Why do people keep positing this? The robots get better every year, but they don't get better fast enough to make me think there will be a robot servant doing anything for anyone in my lifetime. As has been the case for the past fifty years or so, they're either hyperspecialized or remote controlled by people, and neither of those spell doom for the economy.
These signals seem to validate rather than disprove the direction.
Cui bono?
I said you’re never going to get an honest opinion from most of HN because they’re employed by the companies.
Edit: In terms of AI/LLM's etc..
We don't need to engineer plumbing robots - they will engineer themselves. We will see a silicon Cambrian Explosion. Maybe next year maybe in 500, but it's inevitable with the current economic incentives.
Ok, but that's still sci-fi. We've made a huge advancement in automation of knowledge work, but hardware still has no clear path to what you're describing, or even to anything similar to it.
I first heard about Elon Musk in my teens when I was reading astronomy magazines and wishing Robert Zubrin was running NASA. Why wasn't Nasa progressing? We stopped going to the moon and made a space truck to ferry satellites and ISS nodules into LEO for $2B a pop and 1/100 odds of fatality. Anyway here comes this SV guy wishing he could put a greenhouse on mars and see if a plant would grow in Martian regolith...
I'm still waiting for that experiment, Mr. Musk.
Musk was never sincerely planning any kind of sci-fi future, the fact that SpaceX was built with help from Mike Griffin (who was a key player in the 80s 'Star Wars' SDI program) and the fact that Starlink's roadmap is basically reheated leftovers of Brilliant Pebbles[1] really gives the game away. He's just a generic military contractor with (well, used to have) good PR.
Me, too. He's just another Lucy, holding just another football.
People keep talking about how we're going to enter some kind of positive feeback loop where the chatbots design better chatbot chassis but so far we've just started generating articles about that prediction at a higher rate. This is typical of the gains from LLMs: not a qualitative improvement, but a quantitative improvement. I'd sooner believe we're about to build a Paperclip Maximizer than a Singularity Machine.
Then they stand there and say 'how come they can't see what I see? Hmm'.
Oh the answer is - inertia! Lets see how long they toe that line for.
But we haven't. The only kind of software you produce in the latter scenario is unmaintainable and full of flaws. It's not at all a replacement for a team of experts.
AI has made making a demo easy and sometimes it’s might present more than a quick trip to wikipedia would surface. Edit: also it makes making mistakes in Excel easy(analysis).
Best give up all hopes of a future now.
The general populace sees mostly the creative’s view. The results are poor and it comes at the expense of ripping off IP and providing bad copies of it.
The pervasive argument right now doesn’t view LLMs as a tool that have more or less eliminated entire segments of knowledge workers, who had already been offshored and are now basically redundant. Every mid level programmer who copied and pasted stack overflow snippets all the way down to support techs are done.
Go back to the movies of 30-40 years ago... that's what people envisioned about the future.