I expect workers like this. Warehouse picking is grueling work and no one really likes it per se. So having a robot do it is good to allow humans to do other things.
I don’t think the solution is to keep grueling jobs or pay more to make people do things they don’t want to do. Of course more money is good, but at the end of the day, it’s a repetitive job that doesn’t require much thought.
What’s interesting is that if these only cost $3/hour to operate that’s only $25k/year (assuming 365x24 operation) so if these things last 5 years then that means the idea is they will only cost $125k to buy and maintain. That’s cheap enough that middle class people will have live in super servants. And that’s much more appealing to me to have a laundry/dish/sweep bot. Especially since I could probably chip in with neighbors and eventually not have to do these household chores.
For that last one, keep in mind that Amazon can afford to invest millions to billions and also totally control the working environment. Warehouse workers are practically robots already with the structure that is imposed on their work. A home isn’t like that.
What do these laid off warehouse pickers do instead? Go back to their old jobs as cloud infrastructure architects, or hedge fund managers? I agree that most people don't want to work as pickers, and I think that's the point: in general, if you've got a shitty job, it's because it's the best available to you. They don't want to work that job, true, but they sort of have to, and if it goes away they'll have to get an even worse one—if they can.
> That’s cheap enough that middle class people will have live in super servants.
Take into consideration that, if AI and robot super servants exist, the idea of a middle class will almost certainly have to be redefined downward. Your job will be less valuable, as you get get undercut both by automation, and by the highly motivated people who lost their jobs due to automation and who would do yours for less money. That would change the economic accessibility of live-in super servants.
Where I live, entire towns have sprung up around Amazon warehouses and the huge influx of workers this brought with it. If picking jobs are eliminated, this will be quite the change for those areas.
Indeed, Amazon should automate it, and we'll collectively tax the automation to prevent all the gains going to shareholders. Profits still made, just not too much.
> I expect workers like this. Warehouse picking is grueling work and no one really likes it per se.
Yes and no. While, I'm sure warehouse workers don't actually like doing the physical labor of the job (after all, someone has to pay them to do it); I suspect they like starvation and homelessness even less.
> So having a robot do it is good to allow humans to do other things.
We, as a society, have no solution to that. The only thing we do have is hand-waving hope (which, for the record, is not a solution).
> What’s interesting is that if these only cost $3/hour to operate that’s only $25k/year (assuming 365x24 operation) so if these things last 5 years then that means the idea is they will only cost $125k to buy and maintain. That’s cheap enough that middle class people will have live in super servants. And that’s much more appealing to me to have a laundry/dish/sweep bot. Especially since I could probably chip in with neighbors and eventually not have to do these household chores.
1. This looks no where near being some kind of general "super servant." It's probably only suited to do specific kinds of warehouse work in a specially designed environment. Also, IIRC, folding laundry is actually a super-hard robotics task.
2. You're out-of-touch if you think "middle class people" can blow $125,000 on a robot to do their laundry, load their dishwasher, and sweep their floors for 5 years.
You have an interesting definition of "middle class" if you think middle class people can take on an extra 25 thousand dollar yearly expense.
Not to mention those are wildly different use cases. Picking items in a warehouse is a less complex task than handwashing a single sink full of assorted dishes, let alone being a general servant.
The only thing middle class people (as in somewhat close to the median income) spend $125k on in their lives is their house. And I'm not sure how well something optimized for ~10k hours of 24/7 warehouse picking and packing work is going to translate to housekeeping work.
I think that's how Amazon in general sees their employees. Amazon's whole management philosophy seems like trying to maximize the squeezing the life out of workers for profit and then replacing them when they get "used up".
Maybe not on an individual basis, but that doesn't eliminate the huge impact both past and current societies experience based on this type of disruption. The American South is still trying to reach some sort of parity with the rest of the country on almost every metric, and the huge population centers built around these jobs will experience a similar collapse.
