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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

Look all of the progress in robotics. Companies like Physical Intelligence etc. There has been massive progress in all sorts of areas from picking strawberries to assembling kits, folding clothes, etc.

Huge progress in spatial understanding with frontier models now building architecture and complex mechanical systems in Blender.

Plumbing is coming within a few years.

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If you think plumbing is anywhere near being automated away you must not know much about plumbing. You will never see a bigger hodpodge of materials and fittings in so many shapes and sizes and states of decay.

Maybe on new builds with fresh material, but that is already the easiest and quickest plumbing task.

Depends what you mean by automated.

An entry level largely untrained junior doing pro level work because their AR headset and earpiece tells them exactly what to do next? That's possible today.

But nobody wants or pays for "pro level" plumbing work. Just like the majority of construction, speed and minimum viability are king, quality is the last consideration. Especially for plumbing where it all gets covered up. If something leaks in 20 years instead of 40, plumbers don't lose anything. But the plumber who put in extra effort and time does.

Many skilled tradesmen have already left the industry because higher skill levels have little value, and their labor value is just barely above grabbing randos off the street. AI at best is saving a minute of evaluation or google search, but 99.5% of the job is physical work and pain still, not high level problem solving.

Hahahaha absolutely not. There's a lot of carefully staged demos that are good for separating the gullible from their money, but we are nowhere near anything you're talking about.

GPT-2 was nowhere near being able to create web pages. It was largely incoherent. But three years later gpt-3.5 and similar were able to create simple web pages and programs and became very popular. And a few years after that, only a small portion of software engineers generally write code by hand still.

Humanoid robotics may progress faster than that because they are building on existing AI. But it will be capable of some plumbing work within a few years.

There's no "building on existing AI" because those two technologies have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

The robotics structure, dexterity and sensors are already 90-95% there in leading edge humanoids. What makes it able to be a plumber or not are the machine learning models, which are usually built with transformers (VLAs -- vision language actions models), often include frontier VLMs or models with the same architecture as a top level control, and use the same or very similar types of reinforcement learning for training.

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