| ▲ | iknowstuff 5 hours ago | |||||||
Hyperloop was never a company project, neuralink was a separate company, tesla is rolling out driverless robotaxis and fsd is amazing, robots inevitably are going to do the majority of work - there’s no real doubt about it is there? Datacenters in orbit seem insane so idk we’ll see | ||||||||
| ▲ | ben_w 5 hours ago | parent [-] | |||||||
> robots inevitably are going to do the majority of work - there’s no real doubt about it is there? There's a lot of doubt that the AI and compute to enable that would happen on commercially relevant timescales. Consider: "do the majority of work" is a strict superset of "get into car and drive it". The power envelope available for an android is much smaller than a car, and the recently observed rate of improvements for compute hardware efficiency says this will take 16-18 years to bridge that gap; that plus algorithmic efficiency improvements still requires a decade between "car that can drive itself" and "android that can drive a car". (For any given standard of driving). And that's a decade gap even if it only had to do drive a car and no other labour. You can't get around this (for an economy-wide significant number of androids) by moving the compute to a box plugged into the mains, for the same reason everyone's current getting upset about the effect of data centres on their electricity bills. And note that I'm talking about a gap between them, not a time from today. Tesla's car-driving AI still has safety drivers/the owner in the driving seat, it is not a level 4 system. For all that there are anecdotes about certain routes and locations where it works well, there's a lot of others where it fails. That said: Remote control units without much AI are still economically useful, e.g. a factory in Texas is staffed entirely by robots operated over a Starlink connection by a much cheaper team in Nairobi. | ||||||||
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