Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

We have YouTube plumbers. Has destroyed the industry? No. But it’s made plumbing accessible to a whole range of DIYers.

Maybe AI will be just as productive.

Seriously YouTube has been amazing for the world of self learning. AI could learn a lot from it.

I don't think we're that far away but I also think it looks different than humanoid robots.

I can see a drain plumbing system that maps out a new construction home and some sort of automated robot that builds out large sections of pipe. It wouldn't completely eliminate the plumber. But it'd change it from something like measuring, cutting, and gluing 100 times to walking around with a camera for 5 minutes and then gluing 10 things together.

agree with all your points with the anecdata that the Roomba is awesome for dog hair. awesome.

Its more likely that we’ll hire plumbers who are going to throw a robot at the job and double check the work

You need more to maintain a house, drywaller, gardener, carpenter, painter. The most important robotic help though will be cleaner and nurse. As our population ages and shrinks home help will become scarce and we'll desperately need an alternative to take care of ourselves as we age.

The most likely future is that we start standardizing infrastructure and building in a different way that’s easy for robots to use. Kind of like how cars would suck if we didn’t have roads and Benjamin Franklin couldn’t have predicted power plants and wires to every home. Then people who can’t afford the new stuff will keep paying plumbers but there’s a slow path to get rid of them. The old stuff will always be around but much less important.

I expect new “robo friendly” roads will be the first example but of course homes could do the same.

Think like how the Catholic Church never disappeared but the rest of the world moved on around it. We will never get rid of context sensitive plumbing and electrical work but it just won’t really matter

We do, however, have computer assisted plumbers, electricians, and other technicians. With nothing more than YouTube one can fix appliances and cars, or do some DIY home improvement, and the projects that are possible are much more involved than they were in the old days. It's very hard to pick up these skills from a book, but if there's a video to walk through the process - the projects become possible.

AI-assisted plumbers will follow this archetype.

> The wealth gap growing, and the median person being better off aren't mutually exclusive.

The wealth gap was growing since 1980. Is the median person better today when the median person cannot afford a college education or a house?

Both of those were easily afforded in the 80s.

Also remember: the average job didn't require a college education back then either. College has become a gatekeeper due to its rising costs and diminishing returns.

Yeah the thing is there were better jobs that ex-farmers (or at least their children) could go to. I'm unconvinced that's the case this time round. Especially for unskilled people.

Nobody’s arguing things aren’t better in some ways than the past. But your argument amounts to what is essentially trickle down economics. The median American is getting a marginal improvement - the top .1% American has gotten an astronomical improvement.

The wealth gap increasing is a moral failure of our billionaires. They should take pride in building a better tomorrow for their fellow countrymen. And what we have now is the exact opposite of that.

96 years ago we there was a massive financial crisis and depression that killed a lot of people and is directly related to the (lack of) national policies of the time.

USA recovered remarkably well, but only because there was a big pivot away from crony capitalism and towards "socialism" under FDR. Big investments in The People, unions, education, infrastructure.

We are going in the former direction right now.

From what I've seen, the small low-HP tractors without particulate filters have a minimum of electronics. It's the computerized emissions controls where they start creeping in. And I assume the big farmers put up with digital restrictions because they want to have their shiny new gear serviced by professionals anyway, whereas homesteads there is going to be a lot more DIY.

The real problem is that farming is fucking hard. I bought a vertical tiller somewhat as a hedge against societal collapse from the political movement to destroy America, but I'm under no illusions of that being a straightforward food supply. The main aim is to be able to do food plots for neighbors in trade.

Honestly I've got to wonder if we're going this far, why do you even need to live off the land? As in, why turn soil just to get free sun and water? Why not just indoor hydroponics? Or even still using soil, but inside in a much more controlled fashion.

Pretty much every piece of technology we have known so far which had creator restrictions has been jailbroken. Sure the future might be Elon & Bezos androids, but what’s stopping us from jailbreaking them and using them off grid?

The availability of fertile land.

Capital, and its inequal distribution.

The fact that those robots don't exist :-)

the complexity and expense and necessity for expertise of today's farming machines aren't what the OP is talking about, which sounds more like something from Asimov's Caves of Steel

It's actually `letSlightlyDifferentAIJudgeOutputSanity()` rather than `isOutputSane()`, I think.

Nobody sane and smart I know is advocating for AI now. All keep saying 'one day', 'soon' etc. Our megacorp very effectively blocked all of this and we don't have anything internal yet, but we are in specific market.

And basically all I saw so far was a snake oil from people trying to push it or benefit from it, even here. Trust me bro... well no, show me some hard facts and we can start building trust. Sure assistants are nice but thats about it.

Its just too flawed now to be dependable and reliable, it feels like typical 80/20 or 90/10 situation where inexperienced juniors are all over their head how future is now, and seniors just meh and go and do some work.

> If it's legal and economically beneficial to them, they'll fire people.

More importantly, if they can imagine some economic benefit. Very plausible an executive might think a chatbot is as capable as an engineer when they don't know how to evaluate either.

Are you serious? The obvious benefit is they get to lay a bunch of people off and pretend it’s because they’re forward thinking innovators instead of poor managers that are having difficulty growing their business. There’s a huge incentive to present this fiction to stockholders, which is the only opinion they care about.

