I definitely have memories linked to smell, but I can't imagine or remember and pull them up on demand, I am reminded of them when I detect that scent. I can make myself imagine/remember sourness though, but not other flavors. Just thinking of lemon, citrus, pickles, etc. makes my mouth water and start tasting sourness.
Running a business where your employees are isolated with customers in often remote areas is not a standard business. Additional safety for both parties is certainly warranted.
Financial services, especially folks who touch capital markets, does fingerprints and drug testing, but agree a standard background check should be fit for purpose for this use case assuming an exception process with a human queue processor.
Just wait till there is more supply than demand in programmers/tech. Then you'll learn how much the rest of the world sucks.
A lot of us here are earning in the top few percent of our countries households and we don't have to deal with any of the bullshit that people making 1/4th we do or less.
> Just wait till there is more supply than demand in programmers/tech.
Will this happen though? There's still a lot of work to be done, but principally I wonder if AI hype hasn't actually reduced the top of the funnel significantly. If non-programmers (i.e. those who might become programmers) believe the job "won't exist in six months", they are probably not going to set themselves up for that direction. Plus juniors starting work now will suffer from leaning on AI too much as well.
Overall I think it's counterintuitive. When I was growing up, it seemed obvious that my generation knew technology better than the last, and of course the next generation would be even more familiar. In practice though, kids these days are mostly phone-only. The ability to produce technological artifacts remains uncommon.
I don’t understand what the business is here. Is this just scraping ChatGPT results that are public to check if your business has been mentioned in the answer?
Eventually, but consider the power envelope for compute in an android is 10-100x lower than for a car*, while at the same time the range of tasks a general purpose bot has to be good at is a strict superset of driving a car, and that open source attempts at self driving cars are far behind the proprietary attempts, and that compute efficiency is only doubling every 2.5-3 years (Koomey’s Law), so expect something like 20 years before these are properly general purpose and also not remote controlled.
Still plenty of value from special purpose and from remote control, but that's the timeline for solving both at the same time.
* even with the compute being external, the global electricity supply is presently a few hundred watts/capita and already being used for all the other things we want electricity for, hence all current anger about data centers making electricity too expensive, but renewables could tilt this to 8 billion robots with 1kW compute each in as little as 10 years if we brush aside all the decarbonisation efforts and keep burning petrol in cars and gas in stoves etc., otherwise more like 15 years for that.
Those crop harvesting robots can’t do anything else though. They’re also not very good at weeding, or picking berries or tea. Things that require finesse. Also imagine not having to use the god awful amounts of pesticides we currently use. You’ve got to think of these humanoids as universal. You should be able to tell the robot picking weeds to stop and go do the grocery shopping ideally.
- plant new plants (hold plant in pot, remove plant from pot, shake excess soil, dig hole using trowel, place plant in hole, pat down earth, water plant using watering can)
- dig up weeds (using e.g. a hoe, fingers)
- set up a trellis (attach trellis to wall using drilled-in screws; wrap vines around trellis)
- water plants with hose (unwrap hose, turn on tap, spray plants)
etc.
What form factor will beat humans at all these tasks?
I did engineering for 7 years and then burned out of that and then did tech management for another 8. I’m all burnt out of that as well and honestly didn’t enjoy the last 15 years. I’ve been looking, there’s nothing even remotely close to the pay in other industries. My specification were to be able to work mostly alone and work hard for a low six figures but I can’t find a single thing that fits that bill.
I do know a guy in Florida that left tech to take people on manatee tours. He says he works 5-6 hours a day and makes more than $100k a year. I went on one of his tours, it’s a nice easy job, paddling for 2-3 2 hour sessions per day in nice warm weather.
In my experience, reading a solution and even understanding it doesn’t go very far in teaching you how to do something. I can look at calculus solutions all day but only when I actually try to solve them myself do I run into all kinds of roadblocks which is where the real learning happens.
You're right, but learning can take place when you need it. There is no real advantage to learning something ahead of time. The bottleneck is having awareness of what is out there to learn. You can't learn about what you don't know exists. Looking at calculus solutions all day should give a sense of what calculus can be used for, so that it is in your back pocket when the time you need it comes.
Well, at least it used to be the bottleneck. Nowadays you can just ask an LLM. For all their faults, they are really good at letting you know about what tools exist in out there in the world, surfacing more than you could ever come to know about even if all you did was read about what exists all day, every day.
I believe to count as an expert on something you need to have a ready compendium of knowledge ready to go. It becomes very hard to tackle problems or gain deep insights if you don’t already have knowledgeable people that have thought deeply about a particular space. Maybe when we have supremely reliable LLMs that can replace humans we might not but we’re not there yet.
> I believe to count as an expert on something you need to have a ready compendium of knowledge ready to go.
You are certainly headed in the right direction, but not quite. To be seen as an expert in the eyes of others you need to have had a vision for something and to have successfully executed on it. If the vision was dependent on calculus, then you will have reached a point where you had to learn something about calculus, of course...
But that's different to having a taskmaster tell you to learn calculus for no apparent reason. Even if you follow through and built up a huge wealth of knowledge from it, you would still not be deemed an expert by others. You're no different than an encyclopedia, which isn't an expert either. It is being able to see things others can't and the ability to act upon it that makes an expert.
Learning taking place when you need it isn't the same as never.
> Maybe when we have supremely reliable LLMs that can replace humans we might not but we’re not there yet.
Frankly, even Page Rank already replaced humans for this. But LLMs are even better at it. Humans are just that poorly performing. Like I said before, even someone doing nothing in life but looking for what exists in the world could not take in as much as databases that have indexed every written thing.
Calculus might not be the best analogy for my point since it’s pretty fundamental. When I think of an expert I think of an accomplished mathematician or a chemist, someone that can build on existing knowledge to provide new breakthroughs. You can ask an LLM for a particular formulation but you cannot make wide spanning connections to come up with something novel until you have a good understanding of a given space. Not all progress is a series of iterative problems and tasks that need to be solved. In fact for a lot of breakthroughs it’s making disparate connections.
> When I think of an expert I think of an accomplished mathematician or a chemist, someone that can build on existing knowledge to provide new breakthroughs.
I think we're on the same page here. Experts have both vision and execution. Someone who has simply learned a bunch of things, or a lot about one thing, is not what we consider an expert.
> You can ask an LLM for a particular formulation but you cannot make wide spanning connections to come up with something novel until you have a good understanding of a given space.
I don't get where you are trying to go with this. Using an LLM (or Page Rank for that matter) to search for tools that have been created/discovered necessary to fulfill execution of your vision seems to have nothing to do with what you are trying to say. Nobody would ask an LLM to do what you are suggesting, if I am understanding you correctly. LLMs are most definitely not good at that. That is AGI territory.
This is like the Indian education system and presumably other Asian ones. Homework counts for very little towards your grade. 90% of your grade comes from the midterms and the finals. All hand written, no notes, no calculators.
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