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Went to a robotics demo in Austin last week and I think most people are missing the point on AI safety
I sat through a presentation where a guy showed off a robot arm sorting trash, and everyone was asking about killer robots. But the real problem I noticed was when the thing froze up because a soda can was slightly dented. We are so focused on sci-fi stuff that we ignore how brittle these systems still are in basic real world tasks. Has anyone else seen AI fail on something simple that nobody talks about?
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jordanl822mo ago
Man, that napkin story is gold. But here's something I've been chewing on that nobody brought up yet. Look at how much energy these setups guzzle. That trash-sorting arm probably had a server farm somewhere doing cloud computing just to figure out if a dented can was still trash. In my experience, we're so obsessed with making AI smarter that we forget to ask if it's sustainable. A single query to a big language model uses like ten times the power of a regular Google search. So while we worry about robot uprisings, these things are quietly burning through more electricity than a small town just to sort recycling. Your mileage may vary, but I think the "brittle" problem is only half the story.
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charles6782mo ago
The Denny's in San Antonio had a food service bot that got confused by a napkin on the floor once. Sat there beeping for 45 minutes until a manager shoved it out of the way. My advice is to test these systems on the weirdest edge cases you can find, not the perfect lab scenarios. That way you know exactly where they'll break before you depend on them for anything real.
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