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[–] 1 point 1 day ago (1 child)

Is this account just a repost bot?

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

    Those robots are expensive! They're not gonna risk something worth so much on anything dangerous - let the worthless humans do that shit!

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  • [–] 7 points 2 days ago

    I forget which roman senator it was, but in his writings he does say that it is better to pay free-men to work on, eg, malaria invested areas than slaves.

    Why? you don't risk your Capital (slaves). Same thing here

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  • [–] 19 points 2 days ago (8 children)

    But…robots are doing all three of those things?

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

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    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.

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    [–] 11 points 2 days ago

    Robots are doing exactly all the things described because they are hazardous to humans.

    LLMs are not robots.

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  • [–] 56 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (8 children)

    Robots do, there is anlot of automation now in big mines, Copper be extracted in El Teniente mine in chile, in the middle of the andes and the "miners" can sit comfortably in a control room in the city of rancagua with a cup of coffee.

    EDT: Altough part of the mine is still manned.

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    [–] 67 points 2 days ago (4 children)
  • [–] 24 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    Yeah, as an automation engineer, I freaking hate this narrative. "I want the AI to do the dishes not write music"

    You don't need AI for that, you have automation for it. further automation might be cool too, but the LLM has no place in doing a useful task like that.

    You can tell most people making this narrative haven't ever been to a factory

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  • [–] 7 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    I hate the ai boom.

    We needed to continue to advance automation. Weve had it for years and its all we need. It just needs to continue to improve!

    Why bring on this fucking massive philosophical and ethical issue in an already crazy world? What the fuck are we even doing here?

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  • [–] 10 points 2 days ago

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 days ago

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 days ago

    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.

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

    Why don't robots do something useful, like transporting things, washing the dishes or my clothes!!1!

    empties the dishwasher and hops in a car

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    [–] 12 points 2 days ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    Are you nuts, those robots are expensive. We don't want to get them dirty.

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

    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.

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    [–] 8 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    When work is done by the underclass, human life is cheaper than maintaining complex automation.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 days ago

    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.

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

    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

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  • [–] 7 points 2 days ago (4 children)

    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".

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    [–] 8 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    "But that would be to expensive when one is damaged!" /s

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  • [–] 5 points 2 days ago

    Yeah, I recently watched some chinese robots dancing on america's got talent. What a world. smh.

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

    Turns out human-like kinesthetics is a harder problem than spreadsheets. Who knew

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    Why would I want to make PowerPoint??

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    [–] 8 points 2 days ago

    Mining robots won't become computer God, silly! /s

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  • [–] 5 points 2 days ago

    As long as they don't solve material coat issue for sophisticated and specialized robot, let alone how their ai work without failure, robot will always be defeated by ol reliable cheap human miners.

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  • Robots fail too much, which is what they don't want us realizing.

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