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Comment by idopmstuff | Hacker News Reader

My take is that the real societal shift will come when we have AI-powered bipedal robots, a la Agility Robotics' Digit or Tesla's Optimus, at something like <$100,000 a pop.

AI in knowledge work will probably see the sort of changes people talk about - jobs destroyed but new jobs created. A robot that can do cleaning, construction, even retail sales - that's going to wipe out swathes of jobs. You'll have armies of workers that can work nonstop, don't steal, don't want raises, don't have a bad day at work, and can be retrained as quickly as you can install new software.

I don't see that there's any reason we won't be able to have those kinds of robots in, conservatively, 20 years, and I don't see how we get close to replacing the number of jobs they take.

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20 years is not conservative; it is a very aggressive timetable for significant impact on employment.

I think you underestimate just what is involved in most "unskilled", manual jobs, and you also underestimate scale-up difficulties in production and teaching the robots. These are not a bunch of rectangular slabs with only one moving part.

Further, there are hundreds of thousands of occupations; the most numerous occupation, health care aide, is extremely diverse. It's not like "write the next iOS or Android, and you're done": you have to repeat that on the order of a million times.

(Note: I am not given to using adverbs, especially intensifiers, as a rule. Please take that into account when reading "very" and "extremely" above.)

Counterpoint, 20 years ago smartphones didn't exist. Now it's been nearly impossible to work without one for around a decade. Technology can move quite fast sometimes.

Smartphones are just smaller laptops, which are smaller desktops. Apple made the Newton in 1992.

I think humanoid AI robots are a bigger leap.

Smartphones are the rectangular slabs with a single moving part that I mentioned. The simplicity and stupidity of them is colossal.

> Now it's been nearly impossible to work without one for around a decade.

How true this is probably depends on where you live. In my part of the US, this isn't even close to being true. You can get along just fine without a smartphone.

Where I live, in the UK, it isn't possible to login to three of my bank accounts for admin or make credit card payments without a smartphone to confirm payments sometimes. I had to approve the debit card purchase of a small pizza via in-app notification from the bank last week.

Email, voice phone and SMS authentication used to be used but they are gradually being deprecated by some financial services.

One job ago I had to use my smartphone several times a day to approve corporate VPN logins on the work-provided computer, before I could access the Git repo, BitBucket and Linux dev VMs. All of us had to install a specific authenticator app on our phone.

Two jobs ago I had to use Google auth with my smartphone used as a security token, to access work documents and emails. When the phone broke I lost that access, despite transferring a backup to a new phone and most things surviving the transfer, because that access was associated to the device.

I have a strict policy about work and smartphones. Nothing related to work touches my smartphone. If an employer has processes that require a smartphone, then the employer needs to supply that smartphone to me, just like my employer needs to supply other essential work equipment such as a computer.

> don't have a bad day at work

All systems break. Complex systems break in complex ways. Robots will definitely have bad days.

Yeah, that's totally fair. I suppose I see it as different than human problems for two reasons.

First, workers become fungible - right now if John who's the expert on the particular machine we need to use today just got dumped and is doing a bad job, we have to either work with him in his downtrodden state or find someone else with his expertise. With robots, when one starts malfunctioning you swap it out.

Second, you can diagnose and fix it. I can't fix my employee's broken heart or lack of sleep because they have a small child at home. Whatever is wrong with the robot, I can fix.

I once dreamed of a day when robotics would advance to a point that humans would be free of labor. What would they do with all of their newfound time? I imagined us writing, painting, philosophising, exploring the depths of arts, sciences mathematics. In a darker side of the dream, humans are left without purpose, and chase dopamine instead: the species dies with a heroin-muffled whimper.

Stable diffusion poured cold water on that dream. We merely feed the computer all digitized creative works, et voilá, it's more creative than 99% of humanity, and more productive to boot. And it turns out that plumbing is really hard. Therapy, not so much.

With AI poised to replace us in knowledge work, we are left with two options: hard labor, or drugs. And a sufficiently advanced AI could pretty quickly make a plumber-bot.

The only obstacle to this nightmare future is that capitalists are winning the AI game. For the foreseeable future, robots will exist to serve the capitalists. If nobody can afford to live in robo-utopia, it collapses under its own expense.

I cannot wrap my head around how far awry society has gone, that "eliminating tedious labor that no one really wants to do" gets reframed as "destroying jobs". Obviously in reality the benefits do not immediately flow to the people relieved of work, yet this obvious critical flaw of capitalism is always blamed on the automation in question. Yet few suggest we destroy our existing automation, no matter how many wonderful jobs it would recreate such as "washerwoman" and "water carrier". Society is clearly wealthier, the more "jobs" we eliminate.

That’s just your opinion on what jobs are “fun” and “not fun”. The reason those people do those jobs isn’t because it fulfills their 7th level of Maslow’s hierarchy, it’s because it puts foods on the table.

So when that’s taken away from them, what’s left? Join a coding bootcamp?

Having an abundance of resources and people having nothing to do seems like an easier problem than lack of resources and people working 12 hours a day.

> Having an abundance of resources and people having nothing to do

Many revolutions have started under exactly these conditions. The problem is that some person or group is going to end up owning those resources, preventing their benefits from flowing to the people "with nothing to do". It's not a perfect dichotomy of either work 12 hours a day or do nothing, some balance has to be struck such that everyone can do something to contribute to society in a meaningful way.

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