2024 UPDATE!! Altman: prepare for AI to be "uncomfortable" 33% US jobs gone..SKYNET, AI medical advances? BASIC INCOME? 1st AI MOVIE! AI MAYOR!!
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GnauzBookOfRhymes
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Robots Are Coming, and They’re on a Mission: Install Solar Panels
Energy companies say a labor shortage is one big obstacle to installing more solar power. They’re turning to machines to speed things up.
Robots Are Coming, and They’re on a Mission: Install Solar Panels
Energy companies say a labor shortage is one big obstacle to installing more solar power. They’re turning to machines to speed things up.
Listen to this article · 7:45 min
AES Corporation’s Maximo robot. It can install hundreds of solar panels, often weighing 60 pounds or more, in a single day, even when temperatures rise into the 100s Fahrenheit.Credit...AES Corporation
By Brad Plumer
July 30, 2024
The companies racing to build large solar farms across the United States are facing a growing problem: Not enough workers.
Now, they’re turning to robots for help.
On Tuesday, AES Corporation, one of the country’s biggest renewable energy companies, introduced a first-of-its-kind robot that can lug around and install the thousands of heavy panels that typically make up a large solar array. AES said its robot, nicknamed Maximo, would ultimately be able to install solar panels twice as fast as humans can and at half the cost.
Roughly the size of a pickup truck, Maximo has a large extendable arm that uses suction cups to pick up solar panels one by one and lay them neatly into rows, using artificial intelligence and computer vision to position them properly.
After months of testing, AES will put Maximo to work in the California desert later this year to help install panels at the largest solar-plus-battery project under construction, meant to help power Amazon data centers. If all goes well, the company aims to build hundreds of similar A.I.-powered robots.
It’s part of a growing trend: Energy companies want to use automation to overcome worker shortages, cut costs and speed up the construction of large solar farms, which has traditionally been very labor-intensive. Without drastic changes, these companies say, it will be impossible to deploy solar power fast enough to tackle global warming and meet the country’s rapidly growing need for electricity.
“We’re seeing labor shortages on construction projects in the United States, and it’s a bottleneck to the build-out of solar farms,” said Andrés Gluski, chief executive of AES, in an interview. “So how do you get around it? Well, robots can work 24 hours, right? Robots can pick up 80-pound solar panels, not a problem.”
The interest in automation comes as President Biden and other politicians have said that a boom in clean energy could create millions of jobs.
“Whenever automation comes up, there’s always this push and pull,” said Katie Harris, vice president of federal affairs at the BlueGreen Alliance, a partnership of labor unions and environmental groups. “It can help folks be more productive, but we also want to create good-paying union jobs, and automation isn’t always a friend there.”
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To date, AES has used robots to install 10 megawatts of solar panels, about enough to power 2,000 homes.Credit...AES Corporation
Demand for solar power is expected to grow astronomically over the next decade thanks to the plummeting costs of panels, hundreds of billions of dollars in federal subsidies and growing interest from tech companies in securing carbon-free electricity for their data centers. By some estimates, the country will need 475,000 solar workers by 2033, nearly double today’s number. Yet 44 percent of solar companies already say it is “very difficult” to find qualified workers, according to one recent survey.
It can be especially hard to recruit construction workers for large solar arrays, which are often located in remote desert areas. The job involves lifting and installing hundreds of panels per day, each one weighing 60 pounds or more, in places where temperatures can reach in excess of 110 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 43 Celsius.
Getting machines to do the job isn’t easy, however. Unlike the robots that work on assembly lines inside factories, robots that operate outdoors have to withstand rain, dirt and mud while dealing with uneven terrain and other surprises.
To overcome those hurdles, AES is counting on advances in artificial intelligence that allow its robots to recognize and adjust to different types of solar modules and difficult outdoor conditions.
“One of the biggest issues we had to deal with was glare,” said Deise Yumi Asami, who founded the company’s Maximo project. When the robot moved from New York to Ohio for testing, it suddenly faced different angles of sunlight reflecting off modules and the company’s engineers had to train the robot to adapt.
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Built Robotics uses machines to lay the foundations for solar farms.Credit...Built Robotics
To date, AES has installed 10 megawatts of solar panels with its robots, about enough to power 2,000 homes. The company plans to use Maximo to install 100 megawatts by 2025, though that is still a fraction of the 5,000 megawatts of solar the company expects to build in the next three years.
AES hopes to eventually deploy hundreds of robots. Mr. Gluski, the chief executive, pointed out that AES was one of the first companies to feed power from lithium-ion batteries to the electric grid, a practice that started slowly but has since become widespread. “There’s a learning curve, like with all new technologies,” he said.
Currently, it takes 12 to 18 months to build a large solar farm. But with the United States experiencing a frenzy of data center construction and many businesses looking to quickly secure energy supplies, AES wants to cut construction times significantly.
