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Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

epoch.ai

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Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#291

Post by tucnak »

thatcat wrote: post #218
tucnak wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there's going to be less of those. As construction industry is further incentivised to use more efficient methods and materials for their plumbing, driven by the ever-competitive housing market (that would likely see a crash in our lifetime, you know?) making the point moot. I think nobody is delusional that there's blue ocean in plumbing, or some hidden plumbing Renaissance of human labour. Do people even want…

Good luck given the codes in place for all these things, not to mention trade unions.

The unions only protect employees from the employer, not the market. The point of contention here is whether modern-day trade school could ever provide that which they say they do—career security, that is. Nobody dreams about becoming a plumber when they're little. Clue

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#292

Post by tkjef »

danaris wrote: post #290
tkjef wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i’d say likely to fail, not doomed. if you want to have a better life for everyone then what is your solution? you do not provide one. my solution is if enough people with the right thinking also become neofeudal overlords then we can exercise the change you’re talking about. do you think some day everything is just going to magically snap into place and everyone will just be fair? it has been fought for and died ove…

The solution is to keep fighting, not give up and decide that we can only ever have corruption and despotism, with the only choice being whether we are the oppressed or the oppressors. A better world is possible, whether you believe in it or not.

i agree with everything you say. i just think the first step is what i’m laying out.

gotta show them we’re not afraid to play their game and win it as well.

we should be able to play any game, any time. But based on that direct the game to be of higher moral ground.

editing this comment as apparently we’ve reached our thread comment limit.

yes, bargaining from a position of power. that would allow to direct it to a more suitable place. banding together with individuals of power to produce combined power. you say it’s impossible and then say exactly how we’re going to do it. :)

i hope you know this has been a very enjoyable conversation for me.

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#293

Post by danaris »

tkjef wrote: post #292
danaris wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is to keep fighting, not give up and decide that we can only ever have corruption and despotism, with the only choice being whether we are the oppressed or the oppressors. A better world is possible, whether you believe in it or not.

i agree with everything you say. i just think the first step is what i’m laying out. gotta show them we’re not afraid to play their game and win it as well. we should be able to play any game, any time. But based on that direct the game to be of higher moral ground. editing this comment as apparently we’ve reached our thread comment limit. yes, bargaining from a position of power. that would allow to direct it to a m…

I don't see how "become the oppressors" can possibly be read as having the "moral high ground."

At best it's "bargaining from a position of strength."

But, again, I apparently need to emphasize that what you suggest is, for any given individual, effectively impossible. The only way to achieve it would be to band together in such numbers that we could, instead, work to influence politics toward the ultimate goal of equality with much more success.

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#294

Post by mikrl »

somenameforme wrote: post #279
throw80521 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps in response housing will become even more homogenized so that AI has an easier time maintaining it in a standardized way?

But is your house iHouse compatible, or only OpenHouse compatible?

>not using GNoUse

Why do you hate freedom?

Wait brb, the ceiling fan I wrote in Lisp is spraying yogurt again

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#295

Post by robertlagrant »

rqtwteye wrote: post #25
techpineapple wrote: post #2

Does anyone else find techno-optimism really depressing? I guess one for the more common reason that it’s displacing humanity with technology, but the second reason is just you can’t get excited about a hype that is unlikely to manifest. It feels very ungrounded from tangible benefits to society.

Technical progress would be fantastic if the benefits didn't go mainly to the top. I am pretty sure in the not too far future we will have enough technology that you can live off the land somewhere with the help of some robots. Or have them do all your housework. In principle, this is great, but our society is not set up for a lot of people not working while the technology is progressed by a relatively small number o…

> Technical progress would be fantastic if the benefits didn't go mainly to the top

They don't. You live better than Henry VIII in almost all ways (other than you can't establish a new state religion). You have access to painkillers, dentistry, sight correction, and information on a daily basis, along with more chicken than he did. The fact that that's true for hundreds of millions of people is incredible.

