Thousands and thousands of miles of high voltage cables transformers and super expensive chargers sounds easy to you?
A gas station just needs a tank and a pump. You can put it anywhere and can operate with a small generator if 110V electricity is not available. Even as a country you don’t need infra. Just some trucks to import from the closest refinery/ port
Yes, if you're rolling it out for a single charger in the middle of nowhere.
My understanding is that much of the grid already exists if there is a town or even just a rest stop present, it likely has grid power. I will grant that this doesn't speak to the suitability of said existing infrastructure for running one or a number of a high voltage / high speed chargers.
> Just some trucks to import from the closest refinery/ port
Vehicles will be visiting the gas station anyway ? Aka the road-like infrastructure will need to be there.
I do not try to claim that trucking fuel over long distances is efficient. Just stating that gas stations themselves need no additional infrastructure.
I'm not even considering the magazine reload time, just the time between shots assuming a full mag. That's 10 recharges either way, as shown in the videos. It's not like a machine gun where the energy is in the powder.
Yes, of course. The bot can request information and the customer can provide it if they feel like it, and then someone qualified can call them back when they have their hands free.
But there's no bot, per se, needed at all. An answering machine from 1993 can do this same information-gathering job. :)
So update the device from 1993's new-fangled digital answering machine to 2009's Google Voice, and have it do the transcription from voicemail to text.
Someone will still have to call Bill back about his Honda (which is actually the Kia he bought for his daughter -- Bill is not a very technical guy these days[1] and he confuses such concepts regularly) in order to get any trading of money for services done.
It doesn't take an LLM to get there, and Bill would probably prefer to avoid being frustrated by the bot's insistent nature.
The transcription + callback loop is honestly underrated.
Most of the value here is just capturing intent accurately
("Honda" vs "Kia" aside) so the mechanic can prioritize
callbacks. A dumb voicemail-to-text pipeline handles that
fine. The LLM layer adds complexity without solving the
actual bottleneck, which is someone qualified picking up
the phone.
But I'm not sure that a bot can be trusted to make good decisions about priority, either. So even if it makes good decisions based on context (which it can increasingly-often do, but does not always do), it lacks the context that is necessary to form the basis of good decisions.
Suppose a message comes into the box with this form: "This is Wendy, can you call me? My car is making that noise again."
The bot might deprioritize that call because it lacks actionable contextual information. "My job as a bot is to get more jobs into the shop. This call does not have enough data to do that, so I'll shove to the bottom of list of callbacks behind more-actionable jobs."
But the mechanic? The mechanic knows Wendy's Ford very well, and he also knows Wendy. She's a been a good customer for over a decade. The mechanic also knows the noise, and that Wendy has 3 little kids and that she's vacationing 900 miles away on a road trip with those kids in that Ford. The context is all there inside of the mechanic's brain to combine and mean that this might be the highest-priority call he gets all week.
Wendy may not have actively relayed any urgency in her message, but the urgency is real and she needs called back right away. She needs answers about what to do (keep driving and look into it when she gets back? pull over immediately and get a tow to a decent local shop? maybe she even needs help finding such a shop?) pretty much immediately. Not because it means more business today, but because it means more business for years.
The mechanic can spot this from a list of transcripts in an instant and give her a ring back Right Now. The bot is NFG at this.
The addition of the bot only adds noise to the process, and that noise only works to Wendy's detriment. When the bot adds detrimental noise to Wendy's situation, it also adds detriment to the shop's longevity.
The presence of the bot -- even as a prioritizing sorting mechanism -- asymptotically shifts the state from an excellent shop that knows their customers very well to a bot-driven customer-averse hellscape.
(And no, the answer isn't to make the bot into an all-knowing oracle that actively gets fed all context. The documentation burden would be more expensive, time-wise (and thus money-wise) than hiring a competent human receptionist who answers the phone, handles the front door traffic, and absorbs context from their surroundings. A person who chatted with Wendy last Thursday right before she left for her trip is always going to be superior to a bot.)
Look, you‘re kicking an open door.
I think LLMs applied like this are just a layer of complexity that os mostly replacing lower level programming solutions that could do the same thing
Whoever said anything about middle class? Ubi is the poverty level, it could never be anything else.
As for people not being occupied, the theory is that since ubi doesn't stop if you find employment, it would lead to less idleness than the current means-tested social safety nets. In test cases though it seems to depend a lot on culture, Finnish communities saw no difference in employment while Indian rates of business formation tripled.
The reason you'd want to filter for idiots is that a smarter person would waste the scammer's time when they figure out it's a scam after some human interaction. If the ai can take you all the way to the close, there's no reason to filter any more.
If it's my kid? Starting their own Enterprise. Between 'good enough' knowledge work getting cheaper and the bureaucracy that made entrepreneurship less attractive over the last decades being either trimmed or automatable, we may be looking at a golden age of new business formation. There's an old saying, "genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspiration". If ai shifts that to just 2 and 98, it'll unlock massive demand for a certain kind of mind.
How to teach that I'm still pondering. One idea that occurs to me, is that a human will always be needed to ask the right questions and have good taste, but I don't know how to teach those. They can probably only be educated, which in my mind is distinct from teaching. A different idea I have is that an entrepreneur needs three skills: they need to identify a problem, implement a solution, and get paid for it. Those skills probably can be taught, so I'd try to ensure they get early reps in all three.
If I knew how to connect those two ideas I think I'd have a decent curriculum. Anyone have suggestions for that?
Entrepreneurship is like sales; it can't really be taught, only learned through practice, through trial and error. The best way for kids to learn business is through doing it.
Definitely. Unlike asking the right questions or having good taste though, it's possible to know how successful you are at business so the dynamics are definitely different.
reply