Blog

Assembly

Here are most of the parts to print:

Printing and assembly is pretty straightforward. So, a little while later:

Putting brains to body

All the brains to this body are uploaded to the cloud, and can be downloaded and installed pretty easily. Set up the conda environment and clone the repository. Then run the brains with python3 custom_brains/test.py. The brains are not much yet, unfortunately, only keyboard teleoperation.

Stay tuned for updates on the brain.

Getting rid of jobs

There is an insoluble problem at the heart of postmodern society. It is one of the most important things in our lives whether we individually find a solution to it or not: If undesirable positions disappear, those employed in them will lose their job.

Now, however often this applies, at the very least it holds true anecdotally (e.g. Jim lost his job as a weaver to the cotton gin, Marge was laid off from her job as a trash sorter because her company bought trash-sorting machines). Furthermore, when looking at the long term, it’s unclear where we would be headed if the whole thing were possible:

A. A dystopia where the machines do all the work and are owned by a few billionaires (or no one at all) while people kill each other, reproduce, and scrape by.

B. A utopia where we lounge around all day and drink cucumber lemonade by the pool. The lemonade is made and delivered by a robot, and everything slightly laborious is taken care of. Humans only do work that is desirable and fulfilling.

One can be under the impression of B. occurring when in fact A. is, and vice versa. Thus we might be lounging at a pool being delivered cucumber lemonade while most people are experiencing A. Notice, both A. and B. are better than C. and D.

C. A utopia where lower class citizens do all the work and a few people of higher class order them around and make the right decisions – when they want, as is desirable. The lower class citizens might live decent lives but have to work hard for themselves and for the higher classes.

D. A dystopia where citizens do all the work and live horrible lives. They kill each other and scrape by. They reproduce or not, leading to extinction or domination by aggression accordingly.

Consider the present state of humanity (12/31) to be C. Not exactly a utopia – rather, something like Plato’s republic. As a society, we’d like to approach B., but seem to be nearing A. This is due to perhaps these three observations:

1. People are abundant.

2. People look for the first way to survive, often not in deliberation.

3. Higher classes seem to mean to go to war.

These are all perhaps natural facts except for 3., which is probably absorbed into 2.

In any case, there are no grounds for saying now is not the time to get rid of undesirable positions via replacement. Plainly, we should head for B., not the dystopic A. or D., or the “utopia” of C. This is our goal.

Replacement

What are we replacing? Replacing a specific task, though a necessary project, is impractical for our goal. Even replacing by task falls short. For example, suppose there is a very well generalized robotic arm that can, say, do most dishes in most kitchens, given certain training data. This is great but gets us at best slowly to A., a dystopia. A task-based replacement like this couldn’t enter the economy in a natural way so as to benefit all.

Replacement at the level of the business offers a different angle on things. (The more conventional, human/machine-level replacement is explored below.) This could be seen as essentially good old competition in the market. The major point here is that when comparing two businesses, one is clearly machine, and one is clearly the familiar weird economic class-based hierarchy, the positions (some or all of which) we’d like to disappear.

The business

See the repository on GitHub.

Let’s assume what I call the “right wing” of economic theory and suppose an ideal “squaring off” of a human and a machine in the labor market. In this scenario the human has various quantifiable features, as does the machine. Then, with respect to what’s fit to sell, the two competitors are compared based on their efficiency. I recently noticed that the momentum to replace in such a way is from a totally different direction than how this scenario is idealized. For whatever reason, firms with a way to do things – involving, say, x number of humans – are not found comparing efficiencies of equipment (as humans).

I believe that in this economy, it’s only “adventure” capital that replaces, which, while asking the modern question of “Is replacement even good?”, hopes to beat out the competition (answering the “Is replacement more profitable – more key to firms’ survival?”). (To address the biology-economy confusion, I’ll say it’s obvious that biology’s terms descriptively apply to the economy. The core of biology is more about whether these descriptions extend to organisms – hypothesis: they do.)

Blank Street Coffee is a chain of cafes with venture capital behind it. It’s “hypothesis”, a workplace with employees replaced by machines is more profitable. This workplace is the cafe. The demand for labor goes down, it’s harder to get a job. Jobs from the same firm type as the one with x humans replaces u humans yielding z jobs. That’s the “taking our jobs” scene. But in replacing those jobs, the firm is more competitive, lowering prices, increasing “productivity”. In terms of jobs provided by the (winner of the) firm type, replacement here is a burden. But replacement has another output, giving the apparent “transition” a potential up side: increased productivity. The machine does better than the human “squaring off”; it is at it’s core less needy, less costly – perhaps it is also faster, less error-prone, than humans.

