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Our First Generalist Policy

physicalintelligence.company

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Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#121

Post by jack_pp »

bamboozled wrote: post #18
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 was down voted before for asking a similar question, I have no idea what the plan is but I struggle to understand what the future looks like when we literally have nothing to do. Why would I even bother with a hobby when a robot can do everything 10x better? Maybe just "enjoy nature" would be the best bet if we survive the robot wars.

People still play chess even though computers have been better at it for quite some time now. You could say the same for woodworking or other crafts, people don't start these hobbies to become the best in the world at it, you will probably never be better than someone who has 20 years experience on you but people enjoy learning and building something with their own hands regardless

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#122

Post by defrost »

jack_pp wrote: post #119
emmanueloga_ wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As someone who has enough passive income to live with my parents indefinitely without having to work more than 10 hours a month this view is ignoring the access we have to cheap gratification and escapism. If people didn't need to work I suspect a large portion of the population will feel depressed, without a purpose and will waste their life getting whatever convenient pleasure they can afford on that basic income (…

What's a "large portion" and what's the concrete basis for your suspicion?

People are aspirational, my observation of people that have sufficient means to just survive is that a large portion will apply themselves to levelling up in a variety of ways, some in crafts, some in small business, some in music, sports, etc.

Of those that do, a number go on to join leaders in their chosen fields.

Sure, another portion might also kick back and do little else but doom scroll, but that's on them and at least that's keeping them off the streets, adding to the crime stats, etc.

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#123

Post by jack_pp »

bamboozled wrote: post #83
emmanueloga_ wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me try again, just because I find it almost comical that we so cannot understand each other lol. Think of your favorite food. Now, replace eating that food with watching someone else eating it. Is that as enjoyable? Now fast forward to 1000 years in the future where robot humanoids are eating your favorite food and turning it into their form of nutrition. I mean agree to disagree and stuff, but I just cannot for…

We just see it differently. My last attempt, cooking for my family. Let's say a robot can make a 100x better dinner than I can, why would my family want me to cook them food, even though I like it? See what I mean? It's nice you enjoy it, but you're going to be 1% as good as what you could have, so it's likely not going to be worth doing the things you like doing, even if you like the journey?

Hobbies are something you do for yourself not others. If you are attracted to cooking then it could be fun to try to recreate the amazing food the robot gives you for free just as a challenge

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#124

Post by jack_pp »

defrost wrote: post #122
jack_pp wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has enough passive income to live with my parents indefinitely without having to work more than 10 hours a month this view is ignoring the access we have to cheap gratification and escapism. If people didn't need to work I suspect a large portion of the population will feel depressed, without a purpose and will waste their life getting whatever convenient pleasure they can afford on that basic income (…

What's a "large portion" and what's the concrete basis for your suspicion? People are aspirational, my observation of people that have sufficient means to just survive is that a large portion will apply themselves to levelling up in a variety of ways, some in crafts, some in small business, some in music, sports, etc. Of those that do, a number go on to join leaders in their chosen fields. Sure, another portion might…

People that have sufficient means in the current system had to have discipline and motivation to get in that position and considering how few people are like this then that's where my theory comes from.

I'm in a pretty unique position because I've never had a strong drive to work but got lucky and got that passive income without having it as a goal I worked towards. If I had no financial or social pressure I would do little else than play video games all day.

Considering how popular social media is I suspect I'm right about most of the population. I mean just look on the streets, in subways etc. most people are addicted to cheap pleasure

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#125

Post by [deleted] »

realce wrote: post #81
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would the incentives be to provide all of that other than to curb the eventual chaos?

Why do you need incentives? We're talking about the "do art all day because you're bored" phase of the singularity. If people exist, they'll do it because it's just fun to do.

[deleted]

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#126

Post by visarga »

Nevermark wrote: post #117
visarga wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mak…

If someone doesn’t have a job that pays, how do they get those things? I.e. destitute and homeless people do manage to creatively scrounge. But now imagine millions or billions of destitute people with no hope of a paying job. What are they going to scrounge in that context? Jobs are a critical ingredient to people buying those common things with the rich.

