I just finished reading the transcript from this interview with Carl Shulman, and found these parts particularly interesting.

What percentage of people do you think would be interested in taking a job to convert a factory from making cars to manufacturing humanoid robots?  And/or making humanoid robots in those factories?

Would you take a job making humanoid robots for an AGI? Or Elon Musk, or another large Corporation?  How much would you need to be paid per hour? Are there any other concessions or terms you would require, beyond the pay?

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Dagon

Jul 15, 2023

21

I'm not likely to take a factory job per se.  I have worked in robotics and robotic-adjacent software products (including cloud-side coordination of warehouse robots), and would do so again if the work seemed interesting and I liked my coworkers.  

I'm pretty sure that humanoid robots will never become all that common.  It's really a bad design for a whole lot of things that humans currently do, and Moloch will continue to pressure all economic actors to optimize, rather than just recreating what exists.  At least until there's a singular winning entity that doesn't have to compete for anything.

Humans have an amazing generality, but a whole lot of that is that so many tasks have evolved to be done by humans.  The vast majority of those will (over time) change to be done by non-humanoid robots, likely enough that there's never a need to make real humanoid robots.  During the transition, it'll be far cheaper (in terms of whatever resources are scarce to the AI) to just use humans for things that are so long-tail that they haven't been converted to robot-doable.  

 I'm not likely to take a factory job per se.  I have worked in robotics and robotic-adjacent software products (including cloud-side coordination of warehouse robots), and would do so again if the work seemed interesting and I liked my coworkers.  

 

What about if/when all software based work has been mostly replaced by some AGI-like systems?  E.g. As described here:

“Human workers are more valuable for their hands than their heads...”  

-- https://youtu.be/_kRg-ZP1vQc?t=6469

Where your actions would be mostly directed by an ... (read more)