Comment by iknowstuff

> robots inevitably are going to do the majority of work - there’s no real doubt about it is there?

There's a lot of doubt that the AI and compute to enable that would happen on commercially relevant timescales.

Consider: "do the majority of work" is a strict superset of "get into car and drive it". The power envelope available for an android is much smaller than a car, and the recently observed rate of improvements for compute hardware efficiency says this will take 16-18 years to bridge that gap; that plus algorithmic efficiency improvements still requires a decade between "car that can drive itself" and "android that can drive a car". (For any given standard of driving).

And that's a decade gap even if it only had to do drive a car and no other labour.

You can't get around this (for an economy-wide significant number of androids) by moving the compute to a box plugged into the mains, for the same reason everyone's current getting upset about the effect of data centres on their electricity bills.

And note that I'm talking about a gap between them, not a time from today. Tesla's car-driving AI still has safety drivers/the owner in the driving seat, it is not a level 4 system. For all that there are anecdotes about certain routes and locations where it works well, there's a lot of others where it fails.

That said: Remote control units without much AI are still economically useful, e.g. a factory in Texas is staffed entirely by robots operated over a Starlink connection by a much cheaper team in Nairobi.