My favorite of these "trials" ads has got to be their Jenga game from 2014 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWc8dUl7Xfo). I'd like to imagine that that could be turned into a real competition.

That was cool. The guy walking around the stack calling plays was making me nervous though, lol. He'd need more than a hard hat to survive a pileup.

I'm not sure if I love or hate the prospect of future archaeologists finding this and trying to figure out what role it played in our society. "We're referring to it as the 'ball court', though it could also have had ceremonial or political significance. Notice the symmetry and the way it is aligned to true north."

(I know the dirt walls won't last a decade, don't ruin my fun.)

Exactly. It turns out that the pyramids were just a cross-promotional publicity stunt between the Egyptian Wheel Company and an ancient board game.

With big painted billboards advertising Khalem-tet's building force (an early Mechanical Turk) on all 4 sides!

> (I know the dirt walls won't last a decade, don't ruin my fun.)

They probably won't... but maybe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mound_Builders

> hate the prospect of future archaeologists finding this and trying to figure out what role it played in our society

Nowadays archaeologists also trying to figure out what role each thing they found already played in ancient society.

Nobody really don't know why (and how) Egyptian pyramids built in such form as we know it now.

Every thing in our life is a game; Just remember that each player in real world has only "1 life" & there are NO "god mode", even more — there are NO objects which could grant user at least "1UP".

[Spoiler] «The Game of Life». RIP John Conway[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22843306

Do enough stunts, and one or two of them get preserved just by sheer chance.

This one almost certainly won't stay there. None of them will. But whatever gets preserved will be some crazy stuff that future people have no chance of understanding.

(But well, nobody should be surprised that our civilization can align things with the true North... So, nobody probably will.)

Well they won't last any time because their destruction was caught at the end of the video.

oh_sigh

I can't have been the only one who clicked on this thinking it would have something to do with scientists manipulating a biological creature to do something cool :\

Then when I see it I'm all: "That's cool, I guess...:("

Was expecting something fully automated: generate a 3-d plot of the game board, download to a controller that acts like a 3-d printer, with dozers as the “print” heads. Well, Cat’s 100th anniversary is a few years away - we can hope.

It'd been cool if they had hacked the equipment to be able to drive autonomously instead of remote driven. Oh, right, you don't have a right to repair, so you can't modify the rig you just bought. Doh!

Where is the line between your right to repair and Caterpillar's rights to the intellectual property embedded in the various controllers on board the equipment?

When does this become an issue when you and Caterpillar have regulatory obligations for the operations of that equipment with regard to emissions, OSHA, MSHA, etc... ?

I am sincerely interested in understanding the reasonable expectations between anything we purchase (hardware, equipment, cars) and the IP we license that provides the functionality we expect from those devices.

If the license were to say up front, before purchasing, "You are purchasing this hardware and receiving a license to use the embedded IP in perpetuity. If you screw around with the IP, all functions will stop working as expected and YOU personally take responsibility for the hardware from that point forward."

Would that address your concerns about, "Right to Repair?"

It's a start, because it clearly articulates the relationship between you and the the hardware you purchased, however, I suspect you also want more information so that you can take any reasonable maintenance actions necessary for the life of that hardware without relying on the manufacturer

But that is speculation on my part

I want a clearer understanding of where you would draw the lines and what you really want from a modern, culturally significant, "right to repair" policy.

> When does this become an issue when you and Caterpillar have regulatory obligations for the operations of that equipment with regard to emissions, OSHA, MSHA, etc... ?

why would this be an issue for software, but not for the car-modding business ? if you can "trivially" find the materials and guides to add a turbo to your car engine (https://www.torquecars.com/tuning/adding-turbo.php), it's very hypocritical to mandate different rules for software running inside of it.

This is awesome, would be so cool to make these in cities around the country and make various garden competitions to see who could make the most beautiful setup.

In the north, the bottom could be flooded for ice skating in a maze :)

"These trials are designed to surprise and delight our customers"

https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ

That soundbite is a study in how to turn something cool uncool.

Fun. I couldn’t quite parse the title, it made me click though to the article.

That's nuts, but I love it!

Cat makes this fun and games, and its totally cool. Still, they clearly they see the writing on the wall.

In 15 years jobsites will be run by machine operators remotely from (lower wage area?) control centers.

When everything is moved offshore to lower costs, what will we do all day?

> When everything is moved offshore to lower costs, what will we do all day?

Provide a more productive and practical purpose for these people's labour during their blip time on this planet to something?

Those "something's" are practically infinite. People have developed (or been sold) this weird conception that there is only a small finite amount of work available, and therefore we must limit things like the total workforce numbers or other such nonsense.

When any (usually group) of people can come up with an idea, generate thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of value, then really the supply of "what to do" is hardly finite. Most of our limitations on these are self-created through well meaning legislation or through power systems like monopolies, which we have systems to break. But hardly all of them are limited by these two factors.

With simple B2B software alone theres millions of automations/automations just waiting to be productized and profitizied. Consumer-wise we haven't reached anyway near the potential of smartphones, IOT, and desktops in every home.

This idea that there is a finite amount of jobs and there will be nothing left for the guy who figured out how to drive sophisticated machines or run teams/logistics of such people is such a weird unreal fantasy to me. I don't really get it.

Our problem is more of what are the older people going to do and we've come up with quite a few solutions already (UBI) but beyond that these transitions take a lot of time. A lot more than they ever should. And a lot longer than the doomsayers ever predict.

Plus we are a long long way from robots completely replacing labour jobs and things like being an electrician which can be a highly valuable and rewarding career (not everyone has to be a millionaire but middle class life in anywhere country is enviable by almost anyone not in a western country).

I'm so tired of these negative predictions than never seem to work out in reality. In reality we have failure of current systems (in one giant form in America prematurely shipping it all overseas is one). Not failures of the actual technological development.

But regardless you can't stop this constant progress anyway. It's going to happen. IMO our short time on earth is far better spent on fixing the failures of the past that are realized today (criminal sentencing reform, drug laws, the utter failures of political systems maybe due to voting or other factors like how policy is formed, etc, etc) than worrying about the future.

I wished it planted trees rather than uprooted more to create a stupid pr video

It looks like they did it in the middle of some farmer's field. I don't think any trees were uprooted for this.

It's hard to tell the precise location, but this area seems to be where it was actually done: https://goo.gl/maps/njSa71qU6w8CrP9BA. It's already a giant dirt field on the satellite imagery; there wasn't even any fields plowed up for it.

Yep, that's one of our demonstration center: https://www.cat.com/en_US/support/operations/operator-traini...