The Town Crier: Robots are here!

Published 7:15 pm Monday, August 12, 2024

Everybody is talking about AI (artificial intelligence) these days but most of what’s getting passed around as AI is just a better version of a search engine algorithm. You punch in some search terms and the program goes out and looks for it on the internet and brings you back some suggestions.

The new AI stuff goes out and gets it and then writes it up for you now. If you want it to be good, though, you’re going to have to proofread it and edit it yourself. And they say there’s a lot of errors and misinformation in the material. It’s probable that in the race to get it out there for bragging (and selling) rights they rushed it out before it’s been perfected, if that’s even possible. So the AI stuff is still a little around the corner. Ah, but the robots are here now.

Slowly taking over

They aren’t the human-looking kind, and some can’t travel around at all, but they are doing the tasks that people used to do and they are slowly taking over. I’m pretty sure there will always be jobs that robots will never be able to do or at least we won’t trust them to. I went to the dentist the other day and had my teeth cleaned and I don’t think a robot will ever be able to really do that job well. And at the very least I won’t trust one to do it. I like the idea of a lady with a soothing voice telling me to relax and “Let me know if anything hurts” and having the insight to see that when I start tensing up she’ll ask me. She knows when I’m just trying to be macho and hold off on the pain complain. A robot don’t care. I can just hear a dental hygienist robot of the future telling me “Do not panic while I put sharp metal instruments into your oral cavity.” And don’t think for a minute I’ve forgotten what HAL the robot from “2001: A Space Odyssey” was up to. There’s a robot that doesn’t walk around and he covered plenty of ground.

Most of the robots you will see around town you wouldn’t even think of as robots, but rather just machines and devices that have mechanized some of the workload. For this article I’m going to call a robot anything that does a human job and is not directly managed by a human.

For example, a big steam shovel excavator is a machine that is driven and controlled by a human pilot and therefore is just an extension of the human. But in the carpet industry there are many “machines” that work on their own once they are turned on and that do jobs people used to do. Sometimes they work with humans and sometimes in place of humans. And many times they have moving parts that simulate human body parts like an elbow and an arm, or else they move like people do, traveling across the floor even if they are rolling instead of walking.

Bingo!

The word “robot” was first coined by Czech playwright Karel Capek in his 1920 play “R.U.R.” or “Rossum’s Universal Robots.” The word comes from an old Church Slavonic word “robota” that has to do with labor, work, servitude and drudgery.

The robots of the story were invented by a company to work and do the jobs people didn’t want to do. If anyone had “And they revolt in the end” on their card then they can yell “Bingo!” And with another minute of thinking about the plot I bet you came up with “They eventually discover love and go off in the sunset.” Robots, the humanoid type, caught on big time.

Predecessors to the robots are the Frankenstein monster who first appeared in the early 1800s and the Golem of Prague, a monstrous clay man brought to life to help the Jews of that city.

Shortly after “R.U.R.” robots started showing up in science fiction stories and movies like crazy. In the movie “Metropolis,” Maria the Robot is a major character. In the ‘30s and ‘40s they showed up in serials and movies teamed with the likes of Flash Gordon or Bela Lugosi. In one Flash Gordon episode the scientist is told that “iron men” attacked them and he says “You mean mechanical men … robots?”

Robotics

In fiction and fact there are all types of robots with the ones that look like people falling into the humanoid type. You won’t see any of those in the carpet mills. Not yet.

A lot of what you will see in the carpet mills are actually referred to as robotics, the moving arms and swinging machines that duplicate human work. There are robots that move around on the floor and do work but they don’t look like humans, they look more like the droids in “Star Wars,” from the type of robot known as an “android,” although android robots are the most lifelike, like in the movie “Blade Runner.”

The moving robots I saw in a yarn mill did two things. One robot-type was a little cart that went around a given course in the factory past each of the extrusion machines. It picked up the yarn and took it to the shipping department. The other robot was a pretty big machine and took the yarn spools and placed them on a pallet where another robot-type machine wrapped the spools for shipping.

The robots would make their rounds slowly and steadily, although the shipping robot moved pretty quickly. The shipping robots also had a standby area where they went to wait between tasks. I just happened to be standing in the waiting area and, well, here came a robot. I jumped out of the way because it was bigger than me. Maybe it would have stopped when it came really close to me but I wasn’t about to find out. I’ve seen enough robots in the movies to know they can go rogue when they get it in their metal heads.

Other robots/robotics I’ve seen in the carpet mills are the machines that spin/twist the yarn and get it ready to be used on carpet. These machines have lids that slowly open as if the invisible man were opening it when it’s ready to be switched over. There are “arms” on the machines that bend like elbows and wrists and set the machine to its given tasks. There are huge buildings now with just a handful of human workers in there because the machines are so robotized.

In another flooring factory in town, not carpet but hard surfaces, there are long manufacturing lines that are a series of robots linked together and working in sync. Once that line is up and running and all the machines/robots are whirring away at their tasks, all a person has to do is stand around and observe. There’s a control station where they can do various settings but it’s mainly an off/on situation. If there’s an error in the line it’s usually in the materials going through the process, not the machines. In another part of the factory there were giant arms that stacked the product. Not only do these robots not need human interaction, they have yellow warning lines around them … humans stay back!

A pretty lonely business

At some point more and more of the carpet industry will use robots. They say the day is coming when shipping trucks will be automated and won’t need drivers any more. Cameras and sensors on the back of the trucks will allow them to back up to loading docks. At that point, driverless Hysters will grab the ordered carpet rolls and stack them perfectly efficiently in the back of the truck. I don’t know, you think a robot could ever take over the job of a carpet salesman? What about the designers? At some point will it come down to just a guy watching the factory on a TV screen with various “off” buttons and a walkie-talkie to the maintenance man that can fix the machines? A pretty lonely business if you ask me.

I’m hoping not everything goes robotic. Surely the dental hygienist won’t be the last of the human operators. Doctors and dentists will continue to be human, surely. I don’t want the equivalent of a medical vending machine taking care of me, especially if you know the luck I have with vending machines. I’ve been in a sushi restaurant where a robot brought your food and your soy sauce. They made it have funny cartoon eyes so the kids will like it but I think that’s all part of the plan.

Why are we going on about the robots? Well, this is the Town Crier and so “The robots are here! The robots are here! And more are coming!” So get used to it and be ready to make friends with the new kid in town … he’s made of metal.

Mark Hannah, a Dalton native, works in video and film production.