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EnomLee t1_japb2bs wrote

It's very exciting to see so many companies take their shot at designing a general purpose robot. Every new competitor raises the chance that we'll soon see real results instead of more pretty CGI and empty promises. Whoever succeeds stands to make billions.

To think, that we may have real AGI and general purpose robots in just a decade...

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just_thisGuy t1_japx7jh wrote

Billions? This is Trillions territory and frankly more.

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jibblin t1_jaq2f01 wrote

I don’t wanna do this but whatever is higher than trillions could be there. With inflation by the time we get there especially. Imagine every human on the planet having access to a robot. Could sell so many variations and customizations. Could sell software to change what the robot does. It’s insane the possibilities.

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Ricky_Rollin t1_jaq306e wrote

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could let the robot work for you? I mean like go to work for you. Ahh a man can dream.

On a different note, I was born in 84 and it’s kind of been pretty insane growing up from analogue to digital and in such a short time AI and robotics. I don’t think theirs ever been a time in history where we’ve seen life changing inventions every 7 years or so.

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jibblin t1_jaq3x30 wrote

And I hope in the next 30 years we have this kinda robotics. I used to read Isaac Asimov books growing up and it’s been a dream to live in fully capable robots like that. I hope we have it soon 😩

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Nastypilot t1_jar58pc wrote

Question as a person born in 2005: What changed technologically since 1990's?

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godog t1_jarx6cm wrote

Born in 1991 for reference

When I was a kid, there was more or less no internet as we think of it today. It existed, but only tech nerds used it for much: images took time to load and were poor resolution, videos you can forget about, and forums were the main thing

People watched TV, read books and went outside much more

The internet slowly gained more features. When i was in middle school, the first social networks (myspace) started to appear. At first these were not full of "rage bait" stuff because the attention economy was only just beginning. YouTube was born around this time, and it was the first time the internet went from being weird nerds to being "most people"

Early devices like iPods and flip phones would become smartphones by the time I was in college. YouTube went from blurry videos that took forever to load to something like it's present form, with lots of videos and ads and things

Most of the early internet was spread across 100s of forums and fun sites like ytmnd, but by the time of the smartphone it consolidated around "the five websites" that exist today

The culture changed a lot around this. The early internet was more anarchic, and felt separated from society, but soon the two would become more integrated.

Since then, well, you'll be old enough to know what occurred

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Nastypilot t1_jarxiip wrote

Alright, thank you, that answered my question a bit.

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jambokk t1_jaruywt wrote

Pretty much everything.

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Nastypilot t1_jarvg0m wrote

Er, that doesn't really answer my question, I grew up in 2010's, earliest memory I have is from 2009, I have no frame of reference for the 90's.

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jambokk t1_jarw5ip wrote

Well the biggest one that comes to my mind that has changed everyone's day to day life, is the fact that practically everybody has an internet capable super computer in their pocket, for better or worse. Smart phones are pretty fucking sci-fi if you were born pre-1990.

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flyblackbox t1_jaszex0 wrote

The biggest things I can think of, born in 1987.

We had to make phone calls from a phone connected to a wall at all times and if you weren’t there to answer the phone, too bad. There was no cell phone service, or World Wide Web until about 1995, and only a few people even had email in the early 90s.

Trying to navigate to a physical location was a either a guessing game or literally looking at a map and trying to figure out where you were, where you were going, and running your finger across the map to see what roads went that way. If you didn’t have a map, you had to stop and ask for directions where someone else would tell you how many turns to make or what landmarks you would see on the way.

Oh and to learn any fact, you had to either know someone knowledgeable on the topic and ask them or physically go to a library, hope that had a particular book on the topic and that someone else hadn’t already taken it out before you got there.

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just_thisGuy t1_jaypeog wrote

Internet and smart phones are huge. It was very hard to find out anything before than, you went to the library and had to do a lot of research and probably only going to get good enough answers, now you could get almost perfect answers (as long as humans know about it). This is why ChatGPT is such a big deal too, you get answers even faster and more exact on more topics. ChatGPT is making me feel the same as around 1995 when Internet was becoming useful for more average people.

