I implore young people to get into ai resistant fields and push for a return to basics and inefficiency.
I’m almost 49 and my exit plan from my corporate job is to have a small farm just big enough that it can be run simply with man power alone and then market to a premium.
Humans are not meant to be machines. Inefficiency needs to be valued more than it is.
Increasingly, they’re trying to get it to design the building.
I’m having to double-check credentials in my plan reviews because contractors have started turning in plans with AI-generated architect and engineering stamps because they don’t want to pay a professional to prepare their plans.
How can they use AI for an engineering review? Wouldn’t an actual licensed engineer have to sign off on the building?
I work for the city. Contractors are faking stamps to pretend there’s an engineer to get a permit.
Lots of municipalities are overloaded and they’ll just accept a stamp and approve the project. I do not. We review the engineering.
can you fine those who fake official stamps?
No one wants to pay anymore
As AI improves it will program hand like robotics or tool attachments to be able to do this work. This is in the pipeline. They already have workers in China, Indonesia, Vietnam and others wearing cams to capture what they do with their hands so it can be consumed and replicated by AI. It’s only a matter of time. Then there is the replication of an issue we already had. Everyone is going into trades now same as everyone went into colleges before. Long term it will lead to surplus workers in that given field. Best thing to do is be agile and willing to learn and adapt as things shift. Link: https://deepmind.google/blog/gemini-robotics-2-brings-whole-body-intelligence-to-robots/
In the 1950s, Isaac Asimov predicted that eventually, nearly everything on Earth would be automated, leading to mass unemployment. He then predicted that the “excess population” would move to other star systems, which served 3 purposes: reducing unemployment on earth, providing a meaningful existence for the extrasolar colonists, and spreading humanity throughout the galaxy.
I’m down
We always think of not working as something negative, we should desire not having to work and machines giving us the opportunity to do so. But the system is scuffed and capitalism works against us rather than for us.
We need a new system where it’s the goal to automate everything and then we only have to work a few hours a week and spend the rest with our loved ones, getting good at a hobby, enjoying life, singing dancing creating art all the fun stuff.
Well, there’s livelihood and work, and so far no one has exactly inspired confidence that the current labor class will receive a livelihood. We’ve let systems solidify that basically demand that the labor class have some semblance of leverage to participate in the benefits. So far the practical result has been that the hypothetical scenario erases that leverage, while avoiding any concessions that may win over the people that would be screwed over. It’s nice to hand wave and say “some new system”, but without more concrete things to look at, there is the risk of “well, let’s remove the labor leverage and just assume that the utopian outcome results instead of the dystopian”.
One thing that concerns me is that a common short story held up as an example of awesome utopia brought on by post-scarity due to AI is “Manna”. The plight of the dystopian half is very plausible, but the “utopian” half has a lot of problems in mechanism of how it happened and issues when “realized”. If even in fiction we can’t make a convincing narrative that lands in an unambiguous utopia, then my hopes for reality is pretty low.
So I guess in short, I agree with your sentiment, but too pessimistic to see the upside being realized and afraid that the optimisim around the upside results in rationalizing the downsides.
I’d be fine with that, as long as there was some academic aspect involved.
A bunch of idiots doing nothing for a long time isn’t going to accomplish much of anything.
You frame it with ambition as a virtue to be desired, but that’s really not a given… ambition is often super toxic. I can imagine a future of luxury automated space communism™ where the ultimate purpose is fulfillment. To be Zen is to release ones self from ego and put desire and ambition in context.
The toxic aspect generally comes from the consequences of pursuing ambition by undermining others in a competitive context. If, hypothetically, the competitive pressure is off, then “ambition” is not nearly as likely to have negative consequences.
Here the person was saying we really need to actually put our minds to use, and that’s not really likely to be the ‘toxic ambition’ you fear.
How about instead of automating everything to use machines that require electricity, maintenance and resources that wreck the planet, we make it so people worldwide only need to work four days out of the week at most while still being able to afford hobbies, holidays, and luxury items such as food that isnt poison.
And even worse, one of the thing they desperately try to automate is the arts and the humanities…
We can’t let the BOWKYS win
I was at enough construction sites to know it would be quite trivial to automate at least laying bricks with some programmable robots. Less skilled workers are already taught on the construction sites how it’s done, to help out masons. Same with roof tiles, you only need to look out for chimneys and edges.
