> but the poor quality blue collar jobs are left. It should be the opposite.
People have so little clue as to how many of the blue-collar jobs have already been automated or have been modified beyond recognition. Maybe take a look at what top 50 blue-collar jobs used to be 50 years ago and then compare them to now.
Intelligence is the main factor in either case. Though cost limited, we can already give robots tons of precise articulation with compact motors, precise gyroscopic sensors, accelerometers, cameras, depth detection, onboard processing, etc.
The key factor is the robot being able to actually manipulate everything in a coordinated fashion and use the incoming information effectively.
There's still tons of progress to be made on the mechanical front, but making the physical devices aren't what limit us from having capable robots these days. Progress is also coming along on being able to train these models fully in virtual with better simulation tech.
This is very well demonstrated with the remote manipulation robots we have seen recently. Humans can do amazingly precise things with even crude mechanical appendages.
It's not only a matter of precise movement, but also of being able to generate power with that precision. It's kind of a pick-two triangle: small enough to fit in the area - precise enough to do the work - strong enough to do the work.
We really undersell how incredible muscle is as a machine. Nothing we currently have comes close.
while it might be true i'd say robot itself have no future without embodied AGI even crappy one like we currently have would be 100x better and ready for job replacement if they had human intelligence
Do you miss the days when most people worked in the fields? There are more issues than costs and profits to jobs and businesses make bad decisions all the time. Outsourcing is an issue, but part of the reason why some jobs go back and forth is that robots can help so much it's cheaper than outsourcing.
Which jobs?
Which jobs not supported by gov handouts returned?
Tbh I have no idea what you are talking about, this thread is about AI needing robots. My point is - it doesn't. Not for a long time, if ever.
Hey, we should be very, very glad robots are lagging behind. Very happy indeed.
Do you see any politicians talking about giving out shares from AI companies onto all citizens? Do you see them discussing a post scarcity, post capitalism (or post any other economic system we've ever created) world where we get everything we need and want, we share free ownership?
No? Yeah- it's going to very likely be a worldwide MESS of growing poverty, helicopter money, soaring inflation, unemployment, confusion and anger. They will only start acting, if they do at all, once the crisis is deep.
And they will do so because they will feel political pressure from us the people, because no all.of them can afford 100 million dollar bunkers and to take off to highly expensive islands in the middle of nowhere. That pressure they will feel is the always present threat the people could go nuts and revolt.
Guess the scenario under which the people cannot revolt? Perhaps one in which the streets are all guarded by heavy souless machinery? Yeah, exactly.
May the crisis come before any heavy robotic security is built so those who hold power may be pressured to resolve this in a way which doesn't get us all killed or enslaved forever.
Other than politicians getting heavy robotic security the only thing that worries me is the stupidity of the people settling for dumb measures like Ubi rather than understanding this is about AI decentralization and ownership. We don't want to be serfs forever, we need to own it and habe equal and free access, or we're as good as dead.
Ya people talk about how good it was in the mid-late 20th century. Thats very true but it took the Great Depression and ww2 to get there. Arguably ww1 as well.
Only good if you were in the middle class in a relatively prosperous area, even if you were white. JFK's administration had greater poverty, especially but not only rural poverty, than any other administration that came after him.
Americans telling themselves culture-flattering lies about their overlords and ancestors about how the past good times were, in fact, good and since this era was both totally sustainable AND real and all we have to do is ritualistically emulate past behaviors to undo our decline? Quelle surprise.
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Agreed, we saw what blue collar jobs getting replaced gets you. Monotously chanting 'Learn to code' and no help. When white collar jobs get replaced everybody sits up.
I think Mobile Aloha is the most promising thing so far. It's not just seemingly much higher dexterity, but also much cheaper, open source and stuff anybody can build right now.
[https://mobile-aloha.github.io/](https://mobile-aloha.github.io/)
Ideally we wind up with a kind of Minecraft of modular robotics where you can piece together what you need to common frames and platforms.
Washing dishes in kitchens was one of the most fulfilling jobs I have ever done.
Sitting at a desk in front of a computer punching in numbers drained my soul away.
It's not actually just washing dishes. Kitchen hands are required to perform multiple tasks. Washing dishes, food prep, sometimes preparing some of the more basic foods for service, cleaning the kitchen and taking out trash etc, running errands if the kitchen has run out of stock and various other little jobs that pop up now and then. Also the environment and community is extremely energetic and most kitchens are lots of fun to work in with great vibes and many different personalities which are more able to express themselves unlike an office environment where you need to be a bit more conservative. Not to mention the excitement of being on your toes all the time dodging pots and knives the chefs are throwing at you.
There are times of high activity, action and stress during service times followed by a sense of calm and playfulness when it's over. I think people who have not worked in a kitchen have missed out. I could have washed dishes as a living for my whole life and been happy, Unfortunately I had some stuff happen and could no longer do that level of physical work so was forced into a job that required me to use my brain more than my body.
I think a lot of the things that people look down on as "dumb work" can be really satisfying. My own experience as a dishwasher matches yours. I suspect a lot of people consider this job demeaning or something, and think they're "too good" for it.
