Why does this get less attention than LLMs? This is AI literally “taking” a human drivers job today that will never go back and the numbers are indeed skyrocketing.
Someone told me to my face recently “there’s no AI in a Waymo”
All that tells me is that people have no idea what AI is and are completely missing what’s going on, especially when they ignore stuff like this and then blow off AI warning because all they know about AI is chatgpt.
This level of ignorance about the state of technology is the danger.
Notable that the reasons for failure to meet benchmarks was that the locations were too far away, and that they are moving to the “Micro-Fulfillment Center” approach that Amazon is doing at Whole Foods. This is exactly what everyone predicted when Amazon bought WF - turn it into a grocery FC.
That makes sense to me.
Feels like we’re going to have warehouse scale vending machines in cities, and delivery bots taking them from the warehouse-vending-machine to the customer.
This isn’t what Amazon has done at least here on the Peninsula. My WF orders come from Brisbane just like my overnight shipping and Amazon Fresh orders do. Before that they were coming from San Jose, possibly from a WF there but there are closer WF stores in both directions and none in Brisbane.
Because tips are important to the income of delivery shoppers, I find that I generally get good produce selections. It might be difficult to transition that particular incentive to robots, but the point is that delivery items don't have to suck.
The only thing I really still pick out by hand every time are beef briskets. Pork shoulders tend to be uniform enough that randomly picking a cryovac works out, but there's a good bit of variation in brisket that makes a difference with the final product, at least when the brisket is prepared with a smoker. YMMV
I'm not normally a fan of tips, but this seems like a reasonable use of one to me. The picker isn't paid on the shininess of the apple they bring you -- they're paid to pick as quickly as they can from what's on offer. The potential for a tip incentivises them to go beyond that requirement -- to pick the nicest/freshest rather than the most convenient.
Yep. Instacart. I work from home and sometimes I don't want to go to the store (or it would be difficult because I'm on Zoom/Teams a lot), but I need vegetables, meat, milk, etc. for cooking.
With Instacart & Costco memberships and also ordering from the local discount grocers, I can get food delivered for less than it costs to actually go to the mainstream grocery stores like Von's, and I don't get bruised eggplants or cilantro that's already going bad. The drivers/shoppers are generally quite good at picking out items that can lead to higher tips (that or they're just in it for the love of good produce, but either way you can often tell they're not randomly loading the bags).
In any event, delivery doesn't always mean the worst of the produce aisle, and while I noted that the incentive of tips might not transfer to robots, keeping repeat customers might be enough incentive for a way to be found to not make robots and grocery synonymous with only frozen food. That might mean human pickers; better automation on the food selection system; pre-inspected, washed and packaged fruits & veggies; etc.
The grocery industry relentlessly optimizes for implicit choices over expressed preferences. Nobody is asking for misters, colored lighting, skeumorphic veggie bins, and wide open sightlines in the produce aisle. Stores do it because customers buy more when they do. The same thing will happen to in-store shopping if consumer preferences swing ever swing that way instead.
I used to go to Oahu for work once or twice a year and it was really depressing.
The whole city was drunk white tourists from the Midwest or tourists from Japan and Australia. Beaches were packed and full of trash and the “tiki bars” were all the same alcoholic slush drinks you see on bourbon street or in the florida redneck riviera.
The rest of the islands are beautiful but either owned by giant rich plantation owners or giant rich moguls.
It’s not a backlash on the AI it’s a backlash on the society that is utilizing it
Go and read all of the anti-AI articles and they will eventually boil down to something to the effect of:
“the problems we have are more foundational and fundamental and AI looks like a distraction”
However this is a directionless complaint that falls under the “complaining about technology“ trope
As a result there is no real coherent conversation about what AI is how do we define it what are people actually complaining about what are we rallying against because people are overwhelmingly utilizing it in every part of life
Disagree. The people meaningfully controlling the direction of AI are the foundational problem. They are funding the politicians that control the system leaving society vulnerable. And we are well past the point of getting them out of power.
Our ability to affect change on them is about numbers. The backlash to how AI is forced on us is an easy rallying point because it's a widely experienced negative. If you own a computer or phone, chances are good AI has annoyed you at some point.
