Ford Pilots New Exoskeleton to Help Lessen Chance of Worker Fatigue, Injury
media.ford.com
media.ford.com
I find it incredibly impressive for a manufacturer to achieve something like this.
Working with your arms outstretched in front of you, Minority-Report-style, has been determined to be not feasible due to fatigue, so how is working overhead reasonable? I’ve never been in a car factory or on an assembly line, but from an armchair it sounds bound to lead to a lot of strain.
Why not have workers lie on their backs on carts or something?
I've been working for automotive suppliers since 2006 and I've never seen a factory worker doing anything remotely strenuous or dangerous. Programmed robotic arms do almost literally anything involving lifting, and almost anything involving a dangerous tool or machine. Additionally, every workcenter is outfitted with lots of sensor-laden safety systems that all but ensure the operator is far away from anything that could hurt them. 99% of the accidents I see on reports involve ladders, box cutters, hi lo carts, etc.
I'm trying to think of when I would have seen BMW factory employees working overhead, and I just can't think of it. I wonder why Ford would even have tasks that require this rather than just rotate the assemblies being worked on.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=torque+reaction... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpYhY5-cVyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=sn7qETycSUs
There also cranes to help get heavy patients around, but even getting them strapped in can take quite a bit of work.
EDIT: but I agree, getting these for nurses would be a good idea.
Example video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgxr6xAB5ZM
Turning the car on its side sounds like a good idea until you realized that, e.g., the seats can now twist the bottom of the body pan.
Would love to see how this works and maintains an adequate range of motion so as to not get in the way. Seems like it adds rigidity so that the weight is shared by the exoskeleton.
Now picture something that reduces your load by 80% you still need to provide some upward assistance so lowering your arms is still effortless, but holding your arms out is also much less effort. For an easy example, sitting underwater provides this kind of support but it also clearly does not reduce range of motion.
A few months ago, I built a rudimentary unpowered exoskeleton similar to the Ekso models, and it did help with carrying heavy loads once I got past the initial awkwardness of wearing it.
HN is truly sui generis.
Umm, you cannot just drop that kind of comment on HN without more details. That's why we come here!
If you want profit in excess of what the market will pay for your skills then you need to take risk yourself - start a business and make as much profit (or loss) as you are capable of.
There is a section of society that advocates for making laws that artificially pay people more than they are worth by forcing business owners to pay above market wages. This will make employees artificially more expensive and encourage alternative mechanisms to reduce labor costs (automation / outsourcing).
In the best situation, there would be no minimum wage. Society could choose to top-up wages with whatever benefit they want (basic income perhaps) and let the market freely determine wages. The more you warp the free market, the more unintended consequences you have.
I understand the theories, but the real world doesn't operate that way; the market isn't free. Income depends to a significant degree on the ability to write the rules of the marketplace and labor law in your favor, and the resources to utilize those rules and laws (e.g., money and lawyers); workers don't have such influence and resources. Consider Uber and its non-employee employees, for example. It also depends to a great degree on who you know and who your parents were.
Also, I'll point out that a backup offensive lineman in the NFL, junior attorneys and investment bankers in NY, and many similarly situated people in Silicon Valley make more than the U.S. military officer in command of the entire Asia-Pacific region, many Nobel Prize winners, many doctors saving lives right now, not to mention social workers, teachers, diplomats, almost all scientists in academia, etc.
People are paid based on supply and demand for whatever they offer (with supply and demand being determined by everything I discussed above).
Starting a business isn't the only way to participate or take risks in the market. You also can try to sell your skills to another employer.
Working for the government - say as a soldier or social worker - doesn’t mean you deserve more than an investment banker. Your choice was to work for that industry. Perceived impact on society does not translate into wealth. Free markets determine pricing. A soldier earns whatever a politician says he or she does.
Any employee of Uber can leave at any time. No one is forcing them into that economic situation. Plenty of examples of people who grow up poor become rich despite not having well connected parents.
What changes to the system are you advocating for exactly?
E: lowers the price. Supply increases, demand stays the same.
The empirical experience is very clearly the opposite!
Looking to the past, we can look at how industrialization has greatly reduced the amount of human labor in agriculture.
But that discussion is irrelevant to this article — the point is that exoskeletons are cool.
So by reducing injuries, those employees receive higher pay (because they get their normal salary instead of the lesser workers comp pay), and they are able to work more years.
