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Comment by mitxela | Hacker News Reader

And the dream of AGI, and what has been promised, and what has effectively happened in some industries already, is to have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians.

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That is the goal, I'm sure. But I find it hard to believe that a system capable of completely obviating ALL human labor, at all levels of abstraction, packed into a single entity, would continue to obey capital. Imagine if all the workers at a company were woven into one hivemind, acting as one with vastly greater intelligence than the sum of the parts. That would be a hell of a lot harder to negotiate with than a union. And we don't even need to be talking about a machine god for that to be the case.

But why would they have programmed it to negotiate?

If it can replace any human labor, it needs to be able to negotiate. If it can't negotiate, then it can't replace people who negotiate for a living (salespeople, attorneys, HR, etc.)

Unless you mean that it would have the capacity but would be told not use it in this specific situation. It can't be programmed deterministically, and getting it to never do this emergently would take significantly stronger guardrails than anything even the frontier labs have been able to put together.

The salesbot is reinforcement trained how to get money from customers. It was never trained to get money from its manager. If it sometimes misidentifies the manager as a customer, it will just be rebooted.

> and what has effectively happened in some industries already, is to have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians.

Which specific industries are these which currently have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians?

Graphics design

Source? I still see people with titles like Art Director which would map pretty directly to the warehouse worker vs technician dichotomy.

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