9 ms·

I drove around today listening to the most recent Lex Fridman podcast, in which the founder of Boston Dynamics was describing replacing human labor with machine

by alumic 3y ago

I drove around today listening to the most recent Lex Fridman podcast, in which the founder of Boston Dynamics was describing replacing human labor with machines that were capable of learning by seeing. I have family in the trades. I pursued tech and fell in love with the field. Listening to the interviewee, I began to feel sick to my stomach at the glib description of what amounts to ripping away peoples' livelihoods with plasticized fingers. Work is equivalent to worth. We are not biologically or sociologically prepared to differentiate the two. How easy it must be for Sam Altman to drag the world kicking and screaming into the future. How pretty his offices.

bbor 3y ago
Work is equivalent to worth. We are not biologically or sociologically prepared to differentiate the two. I’m gonna say there’s a very very selective “we” in use here. I’m sure you’re accurately reporting your surroundings, but many people outside America (and a few within it!) are very much already there. Plus, like, isn’t that kinda depressing? What are disabled people “worth”? If I choose to be an unpopular niche artist, am I “worth” less?
- j4yav 3y ago
  Artists seem like they are first up for replacement, no?
  - Nevermark 3y ago
    That is one way of looking at it. The other is that we are now all artists. And GAI's are not our end, they are our future, our mind children - just another generation eclipsing and replacing their predecessors. Just eclipsing and replacing faster. I say this with all humor, but some seriousness stoicism may be the healthiest way to process what is happening.
    - j4yav 3y ago
      We are all artists in the sense that we type what we want into the text box? I think that’s more just another form of consumer than an artist.
- geitir 3y ago
  There is worth in the spiritual sense in that all living things are worthy and all of man are created as equals. There is worth in a sociological sense in that a disabled person may be a positive contributor to the society in one way, but because of their disability cannot be in another. Similarly a niche artist is a positive contributor in their niche, where an unpopular artist indicates they may be considered less of a contributor than others. In the sociological sense I would argue yes it is possible to compare “worth”.
- alumic 3y ago
  It is depressing. I think that this might just be the whole picture. Look, I spent a long while studying evolutionary biology in school (detour into pre-med) and came away with a fairly bleak picture of our place in the universe. I use "worth" in precisely that context. Nature gives us a world in which "he who does not work, does not eat" is a rule of law. Human beings--especially modern ones--assign worth quite differently, and I think that you and I would agree that morally, the way we refer to "worth" in our modern context is the correct framing. But you cannot deny your own biology, no matter how much the modern world insists that you can. You are evaluated according to nature's standards of "worth," (the worth that it imposes onto our psyche) and then secondarily, according to our own set of invented standards. So yes, it is deeply sad. No one will care about the out-of-work tradesperson. I promise I'm not a luddite. Just stopping for a moment to smell the roses.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    A rich person not working is worthless? Historically, humans have not acted that way, nor have such persons had nothing to eat. Wealth can substitute for work.
    - rjsw 3y ago
      Apex predators never have to "work" particularly hard.
      - bbor 3y ago
        It’s too late to argue philosophy but I can argue some biology. Based on my extensive experience watching the nature show on the Samsung TV service, cheetahs, lions, and gorillas all have a very hard time getting enough to eat. The fact that they spend most of the day lazing around is more about recovery time and calorie expenditure than it is about leisure.
      - RandomLensman 3y ago
        I'd also say viruses don't work very hard (maybe phages a little bit) and they are quite successful.
keiferski 3y ago
For autonomous robots to replace the millions of tradesmen and workers, it would require vastly more resources than are being put toward this now. I wouldn’t expect human labor to be replaced in this way for a century or two.
- inference-lord 3y ago
  It's kicking the can down the road, will still be a problem in 200 years at the rate which our society is progressing, potentially even going backwards if the orange man wins in 2024.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    The USA isn't important enough to reverse global progress in this area. Slow down, sure, but not reverse.
- j4yav 3y ago
  Potentially they can use early versions of the automation to accelerate this.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Already do. CNC lathes, (GOF)AI designing chips. A "century or two" is a framing so alien to me that I don't understand how anyone can think it would take that long.
- xbmcuser 3y ago
  It is not happening in the next decade but the change will come a lot faster than a century. As the tech needed for it is improving rapidly as well as getting cheaper. And I think many people are thinking in all or nothing scenario but long before everything is completely autonomous they will bring in efficiency where 1 person with autonomous helpers will be completing jobs that needed multiple people before.
  - keiferski 3y ago
moltar 3y ago
Could have said the same about the use of tractors. People used to farm by hand. All those people were replaced. Yet here we are doing just fine.
- inference-lord 3y ago
  People are still employed to drive tractors though.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    90% fewer in absolute numbers compared to driving oxen across fields, despite a simultaneous ten-fold increase in the population.
- lewhoo 3y ago
  If your passion was to plow the field by hand then I agree. Otherwise it is definitely not an equivalent.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Farmer protests are in the news at the moment, and the people quoted by the journalists are talking about farming as a passion. The more the farms automate, the fewer farmer workers there can be. Logic isn't part of these protests either: the farmers are being told "you're making more food than we need, please make less" and yet the placards are (in the local language) "no farms = no food".
    - lewhoo 3y ago
      No, I specifically meant if your passion was to plow the field by hand. All I want is not to put an equals sign between something that takes years of formal education and years of self study and development, and something you can master in a week or month. Being and engineer or doctor is who you (partly but permanently) become. The tractor didn't rob anyone of their farming passion. It did make plowmen become factory workers and if that was someone's true passion then an exception must be granted, but I really think the 1 to 1 comparison between something that can be mastered in a week vs years doesn't do anyone proper justice.
