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Comment by loudmax | Hacker News Reader

One use case I imagine is skilled workmanship. For example, putting on a pair of AR glasses and having the equivalent of an experienced plumber telling me exactly where to look for that leak and how to fix it. Or how to replace my brake pads or install a new kitchen sink.

When I hire a plumber or a mechanic or an electrician, I'm not just paying for muscle. Most of the value these professionals bring is experience and understanding. If a video-capable AI model is able to assume that experience, then either I can do the job myself or hire some 20 year old kid at roughly minimum wage. If capabilities like this come about, it will be very disruptive, for better and for worse.

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Sounds like what Hololens was designed to solve, more in the AR space than AI though

This is called "watching YouTube tutorials". We've had it for decades.

But what if there's no YouTube tutorial for the exact AC unit you have and it doesn't look like any of the videos you checked out?

Have you met people that seem to be able to fix almost anything?

If you can't get a tutorial on your exact case you learn about the problem domain and intuit from there. Usually it works out if you're careful, unlike software.

Then you are equally fucked as the AI will be, so no difference.

Case in point, I remember about ten years ago our washing machine started making noise from the drum bearing. Found a Youtube tutorial for bearing replacement on the exact same model, but 3 years older. Followed it just fine until it was time to split the drum. Then it turned out that in the newer units like mine, some rent-seeking MBA fuckers had decided more profits could be had if they plastic welded shut the entire drum assembly. Which was then a $300 replacement part for a $400 machine.

An AI doesn't help with this type of shit. It can't know the unknown.

But once it knows it’s pretty certain to become common knowledge almost instantaneously. That’s not possible now. What you learn stays localised to you and may be people 1 degree away from you that’s it.

How does that work? None of the current AI models can re-train on the fly. How would the inference engine even know if it's a case of new information that needs to be fed back, or just a user that's not following instructions correctly?

This is correct. What I meant to say was that in due course, re-training on the fly will become a norm. Even without on the fly re-training we are looking at a small delta.

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