Amazon's humanoid robots will eventually cost only $3 per hour to operate(businessinsider.com) |
Amazon's humanoid robots will eventually cost only $3 per hour to operate(businessinsider.com) |
I don’t think the solution is to keep grueling jobs or pay more to make people do things they don’t want to do. Of course more money is good, but at the end of the day, it’s a repetitive job that doesn’t require much thought.
What’s interesting is that if these only cost $3/hour to operate that’s only $25k/year (assuming 365x24 operation) so if these things last 5 years then that means the idea is they will only cost $125k to buy and maintain. That’s cheap enough that middle class people will have live in super servants. And that’s much more appealing to me to have a laundry/dish/sweep bot. Especially since I could probably chip in with neighbors and eventually not have to do these household chores.
“eventually.” “Plus software overhead” … “Amazon.”
For that last one, keep in mind that Amazon can afford to invest millions to billions and also totally control the working environment. Warehouse workers are practically robots already with the structure that is imposed on their work. A home isn’t like that.
Of course I cannot say when it will affordable. It may be Amazon has to solve the last remaining hard problems and then the R&D is paid for: all that remains is packaging and marketing, it may be thousands of hard problems remain. (I'm guessing someplace in between) I also don't state what the home robot will do. May the home robot just picks up the kids toys when they are done but can't do laundry - even though I want the laundry robot more the toys only one is still useful.
> That’s cheap enough that middle class people will have live in super servants.
Take into consideration that, if AI and robot super servants exist, the idea of a middle class will almost certainly have to be redefined downward. Your job will be less valuable, as you get get undercut both by automation, and by the highly motivated people who lost their jobs due to automation and who would do yours for less money. That would change the economic accessibility of live-in super servants.
Your argument has no historical precedent for and lots against so the likelihood of it coming true can only be estimated as very small and you honestly shouldnt be worrying about it too much. Its equivalent to arguing that you are going to win the lottery. Somebody will win eventually but the proba ility makes anything but assuming it wont be you irresponsibke
Couldn't that be solved via political means? You can either institute a de-facto/de-jure caste system (like medieval nobles) or engage in career gatekeeping (like doctors).
What did all of the laid off agricultural workers do when farming was mechanized and industrialized? This isn’t the first time we’re facing technology taking jobs away from people.
Whatever they eventually go on doing anyway, considering Amazon reportedly has a crazy turnover rate of 150% per year:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/edwardsegal/2022/10/24/amazon-r...
What value is a job you can't really hold on to for even a year because it's so gruelling?
this line of reasoning was also peddled by slave owners before the Civil War...these people can only do one thing and will starve unless we provide this opportunity to them...
Nobody's making textiles on looms anymore but the mechanization of that work eliminated a lot of jobs, but it created jobs both higher in numbers and more economically valuable.
Eliminating the need to humans to pick a box off of a shelf and put it into a slightly larger box to get put on a truck is an objectively good goal for the economy (which is probably obvious) and for people, including those doing that job now (definitely less obvious).
Just like how those towns didn’t exist 20 years ago, they may not exist again 20 years from now.
next I guess comes the corporate towns and company scrips.
I remember in microeco101 they talked about how Walmart’s low prices are effectively like a tax with the end result of benefits spread to the lowest income people who benefit the most by low prices on commodity goods.
If Amazon lowers prices due to profit, then, theoretically that gets passed on to consumers. So it’s like a super efficient tax where the tax would be distributed to poor people in food stamps or something. Of course, that’s assuming they reduce prices instead of just keeping profits.
If you think you have any chance of fighting big corporation lobbies to impose that, I have a bridge in SF you might be interested in.
People used to fight wars for salt. Now it’s given away for free by restaurants.
Capitalism results in abundance. Or you can tax / centrally manage it away into scarcity.
Yes and no. While, I'm sure warehouse workers don't actually like doing the physical labor of the job (after all, someone has to pay them to do it); I suspect they like starvation and homelessness even less.
> So having a robot do it is good to allow humans to do other things.
We, as a society, have no solution to that. The only thing we do have is hand-waving hope (which, for the record, is not a solution).
> What’s interesting is that if these only cost $3/hour to operate that’s only $25k/year (assuming 365x24 operation) so if these things last 5 years then that means the idea is they will only cost $125k to buy and maintain. That’s cheap enough that middle class people will have live in super servants. And that’s much more appealing to me to have a laundry/dish/sweep bot. Especially since I could probably chip in with neighbors and eventually not have to do these household chores.
1. This looks no where near being some kind of general "super servant." It's probably only suited to do specific kinds of warehouse work in a specially designed environment. Also, IIRC, folding laundry is actually a super-hard robotics task.
2. You're out-of-touch if you think "middle class people" can blow $125,000 on a robot to do their laundry, load their dishwasher, and sweep their floors for 5 years.
We definitely do, as evidenced by all the jobs that have been automated over the past 100 years and people who are currently employed.
It’s not like people who manually harvested crops starved to death after tractors. Over history, automation has always created jobs.
Regarding middle class use of robots, I meant that middle classers would chip in and have a neighborhood maidbot. Having 10 households chip in $12.5k every 5 years is definitely doable. And since the robot is automated it could just spend an hour or two a day in each person’s home without any need for intervention. Just walking down the sidewalk between houses doing whatever needs doing. That’s a cool future.
do you actually know any middle class people? what do you think a middle class income is?
and given the current trend in robots, why do you think the middle class will continue to exist?
Not to mention those are wildly different use cases. Picking items in a warehouse is a less complex task than handwashing a single sink full of assorted dishes, let alone being a general servant.
Petit bourgeois people very often can.
If by “middle class” you mean “around median income”, which is mostly people firmly in the working class (a use of “middle class” invented to beutralize working class solidarity rather than reflecting any real class distinction), then, well, no, they probably can't.
