I keep getting so depressed thinking about the inevitable. Quite simply, humans can't scale or iteratively improve. We still need to eat, we still need to sleep, we can only think on one thread at a time basically, we take 20 years to get to our prime, which is a fleeting moment, while most of our lifespan is spent in a state of decline of capability. AI humanoid robot from the near future doesn't need to eat or sleep, can work 24/7, can compute thousands of processes in parallel, is the same fungible unit as any other humanoid robot, forever with some maintenance. Why justify a sustaining an inefficient human in that modern world? It is more profitable for the company to have humans go extinct and maximize planetary resource use to its fullest extent possible.
Seems we are digging our graves as a species and don't even realize it. I mean Sam Altman is already saying it taking 20 years to train a human is a Big Problem.
I don't think it will be cost effective to build humanoid robots to do most tangible work. Why assemble an expensive masterpiece of servomotors, chips, plastic and steel, when billions of desperate humans are right there and only cost 2.5 meals a day and a small shelter?
Of course, intelligence will be a solved problem so "20 years of training" won't be needed. You'll just be the hardware. AI will tell you to pick up that box, place it on that conveyor belt, place the autowelder at that seam and wait for the green light, turn the wrench to install bolt B in part C. If you don't wish to, or no longer can, so be it. Another, hungrier human will replace you. After all more are made every day, and they are capable of doing this type of labor by age 10 or so. And what else would they do with their time, go to school and get a completely useless education?
All of this will of course be in service of our technofeudal lords, the owner class. Some robots will be needed for heavy lifting and for the jobs that are too sensitive to trust a human in, like personal security and strikebreaking. Can't risk trusting a serf for those tasks. But for most physical grunt work humans will be cheaper. Shockingly cheap, when they have no other options.
Humanoid robots are only the intermediary. Eventually processes that use robots will be redeveloped to used something that doesn't look anything like a human robot.
In that sense I see their higher cost as temporary. Another factor: robots will not rise up and blow up your factory. They will always work at the same efficiency for each and every robot produced. They will not go on hunger strikes. They will not kill themselves.
> I don't think it will be cost effective to build humanoid robots to do most tangible work. Why assemble an expensive masterpiece of servomotors, chips, plastic and steel, when billions of desperate humans are right there and only cost 2.5 meals a day and a small shelter
If all you have to offer people is this kind of sad fucking "2.5 meals a day and a small shelter" while you live on yachts and eat like a king, eventually they will gang up and kill you
I keep wondering when the west will get tired of having kings and they keep surprising me. I assume humanity get to The Culture eventually, but I'm starting to doubt that Americans will be leading the way on that front.
But maybe Altmans AI will break out and do it for us.
Isn't the problem that Altman and his peers are calling the shots here? We could use robots to work less and spend more time enjoying life, but we can only imagine being crushed under a boot and starving.
Surely we can accelerate human training. Just install a brain implant which administers an electric shock whenever the subject deviates from the official training plan.
Maybe in the future the AI in charge of the in vitro fertilized human factory will uncover the genes to induce siamese attached at the brain twins. Then you cut off the weaker appendages and keep the malformed head with twice the brain capacity. I guess that is one way to scale.
> Why justify a sustaining an inefficient human in that modern world?
I should not need to justify my existence, that is the problem with being led by psychopaths.
Twenty years to train humans for what? A tech job? That is not why we get an education. It is not my purpose to be a cog in the wheel for some psychotic billionaire.
Seems we are digging our graves as a species and don't even realize it. I mean Sam Altman is already saying it taking 20 years to train a human is a Big Problem.