Current Waymos do use the transformer architecture, they're still predicting tokens.
1,784 karma · joined March 17, 2023
I'm disabled, and one thing I'm really interested in long-term for humanoid robots is disability support work. Disability support work involves a huge variety of individual tasks, as many as a typical person will do in their life, so it's a good fit for an extremely general platform like a humanoid robot. Motorised wheelchairs and dishwashers exist, but a support worker might need to push a wheelchair, do sensitive dishes, do laundry, accurately open and place medications without destroying them, weigh & dose powders, help someone with going to the toilet, cook meals, drive a car, control pets, manage the level of noise/light/smells in the environment to stop someone from being overwhelmed, sanitise surfaces including themselves, navigate confusing interfaces on a phone or computer, help someone drink from a bottle, remember what sort of activities helped a disabled person in the past to be able to do them in the future, help someone with physical fitness activities like punching or kicking a pad, talk to people for someone, carry someone safely in the event of an emergency, make coffee in the morning, monitor intake of various drugs/nutrients/macronutrients, be able to reach and catch someone before they hit the floor if they pass out, help someone walk if they're unsteady on their feet, etc etc. It makes sense to me that it would be cost effective to have one platform which can do all of that with similar performance to a human, rather than automating many of those tasks individually in ways that might not be accessible to some disabled people.
In terms of TAM, absolutely huge amounts of money are spent on disability care (keeping in mind that elder care is also disability care), by both governments and private citizens, and this number is forecasted to continue growing as more people become disabled by COVID-19 and demographic changes increase the elderly population relative to working age adults. As well, there are constantly scandals about how bad conditions are in some area of disability care, almost always due to underpaid, untrained, or unmonitored staff, so there's a lot of demand for both more reliable quality & lower prices; that demand is only going to grow with time. Various government bodies are very large sources of funding that are very concerned with value for money and would pursue any option that could do the job without costing as much - in my country (Australia), there's the NDIS, National Disability Insurance Scheme. They are always looking for ways to consolidate care for less money.
I strongly suspect that any humanoid robot which was good enough to do disability support work would be in extremely high demand in the general population for obvious reasons, as well as being useful as a platform for labour automation, but those are much more speculative. Disability support work is a lot of money for incredibly varied tasks being spent right now. Something to think about.
Yes, if your criticism of China is in the news they might not let you in. That doesn't apply to many people but it's still a helpful clarification.
>There are other people like John Cena apologizing for saying something "wrong" in English but no idea if they were threatened by CCP or by their managers
Managers, and the reason isn't out of fear of legal consequences but fear of boycotts. Chinese have often felt like those in the West are talking down to them or being condescending, and they've never in their life had the ability to affect those doing so. Now that people really want access to the Chinese market, it's the first time ever for many Chinese people that they feel they can have any impact on how Westerners talk about China or the Chinese people. As a result (and because China has domestic equivalents of everything), Chinese people can be very boycott happy. The government can stop Chinese people from organising boycotts & very often does so (once again, they have an issue with any sort of mass organising by default), but the government can't force people to buy tickets to John Cena's movies & they didn't view it as appropriate to censor the videos of him screwing up what he meant to say. An organic boycott by the Chinese market is the worst nightmare of a lot of businessmen because the future of their business relies on selling in China, so they'll be even more strict on their people than the Chinese government would to try to avoid that.
My general advice for people travelling to China is to not talk about politics on Chinese social media, or if you do just talk about the domestic politics of your home country & keep in mind that Chinese people might disagree with you. That's also my advice for people travelling to any country, but it's more important in China.
All that said, if you must discuss politics on Chinese social media while you're there, the thing the censors really have an issue with is calls for action, explicit or implied. More than one very pro-PRC heritage speaker who went to China has had their Weibo posts raging against America or Japan censored because they thought the criteria were "Posts have to be pro-China", when really the criteria is "Posts can't be a call to collective action that wasn't started by the party". What the party is actually concerned about is just stopping any sort of organised mass movement that they didn't start. The CCP's point of view is that mass movements are inherently unpredictable & could lead to civil disorder (even if they're nominally "pro-China"), so they're too risky a tool to let anyone other than the state use - important context to that is that Chinese culture, similar to some other East Asian cultures, puts way more value than we do on civil order, harmony etc.