Part II — A Memory from the Pool Season

It has been a custom in human society for a while now to trim one's hair. Now, nevermind the reason, it is apparent that the vast majority of us do it. How this gets done is a rather uninteresting affair — or, so one would think!

The simple problem — How will I get my haircut? — is a paradigm example of a feature of our economy, perhaps the paradigm example. It is one where we can test our frameworks, by applying the various terms and models, and look for coherence and completeness.

I for one had grown out my hair substantially. After many weeks — or even months — of delay, I planned the date to get my hair cut. The morning of, I looked up on Google Maps some barbershops in the area. After going through the results, comparing prices, and "vibe", I went with La Flamme in Harvard Square. So after some dilly-dally and a shower, I set off a-walking through the few streets that lead up to the Square from our house. I walked along the Charles — it was a warm sunny April day, and warmer still under my gray coat, yet still a chill from my legs which, it being a shorts-day, were being lapped by a breeze from over the water with those rowers a-rowing.

Through the door entering the barbershop I fumbled. I walked in and asked if they take walk-ins, and after having fully walked in, I was asked to sit down on a haircutting stool. A quiet, concentrated haircutting proceeded. A concise, no-bullshit job was done. The barber was very friendly and hardworking. My hair was treated diligently and with great care. The barber was responsive to my requests and good at improvising when I had none. By the end, they asked if I was satisfied and of course I was. For a very decent price, a great location, kind barbers, and a welcoming environment, I would recommend La Flamme.

The way I see it, Need is generated by us, well, the subjects we're concerned with. Why? Well again, a multiplicity of reasons which we leave unexplored. After an initial investment or something, a legal owner now plans to install equipment for the job he purports to do. The tasks being a little complex, there is no market for the equipment. This is where exploitation occurs: what appears out of nowhere (or, naively, "what is because it is"), is the job-market. By the social mistake of degenerating mutual aid (a biological accident, actually, of narrowly restricting mutual aid and production). Because humans have needs unfulfilled, they must make a transaction on themselves. From the other side, the owner rents the human at well below market rate — and not because the human is good at the job (which, it sort of is, but that's not its prerogative, its objective function), but because the human has a need which the owner appears to satisfy — that is, the human will see no better option. The human here is, in a sense, a lousy machine, which requires all sorts of complex functions. Therefore it is bought at a very low rate, which takes advantage of those requirements. All the requirements not consequently satisfied (and, granted, there are many, degrading the human's life), are left unsatisfied or achieved through (other) sources (of mutual aid).

The ideal machine here is too complex or very expensive. Why is it not installed?

I assume here a rather plain, mechanical view of labor. Equipment is our go-to term. Owners are the result of civilization and particularly urbanism. If, as we plan on making happen, urbanism is here to stay, owners — ownership or something like it — must exist somehow in tandem with the framework of equipment, etc.

Also assumed is that mutual aid is actually the base of all transactions and more generally, life.

Every once in a while, I head southwest to a laundromat, and as the machines are running, I always go to a nearby cafe called Pavement.

Today it’s a rainy and gusty day. Trash litters the streets; a Sour Patch Kids wrapper lies shipwrecked in a puddle.

It’s a dreary day, but not as dreary as the way people leave your life, and enter it and leave it, and live their own; and people are so atomized. That’s the complaint anyway. A dreary, bleak setting, we fall like rain on a puddle, disturbances to our fellows, out-of-time with us, and never in sync.

I listened to Ode to Joy last night and considered that this piece was the height of what could be remotely felt about joy, as in, we can think, “Ah yes, that’s what joy is, this melody captures it,” but not, when experiencing the piece, “This is pure joy.” The same could be said of all odes perhaps. They encapsulate, shout from atop a summit. But crucially, they are not what they are picturing. Horace, perhaps, really would have been happier in the pastoral. So then maybe odes and ode-writing actually admit defeat. Is ode-writing an effect of second-highest peak syndrome?

Indeed, we are in the era of odes. Everything’s an ode, and we fly amongst odes to things, while the things themselves elude us, and remain hidden below the odes and their composition. We are aimless when it comes to trying to aim towards the things in-and-of themselves. Instead we have odes — even a marketplace of odes — written by dreary writers on some summit of production…

… like perhaps on a rainy day at a cafe. These writers will look up at their object and declare, “That’s what it is, and this captures it.” Then the laundry machines stop running and it’s time to move on, leaving the cafe, and going home.