Other solar companies are also exploring automation. Built Robotics, a San Francisco-based start-up, is using pile-driving robots to build the foundations for solar farms. By automating some processes, a task that typically takes 6 to 7 workers can be done with two workers up to three times as fast, the company said.
Terabase Energy, a start-up based in Berkeley, Calif., has developed a small mobile factory that uses robots to assemble solar modules on-site and install them on racks. The technology has already been used to install 17 megawatts of panels at a solar farm in Arizona and the company says it has made construction 25 percent faster.
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Terabase has developed a small mobile factory that uses robots to assemble solar modules on-site and install them on racks. Credit...Terabase
Matt Campbell, the chief executive of Terabase, wants to slash the cost of solar power in half. Solar power is already one of the cheapest ways to generate electricity. But if the world wants to use energy from the sun to replace natural gas for making fertilizer or hydrogen fuels, then solar power needs to get even cheaper, he said.
The costs of the panels themselves don’t have room to fall too much further. “The only way you can get there is to make the construction a lot less expensive,” Mr. Campbell said.
Many fossil-fuel companies in the United States have already used automation to cut costs: Over the past decade, the number of workers in oil and gas drilling has fallen by 40 percent even as production has reached record highs.
Mr. Gluski said he doesn’t expect robots to completely replace workers. “My idea is not to hire less people, but to do twice as much with the same number of people,” he said, adding that robots could make the work safer for humans by taking on the taxing work of lifting heavy solar panels in the heat. And AES could hire a wider range of workers to operate the robots. “I don’t have to only hire 220-pound men,” he said.
The Laborers’ International Union of North America, one of the country’s largest construction unions, did not respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Harris, of the BlueGreen Alliance, said she was skeptical that even rapid automation would fully fix the looming shortage of clean-energy workers and that policymakers would still need to invest in training and apprenticeship programs.
When it comes to the future, Mr. Gluski said he didn’t think robots would be building wind farms anytime soon, since those tend to be gigantic. But, he added, AES was increasingly interested in using artificial intelligence to do tasks such as identifying potential wind and solar sites that could be developed the fastest or better predicting when wind turbines need maintenance. All of that would make renewable energy cheaper and faster to deploy, he said.
“I have no doubt that in five years time, a lot of this stuff is going to be routine,” Mr. Gluski said.
GnauzBookOfRhymes
Superstar
Right now a lot of AI usage is being masked by companies simply hiring less people.
GnauzBookOfRhymes
Superstar
We’re Entering an AI Price-Fixing Dystopia
Algorithmic collusion appears to be spreading to more and more industries. And existing laws may not be equipped to stop it.
www.theatlantic.com
GnauzBookOfRhymes
Superstar
Cisco lays off 10,000 in 6 months.
GnauzBookOfRhymes
Superstar
In a leaked recording, Amazon cloud chief tells employees that most developers could stop coding soon as AI takes over
Matt Garman sees a shift in software development as AI automates coding, telling staff to enhance product-management skills to stay competitive.
www.businessinsider.com
GnauzBookOfRhymes
Superstar
A.I Mayor
www.the-sun.com
Plan for AI to run city as it hosts meet & greet & 'would be good for democracy'
ARTIFICIAL intelligence has officially run for office in what may be the country’s first election with a robot on the ballot. Victor Miller has always been a big fan of sci-fi books, so it…
www.the-sun.com
GnauzBookOfRhymes
Superstar
Grasping at straws(men)
No one seriously suggests that AI means humans will be completely replaced. It will undoubtedly be used by governments and other organizations to expand and entrench their powers. But I think it’s a bit naive to assume that the extent to which systems depend on human intervention etc won’t change as time goes on. Like anything, the early stages will require more managing but we already have some evidence. I mean it was only a cpl of years ago that many people believed that developers would be immune to any shifts in the industry. But now not only as the systems able to write the code, but they can do the testing/fixes etc that ppl thought would still require a team of developers.
Look at what’s happening with the media. Go back a couple pages and dudes were talking about how AI would never be trusted to produce content and now every other day some legacy media organization is admitting that AI is a fundamental plank of their business strategy going forward. It’s creating content, police will be using it to write reports upon which other decisions will be based. AI is creating reality.
Police officers are starting to use AI chatbots to write crime reports. Will they hold up in court?
Pulling from the sounds of a body camera, an AI tool based on the same technology as ChatGPT can churn out a draft in seconds.
apnews.com
Police officers are starting to use AI chatbots to write crime reports. Will they hold up in court?
Pulling from the sounds of a body camera, an AI tool based on the same technology as ChatGPT can churn out a draft in seconds.
this was inevitable
As long as they retain the original video, audio, transcript and Diff of from the initial AI written report, i don't mind.