And in our hellscape, it will just lead to forcing out a large portion of workers, make them work even more for even less, then a second round of layoffs can go.
Bricklaying robots are already here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZHRbnK1jt4
It was supposed to cure cancer and other diseases, not make us homeless and surveil us.
“It” is very ill defined. The AI they are selling you was never supposed to cure cancer. It was meant to make money. The AI which cures cancers is of a completely different kind than LLMs and media generation. And it does not have any of the same drawbacks nor any of the same funding despite it’s far greater usefulness.
The AI which cures cancers is architecturally pretty similar to LLMs in that it’s based on transformers and GPT in particular is also based on transformers (that’s the T in GPT). It is also generative AI, you give it tokens that describe proteins and it generates folding structures. It’s like an LLM except the tokens aren’t words or syllables like in LLMs.
It’s used very differently and the energy cost is a few orders of magnitude less (you can run it on a single H200 with 141 GB VRAM for ~9000 tokens or an A100 or H100 for ~5000 according to this university and it even has a slow CPU/IO heavy first stage preparing everything so they can minimize the GPU time in stage 2).
There is yet hope that such AI applications will eventually benefit from all the research that’s been put into LLMs. Obviously not everything will carry over, but there may be architectural improvements to be made in research models too.
Yeah, and any “it will cure cancer” usually boils down to “uhmm, if we feed it enough training material, it will turn into a sentient superintelligence, which will cure cancer”.
It’s a tool. Blame the humans who use this tool to make you homeless and surveil you.
Or better yet: Use the tool for one’s own goals.
Leave the orphan crushing machine alone!
Lol I kid. You’re right though: how we use it matters. How we build it matters. I wish it wasn’t destroying the environment a little bit more each month
This is exactly my thoughts when I’m trying to say “misused” to people who don’t seem to understand the sheer resources that would require to solve certain problems which would be a perfect fit. But it’s just not being used for those(not to the extent it should be supported). instead, it’s being funnelled to suck every value out of living a fulfilling life.
It’s like plastic. Certain medical procedures would be unthinkable without it. But then capitalism happens and it becomes beyond reproach real fast.
This is the important difference between defining something as ‘evil’ and using something that is truly innocuous and neutral with evil intentions.
Construction will be 1000% automated in the future. It’s already happening slowly.
The challenge is that the current approaches that are very novel broadly have proven relatively less useful for things like robotic manual labor.
The crux of the current AI craze is machine learning, which needs all the sensory information the human perceives that is relevant to the task and all of the things the human does in response in every detail. You can’t tell a model to “just feel out how that screwdriver is going and make sure you don’t strip the head or cross-thread it by mistake”, it has no abstraction, it can only derive the most likely inputs from training data based on the sensory information.
This works reasonably well for vehicle operation, where the human generally only has sight and hearing, and generally only operates a few relatively simple controls, wheels, pedals, knobs. Even with that advantage, it needs a mountain of sample data. Millions of miles of drive data to work with and the result is still a bit janky, kind of like a human with about 3000 miles of total lifetime driving experience.
Once you want to extend this approach to anything involving a more comprehensive use of hand dexterity and everything you can feel, then it becomes a problem. If you can imagine yourself tele-operating a robot with VR headset and controllers to do a task, then they have a path to get training data. That’s how a lot of these ‘chore-bot’ ambitions are trying to be realized, workers tele-operating for demos and training data, in hopes of getting enough training data to do things competently one day. But imagine trying to use a manual screw driver in that tele-operation scenario, making sure it’s lined up, doesn’t cross thread, and you don’t strip the head. I couldn’t imagine doing something even that simple in the real world without just being able to feel the screwdriver in my hand, to feel how the screw is going in or not going in, if the resistance feels right and consistent. If it’s a situation that makes sense to use a driver, then probably could tele-operate it, but in cases where we need the finesse of a manual tool, those are going to be super challenging to address. Even using a driver, I always manually start it, either with my fingers or a screwdriver, and the driver comes in when alignment is well assured.
