Unlike most other Ransomware there's at least the option of actually pulling the (maybe) proverbial plug on the bot
As long as it's not run Lights out they should be safe
It is only slightly related to the keywords "Dutch" and "tulips", but it is likely an interesting wiki article for the average HN user: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
> In 2022, the EU exported just over €100 million worth of orchid, hyacinth, narcissi, and tulip bulbs to countries across the world, according to statistics published by Eurostat, the EU statistics agency, on 6 April.
> Of this total, 81% of exports came from the Netherlands, which is almost synonymous with tulips and exports many of the flowers and their bulbs.
> The Dutch exported €81.9 million-worth of tulips to countries outside the EU. The next biggest exporter is Lithuania at just €6.7 million.
Yes, this is talked about in the linked article too:
> Plants and bulbs are mostly exported to other European countries. Switzerland is the EU’s main partner for these products, accounting for 31% of EU exports (or €31.3 million). The UK also imported €21.4 million, Norway €11.5 million, Russia €9.4 million, and Ukraine €5.5 million.
No really.
They are ALL outside the EU. Norway is in the EEA, though. Just because they are European countries it doesn't make them EU, which the article doesn't mention.
The point is that the business within the EU is much larger than the export outside.
Random factoid of the day, if you buy tulips at a local market in the Netherlands, you're most likely buying tulips that were grown in Africa. Pretty much everything that's grown in the Netherlands goes to export since that is just so much more profitable.
Can confirm, used to work at Flora Holland, the world's largest flower exchange and a big part of the incoming product was from Africa. A lot from Dutch greenhouses as well.
I'd figure: bulb is dead ==>> plant cells in bulb are dead ==>> virii in the bulb can't reproduce (since that requires living cells). If (say) they know that the disease is infectious (to nearby tulips) mostly later in the course of infection, then "catch early, kill, leave in place" could make perfect sense.
The first virus they're trying to keep in check is called TBV, Tulip Breaking Virus. It spreads through aphids.
The infected plants are sprayed with Roundup and die, so aphids won't feed on them.
Fun fact™: Tulip Breaking Virus (TBV) was the cause of 16th-century "tulip mania," as it causes the petals to have swirls of different colors [on infected "white" bulbs, it is most-striking!].
> said AI companies have millions of users through e.g. Discord networks already.
How many of them are paying customers? how much of the company's reserves are being used to subsidise day to day running of the service? what happens to the user base when you stop giving free access?
this kind of product is normally a service with a contract and upfront cost for the user. ($200k for the machine) with an on going support contract.
The overhead is much lower for software to begin with. We can consider the ratio of hardware manufacturers to even the hobbyist developer who makes a few bucks on YouTube.
Either way, multinationals are running out of ink signing their seats on spaceship AI and they pay in stacks. The critical test is achieving escape velocity for each individual GenAI "solution" (call it what you want...). Software giants with compute access are windmilling free models every day, hardware is racing to capture that compute, and those GenAI companies are entrenching their contracts while the competition is still hot.
Once they have the contracts it's just build build build until another AI winter or possibly a nuclear winter.
Agreed. Discriminative AI, in general, is further through the hype cycle than generative AI, and this is a clear value proposition with clear financials.
And, really, they're two sides of the same coin. I could imagine the tulip robot using leveraging speech-to-control LLMs in the future. Something like: "Move to field 17 and focus on the Pink Diamonds"
Reminds me of my old cycle ride through the Dutch tulip fields to work and back. One day fields and fields were just dropping dead. Turns out it was an intentional 'slaughter', probably to put the plant energy back into the bulbs? Sad to see. But I feel very lucky to have spent time living and working there, amazingly friendly place.
Indeed. These bulbs don't grow in these large fields for being pretty, but because it takes several years and at least one bloom before the bulbs can be sold, planted and start blooming.
I've grown some bulbs from seed, but it takes years. Much easier to buy bulbs that have bloomed before. And, indeed, the plant itself will drop the leaves soon after being pollinated to store all that in the bulb for next year.
Manual weed/insect control is one of the areas I’m really hoping will be a principal benefit of AI and robotics. Imagine replacing a large portion of the chemicals currently used in agriculture with physical means of elimination. That would get rid of a huge source of environmental and ecological damage.
There are some softwares to recognize and track insects given a video feed, I had to search them for a course in uni involving agritech, eg https://github.com/kimbjerge/insectTracking
There are paid SaaS as well
Ninja edit I find agritech in its entirety very interesting, you have startups like constellr that aim to provide insights on your crops with satellite data, and public projects like copernicus that give you access for free to satellitar data of the whole world - and a new scan is done every 5 days -, although satellite resolution still doesn't go under 10/20m I think
Knowing agriculture a little, it's not going to be "replaced by" but rather "in addition to". These tulip farms will continue to use as much pesticides and herbicides as before regardless of mechanical pest controls. It's just too cheap to use chemicals, and the risk for not using it too big.
A local farmer told me that if they don't use herbicides on timed basis (so even if the farmer can see there's no weeds with his eyes and experience) their insurances would go up so much that they could pay twice the amount of chemicals for that insurance rate rise.
Seems like there is gonna be opportunity for another insurance company to compete by understanding new technology and offer new policies that acknowledge that.
If that were the case, there would have been insurance companies that understood statistics and deep, local and domain- knowledge of farmers on what is needed to mitigate or predict risks.
I'm quite sure insurance companies know this extremely well. But either choose to stay on the safe side because of extreme risk aversion and quite certainly because of monopolies or vendor-lock-in.
> These tulip farms will continue to use as much pesticides and herbicides as before regardless of mechanical pest controls.
Not if robots are cheaper than the poisons.
Your point about insurance is interesting, the industry would do a massive backflip on pesticides if some robotics company managed to convince insurance companies that using their product was less risky than chemical means.
Organic gardening is the third "alternative", and it has been proven to work, work well, refined for hundreds of thousands of years, is well known and the risks are known extremely well.
It's not robotics or chemical, that's a false dichotomy.
And yes, I am aware of the "tradeoffs" of organic farming. But it still is a viable business plan, often the farmers' margins (at least in west EU) are much higher than "chemical farming". And no, not always is the yield lower. Nor are the crops it always more expensive. And no, the common conception that "we cannot feed the world with organic farming" is also disproven.
Organic farming still uses "organic" pesticides like copper. The real falsehood is that organic farming is perfectly nontoxic and safe.
Looking forward to having more advanced robots, we could start seeing a lot more permaculture. Organic farming not only relies on pesticides and herbicides but also on monocrops and tilling all of which add up to a lot of problems. Robotic tending could eventually allow more diverse permaculture to take over.
> These tulip farms will continue to use as much pesticides and herbicides as before regardless of mechanical pest controls.
I happen to have worked in that industry. And I do not want justify the environmental burden of floriculture. It is a far from green industry using lots of chemicals and energy. But the tulip business you mention here is also remarkably high tech. It is unfair to frame these companies as they would always choose chemicals against innovation. Au contraire I would say, it is maybe even the most innovative branche of agriculture.
A hybrid approach would work well too in some situations. When I worked in wetland restoration, one thing we did to reduce the ecological impact of herbicides was to cut the weeds a few inches above the water or soil, and then to paint herbicide directly on the cut face with a foam brush. This was a lot more labor intensive than spraying, but reduced the amount of herbicide used by 80-90%, and prevented any from landing in the water via over-spray. Even without the cutting step, applying herbicide directly to the weeds with a brush would be a big improvement over spraying.
Yes - this is exactly what AI/robotics should be targeted at - things that currently would have to be done manually, but aren't feasible (at least not in high-wage countries) like this one, or sorting mixed trash into non-recyclable and recyclable (and further into various metals and plastics) etc.
Instead, it's targeted at replacing graphics artists and software developers...
