The new robot demos from Unitree make me wonder how many classes of unskilled labor are about to be automated (garbage collection, laundry & dishes, pothole repairs, last mile delivery, simple food preparation…)
There are already human-operated robots that collect garbage. Things like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pl9vRCC6V0. If the automated robots end up being anything like that, I wouldn't expect them to be silent.
Is it? Do you include everyone that’s died or lost a loved one due to personal automobiles in that assessment?
We are so far post automobile that it’s hard to compare, but many of the benefits are illusionary when you consider how society has evolved with them as commutes for example used to be shorter. Similarly the air used to be far cleaner and that’s after we got rid of leaded gas and required catalytic converters decades ago.
The automobile on its own was actually far less polluting than the horse wrt. air quality. It's just that there's a whole lot more of the former than there ever was of the latter. Even wrt. climate change, it turns out that horses produce methane emissions which are far worse for the climate than carbon dioxide.
Well you could not sue the video-editing software for someone making child pornography with it. You would, quite sanely, go after the pedophiles themselves.
This might be a good time to recommend you all read the first 5 pages of East of Eden by George Steinbeck. It’s about how the Salinas valley goes through flood and draught cycles, and how every time they’re in one cycle they forget the other one ever happened
Have you been in a Waymo recently or used Tesla FSD 14.2? I live in Austin and my Model 3 is basically autonomous - regularly going for hours from parking space to destination parking space without my touching the steering wheel, navigating really complex situations including construction workers using hand motions to signal the car.
I work in insurance - regulated, human capital heavy, etc.
Three examples for you:
- our policy agent extracts all coverage limits and policy details into a data ontology. This saves 10-20 mins per policy. It is more accurate and consistent than our humans
- our email drafting agent will pull all relevant context on an account whenever an email comes in. It will draft a reply or an email to someone else based on context and workflow. Over half of our emails are now sent without meaningfully modifying the draft, up from 20% two months ago. Hundreds of hours saved per week, now spent on more valuable work for clients.
- our certificates agent will note when a certificate of insurance is requested over email and automatically handle the necessary checks and follow up options or resolution. Will likely save us around $500k this year.
We also now increasingly share prototypes as a way to discuss ideas. Because the cost to vibe code something illustrative is very low, an it’s often much higher fidelity to have the conversation with something visual than a written document
Thanks for that. It's a really interesting data point. My takeaway, which I've already felt and I feel like anyone dealing with insurance would anyway, is that the industry is wildly outdated. Which I guess offers a lot of low hanging fruit where AI could be useful. Other than the email drafting, it really seems like all of that should have been handled by just normal software decades ago.
A big win for 'normal software' here is to have authentication as a multi-party/agent approval process. Have the client of the insurance company request the automated delivery of certified documents to some other company's email.
> "draft" clearly implies a human will will double-check.
The wording does imply this, but since the whole point was to free the human from reading all the details and relevant context about the case, how would this double-checking actually happen in reality?
> the whole point was to free the human from reading all the details and relevant context about the case
That's your assumption.
My read of that comment is that it's much easier to verify and approve (or modify) the message than it is to write it from scratch. The second sentence does confirm a person then modifies it in half the cases, so there is some manual work remaining.
The “double checking” is a step to make sure there’s someone low-level to blame. Everyone knows the “double-checking” in most of these systems will be cursory at best, for most double-checkers. It’s a miserable job to do much of, and with AI, it’s a lot of what a person would be doing. It’ll be half-assed. People will go batshit crazy otherwise.
On the off chance it’s not for that reason, productivity requirements will be increased until you must half-ass it.
The real question is how do you enforce that the human is reviewing and double-checking?
When the AI gets "good enough", and the review becomes largely rubber stamping, and 50% is pretty close to that, then you run the risk that a good percentage of the reviews are approved without real checks.
This is why nuclear operators and security scanning operators have regular "awareness checks". Is something like this also being done, and if so what is the failure rate of these checks?
Years ago I worked at an insurance company where the whole job was doing this - essentially reading through long PDFs with mostly unrelated information and extracting 3-4 numbers of interest. It paid terrible and few people who worked there cared about doing a good job. I’m sure mistakes were constantly being made.
I think we are the stage of the "AI Bubble" that is equivalent to saying it is 1997, 18% of U.S. households have internet access. Obviously, the internet is not working out or 90%+ of households would have internet access if it was going to be as big of deal as some claim.
I work at a place that is doing nothing like this and it seems obvious to me we are going to get put out of business in the long run. This is just adding a power law on top of a power law. Winner winner take all. What I currently do will be done by software engineers and agents in 10 years or less. Gemini is already much smarter than I am. I am going to end up at a factory or Walmart if I can get in.
