If scientists and engineers manage to implement autonomous cars and robots that can do basic human tasks like clean, wait and take care of the sick and elderly we will wake up in a brand new world. It will put a lot of stress on the basics of society, such as democracy and having to work for a salary.
Based on the trends TFA discusses we'll be seeing severe social stress if basic tasks don't get automated. All due to labor shortages. Focusing on alternative arrangements to salaried work is backwards, unless the goal is boost labor participation.
Current demographics are baked in for the next 30 years and only point to a greater shortfall of labor in the future.[1] $1,000 signing bonuses for fast food jobs start to look quaint pretty quickly.
[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545397/empty-planet...
My gut feeling is that it will either be too little or way too much.
Anyway, once they're able to fully robot-ify the police force, social upheaval may become easy to deal with for those in power.
We've historically been very good at coming up with new things for people to do. Why would this time be any different?
On the other hand it takes over two decades from the time someone's born until they are part of the workforce. That won't change and as a result we have a pretty good idea of what the upper threshold on labor looks like globally the next few decades.
Also, doing stuff in the real world is all about sensors. Progress on integrating millions of sensors into a robot has been slow.
A: Awful!
But at any given time you're probably only going to require some millions or double digit billions, unless you're a nation state or something like that.
Progress has been slow mosly because it's been hand-written, such as the sensor fusion in the F-35.
While there are some attempts at using neural networks to do much of the integration (Like Tesla's self driving) they're mostly quite primitive, and lacks the kind of general understanding of the world that we're starting to se in LLM's.
We have started building multimodal neural networks, though, such as GPT-4's ability to handle images, though. he next step is to add video, which is the mode that requires the greatest amount of compute, we will be able to integrate it with lower bandwidth sensors using the same techniques.
That would be where general purpose models start to become good enough to be deployed in robots. Let's imagine your Tesla has the ability to reason about the world the way GPT-4 can (and with enough fine tuning that halicunations are gone), and that it can do that not only based on text, but also all the sensors of the car, then it might become able to handle situations outside its training set much better than today, possibly better than many humans.
Once we're able to build multimodal models able to handle realtime video and s