That’s a problem with unchecked capitalism, not AI. Remember how George Jetson was able to have a house in the sky, a suitcase spaceship, full home automation, a robot maid, and supported his whole family by pushing a button? Consider how many people lived and worked on the ground beneath the cloud cover to make that possible.

Yes. As an aside, the post title reminds me of LinkedIn clickbait. Agree?

I'm seeing a lot of AI apologists in here. I want the leisure time required to create art, instead of being fucking burned out from working multiple jobs and spending all my available free time doing chores. Fuck AI, fuck the uncompensated artists and illegitimate theft of those works used to train the AI, and fuck you for normalizing it.

capitalism is the reason why AI is doing art

I like washing my dishes and do the laundry (but not washing clothes by hand, that we left for good). I feel like some manual labor each day leaves a breathing room for my mind when I don't scroll or consume content or work with my mind exhausted and occupied. It reminds me of how Don Carleone liked his garden work in the book. Just a simple labor with evident results.

The problem here that I see is that people who are the most influential and interested in these AIs most, like Muskie or Altman, never did their dishes or clothes, so this labor doesn't exist for them. Their impotency to feel, to create art, to write, to make jokes is what makes them create an AI for these tasks and since they can't tell good from bad there, they are happy with them. We don't have a soulless AI, we have an AI created for these soul-lacking suits who've never done their dishes or joked at themselves.

That's not an informed opinion, just a funny thought I had from this post <3

It’s been absolutely fascinating watching people catch on to what has happened literally every fucking time we invent paradigm-shifting advances.

Anyone who believes AI is being used for art/writing and not for other things like doing the dishes, has a myopic understanding and a strong confirmation bias. This strawman argument is defeated by a simple Google search to see the multitude of other places where this technology is benefiting humanity.

AI is helping physicists speed up experiments into supernovae to better understand the universe.

AI is helping doctors to expedite cancer screening rates.

Oh, and AI is powering robots that can do the dishes too.

I cannot overstate how much I want a robot butler to take my dirty dishes and fill and start my dishwasher for me. Or just wash the dishes "by hand". It's not that filling the dishwasher takes a long time, but it's just boring work.

TL;DR:
The misuse of technology in capitalism threatens jobs and financial stability. Affordable robots and AI could either enhance our lives or lead to unemployment and misery. Proposals like an automation tax could fund education or basic income. We need good legislation to ensure technology benefits everyone, not just profits. Recent steps like Europe's AI act offer a little hope, but a lot more political action is urgently needed.

Long Version:
From my perspective, the core of the problem is not the technology, but the reckless way we use it in our capitalistic system. Or let's say, let it be used.

For example, a light load robotic industrial arm costs merely 1k to 5k € nowadays. The software for it is cheap as well.
What the business owners and managers see, is not an awesome new invention which could help to propel humanity into the future of a robotic utopia, but cheap labour force, aiding them to cut jobs in order to maximize their profit margin as human labour is expensive.

I am sure AI and robots are our future, one way or another, whether we want it or not.
But I would like to see a future where AI and robots help us to increase our quality of life, instead of making us unemployed and endagering our financial survival.

There are various ideas how this could be achieved. I don't intend to go way too in-depth here, so just as an example:
an automation tax: estimate to which amount a business can be automated and then demand a tax proportional to how much the business was automated. Such a tax could then be used to finance higher education for people or a universal basic income. Maybe at first just an income for those who can't get a decent job due to automation.

We had similar developments as those we see now with virtually all technological advances, where human labour was replaced by more and more clever machines. Jobs where lost due to that but it could still be seen as a good thing in general.

An important difference is the level of required skills though. Someone who's job it was to go around a street and light gas lanterns every day, extinguishing them some time afterwards, was replaced by electric light grids. A switchboard operator at a telephone company, who connected people manually, got replaced by clever hardware. And so on. Those people didn't require high skills for their job though. They had it a bit easier to find another one.

