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

[…] 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?

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

Finally, some fucking sense into all of this.

Yeah exactly, I work in AI and robotics for medicine, and im so goddamn sick and tired of these people and their absolute god-awful uneducated takes on AI.

Shh. Just give one of them dancing robot dogs an impact driver attachment. They’ll figure it out in a week.

Once we perfect doing it in software, then we can graduate to hardware. Today, digital paintings; tomorrow, real paintings; next year, tear down a fucking ship!

That is really cool job description I haven’t seen pop up before! Would you mind sharing what type of things you need to automate? It sounds so interesting, I never really understood why factory line jobs should exist for example * because the work is dangerous, the opposite of stimulating/engaging (works for some sure), and just generally overall depressing unpleasant places to work. We SHOULD be striving for a world where humans don’t have to do such menial unfufilling work.

*very superficially, all the nuance that makes it continue to be necessary and exist I understand)

And yet, people do… https://www.leviathan.eu/

The argument isn’t against the technology, it’s against the application of that technology.

This isn’t even close to what they’re saying. It’s closer to complaining about how the Yankees replaced their star pitcher with a modified howitzer.

It’s not about people “wasting their time on some dumb invention,” it’s about how that useful invention is being used to replace jobs that people actually like doing because it’ll save their bosses money. It’s not even like when photography was invented or Photoshop came out and people freaked out about artists being put out of work, because those require different skill sets and opened up entirely new fields of art while also helping optimize other fields. This stuff could improve the fields that they’re created for by helping people optimize their workflow to make the act of creating things easier. But that’s not what they’re doing. It’s being used to mimic the skills of the people who enjoy doing these things so that they don’t have to pay people to do it.

Even ignoring the ethical/moral aspect of this stuff being trained without permission on the work of the people it’s designed to replace, the end goal isn’t to increase the quality of life of people, allowing us more time to do the things we love - things like, you know, art and writing - it’s to make the rich even richer and push people out of well-paying jobs.

The closest example I can think of is when Disney fired all their 2d animators and switched to 3d. They didn’t do it because 3d was better. In many ways, the quality was much worse at the time. But 2d animators are unionized and 3d animators aren’t, so they could get away with paying them much less. The same exact thing happened with the practical effects vs. digital effects guys in Hollywood right around the same time.

I get the sentiment, but it’s a bad example. Transformer models don’t recognize images in any useful way that could be fed to other systems. They also don’t have any capability of actual understanding or context. Heavily simplifying here, tokenisation of inputs allows them to group clusters of letters together into tokens, so when it receives tokens it can spit out whatever the training data says it should.

The only actual things that are improving greatly here which could be used in different systems are natural language processing, natural language output and visual output.

EDIT: Crossed out stuff that is wrong.

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”.

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.

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.

I get the sentiment, but that is a really dumb take.

$13B invested in OpenAI feels more and more like malinvestment and graft, incentivized by our disastrous energy policy and enormous tech subsidies.

This isn’t purely software automation. Its also an investment in physical media and machines, new or renovated energy infrastructure, and enormous volumes of potable water.

Seems more like a job for unions and workplace safety regulations than for robots

The Role of AI in Union Busting: How Employers Use Artificial Intelligence to Keep Workers From Unionizing

In 2020, a leaked company memo detailed Amazon’s use of a new technology — the geoSPatial Operating Console (SPOC) — to analyze and visualize data sets pertaining to threats to the company, including unions. Reported by Jason Del Rey and Shirin Ghaffary at Vox, some of the data points related to unions include:

Amazon-owned Whole Foods’ market activism and unionization efforts.
Flow patterns of union grant money.
The presence of local union chapters and alt labor groups.

The approach is an obvious attempt by the company to use more passive means of identifying and neutralizing union sympathizers in the company.

“Amazon’s tracking of workers’ micro-movements, decision points and searches and then linking all of that data to that of unions, community groups and legislative policy campaigns is union busting on its face,” said Stuart Appelbaum, President of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) in a statement at the time.