The "AI bubble" is a mass delusion of people in denial of this reality. There is no bubble. The market has just priced all this forward as it should. There is a domino effect of automation that hasn't happened yet because your company still has to interface with stupid companies like mine that are betting on the hand loom. Just have to wait for us to bleed out and then most people will never get hired for white collar work again.
It amuses me when someone says who is going to want the factory jobs in the US if we reshore production? Me and all the other very average people who get displaced out of white collar work and don't want to be homeless is who.
"More valuable" work is just 2026 managerial class speak for "place holder until the agent can take over the task".
That sounds a lot like "LLMs are finally powerful enough technology to overcome our paper/PDF-based business". Solving problems that frankly had no business existing in 2020.
You can’t afford to buy a home because the current owners vote to restrict new housing through zoning and expensive regulation on construction permitting, so supply is limited in the places you’re trying to live (a higher income region?).
The government also subsidized mortgages for the prior generation to increase asset values and now that time is up. Subsidized demand = inflation
Finally, you likely want a bigger house than your parents had. And most people want it to be in the cooler area, not somewhere in Iowa where schools are great but restaurants and non-remote jobs are lacking
> And most people want it to be in the cooler area, not somewhere in Iowa where schools are great but restaurants and non-remote jobs are lacking
This is a fundamental problem. People in big cities are on average richer. That's not just a US thing. People in a Tier 1 city in China have a substantially higher standard of living than people in lower tier cities. There is a very real hierarchy.[1] City tier is determined by size, not income, but income tracks size.
This is the phenomenon that induces over-concentration. Go to the big city and make your fortune, or at least find enough scraps to keep you alive. That's why US homelessness is a rich city thing.
Figuring out how to make mid-sized cities, at the 0.5M to 1M population level work, is something the US currently is not doing well. Those cities have housing, but not jobs.
Supply and demand doesn’t just work in terms of raw housing supply, but in terms of housing that is “on the market”, which is a critical distinction that economists’ arguments deliberately ignore.
In my parents’ generation, it used to be that if you moved or stopped living in a house, you would sell the house in location A and buy a house in location B. Today this would be considered a critical wealth-building error / faux pas. Widespread absenteee landlordism is a new phenomenon, and the fact that we allow it to exist is a de novo policy decision constructed to inflate property value (similar to the subsidized mortgages you referenced).
The reason housing is so unaffordable in my city is not because there isn’t enough housing for the people who live here, it’s because I (along with countless other professionals) am given a choice between subsidizing the lifestyle of somebody who literally doesn’t live here if I’m living in old housing stock, or I’m subsidizing the unavoidably high cost of developing new property (and the lifestyle of property developers) if I’m living in new housing stock.
If the balance of households renting vs owning were inverted, housing would be more affordable. I agree that subsidized mortgages helped create this beast. But the superset problem is the financialization of housing, that the American dream stopped being about the picket fence and started being about securing a passive income / rent-seeking on that picket fence. There are many policies that contributed to this problem.
No mainstream economists touch this problem because we’ve become a country of rent-seeking. So right-leaning economists will say we just need to relax regulation (read: increase the profit margin of property developers) and liberal economists will say we need more “affordable housing” (read: remove more housing stock from the market, for the benefit of a few lucky souls), while neither addresses the core problem of putting median housing titles in the hands of median people, which was perfectly normal from the 50s-80s, before our current system crystallized.
In our current system, building marginal housing and reducing regulation more benefits capital (the top 1% of asset holders; the property developers and the people who can afford to subsidize their profits), not the people who actually live here.
Emotionally, I agree that the current system sucks. But how exactly do you "[put] median housing titles in the hands of median people"? Government seizure and redistribution of property titles? That's where I always get stuck: criticizing society ills is much easier than proposing concrete, pass-able policy.
"No mainstream economists touch this problem" because it's a damn hard problem without painless solutions.
I mean the problem will solve itself eventually. As wealth continues to centralize and urbanization continues unchecked, the “renter” voting block will eventually be state-level majorities in places like New York and California.
There are plenty of ways for people to “vote themselves” property, whether it happens peacefully or not is a decision of those in power. The spectrum runs from land value tax to punitive landlord taxes, improving tenant rights, squatter rights, and outright seizure.
I don’t know which path we’ll go down, but some step in that direction feels inevitable within the next 60 years.
It is precisely this anxiety that is the issue being discussed. Parents are terrified of what might happen to their kids, so too little happens to their kids (both good and bad)
Skilled labor still has some legs.
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