Comment by lambdaone

Comment by 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).

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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- pelasaco 3 days ago
  
  Your laptop is an advanced computer, but the intelligence and computer power is in the cloud. GPU is expensive and no way we can provide it to everyone on earth. Material-wise we have limitations. Unless we destroy the earth, we won't have the amount of raw material that we need to automate cheap jobs. The ROI is too low.
  So the likely trajectory is not a sudden wave of millions of helpful humanoids, but selective automation in structured environments like warehouses, factories, controlled logistics, where conditions are predictable and ROI is clear. Meanwhile, messy, unstructured "dirt jobs" persist as human work because humans are still the most adaptable system available at the lowest upfront cost, maybe not today in the welfare state in Europe, but for sure in other places on Earth...
  
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- pelasaco 3 days ago
  
  > I'm reclining right now typing on what would have been in the 1980s an unimaginable hypercomputer lying in my lap
  But in the 80s you would have a home. In 20 years, I doubt we will be able to buy a home, or even have Humanoids to serve us.
  
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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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