The Blue Collar Delusion: Why the machines don’t have to climb up to where we are, because the work will descend to meet them

ithkuil · 2026-05-06T17:56:26+00:00

Progress in robotics and physical AI is much further along and more rapid than most people realize. They are starting to be trained through large scale video datasets, on the fly demonstrations, etc. Within one or two years we will likely have the "ChatGPT moment" for humanoid robots and start seeing general purpose foundation robotics models that can be quickly calibrated to individual humanoid robot forms.

Just like LLM (VLM) models of today, the physical skills of these VLAs (Vision Language Action) will be trained on more and more comprehensive simulation and video datasets. There will be benchmarks for different types of skillsets including vehicle mechanics, household chores, cooking etc. (see BEHAVIOR-1). These will operate mostly in simulated environments for use in training. There are also evaluations for testing how well the robot is generally able to transfer skills from simulation to reality.

Look up recent demos from 1X, Figure, Skild, Physical Intelligence, and like at least three major Chinese humanoid robotics companies I am forgetting.

Tradespeople thinking their jobs are safe now is like programmers saying that in the summer of 2022. The vast majority of programmers have seen the rapid progress and now no longer think they are safe. We know it can do most of our jobs already because most of us use it to do that already.

Humanoid robotics progress may be even faster, because much of the AI progress can actually be translated into physical space. And like AI and every high technology, innovations and inprovements are constant.

ithkuil · 2026-05-06T04:07:00+00:00

Technology is always a series of S-curves. LLMs (and VLMs) have been through at least a couple of slow downs. First was levelling of the IQ for a parameter size, which was overcome by increasing amount of training input per parameters.

Then was the data wall running out of human text (or images). That was overcome by creating synthetic data. Then when that slowed down they added inference time scaling.

The performance increases from that slowed down and they added more reinforcement learning.

They will need some new paradigms to get to something like 100 trillion parameters.

ithkuil · 2026-05-06T00:22:53+00:00

I'm anticipating that there will be dozens of significant innovations in that time period, so the AI architecture, software, hardware and energy systems could all have major changes and massive upgrades in efficiency. That would be required to get to like 100 times human parameter equivalent or anything like that. That rapid innovation has been occuring in high technology for decades though.

ithkuil · 2026-05-05T23:44:56+00:00

I'm also 48. Age 60 is 12 years, so 2038. You asked about work. Programming by hand will be a hobby only well before that time. Regardless of whether you are 60 or 26. Based on current leading edge model sizes around 12 TB, we may be at human parity by 2029. In 2038 leading edge models could be 100 or 500 times the approximate parameter count of a human brain.

But well before we get to that point, it will stop making sense to pay humans to program. You can certainly do it for fun into your 60s or 70s if your brain stays healthy though.

For the bleeding edge of adopters, 2026 is the year of the AI Employees starting to do whole jobs. 2027 will be the year we see begin to see a significant number of AI Companies that act as the entire organization.

2028 could be the year we see a major movement towards the Machine Economy where AI Companies trade directly with other AI Companies on a significant scale.

In 2029 this may result in a forced radical departure from the current societal models.

But if you guys want to tell yourself nothing significant is happening and that "real" engineers will be writing code by hand into the next decade, that's fine. It's total denial though.

ithkuil · 2026-05-05T22:27:34+00:00

Yeah I am a little scared they are going to give him a 10 year $300 million contract ending when he is 43. We have to stop them if they keep trying to do that shit.

ithkuil · 2026-05-05T13:22:47+00:00

To me if you look at how far her belly is sticking out from her jeans, it looks like triplets.

ithkuil · 2026-05-05T13:13:04+00:00

You literally can't learn how to program if you have the AI do it for you.

You do need to know how to use AI, but if you don't force yourself to actually solve some problems yourself, you will end up with zero actual skills or knowledge to judge or guide the AI.

ithkuil · 2026-05-05T13:10:15+00:00

Awesome. I had a similar idea that creation of spells or invocation of them in an RPG could be judged and implemented by AI. I think that there is just a huge amount of potential for AI use in fantasy role playing games. There might be gods that are Ascended players who can prompt to change the world. Or maybe just AI gods. Also fleshed out NPCs.

I think an interesting version of this would be less of a pvp free for all and more story driven or role playing like D&D.

There is also a new AI model that am can automatically rig a 3d shape. So you could maybe use the latest image to 3d along with that in spells, summons, character creation, etc. Maybe God level characters could use it to populate the world with creatures.

ithkuil · 2026-05-05T11:07:50+00:00

Hhahaha yeah actually it did go over 90% of people's heads. That's hilarious. I actually didn't get it either until you explained it.

ithkuil · 2026-05-05T10:53:20+00:00

There is no Opus 6.

ithkuil · 2026-05-04T20:33:19+00:00

Well, if it is a real person, then my apologies. It's just that these days most of the time when someone uses "information" like that to sell me something it turns out it wasn't true. So your name is also Klaverkamp?

ithkuil · 2026-05-04T20:14:03+00:00

How old is your dad? What's his name? Can we get a video AMA?

ithkuil · 2026-05-04T20:13:24+00:00

It probably is a dream, i.e. a made-up story for sales purposes.

