I do industrial automation for a living, and I just want to point out that automating things that exist purely in the digital domain is far easier than automating things like ship breaking.
Cant imagine how it even could be automated without advanced robotics. Those ships are freakin HUGE! Maybe a collection of robotic snakes with cutting lazers attached to their heads and some little scuttle bots to pick up the pieces the snakes knock off? Just cut the whole thing into 1' disks or maybe hexagons is better
Maybe a collection of robotic snakes with cutting lazers attached to their heads
Upvoot for the matrix
Just make a huge version of those supermarket bread slicer machines and feed the ships through it.
[...] I just want to point out that automating things that exist purely in the digital domain is far easier than automating things like ship breaking.
Not that you're saying otherwise, however isn't that even more of a reason more developers and resources should be allocated toward automating complex and risky physical processes?
Honestly, I don't see how you would do it without general AI, which is something that will be solved in the digital domain first anyway.
Not that you’re saying otherwise, however isn’t that even more of a reason more developers and resources should be allocated toward automating complex and risky physical processes?
You're solving for the wrong problem from the perspective of people with money investing money to solve these problems.
Shipbreaking, while dangerous for the workers, isn't expensive because it is done in far flung countries with workers that have low wages, few protections for safety, and long term health consequences.
Art and writing (for western consumption) requires educated and talented people which are expensive to employ.
People with money, looking for a return, want that return their spending, not reduce human suffering.
Processing the digital world is just the first step. You can't just build a safe autonomous ship disassembly robot without making sure your algorithms are actually sound. Look at self driving cars, they're far from being safe and acceptable. Jumping straight into this problem without testing the shit out of your code in a virtual world is a mistake.
I mean automating it would certainly be a challenge but the first step would be building tools and robotics to allow human operators to more safely and effectively manage the tasks. Then you streamline the industrialized processes. Then you think about automating things.
But this is all really an economic problem, not a technical one. Software tools have minimal resource costs (compared to building/destroying a ship) but require skilled (expensive) laborers to operate. So to cut costs in any digital field you need to get rid of the expensive laborers. Thus the push for AI to replace any computer-bound work. Physical labor is already considered dirt-cheap in our fucked society, and no one is rushing to add expensive tools in fields where disposable people will suffice.
I sympathize immensely with the OP image's final point, but "working for the right company" isn't going to fix it. Reorganizing society is necessary, rethinking what we culturally value and uphold.
I think the solution for ship breakers is for the job to be a highly paid respectable job with protections. In other words the technology that desperately needs to disrupt this industry is probably... unions
"AI" researcher here. The only reason there are models that can "write" and "create art" is because that data is available for training. Basically people put massive amounts of digital text and images on the Internet and the companies scraped all of it to train the models. If there were big enough datasets for ship building, that would happen too...
Besides, what the guy is yapping about it is 80% a robotics problem not an AI problem. It's apples and oranges.
He's essentially saying why can Will Smith finally eat pasta normally while we still don't have the robotic workforce from the 2001 Will Smith movie "I, Robot".
He's a programmer, why doesn't he stop working on aligning buttons on web applications and work on shipbuilding robots!?!?
Not really. You would still need to, you know, build drones or automated factories to actually perform the salvaging. But the point is that nobody DID, because capitalism values profit over human life. Nobody who "matters" is interested in solving that problem.
Actually that's not true at all, there's lots of interest in robotics (check out Boston Dynamic) but it's a really really hard problem. The main issue is developing a controlling intelligence sophisticated enough to be able to use the robot to do a diverse range of tasks. The actual physical mechanical building of the robot isn't that hard.
Of course the way you get that controlling intelligence is AI. So he is complaining about people developing a solution to the problem he's demanding that they solve. He's not happy because they're not magically skipping steps.
This idiot wants fully sapient robots without developing AI in the first place, not sure how on earth he expects that to happen.
I get the sentiment, but that is a really dumb take. Software automation is a hell of a lot easier than creating robotic automation to disassemble ships of all shapes and sizes. That's why art automation has been done, and industrial freighter recycling automation has not been.
How would that even be possible? Presumably, you'd need to break the ships down into pieces first, and even then, you'll be dealing with huge numbers of oddly shaped and sized components of varying materials. It makes a lot more sense to have people do that, though it is likely very dangerous.
Seems more like a job for unions and workplace safety regulations than for robots
more like a job for unions and workplace safety regulations
Yes. That's why they do these things in third world countries. The people there are cheaper than robots will ever be.
3th
threeth.
Making art and writing just happens to be easy to automate with neural networks and machine learning, neither of which was originally researched for the purpose of replacing artists and writers.
Good luck disassembling a ship with a neural network. And maybe do some research about the difficulties of application-specific robotics.