Now the long standing approaches are of course already a big factor in automating construction. The new approaches can also make it easier to take a task that was almost within the reach of robotic choreogrpahy but foiled by something like unexpected weight and wind, so the relatively newer AI approaches help make it easy to correct for deviations to provide a steady environment to execute the programmed movements. But the versalitility of a person with full use of their hands and feelings is going to be a tough road unless some breakthrough happens.
it will not be made by LLMs, because it’s upmost important buildings are built exactly to spec. You will want a proper list of instructions for the machine, not something a model comes up with on the fly.
Important to the people who want to use it, sure. Not so important to the people that just want to sell it.
its not that important, plenty of countries dont give a fuck about building code
Regulations, just like health and safety laws, are written in blood.
Some countries allow deregulation AHEM
In spite of the demonstration videos of robots running and jumping and carrying boxes and slowly sorting packages, none of them are anywhere close to being ready to handle construction jobs, or most manufacturing jobs. And, they can’t design or make the machines that automate the processes.
It’s a billionaire’s dream that this is happening now, it’s not. One of the major hurdles is power consumption, as we’re all seeing while they build out these “data centers”. Robots and computers cannot match the efficiency and self-sufficiency of a human. In a picture:
Yep. I work in prosthetics, people tend to overestimate current battery technology and underestimate how much energy it takes to move around a couple hundred pounds.
Even with batteries that cost a small fortune, we haven’t been able to create a lower limb powered prosthetic that can keep up with the human body for more than a couple hours.
There’s a lot of hype about the humanoid robotics coming out of China, but most everything is just marketing science fiction. Once you factor in the initial cost, power consumption for processing data, multiple batteries per unit, and the massive amount of general maintenance… It becomes pretty apparent that things aren’t going to pan out anytime soon.
I build limbs out of reinforced carbon fiber and titanium and even those acquire a ton of wear in a relatively small amount of time. Any bipedal robot with plastic parts, made to do intensive labour is going to start falling apart almost immediately. The human body takes a ton of damage throughout the day as well, but it’s self repairing.
The equation changes a lot when you start altering the assumptions.
Who says the robots have to have batteries? Human workers drag power cables all over construction sites. Why can’t a robot be built that’s smart enough to manage its own power cord? Power cord management seems simple compared to doing meaningful construction work.
The wear and tear is a legitimate concern, but fixed industrial robots have been operating for many decades. The wear issues are obviously solvable in the right context.
Keep in mind, prosthetics may not be the perfect analogy. We imagine these things as humanoid, but they need not be. You might have a drywall hanging robot that has suction cups to lift up panels and a screw gun to affix them. They might not even have legs. A welding robot could just be a welding tool on the end of a long boom arm.
There’s really no need to even make general purpose robots. It’s not like individual humans practice every trade. You could have trade-specific robots. A drywall robot, a plumber robot, an electrician bot, etc. Each equipped only with those tools needed to complete just that trade. And instead of mechanical hands, they could simply be mounted.
I would agree that humanoid battery powered robots are not likely to result in mass employment in construction any time soon. But if you start relaxing those constraints, the possibility for mass worker displacement exists. A robotic construction site need not visibly resemble a human one.
Who says the robots have to have batteries?
The market. How many cable powered mobile bipedal robots have you seen?
Human workers drag power cables all over construction sites.
No they don’t? Have you ever been on a construction site? They have power cables, but they aren’t attached to them as they constantly move across a construction site. They are used for a specific job then rolled up and taken to the next job. Dozens of people dragging their own powered chords across a building site would not only be dangerous, but a huge pain in the ass.
but fixed industrial robots have been operating for many decades. The wear issues are obviously solvable in the right context.
As I said in my original statement, laypeople such as yourself tend to underestimate the amount of force a moving object creates. Just engaging in something like jogging can have a ground force reaction of 3x your body weight, something like a small jump can exert up to 7x your body weight. That is with more pliable triplaner joints covered in soft tissues that help reduce that ground reaction by absorbing some of the force with higher degrees of range of motion. Something more rigid like a robotic foot/ankle or prosthetics actually experience much higher degrees of ground reaction force.
They might not even have legs. A welding robot could just be a welding tool on the end of a long boom arm.
