcation n. : 区分 区别
  2. spill v. : 喷洒
  3. encroach v. : 侵占 侵略

[5] Thompson describes the social and the labor as “intermingled- the working-day lengthens or contracts according to the task- and there is no great sense of conflict between labor and “passing the time of day.”” He also points out that to those accustomed to labor by the clock (that’s us), this attitude “appears to be wasteful and lacking in energy.” It seems no great leap to suggest that in our current Western world this orientation to time is all but dead. How did we get from there to here?

  1. intermingle v.: 使混合
  2. lengthen v.: 延长
  3. contract v.: 缩短
  4. all but: 几乎； 除...之外

[6] I don’t want to romanticize the peasant life of the middle ages. It has been interesting for me, however, to realize how hard it is to even write about such an approach to time without seeming wistful as if longing for a “bygone” era. The reality is, our approach to time has changed. And it changed along with industrialization. Put another way, those of the pre-industrial “task-oriented” times, largely peasants or craftsmen, had direct ownership of their time. They were largely responsible for completing entire projects, such as making shoes, tending sheep, or building a wagon from scratch. They had the skills and the manual tools to undertake complete projects and arranged their day to day according to their need. The cobbler had complete control over when he worked, or didn’t, on the shoes. He may produce as many shoes as he is able in a day, or he may go an indefinite amount of time doing no work on producing shoes, depending on need and desire for goods, money, or shoes.

  1. romanticize v. : 美化 浪漫化
  2. wistful adj. : 热切的 渴望的

[7] This direct ownership comes because the cobbler had the knowledge and ability to create finished shoes from raw materials himself, and in part because he was the absolute master of his tools. He may, for example, use a blade to cut the leather, but the blade can do nothing of itself and so is simply an extension off the cobbler himself. While this seems mundane it’s an important differentiator to now. While he may never be wealthy, and within the scope of the larger market may or may not even be able to sustain a family with his cobbling, within the scope of his work he is the absolute master of his time. To better understand how machines have crept in, we’ll follow this cobbler through a remarkably long life from pre-industrialization to the largely post-human future workforce.

  1. extension n. : 延长 扩展
  2. sustain v. :维持
  3. within the scope of: 在....范围内
  4. creep in: 悄悄进入

Introducing the Machines

[8] As technological mechanization increased, the cobbler found himself in a different relationship to both his tools and his time. Rather than tools simply being an inert extension of his own self and expertise, they began to make demands on his time. We can, for example, imagine an automatic leather cutter recently acquired by the cobbler, which allows him to simply put in a square piece of leather, wait a period, and then retrieves the newly shaped piece of leather. Previously this may have taken the cobbler 30 minutes to do. Now the machine can do it in 30 seconds. Furthermore, while his old manual blade could never force him to wait, the automatic cutter can. This surrender over control of his work time will be almost certainly seen by the cobbler as returning valuable time to him. He is now able to complete the total project faster, and still largely retains direct control of the entire process.

  1. expertise n. :专门知识
  2. manual adj. : 手工的 体力的
  3. surrender: 投降 妥协

[9] Alfred Chandler, a former professor of Business History at Harvard, helps provide some valuable insight into the next stage, and won the pulitzer prize in in doing it. Chandler describes how the new tools and machinery of the industrial revolution made production possible at vastly grander scales, and divided the work. Where once our cobbler was the master of the shoemaking process, the machines are now able to do too much work too quickly for the cobbler to effectively use them himself. What good is a machine that can cut 500 leather pieces a minute when the cobbler can only use three of them in an hour?

[10] In response to these new abilities, the complete shoemaking processes began to be segmented and specialized. The complete work of our cobbler, because of advances in manufacturing and shipping technology, has now been divided up across many different machines and workers housed at many different factories scattered all over. Specialization necessarily demands coordination, and that has dramatic implications for our cobblers time as we watch him move into the city and get a job at one of these factories.

  1. in response to: 回应
  2. segment v.: 分割
  3. specialize v.: 专业化
  4. manufacture v. & n. :生产制造 5.scatter v.: 分散 散开

Working With Machines

[11] At this phase the humans and machines work together side by side as tools in a large and distributed production process of specialized tasks. Neither the machine nor the human directly owns their time, but must bow to the demands of coordination. A wide web of distributed sole-makers, leather cutters, sowers, designers, and assemblers are now coordinated to complete the same project that is previously completed by one cobbler.