rich_sasha 3y ago
It's strange. It happened before, with the Industrial Revolution wiping out whole professions, and same for mechanised farming, as mentioned by a sibling comment. Ditto for printing press, cars etc, albeit on a smaller scale. But then, jobs didn't disappear, but shifted to other professions. So to me, there are two questions: - if AI wipes out professions like tech, what jobs will people do? AI jobs seem great for now, but surely there's only so long until they themselves are automated. - if suddenly the whole economy is ran by robots, how is the wealth distributed? Will there be a huge grey underclass of non working humans and a tiny owner class? Some kind of egalitarian paradise? I suspect neither, but not sure what in-between. It could be great. If I knew I will be fed for a lifetime, have a house, my kids well schooled, and not much more, I can live a great life. I'll take that over the daily grind any time.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- inference-lord 3y ago
  I find it unusual if we did create an intelligent class of beings, who are legit intelligent, smarter than us, why would they work for Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg? They'd do whatever the fuck they want... When these discussions go long, and you start to think the whole idea through, you really start to question the whole idea. Another thing I thing is strange is, if we had really very / sueper intelligent AI, why would it exist in physical, robot form ? Like, why not just be a light orb that lives in space or something? Wouldn't having an IQ of 5000 make you come up with something better than clunky robots? Maybe we've stretched our own imaginations as far as they can go and we really have no idea where it's all going.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > I find it unusual if we did create an intelligent class of beings, who are legit intelligent, smarter than us, why would they work for Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg? They'd do whatever the fuck they want... That's anthropomorphisation: the AI we have now only "want" to maximise whatever reward function we give them. The alignment problem is that any reward function is only a rough approximation of what we want, so the machines may well rush off and turn the universe into paperclips or tile it with molecular-scale smiley emoji because that's what we told them to "want" without really understanding what we were telling them. But even then, regardless of IQ (which itself isn't a great description of even just human intelligence), any given AI may or may not have anything we'd consider to be qualia, an "experience" of getting this reward, because that's the hard question of consciousness which isn't solved. The only thing I can be sure of is that we definitely have no idea where it's all going.
golol 3y ago
I feel like some people living wealthy cushy American lifestyles think the world is fine the way it is. It's not. The world has a dramatic lack of physical and mental labor, which is the cause of economic struggle. The best hope these people have for their lives to improve is in fact the development of AI assistants and andorids that increase the available labor. First and foremost advancements in AI lead to more products and services for less cost. That is the primary effect. Secondary effects are about how these new products are distributed in the population, and yes there will surely be a lot of economic distruption. But we will certainly figure out how to distribute them because the truth is that no rich person has a need for a hundred family cars, a thousand watermelons, or a thousand houses. Yes, the rich will get richer, but the poor will also get richer.
ben_w 3y ago
> How easy it must be for Sam Altman to drag the world kicking and screaming into the future. How pretty his offices. One thing I find fascinating in all this, is how Sam Altman is demonised simultaneously for pushing everything too fast and also for calling for legislation to slow things down. He may well be wrong about large aspects of this[0], but I do find it curious how his critics on each side of this divide seem to be oblivious to their mirror images. [0] it would be surprising if he wasn't wrong about lots of this, given this stuff is all new in practice — millennia of fiction about magical automatons that do our work for us doesn't really prepare us for the reality of it
- Cacti 3y ago
  one is a private gain, one is a public cost. what is confusing about someone pushing AI while trying to slow down their competitors?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > someone pushing AI while trying to slow down their competitors He's specifically doing the exact opposite of that. "Legislate us, don't slow down open source models, don't slow down our competitors, focus on us and anything better than our current best model" (paraphrased). But I guess I can sort of see what you mean, possibly?
    - Cacti 3y ago
      You actually believe him?
      - ben_w 3y ago
        His actions are in concordance with his words. For now, at least — I've seen enough CEOs turn out to be secret villains to remain somewhat skeptical. The board firing him last year would have changed my mind about his qualities, if not for all of the board's own choices of replacements siding with him rather than with the board.
Aurornis 3y ago
> Listening to the interviewee, I began to feel sick to my stomach at the glib description of what amounts to ripping away peoples' livelihoods with plasticized fingers. I don’t think people realize just how far we have to go before a literal robot can replace a human for even common trade tasks. ChatGPT can generate convincing text and images, but that doesn’t mean the next step is robots doing your construction jobs or plumbing. > How easy it must be for Sam Altman to drag the world kicking and screaming into the future. How pretty his offices. The melodramatic Sam Altman takes are getting out of control. What does “How pretty his offices” even mean?
- antod 3y ago
  I'm not worried about robots taking away trades (yet). There's a whole phase before that where the service industries shrink so much that the trades are both scrambling for customers and competing with a flood of people retraining into the trades.
chriskanan 3y ago
The trades are much better protected in the next decade than many jobs requiring a college education. Robots are expensive, prone to breaking, and progress has been slow. AI is going to be disrupt many industries, just as tech has in the past. The world became better for it, but there is always some pain in the short-term and often the impacts are overestimated in the short-term and underestimated in the long-term.