People hated Clippy. I don't think it would've been helpful to say "It's not Clippy you're mad at, but the societal foundation that enabled Clippy." That's not a good slogan.
As a multiple time ground force commander both in Iraq and stateside for CI operations, I can firmly state that there is literally zero to be learned about leadership from corporate or political worlds.
When I left the USG because it’s fundamentally corrupt, I went into private business thinking there were technical/business leaders that had pro-social incentives, and their heads screwed on.
Man was I wrong.
The US military has by far the best, all encompassing, most focused and persistently updating leadership development and it’s STILL absolutely garbage.
There’s ZERO, and actually most likely negative, incentives to think about and apply ethics in business and politics, because at the end of the day the most ruthless will win in the long run.
There are no good organizations, only ones that aren’t completely corrupt yet. Consider that to start and maintain an organization takes significant capital and energy expenditures upfront, which means you need to fund them from somewhere and ask sources of funding are corrupted. Consider: there are no long lasting egalitarian, distributed power, grassroots organizations that can compete at a level of social influence that can overcome or resist the existing power structure.
I’ve looked at every possible organization that could theoretically fit including; MSF a.k.a. doctors without borders, swords to plowshares, goodwill industries (who employ significant numbers of disabled people for sub min wages while the CEO makes 3M+), Mondragon etc… and they all have exactly the same fucked up incentives
why? because there is no way to survive as a structure, if your org is made up of people who want to eat and don’t want to be a monk.
unless your organization is the lead maximalist resource dominator you will be overrun by some organization with no ethics
Ultimately it comes down to the fact that people have to trade physical and mental work for money to survive. So there is no alternative to do the “right thing” without also risking your own safety and stability in your chosen society. 99.99999% of people are completely unwilling to risk their life on behalf of any particular philosophy - if only because those people don’t feel strongly enough about any particular philosophy to actually put themselves on the line for it.
So whoever has the most money, has the ability to get the most people to work for their goals.
Unfortunately the people with all the money/power do not care about anything other than growing their own personal power
I would love to hear more about your definition of corruption and why it is inevitable. From what I can tell it is that an organization with “morals”, meaning some sort of code restricting their possible actions, will be out competed by an organization without “morals”, whatever that might be. I think it is compelling at face value, but I’m not sure I see a world of wolves out there. Maybe I’m naive.
I want to argue that the rule of law is one moral system that applies to all organizations. Sure, some overstep and may gain some advantage due to that. But in principle and hopefully on average the result should be net negative. In democratic countries the laws are more or less directly the will of the people, about as egalitarian as we can get, no? Anyways, following the rule of laws should lead to “morally sound” corporations as defined by the people. Corporations can go further than what is legally required, too. That is often used in marketing.
Finally i think the same principles apply wherever humans (or other species) compete. Humans on the whole are not entirely cruel barbarians, we try to care for individuals who are not able to care for themselves etc. Whether “true” altruism exists is another discussion, but it certainly looks like it. So if that’s how people act, why should corporations be more corrupt than the bodies that make them up and govern them?
Have you looked at sports federations (especially in Europe, not in US). They're primarily funded by membership fees, some survived over century, and while they have some governance issues (like conflict of interest due to wearing two hats – regulatory function and event organiszing one), it would be a strong claim to say that they're corrupted by their roots/nature.
In fact one of my close friends is a co-owner of the Kraken
Sports teams and leagues are primarily owned by billionaires - like the amount of discussion around who is the owner is a significant portion of sports reporting
The only exception I know off the top of my head I believe is the Packers are community owned but even then I would be skeptical as to how the power dynamics play out in practice
I think it’s a weak form of a mutual cooperative - which unfortunately doesn’t have the ability to defeat a state-billionaire backed corporation in the market.
I guess I don't know what you prefer, I'm guessing anarchy in the academic sense?
But I want to add, that workplace democracy would be turning the billionaire owned companies into democracies themselves. That is the goal of economic democracy at least, changing the fiefdoms into democracies can't be a worse system.
At the most basic biological level the human species can’t organize action larger than a few hundred people in any kind of coherent way.
There are no coherent organizations that are larger than a few hundred people.