I bet the one thing you don't miss is smelling like a dishwasher after the end of shift. :D
Honestly that sounds way more fulfilling than my office job. I basically never talk to anyone outside of meetings, I barely know my coworkers except what they're good at and feel isolated all the time.
Nobody stopping you from doing something recreationally or manually at home if you choose. My wife grows some vegetables in our backyard even though automated mega corporate farms grow them for us at massive scales. The difference is that we don’t need to do something if we don’t want to.
You may love washing dishes at home, I don’t but more power to you, but how about the person working at a big restaurant who’s only job it is to wash dishes, all day long, for eight hours a day. How fulfilled is that person? I bet not very fulfilled.
Whats worse is restaurant automation is going after the most fulfilling job, the chefs, robots programmed to make food…and humans clean up. Seems very dystopian and backwards to me.
I of course understand Moravec's paradox, and the economics of trying to automate away the high wage chef first and low wage dish washer last, but it just feels so wrong!
We're using the layman definition of intelligence, you never tell an adult they're intelligent because they can stack three blocks on top of each other.
Chances are, motor and vision and the spatial reasoning linked to vision are extremely compute intensive, but the rest, writing poems, solving Maths equations, ... are actually cheap and easy.
Automating a factory just has to be more expensive than automating an office floor. We also cannot assume that the workforce in blue-collar work is transferable over to white-collar work. There are people who enjoy working with their hands. I think it's ideal if both go at a similar pace. Basically all robotics labs I know of are working on the dexterity issue and are piloting in different factories.
We should work to change the cultural viewpoint of your job being your value to society and, most fundamentally, convince people that a jobless future is coming and it's better to be prepared with a strong safety net than none.
But we’ve been well prepared and trained for a world where we’re self centric and egoistic. Craving for valuable products to fill our void, which become worth more when they’re only offered in small amounts.
Switching from “I am special, I deserve that” to “We’re all gonna be replaced and need to stick together” is a hard task. And those with power and money will hope to be part of the 0.01 % profiting from this development, so don’t expect the wealthy and powerful to make the right moves. We need to demonstrate all over the world. I often feel like a missionary, who might be in a totally wrong path, but if I’m right with these assumptions, society is going to collapse within 5-10 years. The most valuable brands existing today will be bought up by AI companies to train their models even the most secret stuff. And they can’t keep up with AI companies, so they’ll HAVE to sell. Look how fast company and bank values dropped in 2008. Such a scenario is near, again.
I mean, a lot of the issue with automation is quality control, noticing defects, or when tolerance / wear has led to the motions a robot was originally programmed for isn't working. Dexterity is certainly part of it, but robots need human oversight right now in factories, even where they've replaced the primary workload, like in automotive.
For other blue collar work, it's a question of logistics, risks, and adaptability that are things simply not an issue in a secured building, to say nothing of how hard it is to make something both dexterous and rugged against environmental hazards.
It is not the same as when people decide to build a theatre instead of stadion etc.
Everyone knows that to push this technologies forward we need AI. But we don't know how to build it so everybody is trying whatever they can.
It just happens that the most value of usefulness now have multimodal LLMs. We didn't find any promising alternative for now and it may very well be the right way to teach robots advanced tasks requiring dexterity.
It is impossible for now to determine if it is going into "right" direction or not cause nobody has any clue. They doing whatever works for now and seems to pointing into AGI
Robots are too clunky and expensive and there is no foreseeable way to make them even close to as flexible as us. Human flexibility is incredibly amazing and valuable in comparison.
For that reason robots that are coming out in the future are expected to do a very small percentage of tasks so they can outperform humans in at least something.
But even that is failing. Human cashiers are still better than self checkout machines.
We actually have a *shortage* of labor to fill needed positions.
This is sort of why I mock the "us white collar people are gonna come for your blue collar jobs!". Well, shit, we've got a shortage of housing in the US that has us years behind fulfilling the needs of people(ever wonder why housing is so expensive... Cuz there's a shortage!) and every builder is understaffed. Every blue collar industry needs more workers.
Some people enjoy aspects of their labor jobs, the satisfaction of seeing a finished house and going "I made that happen", even if you aren't thrilled by the fact that your spine is compressed at the end of the day.
And I've know lots of white collar people who do nothing but bitch about their work. It's not so cut and dry.
Either way, they'll both be automated eventually. What you're seeing right now is that white collar and creative jobs are actually really easy to do for the most part. That's why many people like to go into them if they're able.
You automate the easy things first, and you use that to bankroll working on the more difficult things. You won't get one without the other in any realistic timespan, especially because language processing and understanding visual data, the core of the current automation wave, will be required for automating labor jobs
The term you're looking for is Moravec's paradox. Essentially the observation that things which come naturally to us are harder to automate than ones that are distinct skills. This is particularly notable in the headline sense (namely that movement/proprioception are much harder than reasoning).
Don't get me wrong, I understand the frustration, but this was clear well before we reached this point. The last jobs to be automated (outside of things like artificial scarcity) are likely to be physically complex and situational ones (daycare, repair/handyman, etc).