If a police officer signs off on the AI report then they should accept it as if they write it no matter what since signing off on it implies, they read, edited it, and approved it which is their job.
soon these things will be able to assess their conduct on the job to in real-time, not necessarily verbally interfering in the process of them interacting with the public.
GnauzBookOfRhymes
Superstar
To be honest this is one part of policing that would probably end up 100x's better trusting AI over your typical cop.
Police reports are almost always poorly written and difficult to understand.
saw an interesting comment on hackernews...
caseyy 1 day ago | prev | next [–]
This is very multi-faceted and complex.
From one perspective, there should be no harm in simply using LLMs as a text processor, if the accounts written down in said text are genuine and verified as such by the officer.
From a more practical perspective, an account written by a witness itself will always be more accurate to what they actually saw and how they interpreted it, than a statement written by any third party. It doesn’t matter if the third party is human or not.
Also, LLMs show heavy Silicon Valley ethical bias. This is not news to anyone here. To ingest this bias into our legal system, I think grants too much power to the tech companies. Especially in common law, where precedents can be established.
On the other hand, the justice system will be largely supervised by humans, so perhaps they will discern what is right and wrong, moral and immoral, ethical and unethical, or what has perverted ethics.
Then again, if this system becomes more AI-based over time, we may lose human control and our legal system may be in large part controlled by tech companies. This is not a good slope to slide down, and how slippery it is remains to be seen.
Also, what if the halo effect created by the way LLM expresses itself hides institutional prejudice? You can always push ChatGPT to come up with 20 polite ways to express your racist beliefs, for example. But if you wrote your own statements, they may be more visible. I’m sure police already know whatever LLMs produce is more PR friendly as a benefit, but is there a dark side to this?
Lastly, what about data protection? What if I don’t want my data to be ingested by LLMs for training, but I am, let’s say, a victim of a crime? Do I have no reasonable expectation of privacy anymore? Remember what Google said about people who hand over their data to third parties and how they argued it is evidence that such people don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
The responsible adult thing to do would be to run research on it and find how the LLMs bias police statements and what kind of effects that can have to a justice system — proper double blind studies. Done by a committee of experts from judges to institutes and projects for civil justice.
With so many ways to slip off the thin tightrope where everyone acts with integrity and not only best interest, but also competent best interest of one another and justice… I think this is bound to end poorly if we go balls to the walls with this sort of thing.
And then to top this off, other commenters present strong arguments that further complicate the matter.
a lot of contentious comments on reddit..
'Our Chatbots Perform The Tasks Of 700 People': Buy Now, Pay Later Company Klarna To Axe 2,000 Jobs As AI Takes On More Roles
As AI technology continues to advance, Klarna, a Swedish financial services company, is planning to reduce its workforce by almost 50% in favour of AI-powered automation.
www.ibtimes.co.uk
'Our Chatbots Perform The Tasks Of 700 People': Buy Now, Pay Later Company Klarna To Axe 2,000 Jobs As AI Takes On More Roles
Klarna has already cut over 1,000 employees and plans to remove nearly 2,000 more
By Vinay Patel @VinayPBPatel
Published 08/28/24 AT 7:42 AM BST
Klarna has already shed over 1,000 employees and plans to cut nearly 2,000 more. The company claims its AI-powered chatbot can handle the workload previously managed by 700 full-time customer service agents.Wikimedia Commons
A Swedish financial services firm specialising in direct payments, pay-after-delivery options, and instalment plans is preparing to reduce its workforce by nearly 50 per cent as artificial intelligence automation becomes more prevalent.
Klarna, a buy-now, pay-later company, has reduced its workforce by over 1,000 employees in the past year, partially attributed to the increased use of artificial intelligence.
The company plans to implement further job cuts, resulting in a reduction of nearly 2,000 positions. Klarna's current employee count decreased from approximately 5,000 to 3,800 compared to last year.
Klarna's Radical Workforce Reduction
A company spokesperson stated that the number of employees is expected to decrease to approximately 2,000 in the coming years, although they did not provide a specific timeline. In Klarna's interim financial report released on Tuesday, the company attributed the job cuts to its increasing reliance on artificial intelligence, enabling it to reduce its human workforce.
Klarna claims that its AI-powered chatbot can handle the workload previously managed by 700 full-time customer service agents. The company has reduced the average resolution time for customer service inquiries from 11 minutes to two while maintaining consistent customer satisfaction ratings compared to human agents.
"Our proven scale efficiencies have been enhanced by our investment in AI, which has driven down operating expenses and improved gross profits," the company said.
According to the World Economic Forum's 2023 Future of Jobs Report, over 75 percent of companies anticipate adopting artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies within the next five years. This widespread adoption could significantly alter the way we work.