The entirety of my argument was around humanoid robots… That’s why I said it would make more sense for a robot on a flat factory floor to have wheels or tracks. I’m not arguing against the idea of robots in general, just bipedal humanoid ones.
Human workers drag power cables all over construction sites. Why can’t a robot be built that’s smart enough to manage its own power cord? Power cord management seems simple compared to doing meaningful construction work.
I’m sure it seems simple from your desk
One thing: do you think that those power cables are permanently connected to the workers? Are you thinking about workers using extension cords for tools or the ones laying cable for the building, because it sure as fuck isn’t simple to do either, which is why battery and petrol powered tools exist, and why the cableways are planned well in advance.
The wear and tear is a legitimate concern, but fixed industrial robots have been operating for many decades.
Only with maintenance and servicing by a human trained to see every potential flaw and monitor the equipment long term. Nothing, not even the most expensive equipment you can imagine, is without the need for regular maintenance.
You could have trade-specific robots. A drywall robot, a plumber robot, an electrician bot, etc. Each equipped only with those tools needed to complete just that trade. And instead of mechanical hands, they could simply be mounted.
Do you think that a construction site works the same way as a factory building cars? Just one long conveyors that shits out a fully built house? Workers move up, down and across the building dozens of times a day in a job doing multiple different jobs within their field, problem solving on the fly.
Interesting take. I guess I just realized every video we’ve ever seen of humanoid robots had been them doing something for a few minutes. But you never hear of one doing anything for days, months or years outside of science fiction.
Bipedal robots are kinda stuck in between a design flaw of what we want robots to look like, what we want robots to do, and what our technology is currently able to do.
Bipedal locomotion is just not the most efficient or simple mode of mobility for things like a flat factory floor, it’s really only efficient when you are factoring unleveled ground. We just currently don’t have the technology that allows bipedal efficiency across all terrain. That would require a synergistic system of optics and something that mimic propeoception. That’s a ton of information being sent from a vast network of sensory input being sorted out by your spine and brain in real time.
Imo robots for a factory floor should be on tracks or wheels. Attempting to design a robot that’s good for everything is just going to lead to a robot that is good for nothing. In engineering design should be made to fit a solution, designing for form and then trying to find a solution that form can solve is backwards and typically leads to terrible outcomes.
I’m in manufacturing and yeah it’ll be modified arm robots if anything. But current ones are large, heavy, and expensive. Cheaper than a person but they fuck up differently
Yep, in engineering design should be solution oriented. You don’t ever really want to first design the form and then try and see what solutions it may be able to solve.
A robot arm is a great start, you can then customize it further to your needs with different terminal end devices.
The main benefit of human hands is that they have an amazing amount of sensory input. If someone gets peripheral neuropathy and loses even a modest amount of that ability they can barely tie their shoes.
If people just stop eating food, we can use all the farmland for data centers and power plants
I remember reading a presser about how this cloud vendor was using robots for all kinds of tasks in their datacentre and it was super efficient because automation. But it never actually happened. They still have humans racking servers. The last 10% is hard.
Only because estimating the last 10% is so difficult.
In reality the last 10% is really at least half the job.
Don’t they have “3D Printed” houses?
I think the issue is, we are thinking of robots carrying boards and hammering nails etc.
Even not 3D printing you cpuld have a factory that cranks out walls and some sort of automated system that assembles them on site.
They have a bunch of issues, and the only thing that is really automated about them is the walls. Since it’s basically unreinforced concrete they have a horrible time with insulation, cracking, delamination, and shrinkage. Not to mention that they aren’t very good at producing sharp or square angles, so a lot of your door and window work is custom or done manually.
If you know anything about residential construction, building the interior and exterior walls is not exactly an especially time consuming or expensive part of the build process. A decent sized team of good manual workers can put up the exterior and interior walls of a decent sized home in a week or two. The 3d house people say they can do it in 72 hours of machine time…which can run anywhere from 2 weeks to 5 months in real time.
you cpuld have a factory that cranks out walls and some sort of automated system that assembles them on site.
That idea is over a hundred years old. I currently live in a house that someone bought from a sears catalog in the 1930s. They would flat pack an entire house and ship it to you on a train for you to put together yourself, or you could hire a local sears approved contractor that had a team put it together for you.
