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Silicon Valley is turning into its own worst fear (2017)
- fragmede 2y ago> we are still a long way from a robot that can walk into your kitchen and cook you some scrambled eggs I wonder if he's seen the latest videos of staged demos where humanoid robots can fold clothes edit: didn't say 2017 when I commented.
- ceejayoz 2y agoHaven’t most of those been teleoperated?
- fragmede 2y agohttps://www.physicalintelligence.company/blog/pi0 https://www.physicalintelligence.company/blog/pi0 could all be lies and I've been duped, but I'd like to believe not
- sabbaticaldev 2y agoturn this into something commercial is the real trick
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- m463 2y agoHere is the earlier demo [1965] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4bdaN6MRT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4bdaN6MRT8
- Etheryte 2y agoWe've had isolated demos of this and that for many decades, all of varying difficulty of course, but I for one definitely agree with the post. I don't feel like I could go and buy a generic home assistant robot that can perform a variety of basic tasks anytime soon. Demos are nice, but they're kinda like news about new batteries, always a few years away from the real thing.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoI'd bet many more than a few years away from a robot that can arbitrarily navigate your house, gather laundry from several baskets, the floor, etc. Divide into whites/colors or warm/cold loads if desired. Load them into an arbitrary washer, measure out detergent, use the right washer settings for the given load. Then come back and move them to the dryer, then come back and unload, fold, put away, etc. And don't get me started on sheets. It's much easier than it should be to fool people with demos.
- threeseed 2y agoAll whilst safely navigating around people, pets, babies, spills etc. It's one thing for a little robot vacuum to do. Whole other when it's a very large, very heavy humanoid robot.
- sourcepluck 2y agoAbsolutely. And that demo was so bad, the robot was actually shitty at folding clothes (no offense to the robot personally, of course...)
- fragmede 2y agosolid state batteries starting to actually hit the market, as in you can buy one today. https://yoshinopower.com/collections/portable-power-stations https://yoshinopower.com/collections/portable-power-stations
- ValentinA23 2y ago10 years ? 20 ? https://mobile-aloha.github.io/ https://mobile-aloha.github.io/ (note: in some videos the robot is teleoperated)
- catskull 2y agobut how far are we from some bot ordering you a breakfast burrito on DoorEats and having it delivered? I can 100% envision a bug in one of the current crop of "AI" products resulting in mass burritoing.
- willsmith72 2y agoThe bot already does that, you command it through your web or mobile interface
- pixl97 2y agoHeh we're all standing on the tracks looking at the incoming light here at HN, but don't worry, all the down voters are yelling it's very far away over the ever increasing rumble.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago> This summer, Elon Musk spoke to the National Governors Association and told them that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” And here I was going to suggest that billionaires, unbridled mega-corporations were the fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization. > Musk gave an example of an artificial intelligence that’s given the task of picking strawberries. Also odd since it's more likely that a corporation, in the name of maximizing profits, would make decisions that threaten humanity. We can start with Bhopal, India. If you find fault with that example I am sure there are plenty of others, some probably a good deal more subtle, that others can suggest. Me, not worried at all about AI.
- lupire 2y ago> it's more likely that a corporation, in the name of maximizing profits, would make decisions that threaten humanity. > Me, not worried at all about AI. Now imagine AI in the hands of a corporation building murderbots and propaganda bots.
- ein0p 2y agoYou don't have to imagine. Both the corporations and USG have been doing that for the last decade at the very least. If you want to test this, try posting anything controversial (AKA not 100% in line with the neoliberal agenda) in the YT comments section. Gone within seconds. Those aren't human moderators.
- WorkerBee28474 2y ago> And here I was going to suggest that billionaires, unbridled mega-corporations were the fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization. Depending on the measure [0], it's possible that the richest billionaires and least-bridled corporations are both well in the past. Human civilization survived, and will continue to survive. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_richest_Americans_in_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_richest_Americans_in_h...
