We can’t let the BOWKYS win
A.I. is not just computer code. It’s an artificial mind. Once they figure out how to dump that into a robot that doesn’t faceplant everytime it tries to do something useful, the trades are cooked.
That’s not the hard bit tbh, you don’t need a humanoid robot, you need specialized robots for different tasks.
The real issue is that 1) machines are still more expensive than humans and 2) the AI you’re talking about is language models, it knows nothing about building except what it can read in the books. We’d need to train entirely different AI models to handle construction, and they’d ideally need to gather data first by building actual buildings.
Imagine seeing the Benz Patent-Motorwagen and telling people society is going to run on these things, People won’t need horses and people will be riding them casually at 100+km/h anywhere and everywhere they want to go. I’m sure most at that time would think these statements were foolish.
The construction industry is one of the most heavily automated and mechanized industries in existence. We just don’t think about things like “back hoe”, “crane”, “nail gun” or “concrete plant” as forms of automation because they have been around for so long, but they have all replaced more manual aspects of construction processes.
Well… Automation usually describes process automation and you’ve just listed tools. So yeah, I agree, people don’t think of them as automation. Because, colloquially, they’re not.
I mean i could have just as easily described the process. Cutting a trench is a process, most of which was automated by the back hoe, conveyor, dump truck, and laser levels. Before, 20 or 30 people would be required for trench work which is now often done by a crew of two.
Right but whilst the thing is easier with better tools, and indeed the process has changed, to me ‘automation’ of a task refers to its process being reduced to, at best, a daily 30s review. Tools are… Ways of optimising and changing a process. Automation obviates them. It’s a personally lexical stand, you can sanely differ.
The process of producing lumber is largely automated.
The process of producing concrete is largely automated.
The process of producing drywall, mud, paint, nails, tools, wires, switches, pipes, are all largely automated.
The process to create the architectural designs and blueprints for the house are largely automated.
The process to create the electricity, fuels and vehicles needed are all largely automated.
To make a house, people used to draw plans by hand (if at all), chop the trees down with an axe and/or saw that was made by hand by a blacksmith, shape the timber with hand tools made by the blacksmith, fasten things together with hand-crafted joinery or nails hand-made by the blacksmith. All the materials were transported by hand or by horse and lifted onto the structure by hand or manually operated hoist. Every part of it, including the production of all the tools, was previously done by hand.
The invention of the assembly line opened up the possibility to eventually automate virtually everything except the final assembly, and we have robots that can be made capable of doing that autonomously as well. You can buy pre-fab homes where all the major sections are built in a factory by robots and shipped out to the construction site and attached together.
Construction is far more automated than what you make it out to be.
All jobs like this are going to pay minimum wage once the rest of the workers are replaced with AI and there are lines of people willing to work for no money.
If only the construction trades could develop some kind organization to protect members from race to the bottom wages and also promote training that improves work quality.
I think we need bolder strategy. We could develop a 2 team approach where one team is made of up people who make one dollar amount and the other team is made up of everyone with less than that dollar amount. I think we will be much better distributed results.
I’m not expecting to see unions continuing to work let alone remain legal.
yeah, trades have pretty strong unions in my area. only, well my experience with the trades unions have put me in a position to see lots of corruption. it’s not been a great view.
deleted by creator
Literally nothing about loyalties in this.
We always think of not working as something negative, we should desire not having to work and machines giving us the opportunity to do so. But the system is scuffed and capitalism works against us rather than for us.
We need a new system where it’s the goal to automate everything and then we only have to work a few hours a week and spend the rest with our loved ones, getting good at a hobby, enjoying life, singing dancing creating art all the fun stuff.
