You must log in or register to comment.
I do industrial automation for a living, and I just want to point out that automating things that exist purely in the digital domain is far easier than automating things like ship breaking.
Cant imagine how it even could be automated without advanced robotics. Those ships are freakin HUGE! Maybe a collection of robotic snakes with cutting lazers attached to their heads and some little scuttle bots to pick up the pieces the snakes knock off? Just cut the whole thing into 1’ disks or maybe hexagons is better
Maybe a collection of robotic snakes with cutting lazers attached to their heads
I just read The Three Body Problem, and I have some ideas on how it could be done.
Oh! One of my favorite books, have you read all three?
Not yet, but I will!
Oh, there is actually a fourth one by a different author but with Liu Cixin’s approval. It goes deeper into the trisolarian biology than the main series. I havent read that one yet
I’d suggest skipping it. While it’s a fun continuation, the writer is not nearly as good as Liu Cixin. It’s definitely a fanfic
This kind of makes me curious! I didn’t finish the third book of the original trilogy …
Definitely not terrifying
And yet, people do… https://www.leviathan.eu/
[…] I just want to point out that automating things that exist purely in the digital domain is far easier than automating things like ship breaking.
Not that you’re saying otherwise, however isn’t that even more of a reason more developers and resources should be allocated toward automating complex and risky physical processes?
Not that you’re saying otherwise, however isn’t that even more of a reason more developers and resources should be allocated toward automating complex and risky physical processes?
You’re solving for the wrong problem from the perspective of people with money investing money to solve these problems.
-
Shipbreaking, while dangerous for the workers, isn’t expensive because it is done in far flung countries with workers that have low wages, few protections for safety, and long term health consequences.
-
Art and writing (for western consumption) requires educated and talented people which are expensive to employ.
People with money, looking for a return, want that return their spending, not reduce human suffering.
-
This is kind of a dumb argument, isn’t it?
I have to imagine someone centuries ago probably complained about inventors wasting their time on some dumb printing presses so smart people could write books and newspapers better when they could have been building better farm tools. But could we have developed the tractor when we did if we were still handwriting everything?
Progress supports progress. Teaching computers to recognize and reproduce pictures might seem like a waste to some people, but how do you suppose a computer will someday disassemble a ship if it is not capable of recognizing what the ship is and what holds it together? Modern AI is primitive, but it will eventually lead to autonomous machines that can actually do that work intelligently without blindly following an instruction set, oblivious to whatever might be actually happening around it.
The argument isn’t against the technology, it’s against the application of that technology.
Path of least resistance. It is harder to build a robot who can disassemble ships with its hands than it is to pattern match together pictures.
This XKCD comes to mind: https://xkcd.com/1425/
This isn’t even close to what they’re saying. It’s closer to complaining about how the Yankees replaced their star pitcher with a modified howitzer.
It’s not about people “wasting their time on some dumb invention,” it’s about how that useful invention is being used to replace jobs that people actually like doing because it’ll save their bosses money. It’s not even like when photography was invented or Photoshop came out and people freaked out about artists being put out of work, because those require different skill sets and opened up entirely new fields of art while also helping optimize other fields. This stuff could improve the fields that they’re created for by helping people optimize their workflow to make the act of creating things easier. But that’s not what they’re doing. It’s being used to mimic the skills of the people who enjoy doing these things so that they don’t have to pay people to do it.
Even ignoring the ethical/moral aspect of this stuff being trained without permission on the work of the people it’s designed to replace, the end goal isn’t to increase the quality of life of people, allowing us more time to do the things we love - things like, you know, art and writing - it’s to make the rich even richer and push people out of well-paying jobs.
The closest example I can think of is when Disney fired all their 2d animators and switched to 3d. They didn’t do it because 3d was better. In many ways, the quality was much worse at the time. But 2d animators are unionized and 3d animators aren’t, so they could get away with paying them much less. The same exact thing happened with the practical effects vs. digital effects guys in Hollywood right around the same time.
Society has always been losing jobs, the population just pivots to other specialisations. The only reason we fear it is because of our economic system that preys on it and turns it into profit, but that’s an other conversation entirely.
On the subject of losing creative venues, both your examples(photography and Photoshop) show how technology didn’t detract from the arts but add to it, letting the average person do much more. The same will be true for AI, I can see an inevitable boom happening in the filmmaking and animation industry, not to mention comic books and most of all indie gaming. It’s in the long run empowering for the individual imo.
The economic system is what he’s talking about here. That was my point. The entire conversation from the side against this stuff has always been about the economic situation of it. Without that factor, I think the only thing people would care about is whether or not their work is being used without their permission/maliciously.