IIRC “3D Printed” houses are falling apart due to lamination issues. That said, I think it’s a solvable problem, though it will take awhile to sort out the issues. Modular systems also show a lot of promise for mass production, potentially even of higher quality, and likely amenable to robotic assembly if carefully designed for it, but we know it’ll just be a profit seeking race to the bottom. Those construction jobs are safe for at least a decade, likely more.
IIRC “3D Printed” houses are falling apart due to lamination issues. That said, I think it’s a solvable problem, though it will take awhile to sort out the issues.
You’d probably have to invent a new type of concrete first. You can add resin binders to concrete to make wet concrete somewhat stick to drying concrete but it doesn’t work very well. The drying concrete tends to pull the moisture from the wet concrete which ends up interfering with the curing of both sides.
The main issue with 3d printing concrete is more of an inherent issue with how homes settle over time. Unless you are building on bedrock or you’re driving a massive amounts of piles for the foundation, structures will move and settle over time. This is why brick and mortar have been around for such a long time, the mortar gives the bricks enough flexibility to accommodate movement.
Concrete lacks this flexibility and will crack and crumble apart unless you reinforce it with rebar. Rebar gives concrete tensile strength, distributes weight across the whole structure, and holds cracked pieces together. So really any 3d printed home that isn’t reinforced somehow wont last very long.
Nurses.
Watch nurses next time you’re in hospital. They do 8 million things, unprompted, throughout their day. Robots would blow their power load and collapse if they had to do a tenth the things nurses do.
I think the plan is to replace nurses with just letting people die instead.
Reminds me of the Quietus suicide kits in Children of Men.
Nah, they have plans to replace them with realistic sexdolls instead.
Only the poor people.
Have you tried firing all the nurses and just not giving anyone healthcare?
In the US, we just pay nurses shit and then treat them like shit. It’s amazing we have any left.
I live in Canada and nurses make really good money, more than Canadian RNs, in several states. Like you can make over a hundred grand a year. That’s not really bad at all for four years education.
Nurses absolutely deserve what they make but it is not really poor pay that is their biggest issue. More like an unsafe patient load.
Easy solution: Threaten immigrants with deporting them, actually deport half their families…the remaining ones will do anything just not to be deported. No wonder capitalists tend to fund right wing parties
Evil begets evil, I guess. I really hate it.
gonna be honest. I work with money. I see what nurses and MDs get paid. You don’t make what you should. guess what? no one does. You make more per hour and per year than more skilled people in more skilled fields doing more difficult work. why are you complaining about what you make?
unless you want to pretend medicine is the hardest thing out there, which i assure you, it’s not.
I’m not a nurse, but you keep on shitting on people for no good reason
nurses and doctors being overpaid compared to comparably skilled people given the state of the economy where we’re all underpaid, and yet they fairly consistently get on the internet to whine how they went to SCHOOL and so they should be MILLIONAIRES not like their patients?
So you got dumped by a nurse, huh.
Look, no hard feelings, but you should probably die in a fire.
oh yeah, how dare i disrespect the financial ambitions of people who sacrifice their time for money. oh wait, that’s just work.
struck a little too close to home for you on this one, didn’t i?
No, what will happen instead is they’ll get rid of half of the nurses and the ones they keep will be responsible for 16 million things. My agency is going through it right now. They fired one of our APNs and gave all her duties to our other one. She’s already overwhelmed to the point of crying in the office.
Yeah; and insurance companies and healthcare orgs in the US are trying to sub out actual human healthcare providers with “specialist agents”, because PROFIT ÜBER ALLES.
But also, that sounds absolutely ripe for a massive fucking class action lawsuit.
Eh. Modern cpus make over a trillion calculations per second. Number of tasks or thoughts isn’t really the way to win this.
Okay? A CPU can’t fuckin toilet a patient lol.
Sure. That’s just a component. By itself it can’t do anything at all. It’s like saying your tooth can’t toilet a person. But it should be sort of glaringly obvious that AI and robotics have grown insanely in just the last 15 or so years. That’s not likely to just suddenly stop, especially since way more of the world’s finances and companies are working to push them as quickly as possible than have been behind pushing any technology advance ever.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely hate AI and think the AI companies should be burned and all that shit ended for good. But I don’t see the powers of the world agreeing with that, and in another 15 or so years I’d be fairly surprised to not see some form of AI controlled robotic assistant replacing nurses. And pretty much everything people try to insist is ‘safe’.
