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Comment by ericpauley | Hacker News Reader

Am I missing something here? Bike tires are pretty much the easiest tires to change. You don’t even really need irons and it involves a few very basic steps.

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That's the point, he chose something very easy to do to illustrate how out of touch he thinks they are. It's obviously not the case.

But even that can be difficult at times. My roommate had once a racing bike with a tire so tight, we struggled immensely getting it on.

And even without such a difficult tire, imo most people would struggle if you’d ask them to change a tire of a bike, especially the back wheel.

And our robots still look far from capable of changing bike tires...

That's not OP's contention though; it's that models are incapable of even surfacing sufficient information. This doesn't pass the smell test.

To wit, here is ChatGPT's "superintelligent" answer: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a52b4a322bc81919308ec864a0cc056

Seems like a perfectly cromulent description by which a beginner could probably change a tire, perhaps with a few follow-ups to understand what certain components are.

I read his contention as “the people who wrote AI 2040 are nerds who are so ungrounded from physical reality they wouldn’t even know how to change a bike tire if given instructions”. Which I think is also wrong but has a genuine criticism in it.

sure, they have strong bay area aura, but an ad hominem is not very useful criticism of the actual arguments for AI safety (and longtermism, and against x-risks in general).

Might be premature to say that...Elon is essentially betting all of Tesla on the fact that a robot can change a bike tire soon, if he is wrong he might have to come up with some new BS to keep surviving, but maybe he is partially right and a robot ends up being able to change some bike tires sometimes.

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