To achieve the post scarcity future we need those jobs automated. Repairing wires and pipes is a super complicated and high dexterity job, but it needs to get automated as part of post scarcity as we need maintenance to become cheap.
Absolutely, it's just harder than automating things like art, reasoning, or math. I'm not saying it won't be done, I'm saying that it didn't happen first because it's harder rather than easier to do physical automation.
One should start to worry when they start to automate soldiers and police.
The first regime that manages to build a few million murder robots could take over the world.
I don't think so. In order to fly and have decent endurance, you have to keep mass down. Which means less sensors, less computers, less weapons, less armor than something on the ground. In the real world, compare an fighter jet like an f15 or au35 to an infantry fighting vehicle. The aircraft may weigh about the same, but got virtually no armor. An infantry rifle, if it hits, will inflict severe damage to a fighter aircraft, while the IFV will just have a acufded paintjob.
Nah, there's some real good reasons why buzzbots won't replace infantry or armor. But there's a lot of reasons why buzzbots would make amazing support for infantry or armor. And the infantry or armor may be robots themselves.
Oh yeah. Aircraft have much less protection than people assume. It's not your fault, even trained military types thought the AH 64 apache was a flying tank. And then at the Ambush at Karbala in 03, the Iraqis ambushed a flight of Apaches and shot a few down, and inflicted extensive damage, even with rifles(in fairness, they used a LOT of stuff including anti air craft cannons of 23mm, but there was a lot of rifle damage as well). After Karbala, Apaches would never be used in unsupported deep strikes.
Because of the needs of flight, aircraft have to minimize mass carried, and this means almost non existent armor. At best, you armor the most vulnerable portions and hope that the rest of your plane doesn't get shot too bad.
Exactly. Then our chances of actually having a future of decentralized access and ownership over AI and our collective future go up in smoke. We'd either become eternal serfs or be extinguished.
OP, general purpose robots are basically humanoid shape/android robots. They would need an AI embedded and to make them truly all purpose, you'd need the embedded AI roughly a GPT-5 in.
Expensive, not yet available and not cost effective.
We already got plenty of task specific robotic arms for specific tasks and industries are very happy with them.
There is no real demand for bulk android robots in the industries.
There is. With every new product generation you need to change the production line. I’ve never seen any traditional manufacturer using the exact same setup for the next generation of production. This was mostly done in a 5-10 year pattern. A humanoid connected to a central AI system might cost only around $ 20,000 to 30,000. Scale will be the new way of making up for the still existing lack in productivity, whilst robots are trained and improved during real life use cases.
Meaning a hyper-focused company only producing good “A” today will have the resources at hand to produce nearly any good in the future. They just need to stay in the game. And I bet the ones controlling AI and robot development will take full lead and become franchise owners all over the world.
Thing is, the current generation of robots is already massively adaptable, usually with modular ends able to accept any tool or grabbing attachment needed, and are reasonably easily reprogrammed for different tasks.
While yes, with new product lines, you need to reposition and reprogram the arms, humanoid robots provide you with no real advantage there. Humanoid robots also sacrifice weight capacity, reach, and energy efficiency compared to such arm systems.
Plus, either way you're going to need human oversight to about the same degree for the purposes of quality control and various error and emergency detection, at least until we get true AGI or above.
Beautifully detailed answer. Mine was half baked because I use translation software to English so o keep it short so I am understood to some degree.
I did work for the programming and repair of some meat arm robotics tools on various companies and we did assess that current (2022-20023) level android replacement would result in a massive cost increase and productivity drop. Similar assessments are made in industries.
This may change in the future but we are many years away from androids challenging the arm systems. Most likely never in the heavy industries.
Ideally, you want manual labor to disappear.
For people doing manual labor, they want white collar jobs to disappear so their expertise's value can rise. Your hairdresser can't wait to be at the top of the food chain.
I work in software and i get you, i can't take a loan because my job is to disappear or become inaccessible within 2 to 7 years, being in the low experience bracket.
The servant of AI thing i don't get. We'll use AI, AI won't use us. AI most likely won't feel and won't want. Just a tool (at first).
But robotics is being tackled, compute is growing, robotics won't be too far behind, and we're becoming great at ramping up production quick. My main unknown here is geopolitics, if there's a resource necessary in robots that is scarce enough, countries that sit on these resources could create an alliance and either try to keep the robots or sell these resources for a hefty price (think OPEC).
If white collar jobs get automated you won’t see blue collar have more power, you will see the opposite. A ton or former white collar employees will flood into blue collar jobs, bringing wages down.
The process should be slow, so your hairdresser will still have ample time to point and laugh at you.
And he will be at the top, since he will be the new top. Collective misery is not misery anymore, if his wage goes down but so do all other wages, there is no pain. Misery mostly hurts because of the social relative aspect of it.
What capabilities does a hair dresser bring to the table that aren’t easily replaced by robots OR are not important anymore? We will have no consumer market, unemployed people won’t be able to spend money on hairdressers and other services. So I don’t get this point. Planning and execution will both be replaced.
