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Meanwhile, Boston Dynamics robots are doing gymnastics routines and speaking in human language using LLMs. I wonder what they’ll be doing in 10 years. I’m not

by dangus 9mo ago

Meanwhile, Boston Dynamics robots are doing gymnastics routines and speaking in human language using LLMs. I wonder what they’ll be doing in 10 years. I’m not particularly worried about a labor crunch long term. Labor availability is more detached from economic output and prosperity than ever before. If prosperity had to do with labor and birth rate you’d have to explain why Japan and South Korea have better living standards than Bangladesh and Nigeria. The automotive industry’s production employee count peaked decades ago, despite making more cars than ever before. The amount of labor put into a product has very little to do with its economic value. Are your shoes worth more than RAM chips? Because your shoes take way more manual labor to make per item.

somenameforme 9mo ago
You're only considering superficial last mile manufacturing of stuff - not the entire labor pipeline involved in processes. Going from elemental silicon to RAM requires an absolutely insane amount of labor across a vast array of fields and specializations. And imminent seeming doesn't mean imminent. A decade ago full self driving, let alone for commercial trucking, seemed obvious and imminent. Today, it's not only nowhere to be found but, in many ways, feels even further away than it did a decade ago. A robot doing backflips doesn't inherently foretell revolution ahead, especially as Boston Dynamics bots were doing backflips about a decade ago as well. Yeah they look nicer now, and perhaps in a decade we'll be again observing little more than that they look even nicer still. As for country comparisons, it's not meaningfully possible yet because there's no precedent in modern history for countries going through catastrophic fertility collapse. And it does take some time. For instance Japan is in obvious and severe decline, but they're still at what will be considered 'the good ole days' in the future. So we will get to look on at what's set to come to much of the rest of the world over the coming decades.
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by dangus 9mo ago

somenameforme 9mo ago

You're only considering superficial last mile manufacturing of stuff - not the entire labor pipeline involved in processes. Going from elemental silicon to RAM requires an absolutely insane amount of labor across a vast array of fields and specializations. And imminent seeming doesn't mean imminent. A decade ago full self driving, let alone for commercial trucking, seemed obvious and imminent. Today, it's not only nowhere to be found but, in many ways, feels even further away than it did a decade ago. A robot doing backflips doesn't inherently foretell revolution ahead, especially as Boston Dynamics bots were doing backflips about a decade ago as well. Yeah they look nicer now, and perhaps in a decade we'll be again observing little more than that they look even nicer still. As for country comparisons, it's not meaningfully possible yet because there's no precedent in modern history for countries going through catastrophic fertility collapse. And it does take some time. For instance Japan is in obvious and severe decline, but they're still at what will be considered 'the good ole days' in the future. So we will get to look on at what's set to come to much of the rest of the world over the coming decades.

deleted 9mo ago
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