Software automation being easier seems like a reason to not have so many people doing it, then? Like, the harder problem is the one that could really use all of the focus?

But the harder problems aren’t as obviously profitable for a large number of tech CEOs, and they’re not ripe for being a “winning glittery ticket” for a large number of comp sci students looking to be the next big thing in Silicon Valley.

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).

Define art, though.

As it stands neural networks and LLMs can’t do it, because they lack imagination. A human can use it as tool to make art though, and we don’t have these silly kinds of conversations about photoshop (anymore!).

As for the OP, you’ve taken it a bit more literally and reacted a bit more defensively than I think is warranted. The point is about our systems priorities, not so much the specifics.

Human behavior is the issue, capitalism is just one system into which it may develop.

Nah both are

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?

Just drop the ship off the conveyor onto a bar. The good ships will bounce higher, and the bad ones won’t. Problem solved.

Sarcasm aside, this is how they sort cranberries and where the expression “raising the bar” comes from. The higher the bar is set, the tighter the constraints on which cranberries will bounce onto the “good” conveyor.

Irony so thick you can cut it.

He chose a poor way of conveying his message.

He’s ignoring it because he’s not complaining about the tech, but the way it’s being used. Instead of being used to make it easier for artists and writers to do their jobs, it’s being used to replace them entirely so their bosses don’t have to pay them. It’s like when Disney switched to 3d animation. They didn’t do it because the tech was better and made the job easier. They did it because 2d animators are unionized and 3d animators aren’t, so they could pay the new guys less.

And these are the kinds of jobs people actually want - to the point where they don’t pay anywhere near as well as they should because companies can exploit people’s passion for what they do.

Imagine a world of construction workers and road crews, but no civil engineers, architects, or city planners. Imagination and creativity automated away in the name of the almighty profit margin.

Second this.

We’re in the first days and everyday I add a new model or tech to my reading list. We’re close to talking to our CPUs. We’re building these stacks. We’re solving the memory problems. Don’t need RAG with a million tokens, guerrilla model can talk with APIs, most models are great at python which is versatile as fuck, I can see the singularity on the horizon.

Try Ollama if you want to test things yourself.

Use GPT4 if you want to get an inkling of the potential that’s coming. I mean really use it.

It’s a stupid thing to be angry about because AI isn’t about making art it’s just doing that is a good benchmark because it’s very visual and you can easily see at a glance how much more advanced one AI is than another one.

You really think that mega corporations are interested in art? If that was all AI could be used for no one would be researching it.

Isn’t the point that we don’t bother looking into those specialized machines and tools because why bother when we can just throw meatbags at it?

It’s because people like to think that art is some unique human ability. They never really explain why they think this, they just say it.

But really it’s just about looking at the world and creating representations of it in various styles. None of which is some ineffable thing. It’s all electrons moving around a system at the end of the day, it is all physical. If it is physical, then it can be simulated.

Have you met people with opinions? A lot of their opinions consist of preprogrammed responses that you could train a bot to regurgitate.

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.

The ambition isn’t the issue. Its a question of power imbalance.

The Paperclip Maximizing Algorithm doesn’t have an innate desire to destroy the world, merely a mandate to turn everything into paperclips. And if the algorithm has enough resources at its disposal, it will pursue this quixotic campaign without regard for any kind of long term sensible result.

The robot dystopia is therefor a corporate dystopia.

There is some argument that one is a consequence of the other. It is, in some sense, the humans who are being programmed to maximize paperclips. The real Roko’s Basilisk isn’t some sinister robot brain, but a social mythology that leads us to work in the factors that make the paper clips, because we’ve convinced ourselves this will allow us to climb the Paperclip Company Corporate Ladder until we don’t have to make these damned things anymore.

We’re not even close to artificial general intelligence, so I’d like to see if you have anything to substantiate this claim.

(Not saying it’s far fetched, though, just that it seems silly to be so sure at this point in time.)

I don’t see google, twitter, facebook, nvidia and alibaba working on AIs more than the ones designed to replace humans for content generation, and I don’t see money from anyone else of that size going into such projects either.