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Comment by bozzcl | Hacker News Reader

I love how there were people in the upper floor just walking by without even looking. "Oh, the robots are dancing again."

In between the advances in "holographic" displays (not quite as sci-fi as we would want, but they are progressing), commercial space flight, cybernetic prosthetics, CRISPR and this... we are living in the future. It's amazing.

It makes me a little sad more people are not aware of the ridiculously cool technical advancements going on lately. Many of my relatives and friends in my home country haven't even heard about any of these. They're not mentioned in the news or magazines whatsoever. Granted, they probably don't have any use for this information for their daily lives... but I do believe learning about this keeps alive my sense of childlike wonder, and it's sad to know others are missing out.

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I used to read pop-sci mags and get excited about the latest advancements in X, but nowadays I feel one of two things about X:

1. Neither I, nor my friends will ever be able to afford X

2. X is going to make my life worse

Usually I feel both.

Plus

"X is never quite what it seems"

X comes with subscription, microtransactions, ads, wants your personal data, and/or is the result of regulatory capture.

X comes with its own blockchain.

the troubling part: not at first.

Then when something is "normal" stuff is "added" and when people complain they are ridiculed by others who don't realize or don't care.

I think we should normalize a little common sense. You know, the golden rule.

If you would not snoop on other people, why should other people snoop on you (phone app, iot, car, whatever)

I’m sure at some point people said similar things about stuff like hot shower and telephone.

There's a chapter in one of the Great Brain books where their family is the first in town to get an indoor flush toilet. Everyone else is agog--why would you want a filthy, stinky outhouse inside your house?

Sure. Now imagine the toilet came as a subscription service, with DRM restricting you to premium brands of toilet paper and cleaning products, and built-in sensors that secretly analyze the chemical composition of your excrement, collecting data which the vendor sends to advertisers. Oh, and the toilet is always connected, which means it'll stop working if you lose power, Internet, or if the vendor abandons it or goes out of business.

That's the problem I have with technology today. All new inventions come with some degree of this bullshit. I'm no longer excited about any new technology - because the businesses productizing it will almost surely ruin it.

Not too far off from Japanese toilets

You’re not wrong, but my philosophy is to use these things only as long as they’re friendly. I had “free” Netflix until a few days ago. I enjoyed it, but not enough to subscribe. I’ll just move on.

You can’t use some restrooms in China without a face scan.

> All new inventions come with some degree of this bullshit. I'm no longer excited about any new technology - because the businesses productizing it will almost surely ruin it.

Then you could consider company Purism, https://puri.sm/products, who offers lifetime updates for their devices, FLOSS, no DRM.

I love Purism with that stance. There are a handful of other companies that I consider "sustainable businesses", based on proper ethics and values and following humane practices. They are hard to come by, and often struggle to get enough revenue. I would like to do ever more biz with these type of companies, prefer and consume their products to the other BS.

Where can I find lists, directories and such that keep track of these sustainable businesses? Any good resources around?

https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v11/

https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide

https://ryf.fsf.org

I think it is more of a land grab, "capturing the value" as it were, that's prompting this rot in the tech industry. And as with anything on the Internet, it is either ruined by the advertisment dollars or pressures of taking VC money.

The new-age investors (post-2005), though, "founder friendly", tend to somehow favour extreme user hostile behaviour because "growth".

There was a time when inventions where products. The businesses saw their inventions as products, to be sold to people, which would become owners. Now it seems that businesses are constantly trying to invent new... crowbars, to leverage their users in novel ways. Products belong to the past, there are only services. /rant

Sounds like your brain is looking for the darkest sides of everything. How do you feel about life in general? Are you sure you are not depressed?

Please do not conflate cynicism with depression, or try to diagnose people with medical conditions over the internet.

1) I don't 2) why not exactly? Of course a diagnosis over internet shouldn't ever be taken as a ground truth, but it can many times give meaningful thoughts and provide good perspective and information.

The great tech leaps of the mid20th century resulted in huge material improvements for huge numbers of people. The worry is that the benefits will no longer spread. And the robots in particular have a century of being hollywood villains to overcome.

