4 ms·

Very interesting article. IMHO a key factor in how the world changes in the next 10-20 years will be how far the current wave of AI, based on neural networks c

Very interesting article. IMHO a key factor in how the world changes in the next 10-20 years will be how far the current wave of AI, based on neural networks can go. If scientists and engineers manage to implement autonomous cars and robots that can do basic human tasks like clean, wait and take care of the sick and elderly we will wake up in a brand new world. It will put a lot of stress on the basics of society, such as democracy and having to work for a salary.

tuatoru 3y ago
The real world has many trillions of parameters. Also, doing stuff in the real world is all about sensors. Progress on integrating millions of sensors into a robot has been slow.
- borissk 3y ago
  Don't think a robot needs millions of sensors. 90% of the information that a human uses comes through the eyes - so just 2 sensors. Really in terms of doing most types of work all a robot would need is vision and hearing.
  - klipt 3y ago
    Q: But if the robot has no nose, how will it smell? A: Awful!
  - csomar 3y ago
    Humans have an insane number of sensors all working with each other. The eyes are not just 2 sensors and a blind person can still function fairly well though with limitations.
- dontupvoteme 3y ago
  >The real world has many trillions of parameters. But at any given time you're probably only going to require some millions or double digit billions, unless you're a nation state or something like that.
- trashtester 3y ago
  The problem is not integrating millions of sensors of the same type (like individual pixels in a camera), but rather to integrate 2-10 different types of sensors, like microphones, cameras, lidars and tactile/temperature sensors. Progress has been slow mosly because it's been hand-written, such as the sensor fusion in the F-35. While there are some attempts at using neural networks to do much of the integration (Like Tesla's self driving) they're mostly quite primitive, and lacks the kind of general understanding of the world that we're starting to se in LLM's. We have started building multimodal neural networks, though, such as GPT-4's ability to handle images, though. he next step is to add video, which is the mode that requires the greatest amount of compute, we will be able to integrate it with lower bandwidth sensors using the same techniques. That would be where general purpose models start to become good enough to be deployed in robots. Let's imagine your Tesla has the ability to reason about the world the way GPT-4 can (and with enough fine tuning that halicunations are gone), and that it can do that not only based on text, but also all the sensors of the car, then it might become able to handle situations outside its training set much better than today, possibly better than many humans. Once we're able to build multimodal models able to handle realtime video and s
andrewjl 3y ago
> If scientists and engineers manage to implement autonomous cars and robots that can do basic human tasks like clean, wait and take care of the sick and elderly we will wake up in a brand new world. It will put a lot of stress on the basics of society, such as democracy and having to work for a salary. Based on the trends TFA discusses we'll be seeing severe social stress if basic tasks don't get automated. All due to labor shortages. Focusing on alternative arrangements to salaried work is backwards, unless the goal is boost labor participation. Current demographics are baked in for the next 30 years and only point to a greater shortfall of labor in the future.[1] $1,000 signing bonuses for fast food jobs start to look quaint pretty quickly. [1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545397/empty-planet-by-darrell-bricker-and-john-ibbitson/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545397/empty-planet...
- trashtester 3y ago
  The only way we will NOT see severe social stress is if AI is able to barely keep up with the decline in labour supply. My gut feeling is that it will either be too little or way too much. Anyway, once they're able to fully robot-ify the police force, social upheaval may become easy to deal with for those in power.
  - andrewjl 3y ago
    > My gut feeling is that it will either be too little or way too much. We've historically been very good at coming up with new things for people to do. Why would this time be any different? On the other hand it takes over two decades from the time someone's born until they are part of the workforce. That won't change and as a result we have a pretty good idea of what the upper threshold on labor looks like globally the next few decades.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
solumunus 3y ago
The human-like robot dream is a complete non starter for me, total science fiction. Unless economic reality changes radically it will always be cheaper to simply pay a human to do these jobs. There are already many jobs that could be replaced by robots but by and large they haven’t been because buying, maintaining and powering robots costs more than paying humans minimum wage, and this fact isn’t changing any time soon. The type of robots you’re envisioning are even more complex and expensive… Do you really think a human-like robot with some level of useful general AI is going to be cheaper to build, maintain and run then low skilled workers?
- borissk 3y ago
  If not anything else there's a shortage of human workers. Yes, it will be easier to manufacture and power robots, than to increase the number of human workers.
- josh-sematic 3y ago
  The form factor may not be humanoid, but if we can crack a general-purpose home robot, it would start out as a novelty plaything for the ultra rich, but at that point it would be only a matter of time before it started falling down the cost curve as we got more and more efficient & optimized with the manufacturing and the software. So yes, it almost certainly would eventually get cheaper than human labor. How long until that happens? No idea!

