6 ms·
If the vast majority live at a "borderline biblical" standard of living, then there is simply not enough excess wealth to pay for the data centers (or more accu
by rmah 6mo ago
If the vast majority live at a "borderline biblical" standard of living, then there is simply not enough excess wealth to pay for the data centers (or more accurately, the industrial output necessary to build and maintain those data centers) you're talking about. Agrarian societies (i.e. borderline biblical), by definition, do not have the excess labor necessary for industrial output at any scale (here I mean anything more than a few % of contemporary levels).
- energy123 6mo agoRobots will eventually be better than people at manual labor. I don't claim to know when that crossover will happen.
- glitchc 6mo agoThis is still a "hard" problem from a scientific perspective. LLMs haven't taken us any closer to solving the perception, actuation, learning loop. It will require multiple new developments in material science and a new ML paradigm.
- jevndev 6mo agoThis is true about LLMs themselves but the developments behind them have been a boon for robotics. I’m mostly familiar with computer vision so I can’t speak to everything, but vision transformers (ViTs is the term to search for) have helped a ton with persistence of object detection/tracking. And depth estimation techniques for monocular cameras have accelerated from the top of the line raw cnn based models from just a few years ago; largely by adding attention layers to their model. I agree that they’re not there yet but I don’t want to discredit the benefits of these recent advancements
- pixl97 6mo agoWhile you're correct we still need a lot more, the advances in the past 5 years represent more than I've seen in most of my life. Just look at the speed in which we can train a humanoid robot things now. We can send out a mo-cap human, get some data, and in few hours run a few hundred trillion simulations, and publish a kernel that can do that task relatively well. LLMs allow us any perception at all. They feed vision to scene comprehension an then let the robot control part calculate a plan to achieve a goal. It's not very fast, and fine motor controls have a long way to go, but it is possible.
- zozbot234 6mo agoRobots are already way better than people at a vast majority of manufacturing work, but there's still plenty of high-skilled manual jobs around.
- sdenton4 6mo agoWhat are ai and robots other than excess labor, waiting to be allocated? Why does the wealth have to come from the meat bags?
- pastel8739 6mo agoWho is going to buy the stuff that the AI and robots produce, then? What will the point be of producing all this stuff?
- kjkjadksj 6mo agoYou act like I produce the dollars I spend. No, the government does, who debases our currency to print more.
- vel0city 6mo agoYou act like I produce the silver I spend. No, the miners and minters do, who debase our currency mining and minting more. Even if we tied our economic system to shiny rocks the vast majority of us aren't involved in the production of shiny rocks. We're still just trading tokens we agree have some kind of value.
- TFYS 6mo agoThere will be no point, and the stuff that normal people use will become more expensive as resources are more and more directed to megaprojects that the capital class is interested in. More modern equivalents of pyramids and extravagant castles and less consumers goods.
- CalRobert 6mo agoPresumably the captains of the universe will want ever increasing luxuries and expressions of their power.
- 9rx 6mo agoWhat is the point of producing all this stuff now? Historically production was transactional. You give me something, I give you something. But along the way the average Joe ran out of things to offer in return. Businesses give, but increasingly fail to receive in kind. Apple, for example, produced in excess of $50 billion dollars worth of value that they've never been able to get anything in return for. In other words, they have effectively given away $50 billion dollars worth of stuff away for free and have shown no signs of wanting to stop. At least there is no direct transactional value. There is social value. When you've given away $50 billion dollars worth of things, the masses start to idol you. That is why people, like those who oversee Apple, are willing to produce all that stuff. You get social access not afforded to the average Joe. You can do stupid Epstien-style crap without repercussions. You get to live a different life even when you aren't directly getting anything in return. That, no doubt, will remain the point of producing stuff in the future.
- repelsteeltje 6mo agoIn Marc-Uwe Kling's Quality Land novel [1], the absence of purchasing power resulting from AIs having taken over, is mitigated by shopping robots buying random useless stuff. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Qualityland-Marc-Uwe-Kling/dp/1538732963 https://www.amazon.com/Qualityland-Marc-Uwe-Kling/dp/1538732...
- senordevnyc 6mo agoSo the broken windows fallacy for the AI age?
- dag100 6mo agoI feel like this makes very little sense, because a purchase is a trade - one resource (currency) for another (the product/service). If the product has no value, there is no reason to engage in the trade. This can only exist for the purpose of wealth transfer from the operator of the shopping robot to the seller of the useless products, or as a facade of some sort.
- repelsteeltje 6mo agoYou are right. The novel is a bit of a dark comedy sci-fi. And even though many details are surprisingly accurate (for a story written a decade ago) robots buying crap produced by robots is IMO meant to illustrate an absurd racket to inflate demand.