[ncr100]

A useful robot with initial purpose that takes job away, now, primarily from black and brown people. To be clear this is a tech product that increases profitability for a company.

Are ethics discussed in the presentation?

Social equity?

Watching now ... it's 3hrs .. looking for ethics consideration.

.. ok he simplifies what an Economy is, to the theoretical. Can an economy be one which frees marginalized people from poverty? I'm skeptical and hope Tesla has an Economist, on stage, shortly. Musk is claiming good intention, explicitly.

Q: So, who does this? Who is planning future economies where marginalized groups are even further marginalized?

Edit: down voting is perplexing, it's a reasonable topic for discussion given the significance of this tech neutralizing Labor.

Edit 2: we should have qualms about technology that disrupts sensitive populations. I have no qualms about introduction of things like Docker which disrupted the people who wrote lots of crazy scripts to help deployment of crazy configurations to process data on collections of servers. The key is the marginalized community, who is not in a position to be able to pivot because they are marginalized.

[bdlowery]

When shopping carts were introduced into stores people were angry because it would “take away the jobs of the employees shopping for you”.

That’s obviously ridiculous. They went and did more productive things in the store. The same will apply here.

[ncr100]

He's literally talking about eliminating jobs from the Tesla factory in Fremont. And then he takes a further step and discusses in eliminating all manual labor.

I think it's reasonable to consider the chance a fully mobile non-human humanoid will actually disrupt labor more so than the invention of a shopping cart.

I'm talking about marginalized people who are under educated and have very good reason to believe that they are not a part of the broader society, black and brown people. This is a real group of people.

Take away their labor opportunity and they're not going to suddenly become managers. Maybe someone will train them so that they become robot repair technicians or something else which hasn't been a likely to be automated.

Who is thinking about this for them? They're certainly not thinking about it because they don't think they belong in this society, already, based on how they are actively marginalized, based on evidence.

So it's left up to us as technologists to think about the societal impact of the technology that we're working on.

Edit: furthermore, I have worked in a grocery store and it was not great. I had to go out of my way to engage with people, to get some of that juicy worthwhile socialization, because the job was to move stuff around. Move new blocks of cheese into the freezing cold open refrigerators. Move purchased groceries from the cash register to people's cars. Move carts from the parking lot back into the store. Not great labor. So having a personal shopper job would be awesome by comparison.

[panick21_]

People have been making the same argument for 300 years with every technological innovation.

Literally no invention, not this robot by Tesla certainly, would ever have even 5% of the impact the tracks and other farm tools had.

[ncr100]

I think the argument that technology disrupts is an easy one to make. The impact of a fully ambulatory robot could be enormous.

So I think it's worthwhile to consider the ethical impact, if the projected success of this robot comes true.

[ztratar]

If you're in tech and worried about job losses, you may want to look at how history has literally done this 100 times in the past to numerous industries.

Bringing race into this is nonsense. If the robots are taking jobs, do you think they care what color someone is? They don't. And it's literally going to come for everyone's current job. Which is a good thing, so long as we have an economic system that evolves alongside it. This is quite literally the only way to eliminate poverty in totality.

[ncr100]

I have and am!

I argue that different races are impacted differently by different technology disruptors.

Specifically when a robot replaces a manual labor job in a warehouse in Fremont then I believe that's more likely to impact a black or brown human.

Eliminating poverty won't come around for a long time. Just because there's cheaper labor does not mean that humans who are displaced by that cheap labor are going to somehow get free money.

Bonus diversity stats for Fremont: "Tesla publishes its first diversity report, here are the key numbers" https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/12/04/tesla-publishes-its-firs...

[naveen99]

Elon mentions near the beginning that optimus being developed inside tesla, a public company [as opposed to spacex which is a private company], as part of the governance model.

But this is a recruiting / technical event, so you won't find more ethics considerations in the rest of the video probably.

[ncr100]

Well that's sad.

This has a dramatic impact on society. It's not just like a new GPU technology. This is labor.

Consideration for disrupting labor inequity is going to get worse.

The fact that the money people who own Tesla stock are supposedly in charge is a distraction.

Stock owners don't have motivation to make a long-term socially equitable product.

[tim333]

It's a bit of a separate issue. When Ford first mass produced cars if probably reduced jobs in buggy whip manufacturing and similar fields but that's more a thing for the government to maybe worry about rather than car makers.

[ncr100]

Government is ineffective and is responsive to the change after the facts up to the limits of its constituents.

The constituents are lobbyists and poorly organized under-unionized civilians.

So, I don't expect the government to meaningfully produce any accommodation ahead of time, at least in the United States.

Therefore it's up to us as technologists who effectively represents the brains of Tesla, to do that ethical thinking.