You’re looking at it too holistically. Rarely does a tech come and entirely replace something outright (despite what the AI hype bros have been saying)
There will be 50 or 100 companies who know the space working on a single thing the nurse does. My suspicion is that nurses do a lot of book keeping and state recording, that is likely what will go first. There might eventually still be someone administering a drug but fewer people doing data entry.
Still health care is notoriously slow and penny pinching so I suspect it will be a while and the only entrants will be big companies who know how to navigate large government or private organizations.
Nurses do have an especially varied and high-demand job but literally everyone does a million things every day that AI can’t, and in it’s current iteration could never do. Very very few people will actually lose their job to “AI” in the next decade, although many probably have to its false promises, and many more will because of the huge economic crash when businesses finish figuring this out.
Now perhaps. But in 20 years?
Rich people will own all the nurses and everyone else will be left to fend for themselves in the wastes?
Bold to assume we’ll have access to the wastes.
Oh, the wastes! The magnificent wastes! When I was a lad I knew a man who visited the wastes and brought back such beautiful things! Real salt from the dry riverbeds, pieces of rubber that would burn for hours and give us such marvellous dreams! One day I’ll earn enough to take you to the wastes myself, young one. One day.
Oh for a wastes ticket. Just one more hour in the screaming lootbox mines and I might have one!
…this assumes that no one will ever connect LLMs to machinery, or generate code to run machinery (gcode, for example)?
I’ve seen some AI designed STLS. They are…not good
Yep, CAD and house building are still human jobs, for now.
Physical systems are a lot more expensive to train. It’s questionable if they can safely finish buildings before some better new form of AI is invented.
Also to some extent, impossible to train. If a person needs to feel the situation or it demands the full dexterity of the hand, then that is not going to be captured in training data. It’s why the robots are being tele-operated, yes in part to demonstrate the mechanical bits work, but the tele-operation is the only way they can get training data. If you couldn’t use a VR controller to do a task successfully, then they can’t even capture the training data needed.
Just gonna plug it into the house building machine?
Maybe
Fuck yeah
All jobs like this are going to pay minimum wage once the rest of the workers are replaced with AI and there are lines of people willing to work for no money.
If only the construction trades could develop some kind organization to protect members from race to the bottom wages and also promote training that improves work quality.
I think we need bolder strategy. We could develop a 2 team approach where one team is made of up people who make one dollar amount and the other team is made up of everyone with less than that dollar amount. I think we will be much better distributed results.
I’m not expecting to see unions continuing to work let alone remain legal.
See, that’s why strikes work. They don’t have to be legal.
yeah, trades have pretty strong unions in my area. only, well my experience with the trades unions have put me in a position to see lots of corruption. it’s not been a great view.
I remember when it was just as laughable for a phone to dial itself, anything to update itself, computers to write code, etc.
This doesn’t show that AI won’t eventually be constructing buildings. It just shows you’re laughing that a thing that’s pretty much certain to happen will never be possible.
Yeah, robotics and AI aren’t at a point where they can build a row of houses with zero humans involved… that doesn’t say that won’t happen “eventually.”
The vast majority of technology we use daily was unrealistic science fiction just 50 years ago and completely insane to consider much farther back than that.
I believe BMW and others are already operating humanoid robots that work in a factory setting doing tasks a typical machinist would do right now.
Just imagine in 10+ years when the frontier agent models get optimized enough, or more effectively streamed into the robotics and the robotics are robust enough to handle “heavy lifting” tasks. I don’t think there is much some combination of AI and robotics can’t do. Other than suffering the soon to come mass poverty… They’ll never be able to do that.
Quite. As soon as robotics and AI reach a point where they can take care physically creating the needs and wants of the uber wealthy… that’s bad.