Manual work has been getting automated away for over a century. Tech has already eroded low and middle class jobs for decades. To think that similar won't happen in knowledge work (or that we shouldn't let it), feels like a very techy type of NIMBYism
Can you elaborate? Because it's not immediately clear to me the distinction.
I'll concede that automating manual labor has made consumer products cheaper. Whether that is wholly a net benefit, I think, is up for debate. When you consider the externalities like the environmental effects of rampant consumerism and the erosion of the middle class via a reduction in manufacturing jobs, I think there's plenty of basis for at least arguing there is tipping point on automating away manual labor. To say automating manual labor bluntly (and without careful consideration of blowback) always leads to a better society, I think one needs to define what they mean as society and what metrics they're using to define "better." I, personally, don't think raw GDP is a good measure of the health of a society.
If anything, I think automating knowledge work has as at least a potentially larger upside. The downside will largely be borne by the upper-middle and upper-classes, which is why the GGP can read like a classist perspective.
I was referring to automating "jobs" that are not even realistic jobs without automation, because they would be too labor-intensive/unpleasant/low-paying for anyone to want to do them, like the trash-sorting example.
They make the cynical case that automation is coming for us all, and it will eventually replace every ounce of fun or meaning in gainful employment, but that it's okay because of some nebulous societal good. It's not a convincing argument.
While I do question their point that AGI is coming for all jobs, I think you're shoehorning your own narrative onto their point. At no point did they mention "fun" or "meaning". Even the idea that those are synonymous with employment is suspect.
It's not a narrative so much as a leftover from what I was originally going to post, in that the creative/expressive/stimulating work is what's being touted as the first thing to be eliminated by AI.
That aside, what exactly is suspect about finding meaning or joy in work? Is the quintessential experience meant to be soulless and grating?
> Is the quintessential experience meant to be soulless and grating?
Of course not. Few things in life are more fulfilling than a job you absolutely love and are excited to whack at every single day.
But your question raises another one of equal stature: Is the quintessential experience meant to be a job? If we are creative enough to make rocks that can learn to do our jobs for us, surely we are creative enough to craft an economic model which allows us who no longer need to work to paint or write poetry or rebuild antique engines without needing to starve?
I don't think a _job_ is the quintessential experience so much as _productive value,_ doing something that brings you joy from the act of creating, whether it's making music or art, assembling Lego kits, antique engine restoration, etc. Getting that satisfaction from your job is totally possible, so perhaps to some people it is!
As far as crafting a post-scarcity economic model goes, it's not the problem of dreaming one up, it's the pervasiveness of scarcity. Even if all of humanity's basic necessities are one day a given, scarcity won't disappear, just shift around (maybe as transportation for the otherwise-infinite supply of consumer goods? Or living space away from dense urban centers? Maybe even the kind of heuristic analysis abilities humans are unmatched in to keep the matter replicators functioning?)
More to the point, saying that this kind of luxury will exist in a thousand years doesn't nullify the concerns of the present, and probably wouldn't convince most people to forfeit their employment to machines likely owned by the uppermost classes.
I would argue there is a danger of conflating "productive value" with creative effort. The general view is that productive value is measured by how much a market is willing to pay for a product or service. I would venture to guess that most creative efforts aren't very marketable, unless your view is that society should go back to artisan craftsmen. Nobody particularly wants to consume the music that I create, so they have little to no procutive value, other than the joy I get from doing them. On the contrary, a lot of non-creative work has immense productive value. Re-shingling my roof isn't a particularly creative job, but I'm still willing to pay for it.
I think there's a distinction in that I was referring to "knowledge work" which isn't explicitly creative/expressive/stimulating. Many would classify much of research or law as "boring" even though they are knowledge work.
>what exactly is suspect about finding meaning or joy in work?
I did not mean it as wrong to find joy in your work. On the contrary, I think that's a worthwhile goal. But the distinction I make is that any work can be found to be fulfilling. It's the distinction between "finding your passion" and "cultivating your passion." I've worked with people who found meaning in their job cleaning offices and others who treated the design of rockets as soul-crushing. I think it has more to do with the person than the job. So I push back a bit on the false dichotomy created by classifying "knowledge" jobs as inherently worth saving from automation while manual work should be fodder for it. I also think the focus on a job for fulfillment is a bit of a red-herring. I think what people really need are to be valued members of society and, for many, a job is a means to that end (and maybe not even a good one).
Any job that is necessary can have higher pay. Agriculture is probably one of those things that are necessary, unless we all eat fish.
Higher wages in agriculture would mean a combination of less profit and/or higher consumer prices. That is not a sin. It is mostly politicd that demand that food prices have to be low so that the population don't realize how poor they are and much they are being robbed on corruption and waste.
Automating knowledge work is what enables people to learn from books instead of hiring tutors. Teaching can now be done via tools and printing presses. This in turn means we can have libraries, which many people consider a key public good.
It's perhaps worth pausing to consider if we have any kind of useful ability to predict blowback on anything but a trivial scale. It was fifteen years between the invention of HTTP and the creation of Facebook. It was twenty five years between the invention of HTTP and the Cambridge Analytica breach. I do not think any person could have meaningfully predicted those on those timescales.
If we cannot currently usefully predict blowback, then what reason is there to try to anticipate it as a matter of policy?
I don't think I fully agree with the premise that blowback is completely unpredictable. I think there are plenty of examples where people can predict the directionality of future developments, even if they can't predict the exact specifics.
We can certainly predict that when automation happens people will lose jobs. In a country where productivity is king and self-worth is tied to employment, we can predict this may lead to a crisis in society. And we also know people tend to turn to vices like drugs during those times. So I don't think things like the opioid epidemic that hit the former manufacturing centers of the country are unrelated nor completely unpredictable. They just sometimes take decades to play out.
I'm not making a Luddite case that technology needs to be stalled. But I'm also not making the techno-optimist case that everything will eventually work out if we just plow forward with reckless technological abandon. The latter runs the risk of a lot of increased human suffering in the short term at the very least.
To clarify, I am not saying blowback is completely unpredictable. You are absolutely right that there are times when blowback can be predicted in a general sense. My argument is that a general directionality of blowback is generally not useful for crafting policy.
You're completely right that it was easy to predict that there would be some consequences to automation and people losing their jobs. Yet I do not think it was easy to predict what shape those would take. As a result, it was functionally impossible to offer useful policy measures. You can say "We should reform society away from believing productivity is king and self-worth is tied to employment", but that's itself not specific enough to be useful. "This may lead to a crisis in society" is similarly rather non-specific. How do you craft policy around "this may lead to a crisis"?
In practice, I see two recurring patterns when people try to predict blowback. First, people use fears of blowback to launder their anxieties. If you look at the conversation around AI, you will see this happening in many forms.
Second, people often use predictions about blowback to advance policies they wanted anyway. Artists want to be hired more and stronger intellectual property laws, the same things they wanted yesterday. Advocates for saving small towns in the rust belt will suggest the same retaining and social safety net policies they suggested yesterday before anyone asked them to predict blowback.
In my opinion, these two patterns are deeply linked. They are both about trying to turn confirmation bias into policy. None of the answers from this are automatically wrong, but none of them are novel. Most worryingly, neither approach offers any kind of way to reliably predict blowback so it can be dealt with via policy.
In my career, I've seen any number of engineering teams devote significant time and effort to trying to solve technical problems that never arose. Not because they were solved in advance, but because the team's predictions about where issues would arise were wildly incorrect. From this, I have drawn the lesson that we are well-advised to approach the task of trying to predict failure in complex systems with deep humility.
The more complex the system, the more humble we need to be. At some point, trying to make any prediction more specific than "something will probably go wrong" becomes a poor use of time.
This is neither the Luddite case nor the techno-optimist case. It's an argument to be skeptical of our own ability to make good predictions about the future except in, as you wisely and correctly say, very general ways.
You are right that I was speaking in generalities, in part because a forum isn't the best format for these types of in-depth policy discussions and also because I don't claim to be a policy-wonk. In fact, that's why I prefer engineering roles. But I'll try to clarify a bit.
