I’ve gotten several job listings from Indeed that require CAM programming and access to a CNC. I have both. They’re offering ~$135 per hour. The catch is that you use your usual work flow, make a part that your normally would and then remotely upload the results to this company so that they can train their AI to program CNC machines. I’m very against generative AI, but wow is that a lot of money for a 1 year contract. It took me 16 years to get good. Another 4 to make my own shop. But around 300k a year? It makes it hard. I’d love to know what other machinists think about this kind of thing.
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on one hand, you could apply the principle of ‘if i dont do this, it will get done anyway but someone else will benefit instead of me.’ on another you could apply thoreau’s resistance principle of refusing to participate. best, i think, would be to organize some sort of machinist’s union and coordinate a campaign of refusing to make yourself obsolete.
The machinist union is one of the largest in the US at 600,000 members.
oh well i reveal my ignorance. maybe they do have coordinated action on this issue, then.
What results do they want you to upload? Tool paths? Attach a gopro to the router head and upload video?
Tool paths, video, and physical products.
How much of your artistry do you think are in those products, is one of the question I would ask. Is this “strap a gopro to your chest while you run around the shop” or “mount a camera at your big machine with tool changer that is spraying coolant everywhere anyway”. Are the tool paths something you hand craft, or take a generated path and tune it to your machine?
I lean towards “get that bag cause whatever AI startup this is is gonna fail anyway” they probably don’t understand where the complexity in machining lies, since manual -> cnc did most of the automation already.
And definitely get paid up front
Getting paid upfront is not on the table - the offer is hourly. Which, is way better than the ~$20 I can ever realistically pay myself.
I don’t know how exactly it works for a machine shop but if it’s a regular biweekly check that cool. I was thinking you would be working as a subcontractor delivering parts, submitting an invoice with net30 terms, then getting paid 29 days later, possibly 60-90 days after you started ordering materials for that piece for them.
On the bright side, if they pay you (AI ppl are mostly scammers, get something up front) it likely won’t do them much good in the near future, LLMs can’t do that and robot VideoToAction is nascent. On the downside that’ll stick around and later be useful to something, maybe terminators down the line. Choose your own adventure.
I wonder if you could take the contract and fuck shit up on purpose to poison the training data without getting yourself in legal trouble 🤔
I mean, I easily could. But I’d get sued into non-existence. I mean, fuck, the CNC I have is a Hurco from 1980.
I won’t judge you if you take the money, but consider that you are making your own job obsolete. It’s fucked if you do, fucked if you dont.
If you don’t help, you keep your expertise but you may be obsoleted any. If you help, you’re obsolete faster.
Are you close to retirement?
I’m not even close. But it really is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. I guess the real thing that’s holding me up is that there are hundreds of thousands of other skilled people out there that (if I do this job correctly) could just get laid off. It sucks. I stand to gain a legit retirement, but leave many to be unable to do so. I know it’s very self-centered to take the job, but fml Edting out horrible autocorrect
It’s the prisoner’s dillema. Someone will use AI, will it be you or someone that puts you out of that job? AI is a really toxic technology.
It really is. I’m admittedly good enough to the point if I train this thing to the best of my ability - either MasterCam is going to buy it or maybe thousands of machinists are maybe gonna lose their jobs. I fucking hate it. I also want to not work :(
Any way you could sabotage? Train it well, but with some systematic shortcoming that is hard to spot but would become bad at a scale? Ideally something that could be written off as a honest mistake on your end.
Obviously never talk about it or admit to it, as it’s probably poorly received. But I think it’s the most ethical option if you can think of a good way of doing it. You’d get the money, and if you do it well you could fight the system from within.
Obviously I don’t know enough about this specific case to know if it’s feasible at all.
If I poison this, it could quite literally take down the manufacturing ability of two continents.
Fuck AI, Fuck 300k