Any time the idea of UBI comes up I think it’s way more likely for them to decide 99% of us are now redundant and that some convenient pathogen/disease that they have access to a cure for the rest of the world doesn’t know exists would be a fantastic way to get rid of us before we form giant mobs to demand equality. As an added benefit, having ~7.9 billion less humans in the world and no longer needing to produce food or goods for them would reduce pollution and emissions on a massive scale, helping the global environment while also getting rid of all the clutter ruining the views at the nicest beaches.
They’ll still need some of us to boss around and feel superior to, not to mention to breed attractive children for their enjoyment. Just a small enough number broken between enough locations on the planet to get the odds of large scale physical resistance as low as they can.
It’s literally what I tell my friend who seems to be convinced they’ll suddenly be altruistic… Like dude, you’re saying the very same people that fight any form of taxation whatsoever will magically be ok with “giving away” their wealth to people who do no work? They’d rather start a new company to make more money that just films nation wide “bum fights” as they treat us as entertainment, fighting over a chance to eat, than they would give anything for a UBI.
One of the weird things that came out about Covid was that they were doing research on Gain of Function… actively trying to make the disease more transmissible specifically in humans. That isn’t a fantastic line of research.
Knowing that’s a thing that large, well funded places are still researching, the idea that a more deadly disease that transmits through humans even easier could be created along with a vaccine to prevent the disease before it ever becomes public is way, way less unrealistic than I wish it were.
A handful of ultra wealthy folk could fully fund that in secret behind strict NDAs very easily. Hell, one of them could. The same people making policies that their AI should sex chat with kids to increase the kids usage time, visiting rape islands, saying only the extremely wealthy should vote… fuck, some of the Epstein files directly involve conversations about that topic. I think that’s one of the conversations Bill Gates was part of. How to get rid of poverty in the the world by getting rid of the poor folk.
But you can’t even discuss it with most people without seeming like a batshit insane, tinfoil hat conspiracy nut. Bit frustrating.
Developing mass bioweapons to be used on the same planet they need to live on is nothing but pure hubris. Who is to say that the disease won’t evolve to be even worse and the vaccine rendered worthless? I wouldn’t think they’d necessarily come out ahead if they’re forced to quarantine for a long time and rebuild humanity from nothing (assuming they don’t die themselves).
But I don’t have the kind of ego they do either, so maybe they think they’d be fine either way.
If you haven’t read about Zuckerburg’s underground bunker, it’s like a fully stocked 5,000 sqft mansion. Lots of the billionaires are building underground doomsday mansions lately. Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, and Sam Altman are some of the names I know offhand, but there are reports that many silicon valley executives are doing the same thing.
It wouldn’t be a wonderful way to spend the massive amount of time needed for the outside world to recover from nuclear fallout, and they’re all building small shelters for individual families and their slaves, not the sort of larger community that would require. On the other hand they would be fantastic places to spend a few short years while an extremely transmissible deadly virus removes the bulk of the redundant humans cluttering up the world. The virus won’t be able to live long outside of a human host, so if the transmission and mortality rates are high enough it really wouldn’t take all that long for it to be safe to come out from hiding.
The bunkers all have extensive surveillance of the entire above ground region, so even if large scattered patches of humans survive they’ll be able to be sure none of them are lurking around before hand.
Plus they’ve decided it’s a great idea to combine AI, drones, and murder, so it’s not like they’ll be counting on a lot of henchmen with guns who could easily turn on them. AI is currently getting loads of training data right now on how to most accurately target the children in gaza who “look like they could use some food the most” and learning how keeping their center of mass in the happy food scope means they never see that same hungry child again.
Hooray for the future!
The bunkers certainly help them survive a bioweapon pandemic, but then what would be next? Would they have the means to rebuild all of the supply chains in an almost completely automated way? Would they have the means to create new humans in such a way that leaves enough genetic diversity to survive other diseases that will stay in the world?
Of course they could have access to all the technology left over from before the said pandemic, but it doesn’t mean much if there aren’t enough people/machines to utilize them and keep them fixed. They would have to go without a lot of things like convenient private jet travel and complex manufacturing. This is not even mentioning when the food/medicine inevitably runs out.
This isn’t to argue against you, just me wondering if they would take those kinds of risks. IMO they are probably too comfortable with what they have to rebuild everything rather than just capturing current governments and creating corporate dictatorships. If they screw up the former badly enough, we will be extinct after all.