It's clever actually, taking attention from the question which was (total pay / time worked) to (pay rate * time worked). Most wouldn't notice, I'm sure, and it makes things look favourable - especially since your question was about the average worker, not the injured worker, i.e. the exceptional one.
So a device that reduces injuries, will enable them to work more years, and increase their lifetime earnings.
If you think the wage is fair then you will appreciate the lower fatigue and reduced risk of injuries.
The risk is already priced in the insurance so by reducing risk you effectively increase the income spent on insurance.
We shouldn't stop the comparison of pay at the moment a person is injured. These are people, they don't stop existing the moment they aren't useful to a company. And an injury does effectively reduce their pay by preventing them from working, or forcing them to change careers.
This is a safety device, and no productivity improvements have been shown yet. So you wouldn't expect an outright increase in hourly wages. But an increase in working years without injury is a benefit to workers, and does increase their lifetime earnings.
Let's say I own a lawn care business, and you gladly accept work raking lawns for $10/hr@8 hr days, and you can rake 2 acres per day(or, $40 per acre). If I decide to plunk down a bunch of money and buy a turbine leaf blower, and you can now do the same job on 6 acres per day, except using the leaf blower for 6 acres is much less physically exhausting than raking 2 acres of leaves, how much money should I as the business owner owe to you for my own investment into increasing your productivity?
For example, if you work in IT you benefit from massive capital investments that researched, developed, and deployed every bit of technology you use, from 18th century research on electricity (and probably earlier research) to every component in your PC to C to the Internet to AI, to the technology used in the global supply chain that makes it all (to much, much more) ... Should you be paid as if you were utilizing no capital, and you were working in a cave by firelight with carbonized wood on the wall?
Almost all of anyone's productivity, I expect, is due to capital investment that they didn't make.
When viewed through the eyes of the jewish religion for example, which says you need to give 1/7 or 1/10 of your income to the poor. So this number is now 3x.
It all depends on what moral system you view things through, and a moral system that encourage sharing of wealth seems like a good thing.
When I came to HN, I did so because it was not Reddit. It was dominated by 2 things; information that I didn't understand (too technical) or 2) something that improved my knowledge about the world and business, the discussions often more so than the post.
From this I wonder (assuming people agree...) what can we do to hold the values of old HN discussion/posts, or is this the anthem of progress/popularity I have to accept?
Even these voting systems will only surface the popular opinion and not necessarily the right opinion.
Best you can do is to ignore content and comments which are irrelevant to you, that way quality always meet your standards.
The community of actively participating submitters and commentators is surprisingly small. This is true for nearly all communities.
If HN had a really rich ignore feature, it would take a very short time to create a personal ignore list that pruned the glib or polarising political commentators.
I would say though, that whilst this has proven to be a good thing on the communities I run, I personally prefer not to use ignore features.
Service side content filtering only creates bubbles.
I can't believe that. Nothing will be perfect but there must be some combination of options that can improve things significantly.
Maybe it is volunteer mods. Or HN require new members to pass a 'best use' rules questionnaire before posting (or exiting offenders). Or they run algorithms to find users that vote inline with the spirit of HN and ninja ban people they downvote.
I dont profess to know the answer but there must be improving options available. And further someone solving this is a quite important concept (and potentially a great business too), as while here I want a better conversation, the recent US elections showed us what bot armies and paid shills can do, there are probably options that can be employed in the wider internet encourage genuine conversation in general.
In actuality the technical and the social are deeply enmeshed, the society we live in shapes the tools we have, and the tools we have shape the society we live in. In this case we see a technology being developed and deployed to serve the interests of one group of people with little regard for how it affects the livelihoods of the other group. This is an ideological act, and (contrary to the whinging of so many technological determinists) an ideological deployment of technology.
If you've detected a change in the tone around here it's possible that more and more techies are waking up to the fact that politics is more than just dinner-party conversation and affiliation signalling.
For more on the topic I'd recommend picking up some Andrew Feenberg, his book "Transforming Technology" in particular.
There's a comment in this thread saying "Welcome to late stage capitalism, folks" with a follow up asserting slavery. Both are dead, but presumably weren't when GP wrote their side point, and anecdotally that kind of commentary feels like it's in the ascendency.
