Comment by happytiger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by happytiger | Hacker News Reader

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Not to counterpoint, but just for the sake of discussion, i kind of want the opposite but for maybe similar reasons. I want flexible robots that can replace my human labor. I don’t want specialist robots that are obligate specialists.

Laundry, cooking, dishes, sweeping, vacuuming, and other constantly recurring tasks are what I would love to see automated not just a “robot that sweeps” like the market has been trying to sell me.

Ever since I read the second shift book about the unpaid extra 40 hour week women work doing domestic tasks I’ve dreamed of robots replacing that for humanity. It’s a massive cost to people individually and humanity overall, and kind of a silent epidemic.

It’s crazy but freeing up half of humanity from the drudge work of daily chores is one of the most obvious disruptive technology plays. I rarely hear people put the robot revolution in this context, but I very much think we should start doing so.

Here’s a good overview for the uninitiated:

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/unequal-division-la...

I applaud — for real — your ideas and feelings here. I’ve had similar thoughts my whole life, growing up reading golden age science fiction.

But I worry very much that tools like this will be used primarily to increase corporate profits and reduce money spent on humans, rather than remove drudgery from people’s lives and allow them to do things more aligned with their goals and natures.

E.g., if we make a cleaning robot, hotels will replace half their staff — what will these people do for a living? Work in an AI sweatshop, categorizing images of child abuse?

Old-school science fiction often proposed that we’d be entering a new age of art and leisure, as robots and AI take over menial tasks. In fact today I think we’re seeing AI and robots — in part — taking jobs from humans, and in order to provide entertainment and economic leverage to richer humans.

It’s making me reevaluate all that old science fiction, as it seemed to require an invisible 90% of the population basically working for the AIs so that the AIs can curate a great life for a stratospherically-wealthy minority.

> Old-school science fiction often proposed that we’d be entering a new age of art and leisure, as robots and AI take over menial tasks. In fact today I think we’re seeing AI and robots — in part — taking jobs from humans, and in order to provide entertainment and economic leverage to richer humans.

It was also predicted in the mid 20th century that rising productivity would create a shorter work-week; instead we have figured out how to prevent workers from being compensated for higher productivity.

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

I don't think you should reevaluate it in that context. Golden age science fiction assumed what we seem to be now calling AGI and still don't know how to create. What we're now calling artificial intelligence (thanks to OpenAI) is effectively an advanced version of autocomplete with infinite computing power behind it. It's incredibly inefficient, and if we ever build AGI we'll look back at AI like people looking back at the earliest manual typewriters without shift keys or lowercase.

For golden age sci fi theories of human work vs leisure to actually take hold, we need universal basic income, or some other monetary theory that allows us to value other people for being alive rather than solely for being feudal slaves of deranged billionaires.

"Hotel maid" as a job really shouldn't exist when robots can do it better and more consistently (which isn't true yet). At that point, not before, should be considered beneath human dignity. But we definitely need an answer for what happens to the newly undignified human.

Dignity should be intrinsic, not a result of labor. Of course, labor is today necessary, (and in a way will always be necessary by someone), so working is indeed dignified to the extent it helps other people.

I think chores aren't necessarily the terrible boredom. But having a robot as an option, you can do them as a sort of hobby if and when you want. That seems nice.

I think we also will need to develop maturity to deal with our free time, but it's probably not the disaster I've seem many claim (that we lose meaning) -- maybe their way to cope with an unfair world? or my way to cope with laziness.

The main thing is how to protect ourselves from rulers when we aren't necessary for labor. It seems like a difficult but solvable problem. Being able to choose how much to work (and play) is the dream!

The end goal, which I think the vast bulk of humanity wants despite rationalizations to the contrary, is that nobody does anything for a living. People only do things for leisure. Getting from here to there is the problem, which I think is a political and economic problem. People only work in sweatshops when a) they have no choice and b) it is cheaper to hire people than automate. The Star Trek Utopia absolutely requires socialist policies such as social security or UBI or similar to get to the point where wealth and money is meaningless. The alternative is what you see, where more people are pushed out of work by automation, driving down the rate of pay in sweatshops because social security kind of sucks, making more things profitable to run as sweatshops. Automation happens only where it is most profitable, leaving humans working harder for less doing the other jobs, including some of the most menial, degrading and harmful.

I agree that generalist robots would be better, but building them is really hard (which we know, because we've been trying to build them for decades now). So I think piecemeal robots are the happy-enough medium that we can build to start automating away work today (while we hopefully keep working on the general case).

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