Of course, laws/regulations are enforced by the party in a country that has a monopoly on violence, and use the threat of violence to enforce (either imprisonment or a monetary fine, monetary fines are a derivative of kidnapping as money takes time to accumulate). Of course I'm not arguing against these functions in general, they should be used in ways that prevent an even worse act of violence (ex. a corporation wasting the time and money of millions of people by selling them a dangerous product). The application layer is where I believe laws and regulations are appropriate though, not preventing the development of the technology (ex. trying to limit who, how, and when someone/some company can do a large training run for an AI video model, because AI video models will be leveraged by scammers down the line).

Another way to view it is that valid regulations (which in this context includes statute) are about handling externalities, structuring things so that the market must react to them.

One of the most fundamental limits on the market is the criminalization of killing other people, giving it a prohibitive extra "cost". This kind of restriction on the choices of participants is so incredibly well-accepted that we simply take it for granted, and seldom think about it as a "regulation" even though it is.

That regulation prevents CEOs from "rationally" deciding it costs less to assassinate rivals' employees than it costs to improve their product.

I did not write about need for more technology.

What I see is companies failing behind implementing existing well known technologies.

It is people who want to keep doing whatever they were doing for years that later will be angry, because whatever they were doing stopped making sense but they don’t understand it. They will not want to understand things that put them out of job…

No. Most of the time WE can't make this choice. It is imposed on us by the elites.

Do we have the choice? It feels like the market makes such decisions and regulation is not only a taboo but impossible with competition between states.

> Has the last 70 years of productivity increases led to a reduction in weekly work hours?

Yes, it has led to a significant reduction in hours worked: https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever

Of course, the effects aren't equally distributed across all countries. For example, annual work hours per worker have almost halved in Germany since 1950, but only seen a more modest decrease in the US. So political factors still play a role in how the benefits of increased productivity are used by society.

But it's a strong effect. And those numbers don't even consider other factors such as how increased life expectancy combined with mostly unchanged retirement age, and being older when we first start working, give people an extra decade or two of not being part of the workforce at all.

> Has the last 70 years of productivity increases led to a reduction in weekly work hours? No

No, but it hasn't led to a massive increase in incomes either (after adjusting for inflation)

But meanwhile everything gets more expensive so while yes people still have jobs and work as many hours as before, we have much less to show for it

No, it lead to less jobs being available.

Good thing when people actually have another job available for them.

Not everyone lives in regions where there is another job across the street.

Industrial work was really bad for workers at least during the early period. Arguably worse than equivalent agricultural work.

I’m not saying technology makes our lives easier. I’m saying technology makes it more possible than ever to build a world where everyone thrives. But it takes human social systems to make that happen. Understanding just how much good we could do with modern technology underscores the value in fighting for the right human social systems.

Huh? 40 hr work weeks are a recent thing, many people in history worked 12 hr days 6 days a week. Technology and social progress definitely leads to fewer work hours.

This is the core of my original beef, techno-optimism seems divorced from the exact things I think it’s ideologically trying to promote, and instead is just “AI will fix everything”.

And I basically agree about sort of time saving, we got smart phones, which I think was of questionable benefit compared to the invention of computers, the internet, and cell phones in the first place.

You sayin you were capable of ordering any product on earth from your couch and having it delivered within 2 days? Or building an interactive video (modern website) accessible anywhere on earth instantly (all used just to display people's resume and contact details lol)? Or navigate anywhere within minutes from the optimal pathway, without thinking about it? Or research and answer any question you have about anything in the world within a minute? Or hold daily conversations with all your friends in group chats despite vast geographical gaps? Or play games with them in - again - interactive cinematic masterpiece movies accessible anywhere on the planet?

So much time was saved you don't even realize it because most of the above was just practically impossible to do before - and frankly beyond the scope of what any human actually needs. But the scope crept anyway and now they're all normal parts of modern life taken for granted. As for where that time went - capabilities exploded, but any spare time also got eaten by tighter work hours from a more competitive market. That's capitalism for ya baybeeeee

Tell me you never called for a taxi and waited two hours for it only not to show up without telling me.

Uber has saved me a remarkable amount of time.

More-generally:

https://gwern.net/improvement

2 million years is a long time. It’s quite a stretch to say life only started improving in the last 50. An asteroid could hit today and nearly all evidence of our existence would be gone in 10k years.

That's because binary logic is the wrong model.

B requires A. C requires both A and B. But also, A has a cost and B has a cost, and spending more on A or B can maybe get you more C.

Maybe spending more on developing better computers won't actually help anything (because they've already got 640k memory, which is enough for anyone). But only half of the people who can benefit from them have actually bought one so far, so collectively spending twice as much on buying computers can make them collectively twice as beneficial.

https://danluu.com/p95-skill/

> a junior engineer who works by copying existing code but doesn’t understand why

Given the amount of time I have spent fixing code written like this over the years it is not encouraging.

While I know there have been some issues with working conditions at ghost kitchens, I've also heard tons of horrible stories from regular kitchens, so it's not clearly to me that there's a significant difference on that front.

As for referring to them as "faceless factories", I can't even start to imagine what sentiment that should evoke in me. I don't have an issue buying food products made at actual factories, and have visited quite a few. As such I don't have any issue ordering from a ghost kitchen located in an industrial area that may look like a factory on the outside.

I think this is the blind spot that a lot of tech workers have.

To them, AI is years (decades?) away from being able to produce an Excel clone.

To average people, excel is just a tool to add up columns of numbers. Something AI is readily capable of today.

> $CEO says they use $HYPED_TECH to build their $PRODUCT.

Color me surprised.