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[–] 5 points 22 hours ago

If AI's primary function isn't curing cancer like they said it was going to do, then it should not be utilized.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago

    You cant build a stable civilization on the foundation of capitalism. All of us are on the same path, its just some are further down the road.

    Today us, tomorrow you.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 day ago

    For jobs like that, human life is cheaper than AI.

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  • [–] 2 points 21 hours ago

    They're too busy making CSAM for the rich pedos.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago

    Because AI is built by billionaire fuck-o’s who can only think of problems in their direct vicinity and what do billionaire fuck-o’s hate the most… doing their jobs.

    Thus AI writes emails, hires people, fires people, etc.

    The idea that there are people picking up their trash, mowing their lawns, or putting their lives at risk to make said billionaire fuck-o more money, doesn’t even register to them.

    Us “normal” folks only occur to them when we become a problem.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 day ago

    I think it's time we all accept that a terrifying amount of people have no perception of accurate reality

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  • [–] 11 points 1 day ago

    Because those jobs actually involve thinking and problem solving, which AI cannot do.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 day ago

    Because business is the most important thing in the world.

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  • [–] 41 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Its called "killing the entire middle class" and its way more profitable that all that stuff you mentioned.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    Simple answer: Because we've written AIs that work in the digital world, and mines, oil fields, toxic chemicals, and ocean plastic all exist in the real world. If you build a robotic body or arm or some way to do what the people in those places are doing, the AI could control it and do the job.

    This is the one potential upside with things like Tesla Optimus. With a sufficiently general purpose bipedal humanoid robot under AI control, that robot COULD work oil fields and mines and toxic chemicals and the like.

    However I suspect the miners, oil workers, waste handlers, and ocean cleanup technicians would rather keep their jobs, hazardous or not.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 day ago

    Machinery already replaced nearly all the jobs in places like coal mines (in the west). It did increase the safety for the remaining workers, who are mostly machine operators now.

    Turns out that a huge-ass loader does more useful work than a LOT of humanoid forms. Optimus is about dreaming of never having to deal with servent classes. Its the modern dumb waiter.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago

    Yup, and to be more exact the reason that this is the case is that training large models requires a LOT of training data.

    We have a repository of text and video, the Internet, but we do not have a similar repository of training data for robotics.

    That data is being created and robotics models are being trained but it is significantly more expensive when your training data isn't mass produced for free* by people on the Internet.

    *ish

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  • [–] 21 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    The same reason that self-driving cars don't work very well. Shut us way more complicated than people realize because they do it all the time and don't think about the nuances.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 day ago

    Significant part of my work is building robots. This is the correct answer. And amazingly, the thing that's making robots actually capable of folding your laundry, which exists by the way, is machine learning and LLMs. But most folks will not be able to afford this, but they could afford to make their own.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago

    I enjoy working in the mines

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  • [–] 49 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    You know the idea guy, who doesn't want to do the actual work? But takes full credit when it's done? AI is that guy's best friend.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

    This week's Tom Scott episode on Nebula* is interesting on this subject.

    Long story short: folk from a university in Essex are working on creating a robot that can pick strawberries, but it (obviously) turns out that it's waaaay more complex than people think. There are untold different variables that humans just work around without having to think about them, like whether there are fruit inside the plant, obscured from view. A robot has to be programmed to be able to figure shit like that out.

    Sure, it could easily run along the line just grabbing everything, but the plants in enormous growhouses can yield fruit for six months a year, so they need to be treated carefully. _ *it'll be on YouTube next week

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago

    Laissez le bon temps rouler

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  • [–] 16 points 2 days ago* (2 children)

    Because we don’t have AI. We have algorithms putting words after another or pixels next to each other.

    Better question is why we don’t use robots with specific algorithms to do those kinds of tasks.

    We could if we wanted to. Not necessarily right now, but we’re pretty damn close. If all the damn billions we pour into the data centers putting words and pixels into order went into robotics, we’d have a world where no one had to get their hands dirty or risk an injury at work.

