news
Welcome to c/news! We aim to foster a book-club type environment for discussion and critical analysis of the news. Our policy objectives are:
-
To learn about and discuss meaningful news, analysis and perspectives from around the world, with a focus on news outside the Anglosphere and beyond what is normally seen in corporate media (e.g. anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, Marxist, Indigenous, LGBTQ, people of colour).
-
To encourage community members to contribute commentary and for others to thoughtfully engage with this material.
-
To support healthy and good faith discussion as comrades, sharpening our analytical skills and helping one another better understand geopolitics.
We ask community members to appreciate the uncertainty inherent in critical analysis of current events, the need to constantly learn, and take part in the community with humility. None of us are the One True Leftist, not even you, the reader.
Newcomm and Newsmega Rules:
The Hexbear Code of Conduct and Terms of Service apply here.
-
Link titles: Please use informative link titles. Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed.
-
Content warnings: Posts on the newscomm and top-level replies on the newsmega should use content warnings appropriately. Please be thoughtful about wording and triggers when describing awful things in post titles.
-
Fake news: No fake news posts ever, including April 1st. Deliberate fake news posting is a bannable offense. If you mistakenly post fake news the mod team may ask you to delete/modify the post or we may delete it ourselves.
-
Link sources: All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. If you are citing a Twitter post as news, please include the Xcancel.com (or another Nitter instance) or at least strip out identifier information from the twitter link. There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance, such as Libredirect or archive them as you would any other reactionary source.
-
Archive sites: We highly encourage use of non-paywalled archive sites (i.e. archive.is, web.archive.org, ghostarchive.org) so that links are widely accessible to the community and so that reactionary sources don’t derive data/ad revenue from Hexbear users. If you see a link without an archive link, please archive it yourself and add it to the thread, ask the OP to fix it, or report to mods. Including text of articles in threads is welcome.
-
Low effort material: Avoid memes/jokes/shitposts in newscomm posts and top-level replies to the newsmega. This kind of content is OK in post replies and in newsmega sub-threads. We encourage the community to balance their contribution of low effort material with effort posts, links to real news/analysis, and meaningful engagement with material posted in the community.
-
American politics: Discussion and effort posts on the (potential) material impacts of American electoral politics is welcome, but the never-ending circus of American Politics© Brought to You by Mountain Dew™ is not welcome. This refers to polling, pundit reactions, electoral horse races, rumors of who might run, etc.
-
Electoralism: Please try to avoid struggle sessions about the value of voting/taking part in the electoral system in the West. c/electoralism is right over there.
-
AI Slop: Don't post AI generated content. Posts about AI race/chip wars/data centers are fine.
view the rest of the comments
I appreciate your insight and critique. I didn’t know China already had these things working in factories. Definitely makes more sense than a robot butler. Out of curiosity, do you have a source? Not trying to call bullshit, just would like to read more on it. And using an English search engine on anything China usually doesn’t turn up anything useful lol.
From the list of sources I keep I have these articles that mention the humanoid robots doing factory work specifically:
Your First Humanoid Robot Coworker Will Probably Be Chinese (this one tries to put a 'china bad' slant, but still a worthwhile read)
China’s EV giants are betting big on humanoid robots
AI powering China's industrial evolution
And videos:
This is Why "Made in America" Will Fail
CHINA'S ROBOT REVOLUTION! 🤖 YIZHUANG CONFERENCE SHOCKS THE WORLD from 7:47
And that's just what I've read and watched.
That's what I mean by ideological blindspot. The only thing any of these articles say about the use of humanoid robots is
Which isn't much, nothing concrete.
And the videos are straight up slop.
If this was about hyping up Musk, you'd get absolutely dunked on if you presented that as evidence of humanoid robots getting used in factories.
This is already much more than Musk or any other American or European humanoid robot constructor can say about their robots. So no, I agree that it's not much, but it is very much concrete. And remember this is a very recent development, a few years old at most, it's a bit early to make definitive conclusions about how well or poorly it's going.
Incidentally, the appeal of humanoid robots isn't just automating production (because if it was just that specialized robots would be far better than any generalist humanoid), instead I think the appeal of humanoid robots is as a tool to manage the balance between employment and production output. As a socialist society you want to become able to guarantee jobs and access to the products of labor to your citizens. Which means you have to balance level of automation with necessary output: too many robots and there's not enough work for everyone, too few and there might be shortages of certain things due to underproduction. This means that ideally you want to be able to retire a few machines when there are peoples in need of a job and bring more machines in when workers retire or stop working for whatever other reasons. But you can't make the switch quickly enough with specialized robots because these require conditions so vastly different from human workers that you need to refit the entire factory floor or at least part of it both to bring robots in or to get them out, which can take months to years. With humanoid robots though, they can work with the exact same factory floors the human workers use, meaning switching between robots and humans is as easy as ordering the robots to walk in or out of the factory. That's the best argument for humanoid robots in my opinion, and because of that I think it makes a lot of sense for a socialist country to develop the technology.
Well these are youtube videos. I don't see what the quality of the video has to do with whether or not the robots do work in factories though.
I'd get dunked on for presenting images of robots getting used in factories as evidence of robots getting used in factories? I don't get your point here. Is it the fact that it's only a handful of factories?