The biggest Achilles' Heel of any robot has always been its inability to understand or adapt to changing conditions, especially if the use cases fall outside standard operating conditions or result in the harm of itself or nearby humans. A Roomba doesn't know it's trying to clean up dog feces and will keep trying until it jams up its entire system and overheats, spreading mashed-up dogshit everywhere. A sprinkler system will continue to try and put out a house surrounded by a wildfire until it has emptied itself of water not knowing the futility of the situation. A commercial airliner will not realize you've manually depressurized the cabin at altitude and will keep flying as the entire flight slowly dies from hypoxia.
Now imagine an entire factory filled with robots like these. They will work beautifully up until the moment something SLIGHTLY unexpected happens with one, then the entire chain fails.
Hell, just look at what happened to Waymo's robotaxis during the recent La Raza insurrection. Without the company manually shutting the cars down, the rioters would have happily depleted Waymo's entire fleet. Because as thoughtfully as the AI might have been designed, its programmers didn't factor anything in regards to situations where groups of outsiders intend on destroying them. They simply locked up and called law enforcement, allowing themselves to be smashed up and burned to nothing. Other taxis were unable to realize they were being called to the same location as one that had ceased communications and followed each other like lemmings.
What this means is that a robotaxi would happily drive you towards an active warzone where the roads might not even exist anymore and an firefight is ongoing, because it cannot use a human level of judgment to know that it probably shouldn't be there.
And that is something a robot will never best a human in.
I work in a warehouse loading trucks. Any package that is hazardous material, oddly shaped, oversized, or over 70 lbs is not allowed on the conveyor belt system and is required to be put on a cart. These carts, which handle like a shopping cart that weighs 500 lbs, are carried by automated trolleys that look like this.
Normally these work fine. However, occasionally the "gps" navigation or the radar collision system malfunction and the unit ends up not moving because it doesn't know where it is, or it thinks that the support column that has been there for 10 years is a person and it triggers the emergency stop.
When this happens, we have to get onto it and manually drive it to the next checkpoint, or if the malfunction is really bad, get the maintenance guys to tow it away. Regardless, these automated trains keep coming, and when one breaks down it causes a backup, and if it breaks down in the wrong place it ends up causing gridlock for both the trains and the package trucks.
Computers are not smart. They are fast at doing things, but they are not intelligent. It never ceases to make me roll my eyes at normies who think that "A.I." is actually intelligent when it is essentially a talking box blindly throwing salami at the wall hoping it hits the right target.
Our AGV robots in the warehouse already fuck up multiple times per shift, in a building with pre planned routes and guidance markers. There is no way that shit is replacing a human being in a semi truck who can react to changing conditions on the fly.
I wonder if we could ever see crime heat maps like we have traffic heat maps, alerting users to take alternate routes and avoid those areas. We're already close to or surpassed "90s action flick" level crime areas and instead of getting Demolition Man/Robocop level police, they're just nonchalantly fudging the crime stats and redefining what should be considered crime.
I think a far more realistic scenario is that Amazon will split off and have an entirely robotic division that will only handle packages that can be delivered by robots. Any package you send that isn't precisely cubed or whatever they want will have to go to a human based package company that will be far more expensive.
So naturally all products will look the same to take advantage of cheap shipping, and design/overall beauty will get even worse.
Precisely this.
The biggest Achilles' Heel of any robot has always been its inability to understand or adapt to changing conditions, especially if the use cases fall outside standard operating conditions or result in the harm of itself or nearby humans. A Roomba doesn't know it's trying to clean up dog feces and will keep trying until it jams up its entire system and overheats, spreading mashed-up dogshit everywhere. A sprinkler system will continue to try and put out a house surrounded by a wildfire until it has emptied itself of water not knowing the futility of the situation. A commercial airliner will not realize you've manually depressurized the cabin at altitude and will keep flying as the entire flight slowly dies from hypoxia.
Now imagine an entire factory filled with robots like these. They will work beautifully up until the moment something SLIGHTLY unexpected happens with one, then the entire chain fails.
Hell, just look at what happened to Waymo's robotaxis during the recent La Raza insurrection. Without the company manually shutting the cars down, the rioters would have happily depleted Waymo's entire fleet. Because as thoughtfully as the AI might have been designed, its programmers didn't factor anything in regards to situations where groups of outsiders intend on destroying them. They simply locked up and called law enforcement, allowing themselves to be smashed up and burned to nothing. Other taxis were unable to realize they were being called to the same location as one that had ceased communications and followed each other like lemmings.
What this means is that a robotaxi would happily drive you towards an active warzone where the roads might not even exist anymore and an firefight is ongoing, because it cannot use a human level of judgment to know that it probably shouldn't be there.
And that is something a robot will never best a human in.
I work in a warehouse loading trucks. Any package that is hazardous material, oddly shaped, oversized, or over 70 lbs is not allowed on the conveyor belt system and is required to be put on a cart. These carts, which handle like a shopping cart that weighs 500 lbs, are carried by automated trolleys that look like this.
Normally these work fine. However, occasionally the "gps" navigation or the radar collision system malfunction and the unit ends up not moving because it doesn't know where it is, or it thinks that the support column that has been there for 10 years is a person and it triggers the emergency stop.
When this happens, we have to get onto it and manually drive it to the next checkpoint, or if the malfunction is really bad, get the maintenance guys to tow it away. Regardless, these automated trains keep coming, and when one breaks down it causes a backup, and if it breaks down in the wrong place it ends up causing gridlock for both the trains and the package trucks.
Computers are not smart. They are fast at doing things, but they are not intelligent. It never ceases to make me roll my eyes at normies who think that "A.I." is actually intelligent when it is essentially a talking box blindly throwing salami at the wall hoping it hits the right target.
Our AGV robots in the warehouse already fuck up multiple times per shift, in a building with pre planned routes and guidance markers. There is no way that shit is replacing a human being in a semi truck who can react to changing conditions on the fly.
I wonder if we could ever see crime heat maps like we have traffic heat maps, alerting users to take alternate routes and avoid those areas. We're already close to or surpassed "90s action flick" level crime areas and instead of getting Demolition Man/Robocop level police, they're just nonchalantly fudging the crime stats and redefining what should be considered crime.
I think a far more realistic scenario is that Amazon will split off and have an entirely robotic division that will only handle packages that can be delivered by robots. Any package you send that isn't precisely cubed or whatever they want will have to go to a human based package company that will be far more expensive.
So naturally all products will look the same to take advantage of cheap shipping, and design/overall beauty will get even worse.