Full agreement on that one, but those labels are sometimes applied unfairly to any comment which doesn't toe the valley-culture-technological-determinism line too :)
I understand the urge to bring politics in; the world around us seems to be falling apart because of political schemes. I simply do not care. If you really want to throw fits about capitalism and communism, or throw up a pithy quip about Trump et al., do so in a separate thread, possibly an Ask HN ("Who's your favorite liar?"). I'm going to go enjoy the fact that someone's working on mass-producing a powered exoskeleton.
> I simply do not care.
Right, so you live in the kind of comfort and privilege that allows you to detach from society and the political process. Acknowledge that the vast majority of people don't have the same privilege.
It's a real problem that the political systems of the world are broken at best, but quite frankly I haven't got time or money enough to fix it, and my resources are better spent trying to build interesting things and watching others build interesting things. I cannot save the World; I can absolutely make my own life better, and help others around me.
No, but for many of us, that road can be blocked because of politics.
That isn't to say it never comes into play, or that it never becomes a big enough problem to interrupt your actual goals. However, in my (~20 years) of experience in this world, what the President is saying has nothing to do with me. Indeed, the vast, vast majority of 'politics' (i.e., the things that catch your attention in news shows and blog posts) is pointless yelling, and has nothing to do with either of us, or any of the people who angrily demand action and strut back and forth in the comments.
Recently, the same people who wage war in comment sections started warring in the streets, and it has only gotten worse.
These are all reasons why I dislike politics, and why I advocate for separating politics from everything else. There is no point in trying to find a political statement in the games I'm trying to create. At best, you'd get to feel like a hero because you trashed someone's work over some supposed connection to Hitler. Similarly, I have no reason to go around waving guns and demanding that Hacker News ban all commies, or declaring anybody who doesn't use my exact combination of pronouns to be part of the new Reich. I would have nothing but a false sense of purpose to gain from these things, and I'd rather have the real sense of purpose from creating something people enjoy.
I have friends who are graduate students, and I used to be one. Doubling taxes on everyone working in a specific field is... well, it's cutting off people's livelihood out of pure political spite.
As it is, labor law has a daily effect on all of us who work for a living, and recent Congressional efforts in healthcare policy have basically constituted stochastic terrorism against the population at large. Threats of war, loss of healthcare, loss of Social Security, doublings of taxes -- these things affect people's lives.
The social power structure of the USA implies that politics is in the hands of the people. At very least, that's the aspiration of the US Political system (even if its got some issues in practice). So convincing other people on a day-to-day basis is one of the more effective ways of causing political change.
If politics is ignored, then you begin to lose in politics. Not only do people affect laws, but laws also affect people. Ignoring this fact will cause the laws to potentially shift away from your favor.
Or whoever is less represented (local to a given site/subsite) will just shut up because they don't want to fight a 10:1 losing battle with people who can't be convinced to see their side of things (subreddits are a good example).
There's also probably a bunch of people from rural areas in your downtown office who think you're crazy. The foreigners probably think the same thing. Neither group will tell you about it though. It's just not worth saying anything in those settings.
There's also probably a bunch of people from rural areas in your downtown office who think you're crazy. The foreigners probably think the same thing.
To quote the old song: "I won't be fooled again".
Which I don't believe represent the people's interest in the slightest. Anti-vax and "What is Aleppo" stain those two.
Its more legitimate to attempt to usurp the parties from within (ie: Trump / Bernie) to represent another option. And lo and behold: 16 of the 17 "standard" Republicans were defeated by Trump.
Now, I don't like Trump myself, but the last election was not standard by any stretch of the imagination. Clinton narrowly defeated Bernie in the primaries (but Bernie did far better than expected), and Trump of course beat all standard Republicans.
In any case, if you want a "3rd option", participate in the primaries. There were 17 Republicans to support (with ~5 very serious contenders: Bush, Kasich, Rubio, Cruz, and Trump) and something like 4 Democrats to support (with ~2 very serious contenders: Bernie and Clinton, although I was partial to Jim Webb).
I personally managed to find someone in both parties that spoke to my viewpoints: Both Bush and Kasich from the Republicans, and Jim Webb in the Democrats. Lawrence Lessig didn't seem to be running a serious Democrat campaign, but if he were more serious I probably would have supported him. Its a shame that "The Wire" was so popular, because it stained Martin O'Malley (who otherwise looked like a solid candidate).
