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[–] 76 points 3 months ago (27 children)

Nurses.

Watch nurses next time you're in hospital. They do 8 million things, unprompted, throughout their day. Robots would blow their power load and collapse if they had to do a tenth the things nurses do.

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  • [–] 31 points 3 months ago (10 children)

    Have you tried firing all the nurses and just not giving anyone healthcare?

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  • [–] 32 points 3 months ago (9 children)

    In the US, we just pay nurses shit and then treat them like shit. It's amazing we have any left.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago*

    I live in Canada and nurses make really good money, more than Canadian RNs, in several states. Like you can make over a hundred grand a year. That's not really bad at all for four years education.

    Nurses absolutely deserve what they make but it is not really poor pay that is their biggest issue. More like an unsafe patient load.

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  • [+] -13 points 3 months ago* (5 children)

    gonna be honest. I work with money. I see what nurses and MDs get paid. You don't make what you should. guess what? no one does. You make more per hour and per year than more skilled people in more skilled fields doing more difficult work. why are you complaining about what you make?

    unless you want to pretend medicine is the hardest thing out there, which i assure you, it's not.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    I'm not a nurse, but you keep on shitting on people for no good reason

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  • [+] -10 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    nurses and doctors being overpaid compared to comparably skilled people given the state of the economy where we're all underpaid, and yet they fairly consistently get on the internet to whine how they went to SCHOOL and so they should be MILLIONAIRES not like their patients?

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  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago

    No, what will happen instead is they'll get rid of half of the nurses and the ones they keep will be responsible for 16 million things. My agency is going through it right now. They fired one of our APNs and gave all her duties to our other one. She's already overwhelmed to the point of crying in the office.

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  • Yeah; and insurance companies and healthcare orgs in the US are trying to sub out actual human healthcare providers with “specialist agents”, because PROFIT ÜBER ALLES.

    But also, that sounds absolutely ripe for a massive fucking class action lawsuit.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    I think the plan is to replace nurses with just letting people die instead.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

    Eh. Modern cpus make over a trillion calculations per second. Number of tasks or thoughts isn't really the way to win this.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    Okay? A CPU can't fuckin toilet a patient lol.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    Sure. That's just a component. By itself it can't do anything at all. It's like saying your tooth can't toilet a person. But it should be sort of glaringly obvious that AI and robotics have grown insanely in just the last 15 or so years. That's not likely to just suddenly stop, especially since way more of the world's finances and companies are working to push them as quickly as possible than have been behind pushing any technology advance ever.

    Don't get me wrong, I absolutely hate AI and think the AI companies should be burned and all that shit ended for good. But I don't see the powers of the world agreeing with that, and in another 15 or so years I'd be fairly surprised to not see some form of AI controlled robotic assistant replacing nurses. And pretty much everything people try to insist is 'safe'.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago

    Nurses do have an especially varied and high-demand job but literally everyone does a million things every day that AI can't, and in it's current iteration could never do. Very very few people will actually lose their job to "AI" in the next decade, although many probably have to its false promises, and many more will because of the huge economic crash when businesses finish figuring this out.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago

    You're looking at it too holistically. Rarely does a tech come and entirely replace something outright (despite what the AI hype bros have been saying)

    There will be 50 or 100 companies who know the space working on a single thing the nurse does. My suspicion is that nurses do a lot of book keeping and state recording, that is likely what will go first. There might eventually still be someone administering a drug but fewer people doing data entry.

    Still health care is notoriously slow and penny pinching so I suspect it will be a while and the only entrants will be big companies who know how to navigate large government or private organizations.

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  • [–] -2 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Now perhaps. But in 20 years?

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Rich people will own all the nurses and everyone else will be left to fend for themselves in the wastes?

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Bold to assume we'll have access to the wastes.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Oh, the wastes! The magnificent wastes! When I was a lad I knew a man who visited the wastes and brought back such beautiful things! Real salt from the dry riverbeds, pieces of rubber that would burn for hours and give us such marvellous dreams! One day I'll earn enough to take you to the wastes myself, young one. One day.

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  • [–] 56 points 3 months ago (9 children)

    It was supposed to cure cancer and other diseases, not make us homeless and surveil us.

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  • [–] 26 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    "It" is very ill defined. The AI they are selling you was never supposed to cure cancer. It was meant to make money. The AI which cures cancers is of a completely different kind than LLMs and media generation. And it does not have any of the same drawbacks nor any of the same funding despite it's far greater usefulness.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    The AI which cures cancers is architecturally pretty similar to LLMs in that it's based on transformers and GPT in particular is also based on transformers (that's the T in GPT). It is also generative AI, you give it tokens that describe proteins and it generates folding structures. It's like an LLM except the tokens aren't words or syllables like in LLMs.

