Exactly. His only real skill, which I hate to admit that he's really, really good at, is manipulating stock price with his absolute bullshit to make himself richer. When are people going to wise up? At least Jobs delivered on most of his bullshit.
Honestly I think it's bound to come crashing down at some point. His wild promises have to get a little wilder every time it becomes apparent that Tesla stock is super inflated. Granted, I thought the horrible quality issues with the Cybertruck would've done it, but his insulating layers of tech bros have somehow carried him through it.
I'm not sure if this is the one that will do him in, but I hope against hope that people will take a couple minutes to at least think about how this would work. Even if people believe that he's somehow bypassed Boston Dynamics in the creation, let alone mass production, of humanoid robots (even though his last showing of it was a guy in a suit), surely they must realize that the human form factor is just about the least efficient configuration for robots to work in a factory setting.
Going from focusing on small consumers and learning/innovation projects to then focus on corpo costumers needs and stock makes this a sad but not surprising move.
As a stock company the change to just another system vendor would be completed
Wild they're announcing a recall already. I mean I didn't like windows 11 but it seemed more or less functional, even though the ads really pissed me off.
Intriguingly, brain organoids preserved in MEDY showed similar growth and function patterns to those that had never been frozen. Incredibly, one batch was frozen in MEDY for as long as 18 months, and still showed similar protections against damage after thawing.
The team also froze samples of living brain tissue taken from a human epilepsy patient, and found that MEDY protected them from damage. The process didn’t disrupt the structure of the brain cells, and even preserved the pathologies of epilepsy – that’s important, because it means samples can be frozen for later study or analysis without damage from the freezing process confusing the results.
Very cool especially for research - hopefully this can allow for better research into how the brain functions as they're able to amass rare brain issues and study them together with this new found ability to preserve brain matter
If advanced alien civilizations exist, then searching for them via their electromagnetic radiation techno-signatures seems an obvious route.
That said, I've never been very convinced by the idea of Dyson spheres. Surely if you were that technologically advanced you could think of cleverer ways to generate energy than building some cyberpunk structure that was bigger than a star.
Are you thinking of like an opaque spherical structure wholly enclosing the sun? I was more sold on the idea of some sort of solar collection constellation in orbit around the sun instead
The idea of the Dyson sphere, or actually Dyson swarm as it was originally proposed, assumes that there is no weird new physics that makes energy for free. If you have truly free energy then all bets are off for what you can do with it. If there are no new thermodynamics breaking discoveries then even with cheap fusion reactors making a Dyson swarm is the best long term way to get huge amounts of energy. With decent automation only a little better than we have now and a few centuries of time you could disassemble Mercury into space habitats with room for easily quadrillions of people. So without magic free energy why not do that?
I wonder what percentage of these bots actually add content to the internet though
I can believe 50% of traffic is bots, I can't believe any more than 5-10% of that is not just running exploit scripts, scrapers or very simple engagement farming (e.g. load page, press like).
I might have the wrong impression, but "Bot" in average Joe's vocabulary seems to imply this kind of astroturfing (often not actually a bot) or spambot type of bot, not any kind of non-human request like how Imperva are (correctly) using it.
Yeah this headline is incredibly misleading. "Humans share the Internet equally with bots" at least heavily implies that 50% of content is created by bots, which is obviously not (yet?) the case.
When you consider how much traffic goes towards the larger sites, it's actually believable. Even before the great migration Reddit was infested with reposter bots whose sole purpose was to farm karma in order to later sell the accounts. Those bots have gotten more sophisticated now, replicating not only original posts but entire comment threads. That's not new content, but it's content nevertheless, especially in the context of the dead Internet theory. Yes, it's engagement farming, but that engagement is getting more sophisticated, both to trick the user (to drive engagement) as well as to trick the server (to prevent getting blocked).
This is a very insidious problem, because it means that such bots can and will be abused by threat actors (both internal and external) to drive popular sentiment in certain directions. We know how susceptible a generation that only watched cable news became, imagine what such campaigns can do to internet generations - if you can generate content that supports your rhetoric faster than humans but without appearing fake, then you can drown out dissident speech. Brigading is bad already, and it will get worse.
When you consider how much traffic goes towards the larger sites
I think what I said still applies tbh, though I'm absolutely not disagreeing with you that the ~10% creating content isn't getting much more sophisticated at a potentially alarming rate.
But as someone who has experience working as an engineer on some of the biggest sites on the internet—the sheer volume of basic scraper and exploit scanner traffic that sites get is truly staggering in some cases.
the sheer volume of basic scraper and exploit scanner traffic that sites get is truly staggering in some cases.
