AI Won't Need Robots: It Will Teleoperate Humans Instead

> If you had an expert looking over your shoulder and telling you what to do, I expect most of you could do most of the work of an electrician … In fact, that's the bulk of how electricians learn their trade: through apprenticeship. People wearing glasses with built-in cameras, connected to today's strongest AIs could already do a lot with a bit of scaffolding.

Apprentices have their work directly checked by the person supervising them, who is also ultimately personally responsible for the results.

I am a programmer but also like to work with my hands—I’ve done some amount of "real" electrical, plumbing, carpentry, light construction, mechanical, and landscaping work. To me, this line of thinking overall falls into a category of "things computer programmers believe about other kinds of jobs," that I see fairly often on HN. It’s key to the whole argument here but kind of papered over with an unvalidated assumption it’d probably already work with today’s AI.

Anyone who has followed a DIY YouTube video more than a few times has encountered situations where having muscle memory and proprioceptive experience with actually manipulating the tools and objects you’re working with would significantly reduce the chance you mess it up. How tight is too tight? Am I going to shear this bolt head off? Is this saw blade getting dull and going to hurt me? Even the best guides and teachers don’t cover the combinatoric ways things can frequently go wrong–it’s accumulated knowledge in the heads […]

The author uses a strange definition of teleoperation.

Following GPS directions is no different than assembling an Ikea furniture by following the instructions. So I guess Ikea has been teleoperating millions of humans for decades?

Sounds like we're just one step away from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(short_story)

> The classic picture of AIs doing things in the world is robots, but I think a more realistic picture of the near future is computers telling people what to do.

As a purely qualitative description, this does not strike me as anything particularly new. Machines had been doing something like this long before the computer age. For example, as early as the late Middle Ages, mechanical wheel-driven clocks with striking mechanisms were used to call people to prayer.

Any process in which a person reacts to a machine can be characterised in this way. Every till that calculates how much one has to pay, every traffic light, every other machine-generated signal. When a warning light comes on in the car, we are prompted to do something: release the handbrake properly, fasten our seatbelt, visit a garage, ...

We are already so deeply embedded in such cycles that AI seems to be merely a new variation on them than a fundamental change.

The deep sense of unease regarding AI does not stem from a machine telling us what to do, but from the risk of losing control over the situation as a whole.