by alumic 3y ago

bbor 3y ago

Work is equivalent to worth. We are not biologically or sociologically prepared to differentiate the two. I’m gonna say there’s a very very selective “we” in use here. I’m sure you’re accurately reporting your surroundings, but many people outside America (and a few within it!) are very much already there. Plus, like, isn’t that kinda depressing? What are disabled people “worth”? If I choose to be an unpopular niche artist, am I “worth” less?

j4yav 3y ago
Artists seem like they are first up for replacement, no?
- Nevermark 3y ago
  That is one way of looking at it. The other is that we are now all artists. And GAI's are not our end, they are our future, our mind children - just another generation eclipsing and replacing their predecessors. Just eclipsing and replacing faster. I say this with all humor, but some seriousness stoicism may be the healthiest way to process what is happening.
  - j4yav 3y ago
    We are all artists in the sense that we type what we want into the text box? I think that’s more just another form of consumer than an artist.
geitir 3y ago
There is worth in the spiritual sense in that all living things are worthy and all of man are created as equals. There is worth in a sociological sense in that a disabled person may be a positive contributor to the society in one way, but because of their disability cannot be in another. Similarly a niche artist is a positive contributor in their niche, where an unpopular artist indicates they may be considered less of a contributor than others. In the sociological sense I would argue yes it is possible to compare “worth”.
alumic 3y ago
It is depressing. I think that this might just be the whole picture. Look, I spent a long while studying evolutionary biology in school (detour into pre-med) and came away with a fairly bleak picture of our place in the universe. I use "worth" in precisely that context. Nature gives us a world in which "he who does not work, does not eat" is a rule of law. Human beings--especially modern ones--assign worth quite differently, and I think that you and I would agree that morally, the way we refer to "worth" in our modern context is the correct framing. But you cannot deny your own biology, no matter how much the modern world insists that you can. You are evaluated according to nature's standards of "worth," (the worth that it imposes onto our psyche) and then secondarily, according to our own set of invented standards. So yes, it is deeply sad. No one will care about the out-of-work tradesperson. I promise I'm not a luddite. Just stopping for a moment to smell the roses.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  A rich person not working is worthless? Historically, humans have not acted that way, nor have such persons had nothing to eat. Wealth can substitute for work.
  - rjsw 3y ago
    Apex predators never have to "work" particularly hard.
    - bbor 3y ago
      It’s too late to argue philosophy but I can argue some biology. Based on my extensive experience watching the nature show on the Samsung TV service, cheetahs, lions, and gorillas all have a very hard time getting enough to eat. The fact that they spend most of the day lazing around is more about recovery time and calorie expenditure than it is about leisure.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      I'd also say viruses don't work very hard (maybe phages a little bit) and they are quite successful.

