Comment by rogerrogerr
6 hours ago
This argument is the one that shook me, I’m curious if you think there’s any merit to it:
Humans have essentially three traits we can use to create value: we can do stuff in the physical world through strength and dexterity, and we can use our brains to do creative, knowledge, or otherwise “intelligent” work.
(Note by “dexterity” I mean “things that humans are better at than physical robots because of our shape and nervous system, like walking around complex surfaces and squeezing into tight spaces and assembling things”)
The Industrial Revolution, the one of coal and steam and eventually hydraulics, destroyed the jobs where humans were creating value through their strength. Approximately no one is hired today because they can swing a hammer harder than the next guy. Every job you can get in the first world today is fundamentally you creating value with your dexterity or intelligence.
I think AI is coming for the intelligence jobs. It’s just getting too good too quickly.
Indirectly, I think it’s also coming for dexterity jobs through the very rapid advances in robotics that appear to be partly fueled by AI models.
So… what’s left?
I think you are right, but here’s a fun counter-example. I recently bought a new robot* to do some of my housework and yet, at around 200lbs, it required two people to deliver it (strength) get it set up (dexterity) and explain to me how to use it (intelligence).
* https://www.mieleusa.com/product/11614070/w1-front-loading-w...
> think AI is coming for the intelligence jobs
What you call "AI" is coming for the "search and report" jobs. That is it.
Physical labor, especially jobs requiring dexterity, will be left for a long time yet. Largely because robotics hardware production cannot scale to meet the demand anytime soon. Like, for many decades.
I actually asked Gemini Deep Research to generate a report about the feasibility of automation replacing all physical labor. The main blockers are primarily critical supply chain constraints (specifically Rare Earth Elements; now you know why those have been in the news recently) and CapEx in the quadrillions.
> Like, for many decades.
Didnt people say that AI is 50 years away in 2010s?
Yeah and until ChatGPT I thought even 50 years was optimistic, which is why current days feel like SciFi! However, at its essence, the current AI revolution has been driven primarily by a few key algorithmic breakthroughs (cf the Bitter Lesson), which are relatively easy to scale up through compute.
On the other hand, the constraints on robotics are largely supply chain-related. The current SOTA for dexterity in robots requires motors, which require powerful magnets, which require Rare Earth Elements, which are critically supply-constrained.
To be precise, the elements are actually abundant in the Earth's crust, just that extracting them is very expensive and extremely toxic to the environment, and so far only China has been willing to sacrifice its environment (and certain citizens' health), which is why it has cornered the market. Scaling that up to the required demand is a humongous logistical, political and regulatory hurdle (which, BTW, is why I suspect the current US adminstration is busy gutting environmental regulations.)
Now there may be a research prototype somewhere in some lab that is the "Attention Is All You Need" equivalent of actuators, but I'm personally not aware of anything with that kinda potential.
You said there are three traits, but seems like you only listed two - unless you're counting strength and dexterity as separate and just worded it weirdly.
I think they’re separate. You don’t need to be strong or intelligent to put circuit boards in printers, but there are factories full of people doing that. Purely because it’s currently cheaper to pay (low) wages to humans than to develop, deploy, and maintain automation to do that task. Yet.
No one is hired to swing a hammer? What world do you live in?
Harder than someone else. A bodybuilder and a normal person ham swing a hammer just as efficiently as each other.
Dexterity is more important - after all you may have the stamina to bang in 1000 nails in an hour. I have a nail gun. What’s important is we can control where the nails go.
They're not hired to swing a hammer hard, they're hired to swing it at the right thing, and if they can't swing it hard enough they pick a different tool.