- jprete 2y agoThe idea that AGI doom scenarios are really late-stage capitalism is interesting and strikes me as fundamentally correct. The difference between the AGI takeover and capitalism is just the choice of metric to optimize on. But, I think, it's the act of trying to optimize on a metric itself that is the source of the destruction. Unmeasurable human values can't survive an optimization process focused on measurable ones.
- catskull 2y agoIt makes me question if I've ever seen a metric employed by a company that didn't have a detrimental effect on the happiness of the people involved. We are all unique but we're also really, really similar and it's in those uniquenesses that we find real happiness. But if we're only a number of sales/dollars/tickets/loc then the distinction is a zero-sum game; I only stand to lose a dollar that you make.
- fzeroracer 2y agoI personally have never seen a metric that was actually beneficial for a company. Because the moment a metric exists, all rationality and reason is thrown out the window in favor of optimizing that metric. It doesn't matter if it destroys the company or customer trust in your product or runs out valuable employees. None of those are part of The Metric. It's the whole 'we increased shareholder value by 1% even if we won't exist next year' scheme. The notion of any sort of sustainability or long term planning has long vanished.
- nradov 2y agoBusiness is not a zero-sum game, especially not technology businesses that constantly innovate. All sides of the transaction can benefit. Optimizing for profit or similar metrics doesn't inhibit those benefits.
- uoaei 2y agoNot necessarily, but it does reorient the incentive structures so that the desirable outcomes become unlikely.
- mattmaroon 2y agoHow unfortunate that this article aged so well.
- gkoberger 2y agoIf you’re not familiar with Ted Chiang, make sure you put Story of Your Life and Others on your reading list.
- throw0101d 2y ago> Story of Your Life Adapted into the movie Arrival, directed by Denis Villeneuve: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film)
- jackschultz 2y ago>Then I realized that we are already surrounded by machines that demonstrate a complete lack of insight, we just call them corporations. Corporations don’t operate autonomously, of course, and the humans in charge of them are presumably capable of insight, but capitalism doesn’t reward them for using it. On the contrary, capitalism actively erodes this capacity in people by demanding that they replace their own judgment of what “good” means with “whatever the market decides.” Excellent quote. We say we're in a rational world where we make rational decisions in our societal game we've all been told we have to play - capitalism where money is the determinant of success vs failure for corporations, families, individuals. But step back and when looking at the question of whether it's rational to us as humans be playing this game and it is not rational at all. Why are we not deciding that food and places to live for everyone is the determinant of success of a country, society? Or happiness? 60 Minutes has a segment about Bhutan from a couple weeks ago [0] about this. They lived by something they named "Gross National Happiness". Which feels weird to type but again stepping back, it's because our whole lives we're told that "Gross Domestic Product", overall money, is the determinant of "best" and that's so engrained for us. On a different note, Ted Chaing's short story books [1][2] are incredibly, incredibly good. I'm reading them again and read "Story of Your Life" earlier today. Being able to write fiction like that makes it much more trusting to listen to what someone has to say on other topics. And saying that seems like another topic - how we're told to downplay fiction compared to non-fiction, when our brains evolved for stories. But that's for another comment. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g_t1lzn-1A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g_t1lzn-1A [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stories_of_Your_Life_and_Others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stories_of_Your_Life_and_Other... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhalation:_Stories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhalation:_Stories
- bamboozled 2y agoWhy are we not deciding that food and places to live for everyone is the determinant of success of a country, society? Or happiness? I think a lot of countries do, just not the USA. Money is truly king in the USA. But in Europe, developed parts of Asia, people are definitely not as rich, but decent quality basics are much much more accessible and considered a basic right.
- nextworddev 2y agoGreat article. Ted Chiang's "Understand" also happens to be my favorite short story of all time.
- tetrisgm 2y agoAgreed
- cowpig 2y ago[flagged]
- dgfitz 2y agoYou think if elections could be bought they would all have been by this point, no?
