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Comment by crop_rotation | Hacker News Reader

Will there even be many other non physical labour jobs left?

The physical labour jobs will be solved “soon” after AGI, as robotics is mostly a software/ai/perception problem. Yes, currently robotics hardware kind of sucks, but it sucks because of a lack of investment due to a lack of software. If there were suddenly ~$100B going into robotics like there is going into AI, then many of those hardware issues would be solved very quickly. Especially if you have an AGI hive mind to throw at the problem.

Then what? What happens when nobody is employable?

It's not going to happen anytime soon. These language models take several bleeding edge GPU's to run at a reasonable performance. Vision to the likes of how humans perceive detail is another dimension of complexity. There have been groundbreaking advances in machine vision over the past 20 years, yet we still cannot build a robot that folds clothes efficiently [0]. Arguably, this is not only because of vision, but also dexterity, but both are currently of what a human can perform.

But if it happens, likely legislators will regulate AI. Most western governments already provide job procurement programs through being employed by them. Which is a good thing, but HN doesn't like to hear that. The reality is that most people need a job to feel fulfilled and be a healthy member of society. Which could change, but It's not going to happen until this technology falls into the hands of the common people instead of being controlled by large corporations.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jc6iQZN-uA (Robot is recorded at 4x realtime)

It means the rich no longer needs the poor. If robots also replaces the military it means that the rich no longer needs to fear the poor. With both of those out of the equation things aren't looking great for the poor.

The rich still needs the poor to buy the crap his/her company is making that makes him/her rich. He needs the poor to have enough money for that.

This does not even make the slightest sense, who cares about money when you can subjugate the masses in other ways. It is only a power game at this point.

And if most of the population becomes useless, why would any psychopath keep them around? I’m sure it can’t be that hard to exterminate most of the humanity.

paupercide.

Without assuming an answer, the social status of physical labor should be elevated compared to where it is now.

Ideally, the social status of the "email class" should be lowered as well, and no, I'm not talking about just programmers here.

I'm waiting for the billboards on US 101 in Silicon Valley:

Learn a Job GPT-4 can't do.

Train for HVAC installation, plumbing, and electrician work at Palo Alto Adult School.

Plumbers charge a fortune, doesn’t sound like a bad career pivot. You’d be just dealing with different kinds of shit :)

reminds me of a quote in the 1997 movie "Wag the Dog" (context: Stanley Motss, a Hollywood producer played by Dustin Hoffman, helps Conrad Brean, a political spin doctor played by Robert de Niro, to stage a war in order to cover up a presidential sexual-advances-to-underage-girl type scandal two weeks before the election):

Motss: "It's all, you know, thinking ahead. That's what producing is."

Brean: "It's like being a plumber".

Motss: "Yes, like being a plumber: do your job right, nobody should nocice; but when you fuck up, everyone gets full of shit."

The physical labor jobs are only a few years behind due to the ramp-up required in manufacturing for robotics - and price points. But the embodied AIs are coming, in humanoid form, to take all the labor jobs as well.

I _strongly_ doubt that physical labor jobs like plumbing will be replaced within a few years. I spent a year working in welding automation and folks wildly underestimate the difficulty of automating real physical tasks like this. And that's in a weld cell with calibrated physical relationships between every component, laser scanning, stereo cameras, and CAD-modeled parts with reasonable tolerances.

The idea that a robotic solution to "crawling around in a basement and bodging pipes together" is anywhere near happening is frankly laughable. Further, with the current hot AI paradigm being LLMs, it's not even clear how these (very impressive) advancements would get us closer to robotic replacement of the trades.

Well, power tools will make for even more exciting hallucinations.

Edit: Aren't we discounting the computer power that will be required to have a robot computing and reacting to what will be dozens of inputs all in real time in a mobile bundle?

Power is my biggest concern too. Essentially taking 8B fairly efficient human machines and replicating their power consumption to care for them will be massive.

The Fed is playing a game of chicken with the economy to make it collapse, so we'll have to wait a bit longer because Google laid them off*. Hopefully Tesla's everyday robot attempt will be successful.

* https://www.wired.com/story/alphabet-layoffs-hit-trash-sorti...

You say that but robot maintenance quickly makes complicated robots uneconomic.

Eventually you make robots that can maintain other robots who can maintain the maintaining robots.

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