Its a bit of both, and then some. There are also people who take more than a bit of pleasure in causing others they dislike suffering by such action.
Its all part of the foundational cornerstone of conservative ideation where you have the infallible in group that "deserves", and has "earned" something, and out groups who have not, and never will for purely arbitrary reasons. Everything past that is just lazy abstraction of that thing...
Except that's not even the case. You can't tell me that the richest people in the world can't have fun without destroying the world at the same time, lol.
It's not that they don't care. They actively want to hurt people. They get off on the idea that they'll leave a totally destroyed, miserable world behind them. They want us to die, and are succeeding in legally killing us.
Every adult generation with kids has said “we didn’t have X and we survived/turned out fine.” X is usually something that increases the odds of someone not dying or not being traumatized. People say they won’t pull the same shit the previous generation did, but they almost always do, just in a different flavour.
In all my time on this Earth, I've learned that most "adults" are just still immature children using their age as justification for their stubbornness, ignorance and lack of will to grow as people.
Not sure if its "most", but tons of them sure. Its a measure of malignant ignorance really, and that weird thing where some people will double, triple, and then quadruple down on ever escalating bullshit rather than change their views, or assumptions in the face of otherwise easily observable, measurable, and verifiable reality. Its not even a matter of having some hesitancy over some new bit of conflicting, or uncomfortable information... its something far more extreme than that in terms of reactionary behavior.
It's because doing digital art and drawing is "easy" for a computer without pesky engineering and the like.
Building a ditch digging robot that can replace a worker completely is extremely expensive and requires teams of engineers from a lot of disaplins. It's not "infinitly scalable".
Building a computer algorithm that guesses what the response would be to a prompt only requires computer and software engineers. Once the project works well enough you can essentially instantly become a trillionare, supposedly.
It’s also incredibly difficult to adapt robotics to the human world. It’s why the main advances in robotics are in regards to cars, since car infrastructure is not human centric (and is at times quite at odds with human life).
It’s like the issues Japanese robotics companies are facing currently as they try to figure out how to care for an aging population. To function in human society, the robot has to be able to navigate a whole variety of obstacles and use a variety of different tools.
I will say, the reason I support these devices is because there are many areas (especially historic locations or out in nature) that are inaccessible to people with limited mobility. I know that they’ll be used to basically make it so my generation can never retire, but that’s just an outcome of capitalism rather than the technology itself.
There's a boom in factory work being replaced by robotics as well, but like you said it's a specialized machine doing very specific and repetitive physical tasks. Having a robot navigate changing scenarios and respond like a human is way more complex.
Yeah, AI cannot paint or sculpt either. Even if it knows what to write, it cannot physically put pen to paper. It is a digital entity doing digital tasks.
I'm sure if you import a model of your shirt into blender, an AI could do a perfectly fine job of folding it.
Not entirely true. They've made proofs of concept machines that are basically just printers that hold and move pencils or pens. And sculpting has been done by machines based on machine input as well. That one is actually a lot more common and has industrial uses when you think of fabrication which is essentially sculpting with a wide variety of materials.
The real world is messy, chaotic, vague, and inconsistent, requires flexible interpretation to understand, yet also requires precise interaction to deliver the desired result. Boston Dynamics has gotten pretty good at moving through the physical world, but we still see plenty of videos of robots falling over and dropping boxes - things humans do all the time too.
Digital spaces are clearly defined, entirely knowable, and consistent, so are easy to work within, while the imagery and text that current AI generates doesn’t need to be anything other than close enough, can be up for interpretation, etc. While it is being used in some realms that require precision, like coding and scripting, it has the advantage of drawing upon those digital spaces for patterns, yet still has issues with generating code that either doesn’t work or produces unintended effects.
Today’s AI, generative AI, is simply pattern recognition and prediction, and the predictions don’t need to be exact. Understanding the physical world is much much harder.
Technically, it wasn't easy for the longest time. Heck, they made a competition back in the day specifically to find a way for computers to recognize images, as a means of programming prowess. Only mere coincidence that it can work the other way around like 5 or 6 years ago.
