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Equivalent-Ice-7274 t1_iu2s7zn wrote

Reply to comment by amobiusstripper in The Great People Shortage is coming — and it's going to cause global economic chaos | Researchers predict that the world's population will decline in the next 40 years due to declining birth rates — and it will cause a massive shortage of workers. by Shelfrock77

Robots will NOT be near human in 2 years. Are you saying that in 2 years, a robot will be able to drive itself to someone’s house in a work truck, and perform any plumbing job that a human can? More like 20-30 years.

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red75prime t1_iu4c2ky wrote

I agree on the unrealistic expectation of 2 years. The closest thing to human agility we have is Boston Dynamics robots which use hand-tuned dynamic control algorithms. This approach is not scalable by itself and it's unlikely that it will be integrated with machine learning approaches in 2 years. Or that the transformer-based robotic control will scale to realtime control of humanoid (or equally complex) robot.

But at some point AI controlled robots will start feeding back into manufacture of AI hardware. At that point AI-based economy will explode by removing inefficiencies of human-based economy (coordination problems, lengthy learning time, wages and so on).

It will not take much time after that for operating cost of a universal robot to sink below minimum wage.

Every year that passes increases probability of such an explosion. So 2040s can (and most likely will) be in an entirely different era than 2030s.

That's why I distrust confident technological predictions on the scales of 20 years or more.

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Equivalent-Ice-7274 t1_iu4crzn wrote

The main problem besides the AI is the robot hands. We have nothing that is even close to the strength, speed, flexibility and agility of the human hand, and it may be an engineering problem that would require exotic materials to achieve.

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red75prime t1_iu4hadn wrote

Ah, engineering problems. They are certainly a factor. However, AIs seem to be good at coming up with potential solutions (take AlphaFold for example) and prototyping and testing could be made highly parallelized in AI-controlled R&D.

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Equivalent-Ice-7274 t1_iu4htyp wrote

It’s possible, but it’s not close to being developed yet. I am baffled by the people who actually believe that we will have robots that can do anything a human can do in 2-3 years.

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red75prime t1_iu4in64 wrote

Yep, Gates' law: "Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years."

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