[12] The new system, however, is now able to do it with dramatically higher consistency and output. For coordination to work, each part of the process must be timed to coincide with the other separate functions. Soles must be made, on time, to ship, on time, so that they may be combined with leather uppers, on time, at a different location, and so on. If the automatic cutting machine made minor constraints on when the cobbler couldn’t work, now the schedule constraints when he must. And so, as Thompson describes, the clock is given a minute hand, and then a second hand, is perfected and miniaturized, and then given by the companies to their employees for them to wear on their wrists. The human and the machine labor equally under their new master, the schedule.

  1. constraint n: 限制 束缚 约束
  2. miniaturize v: 使微型化

[13] It’s beyond typical in our era to experience time as “pressure,” and then to lament or brag about the “stress” of it all. A lot of this is the price of coordination, and the pressure is real. If any tool, human or machine fails to meet their scheduled output then the process is broken and that tool will be repaired or replaced. There is functionally very little difference at this point from the human and the tool. Put another way, humans are now simply the semi-autonomous tools of the larger production and distribution processes. Time is of existential importance to the tools in the project as any human or machine that continually fails to keeps its deadlines will almost certainly be replaced with one who will. And thus the work of mankind completes its shift from task orientation to the scheduled society.

  1. semi-autonomous: 半自动化的
  2. existential adj.: 存在的

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来源: https://medium.com/@DaveDixon/a-history-and-future-of-the-rise-of-the-robots-cce0fe222a71


下载音频

We’re heading towards the final fulfillment of the Industrial Revolution.

[1] We take time for granted. Not in the “live like it was your last day on earth” kind of way (though likely in that way too). If you’re wearing a watch, look at it. Does it have a second hand? Why? Just in case you suddenly need to stand in as time keeper for an Olympic sprint? Does it have a minute hand? Almost certainly. Time, seen as such, is a relatively new and novel contribution to humanity. It wasn’t a technical issue. The ancients were no dummies when it came to coming up with solutions to their pressing problems. The Chinese and the Vikings figured out precise compass over 1000 years ago. Ancient Roman concrete was vastly superior to our own, and in China they had developed a surprisingly accurate and effective seismoscope to detect distant earthquakes by AD 132! In fact, even precise mechanical clocks had been invented by 725 AD, yet somehow didn’t catch on for another thousand years. Why?

[2] We take time for granted as seconds ticking away at 60 clicks a minute, 60 minutes per hour, 24 hours a day and so on. This hasn’t always been the case. Even when the technology was available for such accurate clocks, why didn’t it catch on for so long, and what changed? E. P. Thompson, the renowned historian who changed the field of social history with his seminal book “The Making of the English Working Class,” also explored how our view of time changed alongside our approach to work. The clock may seem like a rather mundane object of focus, especially when so many of us now keep ours in our purses and pockets. This isn’t just talking about clocks and watches. I’m not even primarily talking about clocks and watches. Much has been said about automation and the replacement of the human workforce for decades now. Lately it’s reached a new height. Autonomous driving is on the horizon. Donald Trump surprised the world, most critically via the votes of the rust belt “working poor” and underemployed, many of whom lost their jobs directly or indirectly to robots.

[3] Our concept of time is inseparably linked with our careers as components, cogs, and tools in the larger systems which drive our economies, provide for our needs, and fulfill our wants. Since the industrial revolution, It’s been just long enough for us take our jobs, careers, and work for granted, and thus fail to see, baring any unforeseen catastrophes, the unsustainability of such an arrangement. Put simply, the last few hundred years have been an anomaly in the history of working humans. It’s vital to explore the past, present, and future of work shifting from humans to machines, how it has impacted our view of time, and take a glimpse into our future.

Before the Machines

[4] Thompson describes a world, before the industrial revolution, where work primarily functioned under what he refers to as “task-oriented” time. The task-oriented approach to time essentially sees time through the lens of the natural work-rhythms of the tasks the individual is attending to. Sheep must be herded, cows must be milked, shoes must be made, the hot coals must be tended and so forth. He describes there being very little demarcation between “work” and “life” at this time. Pause and think about that for a moment. Much ink has been spilt and money spent in the pressing quest to find the ideal “work/life balance,” or to keep work from “encroaching” on our personal lives.

[5] Thompson describes the social and the labor as “intermingled- the working-day lengthens or contracts according to the task- and there is no great sense of conflict between labor and “passing the time of day.”” He also points out that to those accustomed to labor by the clock (that’s us), this attitude “appears to be wasteful and lacking in energy.” It seems no great leap to suggest that in our current Western world this orientation to time is all but dead. How did we get from there to here?

