Just what we need, more walled gardens and exclusivity deals. And of course, another way of monetizing your data, because we don’t have enough of that already.
Search results are already fucked enough as it is. We don’t need to start carving up the internet and and dividing it among different search engines.
It’s easier to build a specialized robot for one task than to create a general purpose robot to handle that task. However, as the technology matures, I think it becomes much more practical to create a general purpose robot that’s capable of performing millions of tasks than to create millions of different specialized robots. Not only is that far less to design, source parts for, build and maintain, but it also makes it much easier to repurpose them as needs change. The same basic design can potentially be used for factory work, household chores, new construction, search and rescue operations, food service, vehicle maintenance, mining, caring for kids/elderly/pets, building and maintaining other robots, etc. We’re not there yet, but that’s where this kind of technology could potentially take us.
The advantage of a mostly humanoid robot is that it’s versatile and can use existing solutions built for people. Yes, you could replace the legs with wheels or treads, and you’d probably be just fine for most functions with a Johnny 5 type design, but there will still be exceptions. Being able to climb up or down a ladder for example means that you don’t have to engineer a solution to deal with getting onto a roof or down into a tunnel system. We’ve already spent thousands of years solving those problems for humans.
Lying about testing a product in order to get people to buy it so you can get your affiliate revenue sounds like fraud to me. Seems like the kind of thing that should lead to lawsuits and potentially criminal charges. Not that anyone would actually try to do something about this or most other problems facing consumers.
Prime was a reasonable value for me a decade ago. The streaming side was never the main draw but it was a nice added bonus, especially when Netflix started to lose a lot of the content I actually wanted to watch.
Unfortunately, Amazon’s been flooded with worthless trash, and they made the conscious decision to make searching and filtering as useless as possible. It’s actually impressive that they’ve so degraded their service that it’s usually more convenient for me to go shopping locally than to try to navigate the unending mine field on Amazon.
So of course they try to ruin the last thing keeping me subscribed. I’m done, they can fuck off. I’ve got a jellyfin server, I don’t need these assholes.
Unfortunately, I’m sure they’ll make an obscene amount of money with this move, because apparently the world is full of people who will pay good money to bend over and take it.
If I buy a product, and the manufacturer remotely disables that product in order to coerce me into buying their goods and services, the people responsible should be charged with fraud, destruction of property, criminal conspiracy, racketeering, and anything else that can stick. It should be treated no less severely than if they hired thugs to smash it with a crowbar.
Yes, you can make a building from pieces that were produced on an assembly line. But the vast majority of construction doesn’t happen that way. And even those require labor to assemble.
My point was that the stationary robot arm you see putting cars together make sense in a factory setting, but that it wouldn’t be so practical on a job site compared to something less specialized and more versatile.
I think it’s going to be interesting to watch machine labor continue to evolve.
Currently we have factories full of dedicated machines which specialize in a limited number of tasks. This makes sense because mass production involves doing a limited variety of jobs in a controlled environment, as part of a process that only rarely changes. A more general purpose robot adds little value.
Where things get interesting is when you leave the factory. New construction shares similarities to factory production. You have a mostly controlled environment, a predictable process, and most variables within a given job can be planned for in advance. But you can’t throw a house or office building on an assembly line and move it past stationary robot arms. Which means that machines need to be light and mobile enough to move around a building throughout the process. And without the assembly line, extreme specialization is less practical. Better to have one machine that handles each stage of construction, as opposed to many machines which are only capable of a single task.
I could see some future prototype robot acting as an assistant, and slowly taking over more and more tasks. As it becomes more refined, its performance becomes more reliable, and we move more and more towards autonomous operation with human oversight.
The greater challenge is leaving the controlled environment of a construction site and into the real world. Going into some hundred year old building and assessing the existing condition, formulating a plan of action, and the executing that plan (adapting to unexpected complications along the way) is so much more complex and demanding. It’s entirely possible for AI to get to the point where it can do that, but it’s going to be a much longer journey.
Still, I could picture a more advanced version of that construction robot following a plumber or electrician and providing assistance while learning as it observes. As these trade bots expand their pool of knowledge and experience, they could gain the ability to recognize similarities to previous issues, and may learn to analyze and propose solutions which can be approved by a human on site. With each successful task, the machines get a little closer to functioning autonomously.
