I’m not an AI techie and I’m not well educated on LLMs/AI in general. The issue I’m having is the dichotomy between how people talk about it. I’ve heard completely opposite ends of the spectrum. From AI is quickly becoming advanced enough to threaten human society, all the way to its a glorified dictionary/search engine that can’t really do much of anything. I know Lemmy has a steep anti-AI slant. But, can someone talk about this in a way I can wrap my head around why the divide seems so big?
While I agree with the sentiment this is happening and no social safety net or wealth distribution is on the horizon, this has absolutely nothing to do with AI. This is a marketing talking point pushed by people like Elon Musk in order to drum up investments. A lot of the automation that is happening in factories is just a continuation of the same automation that already started back in the 80s. Advancements in LLM technologies can benefit some parts of this automation, but often only tangentially. The US has also been lagging behind on places like Europe, where labor costs are higher so automation pays off faster, and China where the tech is cheap and produced locally, so it costs less to automate. The US is now catching up and there’s a lot of AI washing going on.
The biggest issue is the misrepresentation of the technology. LLMs are a very interesting technology and can be very powerful, but also has huge limitations. However anyone claiming it’s actual intelligence is simply wrong. It is marketed as being the AI we’ve known from sci fi stories, but it simply isn’t. It can do what it can (predict the next token based on the tokens that came before) and that’s all it can do. The people behind it will claim it generalizes to actual intelligence and thus will allow for human like robots, actual Star Wars droids, but that simply isn’t true.
Now this isn’t to say stuff like machine vision doesn’t benefit from more powerful GPUs with more memory for example. The investment made by the AI industry in this regard does help a lot, although the increased prices don’t really help. Stuff like machine vision also gets AI washed, just slap the label AI on it and get investments, but it’s basically the same technology that’s been around for a while. A company like Tesla claiming their “AI” “self driving” hardware somehow generalizes to humanoid robots is pretty dumb and just the latest in the long line of Elon grifts.
But like I said factory automation is proceeding rapidly, just like it has since the 80s. I feel like the impact of AI on this is pretty minimal. The warehouse robots used by Amazon for example are extremely capable and are dumb as bricks. Which is a good thing in a warehouse environment where you need stuff to be very reliable and predictable and not prone to random behavior like LLM based stuff almost by definition is. Those warehouse robots are also not humanoid, because that would be very dumb. Often factories and such are limited by their design having to accommodate the human form. Designing such places from the ground up for automation and using robots shaped for the job is much better.
This doesn’t take away from the big issue where automation has been proceeding rapidly since the 80s with no regard to any impact on society. In the past a large amount of the labor force was working in factories. With those jobs either being automated away or just moved off shore, it has pushed the population into the service industry. If that industry is now also automated and off shored, it leaves very little room for regular people to get a job. This should absolutely be talked about as a big issue. But hopefully we can talk about it without repeating billionaire marketing bullshit.
The 1780s, that is.
A few months ago, I‘d second this statement. Today, I do not.
AI/LLM‘s have progressed very fast and you might oversee some advancements. I work in automation and robotics as well and yes, there are new sort of robots entering the factories: Humanoids.
At a fraction of costs, fast to setup with the only drawback that it takes tiem to train them by its video footage. But there will be always stupidos that train them and take off their job by doing so.
You’re talking about the old robots. The new ones will enter areas that couldn’t be automatized before. Just read articles about car factories and Humanoids. It’s not about replacing industrial robot arms, it’s about replacing the last remaining manual tasks. And service industry will be impacted as well.
Then mix this together with the frightening behavior that those AI agent unboxing from OpenAI has shown: They knocked the door over weeks, in masses, and coordinated until they found a way into it. There‘s always a small crack to enter. This is a new dimension.
There is a reason that the US bans foreign-built mobile robots now.
Some factories already run “lights out” - but there will always be manual tasks… deciding what it is the factories produce in the first place being one example.
Machine vision is literally machine learning/ai.
Where do you think the LLM algorithms came from? It’s just translating language into a easily processable form and that doing a little image processing on that, in a sense.
Token processing and image processing share similar roots, but I’d say each is a specialized branch of a common ancestor rather than either being derived from the other.