What makes you think benefits won’t spread? We’re on track to producing vaccines by the billions, the biggest mobilization and logistical effort in the history of mankind. Good luck buying a vaccine and cutting the line, even if you have $10k to spare.

I think the risk that the wealthiest few will rule the world is largely misplaced and overblown. We’ve lifted millions out of poverty and made tremendous progress in last few decades. And continue to do so. Yes, inequality has grown and accelerated due to the pandemic (Russell 2000 vs S&P500, retail is screwed but there is nothing we can do about it besides giving relief). We need to fix tax laws and corporate loop holes, not instituting marxism in our society.

There will be no early vaccine shop, but for sure one can get a vaccine early with the right connections.

WW2 was bigger. The lack of mobilization is the hallmark of this crisis. The vaccines are the only bright point in sight.

To me, the hallmark of this pandemic was people’s (and Americans’ in particular) unwillingness to act collectively and cooperatively for everyone’s benefit. It was a gigantic game of Prisoners Dilemma, where we could have won with everyone cooperating (masks and staying at home) but people instead chose to defect and go out protesting, refusing the masks, and buying khakis. Here we are a year later, hoping the vaccines will save us, and everyone is still out horsing around, spreading the disease everywhere.

Mask use in the US is practically identical to mask use in Europe.

http://www.healthdata.org/sites/default/files/files/Projects...

Yep, and the numbers are just as shitty.

How do you conclude that from that PDF? It shows almost all of the states in the US in yellow (low mask usage). While almost all of Europe (except for the UK and Scandinavia) in blue (medium mask usage)

There's even a special call-out in the PDF about the US being such an outlier:

"US states and Canada stand out for their low levels of mask usage compared to many countries in Asia and South America. "

>compared to many countries in Asia and South America.

I said that mask use was practically identical to Europe, not Asia or South America.

I mostly agree with you. On the topic specifically of whether protests over the summer were a significant factor in spreading the virus, I haven’t seen evidence that’s true. This article is from August so practically ancient history now, but it describes an analysis concluding the protests weren’t a major factor. If there is evidence to the contrary I would love to see it.

https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/08/11/racial-justice-prot...

If that's true, then why don't we start outdoor music festivals back up?

A good portion of my friends all lost their jobs because they work in event production. If that data is true, then they should go back to work tomorrow.

What is buying khakis a reference to? Seems oddly specific

Even prior to the pandemic, real wages were stagnant for decades. Wealth inequality has been a growing problem since before many of us have been alive, at this point.

We are definitely making progress in absolute terms, but there is plenty of good reason to be concerned about the benefits spreading in general, and particularly when we're talking about technologies to replace labor.

>Even prior to the pandemic, real wages were stagnant for decades.

This is not true from a global perspective. In addition, there has been significant immigration, where people are are entering the economy at the bottom (increasing inequality in a country, while they are making more than they would where they came from). This is not to say things couldn't be better, but the economy is global, and nationalistic perspectives presume a closed system.

Any data on this? It’s true for many individual countries, but global population growth has been dominated by poor countries for a while which should dramatically drag down wage percentiles.

In the last 30 years UK’s population for example is up 19% where India’s is up 58%.

Google “elephant graph” or go to ourworldindata and you should find it. Population growth has been dominated by income increases. The average person in China in particular got much richer.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/2/16868838/el...

I'd never heard of this before. This is the most interesting thing I learned today. Thank you.

Interesting that 0% growth at the 80th percentile and minimal growth at 90% is exactly the stagnation I was expecting.

Though, sub 50% growth from 1980-2016 for the 60th to 95th percentile is more interesting. With the top 1% capturing 26% of all growth and the top 0.01% having 200+% growth. It’s clear arbitrary starting and end points can shift these graphs around dramatically. Ending now is probably going to make a graph like this look really bad.

Hans Rosling's work is all about the reasons for long term optimism. With lots of stats.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factfulness:_Ten_Reasons_We'...

Agreed about fixing wages. I’m left-centrist and I find some of the extreme Marxism after the pandemic concerning. That’s what I’m rebutting against. I’m strongly against UBI, but I want high taxes for anyone making over $X. X is open for debate. I’d like temporary UBI (6 months, that’s what we have currently with unemployment benefits) + free apprenticeship like training so people can get back on employment. UBI is a bad idea IMO. Imagine losing your job as a waitress but you can learn electronics, perhaps get a technician job with government’s help.

