This argument is the one that shook me, I’m curious if you think there’s any merit to it:
Humans have essentially three traits we can use to create value: we can do stuff in the physical world through strength and dexterity, and we can use our brains to do creative, knowledge, or otherwise “intelligent” work.
(Note by “dexterity” I mean “things that humans are better at than physical robots because of our shape and nervous system, like walking around complex surfaces and squeezing into tight spaces and assembling things”)
The Industrial Revolution, the one of coal and steam and eventually hydraulics, destroyed the jobs where humans were creating value through their strength. Approximately no one is hired today because they can swing a hammer harder than the next guy. Every job you can get in the first world today is fundamentally you creating value with your dexterity or intelligence.
I think AI is coming for the intelligence jobs. It’s just getting too good too quickly.
Indirectly, I think it’s also coming for dexterity jobs through the very rapid advances in robotics that appear to be partly fueled by AI models.
I think you are right, but here’s a fun counter-example. I recently bought a new robot* to do some of my housework and yet, at around 200lbs, it required two people to deliver it (strength) get it set up (dexterity) and explain to me how to use it (intelligence).
Yeah and I think that extends to even trades we see as protected because they often work in novel and unknown setting, like whatever a drunk tradesman rigged up in the decades previous.
Eventually it will be more economical to just destroy all those old world structures entirely, clear the site out, and replace it with the new modular world able to be repaired with robots that no longer have to look like humans and fit into human centric ux paradigms. They can be entirely purpose built to task unlike a human, who will still be average height and mass with all the usual pieces parts no matter how they are trained.
Most of the “delivery” (getting it from the factory to its final installed location) was done by machine: forklifts, cranes, ships, trucks, and (I'm guessing) a motorized lift on the back of the delivery truck.
Intelligence jobs are sort of the apex of the economy where everything coalesces around to serve those positions ultimately. E.g. any low skilled area even devoid of any resources that basically insists upon its own existence at this point (e.g. walmart workers need gas station, gas station workers need walmart, there is a sort of economy but these are straight up consumption black holes with nothing actually being invented or produced, maybe agricultural products but not by a large fraction of the labor force any longer).
So where does that leave our world without actual creation, production, ideas? I work at the gas station and sell you zyns? You work at the walmart and sell me rotisserie chickens? We both work doubles and eat and sleep in the time remaining? Remain in this holding pattern until World Leader AI realizes we are just waste heat and culls us? I mean, that is sort of the path we are on. Disempowering people. Downskilling them. Passifying them. Removing their abilities to organize themselves. Removing access to technology and tooling. Making the inevitable as easy at it can be when it comes time for it.
We are in a death cult called business efficiency. Fire them, it's more efficient. Lean up the company. Don't invest in research, cheaper not to and buy back stock instead. These are death spirals no different than what happens with ants. We are justifying not giving our own species a seat at the table out of pragmatism. Why create a job for someone? It is inefficient, do more with less and don't worry about the unemployed it is their fault. Why pay them well and let them live comfortably? That is profit you could be making. Eventually it is going to be why feed the human species, because that is the line of logic here with business efficiency. We don't optimize to uplift our species. Quite the opposite, we optimize to hold it down and squeeze and extract.
You said there are three traits, but seems like you only listed two - unless you're counting strength and dexterity as separate and just worded it weirdly.
I think they’re separate. You don’t need to be strong or intelligent to put circuit boards in printers, but there are factories full of people doing that. Purely because it’s currently cheaper to pay (low) wages to humans than to develop, deploy, and maintain automation to do that task. Yet.
They're not hired to swing a hammer hard, they're hired to swing it at the right thing, and if they can't swing it hard enough they pick a different tool.
Harder than someone else. A bodybuilder and a normal person ham swing a hammer just as efficiently as each other.
Dexterity is more important - after all you may have the stamina to bang in 1000 nails in an hour. I have a nail gun. What’s important is we can control where the nails go.
The problem with that argument as I see it is that a lot of jobs can be described that way if you want.
And it's not just these; i.e. video generation is getting better every other week too. It's not yet good enough to produce full length movies but it's getting there and the main component that seems to be missing is just more control over the generated output, but that'll come too.
You might say these movies will be AI slop and you'd be right, but then that'll be enough for most people who just want to see a lot of shit blow up on screen and superhereos fighting other superhereos.
You will still have a niche for 'real actor' films, but it will become a niche.
Physical labor, especially jobs requiring dexterity, will be left for a long time yet. Largely because robotics hardware production cannot scale to meet the demand anytime soon. Like, for many decades.
I actually asked Gemini Deep Research to generate a report about the feasibility of automation replacing all physical labor. The main blockers are primarily critical supply chain constraints (specifically Rare Earth Elements; now you know why those have been in the news recently) and CapEx in the quadrillions.
Yeah and until ChatGPT I thought even 50 years was optimistic, which is why current days feel like SciFi! However, at its essence, the current AI revolution has been driven primarily by a few key algorithmic breakthroughs (cf the Bitter Lesson), which are relatively easy to scale up through compute.
