Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…oing great on video games, they're doing great at predicting what happens next in a youtube video. If you have a camera that they can move they're able to predict what will happen at different angles. Humans do this a lot where we naturally move our eyes in such a way to get images from different angles and different presentations and then predicting combined from that. And you can operate many cars, many robots at once, to get very good robot controllers. So you should think that all the existing robotic equipment or remotely controllable equipment that is wired for that, the AIs can operate that quite well. I think some people might be skeptical that existing robots given their current hardware will have the dexterity and the maneuverability to do a lot of physical labor that an AI might want to do. Do you have reason for thinking otherwise? There's also not very many of them. Production of industrial robots is hundreds of thousands per year and they can do quite a bit in place. Elon Musk is promising a humanoid robot in the tens of thousands of dollars that may take a lot longer than he has said, as this happened with other technologies, but that's a direction to go. But most immediately, hands are actually probably the most scarce thing. But if we consider what do human bodies provide? There's the brain and in this situation, we have now an abundance of high quality brain power that will be increasing as the AIs will have designed new chips, which will be rolling out from the TSMC factories, and they'll have ideas and designs for the production of new fab technologies, new nodes, and additional fabs. But looking around the body. There's legs to move around, and not only that necessarily, wheels work pretty well. Many factory jobs and office jobs can be fully virtualized. But yeah, some amount of legs, wheels, other transport. You have hands and hands are something that are on the expensive end in robots. We can make them, they're made in very small production runs partly because we don't have the control software to use them. In this world the control software is fabulous and so people will produce much larger production runs of them over time, possibly using technology, possibly with quite different technology. But just taking what we've got, right now the industrial robot industry produces hundreds of thousands of machines a year. Some of the nicer ones are like 50,000 dollars. In aggregate the industry has tens of billions of dollars of revenue. By comparison the automobile industry produces over 60 million cars a year, it has revenue of over two trillion dollars per annum. Converting that production capacity over towards robot production would be one of the things to do and in World War Two, industrial conversion of American industry took place over several years and really amazingly ramped up military production by converting existing civilian industry. And that was without the aid of superhuman intelligence and management at every step in the process so yeah, part of that would be very well designed. You'd have AI workers who understood every part of the process and could direct human workers. Even in a fancy factory, most of the time it's not the hands doing a physical motion that a worker is being paid for. They're often looking at things or deciding what to change, the actual time spent in manual motion Is a limited portion of that.…

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