Well, there’s livelihood and work, and so far no one has exactly inspired confidence that the current labor class will receive a livelihood. We’ve let systems solidify that basically demand that the labor class have some semblance of leverage to participate in the benefits. So far the practical result has been that the hypothetical scenario erases that leverage, while avoiding any concessions that may win over the people that would be screwed over. It’s nice to hand wave and say “some new system”, but without more concrete things to look at, there is the risk of “well, let’s remove the labor leverage and just assume that the utopian outcome results instead of the dystopian”.
One thing that concerns me is that a common short story held up as an example of awesome utopia brought on by post-scarity due to AI is “Manna”. The plight of the dystopian half is very plausible, but the “utopian” half has a lot of problems in mechanism of how it happened and issues when “realized”. If even in fiction we can’t make a convincing narrative that lands in an unambiguous utopia, then my hopes for reality is pretty low.
So I guess in short, I agree with your sentiment, but too pessimistic to see the upside being realized and afraid that the optimisim around the upside results in rationalizing the downsides.
And even worse, one of the thing they desperately try to automate is the arts and the humanities…
deleted by creator
You frame it with ambition as a virtue to be desired, but that’s really not a given… ambition is often super toxic. I can imagine a future of luxury automated space communism™ where the ultimate purpose is fulfillment. To be Zen is to release ones self from ego and put desire and ambition in context.
How about instead of automating everything to use machines that require electricity, maintenance and resources that wreck the planet, we make it so people worldwide only need to work four days out of the week at most while still being able to afford hobbies, holidays, and luxury items such as food that isnt poison.
I implore young people to get into ai resistant fields and push for a return to basics and inefficiency.
I’m almost 49 and my exit plan from my corporate job is to have a small farm just big enough that it can be run simply with man power alone and then market to a premium.
Humans are not meant to be machines. Inefficiency needs to be valued more than it is.
Have you ever grown a tomato successfully and eaten it?
Nothing beats a garden tomato. It really is hard to eat store bought produce once you have grown it yourself and it is so much better tasting.
Well yes, but I was thinking more about fantasy vs reality.
As AI improves it will program hand like robotics or tool attachments to be able to do this work. This is in the pipeline. They already have workers in China, Indonesia, Vietnam and others wearing cams to capture what they do with their hands so it can be consumed and replicated by AI. It’s only a matter of time. Then there is the replication of an issue we already had. Everyone is going into trades now same as everyone went into colleges before. Long term it will lead to surplus workers in that given field. Best thing to do is be agile and willing to learn and adapt as things shift. Link: https://deepmind.google/blog/gemini-robotics-2-brings-whole-body-intelligence-to-robots/
Increasingly, they’re trying to get it to design the building.
I’m having to double-check credentials in my plan reviews because contractors have started turning in plans with AI-generated architect and engineering stamps because they don’t want to pay a professional to prepare their plans.
No one wants to pay anymore
How can they use AI for an engineering review? Wouldn’t an actual licensed engineer have to sign off on the building?
I work for the city. Contractors are faking stamps to pretend there’s an engineer to get a permit.
Lots of municipalities are overloaded and they’ll just accept a stamp and approve the project. I do not. We review the engineering.
can you fine those who fake official stamps?
Not really. We can refuse to issue the permits.
If it were to slip by us and the house fail, even then it’s difficult. Almost everything in my city is custom spec homes for the mega-rich, and the developers set up an LLC just for building the one house and dissolve the company as soon as the house sells.
What I’ve learned doing development review for houses being sold to billionaires is that contractors will try to do cheap, shitty, unsafe work no matter how rich the client is.
interesting. It’s so weird they can get away with manufacturing counterfeit documents
What they used to get in trouble for was using an actual engineer’s seal without permission. We’d tell that engineer and they’d go nuclear on the developer. So now they fake a stamp to keep from getting sued.
