We may eventually manufacture the robots to do all these things. We aren't there yet.
Today we have a tiny fraction (like 2%?) of the global supply needed to make enough robots to replace all humans.
This is before we get to the other logistics like power and the rest of the materials, but we have a path to scale those up (except maybe Copper, that's another tough one.) Turns out rare earth elements are actually very abundant, but extremely hard to mine, very toxic to extract (which is partially why China has a strangehold on those) and we don't have a good path to scale those up.
All of this could be moot if we figure out alternative technologies for equally capable motors that could be manufactured at scale, but AFAIK whatever promising is on the horizon would still take a very long time to ramp up.
First, you make a robot that mines rare earth metals. Then construction robots. Then an automated factory for assembling robots. The whole premise is that the robots are faster at these tasks than humans would be.
If the robotics are feasible their rise should be exponential, not linear, since each robot built makes building the next faster and helps to remove whatever bottleneck you had.
You can't just have a robot start mining/processing rare earths, anywhere in the country. You need permits, and a lot of money. I guess that didn't stop AI companies ... but there isn't an "infinite" novelty/hype premium for rare-earths, like there is for LLMs.
That totally does not follow. Robots can be feasible and their payback curve can still be linear or sublinear.
Take mining rare earth metals, for instance. The problem with mining rare earths isn't that it takes so much human labor. The problem is doing it without poisoning the surrounding 30 square miles. Replacing the driver of the earth mover with a robot doesn't fix the chemistry at all, nor (I suspect) does it significantly affect the economics.
To the end of it? Maybe 40?
There are likely more horses today than there were in 1900 - but now they are play things for the upper middle class living in the exurbs (commuting via car to their city job). Sure there are a few Amish (and other similar groups) making a living with a horse, but most of them are toys for the wealthy.
HN: A site full of bold futurists where it's easier to imagine the end of the humanity than the end of capitalism.
Horse are an analogy. When they were more economically useful, there were about 5x the number of them. Now they are basically pets and we get comments like this suggesting the work they do is virtually meaningless.
Are you a preschool teacher? Are you a doctor, a therapist, an artist? Does your work contribute anything to yourself or other humans around you?
Or do you get paid a lot of money to sit in an office and update JIRA tickets about tracking ad conversions and increasing engagement OKRs?
We've already automated the artists. Doctors are currently a strong area of focus. In a world where AI replaces human thought, education becomes only for hobbyists. That leaves therapist.
I suppose we're going to need a lot of therapists.
http://big5.www.gov.cn/gate/big5/www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/...
That or, as rich people loose more and more of their political capital, workers get empowered and use direct action (such as strikes) to demand the end of more and more capitalistic policies, until there are none left. The rich get along with it because the alternative is loose everything.
Or capitalism ends in a big messy fight.
Edit: And today's industrial society is quite far from being capitalist. Feudalism is more close to reality, seeing as the one most important factor for almost everything in life is whether you own real estate or not.
Its very easy to imagine a better world.
Its much harder to imagine the Scrooges in power willfully giving it up so that we can build that better world.
We don't fully know the failure modes of every alternative yet, but that doesn't mean powerful central governments + capitalism is the best alternative.
That's an underrated comment! Totally agree. So so much of discussion on this topic sort of assumes business as usual (both literally and figuratively) and that AI quickly diffuses through the economy, sucking up all economically useful activity, with humans falling by the wayside as inevitable collateral damage.
There's a failure of imagination taking place here that there's no other outcome. Capitalism is an evolved solution to how human community works, but is not inevitable.
How to maintain stability in a world filled with greedy people in power that don't want to give up a single penny is a good question to ask at this point.
HN is literally owned and operated by venture capitalists why are you surprised by this.
Iran recently shot thousands to tens of thousands of its own people when they protested. If a sociopath were in power, what would stop them?
I also think that will be the case. However, not all the jobs are worth being automated. Say, if you are a modern-day horse-riding instructor, I very much doubt the robots will come knocking the door to take your job. Not because they can't, but because the headache is not economically worth it.
About the only things I can think to guarantee will have some constancy are "for the sake of being human" type things. Much like buying handmade bowls is something you can do out of pure preference/taste/ideology even though it's cheaper to buy massed produced ones.
People are more adaptable than horses and tech solutions usually require people to do some of the work. Dishwashers need loading and unloading. My robot vacuum still needs maintenance. Self-checkout means you do the scanning.
Amazon wants to get into drone delivery and there are cases where that might work, but the way news articles describe it, it’s not going to get a package onto my porch.
Now you can imagine a waymo in this mix how it would just be on its knees in a situation like that. How is a waymo to interpret "fucking move already you dumb fuck" into any sort of meaningful instruction?
I'm reminded of that story about activists in SF requesting a dozen waymos at once at some one way street and creating a localized denial of service attack essentially.
So, uh, maybe don't dwell on that too much.
Actually, dwell on that a lot. It's probably the only instructive example.
The rich and powerful only suffer us because they need us. They cannot assemble every lead painted doodad by their own hands. If they could, they never would have hired anyone. So what happens when they no longer need as many people?
Society is already far too constructed around catching some of the wealth that just spills off of the people who own it, by being in their orbit. That activity is not actually productive, but since the only people with money are the ones that have a lot of it (K shaped economy), there's just not enough wealth left in the bottom part of the market to support anything else.
Well that and there are more guns than people and if a million people come for you then there is no army that will be able to save you.
The global horse population peaked in the 1910s.
Horse ownership isn't what it used to be, but the horse population seems fine.
Can we really say that? I think that might be a prediction based on the current situation and on the assumption that jobs will neither be transformed nor created anew. We don’t know what the future holds for us in terms of jobs – or whether the problem of jobs will be a solved issue. Just as the blacksmith never gave a thought to what a mechanic actually was until he saw a car for the first time.