[duccinator]

One of your assumptions is that we will start from 1 robot per year. I believe this is not true. I assume robots will be similar to high end cars in regards to the complexity of manufacturing. Once a company develops a prototype with AGI(mechanically the robots are almost there already, just the control systems and software that's lacking, which is supposed to be solved by AGI) it will rain VC money. The first million will be built by humans. The initial robots will take over the manufacturing only later. Setting up manufacturing that will be able to produce a million units in 2-3 years is possible. Let's say 5 years for a more plausible situation for a million robots to be built. These million will then scale exponentially. Also there is no reason to believe it will be 2^n, it can also be 3^n or 1.1^n or any arbitrary number.

[ben_w]

> One of your assumptions is that we will start from 1 robot per year.

Not per year, total. And it's not really an assumption, just a demonstration of how fast exponential growth is.

> I assume robots will be similar to high end cars in regards to the complexity of manufacturing.

Agreed. This is also the framing Musk uses for Tesla's androids.

> Once a company develops a prototype with AGI

I don't think it needs a complete solution to AGI, as other people use the term. First, all three letters of that initialism mean different things to different people — by my standard, ChatGPT is already this because it's general over the domain of text, and even if you disagree about specific definitions (as almost everyone reading this will), I think this is the right framing, as you'd "only" need something general over the domain of factory work to be a replacement factory worker, or general over mining and tunnels to be a miner, or general over the domain of roads and road users to be a driver.

This isn't to minimise the complexity of those domains, it's just that something as general as ChatGPT has been for text is probably sufficient.

> The first million will be built by humans. The initial robots will take over the manufacturing only later.

Perhaps, perhaps not. The initial number made by humans is highly dependant on the overall (not just sticker-price) cost and capabilities, so a $200k/year TCO robot that can do 80% of human manual labor tasks is very impressive, but likely to be limited to only a few roles, probably won't replace anyone in its own factory; while one which has total costs of $80k/year and can do 90% might well replace most (but not all) of the humans in its own factory; and one costing $20k/year all-in and which can do 95% might well replace all the factory workers but none of the cobalt miners or the truck drivers.

"Fully general" is the end-state, not the transition period. But with fully-general, which is a necessary condition for nobody having any more work, we get a very fast transition from the status quo to having one robot per human.

> Setting up manufacturing that will be able to produce a million units in 2-3 years is possible. Let's say 5 years for a more plausible situation for a million robots to be built.

Agreed on both.

> Also there is no reason to believe it will be 2^n, it can also be 3^n or 1.1^n or any arbitrary number.

It's a definitional requirement of exponential growth, 2^n units after n doubling periods. I anchored on a the doubling period being a year just by reference to the cost of an example existing robot, and using that dollar cost as a proxy for equivalent human labor, and I specifically noted that the other poster's estimate corresponded to a 5-8 week doubling period which didn't seem unreasonable to me. Some robot can do each specific task 4.2 times slower against the wall clock and still be just as fast as a human overall because it's working 24/7 rather than 8/5.

[duccinator]

Agreed, More clarification about the first part:

What I want to convey is that the growth function will be somewhat similar to y= c + ax^n (ignoring/collapsing into c the linear and higher order terms) rather than just y= ax^n.

The c here is robots produced via humans. I predict c will easily touch a million in 5 years with or without human help.

Even if the later bots can do only 50% the work of humans, we will still exponentially grow the robots until the humans become a bottleneck. And that 50% capability is also expected to grow exponentially.

Gemini 1.5 pro already beats most humans in most benchmarks, combine it with Sora which has a great visual world model, add some logical reasoning(architecture or scale), memory and embodiment(so it can experiment and test) and you pretty much have the seeds for an agi.

My optimistic/most probable prediction about the growth rate say it's

Regarding the last part:

My bad, I speed read your comment and didn't focus on the exponential calculations. An exponential growth is just x^n. Both x(multiplication rate(?)) and n(units of time) can be manipulated.

[ben_w]

We're broadly in agreement, the only part I'd disagree with here is:

> Even if the later bots can do only 50% the work of humans, we will still exponentially grow the robots until the humans become a bottleneck. And that 50% capability is also expected to grow exponentially.

I think most automation since the dawn of the industrial revolution has done 50% or more of the task it was automating, and although yes the impact there is exponential growth, humans are a very rapid bottleneck until the next thing gets automated — Amdahl's law, rather than Moore's.

[duccinator]

Whoops, deleted part of my response before submitting.

My optimistic/most probable predictions about the growth rate say it's wild. Like within 5-10 years with the multiple exponentials among different fields you can easily do away with most jobs unless there is a major bottleneck (I don't think there is, there is so much low hanging fruit). I guess that's what the singularity is all about. I don't think this will take multiple decades or centuries in any scenario other than the equivalent of ww3