    It's used very differently and the energy cost is a few orders of magnitude less (you can run it on a single H200 with 141 GB VRAM for ~9000 tokens or an A100 or H100 for ~5000 according to this university and it even has a slow CPU/IO heavy first stage preparing everything so they can minimize the GPU time in stage 2).

    There is yet hope that such AI applications will eventually benefit from all the research that's been put into LLMs. Obviously not everything will carry over, but there may be architectural improvements to be made in research models too.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago*

    Funny thing, right now federal funding is hyper focused on AI because the people who bought Trump expect a return on their money. The things is, the people on the federal side more or less fall into two camps- political appointees who know nothing about anything and old guards who know that "AI" has been around for decades in various forms. This is creating fun situations where a funding opportunity might as well read "please find a way for fElon to make money using AI", but they never specify "LLMs" so submitting a neural network or machine learning proposal fits the guidelines. Time will tell how that plays out.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago*

    This is exactly my thoughts when I'm trying to say "misused" to people who don't seem to understand the sheer resources that would require to solve certain problems which would be a perfect fit. But it's just not being used for those(not to the extent it should be supported). instead, it's being funnelled to suck every value out of living a fulfilling life.

    It's like plastic. Certain medical procedures would be unthinkable without it. But then capitalism happens and it becomes beyond reproach real fast.

    This is the important difference between defining something as 'evil' and using something that is truly innocuous and neutral with evil intentions.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    It's a tool. Blame the humans who use this tool to make you homeless and surveil you.

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  • [–] 113 points 3 months ago (15 children)

    In spite of the demonstration videos of robots running and jumping and carrying boxes and slowly sorting packages, none of them are anywhere close to being ready to handle construction jobs, or most manufacturing jobs. And, they can't design or make the machines that automate the processes.

    It's a billionaire's dream that this is happening now, it's not. One of the major hurdles is power consumption, as we're all seeing while they build out these "data centers". Robots and computers cannot match the efficiency and self-sufficiency of a human. In a picture:

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  • [–] 63 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    Yep. I work in prosthetics, people tend to overestimate current battery technology and underestimate how much energy it takes to move around a couple hundred pounds.

    Even with batteries that cost a small fortune, we haven't been able to create a lower limb powered prosthetic that can keep up with the human body for more than a couple hours.

    There's a lot of hype about the humanoid robotics coming out of China, but most everything is just marketing science fiction. Once you factor in the initial cost, power consumption for processing data, multiple batteries per unit, and the massive amount of general maintenance...... It becomes pretty apparent that things aren't going to pan out anytime soon.

    I build limbs out of reinforced carbon fiber and titanium and even those acquire a ton of wear in a relatively small amount of time. Any bipedal robot with plastic parts, made to do intensive labour is going to start falling apart almost immediately. The human body takes a ton of damage throughout the day as well, but it's self repairing.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Interesting take. I guess I just realized every video we've ever seen of humanoid robots had been them doing something for a few minutes. But you never hear of one doing anything for days, months or years outside of science fiction.

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  • [–] 24 points 3 months ago

    Bipedal robots are kinda stuck in between a design flaw of what we want robots to look like, what we want robots to do, and what our technology is currently able to do.

    Bipedal locomotion is just not the most efficient or simple mode of mobility for things like a flat factory floor, it's really only efficient when you are factoring unleveled ground. We just currently don't have the technology that allows bipedal efficiency across all terrain. That would require a synergistic system of optics and something that mimic propeoception. That's a ton of information being sent from a vast network of sensory input being sorted out by your spine and brain in real time.

    Imo robots for a factory floor should be on tracks or wheels. Attempting to design a robot that's good for everything is just going to lead to a robot that is good for nothing. In engineering design should be made to fit a solution, designing for form and then trying to find a solution that form can solve is backwards and typically leads to terrible outcomes.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I'm in manufacturing and yeah it'll be modified arm robots if anything. But current ones are large, heavy, and expensive. Cheaper than a person but they fuck up differently

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    Yep, in engineering design should be solution oriented. You don't ever really want to first design the form and then try and see what solutions it may be able to solve.

    A robot arm is a great start, you can then customize it further to your needs with different terminal end devices.

    The main benefit of human hands is that they have an amazing amount of sensory input. If someone gets peripheral neuropathy and loses even a modest amount of that ability they can barely tie their shoes.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    The equation changes a lot when you start altering the assumptions.

    Who says the robots have to have batteries? Human workers drag power cables all over construction sites. Why can't a robot be built that's smart enough to manage its own power cord? Power cord management seems simple compared to doing meaningful construction work.

    The wear and tear is a legitimate concern, but fixed industrial robots have been operating for many decades. The wear issues are obviously solvable in the right context.

    Keep in mind, prosthetics may not be the perfect analogy. We imagine these things as humanoid, but they need not be. You might have a drywall hanging robot that has suction cups to lift up panels and a screw gun to affix them. They might not even have legs. A welding robot could just be a welding tool on the end of a long boom arm.