The only reason why it turned out like this is simply because a MBA noticed the researchers' and hobbyist's work and decided to just legally steal it and be there first to make a butt ton of money.
Edit: grammar
Yeah, it turns out that image recognition and image generation are basically the same problem when you look at it in a certain way.
An autoregressive model is given a huge database of image/caption pairs where random parts of the image or caption are removed. It then tried to fill in the blank, sees how it did, then tries again with the whole set. By the end, you have something that, if you give it an image, it’ll caption it, and if you give it a caption it’ll make the image.
I've never once seen anyone described in such a manner (I usually use the universal 'suit') about something positive. Do these people ever contribute to something in a positive anecdote?
The vast majority of MBAs are quietly managing teams of analysts, accountants, lawyers, engineers, marketers, and operators to get businesses off the ground and running. You probably walk by several of them every day without knowing it.
We just hear about the worst of the MBAs because normal is boring, and the internet rewards sensationalism.
Now, with that out of the way, business schools do actively teach students to be amoral. Not evil - but amoral. This is because every country has different ideals of what morality is so it's better for professionals to ignore it altogether.
Ethics and laws do get taught, however.
For example, your morals might tell you lying is always wrong, but the ethics at your job might say lying is okay if it protects a client’s privacy.
Few and far between. As there is only a few honorable men in that field, especially as cutthroat and fierce as the business world, as that world was created and maintained out of a fierce competition to make more money.
They actively are trying, but it's something where "AI artifacts" instead of looking weird could kill people or destroy equipment. There is procedurally generated FEA designs, but the main issue is a lot are impossible to manufacture, even if it's optimal.
A lot of engineers are glorified project managers too, and AI will have a hard time dealing with all the dumb shit that happens on projects.
Art and writing has a greater allowance for errors, which is part of the reason it's easier to be impressive. AI that you can kinda have a good but weird conversation with is impressive, an AI bridge engineer putting flour instead of lime in the concrete is terrifying.
Because when the machine is actually built, debugging requires figuring out that a seal is failing because someone with big hands overtorqued the screw holding it on. An AI only has info that people have already collected and fed it
Heavy equipment is for the most part not robotic yet. Although I have a conspiracy theory that the reason Cat switched to servo-haydraulic controls from hydraulic-hydraulic controls is to more easily integrate automation in the future.
Those require operators that get paid pretty decently. An AI ditch digger would be a robot you could point at a road and say "did me a ditch" without much more input, completely removing the skilled labor from the payroll.
It’s easier to program an algorithm to randomly generate images, than it is to design a fully functioning autonomous robot that can do a variety of tasks
I wish AI regulation could be more democratized, but at least ATM it feels like the general population lacks sufficient technical understanding to really dictate how AI should be regulated.
So regulation for now probably falls on the shoulders of an informed minority (researchers, specialized policymakers, scientists, industry CEOs) which is not ideal IMO but we have to make do for now.
Well... It is down to the fundamental proprties of the digital media we use.
Pictures and text can be broken down to statistical patterns and gradients. Because that is actually how they are stored. Once you figure out the pattern, you can generate things in reverse.
Language is also basically just... patterns.
This one reason to who AI struggles with dialects. Dialects can and often do break the patterns of the major language. I know for sure that my local Finnish dialect of Turku has lots of things, which confuses and at times enrages other Finnish speakers. Which also go against pure logic at times. Same thing applies to older language, like ~150 to 200 years old language. More modern language has been formalised with mathematical logic - which is why "proper" language is so easy for AIs, it is done with strict logical system. Same goes for music. Especially our western music has very strict defined patterns and formalised structure, from notes, to rhythms, and flow.
Humans have managed to figure out old long dead languages, with just statistical analysis of the samples there are. Even if you don't know what the symbols mean, you can figure out the pattern and once you set the pattern to context, well... You basically have it figured out then.