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#296

Post by robertlagrant »

asdf6969 wrote: post #238
somenameforme wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a simple litmus test for these sort of nearish future dystopias - how long before you have an 'AI plumber' or an 'AI electrician'? I'm not just listing random skilled trades, but listing jobs that are extremely complex, 100% context sensitive in a way that just doesn't generalize well, requires a mixture of high dexterity and high strength, and a million other things. To say nothing of the numerous [oft extre…

The most likely future is that we start standardizing infrastructure and building in a different way that’s easy for robots to use. Kind of like how cars would suck if we didn’t have roads and Benjamin Franklin couldn’t have predicted power plants and wires to every home. Then people who can’t afford the new stuff will keep paying plumbers but there’s a slow path to get rid of them. The old stuff will always be aroun…

> Think like how the Catholic Church never disappeared but the rest of the world moved on around it

What does this mean? The world didn't start Catholic and gradually reduce its Catholicism over time. There are apparently about 1.4bn Catholics out there[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#297

Post by robertlagrant »

dragontamer wrote: post #142
mustyoshi wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

120 years ago 40% of Americans were farmers, today that number is under 2%. That technical progress resulted in a few companies and farm conglomerates becoming incredibly wealthy. But the benefits that we all received was we didn't have to toil in a field, and we get fresh beef on every corner. The wealth gap growing, and the median person being better off aren't mutually exclusive.

> The wealth gap growing, and the median person being better off aren't mutually exclusive. The wealth gap was growing since 1980. Is the median person better today when the median person cannot afford a college education or a house? Both of those were easily afforded in the 80s. Also remember: the average job didn't require a college education back then either. College has become a gatekeeper due to its rising costs…

> The wealth gap was growing since 1980. Is the median person better today when the median person cannot afford a college education or a house?

The house is due to population increasing far faster than new houses being built. That's a function of policy, not of rich people existing.

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#298

Post by bennettnate5 »

teucris wrote: post #273
bennettnate5 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you list the titles/author of these books? I'd actually really like to get more into DIY home improvement, and having a starting reference like this would be really valuable

The electrical and plumbing books are from a series from Home Depot called "1-2-3": "Plumbing 1-2-3" and "Wiring 1-2-3". I love them but some other posters have shared books that look even better; I plan to check them out. The construction book is "Modern Carpentry" by Willis H. Wagner. I can't find the landscaping book - haven't needed that one as much - but in my stack I noticed Reader's Digest's "Home Improvements…

Thanks!

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#299

Post by saturn8601 »

milesrout wrote: post #286
rqtwteye wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. I have a serious DIY porn addiction due to Youtube.

But do you actually do any DIY? And is it more than you would have done without watching hours of it on YouTube? I have at times watched a lot of videos of people making stuff or doing DIY. I suspect like 99% of the audience of those videos, they are just entertainment.

not OP but I am forced to. Services are too expensive these days and even when you pay, the quality is usually very hit or miss. I have lost count the number of times where a mechanic does the job right but its sloppy. Even my plumber or electrician gets things done but my drive for perfection cringes at the sloppy craftsmanship. I'm not a multi millionaire so I can't get the people that supposedly made things like Apple Park. A DIYer might not be able to do every job but many of the low hanging fruit can be done well.

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#300

Post by teleforce »

I'm really surprised out of current nearly 300 comments and counting, nobody really is mentioning constraint programming or CP, a seemingly forgotten deterministic sibling of the stochastic data-driven AI [1],[2],[3].

"Out of these 14 tasks, we guessed that only 6 require abstract reasoning alone to perform. Strikingly, we classified only one of the top five most important tasks for medical scientists as relying solely on abstract reasoning. Overall, the most critical aspects of the job appear to require hands-on technical skills, sophisticated coordination with others, specialized equipment use, long-context abilities, and complex multimodal understanding."

Almost all of 14 R&D tasks listed in the table including that are not suited for data-driven AI with abstract reasoning can be solved by CP. Provided that we are allocating enough compute resources with at least similar to that we're currently providing data-driven AI with the crazy amount cloud networks of massively parallel compute CPU/GPU/TPU/etc.

Fun facts, the modern founder of Logic, Optimization, and Constraint Programming is George Boole, the grandfather of Geoffrey Everest Hinton, the "Godfather of AI" and "Godfather of Deep Learning".

[1] Constraint programming:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_programming

[2] Logic, Optimization, and Constraint Programming: A Fruitful Collaboration - John Hooker - CMU (2023) [video]:

https://www.youtube.com/live/TknN8fCQvRk

[3] "We Really Don't Know How to Compute!" - Gerald Sussman - MIT (2011) [video]:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HB5TrK7A4pI

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