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In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

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Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#191

Post by JoeAltmaier »

aninhumer wrote: post #141
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do that now. Write a console app, where if you type 'pain' it prints 'oh! How I'm suffering!'. I don't see how that software is essentially different from the proposed software.

The parent explicitly hypothesised a conscious program. You can argue that such a thing is impossible, but assuming that it is, arguing that such a program would be comparable to a shell script is facile.

Its a mechanistic argument, that says no machinery is capable of consciousness. How do you decide if software is conscious? For instance, it could print "I'm conscious! Oh! I'm suffering!"

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#192

Post by undersuit »

bryondowd wrote: post #187
undersuit wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"would you like fries with that?" Example: 1)You select the #5 and it defaults to a meal, with the size of the meal predetermined by the most profitable selection. 2)You have to manually remove the fries and the drink, with a confirmation for each element. 3)When you hit order a pop-up appears advertising the newest derivative flavor topping for fries that you must dismiss or can click to add to your order. 4)Before…

That sounds like a great way to drive people away. An ordering system more annoying than a pushy salesperson? I'm going across the street instead, unless literally every option around does the same thing. And if Wawa in my area is any indication, there will be better options.

How much better is a Wawa than a Sheetz? When I lived in Virginia(9 years ago?) I would visit one near my work and I could order food on a screen and a few minutes later an invisible person would push it through the service window.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#193

Post by DowsingSpoon »

WalterBright wrote: post #180
idiot_stick wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Defending against that is costly. Costly, yes. But do those costs out-weigh the immediate benefits of slave ownership? Probably not. I have a hard time thinking slave-owners were hurt by slavery; they made out like bandits, but their gains don't counter all the harm done to those enslaved.

That's a more difficult question to answer. Slaves are only good for the lowest menial labor, such as picking cotton. Up until the introduction of the cotton gin, slavery was dying out in the US because it was unprofitable. The cotton gin made slavery profitable again, but it was again dying out by the time of the Civil War. One of the causes of the Civil War was the southern states trying to erect trade barriers to…

I thought that all sorts of skilled labor was done by slaves in Ancient Rome?

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#194

Post by kevinr »

averagewall wrote: post #28
kevinr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And they will be able to provide better and faster service. On the contrary, my local grocery store took out their self-serve checkout kiosks and replaced them with human checkers. Turns out there was some skill involved after all.

Do you know why? Supermarkets everywhere have self-serve checkouts and they seem to be successful. What skill was needed at your local shop that the self-service checkouts didn't have? Was it preventing theft? Identifying produce?

I don't have data, only anecdote. I've used two of the same supermarket chain which both had the machines, one in a mixed-use area next to a mid-sized research university, and one in a very residential area in an inner-ring suburb.

Around the university, the supermarket drew primarily from the adjacent neighborhoods, and got a lot of college students and local residents who were shopping on average weekly, so we quickly got skilled at using the machines. In the residential suburb, the supermarket draws from a much larger area, and there are more customers who shop there infrequently, so they never get skilled at using the machines. Even just as a skilled user, not as a professional checker, I would regularly stand in line behind people where I knew that I could have shaved minutes off their time merely if I had checked them out.

A lot of the skill involved was just in general operation: how to find barcodes, how to scan items reliably, how to identify produce and enter it correctly, how to use coupons, how to flag down help if the machine entered an unexpected state or required human assistance, how to use the payment terminal with cash, credit, and debit, how to bag items correctly and so that the machine would recognize them, what the various prompts mean and how to respond to them. There's a lot of complexity in operations which we denigrate as "unskilled" or "menial labor" which is only evident when you take the time to observe closely and see what people are actually doing in them.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#195

Post by WalterBright »

DowsingSpoon wrote: post #193
WalterBright wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a more difficult question to answer. Slaves are only good for the lowest menial labor, such as picking cotton. Up until the introduction of the cotton gin, slavery was dying out in the US because it was unprofitable. The cotton gin made slavery profitable again, but it was again dying out by the time of the Civil War. One of the causes of the Civil War was the southern states trying to erect trade barriers to…

I thought that all sorts of skilled labor was done by slaves in Ancient Rome?

The Roman economy didn't have to compete with free labor ones.

Ancient Sparta had to militarize all their free men in order to keep their slaves in check.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#196

Post by aninhumer »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #191
aninhumer wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent explicitly hypothesised a conscious program. You can argue that such a thing is impossible, but assuming that it is, arguing that such a program would be comparable to a shell script is facile.

