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Comment by solyin | Hacker News Reader

> AI is not coming for jobs with tasks like "gather and empty trash" or "service, clean, or supply restrooms," or "mix water and detergents or acids in containers to prepare cleaning solutions according to specifications."

Yes it is. YC has a company working on picking strawberries, even. Hardware takes longer than software, but if you think the robots aren't coming, you're not paying attention. The only question is how long will they take to reach the general public? There are test runs already in automotive factories and elsewhere, and yeah, they're slow and don't work very well, for now, but there's a lot of money going into making them better.

And then where will we be?

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Automated harvesting machines for fruits is not an accomplishment of AI. Companies have been building machines to do that long before the advent of AI. Robotic manufacturing is nothing new.

Back in 2012 I genuinely thought the self-driving car was going to put truck drivers out of work and reshape the economy on a timescale of less than a decade. This turned out to be a technofantasy. I think AI is going to play out the same way.

AI is not a panacea for work, and the economic bubble forming around it is going to collapse with devastating consequences before we begin to see adoption of the underlying technologies for real ROI spread widely beyond the software industry.

Eh, this is partially incorrect.

All the 'easy' to automate things have been automated already. A lot of things that were not automated is because there are small bits of problematic things that made it not worth while or the loss slightly too high. AI vision systems solve a lot of this.

"Robotic" isn't new, human-level ability in manipulation is.

The same goes for self-driving cars. It's a exponential, hockey-stick curve that at some point crosses the level of human ability. There is nothing "linear" about it and your suggestion of parallels to former experience is wildly misguided.

People fail to notice, most jobs are less complicated than math and programming. The "obstacles" there are of the kind of "we always did it this way", but that's no real "moat"?

The bubble regarding the big AI firms may well collapse, but the assumption, that was somehow improving the situation is far-fetched.

People automated out of a job will either compete with those in other jobs or be dependent on support. Either way, salaries will fall across the board and prices rise. At an ever accelerating pace.

Prices can't rise while salaries fall in a functioning economy. Humans will continue to be cheaper for many physical applications. Your suggestions of the inevitable exponential curve for the improvement and application of these technologies is wildly misguided.

There’s lots of low price immigrant labour around the world, that are very mobile.

Ahem - work visa - ahem.

> Prices can't rise while salaries fall in a functioning economy.

Absolutely they can, have, and have recently for many.

You can't have falling salaries and rising prices for a very long time before society collapses. It would have domino effects to the point of anarchy, people lose their jobs and banks become landlords, but the houses are worth nothing so banks collapse, with it goes the stock exchanges. Now there's no financial system in place at all, and all you're left with is strawberry picking robots and some tech billionaires living on their islands with their robot pets and flying cars.

Now if all these resources were instead put into actually improving things, then we'd be far better of, unfortunately, for all the intelligence the people behind these things possess, they seem to be stuck in the "lets do the same but faster" mindset.

> all you're left with is strawberry picking robots and some tech billionaires living on their islands with their robot pets and flying cars

I'm pretty sure that's the goal of a solid majority of wealthy people, if not literally all of them. Fully automate their lives of luxury and let the rest of us rot.

What's stopping normies from getting their own robots to automate things? A singular one of these things will be less than 1k and you'll see them everywhere in every junk yard. If I could tell one to go plant a tree my land would be significantly more productive. As it is now it's decidedly not. I don't really understand this idea that only the rich will have access to this tech. It makes no sense.

> A singular one of these things will be less than 1k and you'll see them everywhere in every junk yard.

I don't think that's a foregone conclusion at all

I mean first of all even consumer electronics like a PlayStation are creeping up on 1k, and that's way less sophisticated than a personal robot. Or how about a car? Again, less sophisticated than a personal robot, also very expensive

And I also imagine there will very likely be a ton of regulations on any kind of robot servants. Maybe owner/operator licensing. Who knows.

I am not nearly as confident as you are that this will become an "everyone has one" thing. Most People don't even have 3D printers.

> Either way, salaries will fall across the board and prices rise

You're probably right about the rest. I don't understand how prices can rise when salaries fall. Who's paying the higher prices?