On the other hand, the constraints on robotics are largely supply chain-related. The current SOTA for dexterity in robots requires motors, which require powerful magnets, which require Rare Earth Elements, which are critically supply-constrained.
To be precise, the elements are actually abundant in the Earth's crust, just that extracting them is very expensive and extremely toxic to the environment, and so far only China has been willing to sacrifice its environment (and certain citizens' health), which is why it has cornered the market. Scaling that up to the required demand is a humongous logistical, political and regulatory hurdle (which, BTW, is why I suspect the current US adminstration is busy gutting environmental regulations.)
Now there may be a research prototype somewhere in some lab that is the "Attention Is All You Need" equivalent of actuators, but I'm personally not aware of anything with that kinda potential.
Some types of motors don't require permanent magnets. If we need more motors than we can make permanent magnets, we'll adapt, perhaps with an efficiency loss.
Motors with permanent magnets are preferred because they are much more cost- and energy-efficient, even with the painful reliance on REEs. There is a very strong incentive to find alternatives but nothing comparable has been found yet.
There are of course non-electric alternatives like hyrdaulic and pneumatic actuators but they are mostly good for power, not dexterity. The size and complicated fluid dynamics simply are not conducive for fine motor control. I do think these will play a large part eventually because even electric motors cannot economically produce enough force to be practically useful. Like, last I checked, the base-level Unitree robots can lift 2kg or so? Not even enough to lift a load of laundry.
At this point I suspect we'll end up with hydraulics for strength (arms, legs, torso) and electrics for dexterity (grippers)
Uh, out of all the things that are the bottleneck, you think it's robotics hardware that is the bottleneck?
In an age where seemingly every single robot company has a humanoid prototype whose legs are actively supported through high powered actuators that are strong enough to kick your ribs in?
In an age where the recent advancements in machine learning have given bipedal walking a solution that is 80% of the way to perfection with the last 20% remaining the hardest to solve?
Honestly, from a kinematics/hardware perspective the robots are already good enough. Heck, even the robot hands are pretty good these days. Go back 10 years ago and the average humanoid robot hand was pretty bad. They might still not be perfect today, but they are a non-issue in terms of constructing them.
The only real bottleneck on the hardware side is that robot skin is still in its infancy. There needs to be some sort of textile with electronics weaved into it that gives robots the ability to sense touch and pressure.
What has remained hard is the software side of things and it is stuck in the mud of lack of data. Everyone is recording their own dataset that is unique to their specific robot.
Note I didn't say the bottleneck is the hardware itself, it's the supply chain for production of the hardware. Specifically the Rare Earth Elements, as I explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47178210
The key mistake you make is to believe that "first world" is sustainable by it's own. A lot of people are hired today because they are good at a physical tasks, globalized capitalism just decided that it's cheaper to manufacture it overseas (with all the environmental and societal downsides that hit us back in the face).
So don't worry if we lure ourlselves that it's ok to stop caring for "intelligence job" globalization will provide for every aspect where AI is lacking. And that's not just a figure of speech they are already plenty of "fake it until you make it" stories about AI actually run by overseas cheap laborers.
This ignores that the forces of capitalism, the labor market, value, etc are all made up. They work because people (are made to) believe in them. As soon as people stop believing in them, everything will fall apart. The whole point of an economy is to care for people. It will adapt to continue doing that. Yes, the changeover period might be extremely painful for a lot of people.
The whole point of an economy is to generate value. Very, very different than caring for people
Feudalism was the dominant economic system for millennia. The point is to extract value for the upper class. Peasants only matter as a source of labor, and they only get 'cared for' to the extent of keeping them alive and working.
Now think about what feudalism might look like if the peasants' labor could be automated
Well, yeah, "keeping alive" sounds like caring to me. Not to a great standard, that's how we got numerous revolutions, and feudalism did end eventually. People stopped believing it, and some kings lost their heads.
Apple is developing a tabletop robot as the centerpiece of its artificial intelligence strategy, with plans to launch the device in 2027.. The robot resembles an iPad mounted on a movable limb that can swivel to follow users around a room..The company is also exploring other robotics concepts, including a mobile bot with wheels similar to Amazon’s Astro, and has discussed humanoid models..
I find it more concerning that mass surveillance has come to the point where someone can’t safely express their frankly-not-that-controversial opinions without obfuscating the subject’s name.
So you think that the state has massive surveillance systems (definitely) that it is willing to use maliciously (maybe), but in the age of LLMs is fooled by swapping some letters around? Seems like the threat model is unlikely to line up with reality.
It’s not a “maybe”. This administration was collecting lists of people who spoke negatively about ICE from social media like a week ago. you really think they’re going to send them gift baskets or something?