Let's dilate on "This may lead to a crisis in society" to try to get to a policy. If we can agree on two things we might be able to get a rough scaffolding of a framework to discuss policy. 1) government programs, like everything from social security to roads/bridges take money to run and 2) the vast majority of federal funds come from taxes related to work, like income taxes and social security taxes. By extension, if automation effects jobs, it then affects the programs that create a stable society.
So one aspect is: as automation takes people's jobs, it potentially threatens the ability of government to fund its programs. If a society ignores this, it faces a potential "crisis" if those programs help create the conditions for a stable society. There's a few ways one could address this. On the cost side of the equation, we could use austerity measures to reduce the cost burden. There's certainly something to be gained here, and it would be a long digression to decide which policies are a priority. (For example, I've heard research saying that roads provide the most benefit on a cost basis, followed by early education programs like Head Start). On the supply side of the equation, it seems like there are two options: a) help workers get replacement jobs that pay at, or near, what they had before their job was automated away or b) get the money through a different, non-income based policy. It didn't seem like we did a good job crafting policy in the rust belt related to a). There wasn't much re-investment into those communities or workers, compared to what was gained by automation. There are various ways to address b), including restructuring corporate taxes or instituting an automation tax to make up for the displaced incomes formerly garnered by workers paying a tax. But we went the other way on those, too.
While I concede those are very high-level, the intent is to show there are real discussion points that can be crafted into policy and it's not just some hand-wavy rhetoric.
I believe you may have overlooked one of my key points: we did not have any useful way to predict those consequences at the time production was being automated that would have marked them out as particularly likely.
Automation started in the 1780s, with the industrial revolution. The initial impacts had a lot to do with creating vast numbers of jobs, driving down the cost of all kinds of consumer goods, and heavily driving urbanization. I can't see any easy way to get from there to the rust belt if I'm someone looking forward in 1780. Right now we can treat this as obvious only because we have the benefit of hindsight. I cannot imagine any way in which the modern history of Detroit would have been reasonably and usefully predictable from 1780 (at the time it was a frontier fort under British military control).
You're right, impacts can be decades off. They can even be centuries off. There were a lot of equally credible people who thought automation was going to have utopian consequences that didn't include people losing their productive economic positions. This isn't a binary, either. There were plenty of other possible outcomes as well. How were people in 1780 to know what we do know? What happens if every predicted outcome is taken seriously? What happens if they're then all wrong, or not right on a sufficient timescale? I know how I would expect that to interact with limited government resources.
At the end of it, I think we're likely limited to dealing with consequences and trivially short-term prediction. Those, at least, we have a reasonable shot of observing.
I disagree and I think if you follow the points I laid out, it’s pretty clear that the outcome is fairly obvious from someone who looks from above the system perspective.
When your system is predicated on taxes borne from income, and you implement a disturbance that displaces that income, it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to see there will a problem looming on the horizon. It’s really just connecting two very obvious points that doesn’t need hindsight centuries later to see. People have been ringing the alarm for decades now, policy makers just found it easy and expedient to ignore them.
I think many politicians knew this but policy development has a different wrinkle. Politicians are incentivized to take a short term perspective because election cycles don’t operate on the same time scale as large scale societal issues. It’s the same reason they are incentivized to raid the general coffers for projects that will be completed during their tenure and leave long time horizon problems for someone else to fix. (If you disagree, look at Illinois and their public pension issues)
(And not to be pedantic, but automation dates back a couple thousand years, at least to the use of water wheels to automate grain flour production. The industrial revolution dates to the late 18th century. While they are related, they aren’t the same thing)
>Can you elaborate? Because it's not immediately clear to me the distinction.
Replacing a task with AI that otherwise will be done chemically with environmental degradation or not done at all because people won't or can't-- AI in that context makes things better.
As for attempts to deploy AI as a replacement for sophisticated human work like "automating knowledge work", the output will be worse and it's a race to the bottom on quality. As we see from our algorithmic-driven tech industry friends, robot-led workstreams benefit society only in the short run. In the long run, people come to miss-- and their lives are diminished by-- an absence of quality, humanity, agency, caring, fairness, all the things algorithms cannot and will not ever be or do.
Anyone who is serious about this topic only discusses in terms of AI + humans (as a combination) and not AI as a replacement for sophisticated work. Statements beyond that reflect a lack of appreciation for either the complexity of the topic or for what society actually expects out of a "knowledge" workstream.
I would consider myself in the AI+humans camp. However, I do not see the distinction between automating knowledge work and manual work in what you describe. Somehow, knowledge workers seem to think what they do has some magic special sauce. I tend to think this is the result of human bias and not clear, first-principled thinking. You make a bold claim that automating knowledge work will be worse but don't show any data to confirm it. Even trivial cases can disprove it, however. Do you think knowledge work is worse when it is "automated" using an Excel spreadsheet vs a pencil and paper?
>an absence of quality, humanity, agency, caring, fairness, all the things algorithms cannot and will not ever be or do.
I would argue that automation can be quite better than humans on many of these domains. When they do fall short, it's often because they are reflecting (and in worse cases, amplifying) the shortcomings of humans in these same areas.
It does "take jobs from artists" but it also hugely opens things up for more people. Like, a friend of mine made a parody trading card game a bit ago. Doing custom art for each card would've been completely prohibitive. Instead, she used AI art for it all. Cue lots of hilarity and a good time for all.
Same for writers, another friend is writing a D&D campaign. Again, he doesn't have the skill himself to do good digital art, and dozens of custom pieces is way too much cash at this point. But some carefully-done AI pieces, they mon't be perfect, but a damn bit better than nothing!
So what's your plan for people who currently have those "useless" job that need them to provide for themselves and their family?
I'm all for getting rid of bull$hit jobs to allow people to pursue meaningful, creative work. And while a lot of people laude the automation aspect, I don't see many proposing ideas on how to close that gap.
I think you're having a different "argument". My original post is about rejecting the false dichotomy that automating away manual jobs is inherently good and automating away knowledge jobs is inherently bad. But you chimed in to make the case that knowledge jobs aren't at risk of automation. I don't agree with that latter point, even if it's digression from the original one. Because I disagree with it, I was asking you to elaborate on what you'd suggest for those knowledge workers who eventually get displaced? To use a glib example, do we just tell every lawyer "learn how to plumb"?
> which will yield far more benefit in the long run.
This is questionable at best. Im glad you have optimism, but do you have any facts that show it won't be a long run benefit like cfcs, or lead in everything?
> This temporary period of difficulty is the price we pay...
Im glad you're signing me up for difficulty. I get that you probably think you stand to benefit in some way from AGI, so why don't you pay the price yourself instead of volunteering others? Maybe it's because the difficulty that it causes really really sucks, and the benefit isn't worth paying the price yourself?
Coal workers don't like renewables even though it's great for humanity because it threatens their jobs. The same goes for AGI and everyone else.
It's irrelevant what the average person thinks about AGI because they can't see past the short term fear of losing their job.
They can't see the billions of lives that will be saved, the therapies and medicines and technologies that will be developed, etc. Nothing about the concept of the "singularity" registers, just fear about their next paycheck - a fear to be expressed to their government at that, instead of killing progress that may one day save their own or their children's lives.
We volunteer you for AGI, and myself, and everyone else, because our selfish shortsighted nature and fear for our jobs are not worth the lives and suffering and death and disease of billions of people to come. It's sad that we lose our jobs - but it is the price we pay for the cure to everything. The best we can do is implement UBI while we make this transition as a species.
Trying to stop the development of AGI out of this fear is akin to being a plague doctor trying to stop the development of penicillin so as to not be out of work. I get it, we are all afraid for our jobs, but their importance does not stand a candle to the reduction in global human suffering AGI would be able to net us.
