- Language models / NLP applications for processing large amount of technical text data (SOP, documentation, technical data, machine text logs, voice to text, video data processing for speeding up corrective action, training, onboarding and highlighting areas of improvement / bottlenecks), digitising documents and extracting failure reasons / equipment names / spare parts / processes involved and making associations between them for pareto analysis, better search or process improvement recommendations
- Recommending the next steps to fix something / remote intervention / do something etc. Lowering the expertise threshold required for technicians, electricians, mechanics or reliability engineers to be effective.
- Enabling operators to become data scientists by enabling to train AI models via their day to day activities / analysis. Building better UX in general and providing simple tools that even a toddler could use.
- Autonomous factory use-cases / supply chain automation.
Would love to discuss with people who find these things exciting
But the real cost is that people generally don't know how things work anymore. They're just black boxes, even simple things like a coffee maker or a clothes dryer. Which further reduces the demand for repairability, which seems like a downward spiral toward everything being disposable.
Don't get me wrong - there's a lot of bad ideas in those systems, too. (Like why do I have to use "RUN" vs. "BRUN" on the Apple ][ depending on what type of program it is?) But finding and promoting the better ideas and teaching young people about them is, I think , important and risks being lost otherwise.
Learning about failures from older systems is always interesting, too. Why couldn't Atari and Amiga compete against Apple and Microsoft, for example? I think things like that are important to understand going forward, too.
There is stunningly little literature on any R&D in conventional freight rail transport, something I discovered when looking for any published research some months back.
High-speed rail, yes. Regular old freight, no.
Contrast this with autonomous and electrified trucking as alternatives, with which rail could offer considerable synergies.
I'd suspect that break-bulk, trainset assembly and disassembly, and routing might all offer opportunities.
But ... nada.
I suspect other modalities within the transport sector might be similar, notably ocean shipping.
I'd also say that "preparedness" is generally something nobody is working on. Despite all the shit that happened with Covid, I don't feel like we're even slightly better prepared for an actual lethal pandemic, like with double digit death rates for example. It's not clear we've changed anything other than some political jockeying.
Another example is earthquake/ tsunami preparedness. Everyone knows the west coast is going to be destroyed, we just ignore it because its "boring" and nobody wants to think about it
As someone who has a farm and regularly asks for knowledge transfers from the older farmers around me.. it’ll be difficult when they move on.
It’s things you wouldn’t expect either, like how to install a new piston & hydraulics line on a tractor. Or how to repair an old diesel motor. Some people on HN might know that, I know some of that now. However, generally they are all older and their kids moved on. In terms of a generational knowledge gap I can think of no greater one.
Some thoughts:
* Equipment to allow existing runs to be upgraded to higher voltages or even HVDC while being compatible on the other side with existing equipment and grid voltages. That way existing rights of way can carry far more power over existing wires.
* Smaller more modular cheaper substation equipment that can be slotted in and rapidly replaced, eventually to replace the mega-transformers and stuff that are very hard to physically ship places. Today there are substations with equipment so unwieldy that it would be physically challenging to ship replacement equipment.
* Lower cost methods of stringing new high power transmission lines to bring distant renewable energy to cities.
* Make undersea power lines as cheap (or nearly so) as undersea fiber allowing "global supergrid" systems to share renewable energy.
* Protection equipment or techniques to reduce damage from solar storms or EMP.
The power grid is becoming more and more central and essential to human life, and we are about to drop tons more demand on it via electrification of transport and HVAC (heat pumps). Yet it seems like there's not much innovation there. Right now if everyone comes home and plugs in their car it crashes the grid in many places, and this won't do.
Batteries are hot, but they're still too expensive to back up whole cities or regions. The need for batteries can be greatly reduced if the grid can be made bigger, wider, and at least an order of magnitude more reliable.
My father is a (relatively) recently retired Architect, he ran a small but specialist firm of about 20 people. By the time he retired about 5 years ago there was no one in the office that had ever been trained in traditional draftsmanship, only himself. It’s a lost art.
