Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoever managed the index, I imagine.
In today’s news, Microsoft outbid Amazon to maintain the index.
What index? The question was does it exist.
Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
301–310 of 400 posts
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Something like Waymo also has humans constantly monitoring and helping, but I don't see much discussion about that being "controlled by humans". Constantly doesn't really make sense, riders can call for support and get a near instant response, but it's pretty obvious from some of the mistakes that humans aren't watching every ride in real time. There's video from inside a Waymo which is stuck in a lot repeatedly lo…
Would it even be feasible to provide a taxi service with remote human drivers? I get the remote driver occasionally dealing with slow movement, but I think full time driving at speed would be impossible due to latency issues. It’s not a remote piloted drone that is in the air and so has much less of a chance of hitting something by accident. Otherwise you think someone would have tried offering taxis driven by people…
I believe there's a startup saying they'll deliver cars to you, so, cars with no people inside them driven remotely, once there's a human inside the human is driving. I don't recall the name.
Waymo itself is clear that it has no remote driving capability whatsoever. The Waymo driver is in your vehicle, so any technical issue (e.g. phone network drops out, satellite fails, whatever) won't affect the vehicle's self-driving. It may give up and pull over and let you out, but since it's local any situation where the driver is disabled would be similar impact to a human driver - if a block of concrete drops off an overbridge and smashes the Waymo driver, that could easily happen to your Uber driver the same.
Hence their choice to employ humans to attend in person and drive a Waymo which gets into trouble. In fact the humans sometimes have had to "chase" a Waymo car that, unless it has been specifically told to stop, assumes it should try to complete the journey once it can figure out how. Waymo's remote support can reach into the driver's model and tweak it e.g. to label a stray traffic cone as just trash, not actually off limits - but they aren't driving the car.
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#303The thing that's missed here is that it's not clear that robot purchase, maintenance cost and depreciation would be cheaper than paying 7.5 people a salary... Not to mention that the robots aren't going to be spending part of their salaries at Amazon as a worker might. Also, robots won't be eligible to vote in elections to support Amazon's political aspirations which give it access to billions of government contracts…
That belief about Henry Ford is a myth. It doesn't even pass the smell test, if a company is only selling to their own workers they can never make a profit (note that any company, even a large one like Ford or Amazon, is different from an entire economy).
Ford raised wages and cut hours because his annual turnover was 300%. He ended up making more money through savings in hiring and training costs and workers staying long enough to gain experience.
In a way it was an expression of worker power. Which only applies because workers are humans, robots don't get tired, they don't have feelings, they don't leave for a competitor paying more. The best ones are more expensive than humans right now, but robots get cheaper over time. Ideally we don't want human labor to get cheaper over time.
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
But, some already operate at their peak. Then, you automate that and they can only shift to unemployment. The conversation shouldn't be about replacing the most skilled workers. The conversation should be about what happens to the average worker. That has an average IQ level. That can't learn something to compete with the automation. These people have families. These people will suffer.
> The conversation should be about what happens to the average worker. That has an average IQ level. That can't learn something to compete with the automation. There are many tropes to unpack, including that IQ is somehow fixed and people's fate, and that even the "average" person "can't learn something". Also, it of course glorifies and cements the power of the wealthy who think they are smart and very special and d…
That's a good point but things do change. Malthus was correct about humanities past but won't about the future (from his point in time).
Even aside from that, Learning takes time for everyone. At a certain point we're automating new tasks faster than humans can learn them.
Scaling works against humans too. Say it takes 1 year to train a human in something, and 1 year for a robot/AI. well it might take 1 year for the first AI, but copying software is easy. Training the next person takes another year. Even if it's parallelized and you save some time, the cost of training the marginal additional person is was larger.
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
The key point being it's created more jobs so far but we cannot extrapolate the same thing if AGI comes up tomorrow. Like let's say open ai comes up with a new LLM that is capable of replacing a human in let's say software development. What new jobs would it create? All technological advancement so far has created new jobs because you need someone to actually work on it, like a chip factory or doing devops. As far as…
Poor countries have with little physical or financial infrastructure have high unemployment. You'd think there would be more jobs because there is a lot more opportunity to grow, but no, it's the opposite, there few jobs and they are bad jobs. Because there is little opportunity to create actual VALUE, in economic sense. Technology brings efficiency and brings jobs. Say entire tech sector, software developers and IT…
While I understand your point it seems to only focus on one side of things, a bit like trickle down economy.
Let's say the IT sector is completely automated. What would all those devs do? Now keep automating medicine, legal and everything else and ask what would those people do? What's remaining are probably manual labor jobs for which we don't need so many people.
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
The chain of logic is falsified by the Whitney cotton gin: it was a labour saving device, which saved enough labour to make cotton much more profitable, which led to the growth of the cotton plantations in southern USA, which led to increased slavery, and those slavers actively prevented their slaves from learning to read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-literacy_laws_in_th…
> a growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they are capable of doing a/ My bet is that some large fraction of people are currently doing jobs that are far less demanding ("robotic") than what they are capable of doing. b/ Also, in my experience IQ has a far bigger impact on length of training time than it does on the on-the-job performance afterwards.
> My bet is that some large fraction of people are currently doing jobs that are far less demanding ("robotic") than what they are capable of doing
Agreed, hence the caveat of 100 watts when at human speed: Humans are not capable of competing against costs of 100W * $0.10/kWh = $0.01/hour even when the only expense that human has is the cheapest available calories.
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
For what it’s worth, I purchased from one of these Amazon stores every day for over a year. After leaving the store, it would typically take 2+ hours before my purchases were registered in the Amazon app. I agree that there probably was a large degree of automation but based on how the store worked, there didn’t need to be an army of “real time” reviewers for humans to be involved in each individual purchase… it’s to…
I think it was from a video I watched a day or two ago, describing how with those uber and lyft and other order delivery services that consumers apparently are placing those orders wtih the services, picking up the items themselves and walking out, and then when the actual delivery person arrives, order is gone, reported as missing, the consumer also reports similarly, even though they picked up the orders themselves…
Wonder if you could some how arbitrage your own food delivery...
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Per the articles I read, they did more than label training data. They also did other things to facilitate the checkout process. They didn't get into what those things were however. > "Associates may also validate a small minority of shopping visits where our computer vision technology cannot determine with complete confidence an individual's purchases," the spokesperson said.
The whole discussion around that headline has always been so confusing. It's honestly unclear. What I'd like to know is, what % of actual costumer checkouts required a human being vs what % was 100% automated. Some of the headlines and negative discussions make it sound like 100% of the checkouts required human approval. If that is true, then that's clearly terrible. If on the other hand it was anywhere below 5-10%,…
Claim was around 70%. Amazon disputed but didn't provide own numbers. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/amazon-ends-ai-power...
Maybe it was 69% XD
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#309With the rise of AI, the entire economic structure will undergo even more significant changes.
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the one hand I like to have faith in humanity. OTOH... Anytime someone in power has no need for someone - what have they done? Provided for them for the rest of their life? Or discarded them? The results generally lie with emotional attachment or sentiment. Take care of your aging parents as they become productively useless - sure. Take care of the abstract thousands of people who made [thing] but are out of work…
The point is that they don't end up out of work. We have more automation right now than at pretty much any other point in history, and the unemployment rate is not high.
The point is that the unemployed end up using violence.
So you need to create employment to keep them out of trouble.