alt Hacker NewsI find it interesting that, several years ago when discussing AI, folks used to focus on how automation would first come for blue collar work. Things like driving being automated and truck drivers replaced. And then eventually on the horizon we would see things like this.
But we still have no self driving cars. Seems like the automation came by in the opposite direction. Perhaps driving will actually be the final thing automated.
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An LLM automating web developers with 99% success rate saves the company millions of dollars and allows them to launch products and features faster.
A truck or a car that has a 99% success rate would be the top threat to society and quickly rise to the leading cause of death under 30 if widely deployed.
Driving is heavily regulated, and there are a million interest groups lining up to sue to stop self-driving. Imagine all the people who make their money from car crashes, for example.
It seems fairer to say that the Waymo fleet has >4,000 driverless cars [1]. There is still a long way to go, but it's rising.
The physical world is still more difficult and messy than discrete logic (theorems, software).
Yeah, as always in AI hard things are easy and easy things are hard. How many times have I heard condescending comments from programmers that radiologists are just about to be replaced by AI. And well, AI turned out to get kind of okayish at programming much faster than being acceptable at being radiologist.
> folks used to focus on how automation would first come for blue collar work
Developers are guilty of hubris and they are getting slapped back to reality.
> But we still have no self driving cars.
Do you live under a rock?
Driving is actually regulated.
Something I'm noticing a lot is that automation finds easy footholds in unregulated industries because there's no basis to push back on it. And there's a lot more tolerance for poor quality work in unregulated industries too.
Broadly speaking, this is proof that there will be no jobs coming after AI.
All past inventions have put some of the most miserable humans out of a job. Farming by hand is hard, so is copying books and don't even get me started on the dullness of making clothes by hand.
Driving all day isn't all that far off, though still much better than the above and definitely better than riding horses all day.
Telegraph operators? Hell no. Dude sitting in an elevator all day? No thanks.
It's always been from the other end. This time around, there's gonna be some 10-20 years of robot manufacturing, then a universal lifetime of robots fighting misaligned robots until enough paperclips have been manufactured.
Or you know, we block out the sun and live in caves or whatever you fancy.
> But we still have no self driving cars
While I agree with your statement overall, as someone who drives everyday in LA alongside Waymos without anyone inside of them I must disagree with this aspect of it.