tuatoru 3y ago

The real world has many trillions of parameters. Also, doing stuff in the real world is all about sensors. Progress on integrating millions of sensors into a robot has been slow.

borissk 3y ago
Don't think a robot needs millions of sensors. 90% of the information that a human uses comes through the eyes - so just 2 sensors. Really in terms of doing most types of work all a robot would need is vision and hearing.
- klipt 3y ago
  Q: But if the robot has no nose, how will it smell? A: Awful!
- csomar 3y ago
  Humans have an insane number of sensors all working with each other. The eyes are not just 2 sensors and a blind person can still function fairly well though with limitations.
dontupvoteme 3y ago
>The real world has many trillions of parameters. But at any given time you're probably only going to require some millions or double digit billions, unless you're a nation state or something like that.
trashtester 3y ago
The problem is not integrating millions of sensors of the same type (like individual pixels in a camera), but rather to integrate 2-10 different types of sensors, like microphones, cameras, lidars and tactile/temperature sensors. Progress has been slow mosly because it's been hand-written, such as the sensor fusion in the F-35. While there are some attempts at using neural networks to do much of the integration (Like Tesla's self driving) they're mostly quite primitive, and lacks the kind of general understanding of the world that we're starting to se in LLM's. We have started building multimodal neural networks, though, such as GPT-4's ability to handle images, though. he next step is to add video, which is the mode that requires the greatest amount of compute, we will be able to integrate it with lower bandwidth sensors using the same techniques. That would be where general purpose models start to become good enough to be deployed in robots. Let's imagine your Tesla has the ability to reason about the world the way GPT-4 can (and with enough fine tuning that halicunations are gone), and that it can do that not only based on text, but also all the sensors of the car, then it might become able to handle situations outside its training set much better than today, possibly better than many humans. Once we're able to build multimodal models able to handle realtime video and s

andrewjl 3y ago

> If scientists and engineers manage to implement autonomous cars and robots that can do basic human tasks like clean, wait and take care of the sick and elderly we will wake up in a brand new world. It will put a lot of stress on the basics of society, such as democracy and having to work for a salary. Based on the trends TFA discusses we'll be seeing severe social stress if basic tasks don't get automated. All due to labor shortages. Focusing on alternative arrangements to salaried work is backwards, unless the goal is boost labor participation. Current demographics are baked in for the next 30 years and only point to a greater shortfall of labor in the future.[1] $1,000 signing bonuses for fast food jobs start to look quaint pretty quickly. [1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545397/empty-planet-by-darrell-bricker-and-john-ibbitson/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545397/empty-planet...

trashtester 3y ago
The only way we will NOT see severe social stress is if AI is able to barely keep up with the decline in labour supply. My gut feeling is that it will either be too little or way too much. Anyway, once they're able to fully robot-ify the police force, social upheaval may become easy to deal with for those in power.
- andrewjl 3y ago
  > My gut feeling is that it will either be too little or way too much. We've historically been very good at coming up with new things for people to do. Why would this time be any different? On the other hand it takes over two decades from the time someone's born until they are part of the workforce. That won't change and as a result we have a pretty good idea of what the upper threshold on labor looks like globally the next few decades.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

solumunus 3y ago

The human-like robot dream is a complete non starter for me, total science fiction. Unless economic reality changes radically it will always be cheaper to simply pay a human to do these jobs. There are already many jobs that could be replaced by robots but by and large they haven’t been because buying, maintaining and powering robots costs more than paying humans minimum wage, and this fact isn’t changing any time soon. The type of robots you’re envisioning are even more complex and expensive… Do you really think a human-like robot with some level of useful general AI is going to be cheaper to build, maintain and run then low skilled workers?

borissk 3y ago
If not anything else there's a shortage of human workers. Yes, it will be easier to manufacture and power robots, than to increase the number of human workers.
josh-sematic 3y ago
The form factor may not be humanoid, but if we can crack a general-purpose home robot, it would start out as a novelty plaything for the ultra rich, but at that point it would be only a matter of time before it started falling down the cost curve as we got more and more efficient & optimized with the manufacturing and the software. So yes, it almost certainly would eventually get cheaper than human labor. How long until that happens? No idea!