We are all literally going to die, you hear me? You, me, our children. It's not going to be pretty, because the lack of choice/consent around dying is the single biggest driver of human suffering, full stop.
But AGI could at least give us a choice here, a choice to spend many decades more in healthy life with those we cherish and love, fully provided for and safe and secure, and that's worth more than any job.
Call everyone scared where their next meal is going to come from selfish all you want, that isn't helping them, their spouse, or their kids not go hungry. Maybe it's the gift of hindsight, but the plague doctor could transition to using penicillin to treat their patients. It's less clear what a jr frontend dev or data scientist is going to do.
Saying there's a singularity in the future, when that's so very far from a guaranteed future in many people's eyes - who's to say we don't end up with a dystopian Terminator future rather than a utopian Star Trek future? Your time machine is just as good as theirs. We have three choices for our future. The billionaires,
corporations, and the government. One of those three is where the singularity is going to come from. Which do you pick? Unfortunately, all three a flawed in different ways, so utopian Star Trek future of the singularity is by no means even guaranteed inn the first place.
You want people to trust that one of those three groups will just grant the rest of us living in the singularity. For all of human history, every revolution, it's been the same - there's been new jobs created. Just wait for it to be different this time. Avoiding the question of if we'll ever develop AGI because it's irrelevant, the question is when will machines be able to fix themselves, because that's when no new jobs or follow on jobs need be created.
If no new jobs end up being created, then what?
One time, it'll be different. I don't think we're looking at that quite just yet, but it doesn't see that far off in the future. Openinterpreter is already fixing problems for me on my computer without much intervention, robots doing the same for robots really doesn't seem impossibly far off.
I just pointed out that rushing into something that could make things better has historically involved an awful lot of suffering for people. An awful lot of things that were promoted as short term suffering for some people to make life better for everone (that remained) turned out to be long on the suffering and short on the "better".
So here's my thinking about an alternate plan:
What if we moved forward in a way that both advances the tech and also doesn't force suffering on people? This is possible.
There is no evidence that any of your promises, maybes and coulds are anything but words, and as such you are gambling other people's lives. The idea that "maybe we can help people in the future if we hurt them now" is merely a delusion without evidence, a lie those that hurt people on a whim tell themselves to justify and hide their true motives.
Far more benefit - but the question is, for whom? And don't start with topics like universal basic income, I'm not very optimistic about that. The way it's looking like right now, in the long run 1% will reap the benefits, while 99% will be out of a job...
Strange to ask the question, but eliminate one of the strongest arguments right off the bat. Should probably explain why UBI is not feasible in this scenario.
As for benefits, likely for everyone. People don't work just to make money, people make money since they work and produce for society right? Making money was never the end goal, and if we can avoid more work, that should be better for society as a whole.
I’m not making an argument here. What I would like explained is why we don’t already have UBI, given that mass production and automation has existed for a very long time already.
In short, automation shifted the amount that needed to be done in certain industries. AI could possibly make shift so large that there won't be enough work for everyone to do.
Automation practically eliminated the labor required to provide for the basic necessities of human survival, but if I don’t maintain an increasingly inconsequential job, then I will die homeless in the streets in short order.
I’m really not trying to argue for or against any new technology. But I don’t see why any new technological change necessarily brings about UBI given the absolutely drastic reduction in the amount of labor necessary for human survival we already achieved in the mid 1900’s. So my question is still, why did the old forms of automation not bring about a post scarcity utopia (or at least a UBI)?
Not sure if this is sarcasm and I just need another coffee. Almost everyone works for money, short of a privileged few that are lucky enough to work purely for the satisfaction of the work itself.
That wasn't my point. An individual works for money in order to buy things. But we just have this system in place because labour needs to be done in order for us to survive. Labour makes goods and services that we need, society alloocates money so we can live. If we automate most labour away, then money doesn't need to exist as a system. It exist just to facilitate our current system of consumption and labour. When there is a dramatic shift to that system, we shouldn't fight the shift just because it will automate jobs away and make money less valuable, the system of allocate wealth needs to change to accomodate the shift.
I wasn't trying to say that people don't work for money fullstop, but rather that money isn't what people are trying to get ultimately. People want things, things that make people happy and alive. They get money in order to acquire those things.
Ah gotcha. I understand what you mean. Though I don't know that I share your optimism. I fear the wealthy class will just squeeze and squeeze all the money and resources from everyone else, and make moving to a post-money system as painful as possible.
Young women can always prostitute themselves, and that's something an AI can never replace.
So mass prostitution for women and mass gang violence for men is what the younger generation gets. To the benefit of the few and the elderly. It's already happening.
Answer to you and the other responder: The average man is not going to be their clients. They are broke. The clients are of course going to be those who benefit from the massive difference in wealth. And it does not have to be prostitution only in the traditional sense, it will also be so called sugar dating and literal harems. That is the norm for mammals.
The top men will have harems and many children. They will probably share power and wealth with their sons and daughters (or in-laws), and if it's not enough for the sons to have their own harems, they'll have a wife or series of wives. And in a few generations the huge amount of children from the elite will have diluted their wealth and power significantly.
So the result is that most women and a few men will have offspring, the rest of the men are exterminated from the genome. A future generation of people having a lot of cousins, with all the genetical diseases it brings.
Every new significant invention means massive genetical extermination of males and a new cycle of power struggles. A stable society with monogamy and equality among people is a rare breather.
There's an argument that the relatively "old" tech of internet pornography has already changed the way and amount of sex that people engage in. Why do you think it stops there?
> or sorting mixed trash into non-recyclable and recyclable (and further into various metals and plastics)
A lot of that can already be automated. Push the trash into a series of shredders, until it's powderized, then use magnets to pull out metals, and differentiate the rest by weight, IR spectrum and air streams. Then, one can use a spectrum of solvents to target plastic polymers to get back the precursors.
Unfortunately, for plastic polymers that's still way more expensive than to just dump the wholesale trash on some Asian or African piece of land where it will eventually either degrade into microplastics or be burnt by extremely poor people who hope to get some of the metals back.
It cannot replace neither artists nor software developers. People are already laughing at Devin or whatever this thing is called hallucinating really heavily and producing gibberish.
Hardware is hard. That and the fact that AI is still bleeding edge - I'm not surprised at all that LLMs, image generation, etc. is what companies are jumping for right now.
Instead, it's targeted at replacing graphics artists and software developers...
It would be nice if we would not stigmatize manual labor. There's nothing wrong with manual labor. For some people, it's ideal.
In a city where I used to live, I'd frequently come home on red eye flights. Over time I started to recognize a couple of older gentlemen mopping the floors in the early morning hours.
Then one day, they were gone. Instead, there was a slow-moving robot mopping the floors. One clearly too large to get into all the places where the dirt accumulates, but... Automation!
A couple of years later, I learned that the airport was part of a municipal program employing intellectually challenged adults, and that the cleaning guys I saw were probably part of that.
Now when I travel through that airport, I always wonder what happened to them. Did they find another mopping job? Are they homeless now? Do they have to live under a bridge because society fetishizes technology and robots? Because budget spreadsheets always have a line for "money saved," but never a line for "lives improved?"
Mopping the floors at the airport is not a great job for a tech bro who wants to make seven figures. But it's a good, honest job for a lot of people.
Clearly you've never worked with the intellectually challenged. These are people who want to live normal lives, and like most normal people find earning an honest wage and providing for themselves very rewarding.
And to describe manual labor as "abuse" is, frankly, disgusting.
I have family members who are intellectually challenged and my work is manual labour. There could be many therapeutic applications provided by the government where they could still live 'normal' lives (this is obviously wrong because they do need different conditions, if you really want to benefit them they will have different requirements). Normal lives do not mean doing work that is tiresome.
Perhaps in a different world manual labour could be something good, but i dont think its honest of you to say that you think people who do manual labour are not being abused.
i dont think its honest of you to say that you think people who do manual labour are not being abused.