    There's really no need to even make general purpose robots. It's not like individual humans practice every trade. You could have trade-specific robots. A drywall robot, a plumber robot, an electrician bot, etc. Each equipped only with those tools needed to complete just that trade. And instead of mechanical hands, they could simply be mounted.

    I would agree that humanoid battery powered robots are not likely to result in mass employment in construction any time soon. But if you start relaxing those constraints, the possibility for mass worker displacement exists. A robotic construction site need not visibly resemble a human one.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    Human workers drag power cables all over construction sites. Why can’t a robot be built that’s smart enough to manage its own power cord? Power cord management seems simple compared to doing meaningful construction work.

    I'm sure it seems simple from your desk

    One thing: do you think that those power cables are permanently connected to the workers? Are you thinking about workers using extension cords for tools or the ones laying cable for the building, because it sure as fuck isn't simple to do either, which is why battery and petrol powered tools exist, and why the cableways are planned well in advance.

    The wear and tear is a legitimate concern, but fixed industrial robots have been operating for many decades.

    Only with maintenance and servicing by a human trained to see every potential flaw and monitor the equipment long term. Nothing, not even the most expensive equipment you can imagine, is without the need for regular maintenance.

    You could have trade-specific robots. A drywall robot, a plumber robot, an electrician bot, etc. Each equipped only with those tools needed to complete just that trade. And instead of mechanical hands, they could simply be mounted.

    Do you think that a construction site works the same way as a factory building cars? Just one long conveyors that shits out a fully built house? Workers move up, down and across the building dozens of times a day in a job doing multiple different jobs within their field, problem solving on the fly.

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  • Who says the robots have to have batteries?

    The market. How many cable powered mobile bipedal robots have you seen?

    Human workers drag power cables all over construction sites.

    No they don't? Have you ever been on a construction site? They have power cables, but they aren't attached to them as they constantly move across a construction site. They are used for a specific job then rolled up and taken to the next job. Dozens of people dragging their own powered chords across a building site would not only be dangerous, but a huge pain in the ass.

    but fixed industrial robots have been operating for many decades. The wear issues are obviously solvable in the right context.

    As I said in my original statement, laypeople such as yourself tend to underestimate the amount of force a moving object creates. Just engaging in something like jogging can have a ground force reaction of 3x your body weight, something like a small jump can exert up to 7x your body weight. That is with more pliable triplaner joints covered in soft tissues that help reduce that ground reaction by absorbing some of the force with higher degrees of range of motion. Something more rigid like a robotic foot/ankle or prosthetics actually experience much higher degrees of ground reaction force.

    They might not even have legs. A welding robot could just be a welding tool on the end of a long boom arm.

    The entirety of my argument was around humanoid robots....... That's why I said it would make more sense for a robot on a flat factory floor to have wheels or tracks. I'm not arguing against the idea of robots in general, just bipedal humanoid ones.

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  • [–] 28 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I remember reading a presser about how this cloud vendor was using robots for all kinds of tasks in their datacentre and it was super efficient because automation. But it never actually happened. They still have humans racking servers. The last 10% is hard.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Don't they have "3D Printed" houses?

    I think the issue is, we are thinking of robots carrying boards and hammering nails etc.

    Even not 3D printing you cpuld have a factory that cranks out walls and some sort of automated system that assembles them on site.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    IIRC “3D Printed” houses are falling apart due to lamination issues. That said, I think it's a solvable problem, though it will take awhile to sort out the issues. Modular systems also show a lot of promise for mass production, potentially even of higher quality, and likely amenable to robotic assembly if carefully designed for it, but we know it'll just be a profit seeking race to the bottom. Those construction jobs are safe for at least a decade, likely more.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    IIRC “3D Printed” houses are falling apart due to lamination issues. That said, I think it's a solvable problem, though it will take awhile to sort out the issues.

    You'd probably have to invent a new type of concrete first. You can add resin binders to concrete to make wet concrete somewhat stick to drying concrete but it doesn't work very well. The drying concrete tends to pull the moisture from the wet concrete which ends up interfering with the curing of both sides.

    The main issue with 3d printing concrete is more of an inherent issue with how homes settle over time. Unless you are building on bedrock or you're driving a massive amounts of piles for the foundation, structures will move and settle over time. This is why brick and mortar have been around for such a long time, the mortar gives the bricks enough flexibility to accommodate movement.

    Concrete lacks this flexibility and will crack and crumble apart unless you reinforce it with rebar. Rebar gives concrete tensile strength, distributes weight across the whole structure, and holds cracked pieces together. So really any 3d printed home that isn't reinforced somehow wont last very long.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago

    They have a bunch of issues, and the only thing that is really automated about them is the walls. Since it's basically unreinforced concrete they have a horrible time with insulation, cracking, delamination, and shrinkage. Not to mention that they aren't very good at producing sharp or square angles, so a lot of your door and window work is custom or done manually.

