Lugh

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
 

More and more it looks like the Western world's embrace of neoliberalism was a catastrophic mistake. Its guiding principle is that capital and the markets are always right, and governments/the people should have no say in what they do. After decades of this, manufacturing and industry have fled to where capital & the markets can get the cheapest labor, leaving most Western countries hollowed out and deindustrialized.

COVID exposed a fresh weakness in this model of organizing economies, but now there's yet another disadvantage coming to light. By making China the world's manufacturing HQ, it is handing it the crown of the planet's No 1 in technology.

By rapidly becoming the world's leading car maker, China is in gear to become the world's leading robotics nation. Add to that, it's also arguably already the world's leading AI nation.

Some people in Western countries see this in terms of wars and arms races, but maybe the solution is to look within at home and dump neoliberalism?

 

US Big Tech wants to eliminate the federal government administered by humans, and replace it with AI. Amid all the talk that has generated one aspect has gone relatively unreported. None of the AI they want to replace the humans with actually works.

AI is still plagued by widespread simple and basic errors in reasoning. Furthermore, there is no path to fixing this problem. Tinkering with training data has provided some improvements, but it has not fixed the fundamental problem. AI lacks the ability to independently reason.

'Move fast and break things' has always been a Silicon Valley mantra. It seems increasingly that is the way the basic functions of administering the US state will be run too.

 

What is more important on the path to AGI - scaling and more training data, or fundamental breakthroughs in AI software developed by humans?

Many people believe it is the former, though Deepseek itself arose from the latter.

If training data is to be significant then Tencent may have given itself a huge boost. WeChat is the biggest and most used app on the planet. The Google suite of products is the only thing comparable in western countries. However, Western countries are starting to split into AI walled gardens, so Google won't be able to take full advantage of all its users.

It may not matter. Some people believe scaling alone won't be enough to get to AGI. Some smart humans somewhere will need to figure out breakthroughs in AI software - and that could happen anywhere.

 

Although tariffs might slow things down, the ultimate destiny of the world's robotaxis is probably to be cheap, electric and made in China. This week, BYD the maker of the $9,500 Seagull hatchback said it will make Level 2 self-driving standard on all its cars, including it.

When cars this cheap are self-driving and taxis, it will mean there is little point for many people to own a car. Why, if the few hundred kms/miles you drive a month costs a fraction of car ownership?

Ryan Johnson, the developer of Culdesac, thinks this trend is already helping it, and will ripple out to change the way more and more people live in cities.

Current state of Waymo in Phoenix

  • Now regularly seeing my social circle, male and female, looking to it first

  • Parents now comfortable sending their kids to school and elsewhere. This is a major vibe shift. Early on, women solo riders were the loudest champions. But parents are overtaking that. Effusive praise e.g. “I have my freedom back!”

  • Biggest impediment to growth is that they go slower. Which of course is because they don’t speed and don’t run red lights

  • Perception that Waymo makes other drivers drive safer

  • Now regularly seeing Waymo convoys

  • First anecdote effect dissipating. When someone sees their first minor error from Waymo, it is jarring. But then a long time elapses until they see their second. And that builds intuition that it is rare, and points the finger at how much more common errors are from human drivers

  • People are asking when they can order Waymo via either Lyft or Uber

  • People seeing how fast the AI tools are improving is bringing the “Waymo right now is the worst it will ever be” conclusion

Phoenix is Waymo’s most mature market, now 8 years into public availability. It’s a big reason why we chose Phoenix (Tempe) for the first Culdesac.

The May 2023 launch of the Jaguar platform was a seminal moment in the history of AV Ridehail going mainstream. And AV Ridehail is going to drive the largest change to cities in decades.

11
submitted 9 months ago by Lugh to c/futurology
 

For some time people have spoken of the concept of sovereign AI. Sovereign AI refers to a government's or organization's control over AI technologies and associated data. At the start of 2025 such an idea isn't just talk any more. It's rapidly happening.

It's most obvious in Europe. Just as the US gears up to become more autocratic, the EU has passed laws to ban the AI that enables it. This week the bloc banned AI it deems 'unacceptable risk'. Among other things, it bans AI that manipulates and deceives, targets minorities, allows biometric profiling, or predictive policing. Almost everything on the list is something American Big Tech is doing with the encouragement of the current administration. To make the point clearer, the EU is building its own AI for European governments, institutions and civil service to use.

China is building AI the equal of any, and in the case of DeepSeek, perhaps the best there is. Not only that, they are Open-Sourcing it. There's no reason to think they will slow down. In fact, China may accelerate in AI; they have a huge trove of public data to use for training that the Chinese government has recently decided to make available for the first time. China is many countries in South America and Africa's main trade and technology partner. Where that is the case they may be its main AI source too.