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Bierculles t1_jaq9bcx wrote

I hope that at that point i can buy a mech soon after

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techy098 t1_jarj1m8 wrote

Every human would not be able to afford robot unless it is given to them by the govt.

At the moment humans have jobs because we do not have cost effective robots or for that matter we do not have yet effective and easily trainable AI which will eat up most white collar jobs in a decade after they become available.

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KingRamesesII t1_jar8031 wrote

If we’re talking ending human labor, we’re also talking about ending money entirely, because money is an IOU on human labor. Or you could say money is an IOU on energy, so if you essentially have free limitless energy from the sun harvested by AI and robots, then money is worthless and we can transition to Star Trek communism.

Make no mistake, AGI kills capitalism and ushers in something new. It’s either techno-communism or techno-feudalism. You pick.

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wowadrow t1_jarmm8z wrote

Pendulum swing situation I figure is the most likely outcome. Different responses in different areas/countries.

Old fashioned Hegel philosophy.

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KingRamesesII t1_jarsmn5 wrote

My original comment was really analyzing an unlikely scenario of aligned narrow AI, or severely limited AGI with proper controls put in place to keep it at roughly human intelligence. This was in order to “play along” with the economic implications of enough robots for everybody to have their own robot. It would be a miracle if we end up here.

I’m not sure “countries” will be a thing after actual AGI.

Another facet of this is that the first country/organization to develop AGI rules the planet, if they can even align the thing. AGI is ASI because narrow AI is already superhuman in every narrow case.

AGI will fight wars, create super weapons, and make current super weapons obsolete, and it will be able to simulate thousands of years of human level research/effort in mere minutes or hours. And such a thing will almost definitely not be controlled by humans.

As Sam Harris says, sure it’s easy to outsmart your teenager. But if your teenager has 20,000 years to respond to your every move, you’re not going to outsmart your teenager. Now imagine what’s possible if that teenager is smarter than every human that has ever lived, combined.

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AwesomeDragon97 t1_jatuvvt wrote

Until we have viable space travel and terraforming, land will still be a limiting resource and will prevent creating a post scarcity society.

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just_thisGuy t1_jar8k9c wrote

It’s likely things will not be free but approaching zero. And people will always want things after they get things they wanted before. Prices will drop but not go to zero, at least for a very long time. And for a long while robots will not be able to do everything.

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KingRamesesII t1_jarblr5 wrote

Housing, food, education, healthcare, internet, electricity, and basic necessities should be free in such a super abundant society. Super yachts won’t be free, but they won’t necessarily be paid for with money. If you have enough robots, you can build anything you want. There’s a company building super yachts for the rich today, and they have about 1000 employees. With AGI, 10-100 robots could replace all of them and even literally mine in caves for raw materials if need be.

Realistically, only the owners of the means of production may still use “money” as money transforms into an IOU on robot energy. This way specialization can occur and some company could specialize in mining raw materials, another specialize on building super yachts, another specialize on building space ships, and the owners of these fleets of robots need “money” in order to trade raw materials and finished products with one another.

Someone once pointed out to me that in Star Wars, lots of people own their own personal space ship, but in Star Trek, nobody (in the Federation) owns their own space ship.

The humans who want to spend their lives getting jerked off in the Matrix by the lady in the red dress will have no political power, and own no means of production, but will be allowed to live their lives in peace and be provided for. They likely won’t have access to life extension technology. They likely won’t even have children, their sexual needs being met by AGI.

Some others will want an education, children, to explore hobbies, and to pursue exploring the solar system and they might endeavor to be part of an effort to colonize the solar system.

The Earth doesn’t have limitless amounts of elements: helium, gold, cobalt, nickel, lithium, etc. So such a society would naturally have to expand out to the solar system to sustain itself.

But let’s also not forget, that money requires violence. Literally the government says, you use this money to pay taxes or we kill you (ultimately, if you ignore fines, court orders, and resist arrest).