[6] I don’t want to romanticize the peasant life of the middle ages. It has been interesting for me, however, to realize how hard it is to even write about such an approach to time without seeming wistful as if longing for a “bygone” era. The reality is, our approach to time has changed. And it changed along with industrialization. Put another way, those of the pre-industrial “task-oriented” times, largely peasants or craftsmen, had direct ownership of their time. They were largely responsible for completing entire projects, such as making shoes, tending sheep, or building a wagon from scratch. They had the skills and the manual tools to undertake complete projects and arranged their day to day according to their need. The cobbler had complete control over when he worked, or didn’t, on the shoes. He may produce as many shoes as he is able in a day, or he may go an indefinite amount of time doing no work on producing shoes, depending on need and desire for goods, money, or shoes.

[7] This direct ownership comes because the cobbler had the knowledge and ability to create finished shoes from raw materials himself, and in part because he was the absolute master of his tools. He may, for example, use a blade to cut the leather, but the blade can do nothing of itself and so is simply an extension off the cobbler himself. While this seems mundane it’s an important differentiator to now. While he may never be wealthy, and within the scope of the larger market may or may not even be able to sustain a family with his cobbling, within the scope of his work he is the absolute master of his time. To better understand how machines have crept in, we’ll follow this cobbler through a remarkably long life from pre-industrialization to the largely post-human future workforce.

Introducing the Machines

[8] As technological mechanization increased, the cobbler found himself in a different relationship to both his tools and his time. Rather than tools simply being an inert extension of his own self and expertise, they began to make demands on his time. We can, for example, imagine an automatic leather cutter recently acquired by the cobbler, which allows him to simply put in a square piece of leather, wait a period, and then retrieves the newly shaped piece of leather. Previously this may have taken the cobbler 30 minutes to do. Now the machine can do it in 30 seconds. Furthermore, while his old manual blade could never force him to wait, the automatic cutter can. This surrender over control of his work time will be almost certainly seen by the cobbler as returning valuable time to him. He is now able to complete the total project faster, and still largely retains direct control of the entire process.

[9] Alfred Chandler, a former professor of Business History at Harvard, helps provide some valuable insight into the next stage, and won the pulitzer prize in in doing it. Chandler describes how the new tools and machinery of the industrial revolution made production possible at vastly grander scales, and divided the work. Where once our cobbler was the master of the shoemaking process, the machines are now able to do too much work too quickly for the cobbler to effectively use them himself. What good is a machine that can cut 500 leather pieces a minute when the cobbler can only use three of them in an hour?

[10] In response to these new abilities, the complete shoemaking processes began to be segmented and specialized. The complete work of our cobbler, because of advances in manufacturing and shipping technology, has now been divided up across many different machines and workers housed at many different factories scattered all over. Specialization necessarily demands coordination, and that has dramatic implications for our cobblers time as we watch him move into the city and get a job at one of these factories.

Working With Machines

[11] At this phase the humans and machines work together side by side as tools in a large and distributed production process of specialized tasks. Neither the machine nor the human directly owns their time, but must bow to the demands of coordination. A wide web of distributed sole-makers, leather cutters, sowers, designers, and assemblers are now coordinated to complete the same project that is previously completed by one cobbler.

[12] The new system, however, is now able to do it with dramatically higher consistency and output. For coordination to work, each part of the process must be timed to coincide with the other separate functions. Soles must be made, on time, to ship, on time, so that they may be combined with leather uppers, on time, at a different location, and so on. If the automatic cutting machine made minor constraints on when the cobbler couldn’t work, now the schedule constraints when he must. And so, as Thompson describes, the clock is given a minute hand, and then a second hand, is perfected and miniaturized, and then given by the companies to their employees for them to wear on their wrists. The human and the machine labor equally under their new master, the schedule.

[13] It’s beyond typical in our era to experience time as “pressure,” and then to lament or brag about the “stress” of it all. A lot of this is the price of coordination, and the pressure is real. If any tool, human or machine fails to meet their scheduled output then the process is broken and that tool will be repaired or replaced. There is functionally very little difference at this point from the human and the tool. Put another way, humans are now simply the semi-autonomous tools of the larger production and distribution processes. Time is of existential importance to the tools in the project as any human or machine that continually fails to keeps its deadlines will almost certainly be replaced with one who will. And thus the work of mankind completes its shift from task orientation to the scheduled society.

下载PDF版