> AI is not coming for jobs with tasks like "gather and empty trash" or "service, clean, or supply restrooms," or "mix water and detergents or acids in containers to prepare cleaning solutions according to specifications."

Yes it is. YC has a company working on picking strawberries, even. Hardware takes longer than software, but if you think the robots aren't coming, you're not paying attention. The only question is how long will they take to reach the general public? There are test runs already in automotive factories and elsewhere, and yeah, they're slow and don't work very well, for now, but there's a lot of money going into making them better.

And then where will we be?

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z0r 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Automated harvesting machines for fruits is not an accomplishment of AI. Companies have been building machines to do that long before the advent of AI. Robotic manufacturing is nothing new.

Back in 2012 I genuinely thought the self-driving car was going to put truck drivers out of work and reshape the economy on a timescale of less than a decade. This turned out to be a technofantasy. I think AI is going to play out the same way.

AI is not a panacea for work, and the economic bubble forming around it is going to collapse with devastating consequences before we begin to see adoption of the underlying technologies for real ROI spread widely beyond the software industry.

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Loquebantur 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"Robotic" isn't new, human-level ability in manipulation is.

The same goes for self-driving cars. It's a exponential, hockey-stick curve that at some point crosses the level of human ability. There is nothing "linear" about it and your suggestion of parallels to former experience is wildly misguided.

People fail to notice, most jobs are less complicated than math and programming. The "obstacles" there are of the kind of "we always did it this way", but that's no real "moat"?

The bubble regarding the big AI firms may well collapse, but the assumption, that was somehow improving the situation is far-fetched.

People automated out of a job will either compete with those in other jobs or be dependent on support. Either way, salaries will fall across the board and prices rise. At an ever accelerating pace.

	▲	z0r an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Prices can't rise while salaries fall in a functioning economy. Humans will continue to be cheaper for many physical applications. Your suggestions of the inevitable exponential curve for the improvement and application of these technologies is wildly misguided.
	▲	techpression 34 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You can't have falling salaries and rising prices for a very long time before society collapses. It would have domino effects to the point of anarchy, people lose their jobs and banks become landlords, but the houses are worth nothing so banks collapse, with it goes the stock exchanges. Now there's no financial system in place at all, and all you're left with is strawberry picking robots and some tech billionaires living on their islands with their robot pets and flying cars. Now if all these resources were instead put into actually improving things, then we'd be far better of, unfortunately, for all the intelligence the people behind these things possess, they seem to be stuck in the "lets do the same but faster" mindset.

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elevaet an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I made the same mistake in my thinking wrt truck drivers. I've learned a lesson to be more skeptical about these things.

So far I see that my own work as a programmer has changed radically, and it is far more productive. I still have a lot of work, but I really don't know how this will play out.

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pixl97 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Eh, this is partially incorrect.

All the 'easy' to automate things have been automated already. A lot of things that were not automated is because there are small bits of problematic things that made it not worth while or the loss slightly too high. AI vision systems solve a lot of this.

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uludag an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My understanding is that all of these endeavors involve scale and are very different from a drop-in replacement humanoid robot.

Like with the particular examples you sited, cleaning restrooms can have a huge number of "edge cases" which nothing short of a robot with human-like capabilities could handle.

If expenditures on AI is as huge as it is, with the financials being as shaky as they are, despite AI seeming to be very effective for very high paying jobs, I can't immagine the capex and shaky financials for replacing menial labor en mass. Like immagine all the chips, metals, compute needed as well as the maintenance, depreciation, vandalism, etc.

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Beached 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

While they are slow and dont work well, their cost / output is already on human parity. The Figure 3 test runs are proving that humanoid robots are already good enough for isolated repetitive tasks (factory work).

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jmyeet 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

AI isn't a technical problem. It's an economic one.

There's nothing inherently wrong with automating away certain jobs, particularly if they're dirty, dangerous or repetitive. And I include agriculture in this. The problem is how we as a society handle that. Do we let AI specifically and automation in general to make a handful of people more wealthy? Or do we share those benefits so people have to work less? In short, it's an income and wealth distribution question.

Sadly, I think we're automation will mean minting trillionaires while the fabric of society unravels around us.