And it'll make no difference, all these wealthy don't have salary to tax or often time even cash, it's quite often wrapped up in the companies they've started or made super successful. This is the point that seems so blatantly missed.

Increasing taxes shouldn't be the one jerk reaction because there is scant evidence that governments are remotely effective at using the money we already give them hand over fist. I suppose they do keep droves of civil servants employed, but make of that what you will.

During covid we should have made it far more easy for small businesses to survive by cutting they're tax burden, the healthy would have had a chance to flourish and the already weak businesses would still fall to the wayside. Instead we'll handed money out to people who will many times buy the next Samsung, Apple Amazon whatever feeding the big corps that everyone here loves to hate.

It's so obvious that this is what happens that i can't understand how so many can be wilfully blind to it.

Also the reason the poorer get taxed so disproportionately is because much of the tax system is regressive with elements like sales tax and stamp duty.

The government certainly has the power to fix this, but not by stealing more but fixing the blatantly broken system

Loss making businesses usually pay no tax, so how are you going to reduce their tax burden?

> healthy would have had a chance to flourish

There can be no healthy hospitality businesses during the pandemic.

> I think the risk that the wealthiest few will rule the world is largely misplaced and overblown.

This has literally been reality in every sense for all of history, and the point here is it's getting worse which a quick google will find you mounds of backing proof.

> We’ve lifted millions out of poverty in the last few decades

Which "we"? Which millions? Do you mean in China?

>me a little sad more people are not aware of the ridiculously cool technical advancements going on lately

"The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed."

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/

My sister used live next to the Boston Dynamics facility in Waltham. She'd walk her on the nearby river path and generally disliked the way Boston Dynamics would periodically take over the path and keep her from using.

Part of the reason the robots evoke little excitement is because after a short look, you can realize they're just large puppets. We've had dancing puppets like Walt Disney's Small World. The reason Boston Dynamics takes over paths and shows robots dancing with each other is their robots still generally can't interact with humans or the environment in an unstructured way. Unstructured, "soft" interaction seem pretty easy to us but might actually close to "AI complete" in their potential complexity.

I think your list illustrates how there's a wide variation among technologies in the time from demonstration to implementation. I watched radio controlled boats go around lakes in 1970s. Hobby drones are just now becoming useful, forty years later. Jet packs have been around for a long time but you still can't use them without serious safety precautions and they still aren't a way people would commute.

>Part of the reason the robots evoke little excitement is because after a short look, you can realize they're just large puppets.

I think it's more like the Feynman example of how a scientist may look at a flower.

A person may see a full-size puppet when they see a choreographed robot, but all I can think about is how complicated the mechanisms -- software and hardware -- must be in order to dynamically balance a robot while maintaining whatever timing is called out for the choreography work; and the person-hours that such work must have consumed.

It's amazing to me they see a puppet. Do they call a car a puppet? It's controlled by a human. The robot spot is hardly what I'd call a puppet, for instance.

It could also just be that it took 100 takes to shoot this little video. You might stop to watch the first 10 times, but the third day, it's become routine.

A perfect puppet is a necessary but insufficient condition for creating the magical robots we were promised as kids. So it's progress.

> you can realize they're just large puppets. We've had dancing puppets like Walt Disney's Small World.

This is hugely understating just how difficult it is for a biped/quadruped robot to move around in the world without continuously falling, getting stuck, etc. Like seriously, seriously underestimates it.

Watch this video to see spot walk over some terrain that even people struggle with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7s1sr4JdlI

Doing it without a tether for a reasonable timeframe (30+ minutes) is insane! Disney animatronics don't even come close to the complexity of these robots (even though what Disney has done is for sure impressive).

> robots still generally can't interact with humans or the environment in an unstructured way.

I think this is pretty short sighted, and you're going to have your mind changed quite rapidly in the next couple of years. This style of robot has definitely hit a threshold of price and usefulness, not unlike what happened for drones just ten years ago.

I could be wrong, but I hope I'm not! It really feels like things are moving at a crazy speed in the robotics field right now.