Also if your posts do get censored, it's not as big an issue as it would be here. Where I live, the government deleting my social media posts would feel approximately as serious as armed police rappelling through my windows, and if the former happened I'd at least think about the possibility of the latter happening shortly afterwards. Think something like the Christchurch shooting live feed. It's not like that in China; it's completely normal, for example, that you get angry & post something that gets deleted by a censor, & that is literally the last you ever hear of it, a lot like tweeting something against ToS. If you continue posting about it or try to get around the censorship, eventually a police officer will visit you and talk to you over tea about why you have to stop doing that, and if you keep going that's when the actual legal consequences like deportations or arrest start.
I don't know whether it's past the mark enough to be considered a "taboo" yet, but the other comment replying to him is certainly treating it as taboo. I would note that many, many other people particularly in academia/important society act the same way as the other commenter. I'd also note I have felt strong social pressure to not hold the beliefs I hold about LLM's capacity for reasoning, including actually losing meaningful social status.
Probably worth remembering that different subcultures have different taboos.
They are a global supermajority. In some of the wealthiest nations on the planet, they are instead only a majority.
>there currently exists a solid chunk of people that both sell their time and build wealth from property/interest.
Yes, they are called the petite bourgeoisie. Marx wrote about them extensively. In very wealthy nations like the US, Canada, UK, Australia etc my understanding is that they make up roughly 30% of the population. The rest are proletarians & lumpenproletarians, aside from a negligible-in-numbers percentage of the population that compose the haute bourgeoisie or "real bourgeoisie". I believe the percentage of the population who are bourgeois in the US is around 0.3%, much lower in the other wealth nations because so many of global elite choose to live in the US.
The percentage of the population who are petite bourgeoisie in countries other than the wealthy nations is highly variable, class composition varies a lot worldwide (e.g. there are many countries like the Phillipines where there is quite a large peasant population still). In general, outside of the wealthy nations the petite bourgeoisie are something like 5-15% of the population, and the haute bourgeoisie make up significantly less than 0.3% of the population.
Combined with the increased cost effectiveness of renewables & batteries, & the new build-out of nuclear, it could plausibly speed up the clean energy transition, rather than just disincentivising building out more polluting power plants.
There are two main options for what to do with revenue from a carbon tax. The one that makes the most macroeconomic sense is to use those proceeds to fund subsidies for clean energy roll outs & grid adaptation. You are directly taxing the polluting power grid to fund the construction of a non-polluting power grid. As CO2 emitting industry (and thus carbon tax revenue) declines, we have less required spend on clean energy roll out, so the tax would balance nicely. The downside would be that a carbon tax would increase cost of living and this does nothing about that.
The other option is a disbursement. Give everyone in society a payment directly from the proceeds of the carbon tax. This would offset the regressive aspects of a carbon tax (because that tax would increase consumer costs), and would also act as a sort of auto-stimulus to stop the economy from turning down due to consumption costs increasing. The downside of this is that the clean energy transition happens slower than the above, and that there may be political instability & perverse incentives as people maybe come to rely on this payment that has to go away over the next few decades.
They're both good options. I don't know which is better and I think that's likely something individual countries will probably choose based on their situation. But we do need some sort of way to make those emitting CO2 pay for its negative externalities.
This is interesting because it's both Oddly Specific and also something I have seen happen and I still feel really sorry for the company involved. Now that I think about it, I've actually seen it happen twice.
On what basis do you call yourself a communist when you explicitly advocate "trust" in a bourgeois government on the topic of state killings of homeless & disabled people? Shouldn't that be one of the last topics you would ever trust them on, given their clear class interest in killing members of the proletariat who are unable to continue labouring for profit? It seems fine to trust them not to lie about easily verifiable facts that don't threaten them, like weather warnings, but you should trust them about literally everything else before trusting them to "fairly" and "consensually" carry out killings of proletarians.
The government has no incentive to provide better housing or disability benefits to the working class when they can instead withhold those things and watch legions of poor & desperate people die. Do you know they actually calculate how much money killing all of these marginalised people saves them? That Canadian media advertises these figures to sell the state killing program?