Fascinating. Insane, but it makes sense in today’s economy. Thanks for sharing
It’s one of the big issues that capitalists continually overlook. In most states starting an LLC is nothing. My state it’s like $800 and a 1 page form plus getting a tax id (free and another 1 page form). There’s tons of shitty contractors that will start an LLC, do garbage work and get trashed online, then just fold it and start a new one every 6-12 months. Then if you need warranty work or whatever it’s like “oh sorry, company went under”. But the illusion of the small business being viable means this loophole will never be patched
You can and should check licenses and not hire unlicensed workers, but even that is almost impossible now as many contractors are licensed but never do any real work, they just come out, assess your issue, and then hire subcontractors for a couple hundred bucks per day. Your $30,000 roof replacement is like $1-2k in wages to workers, 8-10k in materials, and $20k to line the pockets of the fat shit “running the show” so he can keep up on the lease payments for his 4 million dollar house and 110k ford f150 that’s never seen a day of work
I was at enough construction sites to know it would be quite trivial to automate at least laying bricks with some programmable robots. Less skilled workers are already taught on the construction sites how it’s done, to help out masons. Same with roof tiles, you only need to look out for chimneys and edges.
And in our hellscape, it will just lead to forcing out a large portion of workers, make them work even more for even less, then a second round of layoffs can go.
Bricklaying robots are already here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZHRbnK1jt4
In the 1950s, Isaac Asimov predicted that eventually, nearly everything on Earth would be automated, leading to mass unemployment. He then predicted that the “excess population” would move to other star systems, which served 3 purposes: reducing unemployment on earth, providing a meaningful existence for the extrasolar colonists, and spreading humanity throughout the galaxy.
I’m down
3d printers.
Which, by the way, I’ve heard the same shit about when I first started with that. In fact, same bullshit was said about the internet.
IDK there’s that giant concrete printer thing. Basically prints houses out of concrete, much like a 3d printer, in a matter of weeks. Stuff like that will become more common.
It’s not AI at all, someone has to make the design, do the plumbing, the electrical wiring, decorate it etc etc
Also, all the 3D printed houses are failing
Oh really? I hadn’t heard. That’s too bad, I was really hoping it would help with affordable housing.
We don’t have affordable housing because everyone keep high the prices, many countries (like USA or Italy) have enough free houses to host all the homeless people in their land
Iirc affordable housing isn’t unavailable because of the cost of construction.
I could be wrong though
I remember when it was just as laughable for a phone to dial itself, anything to update itself, computers to write code, etc.
This doesn’t show that AI won’t eventually be constructing buildings. It just shows you’re laughing that a thing that’s pretty much certain to happen will never be possible.
Yeah, robotics and AI aren’t at a point where they can build a row of houses with zero humans involved… that doesn’t say that won’t happen “eventually.”
The vast majority of technology we use daily was unrealistic science fiction just 50 years ago and completely insane to consider much farther back than that.
No, the vast majority of things we used today were not science fiction in the 70s.
Mobile phones, the Internet, satellites, etc. all of these things existed before the 70s.
The biggest technological innovation of the last hundred years has been miniaturization.
What a silly thing to bicker about.
Of course every one of us having a computer many times more powerful than anything that existed at the time yet small enough to fit in our pocket with plenty of room to spare and using wireless earphones (that also boost external sounds if needed) to communicate with it by simply saying in whatever language we speak what we want the computer to do or researched and having the resulting confirmation or information read back to us, again in whatever language we’d prefer, as part of our professional remote-work career, as we sit in the back of a driverless car heading home from a nice lunch, where we’ll see that the groceries that were automatically ordered and delivered based on the contents of our refrigerators and cabinets compared to the eating preferences and any special requests made by each member of our household are waiting for us… was science fiction in the 70s.
We can add in having whatever music we prefer automatically follow us from our home to our earphones to the car speakers, watching any movie/show or playing any video game from anywhere in the world, using your far more powerful computer at home to do the more demanding tasks but wirelessly using your phone as a monitor to stream whatever game it’s playing to wherever you are and having a wireless controller paired with your phone control the character in the game being played hundreds of miles away nearly seamlessly, being able to hold a face to face conversation with someone who speaks nearly any language you that don’t via live translation and countless other things, and share any sort of book or movie or what would amount to a more information than is contained in a typical library to anyone else on the planet in a few seconds to a few minutes without either of you ever needing to stand up from wherever you’re sitting.