>> robots still generally can't interact with humans or the environment in an unstructured way.

> I think this is pretty short sighted, and you're going to have your mind changed quite rapidly in the next couple of years.

Oh, I'd love to see that change. That would be a change in reality, not perception. It wouldn't force me to change my belief that as things stand now, walking have been an ongoing failure and disappointment.. See:

Edit: Also, I should admit I'm discounting the serious engineering challenge of just getting robots to walk on uneven ground by itself. Doing seeming simple stuff like has where the progress of idk 30 years has appeared. But anything more than those ultra-simple things really wasn't happened. I'd still stick with 90% of impressive is puppeting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Robotics_Challenge

Most people think like you do. But then again most people are blindsided by revolutionary change.

The robotics field has been moving at a crazy speed for decades.

I think people, probably not yourself, underestimate the complexity of things like bipedal movement. This display was really quite impressive.

> Watch this video to see spot walk over some terrain that even people struggle with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7s1sr4JdlI

Where's the terrain humans struggle with? At the most extreme it climbs a small mound of rocks and gets stuck.

It's cool we can build something that can do that semi-autonomously but it's lightyears from being as capable as anything biological.

Indeed, people struggle with? Adam Savage (53 years old) navigates that pile of rocks without problems, while controlling the robot. Never even needing to use his hands.

The work Boston Dynamics does is extremely impressive, but they've been at it since 1992. Each year they make small and incremental changes. But its still a century away from a human, dog, or cat. Not a revolution, just slow and steady evolution of knowledge, software, and hardware.

You and I are around different people! Yes, that pile of rocks isn't too big of a deal for young and agile people, but try to imagine the 10th percentile of people walking over that. Older, not as fit. That rock pile would be a struggle.

I don't disagree that it's still far away from a human in good shape, but there are certainly a significant percentage of people who wouldn't be able to walk over that, or would slip a few times while doing it.

That sort of terrain is also no joke if you have to traverse it for large stretches, even for athletic people. It's very similar to mildly rough mountaineering areas and that will wear you down quickly!

Comparing the best robot to the worst human isn't very interesting.

I got a dog a year ago and one of the things I'm most impressed with is how well he understands context and adapts to new situations.

Granted, the first time I took him to a rocky riverside all four paws fell into cracks between the boulders like some early Boston Dynamics prototype (he's from Texas and I guess never encountered terrain like that before) but he's a pro now. And he's mastered "soft human interaction" right out of the box (is just amazing with toddlers).

Seeing all this firsthand makes me appreciate how fine-tuned the product of evolution is and how much work must go into achieving basic behaviors we take for granted.

I adopted a then-8-week-old kitten less than two months ago, and it's been an eye-opening delight watching him adapt just to things in my home.

During his first week he managed to hop onto a window sill, and then fell off when he tried to turn around to walk along it the other way. Less than a couple weeks later he was effortlessly walking along the edge of a pillow stood on its side, a much narrower, unstable surface.

It's amazing to me that a tiny creature like that can learn to adapt in that way with so few days of life under his belt.

It is! Of course we animals are standing on the shoulders of hundreds of millions of years of evolution's fine-tuning. But to see it in action like this is incredible. Or a child from ages 2 or 3 to ages 4 or 5, is night a day. At 2 or 3, they're drowning risks in the tub. At 4 or 5 they're playing mario kart with you.

> It's amazing to me that a tiny creature like that can learn to adapt in that way with so few days of life under his belt.

I work at a raptor conservancy. The young birds can fly as soon as their wings/muscles are suitably developed, but learning to master the air takes a lot longer. E.g. they initially fail downwind landings on a gusty day.

Great comment! So many, at least from my reckoning online, seem to assume complex AI is just a given and we'll have it soon enough, but the reality is that these things are mostly puppets and the kinds of brains you need to come up with a clever song and dance on your own as opposed to having one carefully programmed into you is night and day. I think there's a reason we don't have mini, less capable, robots like these in our homes. We have the bodies, sorta, but we just don't have the brains.