There are now almost two generations of working architects, those that learnt 2D CAD in the 90s and early 00s who still think in 3d and translate it themselves to 2d in cad (a little like traditional draftsmanship). And those since who have only ever worked in 3d and used the tooling to “project” 2d elevations and sections.
I trained at university in the early 2000s in Industrial Design, we did some traditional drafting lesions (maybe three or four weeks). But then jumped straight to 3d CAD and never looked back. I suspect they don’t even do those lessons now, and in fact most kids have probably done some 3D cad at school, maybe only 10% had when I started.
Software engineers tend to over-estimate the productivity gains that come from software, while underestimating how much we lose to the rigidness of software (which is often the reflection of the underlying data schema). It costs money to change software. By contrast, older systems of organization depended on armies of secretaries, who knew when to bend the rules. The flexibility of having a human enforce rules, but also be able to bend them as needed, allowed an important kind of productivity benefit. We've lost that benefit as we have mostly purged secretaries out of corporations and replaced them with software.
On the theme of "software sucks," if you don't mind a comical, personal story, I shared this event from last month, when my mom was in the hospital (my conclusion is that the rigidity of software systems in hospitals is making hospitals worse):
http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/software-is-making-ho...
It's a far cry from the old "don't give out your A/S/L/(and name)" that I got.
After talking to architects, I'm dismayed that basic heat transfer is not a part of their curriculum.
Typically, you have one graybeard down in the basement that knows how those old centrifuges/distilizers/ionificators/etc work. Things that an entire building is really dependent on. Not only that, but they typically know the limits and how to get good science out of them.
It's more of a $$$ issue though. Loads of these old machines are dying off with the people that know them. This then opens up the market for the new people to come in and reinvent the wheel, sometimes literally so. It costs more, sure, but it keeps things moving along too.
If you get the chance, talk to these old graybeards and hear their stories. Most of it is mumbo jumbo, but man, they are great stories.
I have seen far too many projects become locally-smart but globally-incoherent due to the gradual dissolution of systemic understanding over time.
It's amazing the number of production issues I've fixed with simple sysctl parameters.
The Linux kernel defaults don't fit very well in this huge-cluster/scaling out world
People who go through dealing with health insurance: a lot of this knowledge is difficult to transfer, but is very valuable, and usually transferred through word-of-mouth. People who suddenly have a need for a treatment or surgery, don't always know what their options are and how to deal with insurance claims in the best manner, or to maximize coverage and deal with extra circumstances.
https://xkcd.com/2347/ makes me think the same is true of image software as well.
I'm pretty sure there's a timezone database that's maintained by two guys and literally everything depends on it to get timezones right.
When I was at Microsoft ~10 years ago there was a single guy who truly understood how tables in Word worked. I'm sure they've fixed it by now but back then if you wanted to touch the tables code in Word you had to talk to the tables guy to make sure you wouldn't break everything.
If I remember correctly there's a lot of low level networking code that's basically in this state. I think ntp is maintained by a single person. Curl was written by a single person, not sure who maintains it.
Tons of stuff in the geospatial world is owned and maintained by surprisingly few people like proj and gdal. I'm almost certain I saw something about all GPS code in the world relying on a package maintained by a single person.
Where the technology is mission critical, healthcare companies have worked for decades to train new developers on 1980’s tech.
In the same way that all cultural understanding can become extinct, we probably are losing some bits of wisdom as older generations age out. The problem is it’s not obvious what bits of wisdom are being lost, even to the aged.
Finally, given Moore’s law, many of the constraints which drove early decisions no longer apply. As long as we are on a hyper-growth curve in technology cost and adoption rates, we will suffer from a lack of wisdom, and need lots of extra energy to be spent on bad ideas in order to make progress.
Eventually, when growth rates slow down, we will have a more developed sense of what technological wisdom looks like in the long term. The good news is, that will happen on its own. The bad news is It’s a long way off.
