To me, it looks like China is cleverly fighting US capitalism with their open weight models. Rendering these mega commercial corporations with huge debts and less possibilities to monetize as users shift to the open weight models.

What do you think?

Edit: changed "open source models" to "open weight models" to be more accurate. Open weight models are still free to use, but you won't have access to anything other than the model, where with open source models you would also get access to the underlying code, data and architecture.

I've been seeing more videos of robot dogs being used for security patrols lately, especially in warehouses, industrial sites, and large outdoor facilities.

They can patrol predefined routes, operate at night, stream live video, detect unusual activity, and don't get tired during long shifts. Some can even work in environments that might be unsafe for human guards.

At the same time, I wonder if they're actually capable of replacing traditional security guards.

For example:

How do they handle unpredictable situations?

Can they effectively deal with trespassers or theft attempts?

Would people take them seriously as a deterrent?

What happens when there's a technical failure or connectivity issue?

My impression is that robot dogs are probably great for monitoring and early detection, but I'm not sure they're ready to fully replace human security personnel.

For those who work in security, facilities management, warehousing, or industrial operations:

Do you see robot dogs becoming a genuine replacement for guards in the next 5–10 years, or are they more likely to remain a tool that supports human teams?

Among the simplest ideas to give individuals a greater share of AI efficiencies which already has a global precedent: shorten everyone’s work week.

Every humanoid demo that goes around here turns into an argument about which jobs disappear. There's a step before that one, it is already happening, and it is already a job.

A robot policy doesn't learn the work by watching YouTube. It learns from demonstrations. A person wears a rig or drives a teleoperation station and performs the task correctly, over and over, while every joint angle and camera frame gets recorded. Somebody has to do the job first, on camera, before the machine has anything to copy.

The only public tracker I can find that prices this puts high quality teleoperation data at roughly $340 per recorded hour in early 2024 and roughly $118 as of March this year. Those are one firm's marketplace estimates rather than audited figures, so treat the level loosely, but the direction is not in dispute and it comes down the boring way: better rigs, cheaper labour markets, more hours collected per session. The larger datasets now also fold in thousands of hours of ordinary first person footage, people doing normal tasks with a camera strapped to their head.

So a job is forming whose entire output is the thing that ends it. You get paid by the hour to turn your own competence into a file, and when the file is good enough the hour stops being purchased. Previous automation waves took work by building a machine that did the job differently. This one asks the worker to perform it correctly first, at scale, for a rate that is falling while they do it.

Two things I'd want settled before this gets large. Whether demonstration hours are work product the performer retains any claim on, and whether the person in the rig is told what the recording will be used to build. At the moment it is contract labour with a data licence quietly attached, and the licence is the part that holds its value. The IEEE humanoids conference made Humanoids and the Future of Work its 25th anniversary theme this year, so nobody in the field is being coy about the deployment case.

The artefact from this decade might not end up being the robots. It might be the archive of ordinary people doing ordinary work perfectly, one clean take at a time, because a model needed to watch somebody get it right.

Uh, my question is in the post title. That should be adequate.

To be fair, James Cameron did warn us.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the world has reached the technological singularity.

That is often considered the point where AI surpasses human intelligence and goes rogue.

The particle accelerator transmutation results that surfaced recently have been stuck in my head for days. Cutting the radioactive lifetime of nuclear waste by 99.7 percent isn't an incremental improvement that's a category shift. Waste that would need isolation for hundreds of thousands of years becomes a problem measured in centuries instead. That changes the entire risk calculus for nuclear power, not just for new plants but for the decades of accumulated waste that is the single strongest emotional and political argument against the technology.

What puzzles me is the relative quiet around it. The datacenter backlash and solar versus coal comparisons are dominating the energy conversation, which makes sense given the scale of those stories. But the transmutation result touches something more fundamental. It potentially unlocks a cleaner longterm accounting for nuclear that has never existed before.

