this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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I do industrial automation for a living, and I just want to point out that automating things that exist purely in the digital domain is far easier than automating things like ship breaking.
Not that you're saying otherwise, however isn't that even more of a reason more developers and resources should be allocated toward automating complex and risky physical processes?
Honestly, I don't see how you would do it without general AI, which is something that will be solved in the digital domain first anyway.
They still manually build ships right now what makes you think they could automate taking one apart
Firstly, much of shipbuilding is automated. They use robots to paint them and apply anti-fouling coatings. They also use loads and loads of automated machinery to create the steel parts that make up most of the ship. Do you think some dudes are forging rivets, beams, and pipes by hand? No, those are made by machines that make zillions of them.
Secondly, nearly every ship--even ships that seem generic like big container ships--is a custom, one-off thing. They're all bespoke (for the most part), being engineered for specific purposes, routes, and they even have "upgrades" for companies that pay extra (e.g. nicer quarters, extra antenna masts, more and special equipment mounting options, etc).
The missing piece here is assembly, and disassembly is like 95% of what goes into recycling from what I understand.
Automation requires very high precision/consistency in the parts you want to work on. I seriously doubt that after many years of wear, tear, and impromptu repairs, those ships would be anywhere near consistent enough.
In fact they cannot automate the disassembly of cars even though their construction is highly automated. We just grind them up in a big grinder and separate the materials. So basically the same thing as with ships just on a smaller scale.
Automation does not require very high precision though it does require a modicum of consistency. Millions of vibratory bowl feeders with huge tolerances on their alignment mechanisms demonstrate this fact ("Damnit! A part got caught again... Gerry! Loosen that tolerance screw much farther out so that won't happen again" LOL).
A single repair or modification would ruin the entire automation process. One single screw off by a single mm type thing.
This depends on the system. Mechatronics engineers spend a lot of time learning and figuring out how to make systems that can withstand edge cases like an incorrect screw size. There's whole engineering/mechatronics disciplines around automation reliability (though much of it involves lots and lots of sensors and cameras, haha).
The way they test these things is by intentionally throwing bad parts into the mix at various stages of their automation. Something like a screw being too big/small is a trivial matter that won't make it through a system or facility designed by professionals.
The real problem that really throws a wrench into every mechatronics engineer's carefully-planned automated masterworks is people doing things like throwing wrenches into their carefully-planned automated masterworks 😁
But nothing would ever be identical to a blueprint because of repairs and modifications man…… add in wear and tear, yeah it ain’t happening.
That’s the part you can’t understand. We don’t have anything that can perform this yet, if you want to claim it exists, let’s see it then.
You're solving for the wrong problem from the perspective of people with money investing money to solve these problems.
Shipbreaking, while dangerous for the workers, isn't expensive because it is done in far flung countries with workers that have low wages, few protections for safety, and long term health consequences.
Art and writing (for western consumption) requires educated and talented people which are expensive to employ.
People with money, looking for a return, want that return their spending, not reduce human suffering.
Processing the digital world is just the first step. You can't just build a safe autonomous ship disassembly robot without making sure your algorithms are actually sound. Look at self driving cars, they're far from being safe and acceptable. Jumping straight into this problem without testing the shit out of your code in a virtual world is a mistake.