[modeless]

Yeah, I see people pooh-poohing the idea of humanoid robots being useful this decade, saying it will take at least 20 years. Oh yeah? Instead of 5 years to render all human labor obsolete, it will take 20? The magnitude of that change is so large that the implications of it happening anytime in our lifetimes are too big to ignore.

The important thing is that this is not going to be perpetually 20 years in the future like fusion. This is something that will happen.

[rsynnott]

> The important thing is that this is not going to be perpetually 20 years in the future like fusion. This is something that will happen.

Meanwhile, in 1950: "the important thing is that fusion is not going to be perpetually 20 years in the future like the eradication of all disease [there was a time in the 40s and 50s where people, a bit over-excited about then-new antibiotics and chemotherapy, often did believe this]. This is something that _will happen."

[ben_w]

> Oh yeah? Instead of 5 years to render all human labor obsolete, it will take 20? The magnitude of that change is so large that the implications of it happening anytime in our lifetimes are too big to ignore.

While true, I would suggest two things:

First, that nobody actually knows how long it will take to make fully-general AI to drive robots, humanoid or otherwise. Look how long self-driving cars have taken, and that they're still geo-fenced.

Second, that it doesn't take AI for the robots themselves to have 90% of this impact. All those jokes about AI meaning "Actually Indians"? Well, the same robots controlled not by artificial intelligence but by remote control from cheap 3rd world labourers who charge $5/day, will make current arguments about the effect of immigration on unemployment look laughably naïve. Likewise, unfortunately, crime, because one thing we can guarantee is that someone's going to share their password or access token and some rich person's cheap robot servant will become Mr. Stabby the unknown assassin.

[rhetocj23]

I think its more likely that it wont happen and the hubris of folks like you is going to look comical in hindsight.

[chronci739]

> This is something that will happen.

Not in our lifetime.

The iPhone came out less than 20 years ago.

And what, you scan QR codes at restaurants with iphones?

[TeMPOraL]

You do. And so does your non-technical mother (or a friend of your mother).

The impact of the iPhone and its competitors is felt everywhere, it diffused into every domain of people's lives. Think: the whole of social media was pretty much enabled by smartphones.

Or a more pedestrian, random example: every day I go to the office, I see endless store managers, restaurant managers, etc. walking around their store, making photos to upload to HQ. But this is merely a symptom - the actual consequence is the change in busines structure. It's because smartphones make this easy, that it makes franchise and subcontracted businesses more viable, because it's easier for the HQ to micromanage more semi-independent subordinates.

There are many, many more examples like this everywhere you look. Which is why I'm inclined to agree with Karpathy: computers, iPhones, LLMs, are all the same thing - it's just the more notable manifestations of how we've been staying on 2% growth exponential curve for many hundreds of years now, and why we'll continue to stay on this curve.

But the caveat is: that curve is getting steep enough that the world is starting to transform faster than we can handle.

[ben_w]

The iPhone came out less than 20 years ago, and now I:

• Don't get out my debit card while shopping.

• Don't get lost exploring a new city.

• Have zero-cost video calls with anyone I want.

• Use most spare moments of my time — walking to the shops, or on public transport, or while hiking in the countryside — learning something new. When I'm not too damp for the capacitive touch screen, that can be interactive lessons, not just passive; but even for the passive consumption, mobile internet beats pre-loaded content on an MP3 player.

• Have a real-time augmented-reality translator, for the German I've not yet learned while living in Berlin, and all the other languages I don't (or barely) know while travelling outside the country.

[asadotzler]

• Don't get out my debit card while shopping.

You take out your phone though. How is taking your phone out of your pocket, logging in, and tapping it on a terminal significantly different from pulling a credit card or cash from your pocket and tapping the terminal or handing it to the checker?

• Don't get lost exploring a new city. You're young, I guess. We had GPS in cars well before iPhone. GPS navigation in cars was taking off mid-90s to mid-2000s. I had a Garmin in 2002.

• Have zero-cost video calls with anyone I want. I was doing that on my laptop and desktop before iPhone. Heck, I was doing free video conferencing with European friends in 1995.

• Use most spare moments of my time I did much of this filling in empty times on my laptops years before iPhone but you are right, not as much of it as with smartphones. Cramming my day full of even more noise, however, rather than having more breaks from it, feels like devolution to me.

• Have a real-time augmented-reality translator This is an improvement over pocket electronic translators I was using in Japan in the early 2000s, but really the improvements are mostly in fidelity and usability, not in function.

Don't get me wrong, smartphones changed a lot, but it seems like you're eliding at least a decade of pre-iphone advancements here and focusing on when these tasks became easy and in everyone's hands, rather than when the tasks actually became possible and were in reasonably widespread use. You're not a youngster like many here, so I can't attribute that to naivete and that leaves me thinking haste was at work here. Happy to hear back why I'm wrong and willing to change my mind on any of these.