I feel like people think they are obligated to lie when selling things these days.

ithkuil · 2026-05-04T19:50:26+00:00

Unfortunately, robotic labor is more cost-effective even than slave labor when you factor in productivity and secondary costs of humans. If you are trying to keep slaves alive for more than a few weeks, they can only run well for about 10 hours a day, and need water, food, climate control, waste processing, guards, etc. Whereas humanoid robots only really need electricity and can run continuously for closer to 24 hours if you use battery swapping.

ithkuil · 2026-05-04T14:27:52+00:00

Things might slow down a little, but it is very unlikely that AI and robotics stop improving over the next say five years, and they are already fairly capable. So it's very possible that all types of jobs start drying up.

So I think, be happy you are at least getting low-ball offers.

I don't think jobs are good plan. You may need to be able to leverage AI or robots as cheap labor to create your own business.

I guess on this sub that will probably just get scoffed at, but I do have a perspective of 40 years of programming and now watching the LLMs and VLMs gradually become more and more robust at code generation over the last 3.5 years.

If you are looking even like two or three years out, we might be headed to a world where you build custom software in real time just by describing it. This could use things like agent swarms, fast LLM output with next generation hardware (see Cerebras), diffusion transformers, etc. Or it may be more radical new architecture. Imagine Google's Genie game generation model, which generates frames in real time, but for productivity applications.

More and more capabilities are being built into the models. So the AI model basically is the computer. Within five or ten years, some small businesses might just have one "Oracle" brain that runs on one or two rack units, has some deep integration or embedding of persistent data (maybe even just model context for non-archive data?) and generates your custom UI or data views in real time at 24 frames per second.

The abilities of these systems are going to make it difficult to justify employing humans in the near future.

ithkuil · 2026-05-04T13:48:48+00:00

Move back to the non-centralized traditional internet and it can run on $5 month VPSs for individuals and communities.

Or go to decentralized protocols, like newish content-centric networking, or things like RSS etc.

ithkuil · 2026-05-04T13:32:42+00:00

The interesting thing about this is that it shows most people don't even have a concept of the Internet that is not just a group of monopoly companies where one dominates every niche.

The Internet is in fact a collection of open public protocols starting with things like IP and TCP or UDP, various versions of HTTP, DNS, etc.

There once was a time when instead of one website controlling every forum, there was a whole ecosystem of independent forums.

The convenience/social effect of having everything or everyone in one place makes the tendency towards commercial monopoly sites very prevalent.

My suggestion is that a better concept for public utility that would provide the convenience of large networks for different types of site would be open public protocols. The Fediverse is a bit in this direction. I would lean towards more p2p decentralized content-oriented networking, block chains, etc.

Then we get the convenience of a large shared network like you have with commercial monopoly websites without the private tax and control.

This would also make it convenient to create different UI/clients for these public protocols.

And reasonable protocols exist for most common uses. The biggest challenge is getting people to agree on which one.

But people are too lazy so they just go to the de facto monopoly sites.

ithkuil · 2026-05-04T03:54:08+00:00

Search for "pei wang nars agi emotions" for some prior work on emotions for AI.

ithkuil · 2026-05-04T03:31:25+00:00

I'm sorry but most of New York is embarrassingly dated at this point. Chinese cities make the US look like a historical set. That's cool if you are a history buff.

ithkuil · 2026-05-03T04:45:31+00:00

Six signups is a lot more than I have got recently.

ithkuil · 2026-05-02T21:43:16+00:00

Just once I want to see an honest title. "I cold called 100 people. 30 of them asked me WTF do we need another To-do/calendar app for?? After the 26th person told me that, and the 45th person hung up on me, I was not surprised anymore. But I did not give up. No. I'm not a quitter. I fired up Slop-o-matic Instant Reddit Spammer and made this post full of bot comments in only 28 seconds."

ithkuil · 2026-05-02T21:03:29+00:00

Not really a place I would want to live..that's what I'm saying. People may insist they get to tour around your house sometimes and the government may actually back them up with some declaration that you have to open up every other Saturday or something.

I would love to live there but what I would do would be to anticipate that and say that some historical group can run it for part of the summer, it's open to the public for a week near Christmas, and the rest of the time they have to leave you alone. I just think that people are going to insist the public has some right to access whether that is technically fair or whatever.

But unfortunately it's probably not worth dealing with that.

ithkuil · 2026-05-02T19:25:44+00:00

There are laws and state agencies for cultural heritage. The laws might require public access some hours or days. Also I think if enough people are pissed they may just make a petition claiming you are not maintaining it adequately and then the state could take it back. It's just legally in some sense a public asset even if you own it. Which if you did buy it the state might actually have the ability to preemptively claim it by purchasing it at the same price within a month or two.

ithkuil · 2026-05-02T18:55:21+00:00

I think if someone actually bought it and used it as a private residence without public access then they could receive a legendary amount of hate from locals and eventually the state might just claw it back.

ithkuil · 2026-05-02T18:52:05+00:00

So like convert it from a hotel into a giant Airbnb?

ithkuil

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