
Kai-Fu Lee talks about AI, jobs, and the human heart - NicoJuicy
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/robotics/artificial-intelligence/former-head-of-google-china-foresees-an-ai-crisis
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mjfl
"AI's", even in their specialized domain of pattern recognition, still can't
distinguish a corgi from a loaf of bread or specially designed white noise.
The jobs he listed that are "in danger": truck driving, dish washing, fruit
picking both require serious advances in robotics and do not require advances
in general AI.

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danans
> require serious advances in robotics and do not require advances in general
> AI

Which if anything makes the replacement of workers in those domains even more
tractable in the near future, wouldn't you say?

Dishwashing is an interesting case, because, assuming non-standardized dishes,
glasses, and utensils, it requires solving a very general object recognition
problem for a robot arm to handle different sizes and shapes of dishes.

Andrew Ng's lab at Stanford was working on it some years ago, but I'm not sure
if they solved it more generally:

[http://www.andrewng.org/portfolio/stair-stanford-
artificial-...](http://www.andrewng.org/portfolio/stair-stanford-artificial-
intelligence-robot/)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbipWOeqF1c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbipWOeqF1c)

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zhte415
Dishwashing can surely be done/automated now? A restaurant standardises a
range of dish dimensions, these are mechanically sorted on a 'line' then
cleaned according to their specification and surface scanned for
error/reclean/escalation. No AI needed, decades old tech suffices.

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danans
In large-enough scale food serving operations (i.e. hotels) I imagine it is
already automated to a large extent.

It's the domestic dishwashing use case that Andrew Ng's robot was trying to
solve.

For smaller restaurants, the capital cost of standardized automation may be
significantly higher than the marginal cost of low-wage dishwashing labor, who
also can accomplish other tasks around the restaurant, like bussing, prepping,
and cleaning, and therefore might not be worth it.

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mark_l_watson
I always read anything by Kai-Fu Lee out of general interest and nostalgia:
many decades ago I was perusing AI books in the San Diego Technical Bookstore
and came across his Carnegie Mellon PhD thesis on the Sphinx speech
recognition system. I was mostly working as a FORTRAN scientific programmer at
that time and that ‘book’ along with the book ‘Mind Inside of Matter’ by
Bertram Raphael pivoted my career and life.

In the IEEE article, I agree with his predictions - all very reasonable.

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jxramos
“at the end they had a product [wechat] that was the most innovative social
network. It’s so good that Facebook is now copying them.”

Can anybody substantiate some concrete examples of this reverse copying by
Facebook?

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melling
Has anyone read his book?

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thesausageking
I started it and only got part-way through before putting it down. I found
nothing insightful in it. It was thought-leader drivel surrounding a core of
self-promotion.

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curiouslurker
Agreed. Here is an excerpt from the WSJ. I couldn't finish even the excerpt!

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-human-promise-of-the-ai-
rev...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-human-promise-of-the-ai-
revolution-1536935115)

