I feel like we are missing many shades of grey in the middle.

Semi-automation (human in the loop) can still result in a dramatic uplift in productivity. You can't run a combine harvester 100% autonomous but that doesn't stop anyone from trying to get as close to that limit as possible.

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inetknght 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> You can't run a combine harvester 100% autonomous

I'm curious why you think that.

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theoreticalmal 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Probably repair, refuel, what happens in a tornado. There’s an infinite amount of complexity in the world and a finite amount of computation

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sidewndr46 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The tornado is the easiest one to solve. It's called insurance.

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catchnear4321 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Repair is more maintenance than use. Good eventual goal. Not required to see benefits. Best case, it drives itself to the garage. Worst case, for now, human mechanic does a house call.

Refueling? Seems solvable. Tornadoes? Not directly solvable, but, no less so than for humans.

There’s infinite complexity, sure, but that’s why it’s silly to try and hop to done. One step at a time.

	▲	spauldo an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Tornado: return to the barn when you receive emergency weather alerts. Not much different than people.
	▲	AndrewKemendo 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The whole reason people complain about AI is because they want “hop to done” One step at a time is what is happening and the improvement and rate of improvement is crazy as we see, A whole class of nontechnical people don’t accept anything but “fully solved including every possible edge case” before they call it done, then complain that they didn’t prepare socially for what happens when that is true.

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bob1029 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Many forms of maintenance cannot be automated. Especially break fix maintenance.

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m463 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It is hard to run over spherical cows.

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westurner 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Because of the topology and hydrology of the landform

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mschuster91 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Oh you absolutely can run them autonomously on the field. You only need a human these days to refuel them.

Precision Agriculture stuff is utterly crazy these days, other than fuel the remaining staff is the only thing left where you can get efficiency improvements - and at the scale of modern megafarms, even small percentages add up to a ton of money.

	▲	drfloyd51 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Right. As they said, you can’t do it 100% autonomously. A human needs to feed it. You essentially said: you’re wrong, it is autonomous when it doesn’t need a human during one specific part of its overall usage.