This becomes increasingly difficult as AI and technology in general advances. Recently we see how robots and AI are capabable of tasks where higher skills are necessary. And it's probable that this trend will incresingly continue. At some point, we will have AI developing new and better AI. An explosion of artificial intelligence can then be expected.

It's less a problem as long as people have job prospects in higher skilled work levels. But that will, for a while at least, not be the case. This has different reasons:

As I see it, we have a "work pyramid", where the levels of the pyramid represent the required skills and the width of the pyramid levels represent the amount of available jobs. In other words, there is a way higher demand for low skilled work than for high skilled work. (BTW, what I mean by work skill is the level of specialisation and proficiency, often connected to more intense and long training and education.)

As recent developments in AI now slowly creep into higher and higher levels, people may start investing in their own education in order to even get a job. But higher skilled work is less available making it increasingly tight and problematic to get one.

There may of course also be an effect observable where new jobs are created by enabling more even higher skilled jobs due to the aid of AI, but I think this has limitations. On the one hand, the amount of jobs created that way might be insufficient. On the other hand, people might not want to or can't get an education for that.

The latter needs to be emphasized from my perspective. There are a lot of people who simply don't want to study for a decade in order to get a PhD in something so that they can get some highly specialised job. Some people like the more simple jobs, those requiring more manual than cognitive labour. And that's totally fine. People should be happy and like the work they do.

Currently, not all people even have access to that kind of education. Be it due to limitations in available places at universities / colleges, or due to financial reasons or even due to physical or mental health reasons.

You may now understand, why I see that we are going to create more misery if we don't change the way we handle such things.

I would like to see humanity in that robotic utopia. No one needs to work, as most work is done by AI and robots. But everyone can get a fair share and live a happy life however they would like to live it. They can work, take up some interest and pursue it, but no one needs to.

But currently, this is probably not going to happen. We need good legislation, need to create a system where advancements in AI and robotics can be made without driving people into financial ruin. We need to set those guarding rails which help to guide us towards such a robotic utopia.

That's why I am advocating for putting this topic higher on political priority lists. Politics worldwide don't have it even set on their agenda. They are missing crucial time frames. And I really hope they'll wake up from that slumber and start working on it. I've got some hope. Europe recently passed their first AI act.
It's a start.

Sincerely,

A roboticist working in AI and robot research.

I don’t think I could agree with this more if I tried.

Robotics researchers agree but they can't get it to work yet. Simple tasks as cleaning tables, loading dishwasher and folding laundry have been tried for the last two decades with very limited success. The ones that do succeed are usually tele-operated for a demo.

Does anyone still use scruboards and clotheslines for laundry? What about only using the sink for dishes (that one is a bit more common)? I feel automation already hit the bad things she is talking about.

AI doesn't make you art, it makes art for other people, based on yours

I don't mind AI being able to do all 4, and humans can use the AI tools to create their own art, or do it without them if they want. But I definitely agree I want manul labour done by robots.

Side note: has this woman never heard of a dishwasher? Minimal manual labour required.

I want AI (well, a robotic helper) for laundry and housework. Technically I've already got a dishwasher which is close enough there.

I'd love to have AI help me with making art just like other tools, but not take over it

While I'm not exactly a fan of AI, it does make sense that the first things we're able to replicate with AI, however terribly, are intellectual things like art and writing. While AI might be able to understand how to wash dishes, it would need a way of interacting with the physical dishes to do so, which goes beyond something a computer program can do while confined to a computer.

I wouldn't be surprised if future dishwashers and washing machines end up having little cameras and sensors so that AI can determine how best to wash them, but if anything that feature would be implemented more for collecting your private information than for any real washing benefit. Plus you'd still have to load and unload the machines - if we wanted AI to handle everything, we'd need robots, which would be waaaay more expensive, and likely something only the richest would be able to afford anyway.

Damn straight

Abso-fucking-lutely!

Honestly I just wish companies would stop trying to shove half baked AI into everything. I work for an IT consulting company and every vendor in the tech sector is shoving AI down our throats right now, and most of it, including Google's, just isn't ready yet. And they want our clients to pay subscriptions for the privilege of beta testing it. It's quite exhausting.