Hacker News Reader

Comment by tavavex | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that your roadmap requires things that don't exist yet or only exist at prohibitive prices, and it's not knowable how much time or money you will need to solve either one. So a concrete roadmap is impossible.

Advanced robotics would need to become quite cheap for them to become more affordable and convenient than a minimum-wage employee. And physical fields like materials engineering are known for moving quite slowly and at their own pace, so I'm not sure how much automation could help there.

That's the last barrier we have right now that prevents the total obsolescence (and therefore destruction) of the common worker.

View on HN

Our starting assumption was "Imagine I give you for free the perfect trash picking robot control AI software." If AI can deliver that, why can't it figure out how to take a Boston Dynamics dog, design it for trash picking, and optimize manufacturing costs?

Two different answers:

1. The discussion setup where you imagine a counterfactual is given by magic does not entail that magic can do any other thing you choose.

“Imagine I give you $100, what do you spend it on?”

“A McClaren, since you could have given me $300K”

2. Taking your question directly: because these are not closely related problems.

1. The discussion setup where you imagine a counterfactual is given by magic does not entail that magic can do any other thing you choose.

My question was a sincere ask to define, in this scenario, what is prohibiting that other magic?

Then it’s answer number two.

The thought experiment was not assuming AGI, but something like an old school perfect expert at a given task. Maybe like C-3PO only useful as a “protocol droid”, but fairly useless at everything else

I've been so unconvinced by any of these arguments, that all seem to amount to "because I said so." If it can design software that is out of our reach, it can design hardware. It can look at manufacturing data and identify optimizations. "Fairly useless at everything else"? The denial is getting scary, and it's going to come back and bite us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com