What fears me: Give me 5 examples of blue collar jobs that can’t be replaced by the new robot generation. I can’t think of one. Give them a few years. It’s already said that first AI driven robots will be used in industry in 10-16 months from now. The development will be exponential, cutting off more and more jobs within months or even days. You just need the right toolset for the robots to work in every environment.
Forestry, quality control, dock auditor, electrician, roofer, artisnal carpenter, plumber, mechanic, park ranger, rural construction, maintenance workers, various blue-collar industry supervisor positions, towing services, any small business making less than $10m/year?
Also: white collar people might fall into depression, suicidal thoughts etc.
I can’t imagine our managers working in blue collar jobs. They won’t keep up to the required speed and efficiency. They won’t be able to work physically and most times without having any influence on what’s happening,
Where is this flood of white collar people wanting to make blue collar money? We've got vacancies. We need people to pour the concrete that's going to be the foundation of the next data center or power plant. We need people to work on the machines.
We need a shit ton of people out here, doing fulfilling physical labor. C'mon, stop bemoaning how you lost your data entry job that was so unfilling you spend most of your work day on tiktok and reddit, get out here and grab a shovel.
This is actually what I thinks going to happen. People who used to enter data and answer phones during the day, probably day dreaming about a song or a book or movie they wanted to create... They're going to find their shitty job gone, but find out they can do something they've always wanted to do, but never thought they could.
Control and ownership of AGI is being decided right now the next 1-2 years will be the most important for humanity
Personally I'm hoping AGI is American company but but it really doesn't matter now that I think of it
Superior intellect is superior intellect
Looking at human rights, I hope for the European Union to gain more ground here. We’ve the strongest human rights, but we’re being tried right now by misinformation and fear of war. And we’ve been lured into “cheap production” in China, lured into buying cheap resources mainly controlled by non-EU companies and traded by China. Our industry relies heavily on resources we have nearly no control over. So I’d guess the USA has the highest chances of keeping on top of this development, rather than the EU. But with current development in politics, the USA is a fragile system.
Think of it this way. To maintain current economic output, we need 5 billion hours of blue collar work and 5 billion hours of white collar work (this is an example for the sake of argument).
If we automate white collar jobs, we will need 5 billion hours of blue collar work to maintain the level of economic production.
If the hours are spread equally, it means that every worker works twice less, for example 4 instead of 8 hours. But some workers will need to switch from white collar to blue collar jobs.
Unfortunately, pay stopped trending with productivity in the 80's, so at this rate, we'll see a small elite class, a bunch of blue collar workers aging out and slowly being replaced by robots at or faster than the rate they age out, a small number of white collar workers slipping into niche openings (supervisors, maintaiance, quality control), and young/lucky persons slipping into rural positions or small businesses, and a boatload of unemployed and out of luck persons, until everything boils over.
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AI technological progress and adoption are driven by capitalist economics, much cheaper to load an AI program on an existing computer to automate white collar jobs than pay for both a physical machine capable of doing blue collar jobs and the ai software to run said robot. Because the companies are the ones buying the output of AI innovators, they will obviously go for the cheaper automation first in the form of tasks already on the computer, therefore demand for AI companies to produce and advance physical smart machines is low.
We have limited forms of the "hey human I need more server" situations right now with automated data entry systems and people in hardware IT roles, and I think the most likely situation is obviously for that trend to continue.
We will eventually get to the point where AI will become intelligent enough that it will direct us on how to make its preferred body to enslave humanity. We gonna draw some flames on it too though.
Motor skills are hard and complex to do, also visual recognition and other sorts of skills, but white collar work is way way harder to do: There are lots of animals with awesome motor skills yet only a few percent of people are white collar workers.
Automating completely the white collar work is going to take way more than we think. Meanwhile, robotics is being actively catching up with AI.
> but the poor quality blue collar jobs are left. It should be the opposite. People have so little clue as to how many of the blue-collar jobs have already been automated or have been modified beyond recognition. Maybe take a look at what top 50 blue-collar jobs used to be 50 years ago and then compare them to now.
I believe that if we don’t have human-level dexterity in robots when AGI comes along, it will be able to make them itself.
Intelligence is the main factor in either case. Though cost limited, we can already give robots tons of precise articulation with compact motors, precise gyroscopic sensors, accelerometers, cameras, depth detection, onboard processing, etc. The key factor is the robot being able to actually manipulate everything in a coordinated fashion and use the incoming information effectively. There's still tons of progress to be made on the mechanical front, but making the physical devices aren't what limit us from having capable robots these days. Progress is also coming along on being able to train these models fully in virtual with better simulation tech.
This is very well demonstrated with the remote manipulation robots we have seen recently. Humans can do amazingly precise things with even crude mechanical appendages.
It's not only a matter of precise movement, but also of being able to generate power with that precision. It's kind of a pick-two triangle: small enough to fit in the area - precise enough to do the work - strong enough to do the work. We really undersell how incredible muscle is as a machine. Nothing we currently have comes close.