The next time you drive through a construction zone, let the construction workers know how you feel. I'm interested to hear their responses.
EDIT: Since HN doesn't permit me to respond to your response, I'll note here that I have worked plenty of manual labor jobs. I've been poor. Very poor. I'm better off today than I was then. But, I don't recall ever thinking that having a job involving manual labor was abuse. It was just a job. It's what you did to pay the rent, and hopefully buy some ramen and canned potatoes for the week.
I've done landscaping, and mucked out toilets, and cleaned out the pits of elevator shafts, hauled endless boxes from one end of a factory to the other, and I've always taken pride in my work. Perhaps I was just brought up differently than you were.
Having worked in many, many menial jobs, i can tell you that there is definitely the general tendency to think that we were being abused in all of them.
Perhaps you can try working at a mcdonalds or something or as a janitor for a while, see how you feel about your employers or the institution that is employing you.
As you yourself admit, you describe your own experience with such work in negative terms, conditions of being 'very poor'. Why would you wish it on a person who is intellectually challenged?
Regarding ethics of work, you are talking about something completely different. Being proud of working an honest job is not the subject at hand.
I enjoy manual labor and I wish it was easier to get paid for it. I find cognitive work more pleasant and satisfying when I devote part of my time to external physical effort, which forces me to focus my mind outward instead of on abstractions.
It seems to me (reading your other comments) that your issue is not with manual labor per se but the capitalistic system that devalues it and gives many manual laborers as little autonomy as possible.
I agree, there is a lot of delicate and manual agricultural work that I would like see AI tackle. But this doesn't seem to be one of them.
The article is a little light on the details, but it doesn't look like this robut does any manual work on the flowers. Rather, it seems like it uses image recognition to plot the GPS coordinates of potential sick plants (with the assumption that a human will follow up to remove them manually if necessary).
Pest control targetting is still done manually, unless you buy this expensive robot.
But harvesting robots are already used in the field, and real-time vision helps there.
Makes sense; (red) diesel is already in use on farm fields, one tank lasts for ages, loads of power, doesn't need to be quiet since it's in fields, it's lighter weight so less soil impact, and water doesn't affect it much.
Downsides is of course pollution etc, even if diesel engines have gotten a lot cleaner over the years.
If you think of it, though: all the pollutants, heavy metals, and other chemicals that are in the X liter of diesel a farmer burns per yet, ends up on, and in the crops.
We eat that. (and thus need to wash it, to mitigate that)
What heavy metals? Leaded fuels aren't used for decades. Diesel exhaust doesn't really leave anything worth caring about on the crops, "natural" pollution from rain, soil, bugs and birdshit is an order of magnitude more relevant than exhaust, and the things intentionally sprayed on fields - fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides - is much worse than those, even for organic farms manure and their range of approved pesticides are applied in huge quantities and will mean polluted crops that (obviously) need to be washed and will have all kinds of harmful residue anyway.
If the device was solar instead of diesel, that wouldn't move the needle on the dirtiness of the crops. Even the pollution from wear&tear on tires and brakes is more relevant than fuel - we worry about fossil fuels due to the global effect of greenhouse gas emissions, we also care about people breathing in small particles from diesel exhaust, but it doesn't really harm food in farms.
> all the pollutants, heavy metals, and other chemicals that are in the X liter of diesel a farmer burns per yet, ends up on, and in the crops.
It's really not that much. A combine harvester uses about 15 gallons / hour of fuel and harvests ~450,000 pounds of corn per hour ie more than a lifetimes supply of food. Various other equipment gets used but it's all trivial in comparison to what's directly sprayed on crops.
Meanwhile your directly exposed to all the car fumes around you on a daily basis. Also, tulips aren't a food crop.
The robot arm would still have to be mounted on a truck, wouldn't it? It's not like it will be half a mile long and just reach over the whole field.
Also, robot arms can be a quite expensive way of doing things; I saw a prototype that used tethered drones (like the common quadcopters, but power and data comes over a cable) to manipulate things as apparently it was like 10 times cheaper than a robot arm capable of reaching the same distances and transporting the same weight payload.
I work on a similar type of application (AI connected to a robot arm that sorts recycling). This looks pretty efficient for a few reasons.
- Consistent lighting is crucial for the most efficient AI. Full overhead enclosure makes this way easier
- Gantry style robot is MUCH lighter and easier to repair than both a 6-axis arm or even a delta robot. It's also likely an order of magnitude cheaper than other options
- Gantry robot also makes it pretty modular if they need to modify for different crop widths
I was thinking the same. Even use some drone with reinforced titanium props that double as blades and use the drone propeller to chop up the sick tulips.
Apparently a mummy is an almond nut that was not harvested and remained on the tree. Some pests depend on these to survive the winter, so having them on trees is a risk.
What was interesting to me was how expensive this thing was, I wonder how much of that cost came from the software. Elon mentioned how they're trying to create a "world model" for their Tesla FSD, which has enabled them to use the same software for Optimus.
I'd imagine the future will be large "ready to go" Ai packages, which companies would tweak to their liking.
Seems to me that smaller, more focused models would be more practical. Why would the tulip machine need to know the rules of canasta or the history of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? I wonder if there's going to be a persistent monolith/microservices cycle.
Wasn't it 180.000 EUR? Once you start buying equipment for the industry you will discover that consumer price levels do not apply here. Perhaps it is the lower scale, or it is the burden of compliance.
There you have it, "the future of nursing homes"... All the material for a dystopian sci-fi book, fueled by a single spooky headline. Matrix and A Scanner Darkly mixed up into something... that makes you even more affraid of the future.
Side question to anyone working in this field. Aren't you afraid that the next wave of AI (generic robot that can be taught to do anything) will destroy your business model?
Anyone working in this field is likely to be aware how woeful current actuators and power sources can be in a machine designed solely for one purpose, let alone how they might be in a machine designed for every single purpose.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadThere is an obvious route of abuse for ransomware: reprogram the bot to destroy healthy tulips as well and demand payment.
https://youtu.be/kl6rsi7BEtk
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
> In 2022, the EU exported just over €100 million worth of orchid, hyacinth, narcissi, and tulip bulbs to countries across the world, according to statistics published by Eurostat, the EU statistics agency, on 6 April.
> Of this total, 81% of exports came from the Netherlands, which is almost synonymous with tulips and exports many of the flowers and their bulbs.
> The Dutch exported €81.9 million-worth of tulips to countries outside the EU. The next biggest exporter is Lithuania at just €6.7 million.
https://www.brusselstimes.com/450559/the-netherlands-exporte...
> Plants and bulbs are mostly exported to other European countries. Switzerland is the EU’s main partner for these products, accounting for 31% of EU exports (or €31.3 million). The UK also imported €21.4 million, Norway €11.5 million, Russia €9.4 million, and Ukraine €5.5 million.
The point is that the business within the EU is much larger than the export outside.
How many of them are paying customers? how much of the company's reserves are being used to subsidise day to day running of the service? what happens to the user base when you stop giving free access?
this kind of product is normally a service with a contract and upfront cost for the user. ($200k for the machine) with an on going support contract.
Either way, multinationals are running out of ink signing their seats on spaceship AI and they pay in stacks. The critical test is achieving escape velocity for each individual GenAI "solution" (call it what you want...). Software giants with compute access are windmilling free models every day, hardware is racing to capture that compute, and those GenAI companies are entrenching their contracts while the competition is still hot.
Once they have the contracts it's just build build build until another AI winter or possibly a nuclear winter.
And, really, they're two sides of the same coin. I could imagine the tulip robot using leveraging speech-to-control LLMs in the future. Something like: "Move to field 17 and focus on the Pink Diamonds"
I've grown some bulbs from seed, but it takes years. Much easier to buy bulbs that have bloomed before. And, indeed, the plant itself will drop the leaves soon after being pollinated to store all that in the bulb for next year.