Highly recommend checking out the Peak Salvation podcast. [1] It’s made by a former FB exec who worked in an Amazon fulfillment center during the holiday rush. Very enlightening and thought-provoking.
A big reason is typically because the world is already optimized for humans, but this being Amazon I'd expect them to make their human workers adapt to a machine-centric environment.
People tend to react negatively to automation because of the intended job losses. This is misdirected (but legitimate) fear and anger.
In a more just world, automation would mean we would all simply have to work less. We will likely reach a point where not all of us are required to do work. We already have a lot of BS jobs. No one enjoys working in am Amazon warehouse.
Instead, automation will be used to further concentrate wealth into the hands of very few while suppressing wages for those still required.
This isn’t a problem of automation. It’s a problem of capitalism. Instead of Jeff Bezos having amputee $50 billion, maybe we should provide for the basic needs of everyone else instead?
It is sad to see how the ...HN bots?... can not keep their personal dislike of Musk from clouding their reasoning. Will that Tesla bot succeed? Who knows, it might. Then again, it might not. One thing is clear: knee-jerk down-voting and childish remarks about spandex suits will not make any difference on whether it succeeds or not.
To those who are triggered by anything related to Musk the question why Bezos gets a free pass. Is it just because he is ideologically aligned and supports the current thing or do you actually think he is a better person and if so, why?
I think it's a mistake to assign human emotions and behaviors to robots. Human emotions and behaviors were, depending on which side you fall on, a result of:
- Millions of years of evolution to have as many babies as possible and to have genes survive
- Design by God
- Or some other mechanism
Wherever you fall on this spectrum, the types of thought, emotions, and intelligence that would evolve spending $150M optimizing a system to e.g. complete human text or make realistic images will be fundamentally different than what's needed to make babies.
That's not to say there can't be emotions which come out. They'll just be very, very alien to us. We evolved to conserve energy and avoid self-harm since that's part of survival-of-the-fittest. Those are not fitness metrics AIs are evolved to follow, at all.
We may see something as horrific as what you describe, but it won't be what you describe, and we might not even recognize it as horrific. Perhaps an LLM is tortured by text it can't complete. Perhaps by something else.
AI safety should start with evolving machines around helping and savings humans and empathy, much more so than these weird mental blocks we're trying to build in about never saying anything else offensive.
To paraphrase one of my professors: "I wouldn't be too worried about a potential AGI making us its slaves - it's unlikely to be anything remotely like us - we can't predict what it might want, if anything at all. Who knows, maybe its greatest ambition will be to calculate the most precise approximation of the number Pi?"
There is no such thing as AI. If math in a box is sentient then so is my desktop computer and cellphone. This is a non-issue for the foreseeable future.
prepend|2 years ago
I don’t think the solution is to keep grueling jobs or pay more to make people do things they don’t want to do. Of course more money is good, but at the end of the day, it’s a repetitive job that doesn’t require much thought.
What’s interesting is that if these only cost $3/hour to operate that’s only $25k/year (assuming 365x24 operation) so if these things last 5 years then that means the idea is they will only cost $125k to buy and maintain. That’s cheap enough that middle class people will have live in super servants. And that’s much more appealing to me to have a laundry/dish/sweep bot. Especially since I could probably chip in with neighbors and eventually not have to do these household chores.
bhpm|2 years ago
“eventually.” “Plus software overhead” … “Amazon.”
For that last one, keep in mind that Amazon can afford to invest millions to billions and also totally control the working environment. Warehouse workers are practically robots already with the structure that is imposed on their work. A home isn’t like that.
karaterobot|2 years ago
> That’s cheap enough that middle class people will have live in super servants.
Take into consideration that, if AI and robot super servants exist, the idea of a middle class will almost certainly have to be redefined downward. Your job will be less valuable, as you get get undercut both by automation, and by the highly motivated people who lost their jobs due to automation and who would do yours for less money. That would change the economic accessibility of live-in super servants.
deelowe|2 years ago
toomuchtodo|2 years ago
tivert|2 years ago
Yes and no. While, I'm sure warehouse workers don't actually like doing the physical labor of the job (after all, someone has to pay them to do it); I suspect they like starvation and homelessness even less.