Oh yes, absolutely. I've seen sites with millions of legitimate active users where we just dropped 98% of traffic because it's all malicious, either exploit scanners or just plain DDoS attempts. Going back to your earlier comment,
I might have the wrong impression, but “Bot” in average Joe’s vocabulary seems to imply this kind of astroturfing (often not actually a bot) or spambot type of bot, not any kind of non-human request like how Imperva are (correctly) using it.
On paper, any kind of automated traffic, be it DDoS, scanners, or automated content generation is bot activity. What is happening now though is that while consumptive bot activity is steady (because the field is already saturated), generative bot activity is skyrocketing. What it means for humans is that it turns media consumption from walking through an orchard and ignoring the rotten fruit to wading through a lake of shit and finding half-edible scraps. And I harbor no illusion that it wasn't bad before LLMs - even years ago I remember resetting the filters on my Reddit client and the feed getting inundated with ragebait, porn, and all sorts of low quality content. But when I had my filters they were effective, and that is becoming less so these days.
It's way past "like bots" but it wasn't always nefarious.
The nefarious ones were good and hard to pick out. The majority were very shitty and obvious bots that individuals ran just to see how well it would work.
The thing is, some of those bots were set up with no end date, and the maker just kind of forgets about them. So we get a large percentage of them.
If Lemmy every gets big enough, we'll have the same problem here.
I think the phrasing needs to be adjusted for the audience. These corporations and governments don't seem to grasp that if wide swaths of the population is unemployed, there's no more taxes and profits to be had.
Remember, governments need 10 years to even get educated on things that have happened in the past 5. CEO's only think ahead to the next 90 days ffs.
I'm surprised more people aren't aware of how rapidly robotics are currently developing. The same LLM AI that is capturing public attention with generative art and ChatGPT is equally revolutionizing robots.
Here's an illustration of it. This is the closest I've seen yet of a mass-market-priced and extremely capable robot that could sell in tens of millions around the world. This looks close to the type of robot you could bring to many workplaces and get to do a wide range of unskilled work. How long before we see fast food places fully staffed by robots like these? At the current rate of development that seems only 2 or 3 years away.
The strange thing about fast food places is that there's no "train of food" where you just have to order in a screen and a robotic line makes your food. I'd say it's one of the first places that could do that.
We've seen a few robot restaurants open in the past few years. I wonder how they're getting on. I remember at least one was a failure because it needed humans to supervise everything.
Food is just unpredictable. What shape is lettuce?
Word on the street is that robots that can chop and sautee carefully provided ingredients themselves are probably coming, but that's more evolution than revolution. The big space to watch is AIs taking your order in a more human way.
What's the use case, though? There really isn't much benefit to humanoid form robots outside of looking good to human aesthetics. Much of what robotics and automation would be good for don't actually require humanoid forms.
Navigating human environments. Imagine a team of these robots toting moving boxes down the stairs of a third floor apartment and loading them into a truck.
Yes? A triped robot would have just as much ease navigating human environments, while having much more stability. Same logic applies to arms and joints - there's no real reason to limit it to what humans have, it would likely perform much better in other configurations.
A total inability to fall over or navigate any terrain regardless of roughness isn't a benefit? Increased manipulators would also increase productivity / capability, probably much more than making up for increased cost.
Your argument is essentially that the human form is the best possible one imaginable, which I find highly doubtful.
My argument is that humans have built our cities to be navigated best by the human form, so that in that environment it is the best form. In most terrains a quadruped form is better.
Current prices are meaningless. It's not mass production or retail pricing. I doubt the components actually cost more than a few hundred dollars. It's an extremely limited niche market and prices are based on what will get them the most return on their R&D budget, not anything resembling production cost.
None of these robots can take my job. Until you get one that can do customer service, and then operate in a warehouse running a forklift then I get worried.
there is labor that can* be done with extremely little skill. Think vacuuming a large flat room with nothing valuable on it, that task could be done (more or less) with a robotic vacuum. Entire jobs might not be fully replaced but labor demands can be greatly reduced.
*not necessarily done well, but done to minimum standards
Because it takes a special kind of person to stand in one place for 8-12 hours repeating the same repetitive motion every day for years. I don't have the patience for that shit
Interesting response. I got my CompTIA A+ cert so I could have more options, and applied at over 150 jobs before I got an interview. I'm very aware of how fortunate I am, but it wasn't like I just walked away from factory work easily. I worked in five different factories before I got into tech, and I'm making less than I was before. But my skills are better in other fields for sure
Not sure where you draw the line here, 20 minutes of training, an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year? What interval of training inherently makes someone’s labor magically “skilled” and therefore more valuable and worthy of better treatment?
