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.
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.
Technology isn’t there yet. Don’t worry, our overlords cannot wait to replace us with soulless metal that cannot unionize.
But…robots are doing all three of those things?
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.
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
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
Software vs hardware
Are you nuts, those robots are expensive. We don’t want to get them dirty.
It gets hot in there too
Did this meme come from Facebook?
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
edit: I’m referring to semi-autonomous robots here, not general automation. automation in general is still going strong, as companies love to spend a few millions dollars to automate something so they save on many more millions of labour costs in the future. customers will buy a custom machine from us for a couple million and operator costs will halve while production doubles. the remaining half of the operator costs I mentioned to towards maintenance staff, which is generally a more skilled position than assembly line work. obviously my numbers are rough, but you get the idea
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
Yeah, I recently watched some chinese robots dancing on america’s got talent. What a world. smh.
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.
You get to replace a lot more cost when you swap engineers and artists for AI slop machines than you do when you swap manual labor for actual mechanical robots.
The people with the money to make the bots know this too.
Allegedly the reason can be found in the published Epstein files. But the people told me never pointed me to an exact portion, though it was something in the lines of:
Can you operate these image recognition and similar systems in reverse? That could be used for art generation, and we could dethrone the left from its ivory tower.
Is the implication that this quote comes from inside somewhere in the Epstein Files?
It’s pretty simple:
Robots are very expensive. And ones that could do this type of work cost even more. Nor are they smart enough to be able to reason ahead and envision danger. So they would get crushed in cave ins a lot.
Human males, and yes its vastly men that do mining, are cheap and in plentiful supply. They can do at least some rudimentary reasoning and will get crushed less often. And if you lose a few, well they are easily and cheaply replaced. Making them far more profitable to use.
As an aside, companies are designing and building robotic construction equipment these days. It’s just that none of you hang around with such “dirty trades”.
First you say it can’t be done because it’s too complicated & expensive. Then you say it’s already being done. So which is it?
OP is a robot who is desperately coming up with excuses to avoid being sent to the mines
I never said it couldn’t be done. Just that it’s really expensive and very complicated, (that’s the whole looking ahead and reasoning the dangers - AI robots are not yet that capable), vs the cost of human life.
What IS being done is above ground human supervised robotics doing VERY simple tasks. Because that’s all they can do right now. But it’s an expensive buy in vs cheap human labor so you don’t see it much.
As I said, none of you here get your hands that dirty with that type of work. You just complain from afar.
It can’t be done by every company/can’t be done en masse at an economically viable cost.
But it can, and is, done in smaller cases.
These things aren’t mutually exclusive
