I for one welcome our robot overlords

[Tigerpine]

But, hey, they can dance!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3KWM1kuAw

It's amazing what robots can do nowadays.  The motor skills required to do this kind of dancing were simply not possible even just a few short years ago.  Robots are going to keep getting more and more skilled and cheaper and cheaper to produce.  At some point, we humans really won't stand a chance.

Take a look at the video link above from Boston Dynamics.  It's very impressive.

[maizefolk]

It's interesting to be how the reaction to this video is so split between the "that's cool!" people and the "robots are going to kill us all and dance on our graves" people.

Now that they are actually for sale, I keep trying to find a convincing use case to purchase a Boston Dynamics Spot at work. At $75,000 it wouldn't be THAT hard to swing the funding if I had a plausible reason.

[Tigerpine]

My wife wants one of these for the kitchen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Na3jd0uclkg

I think they're amazing, too.  (Actually, my wife actually suggested starting a restaurant with it.)

I think the reality is that robots will continue to grow in capabilities, and they will gradually do more and more tasks that we humans do today.  I straddle the fence, in that I can appreciate both their sheer technical awesomeness and their potential for disruption to society.  The advances are coming so quickly that I think it will be a real question whether society can keep up with it.

[scottish]

At first I thought that was a CGI, but no, you can actually order one.    So  maybe there is a bright future in robotics beyond manufacturing!    I wonder how they keep all the little bits clean after food prep?

[Life in Balance]

Both of those videos are pretty cool.  We're gonna need UBI...

[maizefolk]

Both of those videos are pretty cool.  We're gonna need UBI...

It's off topic .. but yup.

And these videos are only showing half of it: automating physical work. The automation of mental work through AI is, if anything, going to be faster when it comes. Pretty easy to swap out 10, then 20, then 50% of what a person working on their computer at home is doing for automation running on a server somewhere and needing fewer and fewer real people. Over Christmas had a family call where I heard from an uncle working at a company automating larger and larger proportions of the "sales rep" job of talking to customers, getting product specifications, sending quotes, etc which now happens primarily by e-mail anyway. There are complicated edge cases where the AI needs to escalate to a real human, but the percent of the time a human is needed is shrinking. And that means the number of total humans needed to do the same work is also shrinking.

For whatever reason that one hit home more than most. Perhaps since I'm one of those people interacting with those sales reps in my own job. The importance of hitting FI while my physical and mental labor still have economic value was one of several motivators for me to pursue this path in life.

Anyway, sorry for the off topic digression.

[Tigerpine]

I don't think it's really off-topic at all.  One can not admire the advances in robot and AI technology without a tinge of foreboding.

There are two main impediments to the wide use adoption of robot/AI 'labor', in my opinion.  The first is capabilities, and the second is cost.  As the capability of robots/AI increases, this becomes less and less of an obstacle.  The same is true as the costs decrease over time.

I can see in my own job how the company is slowly tinkering with the idea of automating my job and making it obsolete.  When I'm asked to give feedback on the current project, I'm always reminded of my father, who traveled to Mexico to train the people who took over when the plant was moved down there.  My father was then laid off.  I don't know how close I am to suffering a similar fate, but I agree with @maizefolk that it gives one great incentive to become FI ASAP.

For what it's worth, I kind of see the economy bifurcating into the "large" economy where everything is automated and the "small" economy where much of life is still manual.  Of course, as robots and AI get more and more capable and cheaper and cheaper, they will infiltrate the "small" economy ever more.

Perhaps the jobs that people do versus the jobs that robots/AI do will delineate over time, but I doubt it.  If everything becomes automated, people will have little work to do.  Then what?  UBI?  Massive jobs projects larger in scale than the New Deal (I'm primarily thinking of the "make work" type jobs, such as one group digs a ditch and the next fills it back it just so they have something to do to justify a paycheck)?

[John Galt incarnate!]

  If everything becomes automated, people will have little work to do.  Then what?  UBI?  Massive jobs projects larger in scale than the New Deal (I'm primarily thinking of the "make work" type jobs, such as one group digs a ditch and the next fills it back it just so they have something to do to justify a paycheck)?