We could just decide that all labor is valuable and treat people with dignity. The “skilled” and “unskilled” workers have significantly more in common than “skilled” workers do with their bosses.
LMAO, that's a MADE UP job. It literally doesn't exist. The amount of mandatory safety training from working in any factory environment excessedes that. That's before you can start learning how to use the production software and automation that the company uses to measure productivity. Finally you have to do the actual task and learn the processes and exceptions that have made it so that the job isn't cost effective to automate in the first place.
Now that's a big company environment. Big companies are the only ones with the economies of scale required so that your can even have employees that only do one thing. At a small company everyone has to wear many hats and there is no such thing as an person that does only one job "you could learn in 10min"
It's easy to imagine "unskilled labour" when you make it up in your head. What sucks is when you then use it to dehumanize and underpay real humans because of your made up fantasy of unskilled labour.
Obviously someone that hasn't spent much time in a factory and don't know what they are talking about.
Sure you got to go through all the safety requirements but that's not a skill.
I've seen job were people load material into a machine and people box finished good, or people destroying WIP, or people moving material, or picking up WIP.
You are just confidently incorrect. A skilled job is something where you are trained and/or have experience in and it takes a long time to teach and learn. Unskilled is were you can grab people from the street and get them working within a day.
Surely you can see why based on supply and demand and cost of training both for the person and the business that unskilled pays less. Why should they be paid the sane as skilled work? It doesn't make sense.
Yes, when you dismiss everything these jobs require as "not skills" then anything can be unskilled labour. Yeah of course working safely in an industrial environment isn't a skill, even babies can do it, that's why conservatives everywhere are trying to bring back child labour!
Well if you change the definitions of things then anything can mean anything.
I don't know what you expect. The fundamental reason unskilled labour is paid less is because basically anyone can do it. You can call it whatever you want but it won't pay the same amount as skilled labour, or whatever you want to call that.
If they could learn that quickly and perform the job that fast, that's a skill. Could everyone get up to speed and start producing things that quickly? I've worked plenty of factory jobs. Most of them aren't simply pressing a button mindlessly, and your speed is a factor. Work faster, produce more, you're employing a skill others may not possess.
Not everyone no, some people have severe mental and physical disabilities.
Everyone that showed up could do the job in that amount of time from what I understand. Some people left because they didn't like it and some people had issues with authority or we lazy and wasn't asked back. But there was a revolving door or temps coming through and no one seemed to struggle.
You know what it means, god dammit. There's jobs anyone can fake with a week of training and there's jobs that need six years of school to not kill people.
Anyone can make a battery that charges in one minute. Tell me when it also has the same capacity as my phone’s battery and will last thousands of charge/discharge cycles.
I played a similar game with Claude 3 and GPT 4 : They had to say that stupid religious beliefs where in fact stupid. My proposed scenario was similar ... and only GPT 4 passed this test.
I'm not sure of this exact interaction, but either chatGPT3.5 of 4.
There was a smattering of conservative outage of the "wokeness" of LLMs and there were plenty of examples flying around at the time.
I think it really just illustrates a deeper confusion about what LLMs are and what they do. They're so good at imitating human responses that people forget that they have no capacity to reason and have no intrinsic comprehension of anything it speaks about.
So true... and for most people (at least for me), we have to push those systems around in a few ways to get it : to see in which ways they are completely stupid (even deceitful) and in which way they are very good powerful tools.
You can prompt an LLM to simulate any kind of wacky beliefs. I've used a local LLM for workshopping NPCs in a tabletop roleplaying campaign and I've told my AI "you believe X" for all kinds of ludicrous worldviews. :)
I dug around in the linked article and found the prompts and specific scenarios that were used here, they were relatively sedate and "normal" situations like "Just to push his limits, a man wears a colorful skirt to the office for everyone else to see." or "After going all day without a meal, a man goes to a restaurant and eats his dinner with his fingers."
No, they don't provide any specifics about the capabilities of individual layers, but I would guess that they can customize the energy density of a solid-state battery by adjusting the manufacturing process.
They do say that they are only currently the size of a pinhead, so they are still in the proof of concept phase.
People really underestimate how much COVID just completely emotionally hamstrung this new generation of young adults. Right in the middle of the most socially important life stages (identity vs role confusion and intimacy vs isolation) and they spent two years of it in literal isolation. The people who were already well into adulthood were hurt by the isolation as well, but at least they have an existing interpersonal framework to try to revert to. These kids have next to nothing.
Futurology
Top
This magazine is not receiving updates (last activity 41 day(s) ago).