[ben_w]

> How is taking your phone out of your pocket, logging in, and tapping it on a terminal significantly different from pulling a credit card or cash from your pocket and tapping the terminal or handing it to the checker?

Biometric ID to make the payment. I don't so much "log in" as "touch the fingerprint scanner built into the button that switches the screen on". Though if I cared to wear it, I do also have an Apple Watch and would therefore not even need to take anything out of my pocket.

> You're young, I guess. We had GPS in cars well before iPhone. GPS navigation in cars was taking off mid-90s to mid-2000s. I had a Garmin in 2002.

Just about to turn 42. I saw GPS in use only a little later than that, 2005 I think. But:

1) dedicated GPS was never in everyone's pocket until smartphones became normalised; and even then, location precision was mediocre until assisted GPS got phased in (IIRC the first consumer phone with A-GPS was about a year before the iPhone?)

2) the maps were incredibly bad; my experience in 2005 included it thinking we were doing 70 miles an hour through a field because the main road we were on was newer than the device's map.

3) Phone map apps also include traffic alerts, public transport info including live updates for delays, altitude data (useful for cyclists), ratings and hours for seemingly most of the cafes/restaurants/other attractions, and simply has a lot more detail because it can afford to (e.g. many of the public toilets).

> I was doing that on my laptop and desktop before iPhone. Heck, I was doing free video conferencing with European friends in 1995.

Critical point: "with anyone I want". Almost every independently functioning person in Europe, has a smartphone, and can be contacted without waiting for them to sit down at a desk terminal connected to a fixed line internet connection that was currently switched on.

Back in 1995, most people didn't have the internet at all, so no possibility at all to call them over the internet; those who did have it were either academics (yay JANET), had a relatively expensive wired ISDN line, or were on dialup (charged by the minute and had just about enough bandwidth for 3fps greyscale at 160x120 or so if the compression was what I think it was), and while mobile phones did exist back then, they were (1) unaffordable unless you were a yuppie, (2) didn't have cameras, (3) even worse bandwidth than dialup because 2G.

> This is an improvement over pocket electronic translators I was using in Japan in the early 2000s, but really the improvements are mostly in fidelity and usability, not in function.

I count "point camera at poster, see poster modified with translations overlaid over all text" as very much a change of function.

I mean, I don't need to translate Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Arabic, but sometimes they come up in films and I get curious, but I can't type any of those alphabets in the first place so the only way to translate it is with something like Google Translate (and its predecessor Word Lens) that does it all as a video stream.

> focusing on when these tasks became easy and in everyone's hands, rather than when the tasks actually became possible and were in reasonably widespread use.

For much of this, that's the point. As the quote goes, "The future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed". I assumed it would be clear video calls can only be had with other people that also have video call equipment.

Or forward looking, look at how there are cars with no-steering-wheel-needed (even if Waymo has not actually removed them) full-self-drive, but they're geofenced. It's there, it's not everywhere.

With AI and human labour? Well, that's a two-part thing, the hardware and the software.

Hardware? I can buy a humanoid robot right now — it would be a bit silly, but I could, e.g.: https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005009127396247.html

Software? The software running these robots can (just about) fold laundry, or tidy up litter and dishes — you know, all the things that people keep sarcastically listing to dismiss AI, saying "wake me up when they can XYZ": https://www.youtube.com/@figureai/videos

It's just… these robots are expensive, kinda slow, and the software gives me the same vibes I got from AI Dungeon (I think I saw it shortly after they changed away from GPT-2?), so I ask the same question of those today as I asked myself of a 3D printer in 2015, of an iPhone in 2010, of a multi-language electronic travel dictionary in 2009, of a dedicated GPS unit in 2005, of a laptop in 2002: can I really justify spending that much money on this thing? And my answer is the same: no.

I can't run the fanciest AI models on any of my devices, they won't fit, I'd have to buy a much beefier machine. There's a whole bunch of things that the SOTA AI models themselves can't do yet, but which can be done by tools that AI do know how to use, but I can't run all of those tools either. Any tool that gets invented in the next 20 years (or indeed ever), if it's documented at all in any language current LLMs can follow, those LLMs will be able to use them.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not holding my breath or saying this will be soon. I've opined before that the minimum gap between "a level-5 self driving car" and "a humanoid robot that can get into any old car and drive it equally well" is 5-10 years just because of the smaller form factor having less room for compute and battery. Also, it seems obvious that "all human labour" is a harder problem than "can drive". If (if!) it is necessary to have humanoid robots in order to render all human labor obsolete, then I would be surprised if it takes any less than 15 years from today, but could be more — easily more, and by an arbitrarily large degree. I don't think humanoid robots are necessary for this, which reduces my lower bound, but at the same time it is just a lower bound.

[modeless]

If robots "only" have an iPhone-sized impact on the world I think that would be surprising but also still a huge deal worth caring about.