Yes, those things and way more that we take for granted daily now were nothing more than science fiction in the 70s.
Cassette tapes existed in the 70s I could listen to the same music in my car and in my house, by simply ejecting the tape and carrying it in with me. The way you’re describing shit you might as well say it was science fiction in the 90s too you’re splitting hairs that don’t need to be split and that more importantly have nothing to do with your original argument.
Dear God. The point was that your music can follow you and jump from home speaker system to earphones to car speakers to office speakers without you touching or doing anything.
You seem to have hit the age where you need to be crotchety and bitch several hours per day lest you break a hip next time you shower. I can commiserate, but thankfully I only need to bitch two hours per day to stay safe so far. Good luck with your complaining, hope it goes well.
No, the point was that wasn’t unrealistic science fiction in the 70s. The idea that someday you wouldn’t have to touch the cassette was not unrealistic science fiction.
Just because you’re wrong doesn’t mean you need to be an ass.
Bud, you chose to bicker entirely on whether I was a decade or two off on exactly when many ideas in science fiction stories stopped being considered unrealistic and started to be considered plausibly realistic future technology.
“Woolworth’s didn’t close down in 1972, it was November of '71!”
Be honest with yourself, that’s completely senseless old guy bickering. It’s absolutely irrelevant to the point.
I chose to bicker because it was a ludicrous statement. Whatever else you need to tell yourself is for your own comfort.
I’ll validate you here. You made a good point and you were wrong about nothing that mattered, if anything at all. Yet this dude slid in, in classic online asshole style, to redefine the conversation and cherry pick what it’s about and what would matter or not and even went so far to correct you “no, the point was [what I said, because you don’t matter].”
I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with people who do this. What is the fucking point of attempting to reframe a discussion you didn’t start and die on the hill of “that other person sucks because they said something I argue is technically inaccurate and has little or nothing to do with a valid point they’re making”. I keep saying to myself I have to quit Lemmy, and it’s primarily that exact type of asshole behavior that causes me to think that way.
Cassette tapes existed in the 70s I could listen to the same music in my car and in my house, by simply ejecting the tape and carrying it in with me.
And a rich person in 2000 BC could have produced the exact same effect by hiring a troupe of bards to follow them around. Just because the core function is the same, does not mean true innovation is impossible.
Okay… but the point was that wasn’t unrealistic science fiction 50 years ago.
And yet they made a valid point. Your response here has nothing to do with anything but pointlessly shitting on someone. Which apparently makes you feel better?
This is a public forum, are you saying that they are allowed an opinion and I am not?
I believe BMW and others are already operating humanoid robots that work in a factory setting doing tasks a typical machinist would do right now.
Just imagine in 10+ years when the frontier agent models get optimized enough, or more effectively streamed into the robotics and the robotics are robust enough to handle “heavy lifting” tasks. I don’t think there is much some combination of AI and robotics can’t do. Other than suffering the soon to come mass poverty… They’ll never be able to do that.
Quite. As soon as robotics and AI reach a point where they can take care physically creating the needs and wants of the uber wealthy… that’s bad.
Any time the idea of UBI comes up I think it’s way more likely for them to decide 99% of us are now redundant and that some convenient pathogen/disease that they have access to a cure for the rest of the world doesn’t know exist would be a fantastic way to get rid of us before we form giant mobs to demand equality. As an added benefit, having ~7.9 billion less humans in the world would and no longer needing to produce food or goods for them would reduce pollution and emissions on a massive scale, helping the global environment and getting rid of all the clutter ruining the views at the nicest beaches.
