At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

Re:At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’... by semi-extrinsic on Tuesday January 17, 2017 @04:16PM (#13421288)

So I looked at Momentum Machines. First of all, as you say it's completely unrelated to AI, all the technology is decades old. I'm not sure I'm buying that the hardware and design knowhow is so much cheaper today; people started seriously automating car production lines back in the 1960's, so I can't see how this would've been orders of magnitude more expensive in the 1990's when the tech had matured for 30 years.

Second of all, following their links we find that in 2012 they had a full scale machine built that had a 95% success rate, and they projected 11 months until they could launch the concept in a restaurant. What has happened since? No word, AFAICT. Happy to be corrected if I missed it somewhere and they have actually launched.

But otherwise, it doesn't exactly convince me this is "the next industrial revolution" if they can't polish out that last 5% of a single-purpose burger-making machine in almost half a decade.

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Re:At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’... by nickparker on Tuesday January 17, 2017 @05:25PM (#13422049)

Yeah I don't know what they're up to. I've used them as a useful shorthand example for automation for awhile, but you're right I should perhaps find a new one because they seem to be in some sort of limbo, crunchbase has nothing after their seed funding.

A more concrete if less evocative example is Amazon's warehouse automation. Relatively simple robots with 3 DOF (2D planar movement + a container jack) are wiping out enormous numbers of jobs, both in obvious immediate effects (less fulfillment center jobs) and by decimating conventional retail.

edit: Momentum still has 19 employees on LinkedIn, so they're not completely dead it seems.

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