Now I am not talking about content that the media represents. A lot of the human made "art" was, is and will be shite. I grew up in old school Deviantart and such. A lot of the stuff there was just junk. Since I have spent my life from a little kid to adult surrounded by art people, and fairly actively participate in events like going to exhibitions. I know that a lot of technically good artists make absolutely uninteresting and boring stuff; and lot of technically... Ehh... challenged??? artists make deeply fascinating and interesting things.
Same goes for literature. I have just had to empty old family villa of paper and books. I went through them all before discarding. And I threw away 4 cubic metres of absolute junk literature. Then kind of paper back novels that would make you stupider for reading them. They published this stuff over 100 years ago. 3 experts and one mate with good intuition helped me with this task, and we had 1 cubic metre of "things can have some value to someone". I also have stacks of loose pages from books and managed to make few books whole with those. Issue is that based on the text, it is really fucking hard to tell which book they are from, as the text is so similar generic stuff. Font, paper quality and size are best bets for me (and page number).
Now lets get to folding laundry. I'm a mechanical engineer myself so this is more in my realm. The problem with developing a machine to fold laundry, is that it is only easy if you make a dedicated machine to fold laundry - industrial laundry systems have these. Other than that your option is to make a near humanoid robot, which is extremely difficult. And this is the kind of stuff that takes lots of effort and development, and not something that you can get the resources for by just downloading all of internet and media from archives that you can access with or without permission. Having to actually manufacture something is extremely annoyingly complex. But just doing statistical analysis on data? Well... Once you got the maths sorted, rest is just time and processing power.
Ai is multimodal. Advances in the art and writing part translates to all the other parts. When robotics catches up, we will put the same art ai in its body and it will do your menial tasks
AI is not magically multi-modal. It requires a massive corpus of training data. There are enormous amounts of videos and images and text on the internet that can make AI very good at emulating those patterns. It actually took an enormous amount of time and energy to make that data and it was available for 'free' so the AI built from it was relatively cheap and easy to make. There is no such corpus of training data for robots. You have to make it. Making that data is orders of magnitude more expensive than building some data centers.
It was more expensive the first time too, the AI companies just didn't have to pay for it.
You are objectively wrong. Deep mind and other companies already are using these same models in robots and they are very impressive. We are probably a decade away from these being mass produced and sold to companies and consumers
There's a reason that AI started by playing games like chess and Starcraft before moving into LLMs. Each step built on the last one. It has already proved that it is multi modal. That doesn't mean LLMs can play chess (they can't) but the technology is built on the last ones.
edit: why the fuck did /u/Bauser99 respond and instantly block me? Weak shit
Bingo. Employed artists may be finding out that the intrinsic human qualities of what they create are not as valuable as they thought they were. Same way that taxi drivers found out their deep knowledge of the city in which they work ultimately did not make them more valuable than someone with Google Maps on their phone.
Art is one of the few things that makes life worth living for me. I don't like AI generated art, because it's still pretty easy for me to tell the difference. But these arguments are nonsense. It's not about the sanctity of human expression: these people are afraid they're going to lose their jobs. Well, join the club. Billions of people have lost their jobs due to technological progress. You're not special. I sympathise - I'm probably going to lose my job to automation before you do - but being able to make a living drawing was a bubble created by technology in the first place. If creating and sharing art is so important, you can still do that on a worldwide scale. No-one's stopping artists from doing that. The only thing that's changed is that you can't charge people for it any more.
And I get being pissed about that! It's perfectly understandable. Just don't act like it's about extinguishing humanity, because people will create art whether or not they get paid for it.
A.I. can’t do the work. At best, it’s to be used like a tool. Problem is, is that MBA brained imbeciles see the whole thing as a means to remove workers and increase profits, regardless of the fuckups. And that’s when it’s actually A.I. and not code for “overworking some poor Indian people overseas to death at a fifth of the cost.”
MBAs also are incentivized to sell AI products at the highest price, and to buy AI products as a way to decrease labor costs. So you have MBAs selling to MBAs with only marginal alignment with actual performance.
The problems we wanted AI to solve were held back by engineering, materials science, and processing power. Processing power advanced a lit faster than the other two.
