Comment by ASalazarMX

Comment by ASalazarMX 4 days ago

If machines did all the repetitive, labor intensive, productive work, including building more machines, the natural consequence would be a very disruptive rethinking of economics. Post-scarcity is only a disaster if money exists. People would still work, but as a hobby, not as a way of survival.

Think of it as if in a few generations, everyone had the motivations of a rich junior, for better or worse.

IMO, this is a natural consequence of the industrial revolution, and the information revolution. We started to automate physical labor, then we started to automate mental labor. We're still very far form it, but we're going to automate whole humans (or better) eventually.

Edit: I think I replied to the wrong comment, feel free to ignore this.

myrmidon 4 days ago

"Disruptive rethinking of economics" is a very optimistic way to put this IMO.

The big problem I see is that there is little incentive for "owners" (of datacenters/factories/etc) to share anything with such hobbyist laborers, because hobbyist labor has little to no value to them.

All the past waves of automation provided a lot of entirely new job opportunities AND increased overall demand (by factory workers siphoning off some of the gained wealth and spending it themselves). AI does neither.

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ef2efe 4 days ago

Who cares who owns the data center? The govt can send in the army and nationalise it... Lol as if you really believe that a bunch of people will actually control everything and the govt wont?
Think harder.

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- vinyl7 4 days ago
  
  The US govt is already useless in constrast with the ruling corporations. Congress can't get anything done. What makes you think they could or would do anything to the slave owners who pay them?
  
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- myrmidon 4 days ago
  
  > Who cares who owns the data center? The govt can send in the army and nationalise it
  Do you think the government is going to react with mass nationalisation of private companies to fight wealth inequality? What would the threshold be? The top 1% owning half of everything? 70%? I share no such optimism. The wealthy already have their interests much better represented in politics than their share of votes should allow (and this is a really difficult problem to tackle!), this is only gonna get worse and any government action against rich people interests is going to be increasingly difficult to trigger and sustain.
  Even if such mass nationalisation happened, why would you expect a better final outcome than every attempt at communism got (while doing the same thing): Namely, government just splitting up those spoils with their cronies?
  
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- funkyfiddler369 4 days ago
  
  of course they can, but that's a process, and a reactive one at that.
  the government won't control uptime, ever.
  
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lm28469 3 days ago

> If machines did all the repetitive, labor intensive, productive work, including building more machines, the natural consequence would be a very disruptive rethinking of economics. Post-scarcity is only a disaster if money exists. People would still work, but as a hobby, not as a way of survival.

That's what they told us during the industrial revolution. And also what they told us during the last automation rush of the 70s/80s

It's a political problem, not a technological one, and it's been that way for at least 100 years.

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pelasaco 4 days ago

those are just "wishful thinking" or "Noble lies" that we are used to in the post-truth world. Until now, only creative jobs are going away. Music, Arts, Software development.. Construction Work, Garbage Collector etc, are much safer than expected after the "Robot Revolution"

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lambdaone 3 days ago

I think you'd be suprised how effective robots will be at manual tasks eventually. Manipulating physical objects in space is a different problem from manipulating text strings, but efforts to solve this problem are already well under way.
Boston Dynamics has shown us that the difference between a clumsy robot and an agile one is mostly software, and the differences between current Unitree-class robot and an actual practical worker robot is also likely to be mostly software (and of course access to lots of compute power - most of the 'brain' is unlikely to be situated within the robot body itself, instead residing in a data centre some milliseconds away).

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- pelasaco 3 days ago
  
  yeah yeah, we heard it million times. Noble lies.
  The "robots will do the manual work" story sounds comforting, but it’s not how automation usually spreads in a capitalist economy like ours. Capitalism automates where the return on investment is easiest and fastest, not where society most needs relief. That’s why AI is hitting creative and white-collar work first: you can replace or augment digital labor from a data center, scale instantly through subscriptions, and avoid the slow, expensive realities of manufacturing, maintenance, and safety certification.
  Physical robotics is a very different game. Even if the software improves dramatically, real-world robots are bottlenecked by supply chains for actuators, sensors, batteries, precision parts, and the teams needed to deploy and maintain them. We are running out of Material to build just CPU/GPU/RAM, imagine complex Boston Dynamics robots..
  
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  lambdaone 3 days ago
  
  People always vastly overestimate what can be done in the short term, and vastly underestimate what can be done in the long term.
  I'm reclining right now typing on what would have been in the 1980s an unimaginable hypercomputer lying in my lap, at a cost far less in inflation-adjusted terms roughly that of a ZX80, connected by gigabit-speed links to a world-spanning network of similarly unimaginably fast servers connected by near-terabit optical links. And all this has changed the world in ways impossible to anticipate in the 1980s, ways that look like the most extreme cyberpunk fiction of that time. Who could have anticipated, for example, that politics is now substantially driven by covert bot farms, or that LLMs could seduce people into suicidal psychoses?
  Yes, robots are going to be underwhelming for quite some considerable time, just like the ZX81 represented almost no improvement over the ZX80 and so on - each generation represented only a marginal increase over the previous. Solar panels were crap 20 years ago; toys useful only for powering pocket calculators. But they got a little bit better year by year, and small improvements compund exponentially. Now renewables are approaching 50% of electrical power generation in many places, and it's pretty clear that in another 20 years, wind/solar/battery will be the sole generation source for all but the most niche activities.
  I expect the robot boosterism of the present day to bust pretty quickly when we see how different their capabilities are from the fantasy. But fast-forward just 20 years, and supply chains adapt much faster than expected (cf. Chinese electric car manufacturing) and the concept of ubiquitous robotics seems much more feasible. It certainly seems likely that if we can make roughly 100 million cars every year, we can make robots at a similar rate. I think it's likely to change the world in ways we can't imagine yet.
  People live longer than 20 years, and the average person born today can expect to see perhaps four such technological revolutions. Think long-term.
  
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  ASalazarMX 3 days ago
  
  > The "robots will do the manual work" story sounds comforting, but it’s not how automation usually spreads in a capitalist economy like ours. Capitalism automates where the return on investment is easiest and fastest, not where society most needs relief.
  Quick question: imagine there's a new commercial robot that can essentially work at your house like a tireless professional maid/butler. It costs as much as a new car, which you're used to change every few years.
  Who do you think will profit more in our capitalistic society the car manufacturer, or the robot manufacturer?
  
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  pelasaco 3 days ago
  
  > Who do you think will profit more in our capitalistic society the car manufacturer, or the robot manufacturer?
  Probably the robot manufacturer will be the car manufacturer. But Robot won't be for everyone, as Teslas are not for everyone, and again: The supply-chain for sensors, computer chips are already on the limit, imagine if we suddenly want to build Humanoids. So mostly you won't have your humanoid. You just won't need a Robot at home, because you won't have a home in first place.
  
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