SOTA LLMs couldn't even correctly answer whether a person should drive a car to the car wash or walk there themselves just a week ago, so it's plausible the government's tech might be tripped up here. Costs nothing to try it, at least!
this isnt particularly against you, knowing your comment is mostly in jest, but: not everything needs to be, or should be, thought about in an "llm-first" way.
a simple regex will surface all of the "obfuscated" comments, which can then be sent to some intern analyst to read.
No worries, I didn't take it that way. I lean anti- llm-first myself. I was actually going to make joke about levenshtein distance but figured since we're on HN, I'd lean into the LLM zeitgeist that everyone can't stop talking about here =P
It hasn’t come to that though, you can freely express that persons point with no repercussions outside of maybe not getting a check one day from the person you hate
Beyond just the concept of thought crime, one of the themes in Orwell's 1984 was that the government could arbitrarily decide that a thing you've done could be punished at any time. You didn't need to break a law to be punished by Big Brother, you just had to be a thorn in its side. In our world, the government/Palantir/ICE collecting the identities of people who criticize them is the kind of infrastructure that makes that arbitrary punishment from 1984 possible.
its important to point out that its not about being a thorn in the government's side. you just have to not submit fully. in fact, even if everyone did submit completely, a fair number of people would still need to be rounded up and tortured just to keep the fear alive.
I'm sure there are whole companies that do that kind of "reputation management". Modern tech savvy PR firms etc
I personally experienced it when criticising (turns out quite rightly) the HS2 rail project. The difference in replies on Reddit whether I wrote HS2 or eg |-|S2 or H/S/2 was stark
The problem is this is only true for values of "reasonable" that are "unlikely to be viewed in a negative light by my government, job, or family; either now or at any time in the future". The chilling effect is insane. There was a time in living memory when saying "women should be able to vote" was not a popular thing.
I mean, this is _literally the only thing needed_ for the Trump admin to tie real names to people criticizing $whatever. Does anyone want that? Replace "Trump" with "Biden", "AOC", "Newsom", etc. if they're the ones you disagree with.
Obama carried on where Bush left off. I think Biden was at least marginally better, at the very least I admire him for ripping off the Afghanistan bandaid, but the amount of effort he put onto rolling back executive overreach was minimum if anything.
You're saying that Biden, AOC, and Newsom are "ideologically aligned with right-wing hatred"? This is not something I've ever heard a human being say. Almost afraid to ask, but where's that coming from?
> if you do it in an aircraft equipped with autopilot
There's also a (stupid, imo) tendency for APs to conveniently become inop right before a checkride. It's not accurate to say that all pilots, or even all pilots that have taken an IR ride, are "pilots who understand the capabilities and limits of aviation autopilot technology."
For the PPL specifically, the focus is on basic airmanship in VFR conditions, and that means eyeballing the six pack (or digital equivalent) and looking out of the window. The instrument flying expectations is primarily for emergencies and preparation for future instrument rating.
Sometimes value is not in the code or the product. But the fact that leg work is done and something is generally accepted for the purpose. For me it looks like type of product where the pain is not making the software. It is getting everyone you will deal with to agree that software is acceptable.
the common factor was sort of left as an exercise to the reader to think about moats in the age of AI... but basically anything that has touchpoints to the legal and financial systems im not gonna touch with a 20 ft vibecoded pole.
I’ve sometimes wondered about getting a big plot of land, some cheap old heavy machinery, and letting people pay to play with it.
Probably liability insurance makes it impractical, which is a shame. There really is nothing like playing with a big excavator. Very fortunate that it was one of my formative experiences.
We've thrown some parties on the prop, and have often thought, "Maybe it'd be cool to let people try some of this stuff out," at which point we remember how incredibly dangerous something like an excavator is, even when closely monitored and in a safe environment, and then have nightmares about worst case scenarios. So, it's been a no-go thus far. What we have actually considered, though, is seeing about renting it out to a known-to-be safe / mature user to use on projects when we aren't. But, haven't pulled the trigger on that yet.
Are you willing to share rough numbers? Totally understand if not, just curious. Been thinking about something like this to get away from the AI force-feeding.
Very variable depending on a combination of local/state regulations and what kinds of projects you're willing to tackle. The bottom end of the spectrum is a $50 a month general liability policy.
Humans have essentially three traits we can use to create value: we can do stuff in the physical world through strength and dexterity, and we can use our brains to do creative, knowledge, or otherwise “intelligent” work.
(Note by “dexterity” I mean “things that humans are better at than physical robots because of our shape and nervous system, like walking around complex surfaces and squeezing into tight spaces and assembling things”)
The Industrial Revolution, the one of coal and steam and eventually hydraulics, destroyed the jobs where humans were creating value through their strength. Approximately no one is hired today because they can swing a hammer harder than the next guy. Every job you can get in the first world today is fundamentally you creating value with your dexterity or intelligence.
I think AI is coming for the intelligence jobs. It’s just getting too good too quickly.
Indirectly, I think it’s also coming for dexterity jobs through the very rapid advances in robotics that appear to be partly fueled by AI models.
So… what’s left?
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