As for Photoshop and photography, that’s actually why I brought those up specifically. Because they were feared as things that would destroy artists’ jobs and actually brought about entirely new fields of art - and also because they’re the two people bring up when people argue against LLM replacing people’s jobs, acting like they’re just some Luddites afraid of science.
Right now, the way I see it with AI is that there are 2 distinct groups benefiting from it: those whose workflow has been improved from the use of AI, and those who think AI can get them the result of work without having to either do the work themselves or pay somebody else to do it. And thanks to the economic issues that are at the heart of this whole thing, that second group is set to harm the number of people who can spend time creating things simply because they now have to work a job that isn’t creating things and no longer have the time to put towards that. So I can see AI creating a whole new art boom or a bust in equal measure. That second group is of concern to the art communities as well because they only see the destination and don’t see that the journey is just as important to the act of creation, and that is already causing schisms between artists and “prompters” who think that they’re just as skilled because they used a generator to make some cool stuff. People are already submitting unedited, prompted work to art and writing competitions.
“AI” researcher here. The only reason there are models that can “write” and “create art” is because that data is available for training. Basically people put massive amounts of digital text and images on the Internet and the companies scraped all of it to train the models. If there were big enough datasets for ship building, that would happen too…
Besides, what the guy is yapping about it is 80% a robotics problem not an AI problem. It’s apples and oranges.
He’s essentially saying why can Will Smith finally eat pasta normally while we still don’t have the robotic workforce from the 2001 Will Smith movie “I, Robot”.
He’s a programmer, why doesn’t he stop working on aligning buttons on web applications and work on shipbuilding robots!?!?
Welding bots would be cool as fuck.
Welding bots already are cool as fuck. They might not be able to cut down an old ship yet but they can pretty much fully assemble a car.
Not really. You would still need to, you know, build drones or automated factories to actually perform the salvaging. But the point is that nobody DID, because capitalism values profit over human life. Nobody who “matters” is interested in solving that problem.
Actually that’s not true at all, there’s lots of interest in robotics (check out Boston Dynamic) but it’s a really really hard problem. The main issue is developing a controlling intelligence sophisticated enough to be able to use the robot to do a diverse range of tasks. The actual physical mechanical building of the robot isn’t that hard.
Of course the way you get that controlling intelligence is AI. So he is complaining about people developing a solution to the problem he’s demanding that they solve. He’s not happy because they’re not magically skipping steps.
This idiot wants fully sapient robots without developing AI in the first place, not sure how on earth he expects that to happen.
I think you’re underestimating the mechanical and chemistry problems that still need to be solved before autonomous robots that can perform a task like ship salvage effectively. There’s a very good reason that basically all industrial robots spend their lives plugged into a wall socket.
Ah you’re right, Boston Dynamic’s Spot robot tours entire factories and refineries all while being plugged into a wall socket!
Not true. We have capable robots now. See Boston Dynamics like the other commenter said. Plus we have had industrial robots making cars and stuff forever now. To make robots that can handle a wide variety of things (every ship is bound to be different) is hard and we don’t have data to train such models (see reinforcement learning, imitation learning, “sim2real” problem etc)
I get the sentiment, but that is a really dumb take. Software automation is a hell of a lot easier than creating robotic automation to disassemble ships of all shapes and sizes. That’s why art automation has been done, and industrial freighter recycling automation has not been.
How would that even be possible? Presumably, you’d need to break the ships down into pieces first, and even then, you’ll be dealing with huge numbers of oddly shaped and sized components of varying materials. It makes a lot more sense to have people do that, though it is likely very dangerous.
Seems more like a job for unions and workplace safety regulations than for robots
more like a job for unions and workplace safety regulations
Yes. That’s why they do these things in third world countries. The people there are cheaper than robots will ever be.
3th
threeth.
I get the sentiment, but that is a really dumb take.
$13B invested in OpenAI feels more and more like malinvestment and graft, incentivized by our disastrous energy policy and enormous tech subsidies.
This isn’t purely software automation. Its also an investment in physical media and machines, new or renovated energy infrastructure, and enormous volumes of potable water.
Seems more like a job for unions and workplace safety regulations than for robots
In 2020, a leaked company memo detailed Amazon’s use of a new technology — the geoSPatial Operating Console (SPOC) — to analyze and visualize data sets pertaining to threats to the company, including unions. Reported by Jason Del Rey and Shirin Ghaffary at Vox, some of the data points related to unions include:
Amazon-owned Whole Foods’ market activism and unionization efforts. Flow patterns of union grant money. The presence of local union chapters and alt labor groups.The approach is an obvious attempt by the company to use more passive means of identifying and neutralizing union sympathizers in the company.