No, the vast majority of things we used today were not science fiction in the 70s.
Mobile phones, the Internet, satellites, etc. all of these things existed before the 70s.
The biggest technological innovation of the last hundred years has been miniaturization.
What a silly thing to bicker about.
Of course every one of us having a computer many times more powerful than anything that existed at the time yet small enough to fit in our pocket with plenty of room to spare and using wireless earphones (that also boost external sounds if needed) to communicate with it by simply saying in whatever language we speak what we want the computer to do or research and having the resulting confirmation or information read back to us, again in whatever language we’d prefer, as part of our professional remote-work career, as we sit in the back of a driverless car heading home from a nice lunch, where we’ll see that the groceries that were automatically ordered and delivered based on the contents of our refrigerators and cabinets compared to the eating preferences and any special requests made by each member of our household are waiting for us… was science fiction in the 70s.
We can add in having whatever music we prefer automatically follow us from our home to our earphones to the car speakers, watching any movie/show or playing any video game from anywhere in the world, using your far more powerful computer at home to do the more demanding tasks but wirelessly using your phone as a monitor to stream whatever game it’s playing to wherever you are and having a wireless controller paired with your phone control the character in the game being played hundreds of miles away nearly seamlessly, being able to hold a face to face conversation with someone who speaks nearly any language you that don’t via live translation, to share any sort of book or movie or what would amount to a more information than is contained in a typical library to anyone else on the planet in a few seconds to a few minutes without either of you ever needing to stand up from wherever you’re sitting… I can go on for a few pages easily.
Yes, those things and way more that we take for granted daily now were nothing more than science fiction in the 70s.
Cassette tapes existed in the 70s I could listen to the same music in my car and in my house, by simply ejecting the tape and carrying it in with me. The way you’re describing shit you might as well say it was science fiction in the 90s too you’re splitting hairs that don’t need to be split and that more importantly have nothing to do with your original argument.
Cassette tapes existed in the 70s I could listen to the same music in my car and in my house, by simply ejecting the tape and carrying it in with me.
And a rich person in 2000 BC could have produced the exact same effect by hiring a troupe of bards to follow them around. Just because the core function is the same, does not mean true innovation is impossible.
Okay… but the point was that wasn’t unrealistic science fiction 50 years ago.
Dear God. The point was that your music can follow you and jump from home speaker system to earphones to car speakers to office speakers without you touching or doing anything.
You seem to have hit the age where you need to be crotchety and bitch several hours per day lest you break a hip next time you shower. I can commiserate, but thankfully I only need to bitch two hours per day to stay safe so far. Good luck with your complaining, hope it goes well.
No, the point was that wasn’t unrealistic science fiction in the 70s. The idea that someday you wouldn’t have to touch the cassette was not unrealistic science fiction.
Just because you’re wrong doesn’t mean you need to be an ass.
Bud, you chose to bicker entirely on whether I was a decade or two off on exactly when many ideas in science fiction stories stopped being considered unrealistic and started to be considered plausibly realistic future technology.
“Woolworth’s didn’t close down in 1972, it was November of '71!”
Be honest with yourself, that’s completely senseless old guy bickering. It’s absolutely irrelevant to the point.
I’ll validate you here. You made a good point and you were wrong about nothing that mattered, if anything at all. Yet this dude slid in, in classic online asshole style, to redefine the conversation and cherry pick what it’s about and what would matter or not and even went so far to correct you “no, the point was [what I said, because you don’t matter].”
I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with people who do this. What is the fucking point of attempting to reframe a discussion you didn’t start and die on the hill of “that other person sucks because they said something I argue is technically inaccurate and has little or nothing to do with a valid point they’re making”. I keep saying to myself I have to quit Lemmy, and it’s primarily that exact type of asshole behavior that causes me to think that way.
I chose to bicker because it was a ludicrous statement. Whatever else you need to tell yourself is for your own comfort.
And yet they made a valid point. Your response here has nothing to do with anything but pointlessly shitting on someone. Which apparently makes you feel better?
This is a public forum, are you saying that they are allowed an opinion and I am not?
By the time AI is capable of finishing buildings it will choose to eradicate us instead.