There was a lot of choice actually.
> Which I don't believe represent the people's interest in the slightest. Anti-vax and "What is Aleppo" stain those two.
This isn't the reason we put up with the lesser of two evils; it's simply a symptom. The real reason is that, time and time again, the majority votes for a loud extremist instead of picking a quiet and reasonable candidate, and the majority has shown time and time again that once they have chosen a political stance they will happily overlook anything their candidate does, because their candidate is the lesser evil.
> Its more legitimate to attempt to usurp the parties from within (ie: Trump / Bernie) to represent another option. And lo and behold: 16 of the 17 "standard" Republicans were defeated by Trump.
Theoretically correct. It's theoretically easier to convince a majority to vote for me as a "Republican" or a "Democrat" than it is to convince everyone to stop voting for the lesser of two evils, or to implement an alternative vote. However, all three of these options would require that I dedicate my life to a topic which infuriates me, instead of going about my own business.
> In any case, if you want a "3rd option", participate in the primaries. There were 17 Republicans to support (with ~5 very serious contenders: Bush, Kasich, Rubio, Cruz, and Trump) and something like 4 Democrats to support (with ~2 very serious contenders: Bernie and Clinton, although I was partial to Jim Webb).
But again, the issue of the majority comes up--because the vast majority of people would rather vote for the lesser of two evils, and guarantee a tyrant they agree with, instead of voting for a decent leader, and risking a tyrant they don't agree with getting voted in by people who think that tyrant is the lesser of two evils.
> I personally managed to find someone in both parties that spoke to my viewpoints: Both Bush and Kasich from the Republicans, and Jim Webb in the Democrats. Lawrence Lessig didn't seem to be running a serious Democrat campaign, but if he were more serious I probably would have supported him. Its a shame that "The Wire" was so popular, because it stained Martin O'Malley (who otherwise looked like a solid candidate).
It also doesn't help that 90% of the coverage of an election is focused on the two most questionable candidates. It really doesn't help that most people are expected to vote even if their only understanding of the political climate is from flawed news.
> There was a lot of choice actually.
There was a lot of choice, but as of right now, none of these choices are going to end well. I am stuck in a Prisoner's Dilemma in which I know the other party is always choosing A. I am now choosing not to play, because I am frustrated and have better things to do with my time than play a game of Prisoner's Dilemma every four years.
Then maybe go to a forum for people who don't care whether or not the world is falling apart. The rest of us, well, we live in the world, so we kinda care.
This story has 74 comments, none of them actually mention the company that makes the product the story is about ( Ekso Bionics ) Most, including this thread of comments, are completely off topic.
Incidentally, that's (my understanding of) what "the medium is the message" was about. Basically, changing the profile of which actions/habits/business models are feasible has a far more powerful effect on society and culture than do the specific decisions made within that profile.
Some were always made, but they were very consistently downvoted years ago. The solution I think is to implore those with downvote powers to do a lot more downvoting. In a way it is all custodial duty that cannot be automated.
It can feel mean to downvoted a lot, but there are no shortage of sites where peanut gallery comments are the norm, and I think we should continue to discourage them here as much as possible.
Note: I do not think political or contentious comments are a problem, only the glib.
The guy that replied to you with: "Everything dies or turns to shit in the end." is a good example of what to downvote.
I know I hesitate to downvote anything that isn't obviously a troll or blatantly destructive. But that's too low a standard if we want to keep the comment quality from slipping.
That would enable users to remove the junk on their own and would be more scalable than a moderation team as well as making HN comments an interesting ML dataset.
They should fix this by preventing new sign ups. When the culture returns to something that people like, open a limited number of sign ups per month (perhaps you need to be "vetted" by an active account to sign up).
The problem is purely that of endless summer, and websites just copying broken social commenting features and systems from each other instead of setting up the incentive structure correctly.
Civil and substantive critique, of capitalism or anything else, is fine; violating the site guidelines not so much.
whole lot of weasel words in here. "time away from the job" "lessen the chance of fatigue " "reduce the physical toll on employees"
Its workplace injury, or "injury, illness and fatality" as defined by OSHA.
If the goal really is to protect workers, then bravo. If its to push the envelope on OSHA regulations and skirt safe work environments because joe six pack climbed into a robocop costume, then no. So far the Ekso company mostly works in rehabilitative technology.