I think it is just a matter of where you put resources. I am sure if you put resources into improving recycling ships some advancements will be done (it won't be done using neural network probably).
Ah yes just write code for the ship fold itself neatly back into reusable materials.
Just build a grinder the size of a football stadium to shred battleships into pea-sized chunks, and sort according to metal type, how hard can it be?
I hate this take because I dream of a world where AI can assist any storyteller in bringing their story to life.
The rest is just capitalism. Capitilism is the issue, not the AI.
OP: "We've tragically gone down a path of quantifying and min-maxing every aspect of existence, including creativity and the value of human life."
Comments: "OP clearly doesn't understand the comparative efficiency of the ROI here."
Disappointed programmer here. I thought I could automate farming so that people wouldn't die of hunger. Now I realise that if you automate farming, it would just make some CEO more money because his company now makes corn syrup and destroys rural communities even faster.
I got my "contract not renewed", for the Fortune 500 B2B CRM company I worked for.
I can try to bust my ass to make my 2018 laptop try to render images I can't draw, which does give me some pleasure. It's not the AI tool's fault humanity sucks, it's the goddamn people with money.
This sort of ignores the fact that the advances in that technology are widespread applicable to all tasks, we literally just started with text and image generation because:
The training data is plentiful abd basically free to get your hands on
It's easy to verify it works
LLMs will crawl so that ship breaking robots can run.
Oh no. You can't do it for fun now because the computers are doing it.
This shit again?
The tasks AI is replacing only require powerful computers and internet access.
If you want to make that comparison, to scrap fucking ships using AI, you need a robot that the AI can control.
Or what else do you want to do? Putting a fucking computer server that is running some ship scrapping AI in the middle of a shipyard and see if it magically grows arms?
No, I'm not denying we have an issue with this fucking capitalism (with and without AI), but stop comparing "software" tasks with other tasks what would required specialized machinery/robots.
I remember years ago everyone was saying that art would probably be the last thing AI would be able to handle and menial jobs would probably be the first.
Now look at where we are!
The robot dystopia will not be caused by evil AI enslaving humanity.
No matter how advanced or how self aware, AI will lack the ambition that is part of humanity, part of us due to our evolutionary history.
An AI will never have an opinion, only logical conclusions and directives that it is required to fulfil as efficiently as possible. The directives, however, are programmed by the humans who control these robots.
Humans DO have ambitions and opinions, and they have the ability to use AI to enslave other humans. Human history is filled with powerful, ambitious humans enslaving everyone else.
The robot dystopia is therefor a corporate dystopia.
I always roll my eyes when people invoke Skynet and Terminator whenever something uncanny is shown off. No, it's not the machines I'm worried about.
Big reason why I just build cute little games as a hobby instead of writing spreadsheet software for a megacorp to optimize the lowest quarterly earners out of a job, or develop AI to optimize myself out of a job.
People are cheaper than robots, ergo they are more expendable
I mean, you can still write and make art? AI isnt taking that away from you? If you're upset that its replacing you career wise, maybe you're just upset that you need a job to live and that livelihood is at the whims of capitalists?
It can be both. Why is the first thing we're seeking to automate with this current generation of ai the creative careers that humans can do?
According to this guy, only one thing is allowed to happen at a time. Sorry all, LLMs are the only option. Nothing else.
You know, interesting kind of aside here, I haven't seen talked about anywhere at all, but I would like to interrogate everyone here about it to get their thoughts.
I don't think AI is generally going to just replace artists wholesale, or is going to take over without some sort of editing, and that editing will probably necessitate a kind of creative process, and that's probably going to be adjacent to what lots of artists already do. AI as a tool, rather than as a replacement. We saw this with the shift from 2d to 3d in animation. This was accompanied by lack of unionization in the 3d workforce, yes, and was incentivized by it, but the convergence of these mediums, even really only fairly recently, has bolstered artists' ability to make much smaller projects work on a larger scale than they previously would've been able to. If you really need evidence of this, you can kind of look at much earlier newgrounds stuff vs the later work. There's less people using that site now, and the userbase has probably aged up substantially over time, but I do think it's probably fair to say that the quality of the work has gone up (quality obviously being subjective). Basically, Blender is a pretty good software, it's very cool and good.
SO, to the point, if this is the case, and artists are able to substantially cut down on their workload, while still producing similar or larger outputs, or better outputs, will this actually affect art, kind of, as an industry? Is there a pre-allocated volume of art that public consciousness will allow to exist? In which case, the amount of artists would go down. Or is it more the case that there is only a pre-allocated amount of capital that can be given to art? In which case, the number of artists might be the same, and we might just see larger volumes of art in general? I think historically the latter is the case, but that might have changed, or, more realistically, I think it would be dependent on external economic factors.
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