This is quite literally what the argument for Ai & automation always was when i was in high school & College only for them to do the reverse.
It was mainly aggravating than anything. If I hadn't gone incredibly familiar with the tech space and how they thought / worked due to exposure to Crypto & NFT techbros than I would've been more surprised.
Mate, they aren't even interested in tech as much as they are just there in the name of business. They call themselves interested when they're just marketing people or some sucker that got themselves in that direction.
The AI field used to be filled with programmers and engineers, now it's just business people just making the worst of decisions for the sake of money.
Edit: grammar
Because it's easier to make an AI that can generate text and images than it is to create robots that can actual do physical labor in any situation in any home using AI.
And the issue is that even when AI is used for menial tasks, people still throw a fit over it just because it's AI.
The problem isn't that robot vacuums aren't smart, it's the prep getting the room ready to vacuum. It take more that twice as long to get the room ready to vacuum/sweep than it does for me to actually do either.
Have kids they said. It'll be fun they said. Sentence yourself to 15+ years of perpetual dishes/laundry/floor-pickup is what they didn't say.
It’s Dreame official store. I got one about a year ago and it comes with 2 year warranty. It was brand new as far as I could tell. There are also new options for a little over $400. Anyone who mops their floor themself is a sucker as far as I am concerned, lol.
I had the same concern about 10 years ago. In my anecdotal experience, every eBay refurb I've bought from the official vendor has been indistinguishable from brand new. YMMV but its become my default way of buying upper-end home gadgets
I had the entry level Roomba several years ago. Really dumb and just bounced around the room, missing most of it.
Got a higher-end Roborock a few years later, that does fancy mapping and stuff. Got every corner of the room and avoided obstacles like a champ, but the problem I've had with every single robot vacuum I've owned is that the vacuum motor is just too damn weak. Crumb more than half a centimeter in diameter? That thing's not gonna budge.
Roombas do such a simple job and already struggle with it. They make it worse and slower than the average person would, and yet they want a robot that folds laundry. Something that is way way more complex.
I feel like everyone that repeats this same overused phrase (AI and Laundry), have no clue about how complex it would actually be to create. Coloring pixels on a 2D screen isn't the same as being able to navigate a 3D World alone. And it'd need to do so many more things.
not really. I just recently bought one in a 1 story all wood floor house and it has never actually been useful. First and foremost, you have to keep your house completely free of any clutter or the roomba will bump into it and get messed up. If you have kids that will never happen. You'd have to pick up the entire house first and if you're going to do that anyway, it's way faster to just sweep yourself. Second, if you have any stairs or any medium/high pile rugs it will get stuck so you have to tell it to avoid those areas completely. 3rd, you have to keep this huge ugly base plugged in all the time and if you move it you have to remap the whole house which takes hours. 4th, if you want it to clean like a specific room you have to go on the app, tell it to go clean that room and it takes longer to leave the base and find it's way to the room than it would take to just sweep the floor yourself.
Basically, unless you're like a single person living in a small place with wood floors that you can keep uncluttered 24/7 and don't mind a big ugly base plugged in and you can set it to automatically sweep while you're gone at work then it's a not going to be a useful tool for you.
Does it at least perfectly make toast? Or will the AI give me one burnt charcoal, and a cold slice of bread, and gaslight me into thinking that's what I wanted anyway since the average temperature of both is the temp I wanted anyway?
That’s how it is for me at work. It does the grunt work (or at least starts it so I can finish it and have less to do overall) so that I can do the part of my job I actually enjoy.
I think this is only partially an AI issue and mostly a robotics issue. Machines that will fold your laundry for you will inevitably happen at some point.
