Is this account just a repost bot?
Robots are doing exactly all the things described because they are hazardous to humans.
LLMs are not robots.
Physical AI isn’t that good yet. It’s getting better, but we are still at the beginning. AI hasn’t been out of the AI winter for long; these things take time.
That being said, “dumb” robots already do a lot, and that will probably expand too with new AI support.
Did this meme come from Facebook?
Real answer?
People who have access to the tools use it to do tasks they want to avoid. Sally from the civil team doesn’t work in mines or under the ocean, but she does spend way too much time on PowerPoint slides and emails she doesn’t actually care about. So she has Claude handle it so she can focus on her other work.
We have robots doing the dangerous jobs in this meme. Its just they don’t do 100% of the work. They also don’t do 100% of knowledge work either to this day. If you have an AI make you a power point and then you don’t edit it and do quality assurance on it you are going to have one jank ass powerpoint.
Even if the crazy miracles its doing with decomp & recomp work on video games lately: that still requires a ton of human involvement.
They might eventually be able to do 100% of physical labor though. And 100% of knowledge work. They just are not there yet. The former requires use to have enough physical materials though.
Because we hid all that shit, so there’s no digital data to mimic or copy from.
But…robots are doing all three of those things?
They do these things at night when they aren’t busy making powepoints.
If you consider LLMs to be robots I guess? I don’t think robots are writing emails, like a robot is not sitting down at a keyboard and typing out emails in your average office, or any office at any scale really
The very premise of this meme is ridiculous.
Mining was one of the earliest adopters of automation. “Robots” have been doing mining jobs for decades, for centuries if you are generous with how you define “robot”. Mining companies keep searching for any job they can automate. Even the guys who drive the enormous mine trucks were replaced when they found they could let a machine drive the trucks instead.
The only difference is that nobody yet knew how to automate “knowledge work”. The latest generation of AI can simulate knowledge work, which apparently is good enough for some jobs. But, the fact that it hasn’t yet taken some of the few remaining mining and chemistry jobs is a clue that it has severe limitations.
Sure, you can automate the creation of powerpoint presentations, which is “knowledge work”, but is there a mining company that is willing to fire the guy who supervises the robots and replace him with ChatGPT? These are ruthless profit-driven companies. If AI could do that guy’s job, he’d be unemployed.
Current LLMs are limited by the fact that they can’t train during inference. i.e. They can’t learn. If we find something better than backpropagation or diffusion, then things are going to actually be different. At that point, the models would be able to compose ideas together instead of just predict the next token in sequence based on previous training.
Current LLMs are limited by the fact that they can’t train during inference. i.e. They can’t learn
Learning is much more than just training during inference.
True unsupervised learning is still in its infancy, and requires a completely different architecture than the current fancy auto-suggest boom. Unsupervised learning has been the dream since at least the 1950s when AI was an aspiration, even before transistors existed. Nobody has figured out how to do it yet.
If pigs learn to fly, then things are going to actually be different.
Not anywhere near at equivalent scale.
“Artisanal Mining” (ie, press-ganged children forced into mine work in conflict zones) continues to be a lucrative industry in a way freelance accounting or contracting increasingly is not.
Automation is coming for the high margin jobs, while leaving humans to the low margin manual labor.
You’re comparing slavery to paying for skilled labor tho
Are you nuts, those robots are expensive. We don’t want to get them dirty.
It gets hot in there too
Yeah, I recently watched some chinese robots dancing on america’s got talent. What a world. smh.
The only way robots could possibly be successful at mining is if they are controlled and or trained by actual miners. And it’s still a long shot.
You still need these machines to be wired up, because there’s no way to do wireless communication in a tunnel network.
At some point, it’s cheaper to have a manual operator directly on hand than to try and automate a remote machine against all the contingencies and complexity of mining work.
turns out, a lot of manual labour tasks are too complex to automate easily. even if the work is repetitive and seems like it would be simple, there’s a lot of things that you can’t just stick a robot into and have it work
computer tasks, on the other hand… it’s a lot easier, and there’s much better training data, and the stakes are theoretically (and often in practice) lower.
now, as for WHY we’re not globally prioritizing automating the dangerous stuff completely, that’d be because money, I imagine
There’s irony in how easy it is to automate jobs that are generally regarded as “higher ups”, more intelligent as opposed to lower-tier jobs. And those managers and executives would likely be pretty bad workers.
I used to despise the thought of AI in the workplace doing my job for me
but after seeing what apparently above-average employees output… I understand why it seems appealing
ex: sent my coworker instructions that made note of particular things, and a template file with clearly documented instructions inside the file. they used the wrong template file, not the one I explicitly sent the filepath for. they asked me to review the file. I made note of the issues that cropped up because they didn’t follow the instructions. they asked me to do a final review. I noticed that some of their fixes to my notes did the opposite of what I asked, or were just ignored. like, yeah, AI can do just as well as that. but it can’t do it properly, and that’s what we need
The people in control of the robots write emails and make PowerPoints, that is how the world works to them.
When work is done by the underclass, human life is cheaper than maintaining complex automation.
BYD very famously invested in high end manufacturing equipment early on in it’s history. But, in trying to maintain, upgrade, and expand the equipment alongside increased production demand, the senior managers discovered that this was significantly more expensive than just hiring and training more local machinists to build the cars manually.
They ended up downsizing their automated team and hiring/training a huge number of skilled professionals. This allowed the company to grow far more rapidly, while still implementing new changes to their models with minimal re-engineering of their production floor.
Now, BYD is one of the largest car markets in the world, and they are slowing moving back to re-automate jobs that have become consistent and routine.
Why would I want to make PowerPoint??
IKR give me a trash bag and I’ll get started