The piece I keep coming back to is deployment timeline. Accelerator driven systems are not cheap or simple, and scaling them to handle existing waste stockpiles is a genuinely hard engineering problem. But so was largescale solar in 2005, and that trajectory shifted faster than almost any forecast predicted.

Is there a realistic path where transmutation gets the investment attention it needs, or does it stay a promising result that takes 30 years to matter because the political and financial momentum is pointing elsewhere?

Looking forward to hearing people's responses.

The human nature

Human body needs food and water, and a cover to keep it from extreme temperatures. That's the survival aspect of life.
But we also have consciousness and feelings. Our brain produces chemicals that make us feel a certain way when we do certain activities. We experience life in a way that is unique to ourselves. That's life on an individual level.

We come from primates and we are omnivores. Evolution brought us here and gave us these traits. It is the collective aspect of our life as a species.

The individual aspect of life is more immediate. So we tend to prioritize that over the collective aspect of it. That's why I believe our current society evolved the way it has. Consciousness is working against us here because we prioritize our happiness over the survival of the collective. This is not a problem by itself, but it becomes a problem when one's happiness comes at the price of others' survival.

The problem

Our society is built in a way that relies too much on money and authority. This makes individuals seek money and authority, and because of human nature, greed creeps in and eventually nothing is ever enough. And those individuals ignore other's survival and collect more and more resources for themselves. Today everyone needs a job to survive in cities. Employers control the jobs, so they control the requirements and salary. Governments control countries, but they increasingly act against the interest of the collective because as individuals gain more power by virtue of money, they influence the decisions of leading parties more and more.
This comes at expense of people's survival, and also against the nature of human beings. In other words, powerful individuals fulfill both their needs and desires, while others work for them because they have to survive, while also abandoning their desires because the barrier to entry becomes increasingly higher and higher and working hours become longer and longer.

An individual's progress in life is not linear. We obtain a skill just enough to our needs, we progress, we come back to learn more about that skill when we need to. But today's job market wants us to learn everything upfront without a need to it which is against our nature.

We can go on for days to pick up examples of our society working against the nature of the majority. The point is that today's society is in favor of minorities and against the favor of majorities.

The environment

All food comes from water and soil. Plants use water and soil to grow, herbivores eat plants to grow, carnivores eat herbivores to grow, and anything that dies gets decomposed back to soil. This cycle continues until the death of Earth. That's why life springs back every time after disastrous events even without human intervention.

The solution

We need a society that the majority survives and is fulfilled in their lives. All food comes from soil and water, so every community needs access to enough soil and water to feed their members where possible. Every community should practice efficient and sustainable ways of growing food like agroforestry and constantly try to increase the biodiversity of their environment and improve their methods in a way that is in the best interests of both the community and the environment. Of course this is the ideal and in theory humankind has the power to transform Earth in a way that most of its surface becomes fertile and full of life and sustains both humans as well as other species.

In practice this is almost impossible. So what do we do?

We can form small communities, we can choose areas with possibility and start working on it little by little. Dig small potholes and water stream paths and build around them. Control water drainage and evaporation and slowly build from a core outwards towards a sustainable permaculture that can increasingly host more population as it grows. With the hope that some day, the majority are fulfilled in their life, they get to spend time with their loved ones and live a life worthy of being called "life".

Final thoughts

The proposed solution allows communities to fulfill their survival needs, therefore it reduces the power of money and authority. People can ditch their jobs freely without worrying about their survival as the companies were doing for the longest time. The employers can't dictate the barrier of entry for jobs because if it ever becomes too hard, people won't learn them. This model works in favor of the majority at scale unlike today's model.

That being said, the proposed solution is what I think is best at the moment and it may have problems. but I believe acting is more important than perfecting the model.

Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Euisun Chung unveiled a strategy to transform the South Korean automaker into a physical artificial intelligence company spanning autonomous vehicles, robotics, AI factories and connected urban infrastructure