memes

I'd be fine with that, as long as there was some academic aspect involved.

A bunch of idiots doing nothing for a long time isn't going to accomplish much of anything.

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.

And even worse, one of the thing they desperately try to automate is the arts and the humanities...

Bricklaying robots are already here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZHRbnK1jt4

The challenge is that the current approaches that are very novel broadly have proven relatively less useful for things like robotic manual labor.

The crux of the current AI craze is machine learning, which needs all the sensory information the human perceives that is relevant to the task and all of the things the human does in response in every detail. You can't tell a model to "just feel out how that screwdriver is going and make sure you don't strip the head or cross-thread it by mistake", it has no abstraction, it can only derive the most likely inputs from training data based on the sensory information.

This works reasonably well for vehicle operation, where the human generally only has sight and hearing, and generally only operates a few relatively simple controls, wheels, pedals, knobs. Even with that advantage, it needs a mountain of sample data. Millions of miles of drive data to work with and the result is still a bit janky, kind of like a human with about 3000 miles of total lifetime driving experience.

Once you want to extend this approach to anything involving a more comprehensive use of hand dexterity and everything you can feel, then it becomes a problem. If you can imagine yourself tele-operating a robot with VR headset and controllers to do a task, then they have a path to get training data. That's how a lot of these 'chore-bot' ambitions are trying to be realized, workers tele-operating for demos and training data, in hopes of getting enough training data to do things competently one day. But imagine trying to use a manual screw driver in that tele-operation scenario, making sure it's lined up, doesn't cross thread, and you don't strip the head. I couldn't imagine doing something even that simple in the real world without just being able to feel the screwdriver in my hand, to feel how the screw is going in or not going in, if the resistance feels right and consistent. If it's a situation that makes sense to use a driver, then probably could tele-operate it, but in cases where we need the finesse of a manual tool, those are going to be super challenging to address. Even using a driver, I always manually start it, either with my fingers or a screwdriver, and the driver comes in when alignment is well assured.

Now the long standing approaches are of course already a big factor in automating construction. The new approaches can also make it easier to take a task that was almost within the reach of robotic choreogrpahy but foiled by something like unexpected weight and wind, so the relatively newer AI approaches help make it easy to correct for deviations to provide a steady environment to execute the programmed movements. But the versalitility of a person with full use of their hands and feelings is going to be a tough road unless some breakthrough happens.

it will not be made by LLMs, because it's upmost important buildings are built exactly to spec. You will want a proper list of instructions for the machine, not something a model comes up with on the fly.

"It" is very ill defined. The AI they are selling you was never supposed to cure cancer. It was meant to make money. The AI which cures cancers is of a completely different kind than LLMs and media generation. And it does not have any of the same drawbacks nor any of the same funding despite it's far greater usefulness.

I've seen some AI designed STLS. They are..not good

Physical systems are a lot more expensive to train. It's questionable if they can safely finish buildings before some better new form of AI is invented.

Just gonna plug it into the house building machine?

I think the plan is to replace nurses with just letting people die instead.

If people just stop eating food, we can use all the farmland for data centers and power plants

Yep. I work in prosthetics, people tend to overestimate current battery technology and underestimate how much energy it takes to move around a couple hundred pounds.

Even with batteries that cost a small fortune, we haven't been able to create a lower limb powered prosthetic that can keep up with the human body for more than a couple hours.

There's a lot of hype about the humanoid robotics coming out of China, but most everything is just marketing science fiction. Once you factor in the initial cost, power consumption for processing data, multiple batteries per unit, and the massive amount of general maintenance...... It becomes pretty apparent that things aren't going to pan out anytime soon.

I build limbs out of reinforced carbon fiber and titanium and even those acquire a ton of wear in a relatively small amount of time. Any bipedal robot with plastic parts, made to do intensive labour is going to start falling apart almost immediately. The human body takes a ton of damage throughout the day as well, but it's self repairing.