But I was thinking neighborhoods would chip in together so it’s just a few grand a year. I didn’t mean that every house would have their own robot, Bicentennial Man-style.
That was me working for AWS.
Its like saying amazon's robot dogs after a boston dynamics demo
Clean my house and cook my food for me.
In a more just world, automation would mean we would all simply have to work less. We will likely reach a point where not all of us are required to do work. We already have a lot of BS jobs. No one enjoys working in am Amazon warehouse.
Instead, automation will be used to further concentrate wealth into the hands of very few while suppressing wages for those still required.
This isn’t a problem of automation. It’s a problem of capitalism. Instead of Jeff Bezos having amputee $50 billion, maybe we should provide for the basic needs of everyone else instead?
To those who are triggered by anything related to Musk the question why Bezos gets a free pass. Is it just because he is ideologically aligned and supports the current thing or do you actually think he is a better person and if so, why?
"Don't worry, they're just robots they are not sentient!"
I can picture engineers racing to block this behavior and the robots coming up with ever more elaborate suicide methods.
- Millions of years of evolution to have as many babies as possible and to have genes survive
- Design by God
- Or some other mechanism
Wherever you fall on this spectrum, the types of thought, emotions, and intelligence that would evolve spending $150M optimizing a system to e.g. complete human text or make realistic images will be fundamentally different than what's needed to make babies.
That's not to say there can't be emotions which come out. They'll just be very, very alien to us. We evolved to conserve energy and avoid self-harm since that's part of survival-of-the-fittest. Those are not fitness metrics AIs are evolved to follow, at all.
We may see something as horrific as what you describe, but it won't be what you describe, and we might not even recognize it as horrific. Perhaps an LLM is tortured by text it can't complete. Perhaps by something else.
AI safety should start with evolving machines around helping and savings humans and empathy, much more so than these weird mental blocks we're trying to build in about never saying anything else offensive.
How is training data primarily about things like recognizing traffic signs going to be of any use when the hard problems to solve are stuff like picking up a box without crushing it?
No, we don't. That's the hand-waving hope I'm talking about: expecting past performance to guarantee future success.
All of those previous waves of automation involved pretty limited technologies. AI has the potential to be quite different. For instance, if you have an AGI with average human intelligence, and robots doing manual labor, what jobs are all the average-intelligence humans supposed to do? Door-to-door sales to other door-to-door salesmen? If the technology lives up to the hype, their options may be "die homeless" to the more optimistic "be warehoused at minimum cost until natural death."
The robots may be good but the cost of the social upheaval should be factored in to the cost of their operation. Otherwise the rest of us are paying for the externalities of these devices and incentivizing the displacement of workers.
I’m not sure why you think all humans would be fired immediately and replaced.
Most likely is that humans will stay and robots will be mixed in to increase capacity.
And it is absolutely not. People live as they are protected by some divine power over the consequences of their collective actions.
You could absolutely be right but I see zero evidence that this technological advancement will be any different than the countless before over the last thousand years.
You should be blind not to see how technological advancements driving the increasing gap between classes and put pressure on governments in developed countries all over the world.
No one says that people will go extinct, but throughout the thousands of years you mentioned we had periods of very very bad times. It is very naive to think that high paying tech job will protect from the outcomes of other people losing their jobs en masses.
I mean, most people in the world are religious, aren't they? I sometimes forget that fact working in tech where everyone seems to be an atheist (myself among them), but it seems like a very helpful psychological adaptation to living an uncertain and finite existence.
I do think it will eventually doom us however as we create problems beyond our ability to manage. I was thinking it would be climate change that will doom human civilization if not the species itself, but AI (even just the economics effects rather than some rogue intelligence) also seems like a contender.
You want to optimize for all the good things above without enabling wild power imbalances via cashflows and wealth.
Exactly! They'll stop being warehouse workers and do intellectual and creative work, for instance by becoming commercial artists!
Oh wait.
At some point, you really need to take "past performance is not a guarantee of future results" to heart.
While this is true, I think it’s a better assumption than “this time, we’re just too stupid to change and sit here and starve to death.”
Evidence shows humans as creative problem solvers and I think the trend of people doing more productive things to survive will continue.
There’s a million examples of this. And just look at fast food restaurants and cashiers being replaced by kiosks. Did all the cashiers get fired or starve to death?
I don't think so, for a few good reasons:
1. Making the "everything will be fine" assumption discourages taking proactive steps (e.g. if buggy-whip making is going away, It'd be better to retrain the buggy-whip makers 5-10 years beforehand they become redundant, rather than letting their businesses fail and letting them die penniless and forgotten).
2. This time may be different. There's a lot of hype going on about AI, but if even a little of that is true, it's going to put insoluble squeeze on a lot of workers (e.g. their job gets automated away along with most of the other ones they were supposed to pivot into).
3. You talk about "humans" in the abstract, but what about the seven billion people who are actually out there? You abstraction is a rug that can hide a lot of actual damage. To give an extreme example: what if "humans figuring it out" means two million tech billionaires living in an automated paradise on top of seven billion skeletons of workers they no longer need? "Humans" made it through a lot of things, while lots of individual humans were immiserated an/or died.
> There’s a million examples of this. And just look at fast food restaurants and cashiers being replaced by kiosks. Did all the cashiers get fired or starve to death?
Yeah, happy endings like "the rust belt."
You seem to be implying that these recent advances are somehow going to drive massive irrevocable unemployment and that that's somehow going to lead to some sort of - world war? Or at least "very very bad times?" Presumably at least one of those events is that none of these warehouse workers who stand to lose their jobs will be able to get work doing anything else, which seems extremely unlikely.