Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Philip Goetz's avatar

Why don't dishwashers and washing machines count as robots? The work carrying the clothes to the washer is trivial compared to the work of the washing. In the 1970s I had a home with a laundry chute, which delivered clothes into the laundry. If instead of a chute that works by gravity, I have a hamper I must put dirty clothes into, which a robot carries downstairs, does that count as a robot, while the more-efficient laundry chute doesn't?

Household work can still be more-easily reduced by altering the house than by making robots smarter.

Expand full comment
Dan Browne's avatar

The areas that you have described as requiring many FLOPS fit neatly into the group I also described as requiring many FLOPS (pattern recognition). If you'd read further down the post you'd have noticed I started talking about neural nets to do those types of tasks (pattern recognition). Though you can indeed construct a complicated iterative algorithm to "process" individual parts of patterns over many repetitive operations until the entire pattern is processed I would suspect a trained neural net optimized for recognizing such for recognizing thespecified pattern would be much faster and require much less in the way ofprocessing capacity needs. That is precisely why I am skeptical of the"human brains process at the equivalent of X gazillion FLOPS".

Human brains DON'TPROCESS like one step at a time algorithms AT ALL and thus the comparison is apples and oranges.

Expand full comment
16 more comments...

No posts