Posted by benbreen 5 days ago
As someone with some familiarity with Clemens, and stresses piled upon stresses, I feel it is somewhat insulting to the man to think he just couldn't handle losing some money and having his entrepreneurial dreams not work out, because really that is some minor stuff right there, and in the end he was still one of the most popular writers in the world, it was going through the stress and then getting more on top. Especially, as it is my experience, when you are going through something really difficult and are at your weakest, people try to take advantage of that. It would not have been a good therapy for his misanthropic bent.
That would in fact be the main argument against humanoid robots in many (most?) applications.
The counterpoint is that what humans already do is exactly what's needed in some cases, making those cases the ideal applications for humanoids.
The Unitype was late to market. Mergenthaler already had the Linotype out when the Unitype shipped. The Unitype was half the price of a Linotype. Unitype machines sold for about 20 years, so it wasn't a total failure. The Paige machine uses a lot more parts and space to do the same job.
Mechanism design skill is very rare. All the good Teletype machines were designed by just two people - Howard Krum and Edward Kleinschmidt. There were competing machines, and they were all much worse. William Burroughs invented the first adding machine that worked reliably, and it was better than all the competitors. Burroughs dominated banking well into the computer era.
The video claims that the big problem with the Unitype that it required not just a keyboard operator, but someone manually justifying the lines at the output end. Linotype figured out automatic justification, using expanding wedges. No need for a second worker.
Plus someone had to feed used type back into the Unitype for sorting and return to inventory. With a Linotype, the matrices with the letter forms never leave the machine; they are dispensed, set into a line, used for casting, and then immediately recycled back to the magazine for further use. As long as the supply of lead bars ready to melt holds up, you can keep setting type. With ordinary type setting, mechanized or not, you can end up with all your type tied up in pages waiting to be printed.
So the real problem with the Unitype was that it wasn't labor-saving enough. Despite that, it powered many small country newspapers for years.
They're Mediocre at everything, and worse than a dedicated machine at almost every task, just like a CPU is worse than an ASIC. However, they adapt to new tasks quickly. This decreases ownership costs (you only need one humanoid, not one machine per task), as well as manufacturing costs, as you can make one design and spend a lot of R&D money on scaling that design.
Humans are very space efficient
If my old textbook on control theory (printed in 80s) to be believed, there apparently were quite a lot of processes where simply recording the video of hand/arm movements of the human operators, smoothing the trajectories, and then making the mechanical manipulators simply follow them, was precisely the fastest and cheapest way to automate, compared to trying to reimagine the whole process and rebuild a whole manufacturing line with the newly invented machines.
The 30 second version, sewing is very labor intensive and people started trying to make a sewing machine from about when manufacturing tolerances got tight enough to attempt the process. It still took about 100 years until machines that actually work well were invented, The genius bit that took so long is to not try and sew like a human does but to develop an inverted process that a machine can do. Honestly, despite being quite common at this point in time sewing machines still blow my mind when you consider the intricate process they are required to do with thread.
And a fun fact for free: Apparently patent cartels(cough MPEG LA) are not a new thing and Singer et al set one up in the 1850's to lock up the market on these marvelous machines.
There's also plenty of examples where technology creates something very different than the thing that humans were doing: photograph vs painting, car vs horse/bike. It would be silly to say that we have all this horse infrastructure and saddle UX that we don't want to break compatibility with.
Maybe the lesson is that humans are adaptable but machines/manufacturing is not? It's easier to make a great new thing that humans will use than it is to make a cost-effective production thing that exactly replaces what humans did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_Howe#Invention_of_sewing...
The perfect kind of robot is perhaps something closer to the linotype... a AI controlled macine that has the capability to birth or re-assemble to be optimal for the task at hand. Just like the linotype automated the "casting" of lines of text.
Not necessarily a 3d printer or a nanobot universal assembler... but maybe something more akin to a modular assembly line that can rearrange itself intelligently.
It's similar with LLMs. Compared to a bespoke piece of software for the task they are incredibly inefficient, yet they are extremely useful because they can do things where developing that piece of software would require a lot of research.
I acknowledge that the depth the group brings is at a cost higher than the single actor and it isn't always a better thing.
Anyways, it’s been about 15 years, but the thing that made an impression on me was that it wasn’t just one invention. Gutenberg basically had to assemble like two dozen separate innovations to make it all work.
The type alloy (3 metals!) had to be just soft enough to cast easily, just expandable enough to set well, just hard enough to last. How to cast in quantity and re-melt as needed. The ink had to be just runny enough to apply easily but not so runny it gets everywhere, sticky enough to stick to type, and dry at a good middle speed. The blotter to apply the ink to type. The system of wooden casing to hold the pieces together with the right spacing, that won’t fall apart. How to set up the casing. The screw press needed to have very even pressure. The paper needed to be able to slide and take ink properly without spreading but also not tear. Proper fonts and ligatures for the type. And so on…
IIRC most things stayed pretty similar for a few hundred years, mostly changing stuff like the paper feeding mechanism or tweaking ink application or minor variations in how the lever or screw work. So to be honest, Gutenberg did almost all the hard work himself. It was a big deal because a lot of these smaller inventions had to come together for a narrow purpose all at once (on top of the obvious huge historical effect of cheaper books!)
Really fond memories of my visit, you can tell when someone is passionate.
The trouble for Gutenberg was it was too easy to duplicate his press, and that combined with not being good at business led to his bankruptcy.
It's never been easier for you and interested kids to learn these things on their own.
Easier on its own is therefore effectively meaningless when people aren’t actually learning beyond the most superficial layers.
People benefit greatly from external human feedback, but 1:1 tutoring (with a good tutor) is roughtly an order of magnitude more effective and efficient than a classroom, and classrooms themselves vary wildly; in general the more participatory the better.
Self learning without any help can be more effective and efficient than a typical classroom, because as it is self directed, self paced, can use the best materials someone can find and a whole variety of them vs. whatever was assigned, etc., but it takes a lot of skill (which comes from past practice) and effort on the part of the learner. Many researchers/scholars are doing significant amounts of self-directed learning as their career, and can get very good at it with decades of practice.
The speed of learning in a classroom with 15+ students is inevitably unbelievably slow, and the time is used incredibly inefficiently. This isn't any particular problem with specific teachers, but as far as I can tell an inherent problem with aligning a bunch of people's preparation, motivation, and attention, and a problem with giving feedback in a 1:many setting. Teaching/learning speed generally seems worse at a primary school level vs. at a college level, given a very good teacher in both; I'm not sure if this is because of better prepared (because older) students, or just more motivated students.
I agree that school curricula is often bad. I disagree that we should just accept it as hopeless and not hope it could get better.
I didn't say anything is hopeless. It's just that adding more good and lofty ideas and topics to the curriculum isn't addressing the actual bottleneck.
At least the education system enforces some baseline level of standards
To see a typecaster which works find a Linotype or Monotype.
https://circuitousroot.com/artifice/letters/press/noncastcom...
https://readmeastoryink.com/wp-content/uploads/stories/the_c...