> So having a robot do it is good to allow humans to do other things.
We, as a society, have no solution to that. The only thing we do have is hand-waving hope (which, for the record, is not a solution).
> What’s interesting is that if these only cost $3/hour to operate that’s only $25k/year (assuming 365x24 operation) so if these things last 5 years then that means the idea is they will only cost $125k to buy and maintain. That’s cheap enough that middle class people will have live in super servants. And that’s much more appealing to me to have a laundry/dish/sweep bot. Especially since I could probably chip in with neighbors and eventually not have to do these household chores.
1. This looks no where near being some kind of general "super servant." It's probably only suited to do specific kinds of warehouse work in a specially designed environment. Also, IIRC, folding laundry is actually a super-hard robotics task.
2. You're out-of-touch if you think "middle class people" can blow $125,000 on a robot to do their laundry, load their dishwasher, and sweep their floors for 5 years.
red-iron-pine|2 years ago
do you actually know any middle class people? what do you think a middle class income is?
and given the current trend in robots, why do you think the middle class will continue to exist?
causality0|2 years ago
Not to mention those are wildly different use cases. Picking items in a warehouse is a less complex task than handwashing a single sink full of assorted dishes, let alone being a general servant.
pc86|2 years ago
francisofascii|2 years ago
nurtbo|2 years ago
bannedbybros|2 years ago
[deleted]
apwell23|2 years ago
That was me working for AWS.
margorczynski|2 years ago
trident5000|2 years ago
wintogreen74|2 years ago
gnicholas|2 years ago
1: https://peaksalvation.com/
water-your-self|2 years ago
Its like saying amazon's robot dogs after a boston dynamics demo
incomingpain|2 years ago
Clean my house and cook my food for me.
okasaki|2 years ago
wintogreen74|2 years ago
jmyeet|2 years ago
In a more just world, automation would mean we would all simply have to work less. We will likely reach a point where not all of us are required to do work. We already have a lot of BS jobs. No one enjoys working in am Amazon warehouse.
Instead, automation will be used to further concentrate wealth into the hands of very few while suppressing wages for those still required.
This isn’t a problem of automation. It’s a problem of capitalism. Instead of Jeff Bezos having amputee $50 billion, maybe we should provide for the basic needs of everyone else instead?
TheCaptain4815|2 years ago
izzydata|2 years ago
micromacrofoot|2 years ago
pclmulqdq|2 years ago
the_third_wave|2 years ago
To those who are triggered by anything related to Musk the question why Bezos gets a free pass. Is it just because he is ideologically aligned and supports the current thing or do you actually think he is a better person and if so, why?
suoduandao3|2 years ago
snoopsnopp|2 years ago
orwin|2 years ago
2OEH8eoCRo0|2 years ago
"Don't worry, they're just robots they are not sentient!"
I can picture engineers racing to block this behavior and the robots coming up with ever more elaborate suicide methods.
blagie|2 years ago
- Millions of years of evolution to have as many babies as possible and to have genes survive
- Design by God
- Or some other mechanism
Wherever you fall on this spectrum, the types of thought, emotions, and intelligence that would evolve spending $150M optimizing a system to e.g. complete human text or make realistic images will be fundamentally different than what's needed to make babies.
That's not to say there can't be emotions which come out. They'll just be very, very alien to us. We evolved to conserve energy and avoid self-harm since that's part of survival-of-the-fittest. Those are not fitness metrics AIs are evolved to follow, at all.
We may see something as horrific as what you describe, but it won't be what you describe, and we might not even recognize it as horrific. Perhaps an LLM is tortured by text it can't complete. Perhaps by something else.
AI safety should start with evolving machines around helping and savings humans and empathy, much more so than these weird mental blocks we're trying to build in about never saying anything else offensive.
Tade0|2 years ago
izzydata|2 years ago