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Comment by viceconsole | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

> 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.

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