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Friday, March 14, 2025
Is AI Taking Over CNC Machining?
Fusion Blog: When you think of artificial intelligence (AI), chances are that a vision of supremely intelligent computers and robots taking over the world springs to mind. We’ve been conditioned by sci-fi books and movies to fear the worst.
8 comments:
Julian Grossman
said...
I really appreciated the opening paragraph of this article. I am very much in agreement with the author that while it’s certainly .. interesting that we have built AI that can kind of imitate human artists and kind of sound like a human talks or writes, it’s way cooler that we can use it to automate tasks like machining or analyzing extremely large datasets. I also agree with the author’s conclusion that even as more things are automated, human CNC machinists will still be in work for a good while yet. Did you know that in the early days of linguistics people just had to analyze all their data by hand? Sometimes after a large fieldwork undertaking it would take years to analyze the data because there was just so much of it and it took so long to do by hand. It makes me think of Edmond Edmont, who literally biked around France surveying different people with questions about their dialects. It took 10 years for the resulting linguistic atlas to be published.
The Idea of AI taking over something like CNC machining is interesting because it is such a tedious task to have to plot out tool paths and detailing. So the idea of removing that step from the equation is of interest to me but I do wonder that if AI takes it over will we as humans forget how to do it ourselves and be helpless if something would ever happen to that “tool”. Learning to balance AI as a tool and a way to make our lives more efficient and is it just wanted because of laziness and a crutch to get through. It is such a hard topic to broach because so many people have strong feelings towards it but no one feels the exact same way. Some are all for it and others are much more hesitant. I err on the side of hesitation because I am still trying to figure out how much AI should be involved in a person's daily life and where the line is between a tool and crutch.
I thought that this article was really well written, with how it opened with a discussion of how AI and robots taking over the world is pretty scary, but there are some less terrifying prospects. Utilizing AI to optimize processes like toolpathing is something that I can definitely see some serious value in. Steps in the machining process like toolpathing take a lot of time, and can definitely have a lot of errors, so saving time and also hopefully reducing errors by having the computer do that math and thinking would be pretty cool if it allows the humans to do more drawing, and just speed up the process overall. Another piece of this article that I appreciated was how it talked about how there is still very much a need for human CNC machinists. Many times, articles talking about the future of AI leave a very ominous paragraph about how humans won’t be needed anymore, but this article made it very clear that there are many steps of the process that, for the foreseeable future, need a human brain.
I have done a little bit of work with CNC machining back in high school. I took an introductory course into engineering and the basics of machinery.I was taught surface level knowledge about CNC machining and how it all works. I think it’s a super cool process and allows us to get fabricated parts within thousands of tolerance and makes the fabrication process worlds easier. AI is entering countless different fields, including theatre slowly. It is no surprise that it is coming into the world of CNC machining and fabricating parts. While I have many disagreements with the uses of AI in fields such as art, I think this field is one that AI is a great enhancement to the process. By streamlining processes, making parts even more accurate, and correcting mistakes that were made by humans, AI could revolutionize the CNC industry. I think the introduction of AI in CNC machines will push us even further in the world and make our theatre work that much more intricate and streamlined.
“Is AI taking over…?” is part of an incredibly overused clickbait draw to capture as wide an audience as it can get. It and the whole media industry preys on our base instinct of fear to get more clicks on an article. I've said it before and I'll say it again AI seems to be a powerful tool and yet a lot of it's work is incredibly repetitive and shows a lot of the same mistakes at least with one of the most popular tools, chatGPT. It produces output that at first makes sense but has no grounding or anything to back it up after looking past the first gleam of paragraph after paragraph of text. It also seems like AI is being used as a gap between the phase of workers staying at companies for decades at a time and learning the ins and outs of how to do their job most efficiently and now when they need to job hop every few years to make enough money to survive. Beyond the environmental impacts, it seems to be a way for companies to continue to underpay and understaff jobs for the future.
