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Our First Generalist Policy

physicalintelligence.company

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Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#101

Post by euroderf »

emmanueloga_ wrote: post #38
virgildotcodes wrote: post #15

I wonder at the long term vision for humanity. We have AI replacing a lot of art, writing, coding, etc. We have a bunch of robotics companies racing to replace physical human labor. Waymo and Tesla replacing drivers. What role do the majority of people realistically play in this world?

Basic universal income makes sense to me. I imagine a society where everyone is free to create art or relax in hammocks all day. A basic universal income would not be enough to fund world travel, your fav consumer items, or ambitious projects, so I don't foresee it causing an intellectual meltdown in society as some fear-monger (As an aside: I speculate people afraid of this may likely be the actual lazy members of o…

There's nothing stopping us from taking some baby steps. A nice idea from sci-fi is food machines in busy locations in every city. Insert an ID and get biscuits that are nutritious, kinda filling, and while not necessarily "tasty", they get the job done. Like Soylent but in dry, munchable form. Make an effort to omit the most common allergens, such as lactose and peanuts.

I wonder what this would cost, and assuming it's affordable, why we don't simply do it.

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#102

Post by djoshea »

Congratulations Lachy and the π team! This strikes me as a guide star for neuroscience (for me at least): understanding how the brain achieves physical intelligence. Clearly our brain learns and masters skills by distilling and transferring knowledge about how to interact with the physical world. Some of the methods your team are developing point towards algorithms and representations to search for in the brain. Exciting stuff!

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#104

Post by visarga »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #15

I wonder at the long term vision for humanity. We have AI replacing a lot of art, writing, coding, etc. We have a bunch of robotics companies racing to replace physical human labor. Waymo and Tesla replacing drivers. What role do the majority of people realistically play in this world?

I would not say "replacing" but rather "helping". Replacing means there is a fixed lump of work, but in reality work scales up when capability improves. When you make the road wider, more cars fill it up to the max again. To think that work is fixed means to believe we can't possibly want more, better and faster. It's not like we are out of ideas.

Take software for example - with each new language, library or project on Github we can automate and make it easier to build things, yet after 60 years of self-cannibalizing software we have more developers than ever.

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#105

Post by trhway »

erulabs wrote: post #99

It almost feels easier to disassemble and resew the shirt from recycled fabric. I’m mostly joking, but my point is that physical AI probably implies a complete rethink of every individual routine from first principles: why fold the shirt at all? Why not just-in-time-ironing? We’re focusing on the hard problems because we’re imitating how a human with limited resources would approach the issue. If you asked a robot to…

>we’re imitating how a human with limited resources would approach the issue

in particular the robots with only 2 hands when it could be 3 or 4 and not necessarily the same - say 3 of the same from 3 directions in the horizontal plane and one from above, with probably different "fingers". More hands allows say pipelining the tasks execution, like staged clothes holding or shooting an RPG while one of the hands already ready to put another warhead into the barrel (generally 2 persons job for RPG or mortar) - again our imagination is severely limited by 2 hands and even in such case we've evolved minimal specialization, ie. right/left-handedness.

>If restaurants require no staff, why even have a home kitchen? We’re heading towards a cultural revolution as much as a technology one.

that seems already underway, with Uber[Eats] drivers being the "robots".

>It almost feels easier to disassemble and resew the shirt from recycled fabric.

shred and 3d reprint in a new style. Again, we are already having it in the 0.3 version - the "fast fashion". So we already can preview and project how it would look like in the version 1.0. No kitchen, no washing machines, flat displays or better AR glasses - small urban apartment is enough, a cell like in 5th element, basically a cell in beehive, ... a cell, still more than in Matrix :)

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#106

Post by austhrow743 »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #15

I wonder at the long term vision for humanity. We have AI replacing a lot of art, writing, coding, etc. We have a bunch of robotics companies racing to replace physical human labor. Waymo and Tesla replacing drivers. What role do the majority of people realistically play in this world?

We will work jobs where being human is an innate part of the value proposition eg. servants, wait staff, sex workers.

There are also jobs you wouldn't historically thought of where being human is an innate part of the value proposition but I've seen takes on here from people saying they'll stop watching movies and go to see live plays when movies become purely AI generated.

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#107

Post by int_19h »

Nevermark wrote: post #93
_yb2s wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only the ultra rich can afford and use these technologies, and they no longer employ or involve the poor- isn’t that the same as the rich simply not existing for most practical purposes? What stops “the poor” from continuing to have a thriving economy on their own, offering their own non-robotic and non-AI goods and services to one another like they already do now? Essentially if AI and robotics are so expensive t…

> What stops “the poor” from continuing to have a thriving economy on their own There can be a large class of poor, but it still be cheaper for a poor person to get their goods & services (as they can) from the corporations with the automation to provide them for a fraction of the cost, and of higher quality, than someone without capital can. When poor people get money, they want whatever technology and services the…

> There can be a large class of poor, but it still be cheaper for a poor person to get their goods & services (as they can) from the corporations with the automation to provide them for a fraction of the cost, and of higher quality, than someone without capital can.