They’ll still need some of us to boss around and feel superior to, not to mention to breed attractive children for their enjoyment. Just a small enough number broken between enough locations on the planet to get the odds of large scale physical resistance as low as they can.
It’s literally what I tell my friend who seems to be convinced they’ll suddenly be altruistic… Like dude, you’re saying the very same people that fight any form of taxation whatsoever will magically be ok with “giving away” their wealth to people who do no work? They’d rather start a new company to make more money that just films nation wide “bum fights” as they treat us as entertainment, fighting over a chance to eat, than they would give anything for a UBI.
One of the weird things that came out about Covid was that they were doing research on Gain of Function… actively trying to make the disease more transmissible specifically in humans. That isn’t a fantastic line of research.
Knowing that’s a thing that large, well funded places are still researching, the idea that a more deadly disease that transmits through humans even easier could be created along with a vaccine to prevent the disease before it ever becomes public is way, way less unrealistic than I wish it were.
A handful of ultra wealthy folk could fully fund that in secret behind strict NDAs very easily. Hell, one of them could. The same people making policies that their AI should sex chat with kids to increase the kids usage time, visiting rape islands, saying only the extremely wealthy should vote… fuck, some of the Epstein files directly involve conversations about that topic. I think that’s one of the conversations Bill Gates was part of. How to get rid of poverty in the the world by getting rid of the poor folk.
But you can’t even discuss it with most people without seeming like a batshit insane, tinfoil hat conspiracy nut. Bit frustrating.
Developing mass bioweapons to be used on the same planet they need to live on is nothing but pure hubris. Who is to say that the disease won’t evolve to be even worse and the vaccine rendered worthless? I wouldn’t think they’d necessarily come out ahead if they’re forced to quarantine for a long time and rebuild humanity from nothing (assuming they don’t die themselves).
But I don’t have the kind of ego they do either, so maybe they think they’d be fine either way.
If you haven’t read about Zuckerburg’s underground bunker, it’s like a fully stocked 5,000 sqft mansion. Lots of the billionaires are building underground doomsday mansions lately. Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, and Sam Altman are some of the names I know offhand, but there are reports that many silicon valley executives are doing the same thing.
It wouldn’t be a wonderful way to spend the massive amount of time needed for the outside world to recover from nuclear fallout, and they’re all building small shelters for individual families and their slaves, not the sort of larger community that would require. On the other hand they would be fantastic places to spend a few short years while an extremely transmissible deadly virus removes the bulk of the redundant humans cluttering up the world. The virus won’t be able to live long outside of a human host, so if the transmission and mortality rates are high enough it really wouldn’t take all that long for it to be safe to come out from hiding.
The bunkers all have extensive surveillance of the entire above ground region, so even if large scattered patches of humans survive they’ll be able to be sure none of them are lurking around before hand.
Plus they’ve decided it’s a great idea to combine AI, drones, and murder, so it’s not like they’ll be counting on a lot of henchmen with guns who could easily turn on them. AI is currently getting loads of training data right now on how to most accurately target the children in gaza who “look like they could use some food the most” and learning how keeping their center of mass in the happy food scope means they never see that same hungry child again.
Hooray for the future!
The bunkers certainly help them survive a bioweapon pandemic, but then what would be next? Would they have the means to rebuild all of the supply chains in an almost completely automated way? Would they have the means to create new humans in such a way that leaves enough genetic diversity to survive other diseases that will stay in the world?
Of course they could have access to all the technology left over from before the said pandemic, but it doesn’t mean much if there aren’t enough people/machines to utilize them and keep them fixed. They would have to go without a lot of things like convenient private jet travel and complex manufacturing. This is not even mentioning when the food/medicine inevitably runs out.
This isn’t to argue against you, just me wondering if they would take those kinds of risks. IMO they are probably too comfortable with what they have to rebuild everything rather than just capturing current governments and creating corporate dictatorships. If they screw up the former badly enough, we will be extinct after all.
