Joe Rogan had Rand Paul on the other day, and things went towards AI and ‘universal high income’ as they always do with him. Rand Paul was dubious. I’m with him. Every type of innovation like this has always resulted in more jobs, not less or none.
I’m in another camp. I don’t see how you get there from here.
Denninger has a great piece about autonomous EVs that explains things:
Not long ago about one third of San Francisco’s customers lost power due to some sort of problem in PG&E’s infrastructure. Problem: Those “autonomous” vehicles aren’t really autonomous. They rely on connectivity to mommy, and suddenly that’s gone. Never mind that they also rely on their “knowledge” of the topology including traffic lights, and that all changes instantly too. When their “how the world is supposed to be” changes radically, as in a blackout, they all stop and now whether you have an actual car or use them you’re hosed because if you do use them they aren’t running but they are blocking the roads.
When tech goes pear shaped, someone needs to sort it out.
I’ll go one better.
At one point we had a ‘smart’ litter box, that I dubbed “The Dookienator”. Like this one:
I think my one was a bit bigger. It most certainly had lower sides. You can see the sensors on it in the image. One end was a rake, the other a door. When a cat used it, it waited a period of time for the clumping litter to work. Then, the rake went down, ran along the thing, scooping up the dook. When it reached the end, a door opened and the rake dropped the dooky into a plastic disposable bin, not unlike a single use tupperware bin.
It worked reasonably well, until it didn’t.
First off, it needed clumping litter, which had to be filled and changed. And bargain basement litter didn’t work as well.
Then, there’s the cat. It didn’t always take a dump the same way. What happens when it shits on the rake? Well, the rake digs into it and drags it back and forth, starting a cascading failure, as the cat would still use the box and deposit more each time. And each time it got dragged back and forth.
Or, it would shit on top of the bin. The machine runs, the door opens and drops the shit on the floor. Since there’s now a shitstain on the lid, it becomes the place to shit.
God forbid that failure happen early in the week you’ve travelled for vacation.
Where’s the AI connection?
Who cleans up the shit?
Where AI excels now is content generation, code writing, and search. None of which is in the physical world. Are we going to have robots everywhere to cleanup the mess?
Doubt it.
Who fixes the robots when they screw up?
We’re far from AI being able to deal with physical things. I agree with Denninger that we don’t even see an ROI from it yet. It takes a tremendous amount of hardware and power.
And given our current finances, we are far, far, far away from anything like universal income. Someone will have to pay the morlocks to generate the UBI for the Eloi. I don’t see it happening in my lifetime.
Inspected By Pat 