"While traveling by car during one of his many overseas travels, Professor Milton Friedman spotted scores of road builders moving earth with shovels instead of modern machinery.When he asked why powerful equipment wasn’t used instead of so many laborers, his host told him it was to keep employment high in the construction industry. If they used tractors or modern road building equipment, fewer people would have jobs was his host’s logic."


“Then instead of shovels, why don't you give them spoons and create even more jobs?” Friedman inquired.

[Tigerpine]

Perhaps that is where we are headed.

Masayashi Son of Softbank welcomes AI wholeheartedly.  I am of the opinion that AI and robotics are inevitable.  Therefore there is little use in fighting it/them.  Instead I think it is more useful to prepare in advance as best one can.  What else can you do?

[maizefolk]

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." - Woody Allen

But more seriously, we know fighting automation doesn't work in the long term. A world where a great deal of both physical and mental work is automated could look like Star Trek, or it could look like Elysium.* If nothing changes, the latter seems more likely than the former but I do hope some things change.

*The first four chapters of "Manna" are a good read about how this could gradually sneak up on our existing society: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 . Chapters 5 and onward describe a second path which doesn't seem has plausible or well thought out.

[Tigerpine]

In the video to which I linked in my previous post (as in others), Son says that AI will be much, much smarter than any human.  That is inevitable.  However, he says that AI will be so much smarter than us, that it will be amicable towards humans, because from AI's perspective, it would be meaningless to fight us.  It would be like us fighting babies.  To what end?

[scottish]

I don't think it's really off-topic at all.  One can not admire the advances in robot and AI technology without a tinge of foreboding.

There are two main impediments to the wide use adoption of robot/AI 'labor', in my opinion.  The first is capabilities, and the second is cost.  As the capability of robots/AI increases, this becomes less and less of an obstacle.  The same is true as the costs decrease over time.

I can see in my own job how the company is slowly tinkering with the idea of automating my job and making it obsolete.  When I'm asked to give feedback on the current project, I'm always reminded of my father, who traveled to Mexico to train the people who took over when the plant was moved down there.  My father was then laid off.  I don't know how close I am to suffering a similar fate, but I agree with @maizefolk that it gives one great incentive to become FI ASAP.

For what it's worth, I kind of see the economy bifurcating into the "large" economy where everything is automated and the "small" economy where much of life is still manual.  Of course, as robots and AI get more and more capable and cheaper and cheaper, they will infiltrate the "small" economy ever more.

Perhaps the jobs that people do versus the jobs that robots/AI do will delineate over time, but I doubt it.  If everything becomes automated, people will have little work to do.  Then what?  UBI?  Massive jobs projects larger in scale than the New Deal (I'm primarily thinking of the "make work" type jobs, such as one group digs a ditch and the next fills it back it just so they have something to do to justify a paycheck)?

What type of work do you do?    (I'm a little curious about automating "white collar" jobs...)

In my field (technology), I haven't experienced much risk of automation taking away our jobs.    Automation has shifted the focus quite a bit though.   

For example open source has made it very easy to develop web applications.    It's pretty neat how this feeds into a virtuous cycle of  ease of creating web stuff -> more demand for web stuff -> even easier to create web stuff.

When I started back in the 80's we would have to develop a protocol stack from the ground up.   Today's web ecosystem would not exist with this model.    Just imagine every smartphone manufacturer would need to create their own operating system, GUI and infrastructure.    BlackBerry and Microsoft both experienced this.

[maizefolk]

In the video to which I linked in my previous post (as in others), Son says that AI will be much, much smarter than any human.  That is inevitable.  However, he says that AI will be so much smarter than us, that it will be amicable towards humans, because from AI's perspective, it would be meaningless to fight us.  It would be like us fighting babies.  To what end?

That is a very different level of AI (more The Singularity than Elysium). The distinguishing idea is whether artificial intelligence will hit a point where it is intelligent enough to design ways to may itself even more intelligent that a human would not have thought of, setting off a positive feedback loop.

I worry less about that kind of AI, in part because it assumes that with sufficient intelligence it will always be possible to find ways to further increase intelligence and I don't know that we have strong evidence to support that assumption yet. But if it were to come about, perhaps it would be like fighting babies. But plenty of humans are cruel to babies (or dogs, or wild animals for that matter), so the analogy is not entirely reassuring.