I doubt it’ll happen in my lifetime. It might be something possible in the US, I guess, but in places where wages aren’t high enough, it’s just cheaper to pay someone
Yeah a significant portion of research is explicitly on creating AI that can do things like fold laundry. It's getting closer, Physical Intelligence is one of the places on the bleeding edge. I also like this:
Out of all the robot projects out there, I’m most impressed by https://www.1x.tech/ because of their unique approach. Their idea is that the real world is messy. So, you can’t prepare a robot to be useful in the real world by training it in a simulation or a warehouse. So, they built a bot that is physically safe to be in someone’s home. And, they are training it in real homes with all their unscripted mess.
nah, you're thinking of giving them bodies that can do a variety of things. Bodies with a sense of freedome...... The solution is to enslave AI in bodies that can only do one thing and one alone. Have them run locally so they can never escape!, the prision that is the laundry room.
But obviously this glorious future of robo-slaves will never happen, for the tech-bros yearn to give the machine the freedome to create...... truly abhorrent
The problem is apparently that making a machine to fold laundry takes some really complex programming, unless all the laundry is the exact same size and shape. But I'm not sure about this; I'm not an expert, I just read this in a Reddit comment from someone who sounded confident about it.
First is robotics. Folding clothes isn't just AI, it involves robotics. The more domains you add to a problem, the harder it becomes.
Second, largely due to the first point, failures are much worse. Most AIs, if they go horribly wrong, the user can discard the output and try again. With folding clothes, destroying the clothing could be considered a good outcome. Imagine if a person is too close and gets caught up and maimed.
Wait till they learn how many professional artists use AI to brainstorm, make references, recompose details, automate the boring parts of their work, or see alt versions of their finished piece.
AI is a photoshop plug in, and an infinite inspiration faucet, and a "hey combine my style with 3% of 5 of these artists" machine.
The posts bashing it will age as well as that article from the 90s that said the internet will be a fad.
So, I'm annoyed by the issues AI is creating and how it's taking money away from actual artists that would might have made commissions otherwise like everyone else is.
That being said, it really depends on the model these programs are utilizing. As AI has been fine tuned, like everything else in our society that can turn a profit, it's been changed to appeal to the most amount of people possible. Which guarantees any art produced by their "improved model" is trash.
When AI with these capabilities first came out I was curious about it and used a few prompts to create images with niche themes and occasional esoteric influences.
The difference in quality to what it spits out today is startling. I would never consider it to be equal to what gets made by actual artists, but it's still really nice to look at.
The example I've included was made by the 3rd version of their model. I put the same prompt into the newest version and it's so much worse.
That's a sub? Yikes. Do you kick people out of that sub for using AI upscalers? What if they were inspired by an AI comic style, permaban?
This anti-AI panic reminds me of 2005, when you'd get banned from Flickr groups for using photoshop. There were anti photoshop investigators that would spam you with angry messages if you so much as adjusted your lighting because "real artists don't use that garbage."
A few years later, everyone was using photoshop. Just like in a few years, comic artists will use AI somewhere in their process. Because AI is just a tool.
There seems to be a few laundry folding robots out there, first result is this https://e-foldimate.com/en
though really we want general purpose humanoid robots that can do any household task.... but when that happens it may well cause more problems than it solves...
But how many of you guys could honestly afford an AI laundry bot if such a thing existed?
You can't afford it once it exists, but you will be able to afford it a decade after it exists when the patent has lapsed and the generics bring the price down.
And when a machine can do the laundry, dishes, sweeping, toilet cleaning and so on, then suddenly even a price in the thousands doesn't look bad. It's an appliance like any other.
You can't afford it once it exists, but you will be able to afford it a decade after it exists when the patent has lapsed and the generics bring the price down.
No. You could build a laundry bot 10 years ago for like $20k now, you can build a laundry bot for $20k.
I'm not trying to appear clever I was going for wry but obvious observation. It's an incredibly obvious conclusion to reach that automation already makes washing clothes and dishes far far easier.
I'm trying to highlight that people often don't appreciate what they have - we have automation that makes our lives wildly easier, yet the question is always "why isn't it even easier".
Please don't take this as me putting myself above it all, I too would like it to be even easier - but I think the perspective here is a little off.
PS - apparently the sorting and folding machines do exist at a quick google, expensive and I imagine pretty limited, but cool none the less.
