[a_vanderbilt]

I found the AI 2027 paper to be overly optimistic, but not wholly fantastical. This paper feels wildly speculative, and relies on premises I am not confident even pass surface reasoning. Even under optimistic conditions, we are not going to see robots "capable of 95% of all cognitive and physical tasks" by 2035. Nor do I think a 74% unemployment rate is even remotely possible. Economic collapse would implode AI development long before those figures were plausible.

[skybrian]

The "and physical" is the part I'm particularly skeptical of. Sure, drones are scary, but nobody's really solved getting a robot to deliver a package to your front porch in a civilian setting, and it seems unlikely to be solved quickly.

[foobiekr]

A lot of it relies on what is effectively "the AI will be so smart it can solve anything" magic.

[markstos]

The book Sentient is not about AI but abount the most amazing physical senses some other animals have.

The theme of the scientific findings is that while humans excel with none of our physical sensors, we do very well across the board in making use of them thanks to our relatively huge brains.

And fantastical amounts of compute power is exactly what are handing over to AI. The fact that their training data isn't perfect may matter less.

[CamperBob2]

but nobody's really solved getting a robot to deliver a package to your front porch in a civilian setting, and it seems unlikely to be solved quickly

If you don't care about getting the drone back, it does simplify the problem somewhat.

[burlesona]

Zipline is growing fast… it’s drone-based, but it definitely delivers packages to your front door. (https://www.zipline.com/)

[Grombobulous]

Nobody’s even solved a self-driving vehicles yet, not in in the sort of “they took over everything and put every uber and truck driver out of business” kind of way.

Maybe they will soon but it’s massively far behind the kind of timeframe AI 2027 would have implied.

[wavemode]

I actually think self-driving is one of the easier paths of development. The main thing holding it back right now is regulation and liability.

But, if you could wave a wand and eliminate all legal and liability hurdles to self-driving, automobile deaths would plummet. They're way safer than the average human driver. The technology is definitely capable, our society just isn't ready for it.

[Grombobulous]

I disagree. It has not been figured out enough to take humans out of the equation from a functional standpoint, not just a regulatory one.

This past 4th of July weekend a Waymo ran over an actively burning firework in a low speed scenario, the kind of thing a 95 year old driver would have avoided.

https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/waymo-car-travels...

[reasonableklout]

Do autonomous systems need to solve humanoid robotics to exert power over the physical world? Seems like a lot can be done with drones.

[skybrian]

Military power, sure. In Ukraine they hit everything they can see.

But during peacetime, you don't make money running a delivery service that way, so it's not going to replace those jobs.

[BurningFrog]

> Nor do I think a 74% unemployment rate is even remotely possible

250 years of constant automation has never produced large scale unemployment, despite obsoleting everyone's jobs several times over.

[tired-turtle]

Don’t you think the speed at which obsolescence occurs matters? There’s a bit of survivorship bias here, in the sense of

“I’ve been pulling my sled across this lake for 50 winters even when the temperature went above freezing. Never fell through!”

[fulafel]

It has. For example mechanization of argiculture in places where it didnt coincide with a manufacturing boom (latin america, india, africa) resulted in shantytowns and long term unemployment.

[BurningFrog]

Those are pretty dysfunctional economical and political systems.

In the industrialized world, old professions disappear all the time, and are replaced with new ones. I saw somewhere that it's about 2% per year.

[fulafel]

In a post-AGI scenario, a tech booster POV could be seeing the left behind parts of the populace the same way.

[kypro]

If I took you back to 2020 and said in a little over 5 years there will basically be no human coders writing code anymore you'd almost certainly not believe me.

And similar things can be said about many technologies in recent history – cars replacing the horse, first flight to man on the moon, even the creation of early internet to its mass adoption.

You're talking generally a decade or 2 for society to completely change from the rapid advancement of a new technology.

I'm not saying I agree with the 2035 prediction, but it doesn't seem impossible to me, if AI can help us improve the pace that we're already developing disruptive robotics.

In 2010 the idea of self-driving cars and autonomous delivery drones seemed very sci-fi and a long way out. But today, just 15 years on, these things are increasingly starting to be rolled out.

If they dropped that 95% number to 50-60%, I think I'd probably lean towards agreeing. Not because it makes sense in my gut, but because the logical part of my brain knows exponential trends (if one exists) do things that we wouldn't instinctively predict. But even if you assume exponentials 95% does seem very high.

[skybrian]

You say "just" 15 years, but Waymo is still only available in a few cities. That seems more like a slow, cautious rollout to me, not a fast takeoff. Society has had a lot of time to get used to (and tired of) the idea and come up with regulations.

My guess is that the deployment of other types of robots will often be a similarly slow grind.

That's unlike the Internet, smart phones, and coding agents, which got user adoption at a much quicker pace.

[nullandvoid]

Waymo was largely built pre-LLM and AI level funding - I think it might be a somewhat apple and pairs comparison.

[skybrian]

Maybe research and development will speed up a bit, but I think it’s still going to require a lot of expensive experimenting in the real world.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "If I took you back to 2020 and said in a little over 5 years there will basically be no human coders writing code anymore you'd almost certainly not believe me."

It's 2026, one year after your predicted date, and that still hasn't happened though.

[somebodythere]

The thing about exponentials is if you admit 60%, it's pretty easy to admit 95%.

[kypro]

That's a fair push back.

For a specific technology to become viable, you often need progress in several individual technologies to occur. Some of these will be exponential and surprise us, but many will see slower progress.

Either way, I suspect progress in robotics will be slower than AI, but I also think we'll see a lot of investment in robotics over the next decade given that AI opens up a lot of new potential applications for robotics.

I suspect any task that doesn't require extreme battery life or extreme dexterity will be doable by robots much sooner than most people think today. I think we could have decent-ish humanoid robots within a decade – robots that can prepare food, clean hotel rooms, empty bins, etc. I think Elon's bet on Optimus is quite likely to be viewed as very ahead of the curve with time.

However, it will take much longer for robots to do everything a human body can, but then most jobs don't require we push the physical limits of human body.

That's why I think 60% is reasonable. And even then I'm not saying it will happen, I just don't think that's a bad bet if given even odds.

[skybrian]

Depends on what kind of curve it is. 60% reliable is useless in most safety-related fields and getting to near-perfect reliability is tough.