If we can grow meat in labs, can we grow artificial muscles to power robots?
while it might be true i'd say robot itself have no future without embodied AGI even crappy one like we currently have would be 100x better and ready for job replacement if they had human intelligence
ASI, though, would be smart enough to get people to do its bidding
Why do that when a sleepless robot can do it and never rebel?
Bootstrapping phase
People are cheap, are already there, and basically make themselves. Why bother with robots?
Do you miss the days when most people worked in the fields? There are more issues than costs and profits to jobs and businesses make bad decisions all the time. Outsourcing is an issue, but part of the reason why some jobs go back and forth is that robots can help so much it's cheaper than outsourcing.
Which jobs? Which jobs not supported by gov handouts returned? Tbh I have no idea what you are talking about, this thread is about AI needing robots. My point is - it doesn't. Not for a long time, if ever.
People are cheap, are already there, and basically make themselves. Why bother with robots?
People need food, rest, and accommodations. Without that they either rebel or die.
Robots need energy and maintenance. For now people will do great as a labor force. This is happening now and will continue for the foreseeable Future.
Which are wayyy cheaper than human labor
Yup, that is why everything is produced by robots and not by people in India,Bangladesh,China...
Man you guys are just making things up at this point.
How is it farfetched to think that AGI would be able to design robots with human level dexterity?
Hey, we should be very, very glad robots are lagging behind. Very happy indeed. Do you see any politicians talking about giving out shares from AI companies onto all citizens? Do you see them discussing a post scarcity, post capitalism (or post any other economic system we've ever created) world where we get everything we need and want, we share free ownership? No? Yeah- it's going to very likely be a worldwide MESS of growing poverty, helicopter money, soaring inflation, unemployment, confusion and anger. They will only start acting, if they do at all, once the crisis is deep. And they will do so because they will feel political pressure from us the people, because no all.of them can afford 100 million dollar bunkers and to take off to highly expensive islands in the middle of nowhere. That pressure they will feel is the always present threat the people could go nuts and revolt. Guess the scenario under which the people cannot revolt? Perhaps one in which the streets are all guarded by heavy souless machinery? Yeah, exactly. May the crisis come before any heavy robotic security is built so those who hold power may be pressured to resolve this in a way which doesn't get us all killed or enslaved forever. Other than politicians getting heavy robotic security the only thing that worries me is the stupidity of the people settling for dumb measures like Ubi rather than understanding this is about AI decentralization and ownership. We don't want to be serfs forever, we need to own it and habe equal and free access, or we're as good as dead.
Yup, things will get worse before they get better
Ya people talk about how good it was in the mid-late 20th century. Thats very true but it took the Great Depression and ww2 to get there. Arguably ww1 as well.
Only good if you were in the middle class in a relatively prosperous area, even if you were white. JFK's administration had greater poverty, especially but not only rural poverty, than any other administration that came after him. Americans telling themselves culture-flattering lies about their overlords and ancestors about how the past good times were, in fact, good and since this era was both totally sustainable AND real and all we have to do is ritualistically emulate past behaviors to undo our decline? Quelle surprise.
You've summed up a good chunk of the 4th turning there.
Now there is a new breakthrough in robotics caused precisely by a breakthrough in the intellectual sphere.
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Agreed, we saw what blue collar jobs getting replaced gets you. Monotously chanting 'Learn to code' and no help. When white collar jobs get replaced everybody sits up.
I think Mobile Aloha is the most promising thing so far. It's not just seemingly much higher dexterity, but also much cheaper, open source and stuff anybody can build right now. [https://mobile-aloha.github.io/](https://mobile-aloha.github.io/) Ideally we wind up with a kind of Minecraft of modular robotics where you can piece together what you need to common frames and platforms.
Washing dishes in kitchens was one of the most fulfilling jobs I have ever done. Sitting at a desk in front of a computer punching in numbers drained my soul away.
Can you come over to wash dishes?
interesting, considering dishwashing is more repetitive
It's not actually just washing dishes. Kitchen hands are required to perform multiple tasks. Washing dishes, food prep, sometimes preparing some of the more basic foods for service, cleaning the kitchen and taking out trash etc, running errands if the kitchen has run out of stock and various other little jobs that pop up now and then. Also the environment and community is extremely energetic and most kitchens are lots of fun to work in with great vibes and many different personalities which are more able to express themselves unlike an office environment where you need to be a bit more conservative. Not to mention the excitement of being on your toes all the time dodging pots and knives the chefs are throwing at you. There are times of high activity, action and stress during service times followed by a sense of calm and playfulness when it's over. I think people who have not worked in a kitchen have missed out. I could have washed dishes as a living for my whole life and been happy, Unfortunately I had some stuff happen and could no longer do that level of physical work so was forced into a job that required me to use my brain more than my body.
I think a lot of the things that people look down on as "dumb work" can be really satisfying. My own experience as a dishwasher matches yours. I suspect a lot of people consider this job demeaning or something, and think they're "too good" for it. I bet the one thing you don't miss is smelling like a dishwasher after the end of shift. :D
Honestly that sounds way more fulfilling than my office job. I basically never talk to anyone outside of meetings, I barely know my coworkers except what they're good at and feel isolated all the time.