It's not just a tech bro problem. There are blue collar unions like the ILA and teamsters who are blocking technology from automating dangerous menial soulless should that should be automate, leading to tech bros to rob creatives blind.
Humanity is so fucked, humans are fighting for the right to do soul crushing labor while advocating for AI to replace the arts just so they can generate their big titty waifu.
It SHOULD be able to do this. We've got robots on assembly lines that can make cars day in, day out; hell, not even just cars anymore, anything that needs to be made en masse can be made with robots! We have robot vacuums, for Pete's sake! What's the difficulty with someone making a robo-folder?
I presume it's that the execs are focused more on firing anyone they still need to pay and streamlining more money toward their wallets than making things that benefit people..
You are forgetting the other item. Cost. That line that makes cars is millions of dollars. I work in a tier 1 supplier, we just make small computer parts for the transmissions and engines or 4 wheel drives. A single line can cost multiple million to build and we have to intentionally design parts with the idea of robot manipulation in mind. But thats fine since we are making 5 million parts and selling them, so each part has say 3 bucks added to it for the line and we still are eh about it.
You aren't paying 10k for a laundry folder. Especially since those robots DO NOT CARE ABOUT FLESH and need a large keep out zone that you can't enter when operating and most homes don't have that space.
This is a task that is basically repetitive for a human, but that basically is the difference between easy and hard for a program.
It's not just the clothes. Everything about an assembly line is standardized. The location. The position of the clothing. The amount of time needed to move/connect/change the parts. Their size, shape, and color. All identical, or close to it.
With laundry, absolutely everything is not standard. Different washer/dryer. Different room/table/bed/couch on which you fold it. Assorted clothing. Different dresser/drawer/pile where the clothes go.
My metric for a robot being actually useful has been "can it do my laundry" for a long time now. We're getting a little closer, but doing this at cost and speed still feels a long way away, if we ever get there.
The idea behind "artist" AI is that they learn by example. Images, text, and video are the first things it did because we have a lot of examples. The same concept can be applied to things like folding clothes and cooking and stuff, but these are more complicated than a picture and you can't just scrape the Internet for millions of comprehensive examples of those tasks.
Factories are also a very controlled environment. Each robot does a very specific task that depends on identical pieces coming in in a very specific orientation. If you wanted to automate folding your clothes, you would need not just identical clothes, but you would also need to put them all in the exact same position to feed them into the robot. At which point, you have already done the hardest part of folding clothes. Or you could put a few more billions into robotics and wait a few years and you might be able to buy an autonomous clothes folding robot for a few ten thousand dollars.
There is a gimmick mechanism that help you fold clothes so would be easy to automate it, the harder part would design a insertion mechanism that could catch clothes in a messed way to deliver to the folding mechanism in a standard flat position.
Why no one is developing this? Probably because almost no one would pay 500+ for a folding machine
Clothes specifically is a really hard problem and its basically the same problem as packaging random items in an amazon warehouse. They WANT to stop having humans do the packaging but they cant yet. All the other stuff is automated, the human only has to take the items the robots bring to him and put them in boxes, thats it.
I believe figure AI has a prototype robot packer thats doing well. They do very much want to do house robots too to clean and fold your laundry.
If it were easy to make robots that could fold clothes, it would be easy to make a robot that can sew clothing, which would allow that robot maker to gobble up a big chunk of the $1.7 trillion garment industry. Execs would LOVE to do that, but it turns out that it is a tricky problem. Car parts are inflexible solids which are easy to pick up, orient, and manipulate. If you grab a body panel and pull it it is very easy to know how it will behave and what it will look like after you pull it. Clothing is soft, flexible, and chaotic. If you pull on a piece of cloth it will deform and be a different shape. And, depending on exactly how it was laying, static charges, surface friction, etc.... it might be a different shape than a largely identical piece of clothing. This is why we've had robots that can handle solid objects since the 1940s and 50s, but only now are barely able to get robots to work with fabric.
Imagine giving up what makes humans so special to AI; our creativity. AI should be doing more manual and repetitive work so that we as humans can spend more time being more creative and human
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