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Where are the robotic bricklayers?

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Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#271

Post by eru »

pottertheotter wrote: post #252
egh wrote: post #28

The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here. We haven't automated driving; we haven't automated picking tomatoes; we haven't automated bricklaying; we can't automate cooking a fucking hamburger. But they are completely convinced that it's just around the corner, because they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of…

I find this comment so out of touch with the history of the world. Would you have us stuck back at the art of knocking rocks together to create fire since the people who created matches and lighters had so much contempt for the rock knockers? If anyone has contempt, it's this line of thought. What are we if we aren't trying to move forward--solve problems, invent, and improve lives? A few weeks back I came across Had…

Had OP removed the last part of this sentence:

> Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not and most likely never will be.

To read:

> Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not.

Or

> Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not and most likely will take a while.

You would have nothing to complain about.

As often with AI / automation, the things that seem simplest to humans are the hardest to automate and vice versa.

As another example, look at translation: take an average English speaker and ask them to translate Japanese texts. They will take lots and lots of training to get good.

But provide them with a literal word-for-word translation of the Japanese text into English as cheat sheet, and after a few hours of practice, she will become pretty good at rewriting those into fine English translations. Given long enough text snippets, she'll mostly be able to figure out from context how to resolve ambiguities.

(She won't be perfect, of course, and professional translators bring additional skills to the game. But she'll become pretty proficient pretty quickly.)

Try to do a machine to translate between human language, and you'll notice that doing the literal translation part is what's really easy for the computer, but all the context is hard.

(Incidentally, that's why in the stone age of AI, people thought translation would be easy, but playing chess well would be hard.)

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#272

Post by eru »

mdtusz wrote: post #258
petra wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason there's more programming work, is because machines are capable to do more(connectivity, mobility, ux, marketing, etc).

What do you think enabled these things?

Advances in hardware and software.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#273

Post by eru »

coding123 wrote: post #254
colordrops wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having respect for the skills of a worker and also believing that they are possible to automate are not mutually exclusive. It's no different from people saying the same thing about chess and chess players, or go and go players, before the problem was solved. And it's not just blue collar workers that are a target of this idea. We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and in…

Are we sure that the ML experts that wanted to beat real human chess players actually respected them? Wouldn't they know that at some point the enjoyment of chess itself might fade if the best in the world is a computer? Maybe chess is having a moment right now due to Netflix, perhaps maybe it's a permanent upswing. But long term, I don't know if it will remain interesting to people.

Chess is now more popular than ever before.

Not sure how important Netflix is here? There are lots of chess players on YouTube, too.

Go also get much more popular in the West for a while when Alphago came along.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#274

Post by eru »

h0l0cube wrote: post #246
ALittleLight wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This video really amazed me in terms of automated game development. My fantasies are something like this and GPT-3 plus a couple decades of progress. I think we'll get to genuinely open ended sand box games. https://youtu.be/udPY5rQVoW0

Predicting the next frame from previous frames and learnt sequences is a neat trick, but I think automated game development is already very possible with simple techniques like genetic algorithms, or even a PRNG. I mean Rogue and it's descendants are very much automated game development, but GPT-3 could be useful for something like dynamic quest generation, world-building, narrative, adaptive NPCs (including dialogue…

I'm not sure classic procedural content generation like in rogue-likes is all that comparable to using a GAN to run the whole game?

Have a look at the video, it's quite impressive.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#275

Post by exporectomy »

shreyshnaccount wrote: post #226
egh wrote: post #28

The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here. We haven't automated driving; we haven't automated picking tomatoes; we haven't automated bricklaying; we can't automate cooking a fucking hamburger. But they are completely convinced that it's just around the corner, because they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of…

it's not just computer people. it's everyone. we haven't automated most jobs which require skill, precisely because they aren't easy to- and yet, teachers, agriculture workers, and construction crews are some of the lowest paid sectors. and then there are complaints about these people being lazy and there not being enough people who want to pursue these professions. wel guess what? pay them a decent wage for a change…

Complaints that there aren't enough workers in the labor market are equivalent to complaints that wages are too high. Your proposed solution is really just a restatement of the problem.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#276

Post by eru »

afrodc_ wrote: post #267
meowkit wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self driving hours having a lower incident rate than human drivers. That’s the minimum. Having a 99.9x% success rate (put as many 9s as you desire) is your qualifier and that’s a standard measure in operational uptime.

I've heard the opposite of this in that self driving cars underperform compared to human drivers across the board. The sample size of self driving cars doing everything a driver does is also miniscule. Do you have a source?

So far Google's self-driving cars have vastly fewer accidents than humans have per mile. Or what kind of performance are you interested in? I am sure, they could also be made to drive faster than humans and still be safer on average thanks to superior reflexes and foresight.

But what do you mean by 'across the board'?

As far sources, a web search gives many articles about safety of self driving cars. See eg https://www.wsj.com/articles/self-driving-cars-could-save-ma...

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#277

Post by bserge »

pottertheotter wrote: post #252
egh wrote: post #28

The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here. We haven't automated driving; we haven't automated picking tomatoes; we haven't automated bricklaying; we can't automate cooking a fucking hamburger. But they are completely convinced that it's just around the corner, because they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of…

I find this comment so out of touch with the history of the world. Would you have us stuck back at the art of knocking rocks together to create fire since the people who created matches and lighters had so much contempt for the rock knockers? If anyone has contempt, it's this line of thought. What are we if we aren't trying to move forward--solve problems, invent, and improve lives? A few weeks back I came across Had…

Why not build the CNC router? It's a surprisingly simple machine, you could build one of any size yourself. There's even open source firmware and designs around. Bonus points for making it double as a laser etcher/cutter :D

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#278

Post by exporectomy »

failuser wrote: post #143
waynesonfire wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol.. and we're talking about AI replacing humans next year so come get your basic income check.

AI replacing humans as workers will not result in basic income. It will result either eradication of non-ruling classes or humanity itself.

Historically, most people were farmers. That got automated, and yea, I guess the non-ruling classes were eradicated in the sense that we stopped having serfs and slaves and everyone became more powerful, could own land, etc. It was good news, not bad.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#279

Post by eru »

Shorel wrote: post #238
ALittleLight wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automated tools will lower the difficulty of coding to the point where it'll be easy to pick up and be massively productive. Developers will be replaced by domain experts becoming productive developers easily with automated tools.

Didn't happen with Visual Basic, has not happened with JavaScript. Domain experts are all using Excel, not any other automated tool.

And, honestly, Excel is a pretty good tool for that.

I just hope we could improve on it.

See eg https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/podcast/advancing-e...

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#280

Post by [deleted] »

heavyset_go wrote: post #135
munk-a wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This plays exactly into the OP's comment - but if that is your sincerely held belief there are ~4,000 bricklayers~[1] in America today and you could make a whole boatload of money if you could automate their work. 1. According to the BLS link below it's actually closer to 50,000.

> there are 4,000 bricklayers in America today There are over 50,000 bricklayers in the US according to the BLS[1]. [1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472021.htm

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