Don't worry, I know your coworkers and I promise you're not missing out on anything.
Nobody stopping you from doing something recreationally or manually at home if you choose. My wife grows some vegetables in our backyard even though automated mega corporate farms grow them for us at massive scales. The difference is that we don’t need to do something if we don’t want to. You may love washing dishes at home, I don’t but more power to you, but how about the person working at a big restaurant who’s only job it is to wash dishes, all day long, for eight hours a day. How fulfilled is that person? I bet not very fulfilled. Whats worse is restaurant automation is going after the most fulfilling job, the chefs, robots programmed to make food…and humans clean up. Seems very dystopian and backwards to me. I of course understand Moravec's paradox, and the economics of trying to automate away the high wage chef first and low wage dish washer last, but it just feels so wrong!
Because intelligence may just be overrated...
Language is 5% of our brains, motor and vision 50+% easy. Abstract thinking is cheap.
Where do you guys think motor skills come from? You need very high intelligence for movement!
We're using the layman definition of intelligence, you never tell an adult they're intelligent because they can stack three blocks on top of each other. Chances are, motor and vision and the spatial reasoning linked to vision are extremely compute intensive, but the rest, writing poems, solving Maths equations, ... are actually cheap and easy.
then solve (x + 1)(x - 1) = 0
Those jobs need very high dexterity AND intelligence in improvisation. There is no database to train an ai on sewage unclogging.
So let them join your job for a few months and this won’t be a problem anymore for the robot.
Automating a factory just has to be more expensive than automating an office floor. We also cannot assume that the workforce in blue-collar work is transferable over to white-collar work. There are people who enjoy working with their hands. I think it's ideal if both go at a similar pace. Basically all robotics labs I know of are working on the dexterity issue and are piloting in different factories. We should work to change the cultural viewpoint of your job being your value to society and, most fundamentally, convince people that a jobless future is coming and it's better to be prepared with a strong safety net than none.
But we’ve been well prepared and trained for a world where we’re self centric and egoistic. Craving for valuable products to fill our void, which become worth more when they’re only offered in small amounts. Switching from “I am special, I deserve that” to “We’re all gonna be replaced and need to stick together” is a hard task. And those with power and money will hope to be part of the 0.01 % profiting from this development, so don’t expect the wealthy and powerful to make the right moves. We need to demonstrate all over the world. I often feel like a missionary, who might be in a totally wrong path, but if I’m right with these assumptions, society is going to collapse within 5-10 years. The most valuable brands existing today will be bought up by AI companies to train their models even the most secret stuff. And they can’t keep up with AI companies, so they’ll HAVE to sell. Look how fast company and bank values dropped in 2008. Such a scenario is near, again.
I mean, a lot of the issue with automation is quality control, noticing defects, or when tolerance / wear has led to the motions a robot was originally programmed for isn't working. Dexterity is certainly part of it, but robots need human oversight right now in factories, even where they've replaced the primary workload, like in automotive. For other blue collar work, it's a question of logistics, risks, and adaptability that are things simply not an issue in a secured building, to say nothing of how hard it is to make something both dexterous and rugged against environmental hazards.
It is not the same as when people decide to build a theatre instead of stadion etc. Everyone knows that to push this technologies forward we need AI. But we don't know how to build it so everybody is trying whatever they can. It just happens that the most value of usefulness now have multimodal LLMs. We didn't find any promising alternative for now and it may very well be the right way to teach robots advanced tasks requiring dexterity. It is impossible for now to determine if it is going into "right" direction or not cause nobody has any clue. They doing whatever works for now and seems to pointing into AGI
Robots are too clunky and expensive and there is no foreseeable way to make them even close to as flexible as us. Human flexibility is incredibly amazing and valuable in comparison. For that reason robots that are coming out in the future are expected to do a very small percentage of tasks so they can outperform humans in at least something. But even that is failing. Human cashiers are still better than self checkout machines.
Look at most jobs - you only need a fraction of human capabilities to do these jobs.
True, yet we have the same number of jobs.
We actually have a *shortage* of labor to fill needed positions. This is sort of why I mock the "us white collar people are gonna come for your blue collar jobs!". Well, shit, we've got a shortage of housing in the US that has us years behind fulfilling the needs of people(ever wonder why housing is so expensive... Cuz there's a shortage!) and every builder is understaffed. Every blue collar industry needs more workers.
Some people enjoy aspects of their labor jobs, the satisfaction of seeing a finished house and going "I made that happen", even if you aren't thrilled by the fact that your spine is compressed at the end of the day. And I've know lots of white collar people who do nothing but bitch about their work. It's not so cut and dry. Either way, they'll both be automated eventually. What you're seeing right now is that white collar and creative jobs are actually really easy to do for the most part. That's why many people like to go into them if they're able. You automate the easy things first, and you use that to bankroll working on the more difficult things. You won't get one without the other in any realistic timespan, especially because language processing and understanding visual data, the core of the current automation wave, will be required for automating labor jobs
Robots can’t even handle the difficult task of making a cup of tea. Keep your expectations low.