Klarna reported a 73 percent increase in average revenue per employee compared to last year. According to its website, Klarna, headquartered in Sweden, maintains two UK offices in London and Manchester and numerous additional locations throughout Europe, the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand.
While details about Klarna's workforce in the UK are still scarce, the company said the planned headcount reductions would be even across its sites. In addition to customer service, Klarna currently uses artificial intelligence in its marketing efforts.
"Our AI assistant now also serves as a powerful shopping assistant that helps consumers discover and choose products tailored to them, further transforming the shopping experience and helping them save time and money," the company said.
Notably, none of the workforce reductions have been achieved through layoffs. Instead, the company has relied on a combination of natural staff turnover and a hiring freeze implemented last year.
Klarna's AI-Fueled Revenue Growth
Klarna's interim results demonstrated a 27 percent increase in revenue, reaching 13.3 billion Swedish krona (£990 million). Additionally, the company transitioned from a loss of 456 million krona in the previous year to an adjusted profit of 673 million krona. The job cuts occur amidst a turnaround strategy at Klarna.
The company, which had previously been profitable until 2019, began experiencing financial losses in 2020 following a period of rapid expansion in the United States. Subsequently, Klarna's estimated valuation plummeted from 46 billion US dollars (£34.8 billion) to just 6.7 billion dollars between 2021 and 2022.
Klarna's chief executive, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, indicated that the company may consider an initial public offering (IPO) as early as next year. In an interview with Reuters, he stated that this timeline "sounds reasonable" but emphasised that there are no concrete plans.
Siemiatkowski suggested that the company might favour a US stock market listing but acknowledged that European options have also been considered.
In July, Chrysalis Investments, a major Klarna investor, provided a more recent valuation estimate, suggesting that the fintech firm could achieve a valuation between 15 billion and 20 billion dollars in an initial public offering.
1/2
Bland AI is one of the killer AI tools that has been flying under the radar.
Conversational AI is already being used for a ton of use cases at the enterprise level like sales, ops, customer support.
Imagine when the use cases expand to video games, apps, robotics, VR/AR, healthcare, etc.
We’re headed into a weird future where we’re going to probably talk to AI as much, if not more, than humans. And it’ll be impossible to tell the difference.
Also, try calling the AI agent on the website — it’s pretty uncanny.
2/2
Yes, we've even hosted workshops on it in The Rundown AI University
To post tweets in this format, more info here: https://www.thecoli.com/threads/tips-and-tricks-for-posting-the-coli-megathread.984734/post-52211196
Bland AI is one of the killer AI tools that has been flying under the radar.
Conversational AI is already being used for a ton of use cases at the enterprise level like sales, ops, customer support.
Imagine when the use cases expand to video games, apps, robotics, VR/AR, healthcare, etc.
We’re headed into a weird future where we’re going to probably talk to AI as much, if not more, than humans. And it’ll be impossible to tell the difference.
Also, try calling the AI agent on the website — it’s pretty uncanny.
2/2
Yes, we've even hosted workshops on it in The Rundown AI University
To post tweets in this format, more info here: https://www.thecoli.com/threads/tips-and-tricks-for-posting-the-coli-megathread.984734/post-52211196
1/6
Today, marks a major milestone for us. We’ve closed our series A with $22M in funding. As we emerge from stealth, we wanted to formally introduce you to Bland, Your newest AI employee.
Bland is a customizable phone calling agent that sounds just like a human. It can:
Talk in any language or voice
Be designed for any use case
Handle millions of calls simultaneously. 24/7.
Bland does all of this without hallucination - and that’s just the start. But we'll let it speak for itself...
Call Now: Bland AI | Automate Phone Calls with Conversational AI for Enterprises
2/6
We hope that AI does the Bland work. Our goal is to make human interactions more meaningful and purposeful
3/6
huh
4/6
5/6
Probably catch a few more GPUs on fire...
6/6
DM!
To post tweets in this format, more info here: https://www.thecoli.com/threads/tips-and-tricks-for-posting-the-coli-megathread.984734/post-52211196
Today, marks a major milestone for us. We’ve closed our series A with $22M in funding. As we emerge from stealth, we wanted to formally introduce you to Bland, Your newest AI employee.
Bland is a customizable phone calling agent that sounds just like a human. It can:
Talk in any language or voice Be designed for any use case Handle millions of calls simultaneously. 24/7.Bland does all of this without hallucination - and that’s just the start. But we'll let it speak for itself...
Call Now: Bland AI | Automate Phone Calls with Conversational AI for Enterprises
2/6
We hope that AI does the Bland work. Our goal is to make human interactions more meaningful and purposeful
3/6
huh
4/6
5/6
Probably catch a few more GPUs on fire...
6/6
DM!
To post tweets in this format, more info here: https://www.thecoli.com/threads/tips-and-tricks-for-posting-the-coli-megathread.984734/post-52211196