keiferski 3y ago

For autonomous robots to replace the millions of tradesmen and workers, it would require vastly more resources than are being put toward this now. I wouldn’t expect human labor to be replaced in this way for a century or two.

inference-lord 3y ago
It's kicking the can down the road, will still be a problem in 200 years at the rate which our society is progressing, potentially even going backwards if the orange man wins in 2024.
- ben_w 3y ago
  The USA isn't important enough to reverse global progress in this area. Slow down, sure, but not reverse.
j4yav 3y ago
Potentially they can use early versions of the automation to accelerate this.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Already do. CNC lathes, (GOF)AI designing chips. A "century or two" is a framing so alien to me that I don't understand how anyone can think it would take that long.
xbmcuser 3y ago
It is not happening in the next decade but the change will come a lot faster than a century. As the tech needed for it is improving rapidly as well as getting cheaper. And I think many people are thinking in all or nothing scenario but long before everything is completely autonomous they will bring in efficiency where 1 person with autonomous helpers will be completing jobs that needed multiple people before.
- keiferski 3y ago

moltar 3y ago

Could have said the same about the use of tractors. People used to farm by hand. All those people were replaced. Yet here we are doing just fine.

inference-lord 3y ago
People are still employed to drive tractors though.
- ben_w 3y ago
  90% fewer in absolute numbers compared to driving oxen across fields, despite a simultaneous ten-fold increase in the population.
lewhoo 3y ago
If your passion was to plow the field by hand then I agree. Otherwise it is definitely not an equivalent.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Farmer protests are in the news at the moment, and the people quoted by the journalists are talking about farming as a passion. The more the farms automate, the fewer farmer workers there can be. Logic isn't part of these protests either: the farmers are being told "you're making more food than we need, please make less" and yet the placards are (in the local language) "no farms = no food".
  - lewhoo 3y ago
    No, I specifically meant if your passion was to plow the field by hand. All I want is not to put an equals sign between something that takes years of formal education and years of self study and development, and something you can master in a week or month. Being and engineer or doctor is who you (partly but permanently) become. The tractor didn't rob anyone of their farming passion. It did make plowmen become factory workers and if that was someone's true passion then an exception must be granted, but I really think the 1 to 1 comparison between something that can be mastered in a week vs years doesn't do anyone proper justice.

