Jürgen Schmidhuber – Can All-Purpose Robots Fuel a Comeback?
people.idsia.ch
people.idsia.ch
Sure the robots could do very dangerous or tedious work that would be “inhuman”, but I would argue that for this kind of work a specialised robot will always be more efficient and way cheaper to produce.
Apart from how science fiction this all is - we can’t even produce a general purpose robot don’t make that does the most basic things like walking or picking up objects in real life (outside of special test environments)
Most of the western world is having demographic issues. We are having trouble getting people to reproduce in sufficient numbers to keep our societies going. This is an ugly trajectory to be on because you have an increasingly big group of old people who need to be supported by an increasingly small number of young people.
But how do you accomplish this? Where do you get the money from? Nobody wants to invest in Germany, not even the Germans themselves. So the government tries to jump start investment, but the government is both incompetent and corrupt, so for example the German government bet on Quantum Computing instead of AI. Now the government in investing in AI, but instead of investing in LLMs they are investing in "AI for science" projects, 99% of which are complete deadends. Actually this is a sort of theme. The government funded startups are always doing some sort of "science" based product. For some reason this appeals to the founding agencies because science sounds like a solid investment. But most of these startups are either attacking a problem that is way too improbably of yielding any results, or they are projects that sound good to the uninitiated but are actually fundamentally flawed when you actually dig deep into them (like a lot of AI for science crap).
I think, if there is a way forward, it's for the government to stop trying to be a startup accelerator. They are too incompetent and corrupt for that. Instead, it should be a mediator between foreign investors and local talent. Make it attractive to build in Germany and use local talent to do that. And make sure the local talent gets competitively compensated so they do not emigrate.
If there would be a magic pill that enabled anyone to learn a new language instantly, that would be the end of the US and UK as major immigration destinations.
I have met a couple of Americans with 10+YOE who have been imported to Germany with competitive salaries, like 150k€/year. They live in Berlin or Munich, are already partnered up, have a nice nest egg from their years working in the US, and just enjoy being expats on a little adventure.
This is not the typical skilled immigrant experience. If you start with 0YOE in Germany, it's much harder to go anywhere in life. And when you don't already have a well populated nest egg, you start getting anxious about your inability to accumulate savings. And a lot of jobs are unfortunately not in Berlin or Munich. A lot of these skilled immigrants end up in some 20,000 pop town, 1hr away from the nearest mid sized city. And then, if they come from non-western countries and they do not look European enough, that also adds something to the experience.
And if so, would that mean life in such a town is worse than in a comparable small town somewhere in the middle of the US?
Indeed, salaries are better in the US, especially AI jobs salaries.
But you also need less savings in the EU due to a much better social security system, e. g. free healthcare in case you get unemployed, free university (that alone saves you > 100K US$/kid),...
> would that mean life in such a town is worse than in a comparable small town somewhere in the middle of the US?
You lose a lot of the advantages that you listed such as public transportation, walkable cities and free healthcare (availability is terrible in certain locations). But honestly, it's a terrible location to live in, if you want to have any kind of social life, and consider that as a foreigner you probably don't have loads of contacts in the country.
In most capacities except for salary.
For example, you might get a job at a research institute or at government funded startup and gain experience working with cutting edge technologies. The pay is mid, but you don't care because you are gaining experience. Then your contract ends. The private sector cannot make use of your experience. So you have to pivot to programming CRUD webapps or you emigrate, or you get another public sector contract with the corresponding public sector salary.
You_again with this_again
https://www.transparency.org/en/news/cpi-2023-highlights-ins...
Measuring corruption versus measuring perception of corruption. The former requires evidence of corruption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files
The problem with that index is that each culture reacts differently to corruption. In some cultures, if a public servant buys a coffee using the company card, that's a scandal, and some of those cultures have a reputation for being corrupt. In Germany, everyone downplays corruption for some reason. But I see it everywhere, especially in everything that had to do with public funds. But it's never called corruption, so corruption does not exist because it is never acknowledged.
100%.
Cheers for the references.
q.e.d.
Anyway there is enough capital and enough rich people to found a company like open AI. Obviously Germany can afford to spend billions on other things...
edit: I just re-read the GP comment and I get it now.. it was only doubting that there are people who recently accumulated riches.. then of course Schwarz would be a bad example :)
This is dead boring German pragmatism. Once Schwartz group is a competitor of Walmart on the US market, they'll not store data on Amazon.
> and they were one of the very few large companies that dared to NOT use SAP but build their own stuff.
But they (Lidl) paid money to SAP anyway.
Industrial dynasties speaking German and originating from 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.
SMH
That said, Japan has very different work culture than all other developed nations. But still.
But it’s too early to gauge if these quality problems are false alarms or something BYD needs to take very seriously.
The only thing that graph shows is that China was dirt poor in 1995, and is now still only at 25-35% of USA levels.
It's also a bit laughable that Germany could stand a realistic chance to top the world's intelligent robot production - as long as we're talking about general-purpose and hence likely humanoid robots. As far as I'm aware, Germany has no history in building such robots while companies from other countries, both Asian and US, have a big head-start.
This article reads more like a more or less desperate sounding attempt to somehow save Germany's former manufacturing glory in the 21st century. Alas, without first class AI software, this isn't going to happen, and in that respect, Germany is more or less irrelevant.
His description of how German politicians have time and again failed to recognize realities and act accordingly seems spot-on, however.
Germany was leading in the industrial robots with KUKA until they sold the company to China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KUKA
The idea behind selling KUKA is, the very same narrative like in any startup. The robot itself has become a commodity. It was clear, that China will be cheaper in production of this commodity in the long term. The know-how is not in the production of such robots. The idea was to pivot more into integration. But that is very capital intensive. As big company you are limited in the possibilities to raise money. An alternative is to have a bigger company with big pockets to cooperate with or even selling the business and stay somehow as an independent business unit. I have seen this with small companies who needed to raise money. I have seen this with big companies.
BTW, one of the people involved in pivoting was one who in the 1980/1990 made the automation for the KUKA robots as a small engineering office. About a fews years late he got bought by KUKA when they discovered that this small engineering office had the whole knowledge and there was almost no knowledge within KUKA.
Without further substantiation such a claim is very low signal. What it tells me is that you think he said something bad or something you disapprove of.
To create all-purpose robots, we must prioritize both mechanical expertise and software development. However, this mindset problem exists at the top level of management, where senior executives fail to recognize the significance of software, despite the presence of highly skilled software engineers in the country.
Notably, SAP stands out as the only German company that takes software seriously, and it holds the distinction as the largest public company in Germany.
I think it's really mostly mechanical engineering companies that undervalue software. My main client is one, they actually do value software so it's a decent environment. Unfortunately still rare.
Otherwise I agree.
Absolutely!
nb: I married to one, so I know. :)