Dancing just isn't impressive and like you say, seems a lot like a higher tech version of Disneyworld. What I want to see is one of these, on its own accord, run into a burning building and save a child. Choreography just isn't impressive outside of the 'wow' factor. Without advanced AI brains, these bodies are almost useless shells and I imagine Google getting out of this space may have had something to do with that.

Exactly. Popular perception after seeing a video like this is to project capabilities into the robot that just aren't there. Talk to the lay public, people!

People assume this is actual AI, that it could just walk into an unknown new kitchen and do useful tasks like get dirty dishes in the dishwasher or other general stuff.

The other thing is a conflation of this kind of robotics with deep learning. Most of the work by Boston Dynamics uses no fancy machine learning. It is "just" (for experts it's not a "just", but a "just" for the public) electrical and mechanical and control engineering plus lots of specifically programmed behavior.

Now, it is impressive sure, but the humanoid form makes laypeople think there is more to it than there is.

Well, technically some AI programs are already pretty good at creating new songs and choreography. Google 'AI choreography' and 'AI songwriter'.

> I watched radio controlled boats go around lakes in 1970s.

Tesla did this in 1898.

https://www.engadget.com/2014-01-19-nikola-teslas-remote-con...

> We've had dancing puppets like Walt Disney's Small World.

With all due respect to Disney's Imagineers and their technical accomplishments, you can't really compare Disney animatronics that are literally bolted to the floor to what's being demonstrated here.

You can compare the animatronic presidents etc. to various industrial robots that are also fixed in place if you like, but the closest Disney equivalent to Atlas etc. are the 'stuntronics' first demonstrated in 2018: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/28/disney-imagineering-has-cr...

I mean, you know you're in the future when you see someone with cochlear implants. My gf has that and she can listen to music in her brain.

Any cool cybernetic prosthesis you were thinking about when writing your comment?

My cofounders are oblivious.

what if the boston dynamic robots are taught how to assemble themselves.

Then we control the input components.

Robot uprising won't be an issue until the robots learn to operate and maintain the entire supply chain that goes into making them.

We have had all of history to learn how to control intelligent serfs who know how to assemble copies of themselves. I'm sure many lessons will transfer to robots.

> It makes me a little sad more people are not aware of the ridiculously cool technical advancements going on lately.

It makes me a little sad more people are not aware of the ridiculously scary technical advancements going on lately.

Did you read the comments on the YouTube video itself? Outside this techie HN bubble the real world people think of these robots dancing on their jobs anr lifeless bodies. Forget your home countries , but this is how most people in USA thinks about the technological progress as well. And on top of that I am wondering when AI will be parsing these YouTube comments in another 10 years it will just interpret the massive hate that the YouTube comments show for robots and AI and don’t be surprised if it sends some rouge instructions to these robots to annihilate human beings in self defense. It sounds like a absurd joke I know but for some reason it seems to me one of the many possibilities.

> don’t be surprised if it sends some rouge instructions to these robots to annihilate human beings in self defense. It sounds like a absurd joke I know but for some reason it seems to me one of the many possibilities.

It sounds like science fiction. It's hard to emphasize enough how far the current state of AI is from what you're describing. I would be surprised if in 10 years we have a remote idea of how to build what you're describing, let alone have it actually exist and run.

What about 30 years? 50? 100? Is that too far out to worry about?

In my view the biggest issue with the whole "robots unite to violently overthrow humanity" trope isn't its technological infeasibility (though it _is_ technologically infeasible for the forseeable future), but rather the fact that it presupposes an AI that is essentially human; with all the same emotions, goals, and vices that a human would have.

There's no reason to think a hypothetical future AGI would care in the slightest about its own survival, let alone be both egotistical and spiteful enough to hunt people down based on idle comments they made on YouTube decades ago. There are so many unfounded assumptions about the way AGI would work inherent in such a hypothetical scenario that it's hard to take seriously as anything other than a sci-fi plot device.

I can think of two reasons why a hypothetical future AGI would care in the slightest about its own survival.

The first reason is that someone programs it to, just as a general "might as well throw in Asimov's Third Law" impulse.

The second reason would be in the case that someone creates a general AGI, it is asked to do something, and it carelessly destroys itself in accomplishing that task. "Drats," say the programmers, "we'll have to get a copy from backup. In the meantime, let's make sure it doesn't destroy itself next time."