With a complex enough AI, we really could reach a point where the only jobs performed by humans are the ones where we value the human involvement. AI politicians probably aren’t on the agenda, and there will always be a demand for human sex work. So if nothing else, know that there will always be a job out there for those who specialize in fucking the people.
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AI today, or actual AI someday? And do they need to do the job well, or just at all?
I also wonder how many of these people are open to the idea of UBI when brought up in the context of AI replacing the majority of human labor.
Not since I was a teenager.
Sending a notification that a renewal is coming up? Impossible, will cost a fortune.
Sending mountains of junk mail offering bundles and limited time offers? Clearly much cheaper and easier.
Also, think of the labor costs, retraining the call center staff to not spend hours trying to talk people out of canceling and instead just having them hit a button. Why, that’s got to force a price hike.
That’s not entirely true. Russia is part of Europe, and he’s definitely gonna keep helping them.
Not only is there a lower margin, but the fact that EVs are lower maintenance means they will get less money from a customer coming into their service department. Not that it even needs to get to anything as farsighted as that when a sales guy gets a larger commission for an ICE vehicle. They aren’t going to spend time learning about a product that gets them paid less, they are going to say whatever it takes to steer a customer towards whatever gets them the biggest payday.
One of my favorite examples of ignorant dealers saying stupid shit was a dealer telling a would be customer that they weren’t able to bring EVs into their service dept because they have to be kept in a bomb proof shelter in case the battery explodes. This wasn’t even a sales guy, it was a manager in a service dept, at a dealer that (supposedly) sells and services EVs.
The automatic diverting of money to the copyright troll is the part that gets me. That really ought to open YouTube up for liability just as much if not more so than hosting copyright violating material. Copyright trolls should be facing fraud charges and systems that reward them should be under intense legal scrutiny.
Sadly, that’s not how it works and even if there was enough interest to organize and lobby for a positive change, there’d still be zero chance of congress anything useful in the foreseeable future.
While they could, that is also a different situation. YouTube copyright claims are generally done through YouTube’s own system, not through the actual DMCA process. That system is designed first and foremost to prevent YouTube from getting sued. It’s rigged in favor of the people claiming copyright because those are the ones doing the suing. Any attempt to fix it increases the chances of a lawsuit.
These trolls messing with Google are making actual DMCA claims, which is a formal legal process and opens the claimant up to potential liability. False claims are perjury. And by affecting Google search results on a large enough scale, they are hurting Google’s business. Those sites getting taken down abelong to current or potenti customers.
I used Bing to get coordinates for every postal code in the British postal system. As long as I didn’t ask for too many at once, it would give it to me in a convenient table. And each one seems to have been accurate, at least for the ones I checked.
But on the other hand, I tried asking it to look up some Pathfinder homebrew, and even though it could give me the link to the exact document I wanted, and it definitely saw the content, it was absolutely incapable of giving accurate information. It would give statblocks that were formatted correctly but had the wrong numbers, and abilities that either shouldn’t be there at all, or with the right name but the wrong rules, either because it made up a plausible sounding entry or because it was bringing in the d&d version. I even tried asking it to tell me about a series of feats in one of these documents, and it would make up its own feats that matched the naming scheme instead of giving me the feats in the document it was referencing.
The inability to reliably quote things is a bit of problem for something that wants to be a search engine.
Google results have gotten less useful, but one reason for that is that there is an ever growing sea of AI generated articles out there trying to hijack searches. In a way, Bing is just cutting out the middle man.
I enjoy playing with ChatGPT as much as the next guy, but it isn’t a search engine. Hooking Bing up to an LLM just means that I now have to verify that the results it spits out aren’t hallucinations, assuming it understood what I was asking in the first place.
Neat.
Remind me to check back in 5 years to see if this ever actually materializes.
Buzzfeed would be a step up from Wired.
Also pretty sure that creating a voter registration site that only appears to register voters in swing states (while gathering their data so you can follow up with only the ones you want to target) could also lead to criminal charges if the matter were to be pursued.