I’m not following robotics closely but last time I checked we were still far from “human level ability”, it was PR lies notably from Tesla that play on the confusion with the progress in AI.

> People fail to notice, most jobs are less complicated than math and programming.

It is known since the 80s as the Moravec paradox that coginition is not the hard part in robotics.

Automation is coming for manual jobs that are repetitive in a controlled environment, like warehouse logistics. But automation for jobs that require fine hand dexterity, constant adaption to new environments and human interactions (trades, healthcare, etc.) is not on the horizon.

The robotic tech demonstrations I see daily on Twitter are significantly better than what you are thinking. There are visible major improvements from year to year. Specifically robotic hands are hitting the point where it can easily sort eggs or pick fruit.

I made the same mistake in my thinking wrt truck drivers. I've learned a lesson to be more skeptical about these things.

So far I see that my own work as a programmer has changed radically, and it is far more productive. I still have a lot of work, but I really don't know how this will play out.

One repeated failure that I have noticed as I age is that is folks expect change to either happen quickly, or to not happen at all. As a species we collectively seem to lack the patience that reality demands of us, probably because our own useful lifespans are so short.

Self-driving trucks are not here, nor are they coming anytime very soon, but driver assistance systems really have advanced meaningfully since 2012. They will continue to do so, to the point where I imagine driving without them will feel pretty alien. I feel much the same way about AI; it will change everything, but we need to be thinking of that change on thirty or fifty year timescales. 2030 won't feel so different to 2025.

This is very true, and is the (perhaps not obvious) subtext of my post as well. I'm not arguing that self driving cars are never going to happen or that AI won't eventually change the nature of a lot of work. There is a big leap between AI changing how programming is done and AI changing every other job too. The other poster arguing that "programming is harder than most other jobs, and therefore AI will eat them too", is taking a very stereotypically myopic and arrogant "computer person" posture.

> Companies have been building machines to do that long before the advent of AI.

I've been very optimistic about AI. Wow, your comment just gave me pang of terror thinking about the outcome for humans due to Whitney and his cotton gin.

My understanding is that all of these endeavors involve scale and are very different from a drop-in replacement humanoid robot.

Like with the particular examples you sited, cleaning restrooms can have a huge number of "edge cases" which nothing short of a robot with human-like capabilities could handle.

If expenditures on AI is as huge as it is, with the financials being as shaky as they are, despite AI seeming to be very effective for very high paying jobs, I can't immagine the capex and shaky financials for replacing menial labor en mass. Like immagine all the chips, metals, compute needed as well as the maintenance, depreciation, vandalism, etc.

Visit a trade show of a specific industry and experience firsthand how naïve your viewpoint of automation is. The jump from one-shorting flappy bird to meaningful industrial automation is so large that I cringe every time I read a comment like this.

Steel manufacturing. Elevators. Plastics. Ball bearings. Chemicals. Pharmaceuticals. Electronics. Go to a trade show and visit the booths related to automation and talk to someone who has spent their career grinding against the meatspace problems of automation that robotics is a century away from addressing with positive ROI.

Right. I think these kinds of posters are delusional / have AI pychosis

AI isn't a technical problem. It's an economic one.

There's nothing inherently wrong with automating away certain jobs, particularly if they're dirty, dangerous or repetitive. And I include agriculture in this. The problem is how we as a society handle that. Do we let AI specifically and automation in general to make a handful of people more wealthy? Or do we share those benefits so people have to work less? In short, it's an income and wealth distribution question.

Sadly, I think we're automation will mean minting trillionaires while the fabric of society unravels around us.

This is absolute delusion.

Technology and economics are intertwined.

While they are slow and dont work well, their cost / output is already on human parity. The Figure 3 test runs are proving that humanoid robots are already good enough for isolated repetitive tasks (factory work).

Rotating boxes and finding barcodes is hardly revolutionary in the automation space.

The biggest benefit of humanoid robots may be that the machines are generally safer to be around than giant built-for-purpose machines, and that they can navigate the same buildings that their operators navigate (e.g. stairs), otherwise humanoid robots are generally an automation gimmick (for now). Just put a mechanical arm next to the conveyor belt.

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