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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I think the plan is to replace nurses with just letting people die instead.
Nah, they have plans to replace them with realistic sexdolls instead.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Have you ever grown a tomato successfully and eaten it?
Nothing beats a garden tomato. It really is hard to eat store bought produce once you have grown it yourself and it is so much better tasting.
Well yes, but I was thinking more about fantasy vs reality.
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?
Not really. We can refuse to issue the permits.
If it were to slip by us and the house fail, even then it’s difficult. Almost everything in my city is custom spec homes for the mega-rich, and the developers set up an LLC just for building the one house and dissolve the company as soon as the house sells.
What I’ve learned doing development review for houses being sold to billionaires is that contractors will try to do cheap, shitty, unsafe work no matter how rich the client is.
interesting. It’s so weird they can get away with manufacturing counterfeit documents
What they used to get in trouble for was using an actual engineer’s seal without permission. We’d tell that engineer and they’d go nuclear on the developer. So now they fake a stamp to keep from getting sued.
No one wants to pay anymore
Part of the problem is corporations have squeezed so much money out of all our systems that there is none left unless you start cutting corners. So that is what people will do.
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.
By the time AI is capable of finishing buildings it will choose to eradicate us instead.
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.
The construction industry is one of the most heavily automated and mechanized industries in existence. We just don’t think about things like “back hoe”, “crane”, “nail gun” or “concrete plant” as forms of automation because they have been around for so long, but they have all replaced more manual aspects of construction processes.
Well… Automation usually describes process automation and you’ve just listed tools. So yeah, I agree, people don’t think of them as automation. Because, colloquially, they’re not.
The process of producing lumber is largely automated.
The process of producing concrete is largely automated.
The process of producing drywall, mud, paint, nails, tools, wires, switches, pipes, are all largely automated.
The process to create the architectural designs and blueprints for the house are largely automated.
The process to create the electricity, fuels and vehicles needed are all largely automated.
To make a house, people used to draw plans by hand (if at all), chop the trees down with an axe and/or saw that was made by hand by a blacksmith, shape the timber with hand tools made by the blacksmith, fasten things together with hand-crafted joinery or nails hand-made by the blacksmith. All the materials were transported by hand or by horse and lifted onto the structure by hand or manually operated hoist. Every part of it, including the production of all the tools, was previously done by hand.
The invention of the assembly line opened up the possibility to eventually automate virtually everything except the final assembly, and we have robots that can be made capable of doing that autonomously as well. You can buy pre-fab homes where all the major sections are built in a factory by robots and shipped out to the construction site and attached together.
Construction is far more automated than what you make it out to be.
So when you hit assembly line I was with you. "That* is automation
I mean i could have just as easily described the process. Cutting a trench is a process, most of which was automated by the back hoe, conveyor, dump truck, and laser levels. Before, 20 or 30 people would be required for trench work which is now often done by a crew of two.
Right but whilst the thing is easier with better tools, and indeed the process has changed, to me ‘automation’ of a task refers to its process being reduced to, at best, a daily 30s review. Tools are… Ways of optimising and changing a process. Automation obviates them. It’s a personally lexical stand, you can sanely differ.
And further automation will continue. We probably don’t even need humanoid robots. For instance, a robotic ironworker, instead of a humanoid robot, could be a module bolted on to a back hoe or other hoist.
Hey ChatGPT, tell me about Brian Hood.
Is “AI” the new “automation”?
No
It can’t draw dicks and write racial slurs all over the Porto potties with sharpie either
Bro they have factories that build EVs with zero labor besides two engineers sitting in the control room, self cleaning they don’t even have janitors.
It’s just a matter of years before they put up buidings the same way.
Tells me you’ve never worked in construction. Building a building is far from straight forward. Shit changes way too often. Architects can’t and don’t understand every scope, but they get the broad strokes. Each trade understands their own scope best, which is why shop drawings exist, but even then, it’s the field guys who see what has to deviate from shops, which is why As-Builts and Record drawings exist. You will literally never seen a build go up as drawn. And that’s not even taking ASIs into account.
You think building an EV is straightforward??
Yes, ive worked construction, i know how difficult it is. It’s gonna get automated with robots like everything else, sure one of the harder things that will get automated last, but it will.
Uh, yeah. Cars are churned out as copies. Once you get it going, it’s rinse repeat. The difficulty is only upfront.
I’m talking commercial construction. Prebuilt homes have existed for ages. Hell you could buy a premade house from Sears. Good luck doing the same on a commercial level. To say nothing of the doldrum monotony of pre-fabricated buildings. There’s a reason pre-fabs aren’t more common.
Im not talking about prefabs either, im talking about they’re gonna bring the whole factory to the site and build it, like the way they set up a travelling circus except it will be all robots
Imagine seeing the Benz Patent-Motorwagen and telling people society is going to run on these things, People won’t need horses and people will be riding them casually at 100+km/h anywhere and everywhere they want to go. I’m sure most at that time would think these statements were foolish.
A.I. is not just computer code. It’s an artificial mind. Once they figure out how to dump that into a robot that doesn’t faceplant everytime it tries to do something useful, the trades are cooked.
