"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
That’s a problem with unchecked capitalism, not AI. Remember how George Jetson was able to have a house in the sky, a suitcase spaceship, full home automation, a robot maid, and supported his whole family by pushing a button? Consider how many people lived and worked on the ground beneath the cloud cover to make that possible.
Yes. As an aside, the post title reminds me of LinkedIn clickbait. Agree?
TL;DR:
The misuse of technology in capitalism threatens jobs and financial stability. Affordable robots and AI could either enhance our lives or lead to unemployment and misery. Proposals like an automation tax could fund education or basic income. We need good legislation to ensure technology benefits everyone, not just profits. Recent steps like Europe's AI act offer a little hope, but a lot more political action is urgently needed.
Long Version:
From my perspective, the core of the problem is not the technology, but the reckless way we use it in our capitalistic system. Or let's say, let it be used.
For example, a light load robotic industrial arm costs merely 1k to 5k € nowadays. The software for it is cheap as well.
What the business owners and managers see, is not an awesome new invention which could help to propel humanity into the future of a robotic utopia, but cheap labour force, aiding them to cut jobs in order to maximize their profit margin as human labour is expensive.
I am sure AI and robots are our future, one way or another, whether we want it or not.
But I would like to see a future where AI and robots help us to increase our quality of life, instead of making us unemployed and endagering our financial survival.
There are various ideas how this could be achieved. I don't intend to go way too in-depth here, so just as an example:
an automation tax: estimate to which amount a business can be automated and then demand a tax proportional to how much the business was automated. Such a tax could then be used to finance higher education for people or a universal basic income. Maybe at first just an income for those who can't get a decent job due to automation.
We had similar developments as those we see now with virtually all technological advances, where human labour was replaced by more and more clever machines. Jobs where lost due to that but it could still be seen as a good thing in general.
An important difference is the level of required skills though. Someone who's job it was to go around a street and light gas lanterns every day, extinguishing them some time afterwards, was replaced by electric light grids. A switchboard operator at a telephone company, who connected people manually, got replaced by clever hardware. And so on. Those people didn't require high skills for their job though. They had it a bit easier to find another one.
This becomes increasingly difficult as AI and technology in general advances. Recently we see how robots and AI are capabable of tasks where higher skills are necessary. And it's probable that this trend will incresingly continue. At some point, we will have AI developing new and better AI. An explosion of artificial intelligence can then be expected.
It's less a problem as long as people have job prospects in higher skilled work levels. But that will, for a while at least, not be the case. This has different reasons:
As I see it, we have a "work pyramid", where the levels of the pyramid represent the required skills and the width of the pyramid levels represent the amount of available jobs. In other words, there is a way higher demand for low skilled work than for high skilled work. (BTW, what I mean by work skill is the level of specialisation and proficiency, often connected to more intense and long training and education.)
As recent developments in AI now slowly creep into higher and higher levels, people may start investing in their own education in order to even get a job. But higher skilled work is less available making it increasingly tight and problematic to get one.
There may of course also be an effect observable where new jobs are created by enabling more even higher skilled jobs due to the aid of AI, but I think this has limitations. On the one hand, the amount of jobs created that way might be insufficient. On the other hand, people might not want to or can't get an education for that.
The latter needs to be emphasized from my perspective. There are a lot of people who simply don't want to study for a decade in order to get a PhD in something so that they can get some highly specialised job. Some people like the more simple jobs, those requiring more manual than cognitive labour. And that's totally fine. People should be happy and like the work they do.
Currently, not all people even have access to that kind of education. Be it due to limitations in available places at universities / colleges, or due to financial reasons or even due to physical or mental health reasons.
You may now understand, why I see that we are going to create more misery if we don't change the way we handle such things.
I would like to see humanity in that robotic utopia. No one needs to work, as most work is done by AI and robots. But everyone can get a fair share and live a happy life however they would like to live it. They can work, take up some interest and pursue it, but no one needs to.
But currently, this is probably not going to happen. We need good legislation, need to create a system where advancements in AI and robotics can be made without driving people into financial ruin. We need to set those guarding rails which help to guide us towards such a robotic utopia.