    That would also make billionaires billionaires. But that would not stomp the regular folk down, and that’s the catch.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago*

    ... It's not "putting pixels next to eachother". It's figuring out how to filter noise to get it closer to what the prompt describes. Literally starts as noise, like an old TV that isn't tuned to a channel. And then it applies a filter that it calculates will best get that noise closer to the tokens of the prompt. And then does it again and again and again

    Regardless! Even if that investment went into healthcare, or a universal basic income...
    Maybe we invest it into robotics to automate stuff. Or maybe we invest it into people.
    Investing in people would be neat

    But that will never happen until it is required to prevent collapse

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  • [–] 11 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    Are we still using pickaxes to mine??? We have Robots assisting with manual labor since the car. Modern factories rely on tons of neural networks and machine-vision. This is silly.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    Yup, can confirm firsthand, having lookied at mines in Zambia in 2022, 17 year olds were still using pickaxes. While a lot of modern world is doing machine assisted mining. Pickaxes aren't gone gone.

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  • I mean, kind of. They do use outdated heavy machinery, maybe some pickaxes to help the machines, but amount you can mine manually like that i basically pointless at this point. The bigger problem are the working conditions there in general. Time for some supply chain regulation.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 day ago

    Well because robots need bodies

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  • [–] 22 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    Tbh, I figure there are robots for all that, they just aren't LLMs and usually cost more than what folks are asking for the same job in some cases.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 days ago* (1 child)

    Unfortunately there kinda.... aren't. Robots to handle those tasks, that is. There absolutely can be, we just haven't built them because the C-Suite has been terrified since 2011, that the rest of us would realize they are as useless as Forbes reported that year.

    The main reason they want to take over automation of mental tasks is that we already can, fairly easily, automate single manual tasks. They have been able to automate away 99% of middle management and the C-Suite since 2011, when an algorithm that had been running for two years proved to be correct 99% of the time, when the human executives turned out to be correct in their conclusions only 68% of the time. They want the mental tasks automated so that no one realizes that they are just stealing everything they can from us, because they realized they are replaceable.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 day ago

    Because LLMs, although marketed as a productivity increasing tool, are fundamentally investment vehicles. It's a lot easier to market LLMs that can beat the Turing test than physical robots which are really hard to manufacture and would require the development of thousands of new technologies.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    Because the right hates intellectuals. They hate us because we're more often on the side of the truth than their childish delusions. So they built a tool that promises it to them.

    And now they want us broken, both in the mind and body, so they can amuse themselves with out suffering. Literally all the right wing media grifters who previously talked about how entertainment must be gatekept from women and minorities are celebrating that "art is no longer gatekept".

    But still, all they can get is slop with the AI. Don't fool yourself with any of the game projects, or even that Windows XP music video that got popular with the Bluesky developers, it's still unable to create anything meaningful, or worthy to be remembered.

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    [–] 8 points 2 days ago

    Because the 'menial' labor often has to be done right or something goes terribly wrong, it's art and poetry that AI can be allowed to fuck up without serious consequences.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    Humanity is a lost project. Too greedy, too selfish, too cruel. We will eradicate ourselves.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 days ago

    Because the fucking dipshits that use it are too stupid to realize they’ve been lied to.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    Could be because of money, but most likely it's just that they never develop the thought because they do not give a fuck about the conditions of humans in slavery.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (1 child)

    You should ask to see a tradie's pay slip if you think those people are in slavery.

    The reason AI isn't doing those jobs is because it cannot think or solve problems, just guess.

    And that's not good enough on a job site.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 days ago

    Art and poetry are just 0s and 1s. Generative AI takes 0s and 1s as input and produces 0s and 1s as output. It's a math problem. Mining ore is a physical task. Getting a robot to perform a physical task is complicated because the computer needs to track all kinds of things we do naturally.

    You can close your eyes and touch the tip of your nose because you have proprioception. A robot doesn't have that. It needs some kind of way to determine where parts of it are in 3D space. Do you put GPS on those parts? LIDAR? RFID tags? The more sensors you add, the more expensive the robot becomes. The less sensors you have, the more guesswork is being done in the calculations, and the more likely it will fail at the task. Either you have a robot the can do the work autonomously, but costs more than a human labourer, or you have a cheap robot that needs the constant supervision of a human labourer.

    Automation is less autonomous robot and more machine that has been purpose built to do one hyper specific thing and I think it'll be like that for a while. Sarah Davis Baker has a great video on the topic of the robot body and the difficulties of reducing reality to a stream of sensor data.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 days ago

    As someone with a job that AI could replace: it's because it's nonsense and isn't important. We automated every job a robot could do a long time ago, so now the facade is falling and the bullshit jobs that don't need to exist can be done by shitty robots because the job was also done by shitty humans. Also humans might be cheaper than robots?

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