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Comment by 9dev | Hacker News Reader

> There will be hardly any, if any, jobs left only a human can do.

A highly white-collar perspective. The great irony of technologist-led industrial revolution is that we set out to automate the mundane, physical labor, but instead cannibalised the creative jobs first. It's a wonderful example of Conway's law, as the creators modelled the solution after themselves. However, even with a lot of programmers and lawyers and architects going out of business, the majority of the population working in factories, building houses, cutting people's hair, or tending to gardens, is still in business—and will not be replaced any time soon.

The contenders for "superhuman AI", for now, are glorified approximations of what a random Redditor might utter next.

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Advanced AI will solve robotics as well, and do away with human physical labor.

And with a wave of a hand and a reading of the tea leaves, the future has been foretold.

Waymo robotaxis, the current state of the art for real-world AI robotics, are thwarted by a simple traffic cone placed on the roof. I don't think human labor is going away any soon.

If that AI is worth more than a dime, it will recognise how incredibly efficient humans are in physical labor, and employ them instead of ”doing away“ with it (whatever that’s even supposed to mean.)

No matter how much you ”solve“ robotics, you’re not going to compete with the result of millions of years of brutal natural selection, the incredible layering of synergies in organisms, the efficiency of the biomass to energy conversion, and the billions of other sophisticated biological systems. It’s all just science fiction and propaganda.

wrong. a human needs to have insane resources to operate. each human needs a home, clean water, delicious and varied foods and a sense of identity and a society to be a part of. they need a sense of purpose. if a human goes down in the field, it has to be medically treated or else the other humans will throw up and stop working. that human has to be treated in a hospital. if these conditions arent met then performance will degrade rapidly. humans use vastly more resources than robots. robots will crush humans.

> If that AI is worth more than a dime, it will recognise how incredibly efficient humans are in physical labor, and employ them instead of ”doing away“ with it (whatever that’s even supposed to mean.)

AI employing all humans does not sound like a wonderful society in which to live. Basically Amazon/Walmart scaled up to the whole population level.

Have you read "Manna"? I think you'll like it:

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

Yep - I’m firmly in the “first half of the story” camp.

The efficiency you mentioned probably applies to animals that rely on subsistence to survive, work, and reproduce. But it doesn't hold for modern humans, whose needs go well beyond mere necessities.

Your argument goes like "If they're really intelligent, they'll think like me."

For a true superhuman AI, what you or me think is irrelevant and probably wrong.

Cars are still faster than humans, besides evolution.

That is a repetition of the argument other commenters have made. A car is better than a human in a single dimension. It is hard, though, to be better in multiple dimensions simultaneously, because humans effectively are highly optimised general purpose machines. Silicon devices have a hard time competing with biological devices, and no amount of ”AI“ will change that.

It's a matter of time. White collar professionals have to worry about being cost-competitive with GPUs; blue collar laborers have to worry about being cost-competitive with servomotors. Those are both hard to keep up with in the long run.

The idea that robots displace workers has been around for more than half a century, but nothing has ever come out of it. As it turns out, the problems a robot faces when, say laying bricks, are prohibitively complex to solve. A human bricklayer is better in every single dimension. And even if you manage to build an extremely sophisticated robot bricklayer, it will consume vast amounts of energy, is not repairable by a typical construction company, requires expensive spare parts, and costs a ridiculous amount of money.

Why on earth would anyone invest in that when you have an infinite amount of human work available?

> but nothing has ever come out of it

Have you ever seen the inside of a modern car factory?

A factory is a fully controlled environment. All that neat control goes down the drain when you’re confronted with the outside world—weather, wind, animals, plants, pollen, rubbish, teenagers, dust, daylight, and a myriad of other factors ruining your robot's day.

I'm not sure that "humans will still dominate work performed in uncontrolled environments" leaves much opportunity for the majority of humanity.

Factories are highly automated. Especially in the US, where the main factories are semiconductors, which are nearly fully robotic. A lot of those manual labor jobs that were automated away were offset by demand for knowledge work. Hmm.

> the problems a robot faces when, say laying bricks, are prohibitively complex to solve.

That's what we thought about Go, and all the other things. I'm not saying bricklayers will all be out of work by 2027. But the "prohibitively complex" barrier is not going to prove durable for as long as it used to seem like it would.

This highlights the problem very well. Robots, and AI, to an extent, are highly efficient in a single problem domain, but fail rapidly when confronted with a combination of them. An encapsulated factory is one thing, laying bricks, outdoor, while it’s raining, at low temperatures, with a hungover human coworker operating next to you—that’s not remotely comparable.

But encapsulated factories were solved by automation using technology available 30 years ago, if not 70. The technology that is becoming available now will also be enabling automation to get a lot more flexible than it used to be, and begin to work in uncontrolled environments where it never would have been considered before. This is my field and I am watching it change before my eyes. This is being driven by other breakthroughs that are happening right now in AI, not LLMs per se, but models for control, SLAM, machine vision, grasping, planning, and similar tasks, as well as improvements in sensors that feed into these, and firming up of standards around safety. I'm not saying it will happen overnight; it may be five years before the foundations are solid enough, another five before some company comes out with practically workable hardware product to apply it (because hardware is hard), another five or ten before that product gains acceptance in the market, and another ten before costs really get low. So it could be twenty or thirty years out for boring reasons, even if the tech is almost ready today in principle. But I'm talking about the long run for a reason.

I'm glad I spent 10 years working to become a better programmer so I could eventually become a ditch digger.

AI is doing all the fun jobs such as painting and writing.

The crappy jobs are left for humans.

do you know how ignorant and rude this comment is?

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