I don’t have much experience with cnc machining but from what I’ve heard from others it can tend to be at time pretty tedious and time consuming at certain points in the process. I think it’s important to not that ai is more being used as a tool to make things easier and speed things along which I think is nice for a lot of people however I am worried if ai takes over a lot of that tedious work if knowledge of those tasks will retain over time. This isn’t something like art or writing that people like to do and will continue to do even with the presence of ai, if everyone in the industry resorts to using ai for cnc then at a certain point those skills would be lost however I suppose there wouldn’t be a need for those skills if there’s something else that can do it reliably but it’s always sad to see knowledge dissipate over time from the emergence of new technology
I have a lot of Thoughts about AI, and I really appreciate how this article acknowledges the fear people have regarding it, but also the fact that AI isn’t necessarily some evil thing sent to put us out of jobs and take over the world. AI as we know it isn’t “broad” intellegence, it’s not capable of the level of versatile reasoning that humans have, and it’s this level of reasoning that makes the evil AI of sci-fi capable of its evil. But AI that we know of is just a series of really specialized and highly optimized self learning algorithms, and to completely ignore the value these algorithms can contribute because of a bunch of people trying to ruin it for everyone else (those who abuse generative art and those who want to fully replace human labor, that type of stuff) would be very sorry. Toolpathing assistance can help us SO much, particularly in time and effort, without running us out of jobs
I have a lot of Thoughts about AI, and I really appreciate how this article acknowledges the fear people have regarding it, but also the fact that AI isn’t necessarily some evil thing sent to put us out of jobs and take over the world. AI as we know it isn’t “broad” intellegence, it’s not capable of the level of versatile reasoning that humans have, and it’s this level of reasoning that makes the evil AI of sci-fi capable of its evil. But AI that we know of is just a series of really specialized and highly optimized self learning algorithms, and to completely ignore the value these algorithms can contribute because of a bunch of people trying to ruin it for everyone else (those who abuse generative art and those who want to fully replace human labor, that type of stuff) would be very sorry. Toolpathing assistance can help us SO much, particularly in time and effort, without running us out of jobs. Idk why my last comment was anonymous.
8 comments:
I really appreciated the opening paragraph of this article. I am very much in agreement with the author that while it’s certainly .. interesting that we have built AI that can kind of imitate human artists and kind of sound like a human talks or writes, it’s way cooler that we can use it to automate tasks like machining or analyzing extremely large datasets. I also agree with the author’s conclusion that even as more things are automated, human CNC machinists will still be in work for a good while yet. Did you know that in the early days of linguistics people just had to analyze all their data by hand? Sometimes after a large fieldwork undertaking it would take years to analyze the data because there was just so much of it and it took so long to do by hand. It makes me think of Edmond Edmont, who literally biked around France surveying different people with questions about their dialects. It took 10 years for the resulting linguistic atlas to be published.
The Idea of AI taking over something like CNC machining is interesting because it is such a tedious task to have to plot out tool paths and detailing. So the idea of removing that step from the equation is of interest to me but I do wonder that if AI takes it over will we as humans forget how to do it ourselves and be helpless if something would ever happen to that “tool”. Learning to balance AI as a tool and a way to make our lives more efficient and is it just wanted because of laziness and a crutch to get through. It is such a hard topic to broach because so many people have strong feelings towards it but no one feels the exact same way. Some are all for it and others are much more hesitant. I err on the side of hesitation because I am still trying to figure out how much AI should be involved in a person's daily life and where the line is between a tool and crutch.
I thought that this article was really well written, with how it opened with a discussion of how AI and robots taking over the world is pretty scary, but there are some less terrifying prospects. Utilizing AI to optimize processes like toolpathing is something that I can definitely see some serious value in. Steps in the machining process like toolpathing take a lot of time, and can definitely have a lot of errors, so saving time and also hopefully reducing errors by having the computer do that math and thinking would be pretty cool if it allows the humans to do more drawing, and just speed up the process overall. Another piece of this article that I appreciated was how it talked about how there is still very much a need for human CNC machinists. Many times, articles talking about the future of AI leave a very ominous paragraph about how humans won’t be needed anymore, but this article made it very clear that there are many steps of the process that, for the foreseeable future, need a human brain.