American Big Tech has historically been used to dominating globally, but there are all the signs that it isn't going to happen with AI.

 

Amazon's plans

Figure's plans

Their plans are separate, but what is significant is that they are just two companies, and the raw numbers can be so huge.

Amazon expects to soon save $10 billion a year replacing humans with robots. Amazon currently employs 1.1 million in the US. If we take the average cost of each as $50K - that's 200,000 jobs. Figure is talking about 100,000 robots.

For now, this issue is still relatively politically muted. But for how much longer?

[–] Lugh 2 points 1 year ago

Even more insane is the price. 10c per 1 km. Wow. If they were that cheap in the west who would want to spend the several hundreds of dollars/euros per month it costs to own a car.

[–] Lugh 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks, I subscribed to them.

[–] Lugh 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Google logins and similar?

I've never seen that done, but I'm going to look into it, as it would be good.

trick for ordinary users is getting here with minimum clicks.

Yes, added to that the clunkiness of finding and subscribing to other instances is a huge turn off. I wish we could have "special" accounts for new users, that were already subscribed to a top 50-100 curated instances. Sadly, AFAIK You can't do that.

[–] Lugh 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

There's 2 issues here.

  1. We want to be very selective with our use of automod & pinned posts/comments. It can easily move to accusations of spam.

  2. We've tried emphasizing the open-source, no-tracking aspect before. It doesn't seem to attract much interest.

Most Redditors are casual users there for content. Only a small minority care about the issues that motivate the fediverse. What we'd like to do is bring some of the large group here; but they will have to be motivated by something else.

We have regular posting here now, often with topics not on the sub-reddit. My hunch is that an approach like - "Like r/futurology? - come to our other site for extra content" - might work better.

[–] Lugh 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Science fiction has given us the idea of super-advanced android robots like those in 'Westworld', 'Megan', or 'Humans'. But long before that point is reached, much simpler robots will be widespread and very useful. It feels like we are on the verge of that happening. There are almost twenty humanoid robot start-ups around the world. Here we can see how many of them may soon be successful.

Multimodal AI is already here. The robot start-ups don't have to build it, they just have to integrate it into their existing products. These robots can be cheap or expensive, but that doesn't matter so much. The real power is in the AI.

[–] Lugh 5 points 1 year ago

Declining living standards, stagnant wages and Inflation is already leading to political instability around the world. The rise in support for fascism and the far right are directly linked to these factors. It seems climate change is already making these problems worse.

There's another knock-on effect from this. One of the traditional central bank responses to inflation is higher interest rates. America has so much government debt it's spending more money on the interest payments than it is on the military. Those annual interest payments are now at $1 trillion. It seems climate change will make them bigger by pushing up interest rates.

[–] Lugh 5 points 1 year ago

There are some interesting lessons to be learned here. It seems having lots of near-empty space is driving this. Solar is being built in poorer rural areas with low planning and permitting requirements. More densely populated places can't always take such an approach easily, but it points to the fact that planning authorization may be placing a bottleneck on reducing climate change damage.

[–] Lugh 4 points 1 year ago

The AI Investor hype bubble always seemed ultimately doomed. AI will be profoundly deflationary, and will likely lead us to end up dominated by a very different economic system than today, with a far smaller role for capitalism, stock markets, and investors.

This article is interesting as it neatly illustrates the schizophrenia at the heart of the AI investor worldview. On the one hand, it berates people who made claims that 300 million jobs would be automated - because they've failed to live up to that "promise" to AI investors fast enough.

What you never see is anyone joining the dots, and asking what sort of economic model society will evolve to when job automation is at that scale. (Hint: It probably won't have much room for high stock market or property prices, or prosperous investors).

[–] Lugh 10 points 1 year ago

I'm fascinated by people's tendencies to anthropomorphize AI & robotics; it's hard to see how this is truly analogous to the human mind and depression.

[–] Lugh 4 points 1 year ago

Yes. I don't think enough people realise the significances of this fact. Unlike us, AI will never peak; it will always relentlessly get better.

[–] Lugh 5 points 1 year ago

One of the difficulties with ending the fossil fuel age is transitioning workers and economic activity. Geothermal energy like Fervo, apart from all its other benefits, might help solve that problem. There's a large cross-over in terms of skills between them and the oil and gas industry. They even sometimes use sites of former fossil fuel extraction for geothermal plants. Now they seem to have successfully demonstrated proof-of-concept it's frustrating things aren't moving faster with this energy source.

[–] Lugh 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It makes sense China dominates manufacturing standards; it's the world's biggest manufacturer. It seems an odd thing for the article writer to get worked up over.

view more: ‹ prev next ›