There are paid SaaS as well
Ninja edit I find agritech in its entirety very interesting, you have startups like constellr that aim to provide insights on your crops with satellite data, and public projects like copernicus that give you access for free to satellitar data of the whole world - and a new scan is done every 5 days -, although satellite resolution still doesn't go under 10/20m I think
Flower fields are terrible chemical wise, much worse then food due to less strict rules
A local farmer told me that if they don't use herbicides on timed basis (so even if the farmer can see there's no weeds with his eyes and experience) their insurances would go up so much that they could pay twice the amount of chemicals for that insurance rate rise.
I'm quite sure insurance companies know this extremely well. But either choose to stay on the safe side because of extreme risk aversion and quite certainly because of monopolies or vendor-lock-in.
Sounds like a perfect job for an AI-actuary-based insurance company.
Not if robots are cheaper than the poisons.
Your point about insurance is interesting, the industry would do a massive backflip on pesticides if some robotics company managed to convince insurance companies that using their product was less risky than chemical means.
It's not robotics or chemical, that's a false dichotomy.
And yes, I am aware of the "tradeoffs" of organic farming. But it still is a viable business plan, often the farmers' margins (at least in west EU) are much higher than "chemical farming". And no, not always is the yield lower. Nor are the crops it always more expensive. And no, the common conception that "we cannot feed the world with organic farming" is also disproven.
Looking forward to having more advanced robots, we could start seeing a lot more permaculture. Organic farming not only relies on pesticides and herbicides but also on monocrops and tilling all of which add up to a lot of problems. Robotic tending could eventually allow more diverse permaculture to take over.
https://www.deere.com/en/sprayers/see-spray-ultimate/
No, now you pay for the service AND they sell your data.
Companies will take every edge they can legally hold.
I happen to have worked in that industry. And I do not want justify the environmental burden of floriculture. It is a far from green industry using lots of chemicals and energy. But the tulip business you mention here is also remarkably high tech. It is unfair to frame these companies as they would always choose chemicals against innovation. Au contraire I would say, it is maybe even the most innovative branche of agriculture.
Instead, it's targeted at replacing graphics artists and software developers...
Manual work has been getting automated away for over a century. Tech has already eroded low and middle class jobs for decades. To think that similar won't happen in knowledge work (or that we shouldn't let it), feels like a very techy type of NIMBYism
I'll concede that automating manual labor has made consumer products cheaper. Whether that is wholly a net benefit, I think, is up for debate. When you consider the externalities like the environmental effects of rampant consumerism and the erosion of the middle class via a reduction in manufacturing jobs, I think there's plenty of basis for at least arguing there is tipping point on automating away manual labor. To say automating manual labor bluntly (and without careful consideration of blowback) always leads to a better society, I think one needs to define what they mean as society and what metrics they're using to define "better." I, personally, don't think raw GDP is a good measure of the health of a society.
If anything, I think automating knowledge work has as at least a potentially larger upside. The downside will largely be borne by the upper-middle and upper-classes, which is why the GGP can read like a classist perspective.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39828089
That aside, what exactly is suspect about finding meaning or joy in work? Is the quintessential experience meant to be soulless and grating?
Of course not. Few things in life are more fulfilling than a job you absolutely love and are excited to whack at every single day.
But your question raises another one of equal stature: Is the quintessential experience meant to be a job? If we are creative enough to make rocks that can learn to do our jobs for us, surely we are creative enough to craft an economic model which allows us who no longer need to work to paint or write poetry or rebuild antique engines without needing to starve?
As far as crafting a post-scarcity economic model goes, it's not the problem of dreaming one up, it's the pervasiveness of scarcity. Even if all of humanity's basic necessities are one day a given, scarcity won't disappear, just shift around (maybe as transportation for the otherwise-infinite supply of consumer goods? Or living space away from dense urban centers? Maybe even the kind of heuristic analysis abilities humans are unmatched in to keep the matter replicators functioning?)
More to the point, saying that this kind of luxury will exist in a thousand years doesn't nullify the concerns of the present, and probably wouldn't convince most people to forfeit their employment to machines likely owned by the uppermost classes.
I think there's a distinction in that I was referring to "knowledge work" which isn't explicitly creative/expressive/stimulating. Many would classify much of research or law as "boring" even though they are knowledge work.
>what exactly is suspect about finding meaning or joy in work?
I did not mean it as wrong to find joy in your work. On the contrary, I think that's a worthwhile goal. But the distinction I make is that any work can be found to be fulfilling. It's the distinction between "finding your passion" and "cultivating your passion." I've worked with people who found meaning in their job cleaning offices and others who treated the design of rockets as soul-crushing. I think it has more to do with the person than the job. So I push back a bit on the false dichotomy created by classifying "knowledge" jobs as inherently worth saving from automation while manual work should be fodder for it. I also think the focus on a job for fulfillment is a bit of a red-herring. I think what people really need are to be valued members of society and, for many, a job is a means to that end (and maybe not even a good one).
Higher wages in agriculture would mean a combination of less profit and/or higher consumer prices. That is not a sin. It is mostly politicd that demand that food prices have to be low so that the population don't realize how poor they are and much they are being robbed on corruption and waste.
It's perhaps worth pausing to consider if we have any kind of useful ability to predict blowback on anything but a trivial scale. It was fifteen years between the invention of HTTP and the creation of Facebook. It was twenty five years between the invention of HTTP and the Cambridge Analytica breach. I do not think any person could have meaningfully predicted those on those timescales.
If we cannot currently usefully predict blowback, then what reason is there to try to anticipate it as a matter of policy?
We can certainly predict that when automation happens people will lose jobs. In a country where productivity is king and self-worth is tied to employment, we can predict this may lead to a crisis in society. And we also know people tend to turn to vices like drugs during those times. So I don't think things like the opioid epidemic that hit the former manufacturing centers of the country are unrelated nor completely unpredictable. They just sometimes take decades to play out.
I'm not making a Luddite case that technology needs to be stalled. But I'm also not making the techno-optimist case that everything will eventually work out if we just plow forward with reckless technological abandon. The latter runs the risk of a lot of increased human suffering in the short term at the very least.
You're completely right that it was easy to predict that there would be some consequences to automation and people losing their jobs. Yet I do not think it was easy to predict what shape those would take. As a result, it was functionally impossible to offer useful policy measures. You can say "We should reform society away from believing productivity is king and self-worth is tied to employment", but that's itself not specific enough to be useful. "This may lead to a crisis in society" is similarly rather non-specific. How do you craft policy around "this may lead to a crisis"?
In practice, I see two recurring patterns when people try to predict blowback. First, people use fears of blowback to launder their anxieties. If you look at the conversation around AI, you will see this happening in many forms.
Second, people often use predictions about blowback to advance policies they wanted anyway. Artists want to be hired more and stronger intellectual property laws, the same things they wanted yesterday. Advocates for saving small towns in the rust belt will suggest the same retaining and social safety net policies they suggested yesterday before anyone asked them to predict blowback.
In my opinion, these two patterns are deeply linked. They are both about trying to turn confirmation bias into policy. None of the answers from this are automatically wrong, but none of them are novel. Most worryingly, neither approach offers any kind of way to reliably predict blowback so it can be dealt with via policy.
In my career, I've seen any number of engineering teams devote significant time and effort to trying to solve technical problems that never arose. Not because they were solved in advance, but because the team's predictions about where issues would arise were wildly incorrect. From this, I have drawn the lesson that we are well-advised to approach the task of trying to predict failure in complex systems with deep humility.
The more complex the system, the more humble we need to be. At some point, trying to make any prediction more specific than "something will probably go wrong" becomes a poor use of time.
This is neither the Luddite case nor the techno-optimist case. It's an argument to be skeptical of our own ability to make good predictions about the future except in, as you wisely and correctly say, very general ways.