    If you know anything about residential construction, building the interior and exterior walls is not exactly an especially time consuming or expensive part of the build process. A decent sized team of good manual workers can put up the exterior and interior walls of a decent sized home in a week or two. The 3d house people say they can do it in 72 hours of machine time.....which can run anywhere from 2 weeks to 5 months in real time.

    you cpuld have a factory that cranks out walls and some sort of automated system that assembles them on site.

    That idea is over a hundred years old. I currently live in a house that someone bought from a sears catalog in the 1930s. They would flat pack an entire house and ship it to you on a train for you to put together yourself, or you could hire a local sears approved contractor that had a team put it together for you.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 months ago (10 children)

    Increasingly, they're trying to get it to design the building.

    I'm having to double-check credentials in my plan reviews because contractors have started turning in plans with AI-generated architect and engineering stamps because they don't want to pay a professional to prepare their plans.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    How can they use AI for an engineering review? Wouldn't an actual licensed engineer have to sign off on the building?

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago* (6 children)

    I work for the city. Contractors are faking stamps to pretend there's an engineer to get a permit.

    Lots of municipalities are overloaded and they'll just accept a stamp and approve the project. I do not. We review the engineering.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    can you fine those who fake official stamps?

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Not really. We can refuse to issue the permits.

    If it were to slip by us and the house fail, even then it's difficult. Almost everything in my city is custom spec homes for the mega-rich, and the developers set up an LLC just for building the one house and dissolve the company as soon as the house sells.

    What I've learned doing development review for houses being sold to billionaires is that contractors will try to do cheap, shitty, unsafe work no matter how rich the client is.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Fascinating. Insane, but it makes sense in today's economy. Thanks for sharing

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    It’s one of the big issues that capitalists continually overlook. In most states starting an LLC is nothing. My state it’s like $800 and a 1 page form plus getting a tax id (free and another 1 page form). There’s tons of shitty contractors that will start an LLC, do garbage work and get trashed online, then just fold it and start a new one every 6-12 months. Then if you need warranty work or whatever it’s like “oh sorry, company went under”. But the illusion of the small business being viable means this loophole will never be patched

    You can and should check licenses and not hire unlicensed workers, but even that is almost impossible now as many contractors are licensed but never do any real work, they just come out, assess your issue, and then hire subcontractors for a couple hundred bucks per day. Your $30,000 roof replacement is like $1-2k in wages to workers, 8-10k in materials, and $20k to line the pockets of the fat shit “running the show” so he can keep up on the lease payments for his 4 million dollar house and 110k ford f150 that’s never seen a day of work

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    interesting. It's so weird they can get away with manufacturing counterfeit documents

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    What they used to get in trouble for was using an actual engineer's seal without permission. We'd tell that engineer and they'd go nuclear on the developer. So now they fake a stamp to keep from getting sued.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago

    If I'm reading these comments correctly, I sould be seeking a late career change to a trade of some sort. I've haven't seen a robot plumb a shitter (yet).

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  • [–] 15 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    I implore young people to get into ai resistant fields and push for a return to basics and inefficiency.

    I'm almost 49 and my exit plan from my corporate job is to have a small farm just big enough that it can be run simply with man power alone and then market to a premium.

    Humans are not meant to be machines. Inefficiency needs to be valued more than it is.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Have you ever grown a tomato successfully and eaten it?

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    In the 1950s, Isaac Asimov predicted that eventually, nearly everything on Earth would be automated, leading to mass unemployment. He then predicted that the "excess population" would move to other star systems, which served 3 purposes: reducing unemployment on earth, providing a meaningful existence for the extrasolar colonists, and spreading humanity throughout the galaxy.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I was at enough construction sites to know it would be quite trivial to automate at least laying bricks with some programmable robots. Less skilled workers are already taught on the construction sites how it's done, to help out masons. Same with roof tiles, you only need to look out for chimneys and edges.

    And in our hellscape, it will just lead to forcing out a large portion of workers, make them work even more for even less, then a second round of layoffs can go.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago

    By the time AI is capable of finishing buildings it will choose to eradicate us instead.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago

    The funny thing is it can't do white collar jobs either.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    All jobs like this are going to pay minimum wage once the rest of the workers are replaced with AI and there are lines of people willing to work for no money.

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  • [–] 24 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    If only the construction trades could develop some kind organization to protect members from race to the bottom wages and also promote training that improves work quality.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    I think we need bolder strategy. We could develop a 2 team approach where one team is made of up people who make one dollar amount and the other team is made up of everyone with less than that dollar amount. I think we will be much better distributed results.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I'm not expecting to see unions continuing to work let alone remain legal.

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