For jobs like that, human life is cheaper than AI.
Because business is the most important thing in the world.
Laissez le bon temps rouler
I think it’s time we all accept that a terrifying amount of people have no perception of accurate reality
Because those jobs actually involve thinking and problem solving, which AI cannot do.
Simple answer: Because we’ve written AIs that work in the digital world, and mines, oil fields, toxic chemicals, and ocean plastic all exist in the real world. If you build a robotic body or arm or some way to do what the people in those places are doing, the AI could control it and do the job.
This is the one potential upside with things like Tesla Optimus. With a sufficiently general purpose bipedal humanoid robot under AI control, that robot COULD work oil fields and mines and toxic chemicals and the like.
However I suspect the miners, oil workers, waste handlers, and ocean cleanup technicians would rather keep their jobs, hazardous or not.
Machinery already replaced nearly all the jobs in places like coal mines (in the west). It did increase the safety for the remaining workers, who are mostly machine operators now.
Turns out that a huge-ass loader does more useful work than a LOT of humanoid forms. Optimus is about dreaming of never having to deal with servent classes. Its the modern dumb waiter.
Yup, and to be more exact the reason that this is the case is that training large models requires a LOT of training data.
We have a repository of text and video, the Internet, but we do not have a similar repository of training data for robotics.
That data is being created and robotics models are being trained but it is significantly more expensive when your training data isn’t mass produced for free* by people on the Internet.
*ish
Robots are working in the mines, oil fields, and handling toxic chemicals. There are at lest plans to get them to remove plastic from the ocean.
They aren’t humanoid robots. The “robots” in chemical plants are made of pipes and sensors and valves. The ones in mines have wheels and picks and conveyor belts.
The only jobs left are the ones they haven’t figured out how to automate: the people who supervise, oversee and give orders to the “robots”.
I would think the reason that those final few jobs performed by humans in chemical plants haven’t yet been eliminated is obvious. If an LLM customer service bot “goes rogue” the worst it can do is tell someone that they are entitled to a discount that doesn’t actually exist. An LLM “supervisor” for a chemical plant might actually be worse at the job than Homer Simpson.
There are a gigantic number of dangerous construction, lumber, fishing, and mining jobs still done by humans which could instead be enhanced with remote controlled robotics from a safe location free of physical danger and toxin exposure. Enormous numbers of those jobs. Instead we are pursuing the automation of the most human activities. Art, creativity, and thought. That’s what this post is about. Our fucked up priorities.
There are a gigantic number of dangerous construction, lumber, fishing, and mining jobs still done by humans which could instead be enhanced with remote controlled robotics from a safe location free of physical danger and toxin exposure
[citation heavily needed]
Are you seriously suggesting no one works in construction anymore? There are no tradesmen? No miners? No fishermen? You’re suggesting these jobs don’t exist in enormous numbers?
Its called “killing the entire middle class” and its way more profitable that all that stuff you mentioned.
Ooh i think I’ve heard it called “killing the lower class” too. You have to get past the “scapegoat immigrants” part though.
The same reason that self-driving cars don’t work very well. Shut us way more complicated than people realize because they do it all the time and don’t think about the nuances.
Significant part of my work is building robots. This is the correct answer. And amazingly, the thing that’s making robots actually capable of folding your laundry, which exists by the way, is machine learning and LLMs. But most folks will not be able to afford this, but they could afford to make their own.
This week’s Tom Scott episode on Nebula* is interesting on this subject.
Long story short: folk from a university in Essex are working on creating a robot that can pick strawberries, but it (obviously) turns out that it’s waaaay more complex than people think. There are untold different variables that humans just work around without having to think about them, like whether there are fruit inside the plant, obscured from view. A robot has to be programmed to be able to figure shit like that out.
Sure, it could easily run along the line just grabbing everything, but the plants in enormous growhouses can yield fruit for six months a year, so they need to be treated carefully. _ *it’ll be on YouTube next week
Well because robots need bodies
Are we still using pickaxes to mine??? We have Robots assisting with manual labor since the car. Modern factories rely on tons of neural networks and machine-vision. This is silly.
Yup, can confirm firsthand, having lookied at mines in Zambia in 2022, 17 year olds were still using pickaxes. While a lot of modern world is doing machine assisted mining. Pickaxes aren’t gone gone.
yeah, a pickaxe is too useful a tool in mining to get rid of. given modern mining techniques, it’s precision work.
I mean, kind of. They do use outdated heavy machinery, maybe some pickaxes to help the machines, but amount you can mine manually like that i basically pointless at this point. The bigger problem are the working conditions there in general. Time for some supply chain regulation.
Because we don’t have AI. We have algorithms putting words after another or pixels next to each other.
Better question is why we don’t use robots with specific algorithms to do those kinds of tasks.
We could if we wanted to. Not necessarily right now, but we’re pretty damn close. If all the damn billions we pour into the data centers putting words and pixels into order went into robotics, we’d have a world where no one had to get their hands dirty or risk an injury at work.
That would also make billionaires billionaires. But that would not stomp the regular folk down, and that’s the catch.
… It’s not “putting pixels next to eachother”. It’s figuring out how to filter noise to get it closer to what the prompt describes. Literally starts as noise, like an old TV that isn’t tuned to a channel. And then it applies a filter that it calculates will best get that noise closer to the tokens of the prompt. And then does it again and again and again
Regardless! Even if that investment went into healthcare, or a universal basic income…
Maybe we invest it into robotics to automate stuff. Or maybe we invest it into people.
Investing in people would be neatBut that will never happen until it is required to prevent collapse
Better question is why we don’t use robots with specific algorithms to do those kinds of tasks.
but we need a million different robots with the same algorithm or the data they send back to the company will be useless
Because the right hates intellectuals. They hate us because we’re more often on the side of the truth than their childish delusions. So they built a tool that promises it to them.
And now they want us broken, both in the mind and body, so they can amuse themselves with out suffering. Literally all the right wing media grifters who previously talked about how entertainment must be gatekept from women and minorities are celebrating that “art is no longer gatekept”.
But still, all they can get is slop with the AI. Don’t fool yourself with any of the game projects, or even that Windows XP music video that got popular with the Bluesky developers, it’s still unable to create anything meaningful, or worthy to be remembered.
Sorry, but sending emails and making power points doesn’t make you an intellectual.
What this shoes is that blue collar work is far more difficult, and involves far more thinking, than anyone who doesn’t do that work thinks.
You know the idea guy, who doesn’t want to do the actual work? But takes full credit when it’s done? AI is that guy’s best friend.
Is that kinda like the guy in the group project whos decided they wont do any work but will gladly accept the A when the sucker who chose to be group leader stayed up all night doing everyone else’s part?