It is a biological impossibility for the human species to maintain long lasting (thousands of years) groups that can have social structures that last long enough to encode genetic fitness changes at the rate of environmental change.,
We do not have the ability to comfortably maintain coherent heirarchies, and subordinated structures, around a coherent epistemological grounding.
Humans are not eusocial.
I just fundamentally don’t see any future for the species level organization whatsoever
I have always been in favor of changing the definition if incorporation to ensure that over time ownership transfers slowly but increasingly to the employees of the corporate entity. How that would work, though, would require detailed thought by experts more knowledgeable than i :)
> Sports teams and leagues are primarily owned by billionaires
My question was about sports federations, and not about leagues and commercial clubs (and definitely not in US). Take FIS (International Ski and Snowboard Federation) for example, or smaller European national and regional federations.
You could point to any organization smaller than 1000 people is being reasonably coherent I don’t think that this is relevant for the context we were discussing the Amish also doing a pretty good job and maintaining stable community but they are irrelevant
What context are you discussing? Parent comment talks about "all organisations".
You know what, forget it. I thought you have some interesting/insightful framework and thoughts about power/structures in organisations and happy to share it.
That means there does not exist a mechanism for one person or group, who has excess resources to reliably transfer those resources to another group in a way that does not have an implied return or reward function of some sort to the giver
Because of the nature of this transactional process it corrupts any possible transfer of power
So consolidated power in any form, is not equitable and the state of physics doesn’t allow for another regime. It’s a munchausen trilemma
I don't know man. I agree that transfer of resources are always mixed with incentives and power asymmetries, no questions about that. But "corrupted" (as opposed to "risks of being corrupted") is a word that means in my parlor "illegitimate and norm-breaking".
I’d be curious what you identified as the shortcomings of e.g. MSF or Mondragon. I might throw semi-decentralized social ventures like the IFRC in the mix there too: that emblem alone sure carries an almost-talismanic degree of social weight, seemingly worldwide, I think in large part because they’re foresworn from swinging around their influence outside of their lane.
And I mean… “don’t want to live like a monk” seems like a telling qualifier: the whole monastic lifestyle seems pretty widespread and enduring across cultures and through time… is the humbler mode of religious devotion an example of what you’re looking for?
In any case you’ve clearly thought deeply and widely about this question—I’d be interested to read your thoughts if you end up collecting them somewhere!
That's quite a strong claim. I disagree. Military leadership, like business leadership, is imperfect. Both vary based on individuals, the operating environment, and culture.
You should look into what’s happening with DIY robotics because it looks eerily similar to what I experienced in the early to mid 90s with PC hardware and software
And you can do way more than just host a bbs with robots
Its so interesting that the difference between Indy and F1 in terms of lap times is objectively marginal but subjectively extreme.
I would have guessed given the extreme cost difference between them there would have been a significant gap (like 30 seconds) but the fact that it’s only a few seconds difference is surprising.
I'm not sure it is objectively marginal. At Circuit of the Americas where they have both raced recently the difference in lap time is about 10 seconds. That doesn't sound like a lot but is close to 10% of the lap. The F1 race is 56 laps so by the end an Indycar is going to be 5 or 6 laps down. Throw in the fact an Indycar can't do 56 laps without refueling and it might be closer to 7 laps. In motorsport that is extreme
making a car go fast on a straight bit of road is relatively cheap. making a car take a corner a couple tenths of a second faster is very expensive. and there's only so many corners in a lap. add up those tenths - that's your few seconds of difference!
Getting faster is hard and expensive really. You can be pretty cheap and still be quite fast.
On other side, F1 has for very long time kept speeds down when new innovative ways to gain it has been discovered. For some reason I can not understand drivers and spectators dying in accidents is bad look for the sport... As such it really is not best we could technically do.
I love F1 (Give my boy Lando his WDC!), but I wouldn't mind a more unhinged version without human drivers, at least not in the cockpit. Not going to happen because ones and zeros can't sell expensive watches like F1 drivers.
If you haven't seen it, there's actually been a couple races of autonomously controlled formula-type cars at the Abu Dhabi circuit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9LLZ5mb5cA
This is mission critical robotics software
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