Let's dilate on "This may lead to a crisis in society" to try to get to a policy. If we can agree on two things we might be able to get a rough scaffolding of a framework to discuss policy. 1) government programs, like everything from social security to roads/bridges take money to run and 2) the vast majority of federal funds come from taxes related to work, like income taxes and social security taxes. By extension, if automation effects jobs, it then affects the programs that create a stable society.
So one aspect is: as automation takes people's jobs, it potentially threatens the ability of government to fund its programs. If a society ignores this, it faces a potential "crisis" if those programs help create the conditions for a stable society. There's a few ways one could address this. On the cost side of the equation, we could use austerity measures to reduce the cost burden. There's certainly something to be gained here, and it would be a long digression to decide which policies are a priority. (For example, I've heard research saying that roads provide the most benefit on a cost basis, followed by early education programs like Head Start). On the supply side of the equation, it seems like there are two options: a) help workers get replacement jobs that pay at, or near, what they had before their job was automated away or b) get the money through a different, non-income based policy. It didn't seem like we did a good job crafting policy in the rust belt related to a). There wasn't much re-investment into those communities or workers, compared to what was gained by automation. There are various ways to address b), including restructuring corporate taxes or instituting an automation tax to make up for the displaced incomes formerly garnered by workers paying a tax. But we went the other way on those, too.
While I concede those are very high-level, the intent is to show there are real discussion points that can be crafted into policy and it's not just some hand-wavy rhetoric.
Automation started in the 1780s, with the industrial revolution. The initial impacts had a lot to do with creating vast numbers of jobs, driving down the cost of all kinds of consumer goods, and heavily driving urbanization. I can't see any easy way to get from there to the rust belt if I'm someone looking forward in 1780. Right now we can treat this as obvious only because we have the benefit of hindsight. I cannot imagine any way in which the modern history of Detroit would have been reasonably and usefully predictable from 1780 (at the time it was a frontier fort under British military control).
You're right, impacts can be decades off. They can even be centuries off. There were a lot of equally credible people who thought automation was going to have utopian consequences that didn't include people losing their productive economic positions. This isn't a binary, either. There were plenty of other possible outcomes as well. How were people in 1780 to know what we do know? What happens if every predicted outcome is taken seriously? What happens if they're then all wrong, or not right on a sufficient timescale? I know how I would expect that to interact with limited government resources.
At the end of it, I think we're likely limited to dealing with consequences and trivially short-term prediction. Those, at least, we have a reasonable shot of observing.
When your system is predicated on taxes borne from income, and you implement a disturbance that displaces that income, it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to see there will a problem looming on the horizon. It’s really just connecting two very obvious points that doesn’t need hindsight centuries later to see. People have been ringing the alarm for decades now, policy makers just found it easy and expedient to ignore them.
I think many politicians knew this but policy development has a different wrinkle. Politicians are incentivized to take a short term perspective because election cycles don’t operate on the same time scale as large scale societal issues. It’s the same reason they are incentivized to raid the general coffers for projects that will be completed during their tenure and leave long time horizon problems for someone else to fix. (If you disagree, look at Illinois and their public pension issues)
(And not to be pedantic, but automation dates back a couple thousand years, at least to the use of water wheels to automate grain flour production. The industrial revolution dates to the late 18th century. While they are related, they aren’t the same thing)
Replacing a task with AI that otherwise will be done chemically with environmental degradation or not done at all because people won't or can't-- AI in that context makes things better.
As for attempts to deploy AI as a replacement for sophisticated human work like "automating knowledge work", the output will be worse and it's a race to the bottom on quality. As we see from our algorithmic-driven tech industry friends, robot-led workstreams benefit society only in the short run. In the long run, people come to miss-- and their lives are diminished by-- an absence of quality, humanity, agency, caring, fairness, all the things algorithms cannot and will not ever be or do.
Anyone who is serious about this topic only discusses in terms of AI + humans (as a combination) and not AI as a replacement for sophisticated work. Statements beyond that reflect a lack of appreciation for either the complexity of the topic or for what society actually expects out of a "knowledge" workstream.
>an absence of quality, humanity, agency, caring, fairness, all the things algorithms cannot and will not ever be or do.
I would argue that automation can be quite better than humans on many of these domains. When they do fall short, it's often because they are reflecting (and in worse cases, amplifying) the shortcomings of humans in these same areas.
Can you be explicit?
With LLMs I use it as a tool to improve my efficiency at translating thought to code, that's good.
With image generation, I struggle to see the value, especially relative to its harm even apart from taking jobs from artists. What I see is:
* The increase in possibility of fake photos/fake news (the recent photoshopped Kate Middleton comes to mind)
* A new level of degenerate coomer addiction from AI booba
* Mass production of CSAM (I believe this to be a hugely underreported issue from what I've seen on reddit/civitai)
Diffusion models/image transformers are incredible and fun technological marvels but as far as I can tell current usage is at best a fun toy.
Same for writers, another friend is writing a D&D campaign. Again, he doesn't have the skill himself to do good digital art, and dozens of custom pieces is way too much cash at this point. But some carefully-done AI pieces, they mon't be perfect, but a damn bit better than nothing!
There's an argument that neither do most jobs [1], but that doesn't mean they are unaffected by automation.
[1] Graeber, D. and Lou, L.I.T., 2019. Bullshit Jobs: A Conversation with David Graeber. Made in China Journal, (2).
Agreed, lets not add to that pile of useless jobs
I'm all for getting rid of bull$hit jobs to allow people to pursue meaningful, creative work. And while a lot of people laude the automation aspect, I don't see many proposing ideas on how to close that gap.
Art, writing, and basic programming are just the easiest ones to tackle first. You have fast iteration cycles because iteration is virtual.
This temporary period of difficulty is the price we pay for AGI, which will yield far more benefit in the long run.
This is questionable at best. Im glad you have optimism, but do you have any facts that show it won't be a long run benefit like cfcs, or lead in everything?
> This temporary period of difficulty is the price we pay...
Im glad you're signing me up for difficulty. I get that you probably think you stand to benefit in some way from AGI, so why don't you pay the price yourself instead of volunteering others? Maybe it's because the difficulty that it causes really really sucks, and the benefit isn't worth paying the price yourself?
It's irrelevant what the average person thinks about AGI because they can't see past the short term fear of losing their job.
They can't see the billions of lives that will be saved, the therapies and medicines and technologies that will be developed, etc. Nothing about the concept of the "singularity" registers, just fear about their next paycheck - a fear to be expressed to their government at that, instead of killing progress that may one day save their own or their children's lives.
We volunteer you for AGI, and myself, and everyone else, because our selfish shortsighted nature and fear for our jobs are not worth the lives and suffering and death and disease of billions of people to come. It's sad that we lose our jobs - but it is the price we pay for the cure to everything. The best we can do is implement UBI while we make this transition as a species.
Trying to stop the development of AGI out of this fear is akin to being a plague doctor trying to stop the development of penicillin so as to not be out of work. I get it, we are all afraid for our jobs, but their importance does not stand a candle to the reduction in global human suffering AGI would be able to net us.
We are all literally going to die, you hear me? You, me, our children. It's not going to be pretty, because the lack of choice/consent around dying is the single biggest driver of human suffering, full stop.
But AGI could at least give us a choice here, a choice to spend many decades more in healthy life with those we cherish and love, fully provided for and safe and secure, and that's worth more than any job.
Saying there's a singularity in the future, when that's so very far from a guaranteed future in many people's eyes - who's to say we don't end up with a dystopian Terminator future rather than a utopian Star Trek future? Your time machine is just as good as theirs. We have three choices for our future. The billionaires, corporations, and the government. One of those three is where the singularity is going to come from. Which do you pick? Unfortunately, all three a flawed in different ways, so utopian Star Trek future of the singularity is by no means even guaranteed inn the first place.
You want people to trust that one of those three groups will just grant the rest of us living in the singularity. For all of human history, every revolution, it's been the same - there's been new jobs created. Just wait for it to be different this time. Avoiding the question of if we'll ever develop AGI because it's irrelevant, the question is when will machines be able to fix themselves, because that's when no new jobs or follow on jobs need be created.