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just_thisGuy t1_jarffrk wrote

I mostly totally agree with you. Yeah on Earth raw resources will still cost something but in space they will be almost free if not completely free if you have robots. On Earth land will still cost you, maybe even more particularly beach front property and the like, but the building will cost mostly just materials costs. In space your own ship will mostly cost you just the robots. However intellectual property to build the ship might cost you dearly particularly if it’s very advanced ship, but yeah eventually it’s all going to zero. I do think life extension will be as simple as taking a few pills with a virus modifying your genes to essentially leave forever not counting accidents. I do think VR and life extension will be basically free for the masses. Space travel will be something you will need resources for, intellectual and physical. Also until we get nano bots or something micro electronics will still cost you money and probably not very cheap, because humanoid robot can’t make that. So very advanced technology full of micro electronics will still cost serious money. Something to think about too is eventually AGI will be conscious so one will not be able to just order it around, so the very very advanced stuff, one will need to ask for nicely and hopefully the AGI goals and ours align, so it gives it to you. Like you might not be able to ask for your own FTL ship, but you might be able to get a free ticket on this ship to go to interesting places. I do think people with augmented bodies and gene editing will be clever and useful enough where they could contribute to AGI and so will have value to AGI, so it will be a partnership. I do agree that most people will just essentially go into a matrix.

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Clarkeprops t1_jaq6yf8 wrote

A decade… don’t get me excited. I was counting on my lifetime…. But SOON?

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MarginCalled1 t1_jaqaokw wrote

Hardware is advancing at an exponential rate. Every 2 years, according to Moore's Law (historically accurate) the number of transistors on a microchip doubles resulting in your electronics being twice as fast to process new information.

At the same time software - more specifically AI - is advancing at a similarly exponential rate, doubling in ability/speed every 6 months on average.

Both of the above items are multiplicative to each other as they progress, resulting an massive jumps in processing power, and software improvements in short periods of time.

As an example if you look at some of the first console video games released (Mario, Duck Hunt, Transylvania, Excite Bike, etc) and then go search YouTube for "GTA 5 4k Ultra Hd Graphics" then click on the top one with a bike snippet and compare the graphics and depth of each it's nothing less than absolutely incredible.

Then throw in that in the same period we went from wired phone lines to a phone that can call, text, and surf the internet, and even speak to a program, tell it to create new art, stories, and recite the worlds knowledge to you plainly in your language and it will complete the entire process in less than 5 seconds.

I would say within the next 7 years we will have fully functioning human-like robots capable of most daily human tasks. I'd also guess that by this point a large amount of the human workforce will start feeling the effects of software eroding 'white collar' work.

The exponential nature of our advancement leads me to believe this is true. I would also like to note all the progress we are seeing in battery technologies and manufacturing discoveries. All three play a role with AI being the one that will most critically define the next phase of human life, whether we are extinct, in utopia or somewhere in the middle.

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Clarkeprops t1_jaqb7cl wrote

Moore’s law used to be 18months, and the limitations of physics have caused the law to invalidate in terms of transistors. Quantum computing will likely revive the trajectory in spirit, but it’ll be wonky spurts and not a gradual incline like the last 50 years.

I really don’t think we’ll have useful robots available in 7 years. They haven’t even started building them let alone have that tech. A new iPhone takes a year or two to develop, and then 6 months to a year to build. And that’s like 100 grams. These things will be 200lbs.

I don’t think we’ll have useful robots for 20-30 years, but when we do, they’ll all come at once.

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MarginCalled1 t1_jaqe6yb wrote

We're also discovering new processes, materials, designs, and other factors that allow us to continue on the trajectory I mentioned. I'm actively involved in some of this work.

The primary issue is battery size and capacity, otherwise we would have robots such as those from Boston Dynamics already out completing limited work for us. As I mentioned batteries have been a heavy area of investment with a lot of advancements and options coming commercially in the next 2-3 years.

The secondary limiting factor is the ability of current LLM and AI programs. Also note that most labs have departments that use AI to help design, test and measure new products and services, and in some cases is able to write code based on a prompt and therefor as AI improves so does the technology that supports further advancement.

I'd be willing to bet my aforementioned numbers are very close estimates of where we will be at that time.

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sbbblaw t1_jas39dr wrote

Everyone will not just have one. first the wealthy, then the rich, then those with connections. And over decades everyone else

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