- cowpig 2y agoThere was an infamous supreme court case[0] in 2010 which has set off a steady increase in campaign. Before that influencing campaigns with money was much more regulated. Since then it seems to me (I am not an expert in this) that there's been basically a race to the bottom in politics which Donald Trump correctly identified, and has had basically a "pay me and I'll do you political favors nakedly and nobody can do anything about it" approach, which appears to be a winning strategy, unfortunately for the system as a whole. edit: I seem to have also missed a ruling this past march which had an impact: > America PAC’s work was aided by a March ruling from the Federal Election Commission that paved the way for super PACs to coordinate their canvassing efforts with campaigns, allowing the Trump campaign to rely on the near-unlimited money of the nation’s most high-profile billionaire to boost turnout in deep-red parts of the country. source: https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-donald-trump-election-2024-28d023d2ea2d06a8be99add994feb4aa https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-donald-trump-election-2... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
- dgfitz 2y agoI’m do sincerely appreciate your insight. Thank you.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sourcepluck 2y agoExceptionally good. Wow, going to be reading some of this fellow!
- nextworddev 2y agoTed's writing feels like it compresses so much into each sentence. He clearly practices extreme craftsmanship and is a very deep thinker.
- kortilla 2y agoThis article compares a strawberry picking machine killing all of humanity to increase strawberry fields with current corporations. This is stupid because corporations do have guardrails both internally and externally from society. All of the mega Silicon Valley corporations are not expanding by murdering people. Even in the ones that are expanding in ways that people question (social media), they are filled with humans who actually think they are doing the right thing. Humans with morals are still very much in the decision chain and there is obviously a lot of debate about their morals, but them being there makes such a vast difference that the comparison to the strawberry AI is completely invalid. The strawberry AI isn’t even considering humans. The article then builds on that false comparison for the rest of the article so there isn’t much to gain from the rest of it. You can make the same lazy comparison to a completely socialist, centralized decision making by a government optimizing for a single metric (voter approvals, poverty levels, whatever). It has nothing to do with capitalism or the economic system. TLDR; article says mega corps are the same as dangerous AI because they make optimizations in favor of profit that some people disagree with.
- homefree 2y agoI love his science fiction but he was wrong on AI in 2017 and is even more wrong on today.
- ozim 2y agoProblem is that for strawberries or diamonds or SV startup stuff there is a line where if you make something infinitely available it will also loose the value. You cannot equate paper clip maximizer with SV companies. Because fitness functions are different. Not saying that diamonds industry didn’t make world worse off but still somehow it didn’t take over the world to make people eat diamonds for breakfast. So the same there will be no entity that can make all people everywhere eat strawberries for breakfast all year long. Scary part is finance industry that basically already is self conscious with all the rules baked in and no single person being able to grasp it. Finance with AGI could already become paper clip optimizer - but it actually needs energy only. It doesn’t need humans anymore. So it would most likely fill in whole world with power plants and erase all other life just to have the electricity.
- efitz 2y agoThe problem is not capitalism, it’s corporatism. Or more precisely, it is that we allow a group of people, under the control of a single person or very small number of people, amass incredible power, and do so in an amoral framework in blind service to a goal of stock price growth. The problem is a scale problem in my mind. If you limit the scale then all the other problems become manageable. We wouldn’t need antitrust laws anymore if our tax laws made it unprofitable to own shares in a company with, for example, 50% of search market share or online retailing share.
- notacoward 2y ago> The problem is not capitalism, it’s corporatism. I can't agree with this, even though I think the corporate form has done more harm than good. While the idea of limited liability in exchange for a public good has some possible merit - building transport infrastructure was one of the original reasons they were created - giving away limited liability for nothing was a mistake. The shareholder value myth and corporate personhood have done even more damage. Nonetheless, not all capitalist ills are corporate ones. Many of the companies with the most capital doing the most damage are "shadow banks" - hedge funds, PE firms, etc. - which are run as partnerships, not corporations. They don't even issue stock, let alone care about its price. Also, nobody qualified to be opining about this could be unaware of the damage hyper-rich individuals are doing and will continue to do regardless of whether corporations are involved. Infinite accumulation of capital (and political power to go with it) is a problem, the corporate form is a problem, there's some overlap and they're both anti-free-market, but neither should be dismissed to focus on the other.