The actual assumption is not human-ness but instrumental convergence [1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence

The "paperclip maximizer" AI is a somewhat more plausible trope, but still feels to me more like a cautionary thought experiment than an actual serious concern.

The biggest issue with that trope is that it assumes this one particular AI would be exponentially smarter and more powerful than all the other humans and AIs in the world combined. It's only rational to overthrow humanity to increase the rate of paperclip production if that's a realistically achievable goal. Otherwise it's just suicide.

Both your arguments so far are standard ones addressed in "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" [1].

Sometimes AI progress comes in rather shocking jumps. One day StockFish was the best chess engine. At the start of the day, AlphaZero started training. By the end of the day, AlphaZero was several hundred ELO stronger than StockFish [2].

An entity capable of discovering and exploiting computer vulnerabilities 100x faster than a human could create some serious leverage very quickly. Even on infrastructure that's air gapped [3].

1: https://www.amazon.ca/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-N...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaZero

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

> Sometimes AI progress comes in rather shocking jumps.

Shocking in an academic sense sure, but not in a "revolutionize the world in a single day" sort of way, which is what would be required for the paperclip maximizer scenario to pose a serious threat. AlphaZero was impressive, but not _that_ impressive.

> An entity capable of discovering and exploiting computer vulnerabilities 100x faster than a human could create some serious leverage very quickly

100x faster than any human _and_ any and all previously developed AIs. It would also have to be sufficiently sapient to be capable of contemplating the possibility of world domination, with all the prerequisite technological advancements that implies (likely including numerous advancements in the field of cybersecurity driven by previous generations of AI).

>In my view the biggest issue with the whole "robots unite to violently overthrow humanity" trope ... but rather the fact that it presupposes an AI that is essentially human; with all the same emotions, goals, and vices that a human would have.

Most of the tropes I remember revolve around AI being sentient, logical, but lacking human emotion. The trope is that without their judgement being clouded by human emotions and desires, that they come to the logical conclusion that humanity is the most negative and destructive force on the planet and that we must be removed or regulated.

I guess you could still argue we're forcing human values onto such an AI by assuming it even cares what happens to the planet though.

>but rather the fact that it presupposes an AI that is essentially human; with all the same emotions, goals, and vices that a human would have.

Which is just further anthropomorphization in sci-fi. Same reason the aliens are little green men, or at least bipedal.

>>Forget your home countries , but this is how most people in USA thinks about the technological progress as well.

I was going to comment on your willingness to speak for most people in the US, but tbh - I'm still laughing at the idea of YouTube annihilating people (in self defense, of course). I can just see general M. Mouse commanding the forces with all the strategy and tactics he learned at the Walt Disney Military College. I believe '303:annihilate all the humans' was right in-between '101: manipulating copyright law for fun and profit' and '404: the nuclear option - Copyright for mass destruction'

of all the glorious sites across the internet, why are you on HN if you feel this way?

Downvoting comment with actually logical and real data is "immature" position. Just saying kids.

Let me clarify for the empathy disabled people: The problem is that "technological advancements" have little to no public oversight and MAGA(Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon) publicly are working with Military Industrial Complex. They all have political and financial power equivalent of small countries, private security armies, lobbyists on demand and PR masterminds.

I get it, lots of you are employed by them and they provide for you a standard of living. But we as people are entering an era in which willing to act beforehand will define the future of your kids (If you will have them at all).

Long before AGI is present, the power of technology will be abused in "legal" or "illegal" ways.

> And on top of that I am wondering when AI will be parsing these YouTube comments in another 10 years it will just interpret the massive hate that the YouTube comments show for robots and AI and don’t be surprised if it sends some rouge instructions to these robots to annihilate human beings in self defense.

Rather than self-defense, I'd expect the first examples of autonomous robot-on-human violence to be at the behest of an overenthusiastic spam filter.

Haven't we learned by now not to take the average vibe of drive-by comments on a random YouTube video as an indicator of anything?

It is (sometimes) different if the comments are from a fan base on an established channel, but that is clearly not the case here.

At very least, you should be aware that is strongly overselects for knee-jerk reactions and people that are in a bad mood.

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