“Amazon’s tracking of workers’ micro-movements, decision points and searches and then linking all of that data to that of unions, community groups and legislative policy campaigns is union busting on its face,” said Stuart Appelbaum, President of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) in a statement at the time.
That is very true, but my critique was more focused on the difference between automating software tasks vs mechanical tasks, especially with non-uniform inputs and not the economic investment required. Some tasks are better suited to automation - and plagiarizing art is far easier than deconstructing and recycling massive industrial freighters.
Not on the side of the AI art generators here - that was just low hanging fruit compared to something like was suggested in the original post. Definitely need extremely strong labor law to protect against AI union busting (and union busting generally)
Disappointed programmer here. I thought I could automate farming so that people wouldn’t die of hunger. Now I realise that if you automate farming, it would just make some CEO more money because his company now makes corn syrup and destroys rural communities even faster.
I got my “contract not renewed”, for the Fortune 500 B2B CRM company I worked for.
I can try to bust my ass to make my 2018 laptop try to render images I can’t draw, which does give me some pleasure. It’s not the AI tool’s fault humanity sucks, it’s the goddamn people with money.
OP: “We’ve tragically gone down a path of quantifying and min-maxing every aspect of existence, including creativity and the value of human life.”
Comments: “OP clearly doesn’t understand the comparative efficiency of the ROI here.”
He chose a poor way of conveying his message.
Mentioned it in another comment already… People already do this with robotics and ai
The world loves Michael Jackson and The Beatles. The problem is most of them died, but now we have Beatles Jackson. The fab 5. Billie Jean is not my Yellow Submarine! Featuring Kurt Cobain and Cab Calloway. The biggest hit of the year fellas, I’m telling you. Art is over. Art said god is dead. God is just being born!
Bow before your digital overlords!
I never even imagined a world where machines replace artists. Man.
I mean, you can still write and make art? AI isnt taking that away from you? If you’re upset that its replacing you career wise, maybe you’re just upset that you need a job to live and that livelihood is at the whims of capitalists?
You use the word upset as in there is no rational reason to care about this and emotions are invalid or lesser.
Anyway, cameras and paintings…
It can be both. Why is the first thing we’re seeking to automate with this current generation of ai the creative careers that humans can do?
Because they happened to be the fields that got there first. It’s not like these are recent trends, ELIZA and AARON are from the 1960’s. But it really is just the perfect example of “They were so preoccupied with if they could they never stopped to think if they should” spread over 60 years of technological advancement.
We’re not “seeking” to do anything. Ai art is a pretty logical and inevitable step in our progress in this recent breakthrough in machine learning. But we’re making AI out of everything for which there is a large amount of data on the internet. The same tech that is creating AI art by stealing assets off of the Internet is also combing through sequenced DNA to find patterns and analyzing telescope data to find anomalies.
And none of this new AI tech has anything to do with robotics or ship dismantling so it makes sense that that isn’t the field being advanced by it. Although I bet you could fiddle with AI to analyze data around ship dismantling to make it more efficient.
I’ve been saying this ages. Thank you assholes for focusing on automating art and games like chess. What is the benefit for humanity? You just ruined my hobbies. Focus on automatic plumbers and farmers, for Thoth’s sake.
The robot dystopia will not be caused by evil AI enslaving humanity.
No matter how advanced or how self aware, AI will lack the ambition that is part of humanity, part of us due to our evolutionary history.
An AI will never have an opinion, only logical conclusions and directives that it is required to fulfil as efficiently as possible. The directives, however, are programmed by the humans who control these robots.
Humans DO have ambitions and opinions, and they have the ability to use AI to enslave other humans. Human history is filled with powerful, ambitious humans enslaving everyone else.
The robot dystopia is therefor a corporate dystopia.
I always roll my eyes when people invoke Skynet and Terminator whenever something uncanny is shown off. No, it’s not the machines I’m worried about.
Have you met people with opinions? A lot of their opinions consist of preprogrammed responses that you could train a bot to regurgitate.
People are cheaper than robots, ergo they are more expendable
This is one of the most interesting takes I’ve seen on AI.
Such a good point. We totally need robots to be the ones picking through piles of E-waste to get precious metals, not little kids.
Ah yes just write code for the ship fold itself neatly back into reusable materials.
I agree that there should definitely be safety regulations in place for ship recycling, but this guy is building a strawman argument and it really undermines his point in my view.
