The only situation in which 2A will stop mattering is if the government decides it is willing to level American cities to achieve its future goals.
You cannot kick down doors with AI. You cannot infiltrate meetings with AI (well, at least not if the meeting holders have good opsec).
AI is great if you want to identify targets, but it does not move the needle very much on an occupation. If you want to preserve the area you're occupying then you will have to pay for it in blood.
Not really. Drones give you pretty good tracking/murdering capability. I suspect ground based systems either similar characteristics will be deployed soon.
> The only situation in which 2A will stop mattering is if the government decides it is willing to level American cities to achieve its future goals.
That wouldn't even be necessary. A siege/blockade would cripple any resistance after enough attrition. Take any moderate or large city. It's hard to maintain hundreds of thousands to millions of people with no running water, electricity, agriculture, fuel, healthcare, etc..
This is a terrible plan to get those devs onboard, and unless your theory is "these companies are idiots who don't know how much to pay for devs" they're still gonna try and find ways to hire them.
Really, it sounds like what you want is the European system where employee protections are so strong that the tech industry is barely willing to hire and is crippled as a result. Layoffs suck but the alternative (turning hiring into a patronage system) is worse.
No, it just sounds like you deeply hate your fellow man which I find profoundly sad. Not wanting to better the lives of people around you and would rather greedily hoard all the resources just shows your lack of humanity.
Sincerely hope you don't treat people around you with this disregard, but seeing how you selfishly only care about yourself I hope they find a new community that loves them more than what you can (or can't) provide.
These folks (in CA at least) have a marginal tax rate in excess of 40%. In the US they are the main payer of federal income tax - income tax that is then mostly used to fund social programs. Double your income and your taxes (at least) double.
But it's not good enough for you, apparently, because the only acceptable way for me to prove I care is to support YOU making more money and being immune to layoffs.
I'm self-interested and freely admit that I like making money because money is nice. You're self-interested but you're pretending this take is for your "fellow man."
If you're a well paid software engineer, you're already incredibly privileged. Most of the world would kill to have that job, but according to you the real unfair part is that companies can choose to pay some people more than you?
The point of the Edison motors approach is that you can just drop in a diesel engine - their initial goal is to electrify trucks used for industrial work in Canada by making them series hybrids.
It will work great for them because these trucks are designed to be modular and easily repairable (they are driven hard and WILL break when their owners need them). I would not be surprised at all if it develops into an impromptu standard just because so many eyes are on the system all the time.
Battery swaps are not practical, but the guy you're replying to is making the point that an electric vehicle could be built with a modular, removable power source, and converted between gas/hybrid/battery/hydrogen/natural gas/whatever later in life depending on the needs. That's just not possible with a vehicle which directly connects the powerplant with the wheels - there's too much nonsense like transmissions and differentials to deal with when you do that.
I think it makes a ton of sense for trucks, much less sense for cars.
Even in the US, I4 engines are by far the most popular. Most consumer cars are built for fuel economy with the one notable exception being the suburban tacticool pickup truck, which are often modded to burn MORE fuel.
It does not hurt that you can easily get 200+ horsepower from the factory with one, either. My car is a series hybrid with an Atkinson-cycle I4 but it still bursts to 200hp because it's a hybrid.
I have a Mazda CX-9 with an I4 and, my anecdote, it sucks on gas. About 14 mpg in non-highway short hop driving. That might be fine as part of larger group but it always feels embarrassingly low.
I personally like using AI at my job and would resent being forced to join a union which opposed it.
The way that I guarantee my job treats me well is by being willing to quit whenever it stops working for me. Despite everyone panicking about AI layoffs, I still consistently get messages from recruiters trying to fill AI-related jobs. In your ideal world where the union is supposed to represent me but oppose AI, do those jobs still exist?
> The way that I guarantee my job treats me well is by being willing to quit whenever it stops working for me.
That will work until it won't.
But you're deciding to leave power on the table. That's kinda like leaving money on the table. And of course, it's typically the unsophisticated people who do that.
I am an employee. My power is getting things done so that people pay me money so that I can do other things that are not work. It is difficult for me to imagine a world where a tool makes me more productive while also reducing my value, since being productive on behalf of my employer is the entire reason I have a job.
The literature backs this up: not all of the productivity gains from AI are captured by employers. At least some of it is captured by employees, with the split varying by study.
You can call me unsophisticated, but that's like telling a 1970s assembly programmer that they're a moron for ever supporting using a C compiler. Obviously they're working against their job security, right?