But why would the corporations (or rather, their owners) even bother to do that, once robots are producing everything? And what would the poor buy those robot-made goods and services with? For money to work as universal medium, it needs to circulate - but if everything that the rich consume is made by robots that the rich also own, and it's cheaper than a human's living wage, then all trade would happen in that circle, and money used for that would never leave that part of the economy. So people outside of it simply wouldn't have anything useful to buy goods with.

Or, to put it in another way - any wealth transfer from the haves to the have-nots in such an arrangement would be pure welfare. Which, given a socioeconomic system that does not encourage altruism, to put it mildly, would only be done to the extent that is necessary to prevent a torches and pitchforks situation. And even that would only be the case until making killer drone swarms is a cheaper way to prevent any would-be uprisings than bread and circuses - and I think that, thanks to the likes of Anduril, we're already well on the way there.

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#108

Post by nextaccountic »

_yb2s wrote: post #88
ryandrake wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If robotics and AI are doing all the work, what are the former workers going to do for money? Nothing. They won’t have money. It’s not like the rich will have 1e6 x the poor. The poor will have nothing at all. The future is a tiny elite leisure class with all the wealth and property and access to robotics and automation that does all the work for them and a huge underclass with nothing, nothing to do, and no access t…

If only the ultra rich can afford and use these technologies, and they no longer employ or involve the poor- isn’t that the same as the rich simply not existing for most practical purposes? What stops “the poor” from continuing to have a thriving economy on their own, offering their own non-robotic and non-AI goods and services to one another like they already do now? Essentially if AI and robotics are so expensive t…

> What stops “the poor” from continuing to have a thriving economy on their own, offering their own non-robotic and non-AI goods and services to one another like they already do now?

Control of industrial output, raw materials, energetic resources, land ownership, things like that. The rich are rich precisely because they control the economic output of their country

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#109

Post by visarga »

ryandrake wrote: post #80
seventhtiger wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is our goal to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, or to improve the lives of the poor? Because the gap itself is actually irrelevant to poor people's lives. Rich people's improvement outpacing poor people's is not necessarily an issue. Second, a financial gap does not necessarily translate to a material gap. Someone with 1,000,000x someone else's net worth still buys the same iPhone and drinks the same coc…

If robotics and AI are doing all the work, what are the former workers going to do for money? Nothing. They won’t have money. It’s not like the rich will have 1e6 x the poor. The poor will have nothing at all. The future is a tiny elite leisure class with all the wealth and property and access to robotics and automation that does all the work for them and a huge underclass with nothing, nothing to do, and no access t…

> a huge underclass with nothing, nothing to do, and no access to that automation

Why do you think the poor won't have AGI in their pockets and robots as well? If we look at how LLMs are evolving, they become easier to run on edge, and there are so many of them being pushed out every day. Costs for robotic hardware are also going down fast. Intelligence is free to have, unlike UBI. And robots can build robots, or make it cheaper to build robots.

For example instead of AI, take web search - if you are rich or poor, you get the same search space and tools. The rich are not searching better. They don't have radically better operating systems, social networks or phones. Same thing with content - we all have the same massive pool of content to watch. The rich don't have their own private movies that are 10x better.

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#110

Post by int_19h »

nyokodo wrote: post #97
krisoft wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would I even bother with a hobby when a robot can do everything 10x better? Because you enjoy doing it. It is about the journey, not the destination. It always was and will be. > what the future looks like when we literally have nothing to do Human life is about finding meaning. Go to a book club, learn sailing, dance at a beach, practice blacksmithing, learn to draw the best circle you can freehand, give a tru…

> Human life is about finding meaning All of the things you list are, in the hypothetical scenario, better done by robots. Therefore, they don’t serve any purpose by truly serving anyone or adding any value to society etc. Most people don’t ascribe any deeply satisfying meaning to mere personal enjoyment, so in this scenario what is the basis for extracting meaning from any human labor?

What people consider deeply satisfying is very much culturally engrained. Our society conditions us to define our own value mostly in terms of how much value we contribute to others, and to treat personal enjoyment as at least somewhat suspect. But this isn't a universal set of values, not even in our own societies historically.

If you really want to get philosophical about it, what's the point of you serving someone else or adding value to society? Society, after all, is other people just like you. If you're trying to make them happy, why wouldn't you want to also make yourself happy? And if it turns out that we're at a technological point where everyone can keep themselves happy without any effort, why shouldn't we collectively just embrace that as a society?

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