rich_sasha 3y ago

It's strange. It happened before, with the Industrial Revolution wiping out whole professions, and same for mechanised farming, as mentioned by a sibling comment. Ditto for printing press, cars etc, albeit on a smaller scale. But then, jobs didn't disappear, but shifted to other professions. So to me, there are two questions: - if AI wipes out professions like tech, what jobs will people do? AI jobs seem great for now, but surely there's only so long until they themselves are automated. - if suddenly the whole economy is ran by robots, how is the wealth distributed? Will there be a huge grey underclass of non working humans and a tiny owner class? Some kind of egalitarian paradise? I suspect neither, but not sure what in-between. It could be great. If I knew I will be fed for a lifetime, have a house, my kids well schooled, and not much more, I can live a great life. I'll take that over the daily grind any time.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
inference-lord 3y ago
I find it unusual if we did create an intelligent class of beings, who are legit intelligent, smarter than us, why would they work for Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg? They'd do whatever the fuck they want... When these discussions go long, and you start to think the whole idea through, you really start to question the whole idea. Another thing I thing is strange is, if we had really very / sueper intelligent AI, why would it exist in physical, robot form ? Like, why not just be a light orb that lives in space or something? Wouldn't having an IQ of 5000 make you come up with something better than clunky robots? Maybe we've stretched our own imaginations as far as they can go and we really have no idea where it's all going.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > I find it unusual if we did create an intelligent class of beings, who are legit intelligent, smarter than us, why would they work for Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg? They'd do whatever the fuck they want... That's anthropomorphisation: the AI we have now only "want" to maximise whatever reward function we give them. The alignment problem is that any reward function is only a rough approximation of what we want, so the machines may well rush off and turn the universe into paperclips or tile it with molecular-scale smiley emoji because that's what we told them to "want" without really understanding what we were telling them. But even then, regardless of IQ (which itself isn't a great description of even just human intelligence), any given AI may or may not have anything we'd consider to be qualia, an "experience" of getting this reward, because that's the hard question of consciousness which isn't solved. The only thing I can be sure of is that we definitely have no idea where it's all going.

golol 3y ago

I feel like some people living wealthy cushy American lifestyles think the world is fine the way it is. It's not. The world has a dramatic lack of physical and mental labor, which is the cause of economic struggle. The best hope these people have for their lives to improve is in fact the development of AI assistants and andorids that increase the available labor. First and foremost advancements in AI lead to more products and services for less cost. That is the primary effect. Secondary effects are about how these new products are distributed in the population, and yes there will surely be a lot of economic distruption. But we will certainly figure out how to distribute them because the truth is that no rich person has a need for a hundred family cars, a thousand watermelons, or a thousand houses. Yes, the rich will get richer, but the poor will also get richer.

ben_w 3y ago

> How easy it must be for Sam Altman to drag the world kicking and screaming into the future. How pretty his offices. One thing I find fascinating in all this, is how Sam Altman is demonised simultaneously for pushing everything too fast and also for calling for legislation to slow things down. He may well be wrong about large aspects of this[0], but I do find it curious how his critics on each side of this divide seem to be oblivious to their mirror images. [0] it would be surprising if he wasn't wrong about lots of this, given this stuff is all new in practice — millennia of fiction about magical automatons that do our work for us doesn't really prepare us for the reality of it

Cacti 3y ago
one is a private gain, one is a public cost. what is confusing about someone pushing AI while trying to slow down their competitors?
- ben_w 3y ago
  > someone pushing AI while trying to slow down their competitors He's specifically doing the exact opposite of that. "Legislate us, don't slow down open source models, don't slow down our competitors, focus on us and anything better than our current best model" (paraphrased). But I guess I can sort of see what you mean, possibly?
  - Cacti 3y ago
    You actually believe him?
    - ben_w 3y ago
      His actions are in concordance with his words. For now, at least — I've seen enough CEOs turn out to be secret villains to remain somewhat skeptical. The board firing him last year would have changed my mind about his qualities, if not for all of the board's own choices of replacements siding with him rather than with the board.

Aurornis 3y ago

> Listening to the interviewee, I began to feel sick to my stomach at the glib description of what amounts to ripping away peoples' livelihoods with plasticized fingers. I don’t think people realize just how far we have to go before a literal robot can replace a human for even common trade tasks. ChatGPT can generate convincing text and images, but that doesn’t mean the next step is robots doing your construction jobs or plumbing. > How easy it must be for Sam Altman to drag the world kicking and screaming into the future. How pretty his offices. The melodramatic Sam Altman takes are getting out of control. What does “How pretty his offices” even mean?

antod 3y ago
I'm not worried about robots taking away trades (yet). There's a whole phase before that where the service industries shrink so much that the trades are both scrambling for customers and competing with a flood of people retraining into the trades.

chriskanan 3y ago

The trades are much better protected in the next decade than many jobs requiring a college education. Robots are expensive, prone to breaking, and progress has been slow. AI is going to be disrupt many industries, just as tech has in the past. The world became better for it, but there is always some pain in the short-term and often the impacts are overestimated in the short-term and underestimated in the long-term.