That's why I am advocating for putting this topic higher on political priority lists. Politics worldwide don't have it even set on their agenda. They are missing crucial time frames. And I really hope they'll wake up from that slumber and start working on it. I've got some hope. Europe recently passed their first AI act.
It's a start.
Sincerely,
A roboticist working in AI and robot research.
Yes but the artbro luddites will not read this. They are narcissists who are upset that some kid with a computer in Argentina can now generate anime titties instead of paying $300 for them to draw it and they are fighting the realization of how bullshit their industry was from the get-go
Does anyone still use scruboards and clotheslines for laundry? What about only using the sink for dishes (that one is a bit more common)? I feel automation already hit the bad things she is talking about.
Anyone who believes AI is being used for art/writing and not for other things like doing the dishes, has a myopic understanding and a strong confirmation bias. This strawman argument is defeated by a simple Google search to see the multitude of other places where this technology is benefiting humanity.
AI is helping physicists speed up experiments into supernovae to better understand the universe.
Anyone who believes that anyone here is trying to suggest that art/writing is the only thing AI is used for, has a myopic understanding of how nuanced conversation works.
I don’t think artists/writers care about what else AI is being used for when they are losing their livelihood to a kid with a computer.
but it is true that big tech companies are pouring disproportionately large sums of money into AI that seems like it is doing creative stuff so that they can ride the AI hype wave.
Oh no big companies are spending money instead of using it to buy back their own stock, giving bonuses to the c-suite, or just hoarding it. And they are spending it on projects that are total moon shots that might take a decade or more to pay off.
This is terrible. And not at all what people have been yelling at tech companies for doing since about 2002.
I expect my tech companies to only invest in proven technology and engage in the shortest possible shortterm thinking.
Robotics researchers agree but they can't get it to work yet. Simple tasks as cleaning tables, loading dishwasher and folding laundry have been tried for the last two decades with very limited success. The ones that do succeed are usually tele-operated for a demo.
Not to mention if it does happen and it does make it to consumers these robots will be insanely expensive to make and maintain. People going "why doesn't AI just work on physical labor?!" can't seem to understand that software is a million times easier and cheaper to make
It's not like scientists woke up one day and said DAMN we need to make robots take away fun jobs ans nothing else. It's just where machine learning took us.
I want AI (well, a robotic helper) for laundry and housework. Technically I've already got a dishwasher which is close enough there.
I'd love to have AI help me with making art just like other tools, but not take over it
While I'm not exactly a fan of AI, it does make sense that the first things we're able to replicate with AI, however terribly, are intellectual things like art and writing. While AI might be able to understand how to wash dishes, it would need a way of interacting with the physical dishes to do so, which goes beyond something a computer program can do while confined to a computer.
I wouldn't be surprised if future dishwashers and washing machines end up having little cameras and sensors so that AI can determine how best to wash them, but if anything that feature would be implemented more for collecting your private information than for any real washing benefit. Plus you'd still have to load and unload the machines - if we wanted AI to handle everything, we'd need robots, which would be waaaay more expensive, and likely something only the richest would be able to afford anyway.
haha as If Ai was ever going to stop at laborious tasks.
it was beating chess champions long before writing and art came into the picture....
Chess engines don't use machine learning
edit: ya know, I get why y'all would downvote my other comments but this one is just a fact.
This is just wrong. Yes they do.
Take stockfish for example. It's probably the most well known engine. It uses specialized neural networks to evaluate board positions.
I mean I certainly agreed with the sentiment, but this is largely describing dishwashers, washing machines, and dryers, which were invented some time ago.
Part of the reason these take time is that a lot of folks are resource conscious (as am I). So we want the dishwasher to be efficiently loaded, the clothes to be dried on a clothesline if possible, the white/colors to be separated (increasea the longevity of the clothes), etc. Sacrificing all of these things makes these chores really very quii, if you can afford to have them all in your home.
And in fact, the cost of these things is relatively low
in my high COL area, it's not that people can't afford these things, it's that they can't afford a place big enough to accommodate them. Which is its own issue altogether...