There is some value in producing a lot of solid hardware, but nowhere even close to Tesla's absurd valuation.
I think they are perfectly capable of writing software to drive the robot - if Musk doesn't stick his head in like he did with LIDAR/FSD and impose some stupid requirement that handicaps the product.
But the whole shtick with Optimus is that they aren't writing software. It's supposed to be all LLM training so when you buy your robot you can give it orders like "do the dishes", "clean the gutters", "dig a backyard pool for me", or "build me another Optimus" and you can go off to do whatever while it completes the task.
Elon thinks it would be too expensive to have to write code for every task you might ask one of these to do, they want it to be fully autonomous.
Their engineers aren't behind keyboards typing C++, they're wearing VR headsets and feeding the data to a LLM, although even that is probably too specific for Elon's long term plans. Obviously he doesn't want to have to have people repeat actions hundreds of times before the dumb robots figure it out. Especially for "simple" tasks like serving drinks at press events.
I feel like society is decades away from being comfortable with "you can go off to do whatever while it completes the task"...regardless of whether or not the tech is there.
It's just the AI singularity discussion again. AI Techbros insist it will be here before the end of the decade. Like you I am skeptical about it. I tend to think AI capability is already plateauing and ever more effort is going to be spent chasing smaller and smaller returns.
I'm experiencing AI that is very fast, but also kinda dumb and thoughtless.
You say this like it's a bad idea. These VLA models are going to be even more disruptive than the coding models because otherwise it's prohibitively expensive to set up an industrial robot for most uses.
My main doubts about Tesla's plan are that they will sell enough of these to get benefits of scale or that Musk will force the engineering team to "skip lidar" again and compromise the design.
> My main doubts about Tesla's plan are that they will sell enough of these to get benefits of scale or that Musk will force the engineering team to "skip lidar" again and compromise the design.
Indeed.
Even with 9 million total cars sold, Tesla still has yet to solve for driving safely with no interventions across just the contiguous USA.
With a similar approach, a million robots operating for years is still a long way short of gathering the data needed for training an AI to autonomously operate safely in a full range of industrial environments.
(That said, IMO remote-controlled humanoid robots still make a lot of sense, they'd only need a little bit of AI to assist rather than to do everything; if I was in Musk's position, I would be selling that vision of the future rather than claiming fully autonomous AI-driven androids are anywhere near).
It's yet another gamble where if it works out he will look like a visionary and if it doesn't he'll look like an idiot. The exact sort of bet that Elon never fails to go for.
But how would we evaluate "perfectly capable" without evidence, there's just been no evidence they've done anything so far right? Am I missing something? I guess looking closer it was only announced four years ago. But it seems like it's only been smoke and mirrors so far.
I think FSD is very impressive, even if it is still pretty unsafe.
Tesla clearly has at least some AI chops, and if Musk can bullshit for long enough, they might have enough time to make these robots more than just props.
The elephant in the room when talking about EV repair costs is Tesla's gigapress that they use for the Model 3/Y.
It's excellent and cheap (at least it is now after thousands of customers have been used as guinea pigs and sold cars with wildly defective underpinnings) but it does mean that virtually any damage to the casting will total the car since it's not practical to replace or repair it.
Given that the majority of EVs on the road in the US are one of those two models, it really does spike average EV repair costs.
This is just painfully and obviously not the reason why childcare is so expensive now. Labor costs are higher these days (Baumol's cost disease), regulations have become more strict because we are more protective of our children, and multigenerational living has declined.
Taxing the rich is great but it's not gonna fix any of those.
Taxing the rich means that there are fewer people with absurd money, which means businesses won't have many customers at such high prices. It's like McDonalds charging $5 for a quarter of a potato. They're hoping that the lost sales from the poors at such a high price is made up by fewer high priced purchases by the rich.
If even the rich couldn't or didnt want to afford $5 quarter potatoes then they'd have to lower the price
I'm very disappointed reading the replies to your comment. It's pretty clear that most people just saw a long set of words that wasn't full-tilt negative and assumed you are pro-camera.
Thanks! But I'm much more interested in just getting people to do local politics. It is nothing at all like national politics. The people you need to persuade aren't faceless, they're not a mass of people swayed by the media, the electeds will take your phone calls directly, you can go door-to-door to make things happen. I see so much nihilistic fatalism in these threads and I think most of it is based off a conception of politics rooted in, like, the shit Politico reports about.
Most of the stuff that really impacts your community, like Flock, is governed locally, by very small numbers of people.
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