For example, there are hundreds of varieties of tomato. There are wild tomatoes from the Andes Mountains to the Everglades. There are thousands of varieties of brassica (a huge genus of plants that includes bok choy, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kohlrabi, cabbage, rutabaga, and turnip, etc.)
I was just hearing from the proprietor of a seed company that many of the old guard are retiring and some are having trouble finding people to carry the torch.
I wonder how much of the "everything is a service, access this calculator for a small monthly fee" problem is due to how poor GUI toolkits are.
- Need a dedicated degree (2 year as well as 4 year) in Manufacturing
- Trade schools and apprenticeship programs that do not sound like scam
- Automated material movement and handling
- Machine vision, automation of quality assurance
- Automated mold making and plastic injection molding optimization (still done by humans and takes 4 months)
- Factory software (ERP, MRP, MES, SPC, etc.)
No child left without a 5-axis milling machine!
I heard once from a recruiter that a lot of the air traffic communications in the defense industry are losing old timers and there's not enough young blood to replace them. That could've just been him trying to sell me the job though
I remember my Dad use to do DIY of almost everything in the house, Radio repair, Grinder-Mixer repair, TV repair, Plumbing, Carpentry, Stove repair, Fan repair, Building his own tools for work, Electricals of the house, Sewing machine repair, Scooter repair(hell, he once even built a small moped for his boss's daughter!). And he had limited resources i.e. lack of tools. His education? A basic Diploma in electronics, in native language(not English) in a remote village and completed just few years after the country became independent from British rule?
But he was not unique. Most of my neighbours use to do DIY of most things. We are losing that art.
Composting, and gardening for food. Pickling. Fermenting.
Cooking large, healthy meals together in intergenerational groups, and communally with strangers.
I could go on, but basically anything and everything our grandparents did, and is now only done in "the West" in dwindling rural communities.
Domestic food production is another, far simpler, not that exiting, but still important: these days some children do not even know where came from something they eat. Without any catastrophic scenario any society need to know at least superficially anything essential to survive. This include for instance basic knowledge about tools for instance to grind and pack meat to make salami, tools to sterilize and store vacuumed foods etc new tools to modernize and made such process a pleasure to do.
Last but not least generic knowledge, generic tools. We have gazillions of hyper-specialist in any fields and veeeeery few able to see the big picture. We have gazillion of tools for doing a thing and only one. We need generic stuff. Standards not made like https://xkcd.com/927/ but made and updated to be useful and spread. This is the essence of most tech, including the generic desktops cited above, including solar panels with maaaany cells one after another, including bricks, simple thing we can use to made a wall, a house, a bridge, ... it's very hard to made anything in such domain, but it's tremendously useful once done. In the past we have seen some examples here and there, nowadays nobody care.
There are a lot of challenges, especially in typical fields in South Europe, where large and automated tractors aren't an option.
Over a decade was spent by enterprises designing software using Structured Analysis (data-flow modeling) - lessons lost. Functional decomposition as a design methodology lessons learned - forgotten. Data modeling lessons learned - we are all the way back to people proposing stored procedures for logic. Object-oriented modeling - deprecated, unfashionable and obscured by “its about messaging” or “code organization” in a world that supposedly should be entirely functional.
When you read discussions of "going into the trades" instead of going to college, there is almost never a mention of the skilled trades. It all seems to be construction, and I think that's a mistake.
Engineering knowledge relating to ICE engines will also disappear (though it seems gas turbines will be with us for a little longer).
I’m not sure it matters that much however. If we ever need these things again in the future it seems that we could re-learn it in a decade or two.
They will be replaced by IP and fibre, but not yet.
We are envisioning a type of sleeping capsule with a cover that seals the user from the elements and fallout materials, providing clean air, heat and water. These could be deployed quickly. As the starvation continues the capsules would, every other night, fairly, amongst those of an equal social value, reduce the oxygen during sleep for a painless and stress free passing, and then alert others in the prospect to convert the remains into new rations.
It’s out there, but we’re serious. Based on reasonable logic in a bad situation. Important, but nobody seems to care. When 5 billion people have nothing left to eat then they’ll care.