This jump from "AI assistance" to "millions or billions of destitute people" is unjustified. Yes, AI can assist, but it doesn't replace human presence as it is now, in any field. Instead it creates demand for improvements across the board and creates more work for us.

When we went from horses to cars, we increased the volume of shipments and percentually more people work in transportation now than in 1910.

Another example - programming has been automating itself for 60 years. Each new language, framework or library, each project on Github makes future work more efficient. Yet we have seen an increase, not a decrease, in development jobs, and good salaries.

I would say humans are the critical ingredient AI needs to be effective, at least for now. And in the far future where AI can work without assistance, then it just empowers everyone to not need to work. We can use AI directly for our own benefit, automating self reliance for people. Unlike UBI, you can copy an AI and give it to everyone for free.

In both scenarios: weak AI making room for jobs, or strong AI making work not necessary, it turns out ok. But have more faith in our insatiable greed, we won't run out of work before we run out of desires.

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#127

Post by strbean »

visarga wrote: post #109
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…

> 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 mak…

Because AGI is probably going to be incredibly expensive to develop, require mega-scale access to data and compute to train, etc.

And unless the models get leaked or stolen, whoever gets there first likely won't give out the secret sauce.

Then you have a single actor with access to, basically, limitless productivity. Would they share it? Given any use case for it, the owners of the AGI technology could trivially outcompete anyone else. Why would they let anyone else use it at all?

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#128

Post by strbean »

visarga wrote: post #126
Nevermark wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone doesn’t have a job that pays, how do they get those things? I.e. destitute and homeless people do manage to creatively scrounge. But now imagine millions or billions of destitute people with no hope of a paying job. What are they going to scrounge in that context? Jobs are a critical ingredient to people buying those common things with the rich.

This jump from "AI assistance" to "millions or billions of destitute people" is unjustified. Yes, AI can assist, but it doesn't replace human presence as it is now, in any field. Instead it creates demand for improvements across the board and creates more work for us. When we went from horses to cars, we increased the volume of shipments and percentually more people work in transportation now than in 1910. Another ex…

This is all speculation based on the development of AGI. If we achieve AGI, yes, it would enable humanity to have a Star Trek-style fully automated space communism utopia. However, that hinges entirely on access to AGI and the fruits of it's productivity being distributed across the population, instead of hoarded by a small group.

If AGI is developed and kept closely guarded, whoever has it will have essentially limitless productivity, and quickly concentrate all wealth and power. They wouldn't even need to engage with markets, they could simply build overwhelming autonomous military power.

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#129

Post by ben_w »

trhway wrote: post #105
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 alread…

> shred and 3d reprint in a new style. Again, we are already having it in the 0.3 version - the "fast fashion"

Or bioengineering living clothes.

I've heard several hypotheses for which evolutionary pressures took away our natural body fur and how we got clothing in the first place, but for all the ones I've heard, if we are so resource unbounded that any of the other options makes sense then we may well also be so unbounded as to return to the absence of clothing entirely.

Re: Our First Generalist Policy

#130

Post by sokoloff »

hakfoo wrote: post #79
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…

> Rich people's improvement outpacing poor people's is not necessarily an issue. That's like saying "the fact there's a black hole in the centre of the galaxy is not an issue." Extreme wealth distorts the universe around it. There are people who have no business making nation-state level decisions that are still on the speed dial of the people who are, because of their financial positions. There's also a strong case…

> Parents who can afford it take their kids out of the default public school and take them to a magnet, charter, or private school.

I think it’s pointless to try to prevent this. Try to block it and parents who can afford to will just move to where the public schools are good.

There’s no level of forced equality (other than everyone living in abject squalor) where there won’t be a spread of resources and some will choose to direct theirs in less or more long-term productive ways.

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