
Elon Musk: ‘Robots will be able to do everything better than us’ - urahara
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/17/elon-musk-robots-will-be-able-to-do-everything-better-than-us.html
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observation
I greatly admire Elon. I have to disagree with him.

Unless he is aware of something I'm not, Moravec's Paradox points to a future
of increasing employment for blue collar labour (builders, nurses), a minority
of jobs for information manipulation labour (programmers, designers) but
unemployment for huge parts of the traditional middle class gig: architects,
lawyers, accountants and engineers.

Geoff Hinton's inventions and observations are intimately tied into that. The
likely disappearance of radiologists excepting an elite few specialists
(search for "hinton radiologists"). If your work can be represented by a 2D
photograph that is not good news for you.

The self driving car doesn't change this view (short-mid term), the driving of
vehicles is a particularly constrained environment in comparison to other blue
collar tasks. People have been trying to build houses in factories for
centuries without succeeding because it turns out people with upgraded hand
tools are flexible and fast (see Toyota), it already costs next to nothing to
frame a house, prefabrication exists but is most often for high spec builds: a
clue to the economics.

As Elon has said, it takes about 20 years for autonomous cars to become
normal.

Bluntly: Can you put a robot into meatspace alongside people, pets and make it
do useful work. Boston Dynamics has them walking, just about, under
constraint. The robots in Fukushima have been something of a disappointment.

tldr; As of yet: Robotics != AI. Advances in AI do not automatically imply
robotics. AI is hard, Robotics is insanely hard.

Now please tell me I'm wrong.

