Why no mention of the level 4 autonomous robobuggies from Starship. These buggies have been exponentially ramping up now for over 10 years and they can make various grocery deliveries without human oversight. Autonomous vehicles have arrived and they are navigating our urban landscapes! There have been many millions of uneventful trips to date. What I find surprising is that some sort of an oversized robobuggy has not been brought out that would allow a person to be transported by them. One could imagine for example, that patrons of bars who had too many drinks to drive home could be wheeled about in these buggies. This could already be done quite safely on sidewalks at fairly low speed. for those who have had a few too many speed might not be an overly important feature. Considering how many fatalities are involved with impaired drivers it surprises me that MADD has not been more vocal in advocating for such a solution. So, in a sense there is already widespread autonomous vehicles currently operating on American streets. Importantly these vehicles are helping us to reimagine what transport could be. Instead of thinking in terms of rushing from one place to another, people might embrace more of a slow travel mentality in which instead of steering their vehicles they could do more of what they want to like surf the internet, email, chat with GPT etc.. The end of the commute as we know it?
Aligned?
Personal perspective: psychotic experience truly is an enigma wrapped inside of a riddle. So much complexity involved that rookies would have no idea what was actually going on (even the insiders would largely be unaware of whatever ground truth might exist).
Interestingly, perhaps my clearest memory from that time was thinking that I was playing my most rational strategy to cope with my life as it was. My life was not making sense and escape seemed the best way out.
From the perspective of today that might seem an odd take, though given what I know now it actually was not an entirely bad strategy at all—perhaps my optimal strategy. How could that possibly be true? It turns out that my family has coped with dominant Alzheimer’s disease for centuries and this was never made clear to me when growing up. This was of interest because the parent with the dementia risk waited an especially long time to start a family. From what I understand this parent would have been cognitively comprised even while I was a teenager and this parent went onto developing profoundly severe Alzheimer’s dementia. There is really no way that a parent with such hidden cognitive impairment could realistically be a competent parent to teenagers.
This was the view of our closest family. They were extremely surprised at the near complete absence of judgment demonstrated by my parent in the role of a caregiver. The family had stayed back on the farm hours and hours away on a plane and we wound up in a big city where everyone works around the clock. The rural relatives were absolutely shocked at the level of child abuse that they witnessed in our city life ways. I was equally surprised at their perspective because from what I could tell it was not so much abuse as largely normal modern urban behavior.
There are just so many layers and layers of this. People who somehow think that this can be neatly described have no understanding. It is quantum physics—it is beyond linear description. So of course, the parent with the centuries history of dominant Alzheimer’s became a respected member of the psychiatric treatment community. Thus, the power balance was clearly stacked against me. When you become embedded into the power structure you are uniquely positioned to create your own self-serving narrative.
Of course it also turns out that there was an underlying genetic risk for me that involved mental illness, though this risk was actually highly dependent upon environmental circumstances. Once I became aware of the nature of this genetic risk, I simply chose those environments that were non-triggering. No problems for me from there on out. Unfortunately, this knowledge has largely not spread to others with this genotype. There must be a world of hurt out there as people constantly reenact my trauma when it could simply be avoided by choosing the correct life path. Strangely, others in the family also have this genotype yet have never had an acute episode; this has meant that they have never fully incorporated the understanding of the genotype into their life. Ergo, while they have never acquired the crazy label they have made the problem into a chronic condition that was never recognized. For me, actually having to deal with it has allowed me to move on with my life.
And on and on. The storyline is essentially endless; I am sure that there are many many layers that I have not even imagined yet.
The shower water recycle idea is something that I have already bought and tried. They sell these units for those who want to have a shower while camping. They are quite inexpensive and actually would pay for themself with a month of my typical shower usage. So, for this one, it’s better than not costing anything: it actually has large potential as a cost saver.
Perhaps this is somewhat off topic, though I have found my robovac to be a great piece of technology. Here again by any reasonable measure of the value of my time the robovac has to be considered a negative cost purchase.
Remote work/school also seems in this category.
Isn’t a substantial problem that the programming priesthood is being dethroned by the GPT technology and this is allowing the masses entry—even those with minimal programming understanding? For not only has GPT given us a front end natural language interface with information technology, but we now have a back end natural language interface (i.e., the programming side) that creates a low barrier to entry for AI programming. The “programming” itself that I saw for BabyAGI has the feel of merely abstract level natural language interface. Doesn’t this make the threat from alignment much more plausible? Democracy is great and everything, it’s just when we democratize the ability to go the last mile to full AGI that life becomes quite scary.
Thank you Daniel for your reply.
The latest delivery count is 5M. That is a fairly substantial ramp up. It means that the double over the 1.5 years from October 2021 --> April 2023 is being maintained in the 1.5 years from Jan 2022 through July 2023 (admittedly with a considerable amount of overlapping time).
In addition it is quite remarkable as noted above that they have been level 4 autonomous for years now. This is real world data that can help us move towards other level 4 applications. Obviously, when you try and have level 4 cars that move at highway speeds and must interact with humans problems can happen. Yet, when you move it down to sidewalk speeds on often sparsely traveled pavement there is a reduction in potential harm.
I am super-excited about the potential of robobuggies! There are a near endless number of potential applications. The COVID pandemic would have been dramatically different with universal robobuggy technology. Locking down society hard when people had to grocery shop would have stopped the pandemic quickly. As it was shopping was probably one of the most important transmission vectors. With a truly hard lockdown the pandemic would have stopped within 2 weeks.
Of course transport will become much safer and more environmentally friendly with robobuggies and people will be spared the burdens of moving about space. It is interesting to note that many people are stuck in so called food deserts and these robobuggies would allow them to escape such an unhealthy existence. Robobuggy transport would also allow school children to have more educational options as they would then not be stuck into attending the school that was closest to their home.
I see robobuggies as a super positive development. Over the next 10 years with continued exponential growth we could see this at global scale.