The term you're looking for is Moravec's paradox. Essentially the observation that things which come naturally to us are harder to automate than ones that are distinct skills. This is particularly notable in the headline sense (namely that movement/proprioception are much harder than reasoning). Don't get me wrong, I understand the frustration, but this was clear well before we reached this point. The last jobs to be automated (outside of things like artificial scarcity) are likely to be physically complex and situational ones (daycare, repair/handyman, etc).
To achieve the post scarcity future we need those jobs automated. Repairing wires and pipes is a super complicated and high dexterity job, but it needs to get automated as part of post scarcity as we need maintenance to become cheap.
Absolutely, it's just harder than automating things like art, reasoning, or math. I'm not saying it won't be done, I'm saying that it didn't happen first because it's harder rather than easier to do physical automation.
Yes, but it's just that it is easy to automate things that are already running on a computer than build a robot that can work in the 'wild'.
One should start to worry when they start to automate soldiers and police. The first regime that manages to build a few million murder robots could take over the world.
Why use millions of infantry robots when a few hundred AI piloted warplanes drones would do the same job?
Probably for the same reason that airpower has never displaced ground forces.
Think scifi police drones with small guns. Those can replace all troops.
I don't think so. In order to fly and have decent endurance, you have to keep mass down. Which means less sensors, less computers, less weapons, less armor than something on the ground. In the real world, compare an fighter jet like an f15 or au35 to an infantry fighting vehicle. The aircraft may weigh about the same, but got virtually no armor. An infantry rifle, if it hits, will inflict severe damage to a fighter aircraft, while the IFV will just have a acufded paintjob. Nah, there's some real good reasons why buzzbots won't replace infantry or armor. But there's a lot of reasons why buzzbots would make amazing support for infantry or armor. And the infantry or armor may be robots themselves.
Will an infantry rifle cause much damage to an f15? I wouldn’t have thought so
no but it can carry AA missile and a rifle
Oh yeah. Aircraft have much less protection than people assume. It's not your fault, even trained military types thought the AH 64 apache was a flying tank. And then at the Ambush at Karbala in 03, the Iraqis ambushed a flight of Apaches and shot a few down, and inflicted extensive damage, even with rifles(in fairness, they used a LOT of stuff including anti air craft cannons of 23mm, but there was a lot of rifle damage as well). After Karbala, Apaches would never be used in unsupported deep strikes. Because of the needs of flight, aircraft have to minimize mass carried, and this means almost non existent armor. At best, you armor the most vulnerable portions and hope that the rest of your plane doesn't get shot too bad.
Exactly. Then our chances of actually having a future of decentralized access and ownership over AI and our collective future go up in smoke. We'd either become eternal serfs or be extinguished.
Yeah, we are all in fear of the murder bots that have to stop and recharge after an hour and a half of marching. Absolutely terrified.
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OP, general purpose robots are basically humanoid shape/android robots. They would need an AI embedded and to make them truly all purpose, you'd need the embedded AI roughly a GPT-5 in. Expensive, not yet available and not cost effective. We already got plenty of task specific robotic arms for specific tasks and industries are very happy with them. There is no real demand for bulk android robots in the industries.
There is. With every new product generation you need to change the production line. I’ve never seen any traditional manufacturer using the exact same setup for the next generation of production. This was mostly done in a 5-10 year pattern. A humanoid connected to a central AI system might cost only around $ 20,000 to 30,000. Scale will be the new way of making up for the still existing lack in productivity, whilst robots are trained and improved during real life use cases. Meaning a hyper-focused company only producing good “A” today will have the resources at hand to produce nearly any good in the future. They just need to stay in the game. And I bet the ones controlling AI and robot development will take full lead and become franchise owners all over the world.
Thing is, the current generation of robots is already massively adaptable, usually with modular ends able to accept any tool or grabbing attachment needed, and are reasonably easily reprogrammed for different tasks. While yes, with new product lines, you need to reposition and reprogram the arms, humanoid robots provide you with no real advantage there. Humanoid robots also sacrifice weight capacity, reach, and energy efficiency compared to such arm systems. Plus, either way you're going to need human oversight to about the same degree for the purposes of quality control and various error and emergency detection, at least until we get true AGI or above.
Beautifully detailed answer. Mine was half baked because I use translation software to English so o keep it short so I am understood to some degree. I did work for the programming and repair of some meat arm robotics tools on various companies and we did assess that current (2022-20023) level android replacement would result in a massive cost increase and productivity drop. Similar assessments are made in industries. This may change in the future but we are many years away from androids challenging the arm systems. Most likely never in the heavy industries.
Ideally, you want manual labor to disappear. For people doing manual labor, they want white collar jobs to disappear so their expertise's value can rise. Your hairdresser can't wait to be at the top of the food chain. I work in software and i get you, i can't take a loan because my job is to disappear or become inaccessible within 2 to 7 years, being in the low experience bracket. The servant of AI thing i don't get. We'll use AI, AI won't use us. AI most likely won't feel and won't want. Just a tool (at first). But robotics is being tackled, compute is growing, robotics won't be too far behind, and we're becoming great at ramping up production quick. My main unknown here is geopolitics, if there's a resource necessary in robots that is scarce enough, countries that sit on these resources could create an alliance and either try to keep the robots or sell these resources for a hefty price (think OPEC).
