It sucks.
I used to get paid to do OCR on tax forms. I used n gram models, BERT,etc and it took weeks to get the forms right. Now you can do it in seconds with an api.
I wouldn’t say the profession got destroyed. I just work with different tools now. Instead of running ngrams, I’m testing different apis or embedding models.
The old job doesn’t exist anymore, in many ways I am the classic example of losing your job to AI-but I wouldn’t say it destroyed the profession. People just use different tools today to get intelligence from PDFs.
“The particularity of this profession to me is that it’s like it was 2 years ago, and it’s a skill that’s handed down from dev to dev. You go around with the most expert, most experienced BERTitori, and you watch and listen to them, and slowly they start to give you the keyboard. You try with them next to you, piano piano, and gradually, you begin to do more on your own,” explained Stocchi. “It’s a big responsibility, you have to be really capable of doing it, you can’t damage the forms.”
some professions spawn from viable hobbies and some hobbies spawn from unviable professions.
I assume the people doing that work might have been lighting lamps in the past.
In the same vein, you doing OCR and now doing other work is not a profession change. You're still a computer scientist doing computer engineering work just on a different problem set.
Lamp lighter to cheese tapper is a profession change. A lamp lighter with bad hearing or attention to detail is not a problem per se. Tapping cheese to see if its ripe (and all the other skills that come with cheese making) will potentially be different enough.
Now the problem comes in, when lamp lighter is supposed to start doing OCR engineering work. Unless the lamp lighter was horribly over qualified, most lamp lighters will not be able to do OCR engineering or any computer scientist style engineering work at all.
Professions do get destroyed all the time. Hopefully while a new profession is born that has similar enough skill level requirements as the previous ones, just in different form. Like a lamp lighter might do well in an Amazon warehouse but not as an AWS software engineer.
It's somewhat still held by the same people that somewhat-traditionally did the job. In some places, it used to be job of the night watch constable to light the kerosene lamps. Police now days just report a broken traffic light.
Our tendency to 'progress' doesn't have to be the case, we all could collectively decide to hold ourselves here.
Also, I don't think that all our technology has always been good for us either. But we are blind to the downsides mostly.
Engineering, the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.
Out of pure curiosity, how would an industrial process engineer approach this problem, de novo?
> A study on structural quality control of Swiss‐type cheese with ultrasound is presented. We used a longitudinal mode pulse‐echo setup using 1–2MHz ultrasonic frequencies to detect cheese‐eyes and ripening induced cracks. Results show that the ultrasonic method posses good potential to monitor the cheese structure during the ripening process. Preliminary results indicate that maturation stage could be monitored with ultrasonic velocity measurements.
https://pubs.aip.org/aip/acp/article-abstract/894/1/1328/953...
https://acs-international.com/instruments/ultrasonic-pulse-e...
Ultrasound would also be a solid bet, but it depends how many points you need to sample if it would be time efficient.
Now, I don't think ultrasound would work (it's a harder cheese than Swiss cheese), also the mechanical interface would be a complication (you can't gel the cheese). CT would work but be expensive
But tiny percussions and analysis of echo/transmission delays would work in principle
> Thus operating frequency is always a trade-off between resolution and penetration. Optimal depth of subsurface penetration is achieved in ice where the depth of penetration can achieve several thousand metres (to bedrock in Greenland) at low GPR frequencies. Dry sandy soils or massive dry materials such as granite, limestone, and concrete tend to be resistive rather than conductive, and the depth of penetration could be up to 15 metres (49 ft). However, in moist or clay-laden soils and materials with high electrical conductivity, penetration may be as little as a few centimetres.
It's not only the sound, it's the sound, the bounce, the response to different strengths, the smell, the color. Humans are multimodal, machines are not, yet.
The moment we have a Michelin star level robot cook, then we can start thinking about automating this kind of stuff. For now, we have better results with humans!
Italians have absolutely zero problems replacing manual processes with technology. Creating each wheel is more science than art, everything is done in highly sterilized environments with exact temperature control, as an example.
It has been fun watching Starbucks' various attempts at cracking into the Italian market.
The US government operates several special tasting departments.
It probably also helps that they are downing a demitasse in a minute or two instead of a giant venti size beast that lasts for an hour.
I have a Flair Espresso machine and get beans from a nearby roaster. I dunno. It seems decent. I don’t consider myself a snob, but I put some effort in.
Maybe Italians would be able to tase the defects that I add. But, they are the people who popularized Moka pots so they can’t really be so perfect.
I pretty much drink solely espresso, but will sometimes have cappuccino for breakfast (which is the only time of day that Italy accepts!)
Ultimately, it’s about what you like. It doesn’t really matter what Italy thinks. But as with anything, getting good ingredients and preparing them well makes a difference.
I wouldn’t consider myself a ‘coffee snob’, more a coffee enthusiast :D. Good coffee from ethical sources is just better. People talk of coffee jitters. I don’t get any. And the variety of flavours is awesome.
btw, anyone in the UK: I really like Coffee Bean Shop [1]. It’s a small family owned coffee roaster, with a good variety of flavours. And on every delivery there’s a hand written note from the packer. Usually talking about the weather, but can be a variety of things. It’s very cute in our internet age and genuinely brings a smile to my face every time I open the package. The coffees are excellent too.
I'm unfamiliar with the regs on this, but can the duties of the battitore be written into the standard for the cheese?
So what's written in the _disciplinare_ is the expectation that the wheel is flawless and that the experts will validate it at certain times. The details of how the validation is performed is vague, it mentions using the hammer but doesn't specify stuff like "it sounds X".
I agree. As soon as you replace humans with machines, the next step is so-called "value engineering," where squeezing pennies out of a process becomes more important than the product.
Let the tech people do tech. Let the artists do art. Food is an art.
While I respect the point you're making, food is not an art. It is usually a perishable commodity and a requirement for survival.
It does't have to be, of course, but the people with enough capital to set up automation tend to care more about money than cheese.
The cheap bad cheese wouldn't last a second in the market if we didn't all rush to buy it, accepting it's failings, but rejoicing in how close it is to the "real" thing and, of course, deriding the original as being "so expensive"
On the other side you have those wealthy enough to enjoy as much as the want out of it at its current price. Those would be the losers if quality were to deteriorate.
Edit: I can point to cases of that happening
Ferrari, who couldn't turn a profit so sold to another car manufacturer that created a "profitable" version that, quite frankly, is a shadow on its former glory
The watch on my arm is (mostly) handmade and worth a fortune, there are plenty of other cheaper watches that are arguably better due to them being made by robots.
Same principle, I think.
In the world of watches, this logic extends far beyond "handmade vs made by robots". Quartz, for example, is better than automatic & mechanical in every single quantitative metric, yet perceived as lower value due to the lack of craftsmanship.
It is interesting how important it seems to us that jobs like this remain done in the traditional way. For all their expertise, I am sure a technical solution would also easily be able to detect what they are looking for: voids within the cheese, or lack of uniform density. This does not seem to be a case where the human expertise and artistry is actually important to the final product, besides the feeling of tradition.
Perhaps the best argument for keeping traditional jobs like this is that, even if that exact job could be done by machine, replacing these humans with machines would be the start of a short process that would end up with indistrially-produced bad cheese.