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AI is different

antirez.com

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Re: AI is different

#391

Post by SirHumphrey »

danielbln wrote: post #317
nlawalker wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine a world where high quality landscaping exists for the average person. And this is made possible because we'll live in a world where the equivalent of today's uber driver owns a team of gardening androids. I think it's going to be the other way around. It's looking like automation of dynamic physical capability is going to be the very last thing we figure out; what we're going to get first is teams of lower-…

Looking at the advancements in low cost flexible robotics I'm not sure I share that sentiment. Plus the LLM craze is fueling generalist advancement in robotics as well. I'd say we'll see physical labor displacement within a decade tops.

Kinematics is deceptively hard and at least evolutionary took a lot longer to develop than language. Low wage physical labor seems easy only because humans are naturally very good at it, and this took millions of years to develop.

The number of edge cases when you are dealing with physical world is several order of magnitudes higher than when dealing with text only and the spacial reasoning capabilities of the current crop of MLLMs are not nearly as good at it as required. And this doesn't even take in to account that now you are dealing with hardware and hardware is expensive. Expensive enough, that even on the manufacturing lines (a more predictable environment than let's say landscaping) automation sometimes doesn't make economic sense.

Re: AI is different

#393

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

omnimus wrote: post #209
andrei_says_ wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how exactly politicians will jump from “minimal wages don’t have to be livable wages” and “people who are able to work should absolutely not have access to free healthcare” and “any tax-supported benefits are actually undeserved entitlements and should be eliminated” to “everyone deserves a universal basic income”.

I wouldn't underestimate what can happen if 1/3 of your workforce is displaced and put aside with nothing to do. People are usually obedient because they have something in life and they are very busy with work. So they don't have time or headspace to really care about politics. When suddenly big numbers of people start to more care about politics it leads to organizing and all kinds of political changes. What i mean…

I wouldn't underestimate how easily AI will suppress this through a combination of ultrasurveillance, psychological and emotional modelling, and personally targeted persuasion delivered by chatbot etc.

If all else fails you can simply bomb city blocks into submission. Or arrange targeted drone decapitations of troublemakers. (Possibly literally.)

The automation and personalisation of social and political control - and violence - is the biggest difference this time around. The US has already seen a revolution in the effectiveness of mass state propaganda, and AI has the potential to take that up another level.

What's more likely to happen is survivors will move off-grid altogether - away from the big cities, off the Internet, almost certainly disconnected and unable to organise unless communication starts happening on electronic backchannels.

Re: AI is different

#394

Post by lagadu »

ACCount37 wrote: post #296
thephotonsphere wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla uses only cameras, which sounds crazy (reflections, direct sunlight disturbances, fog , smoke, etc. LiDAR, radar assistance feels crucial https://fortune.com/2025/08/15/waymo-srikanth-thirumalai-int...

Humans use only cameras. And humans don't even have true 360 coverage on those cameras. The bottleneck for self-driving technology isn't sensors - it's AI. Building a car that collects enough sensory data to enable self-driving is easy. Building a car AI that actually drives well in a diverse range of conditions is hard.

Once computers and AIs can approach even a small fraction of the our capacity then sure, only cameras is fine, it's a shame that our suite of camera data processing equipment is so far beyond our understanding that we don't even have models of how it might work at its core.

Even at that point, why would you possibly use only cameras though, when you can get far better data by using multiple complementary systems? Humans still crash plenty often, in large part because of how limited our "camera" system can be.

Re: AI is different

#395

Post by BoorishBears »

yladiz wrote: post #363
BoorishBears wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cars aren't expensive by raw cost (low six figures, which is about what an S-class with highway-only L3 costs) But there is a lot of expenditure relative to each mile being driven. > The goalpost will be when you can buy one and drive it anywhere. This won't happen any time soon, so I and millions of other people will continue to derive value from them while you wait for that.

Low six figures is quite expensive, and unobtainable to a large number of people.

Not even close.

It's a 2-ton vehicle that can self-drive reliably enough to be roving a city 24/7 without a safety driver.

The measure of expensive for that isn't "can everyone afford it", the fact we can even afford to let anyone ride them is a small wonder.

Re: AI is different

#396

Post by yubblegum »

Clear long term winners are energy producers. AI can replace everything including hardware design & production but it can not produce energy out of thin air.

Re: AI is different

#397

Post by tobyhinloopen »

It's not a matter of "IF" LLM/AI will replace a huge amount of people, but "WHEN". Consider the current amount of somewhat low-skilled administrative jobs - these can be replaced with the LLM/AI's of today. Not completely, but 4 low-skill workers can be replaced with 1 supervisor, controlling the AI agent(s).

I'd guess, within a few years, 5 to 10% of the total working population will be unemployable due to no fault of their own, because they have relevant skill left, and they are incapable of learning anything that cannot be done by AI.

Re: AI is different

#398

Post by TacticalCoder »

btilly wrote: post #7

In every technology wave so far, we've disrupted many existing jobs. However we've also opened up new kinds of jobs. And, because it is easier to retrain humans than build machines for those jobs, we wound up with more and better jobs. This is the first technology wave that doesn't just displace humans, but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can. Right now it can't replace human…

[dead]

Re: AI is different

#399

Post by antirez »

btilly wrote: post #7

In every technology wave so far, we've disrupted many existing jobs. However we've also opened up new kinds of jobs. And, because it is easier to retrain humans than build machines for those jobs, we wound up with more and better jobs. This is the first technology wave that doesn't just displace humans, but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can. Right now it can't replace human…

I too believe that a mostly autonomous work world would be something we could handle well assuming the leadership was composed of smart folks picking the right decisions, without also being too much exposed to external powers opposing an impossible to win force (large companies and interests). The problem is if we mix what could happen (not clear when, right now) with the current weak leadership across the world.

Re: AI is different

#400

Post by [deleted] »

mofeien wrote: post #353
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI has already rendered academic take-home assignments moot Not really, there are plenty of things that LLMs cannot do that a professor could make his students do. It is just a asymmetric attack on the professor's (or whomever is grading) time to do that. IMO, credentials shouldn't be given to those who test or submit assignments without proctoring (a lot of schools allow this).

> there are plenty of things that LLMs cannot do that a professor could make his students do. Name three?

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