Hacker News Reader

Comment by mkotlikov | Hacker News Reader

5 years ago everyone knew that human thinking was the last thing to get automated. Now everyone knows that physical labor is an impenetrable fortress against AI.

The hardware is already there waiting for the right model to direct it. If GPT 7 or Claude 6 is a true AGI we'll be months away from the same type of blue collar automation. The fact that the models are already building with blender demonstrates a growing understanding of the necessary spatial awareness and reasoning.

View on HN

You've never contorted yourself under a sink trying to undo a pipe, have you?

People with wrenches aren't being replaced any time in the next 50 years.

You think they won't invent the robot with the wrench in the next 50 years?

I think they won't replace most household plumbers.

We didn't think artists and software engineers would be replaced only a few years ago.

And they haven’t been

It's almost like sitting at a keyboard and typing is different to driving to a site, lugging a drain snake off the back of a flatbed, asking the owner where their outside tap is, cutting the dead bush away so you can reach that tap, finding the drain, snaking the thing down the drain, monitoring it all, not making a mess in the customer's back yard, packing it all up, and driving away.

I mean they're basically the same job.

I didn't say they were the same, just that "surely those jobs won't be automated" wasn't a very good prediction.

Which part of my backyard plumber story do you think will be automated?

Either the plumber is replaced, or they aren't. I contest that they aren't.

I think there will be a general-purpose humanoid robot that can do all that, and a lot sooner than you think.

I'd say there's similar challenges to changing legacy hardware/software and all it interacts with. If all you're doing is new then you could probably devise a robot friendly standard and they'd take over the profession, the issue is the huge variety of how plumbing is implemented within a building of any given age, different building eras in a city, across a country, different countries, complying with all their different sets of regulations, all the variety of parts they connect to. That's with very little plumbing knowledge, in my field of courier shipping where companies have been actively pursuing automation for a long time and still are, even if one of the largest companies with influence like amazon are able to standardize on a few things, it's a huge number of other entities they need to interface with where they are limited on how much they can push (i.e. standard size items) without making themselves irrelevant.

But the people who will be replaced won’t have money to pay the people with wrenches. We all are gonna get poorer

> But the people who will be replaced won’t have money to pay the people with wrenches.

Those people will spend their savings, sell their houses to live in the smaller ones, or find another jobs. They will probably gonna get poorer. But the majority of the people with wrenches definitely will get richer, that is how economy works.

The article addresses this.

There are two risks:

1. Humanoid robots learn to do everything. Perfectly plausible at current progress rates.

2. The skill is removed and AI acts as a leveler, same as in programming. You still need humans to point the nail gun and squeeze the trigger, but everything else is just instructions coming into their smart glasses from an AI. The tradesman is just a meat proxy.

Not many wrenches needed for the modern push-fit plastic fittings (which break all the time).

I work in robotics. You are sadly mistaken. There is exactly a 0% chance that humans are still using wrenches by hand in 2076 (unless there's some global collapse from climate change / war)

There are many barriers to it happening completely unrelated to the capabilities of robots.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com