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Comment by falcor84 | Hacker News Reader

I keep thinking of that Warren Bennis's quote: "The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."

Only now I think the dog will be robotic too.

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Lol what... Haven't heard of this quote but i just had a weird dream two weeks ago about a robotic dog that was with me all the time. It started to keep me from working (own company, alone in the office, a lot of jumping between software & hardware tinkering). It stopped me by being cute & playful. It was a very intense dream. in general.

I interpreted as coming from my inner conflict of being a father (6 months old) while also now being at the point of having the chance to work on great things. i have been working to have this possibility to work on for a decade every day pulling 12h-15h or all-nighters regularly... and now struggle with accepting the feeling that all of this is pointless & only my child means something to me. Because that would mean, all of the invisible effort i put in, will stay invisible & i will be the loser that i must look like from the outside.

Thanks for the quote, i already forgot about that dream somehow. Back to dealing with that.

What a beautiful thought.

Reminds me of the scene at the end of Vonnegut's Player Piano (an allegory of his time working @GE, post-WWII), where the main character meets the blue-collar craftsmen whose movements trained the present-day automatons drunk in a bar... sedated/distracted, in drink, to prevent interference with the machines.

Both dog and man will bot, no?

You can buy a robot dog for probably cheaper than an actual dog these days (looking at you unitree)

And that is exactly the setting of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" - where everyone still on Earth is socially expected to take care of at least one animal, but because of being so expensive, there's a black market of robotic animals.

which means you don't need the man to feed it

Nor the dog to distract the man! Perpetual motion discovered; nothing shall ever break or change in this factory

Strikes me as odd. Why have either? We're clearly in a fairytale - I just lack context. Probably a complaint with some creative color

It’s a joke about how automated processes will become.

And to be fair, you could have machines repairing machines. It’s basically how we operate. Some humans do the work, some fix the others

I see, thank you - I didn't mean to stress it or anything.

Clearly a sort of simulation, some allowances make sense :) Spherical cows and all.

Figure the man (or woman) is really only there to meet legal requirements around having a human somewhere in the loop. The human is a liability, thus the dog. From the interpretation where dog is guarding the equipment, the dog may as well be robotic, sure. But some live animal also provides distraction from the equipment, as well as the ongoing companionship needed to keep the human psychologically stable, which is also crucial for long term liability. Spare human workers are hard to come by, most of them having died of starvation due to lack of employment.

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