If no new jobs end up being created, then what?
One time, it'll be different. I don't think we're looking at that quite just yet, but it doesn't see that far off in the future. Openinterpreter is already fixing problems for me on my computer without much intervention, robots doing the same for robots really doesn't seem impossibly far off.
I just pointed out that rushing into something that could make things better has historically involved an awful lot of suffering for people. An awful lot of things that were promoted as short term suffering for some people to make life better for everone (that remained) turned out to be long on the suffering and short on the "better".
So here's my thinking about an alternate plan:
What if we moved forward in a way that both advances the tech and also doesn't force suffering on people? This is possible.
There is no evidence that any of your promises, maybes and coulds are anything but words, and as such you are gambling other people's lives. The idea that "maybe we can help people in the future if we hurt them now" is merely a delusion without evidence, a lie those that hurt people on a whim tell themselves to justify and hide their true motives.
As for benefits, likely for everyone. People don't work just to make money, people make money since they work and produce for society right? Making money was never the end goal, and if we can avoid more work, that should be better for society as a whole.
In short, automation shifted the amount that needed to be done in certain industries. AI could possibly make shift so large that there won't be enough work for everyone to do.
I’m really not trying to argue for or against any new technology. But I don’t see why any new technological change necessarily brings about UBI given the absolutely drastic reduction in the amount of labor necessary for human survival we already achieved in the mid 1900’s. So my question is still, why did the old forms of automation not bring about a post scarcity utopia (or at least a UBI)?
I wasn't trying to say that people don't work for money fullstop, but rather that money isn't what people are trying to get ultimately. People want things, things that make people happy and alive. They get money in order to acquire those things.
So mass prostitution for women and mass gang violence for men is what the younger generation gets. To the benefit of the few and the elderly. It's already happening.
How will the clients pay if AI has already taken away the jobs?
So the result is that most women and a few men will have offspring, the rest of the men are exterminated from the genome. A future generation of people having a lot of cousins, with all the genetical diseases it brings.
Every new significant invention means massive genetical extermination of males and a new cycle of power struggles. A stable society with monogamy and equality among people is a rare breather.
A lot of that can already be automated. Push the trash into a series of shredders, until it's powderized, then use magnets to pull out metals, and differentiate the rest by weight, IR spectrum and air streams. Then, one can use a spectrum of solvents to target plastic polymers to get back the precursors.
Unfortunately, for plastic polymers that's still way more expensive than to just dump the wholesale trash on some Asian or African piece of land where it will eventually either degrade into microplastics or be burnt by extremely poor people who hope to get some of the metals back.
It would be nice if we would not stigmatize manual labor. There's nothing wrong with manual labor. For some people, it's ideal.
In a city where I used to live, I'd frequently come home on red eye flights. Over time I started to recognize a couple of older gentlemen mopping the floors in the early morning hours.
Then one day, they were gone. Instead, there was a slow-moving robot mopping the floors. One clearly too large to get into all the places where the dirt accumulates, but... Automation!
A couple of years later, I learned that the airport was part of a municipal program employing intellectually challenged adults, and that the cleaning guys I saw were probably part of that.
Now when I travel through that airport, I always wonder what happened to them. Did they find another mopping job? Are they homeless now? Do they have to live under a bridge because society fetishizes technology and robots? Because budget spreadsheets always have a line for "money saved," but never a line for "lives improved?"
Mopping the floors at the airport is not a great job for a tech bro who wants to make seven figures. But it's a good, honest job for a lot of people.
And to describe manual labor as "abuse" is, frankly, disgusting.
Perhaps in a different world manual labour could be something good, but i dont think its honest of you to say that you think people who do manual labour are not being abused.
The next time you drive through a construction zone, let the construction workers know how you feel. I'm interested to hear their responses.
EDIT: Since HN doesn't permit me to respond to your response, I'll note here that I have worked plenty of manual labor jobs. I've been poor. Very poor. I'm better off today than I was then. But, I don't recall ever thinking that having a job involving manual labor was abuse. It was just a job. It's what you did to pay the rent, and hopefully buy some ramen and canned potatoes for the week.
I've done landscaping, and mucked out toilets, and cleaned out the pits of elevator shafts, hauled endless boxes from one end of a factory to the other, and I've always taken pride in my work. Perhaps I was just brought up differently than you were.
Perhaps you can try working at a mcdonalds or something or as a janitor for a while, see how you feel about your employers or the institution that is employing you.
Regarding ethics of work, you are talking about something completely different. Being proud of working an honest job is not the subject at hand.
I enjoy manual labor and I wish it was easier to get paid for it. I find cognitive work more pleasant and satisfying when I devote part of my time to external physical effort, which forces me to focus my mind outward instead of on abstractions.
It seems to me (reading your other comments) that your issue is not with manual labor per se but the capitalistic system that devalues it and gives many manual laborers as little autonomy as possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV0cR_Nhac0
The article is a little light on the details, but it doesn't look like this robut does any manual work on the flowers. Rather, it seems like it uses image recognition to plot the GPS coordinates of potential sick plants (with the assumption that a human will follow up to remove them manually if necessary).
Pest control targetting is still done manually, unless you buy this expensive robot. But harvesting robots are already used in the field, and real-time vision helps there.
Granted, what's cheapest is usually what the consumer wants.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UwrXj4as6LA&t=18
It's very cool. The machine is basically a very big overhead scanner that slowly moves over hills.
Seems that this design is pretty much applicable to other crops (such as potatoes...) as well.
It sounds like a gasoline engine? That seems an interesting choice.
Downsides is of course pollution etc, even if diesel engines have gotten a lot cleaner over the years.
We eat that. (and thus need to wash it, to mitigate that)
And the same design would likely work with a battery at some point in the future. But currently diesel is standard on the fields.
If the device was solar instead of diesel, that wouldn't move the needle on the dirtiness of the crops. Even the pollution from wear&tear on tires and brakes is more relevant than fuel - we worry about fossil fuels due to the global effect of greenhouse gas emissions, we also care about people breathing in small particles from diesel exhaust, but it doesn't really harm food in farms.
It's really not that much. A combine harvester uses about 15 gallons / hour of fuel and harvests ~450,000 pounds of corn per hour ie more than a lifetimes supply of food. Various other equipment gets used but it's all trivial in comparison to what's directly sprayed on crops.
Meanwhile your directly exposed to all the car fumes around you on a daily basis. Also, tulips aren't a food crop.
Also, robot arms can be a quite expensive way of doing things; I saw a prototype that used tethered drones (like the common quadcopters, but power and data comes over a cable) to manipulate things as apparently it was like 10 times cheaper than a robot arm capable of reaching the same distances and transporting the same weight payload.
It also needs lots of lighting (https://youtube.com/watch?v=9H_JUvXyL74)
That roof also may protect the electronics better from rain.
Finally, I can’t find details on https://h2lrobotics.com/?page_id=254&lang=en but I doubt it is “the camera”. There probably is more than one.
- Consistent lighting is crucial for the most efficient AI. Full overhead enclosure makes this way easier
- Gantry style robot is MUCH lighter and easier to repair than both a 6-axis arm or even a delta robot. It's also likely an order of magnitude cheaper than other options
- Gantry robot also makes it pretty modular if they need to modify for different crop widths
An almond tree mummy remover: A robot with Airsoft guns.
https://www.insighttrac.com/
I can't even find the definition (in context) in the dictionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mummy
It's always important to be conscious of industry jargon and define it.
(The landing page should probably have some kind of definition of what a mummy is. It doesn't need to be detailed.)
(BTW, I wasn't involved directly)
At first the title gave me a vision of a rage fueled automaton laying waste to awesome tulips lol.
I'd imagine the future will be large "ready to go" Ai packages, which companies would tweak to their liking.