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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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We’re less than 20 years from the vast majority of labor being automated by AI and robots.

I beat this drum on occasion but we absolutely aren’t. I’m directly involved with this sort of thing and absent a paradigm-shifting in improvement and robot hardware (possible but far from guaranteed) we cannot practically automate much more than is already automated.

AI is a probabilistic inference machine. It’s not suitable for doing physical tasks with a high degree of accuracy at >99.9% success rate. At 1 part per 6 seconds, even that figure means a line failure every 1000 parts ie. about once every 2 hours.

And robot hardware isn’t up to performing constant physical work with soft bodies like cloth or complex shapes. Anything more complex than a suction gripper or pinching fingers has failed to take off in a factory setting because it’s not reliable enough or because it wears out too quickly.

Starting to see recognition of this in fiction now. Just translated something with a few lines like

"My God, why can't you just use robots?"
The researcher gave him a puzzled look.
"Humans are much cheaper, of course."