I don’t think the solution is to keep grueling jobs or pay more to make people do things they don’t want to do. Of course more money is good, but at the end of the day, it’s a repetitive job that doesn’t require much thought.
What’s interesting is that if these only cost $3/hour to operate that’s only $25k/year (assuming 365x24 operation) so if these things last 5 years then that means the idea is they will only cost $125k to buy and maintain. That’s cheap enough that middle class people will have live in super servants. And that’s much more appealing to me to have a laundry/dish/sweep bot. Especially since I could probably chip in with neighbors and eventually not have to do these household chores.
“eventually.” “Plus software overhead” … “Amazon.”
For that last one, keep in mind that Amazon can afford to invest millions to billions and also totally control the working environment. Warehouse workers are practically robots already with the structure that is imposed on their work. A home isn’t like that.
Of course I cannot say when it will affordable. It may be Amazon has to solve the last remaining hard problems and then the R&D is paid for: all that remains is packaging and marketing, it may be thousands of hard problems remain. (I'm guessing someplace in between) I also don't state what the home robot will do. May the home robot just picks up the kids toys when they are done but can't do laundry - even though I want the laundry robot more the toys only one is still useful.
> That’s cheap enough that middle class people will have live in super servants.
Take into consideration that, if AI and robot super servants exist, the idea of a middle class will almost certainly have to be redefined downward. Your job will be less valuable, as you get get undercut both by automation, and by the highly motivated people who lost their jobs due to automation and who would do yours for less money. That would change the economic accessibility of live-in super servants.
Your argument has no historical precedent for and lots against so the likelihood of it coming true can only be estimated as very small and you honestly shouldnt be worrying about it too much. Its equivalent to arguing that you are going to win the lottery. Somebody will win eventually but the proba ility makes anything but assuming it wont be you irresponsibke
Couldn't that be solved via political means? You can either institute a de-facto/de-jure caste system (like medieval nobles) or engage in career gatekeeping (like doctors).
What did all of the laid off agricultural workers do when farming was mechanized and industrialized? This isn’t the first time we’re facing technology taking jobs away from people.
Whatever they eventually go on doing anyway, considering Amazon reportedly has a crazy turnover rate of 150% per year:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/edwardsegal/2022/10/24/amazon-r...
What value is a job you can't really hold on to for even a year because it's so gruelling?
this line of reasoning was also peddled by slave owners before the Civil War...these people can only do one thing and will starve unless we provide this opportunity to them...
Nobody's making textiles on looms anymore but the mechanization of that work eliminated a lot of jobs, but it created jobs both higher in numbers and more economically valuable.
Eliminating the need to humans to pick a box off of a shelf and put it into a slightly larger box to get put on a truck is an objectively good goal for the economy (which is probably obvious) and for people, including those doing that job now (definitely less obvious).
Just like how those towns didn’t exist 20 years ago, they may not exist again 20 years from now.
next I guess comes the corporate towns and company scrips.
I remember in microeco101 they talked about how Walmart’s low prices are effectively like a tax with the end result of benefits spread to the lowest income people who benefit the most by low prices on commodity goods.
If Amazon lowers prices due to profit, then, theoretically that gets passed on to consumers. So it’s like a super efficient tax where the tax would be distributed to poor people in food stamps or something. Of course, that’s assuming they reduce prices instead of just keeping profits.
If you think you have any chance of fighting big corporation lobbies to impose that, I have a bridge in SF you might be interested in.
People used to fight wars for salt. Now it’s given away for free by restaurants.
Capitalism results in abundance. Or you can tax / centrally manage it away into scarcity.
Yes and no. While, I'm sure warehouse workers don't actually like doing the physical labor of the job (after all, someone has to pay them to do it); I suspect they like starvation and homelessness even less.
> So having a robot do it is good to allow humans to do other things.
We, as a society, have no solution to that. The only thing we do have is hand-waving hope (which, for the record, is not a solution).
> What’s interesting is that if these only cost $3/hour to operate that’s only $25k/year (assuming 365x24 operation) so if these things last 5 years then that means the idea is they will only cost $125k to buy and maintain. That’s cheap enough that middle class people will have live in super servants. And that’s much more appealing to me to have a laundry/dish/sweep bot. Especially since I could probably chip in with neighbors and eventually not have to do these household chores.
1. This looks no where near being some kind of general "super servant." It's probably only suited to do specific kinds of warehouse work in a specially designed environment. Also, IIRC, folding laundry is actually a super-hard robotics task.
2. You're out-of-touch if you think "middle class people" can blow $125,000 on a robot to do their laundry, load their dishwasher, and sweep their floors for 5 years.
We definitely do, as evidenced by all the jobs that have been automated over the past 100 years and people who are currently employed.
It’s not like people who manually harvested crops starved to death after tractors. Over history, automation has always created jobs.
Regarding middle class use of robots, I meant that middle classers would chip in and have a neighborhood maidbot. Having 10 households chip in $12.5k every 5 years is definitely doable. And since the robot is automated it could just spend an hour or two a day in each person’s home without any need for intervention. Just walking down the sidewalk between houses doing whatever needs doing. That’s a cool future.
do you actually know any middle class people? what do you think a middle class income is?
and given the current trend in robots, why do you think the middle class will continue to exist?
Not to mention those are wildly different use cases. Picking items in a warehouse is a less complex task than handwashing a single sink full of assorted dishes, let alone being a general servant.
Petit bourgeois people very often can.
If by “middle class” you mean “around median income”, which is mostly people firmly in the working class (a use of “middle class” invented to beutralize working class solidarity rather than reflecting any real class distinction), then, well, no, they probably can't.
But I was thinking neighborhoods would chip in together so it’s just a few grand a year. I didn’t mean that every house would have their own robot, Bicentennial Man-style.
That was me working for AWS.
Its like saying amazon's robot dogs after a boston dynamics demo
Clean my house and cook my food for me.
In a more just world, automation would mean we would all simply have to work less. We will likely reach a point where not all of us are required to do work. We already have a lot of BS jobs. No one enjoys working in am Amazon warehouse.
Instead, automation will be used to further concentrate wealth into the hands of very few while suppressing wages for those still required.
This isn’t a problem of automation. It’s a problem of capitalism. Instead of Jeff Bezos having amputee $50 billion, maybe we should provide for the basic needs of everyone else instead?
To those who are triggered by anything related to Musk the question why Bezos gets a free pass. Is it just because he is ideologically aligned and supports the current thing or do you actually think he is a better person and if so, why?
"Don't worry, they're just robots they are not sentient!"
I can picture engineers racing to block this behavior and the robots coming up with ever more elaborate suicide methods.
- Millions of years of evolution to have as many babies as possible and to have genes survive
- Design by God
- Or some other mechanism
Wherever you fall on this spectrum, the types of thought, emotions, and intelligence that would evolve spending $150M optimizing a system to e.g. complete human text or make realistic images will be fundamentally different than what's needed to make babies.
That's not to say there can't be emotions which come out. They'll just be very, very alien to us. We evolved to conserve energy and avoid self-harm since that's part of survival-of-the-fittest. Those are not fitness metrics AIs are evolved to follow, at all.
We may see something as horrific as what you describe, but it won't be what you describe, and we might not even recognize it as horrific. Perhaps an LLM is tortured by text it can't complete. Perhaps by something else.
AI safety should start with evolving machines around helping and savings humans and empathy, much more so than these weird mental blocks we're trying to build in about never saying anything else offensive.