I have done a little bit of work with CNC machining back in high school. I took an introductory course into engineering and the basics of machinery.I was taught surface level knowledge about CNC machining and how it all works. I think it’s a super cool process and allows us to get fabricated parts within thousands of tolerance and makes the fabrication process worlds easier. AI is entering countless different fields, including theatre slowly. It is no surprise that it is coming into the world of CNC machining and fabricating parts. While I have many disagreements with the uses of AI in fields such as art, I think this field is one that AI is a great enhancement to the process. By streamlining processes, making parts even more accurate, and correcting mistakes that were made by humans, AI could revolutionize the CNC industry. I think the introduction of AI in CNC machines will push us even further in the world and make our theatre work that much more intricate and streamlined.
“Is AI taking over…?” is part of an incredibly overused clickbait draw to capture as wide an audience as it can get. It and the whole media industry preys on our base instinct of fear to get more clicks on an article. I've said it before and I'll say it again AI seems to be a powerful tool and yet a lot of it's work is incredibly repetitive and shows a lot of the same mistakes at least with one of the most popular tools, chatGPT. It produces output that at first makes sense but has no grounding or anything to back it up after looking past the first gleam of paragraph after paragraph of text. It also seems like AI is being used as a gap between the phase of workers staying at companies for decades at a time and learning the ins and outs of how to do their job most efficiently and now when they need to job hop every few years to make enough money to survive. Beyond the environmental impacts, it seems to be a way for companies to continue to underpay and understaff jobs for the future.
I don’t have much experience with cnc machining but from what I’ve heard from others it can tend to be at time pretty tedious and time consuming at certain points in the process. I think it’s important to not that ai is more being used as a tool to make things easier and speed things along which I think is nice for a lot of people however I am worried if ai takes over a lot of that tedious work if knowledge of those tasks will retain over time. This isn’t something like art or writing that people like to do and will continue to do even with the presence of ai, if everyone in the industry resorts to using ai for cnc then at a certain point those skills would be lost however I suppose there wouldn’t be a need for those skills if there’s something else that can do it reliably but it’s always sad to see knowledge dissipate over time from the emergence of new technology
I have a lot of Thoughts about AI, and I really appreciate how this article acknowledges the fear people have regarding it, but also the fact that AI isn’t necessarily some evil thing sent to put us out of jobs and take over the world. AI as we know it isn’t “broad” intellegence, it’s not capable of the level of versatile reasoning that humans have, and it’s this level of reasoning that makes the evil AI of sci-fi capable of its evil. But AI that we know of is just a series of really specialized and highly optimized self learning algorithms, and to completely ignore the value these algorithms can contribute because of a bunch of people trying to ruin it for everyone else (those who abuse generative art and those who want to fully replace human labor, that type of stuff) would be very sorry. Toolpathing assistance can help us SO much, particularly in time and effort, without running us out of jobs
I have a lot of Thoughts about AI, and I really appreciate how this article acknowledges the fear people have regarding it, but also the fact that AI isn’t necessarily some evil thing sent to put us out of jobs and take over the world. AI as we know it isn’t “broad” intellegence, it’s not capable of the level of versatile reasoning that humans have, and it’s this level of reasoning that makes the evil AI of sci-fi capable of its evil. But AI that we know of is just a series of really specialized and highly optimized self learning algorithms, and to completely ignore the value these algorithms can contribute because of a bunch of people trying to ruin it for everyone else (those who abuse generative art and those who want to fully replace human labor, that type of stuff) would be very sorry. Toolpathing assistance can help us SO much, particularly in time and effort, without running us out of jobs. Idk why my last comment was anonymous.
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