https://youtu.be/d6IGHUCZQOI?si=Qd8WjvRTL4N9Qe7K

Start watching at 4:11. It takes about a minute until the full impact is felt. I showed this to M and she flipped on her attitude towards AI. Before this video it was just this random innocuous thing out in the periphery. Now unless your job is physical, the AI mental robot is gunning for you. And when robots become cheap enough, those jobs are next.

Most advances in AI are at an esoteric level. Unless it's directly within your field, it's easy to ignore. But everybody listens to music.

To start off I want to write a song. I'm too lazy or incompetent to write it myself so I feed an idea to GPT and it kicks the lyrics out for me. ChatGPT can flesh out ideas. It is all the vocabulary associated with those ideas and it can make them rhyme.

I then feed it into Suno. I choose a genre of music or I create a new one. I spin a few dials, a check off a few boxes to say male or female or somewhere in between and a few other options and I hit generate. I generate 20 or 30 versions and then I do a bit of fine tuning and I'm ready to cut the new song.

Multiply that by millions of people. There will be a tsunami of new music coming. 99% crap I'm sure. But that's my job to say that. All music beyond my generations music is crap. Whether human or AI generated.

I focused on learning about programming assistant style AI because that impacts my historical career. (I have no career right now). That is something I consider myself qualified to judge on the progress. The rest is goblygook. And I see advances that blow me away but don't totally remove the requirement to have programmers. Just those programmers better make really good use of AI so they're not outclassed by the programmers that are.

But those types of demos are worthless to show non-programmers. A generic music producing AI workflow is hard because those music lyrics require a deep understanding of what's going on. Or at least the ability to fake it really well. Plus the ability to empathize and emote or fake it. Stringing those words together with the correct intonation is not easy. And that pretty much covers 90% of professions.

https://youtu.be/qV9C6Am8xzk?si=HkCtZoMCwZBYZ0ix
M mentioned that she found something I was worried about. So she eased my mind. And this song came to mind.

Obviously I missed out on the fact that Judas was pissed at Christ for wasting money that should have gone to the poor. Christ was a prick. At least in this portrayal.

I am very happy that I live in a time that I can repeat the following pattern. A daily experience reminds me of a song. I hum a bar or two of the song and then go: I can have this for real. 30 seconds of YouTube searching later shows me half a dozen copies of this song, some live, some raw recorded and other's artistically recorded with an MTV video. I click on the one I want and enjoy.

This is incredible. Before my time frame, it would be a matter of old people chanting by the fire. Or very rich people being entertained by the musicians. And then recordings showed up a few decades before my birth. And the world changed.

In my youth it was limited to the number of records I could afford. Or the amount of time I could waste while recording off the radio. As I got older it became a matter of how many CDs I was willing to carry around with me. I had a thousand lb of CDs in milk crates. And it was an enormous amount of effort to go find a particular song to listen to. I'm so happy I sold them all at a used record store.

Now I have at will choice of an infinite amount of music. I don't know how long this will last but I will enjoy it while it does.

I'm going to start with an incredibly cheap $15 an hour. That's 31k. Then add in whatever overhead per employee such as HR and management costs. Add in any benefits. Let's cap it at a cheap 50k. Keep in mind there will come a point where human infrastructure such as bathrooms will become optional. Which means certain plumbing will become optional for certain buildings. There are huge swaths of expense that can be removed once people are out of the picture in a manufacturing environment. If it gets more expensive per employee then the robots become more attractive. If the operation is capable of 24x7 operation then that means a robot can replace three employees. But let's knock that down to two and give the robot a shift to be maintained.

At this point the value of the robot is 100k per year. The robot will not bitch at the boss or spread anti-company gossip or attempt to unionize, or sue the company, etc etc etc. There is a whole lot of benefit to the robot, far beyond the money savings, but let's start there.

What is the reasonable expected payback time for this type of factory floor automation? I see between 6 months and 5 years so I'm just going to make up 2 years. That would be 200k.

The moment the robot is cheaper than 200k, it becomes reasonable to replace the person with it from a simple cost benefit analysis based on these assumptions. Since you see I went cheap if the people are any more expensive then the robots can be more expensive or will have a quicker payback.

A factory floor worker in a auto manufacturing plant costs a hell of a lot more than 50k per year. People digging in mines make a hell of a lot more than 50k a year. Either way the robots I see capable of factory automation don't look like they cost more than 200k to build. When they go full factory level automation I say they cost 50k and are sold for 100K for a healthy profit margin while still being very attractive to the final consumer companies.

Also, the robots don't have to be general purpose. They just have to be cost-effective enough replace people and the production environment and the company will be willing to modify the environment to accommodate the robots if that meant they could get cheaper robots. Legs and feet and a highly specialized balancing system is a lot more expensive than treads. So if we don't need the thing to walk steps then it can have the much cheaper treads. If the job is a person sitting at a single location and reaching forward with their hands and then swiveling, then there doesn't need to be any mobility at all. No mobility requirement means no battery packs and full-time wall power. Much cheaper.

The reason all of this is possible now is because we didn't have a vision driven manually dexterous system. The AI brings it all together. Now let's see what the bare minimum of human-like parts are required to replace a factory worker on an assembly line. Eyes arms hands fingers attached on a swiveling pole. There will be lots of those type of balancing decisions to keep the costs down.

Iron may be expensive relative to silicon, but it's far cheaper than people.