Its a mechanistic argument, that says no machinery is capable of consciousness. How do you decide if software is conscious? For instance, it could print "I'm conscious! Oh! I'm suffering!"

>How do you decide if software is conscious?

How do you decide if a human is conscious?

I don't think we know enough about the nature of consciousness to state with certainty that a "machine" is incapable of it.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#197

Post by chillwaves »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #125
aninhumer wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we become reliant on robots to survive, it would be relatively easy for those robots to kill us off very quickly if they somehow decided to do so. Why would they choose a slow way instead? You call it a "rounding error", but it's still a measurable amount of time and resources wasted. I can imagine such a scenario occurring by accident (e.g. because the AI only values individual humans' happiness, not continuation…

Well? Maybe they would enjoy watching us. Kind of like pets.

Seems optimistic, especially when you consider how much of nature is not valued as pets to humans today. Yes, maybe some humans -- but probably not many.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#198

Post by marcosdumay »

pygy_ wrote: post #190
marcosdumay wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it looks like finance has become mostly independent It's not. The fact that when we take a little bit of human demand away, everything falls apart is evidence of that. Governments are a kind of AI that demands stuff by itself. We've been good at keeping it at check up to now. I'm not concerned about anything else being a more effective consumer until we get into superhuman AI, as desiring stuff is not something…

Couldn't industrial corporations become demand drivers?

They could. But why would they?

Why would corporations decide to buy stuff for their own sake? That's a loss of what they are built to maximize, that is money.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#199

Post by nojvek »

pygy_ wrote: post #146
sgt101 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an ontology issue here - when people think of Robots now I think most people think of CP30 and R2D2. These are actors in a drama, their decisions and interventions change the flow of the story. Robots in the AI sense (as in technology not magic or fiction) are not actors in this way, they are... Robots! They have a very limited type of autonomy, they can choose from sets of options to attempt to achieve a go…

I'm not so much scared of "go kill these people". More of "stop feeding them, we need to repurpose arable land for energy production" at a point where we won't have the know how to produce food for everyone by hand, or similar scenarios. It may still be people at the helm at the time it happens, it doesn't matter. Humans are capable of large scale atrocities, provided they de-humanize their victims. Many people in th…

To be honest I really think the world population will slowly reduce as more people start getting wealthier.

I also think as soon as you can upload your brain into a robot, people will opt into that and shoot themselves in space towards other planets.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#200

Post by sgt101 »

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #149
sgt101 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an ontology issue here - when people think of Robots now I think most people think of CP30 and R2D2. These are actors in a drama, their decisions and interventions change the flow of the story. Robots in the AI sense (as in technology not magic or fiction) are not actors in this way, they are... Robots! They have a very limited type of autonomy, they can choose from sets of options to attempt to achieve a go…

But you're ignoring the role of institutions. Eventually, some company will tell a system with access to all human knowledge, control of a vast number of robots, production plants, etc "maximize the wealth of the company". That robot could easily decide a union with a few other such entities and not a lot of scampering meatbags is a great way to do that. And that's not even considering radicals that, say, inject a co…

Hello there, my point($) is that as far as I understand the technology (I did an ML PhD 20 years ago and have worked in "applications of AI" since then) we don't have an issue around autonomy of machines in two ways. Firstly the machines have no autonomy and will probably not ever have autonomy. Secondly there are already 7 billion autonomous agents, perhaps 0.1% of these are genuinely dangerous to other humans, perhaps many of those are somehow under social control (prison, family, hospital) but some aren't.

We do have a problem with dangerous actuators, nuclear submarines are very dangerous actuators. Nuclear submarines are badly run, and not well managed by any social system.

Rather than worrying about dangerous AI being invented and misused I think we should worry about nuclear submarines being used.

Very few people acknowledge or give a fig about this, instead they sit in bars and talk about fictional scenarios involving what is likely impossible technology (strong AI). And yet today, tomorrow or on any day in the foreseeable future 100's(+) of millions of people may die because of the stupid and careless setup of 60 year old technology.

($) many other people made this point before me, most effectively a chap who I think is called Jaron Lanier, who said it at a talk.

(+) I've made this point before on HN and when I do I get taken to task by two groups of people. Some people think that this estimate is too high because "nuclear weapons aren't that destructive and/or not many of them would actually be used". I invite everyone to do their own research on this topic, a good starting point is an application called NUKEMAP, give yourself a budget of 500 100KT nukes and go after the cities in a continent of your choice. The second criticism is that the estimate is very low, which I agree with - but I am thinking of the people who die that day, not the billions who starve and die as societies collapse (note, these may or may not be the society of western europe or the USA).

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