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The "and physical" is the part I'm particularly skeptical of. Sure, drones are scary, but nobody's really solved getting a robot to deliver a package to your front porch in a civilian setting, and it seems unlikely to be solved quickly.
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A lot of it relies on what is effectively "the AI will be so smart it can solve anything" magic.
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The book Sentient is not about AI but abount the most amazing physical senses some other animals have.

The theme of the scientific findings is that while humans excel with none of our physical sensors, we do very well across the board in making use of them thanks to our relatively huge brains.

And fantastical amounts of compute power is exactly what are handing over to AI. The fact that their training data isn't perfect may matter less.

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Zipline is growing fast… it’s drone-based, but it definitely delivers packages to your front door. (https://www.zipline.com/)
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Nobody’s even solved a self-driving vehicles yet, not in in the sort of “they took over everything and put every uber and truck driver out of business” kind of way.

Maybe they will soon but it’s massively far behind the kind of timeframe AI 2027 would have implied.

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I actually think self-driving is one of the easier paths of development. The main thing holding it back right now is regulation and liability.

But, if you could wave a wand and eliminate all legal and liability hurdles to self-driving, automobile deaths would plummet. They're way safer than the average human driver. The technology is definitely capable, our society just isn't ready for it.

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but nobody's really solved getting a robot to deliver a package to your front porch in a civilian setting, and it seems unlikely to be solved quickly

If you don't care about getting the drone back, it does simplify the problem somewhat.

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Do autonomous systems need to solve humanoid robotics to exert power over the physical world? Seems like a lot can be done with drones.
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Military power, sure. In Ukraine they hit everything they can see.

But during peacetime, you don't make money running a delivery service that way, so it's not going to replace those jobs.

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> Nor do I think a 74% unemployment rate is even remotely possible

250 years of constant automation has never produced large scale unemployment, despite obsoleting everyone's jobs several times over.

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Don’t you think the speed at which obsolescence occurs matters? There’s a bit of survivorship bias here, in the sense of

“I’ve been pulling my sled across this lake for 50 winters even when the temperature went above freezing. Never fell through!”

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It has. For example mechanization of argiculture in places where it didnt coincide with a manufacturing boom (latin america, india, africa) resulted in shantytowns and long term unemployment.
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If I took you back to 2020 and said in a little over 5 years there will basically be no human coders writing code anymore you'd almost certainly not believe me.

And similar things can be said about many technologies in recent history – cars replacing the horse, first flight to man on the moon, even the creation of early internet to its mass adoption.

You're talking generally a decade or 2 for society to completely change from the rapid advancement of a new technology.

I'm not saying I agree with the 2035 prediction, but it doesn't seem impossible to me, if AI can help us improve the pace that we're already developing disruptive robotics.

In 2010 the idea of self-driving cars and autonomous delivery drones seemed very sci-fi and a long way out. But today, just 15 years on, these things are increasingly starting to be rolled out.

If they dropped that 95% number to 50-60%, I think I'd probably lean towards agreeing. Not because it makes sense in my gut, but because the logical part of my brain knows exponential trends (if one exists) do things that we wouldn't instinctively predict. But even if you assume exponentials 95% does seem very high.

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> "If I took you back to 2020 and said in a little over 5 years there will basically be no human coders writing code anymore you'd almost certainly not believe me."

It's 2026, one year after your predicted date, and that still hasn't happened though.

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You say "just" 15 years, but Waymo is still only available in a few cities. That seems more like a slow, cautious rollout to me, not a fast takeoff. Society has had a lot of time to get used to (and tired of) the idea and come up with regulations.

My guess is that the deployment of other types of robots will often be a similarly slow grind.

That's unlike the Internet, smart phones, and coding agents, which got user adoption at a much quicker pace.

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Waymo was largely built pre-LLM and AI level funding - I think it might be a somewhat apple and pairs comparison.
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Maybe research and development will speed up a bit, but I think it’s still going to require a lot of expensive experimenting in the real world.
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The thing about exponentials is if you admit 60%, it's pretty easy to admit 95%.
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Depends on what kind of curve it is. 60% reliable is useless in most safety-related fields and getting to near-perfect reliability is tough.
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