Comment by plaidfuji | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plaidfuji | Hacker News Reader

I generally agree with the prevailing commentary here, i.e. that automating app development and maths proofs may not be as world-changing as the Artificial Intelligentsia purport / “fear” it to be.

But also, upon more reflection, it occurred to me that if we’re able to create a competent humanoid robot, that could legitimately be world changing in some good and other very bad ways. The scary part is that I don’t believe there’s any major physical / energetic barrier to this. The hardware exists, the power supplies are light enough. The only part that’s lagging is the software and motion contols; the intelligence. The part that is experiencing breakthroughs at an accelerating pace.

What if a highly intelligent and physically competent robot were available for the price of a cheap car, say ~$20k? What if that robot were competent enough to cook, clean, assist the elderly, move things around, assemble and disassemble things, etc? Billions of jobs would be displaced, or hit with a very concrete maximum wage.

Many white collar jobs, while still at risk for displacement as well, benefit from barriers like IT integration and data privacy hurdles, and the fact that corporate higher-ups simply prefer to communicate with humans.

But most blue collar / manual labor jobs have almost the opposite condition: humans introduce risk, and generally don’t enhance anybody’s “experience” - see people’s somewhat odd acceptance of higher fares for a Waymo vs an Uber. [1]

I don’t think we’re there yet, but the fact that we are rapidly accelerating our trajectory toward that world should be at the least, unsettling.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/12/waymo-rides-cost-more-than...

I think the "humanoid robot replacing all blue collar jobs" fear understates the amount of real world (i.e. visual, physical, sensory) data and tacit knowledge involved in many such jobs.

Driving shows it can be done, but even there it's taken years of highly directed research and investment, and driving (at least where Waymo operates) is still pretty well defined compared to plumber.

Such data can be gathered but the current methods of RLHF by paying white collar experts, accessing private datasets, etc. don't seem to really get at this.

I'm also continually surprised that people seem to think politics doesn't exist anymore. I find it exceedingly unlikely that massive amounts of people will simply accept this purported widespread unemployment without major political consequences.

> understates the amount of real world (i.e. visual, physical, sensory) data and tacit knowledge

I agree the data trove for these is not nearly as comprehensive as “the entire internet” was for LLMs. But LLMs paved the way - people are building the datasets rapidly now. I suspect this will look a lot like LLM rollout looked over the past 5-ish years. Unusable garbage… less unusable garbage… then suddenly, a fully capable model like Opus 5.5 or the like.

And the “problem” with the way the foundational models seem to work is that they don’t just acquire individual skills one at a time like we do - they go from knowing nothing to knowing everything.

> I'm also continually surprised that people seem to think politics doesn't exist anymore. I find it exceedingly unlikely that massive amounts of people will simply accept this

This is exactly the part I’m afraid of. The political response of the displaced labor (which may or may not be violent / revolutionary), and the subsequent counter-response of capital… potentially using the very robots that displaced the jobs to begin with.

> This is exactly the part I’m afraid of. The political response of the displaced labor (which may or may not be violent / revolutionary), and the subsequent counter-response of capital… potentially using the very robots that displaced the jobs to begin with.

I get the fear, but at that point we're basically imagining that Terminator is a documentary. Given that the US has more civilian guns than people, and that private ownership of military grade weaponry is strictly controlled, I don't think street wars between private robot armies and folks in the bread line is a realistic outcome.

> I find it exceedingly unlikely that massive amounts of people will simply accept this purported widespread unemployment without major political consequences.

Well supposedly some of the richer folks are busy building doomsday bunkers and whatnot, so I guess they aren't entirely blind to "political consequences"? Not sure what they hope accomplish there, unless they want to be king of some post-apocalyptic wasteland.

I for one am worried about our future, and have neither the money for a doomsday bunker nor the desire to live in the wasteland.

Try doing some of that blue-collar work yourself and enlist help of SOTA models for the task. I think it's not that far off. Your AI plumber may not look like a humanoid, and may not have the same hands that can "feel" the pipe and ears that can "hear", but they can hit the pipe with precise amount of force, and run Python in their head to analyze spectrogram, and learn much more from that than you could with your natural senses.

You can test this premise today. I already do, doing repairs around the house; the ability to send thermal cam photos or spectrograms (or just raw recordings) to Claude turns my phone into a tricorder with extra steps.

I do a ton of DIY work, from vehicle maintenance (eg valve adjustment) to plumbing, plastering, insulation, ventilation, carpentry, electrical, irrigation, etc.

"Hit that pipe with precise amount of force" is a good example. That works on a shop floor where there's room to operate or set up a jig. How is it going to work in tight spaces that aren't generalizable?

For humans? It won't, because we don't have precise enough senses, and precise enough control over our bodies, to pull this off. A machine, whether autonomous, or a tool held by a human, absolutely can make it work, calibrating itself on the fly; it's a matter of good enough components and some signal processing magic.

And to be honest this is also the sad part. It has become conceivable that we may at some point solve work. In theory: amazing! However it remains inconceivable that we have solved sharing between humans. So there is this feeling of looming doom. In some sense, if you cannot provide shareholder value, you have no value.

Yeah and this is what makes my worldview bleak atm. We as developers got these cool new tools which enable us to do our job 80% faster, but the end result wasn't less work. It was massive layoffs and making the rest of us work even harder to be "at the top".

When I was young there were already ideas about 4 day work weeks, it's now been 20 years later and so many things are automated, where are the shorter work weeks? I thought the point as a society was to not work ourselves off and actually enjoy day to day life while automation handles the boring part.

> if we’re able to create a competent humanoid robot

If we have ham, we'll have ham and eggs, if we have eggs.

This is the first time I hear this idiom and it's immediately shot to the top of my list...

It will take decades before that kind of technology is available and, much more importantly, trustworthy. I will not have a humanoid robot that I cannot trust 100% in my home or around my children. Heck, I'm damn uncomfortable with robotic lawn mowers.

> The hardware exists, the power supplies are light enough. The only part that’s lagging is the software and motion controls; the intelligence.

If that's all it is then shouldn't the mass produced robots that are posted on r/singularity and such places just be remote operated by people in low wage countries? Couldn't the Amazon package sorter robot just be a remote operated bot instead of paying US wages? Why aren't they selling them with a cheap operator subscription? This seems like a clear product direction if the robots were really capable today.

It’s a good question - my sense is it is a combination of factors. First, robotics hardware is not at the $20k price point I hypothesized, and the durability is also not good enough to realize a payoff. Second, enabling remote operation would require significant additional investment in sensors and probably enhanced control workstations on the operator end - unlikely to be doable from a laptop. A reliable high speed internet connection would also be required on both ends. And third, human operators can be kind of a wild card. They require training, management, and carry their own security and safety risks.

Again, I’m not saying we’re there, it just feels like the control software is the main bottleneck, and the development of that is now being accelerated by LLMs.

I agree with this idea very much. I think that the magic moment will be when a humanoid robot can fully repair another humanoid robot.

If it can do all the other stuff that you're describing plus partial self-repair / full repair of another robot it can, with a supply of spare parts, with enough time and access to raw materials fully self replicate.

Anyone who owns those machines has a tremendous opportunity to build whatever they want.

> What if a highly intelligent and physically competent robot were available for the price of a cheap car, say ~$20k?

People would buy them second hand, weld spikes onto their arms and get them to box each other for money.

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