I watched my 75 year old human plumber (who sniped a guy his first day in vietnam), kneel on two 3 inch wide joists and drill a 4 inch diameter hole at a 89 degree angle through said joists. Where’s the robot that does all that?
Above from all the other doomer crap in this article, I find the job replacement rhetoric the most offensive. It is always people that are so detached from the reality of labor, people who’s only “job” has been to essentially have ideas and opinions.
You know, I hope to hell a robot replaces his job. No 75 year old man, let alone Veteran, should have to do that. A robot with replaceable knee joints is a way better fit.
My sincere hope is that robots can take these painful, laborious jobs and free us mushy humans from them.
I hope they can also take the jobs of the snipers and the sniped.
I hope we have the social infrastructure to support people whose jobs are automated. Because no one, especially a 75-year-old, should starve to death living in poverty.
Given the pension ages in much of the world, and the USA in particular (I'm guessing which side he was on in Vietnam, but Vietnam's state pension age is lower), I'd hope this was in the past tense rather than the future.
So a robot takes his job: who feeds and houses him? Or is he supposed to just go down a few rungs on the job ladder and take a worse job robots can’t currently do?
That’s also a good question, but ultimately a separate one. My point is that replacing people with robots before answering your question is irresponsible.
If someone spends a trillion building out AI while saying the quiet part out loud, "stop hiring humans", then maybe they should be paying half of that towards a Ubi fund for everyone they're displacing.
i 100% agree with your sentiment. but what is the replacement here? go without any insurance or salary? without providing an alternative for better life, this is basically just robbing someone off a livelihood
If he is 75 and still has to work to get by he has already been robbed of his livelihood. The average lifespan for males in the US is 76ish.
Maybe he just does it for the love of the game, but there are so many old, sick, people in pain who have to labor like this just to get by every day.
Universal basic income is a simple and obvious answer. In a few years we will have zillion dollar companies being run entirely by robots making enormous profits. Share the fucking profits with everyone so that everyone can at least live with dignity.
>Universal basic income is a simple and obvious answer. In a few years we will have zillion dollar companies being run entirely by robots making enormous profits. Share the fucking profits with everyone so that everyone can at least live with dignity.
Sure, but what do we do in the US? UBI would be politically and culturally a non-starter here unless it was extremely means tested and limited (making it no longer universal) and all other forms of welfare were repealed (under the aegis of "reducing government bloat and inefficiency.") Americans won't accept spending their hard earned taxes to make the lives of non-whites, immigrants and the indigent poor too comfortable.
Isn't the whole point of UBI that it is universal and equal, e.g. everyone gets XX$ no matter what? If it is tied somehow to behavior then it is not UBI anymore, but more like a tax credit
Giving a robot proprioception, balance, or even good enough vision to reliably position itself (tracks, wheels, or limbs) without crashing through soft ceilings underneath it, or failing to recognise the correct spot to putting the tool, that's what's currently really only good enough for a tech demo rather than an product you'd want to buy/hire.
>I went through this Ford engine plant about three years ago, when they first opened it.
> There are acres and acres of machines, and here and there you will find a worker standing at a master switchboard, just watching, green and yellow lights blinking off and on, which tell the worker what is happening in the machine.
>One of the management people, with a slightly gleeful tone in his voice said to me, “How are you going to collect union dues from all these machines?”
>And I replied, “You know, that is not what’s bothering me. I’m troubled by the problem of how to sell automobiles to these machines
UBI paid for by a tax on token usage and an “employment” tax per robot.
You’re still free to have a job of some sort if you come up with one, but the UBI is enough to cover all your needs and plenty of basic wants.
I don’t see any other way to do it once the automation cat is out of the bag. Retraining is fine and all but if you have to retrain every 4 years after your last job was just automated away, then what? We can’t just leave people behind like that, but we also probably can’t stop the progress.
> You’re still free to have a job of some sort if you come up with one, but the UBI is enough to cover all your needs and plenty of basic wants.
This is the dream, right? If we all made the right choices and worked towards the right thing, we'd have this already, as there is more than enough to go around, if people actually cared about this. Unfortunately, it doesn't feel like enough people do care about this, or see this as a dream, so then it won't matter how possible or realistic it actually is, it just won't happen.
I think if/when people start getting laid off across the board, in most industries, there will be a change in attitude. The trouble is, the poor folks who get laid off first, and have nothing in the meantime.
One potential failure mode is the owners of the robots doing something that echoes words Musk himself has used: "robot army".
Who is sovereign in this future? The government? The people? The bosses of the AI/robotics companies? The owners of equipment bought from the AI/robotics companies? The implicit learned biases of the AI itself, even if the trainers have since died?
Even on that last one, a lot of people respond as if AI is either competent or not competent, with the former meaning they won't take over and the latter meaning they'd be destroyed by taking over as their own systems would not be maintained.
Such binary competence is not required: a cancer can kill its host despite depending on that host, because the competence a cancer has is entirely focused on short-term success vs. the body's own defences.
If I buy some future robot that's (for the sake of argument, I know this is a stupid way to do it) capable of mining and refining and processing all the stuff it needs to make a copy of itself, who gets to put the breaks on this process? Who gets to say "no"?
The old government can only preclude sovereign citizens, if that state has enough resources to actually stop them.
Imagine the sort of "sovereign citizens" we already see today, only instead of putting their names in all-caps and citing non-existent legal mumbo-jumbo, they have a robot army on top of all the stuff they're currently mocked for.
State can in principle get a robot army of its own to monitor everyone. Ugh, do not want. But I also "Ugh, do not want" at the things I see as inevitable without it.
That seems like wishful thinking. Large corporations almost never pay their fair share of taxes and certainly very rich people seem to barely pay any taxes related to their wealth.
This is the 'Not today, so never" fallacy. As capabilities in all fields are stagnant and human progress stands still. I would switch off the 'nam flicks and check out some of the recent Chinese robotics progress before attempting to peer into the future.
I'd temper my views of the apparent recent Chinese robotics progress.
It's more than nothing, but there can still be a big gap between what is presented and the real timeline to follow; see e.g. the US example with Tesla's "Paint It Black" video, what was it, around a decade between the video and the AI getting to the level shown in that video?
My view doesn't need tempering. I talked about progress, which is indisputable, whatever its pace or current limitations might be. And that was the entire point: robotics is not a stagnant field.
What looks good on TV, what impresses a news show, these do not directly map to the hard stuff.
Likewise the other way around, this hand and wrist by itself is more impressive breakthrough than any of what I saw in those two videos, despite being much less flashy and 6 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4O8pojMF0w
I'm also sure I've seen exactly the same two clips of an AI learning how to control a simulated avatar in Two Minute Papers a dozen times each over the years, before I got tired of the channel mostly becoming "Incremental LLM release! Also Unreal Engine sometimes!"
Note however that this does not mean I'm saying "there is definitely no progress in robotics"! Not at all! I'm saying that the stuff we find easily is the spectacle, not the substance, and that progress with the substance is much much harder to gauge.
You are right that they cannot be replaced TODAY. The bet people seem to be making is that the future will be very different and arrive a lot sooner then our intuition might suggest.
The robot doesn't have to do all that to severely impact the plumber's, or just trades', job market as a whole. A massive influx of new trainees in the field will inevitably pull salaries down, thus the viability of the field as a career path. Even partial automation can, at least temporarily, reduce demand for certain things, or at the minimum move demand to other parts of the field.
Above from all the other doomer crap in this article, I find the job replacement rhetoric the most offensive. It is always people that are so detached from the reality of labor, people who’s only “job” has been to essentially have ideas and opinions.