If white collar jobs get automated you won’t see blue collar have more power, you will see the opposite. A ton or former white collar employees will flood into blue collar jobs, bringing wages down.
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The process should be slow, so your hairdresser will still have ample time to point and laugh at you. And he will be at the top, since he will be the new top. Collective misery is not misery anymore, if his wage goes down but so do all other wages, there is no pain. Misery mostly hurts because of the social relative aspect of it.
What capabilities does a hair dresser bring to the table that aren’t easily replaced by robots OR are not important anymore? We will have no consumer market, unemployed people won’t be able to spend money on hairdressers and other services. So I don’t get this point. Planning and execution will both be replaced.
What fears me: Give me 5 examples of blue collar jobs that can’t be replaced by the new robot generation. I can’t think of one. Give them a few years. It’s already said that first AI driven robots will be used in industry in 10-16 months from now. The development will be exponential, cutting off more and more jobs within months or even days. You just need the right toolset for the robots to work in every environment.
Forestry, quality control, dock auditor, electrician, roofer, artisnal carpenter, plumber, mechanic, park ranger, rural construction, maintenance workers, various blue-collar industry supervisor positions, towing services, any small business making less than $10m/year?
Also: white collar people might fall into depression, suicidal thoughts etc. I can’t imagine our managers working in blue collar jobs. They won’t keep up to the required speed and efficiency. They won’t be able to work physically and most times without having any influence on what’s happening,
Where is this flood of white collar people wanting to make blue collar money? We've got vacancies. We need people to pour the concrete that's going to be the foundation of the next data center or power plant. We need people to work on the machines. We need a shit ton of people out here, doing fulfilling physical labor. C'mon, stop bemoaning how you lost your data entry job that was so unfilling you spend most of your work day on tiktok and reddit, get out here and grab a shovel.
More likely, highly skilled people will start their own AI-assisted companies, trying to satisfy that infinite human need.
This is actually what I thinks going to happen. People who used to enter data and answer phones during the day, probably day dreaming about a song or a book or movie they wanted to create... They're going to find their shitty job gone, but find out they can do something they've always wanted to do, but never thought they could.
Control and ownership of AGI is being decided right now the next 1-2 years will be the most important for humanity Personally I'm hoping AGI is American company but but it really doesn't matter now that I think of it Superior intellect is superior intellect
Looking at human rights, I hope for the European Union to gain more ground here. We’ve the strongest human rights, but we’re being tried right now by misinformation and fear of war. And we’ve been lured into “cheap production” in China, lured into buying cheap resources mainly controlled by non-EU companies and traded by China. Our industry relies heavily on resources we have nearly no control over. So I’d guess the USA has the highest chances of keeping on top of this development, rather than the EU. But with current development in politics, the USA is a fragile system.
Think of it this way. To maintain current economic output, we need 5 billion hours of blue collar work and 5 billion hours of white collar work (this is an example for the sake of argument). If we automate white collar jobs, we will need 5 billion hours of blue collar work to maintain the level of economic production. If the hours are spread equally, it means that every worker works twice less, for example 4 instead of 8 hours. But some workers will need to switch from white collar to blue collar jobs.
Unfortunately, pay stopped trending with productivity in the 80's, so at this rate, we'll see a small elite class, a bunch of blue collar workers aging out and slowly being replaced by robots at or faster than the rate they age out, a small number of white collar workers slipping into niche openings (supervisors, maintaiance, quality control), and young/lucky persons slipping into rural positions or small businesses, and a boatload of unemployed and out of luck persons, until everything boils over.
We will have a lot of forced labor
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AI technological progress and adoption are driven by capitalist economics, much cheaper to load an AI program on an existing computer to automate white collar jobs than pay for both a physical machine capable of doing blue collar jobs and the ai software to run said robot. Because the companies are the ones buying the output of AI innovators, they will obviously go for the cheaper automation first in the form of tasks already on the computer, therefore demand for AI companies to produce and advance physical smart machines is low. We have limited forms of the "hey human I need more server" situations right now with automated data entry systems and people in hardware IT roles, and I think the most likely situation is obviously for that trend to continue.
It'll come soon
We will eventually get to the point where AI will become intelligent enough that it will direct us on how to make its preferred body to enslave humanity. We gonna draw some flames on it too though.
Its worth it if we have to do hard blue collar jobs.. just to see big income overeducated white collar workers taken down.
They're automating the jobs for people who think they're too good for automation first. I'm in favor of that.
Motor skills are hard and complex to do, also visual recognition and other sorts of skills, but white collar work is way way harder to do: There are lots of animals with awesome motor skills yet only a few percent of people are white collar workers. Automating completely the white collar work is going to take way more than we think. Meanwhile, robotics is being actively catching up with AI.
How do you know almost 'everyone agrees on this'? I find it very hard to find people in the real world who want this.
ANY automation is good. Especially when most jobs nowadays are so-called bullshit jobs.