AI firm HUMXN offers free plumbing and HVAC service in Minnesota to train robots

Noaidi

Anyone who participates in this is a traitor to humanity.

black6

At what point do these services become free, in the Star Trek post-scarcity sense? How is the promise that automation will ultimately provides freedom from struggling for survival upheld? The piper has to be paid, unless the owner class all of a sudden does a one-eighty and decides they can stop raking in money.

maitland

the gen ai image on this page has a "shut off" label for the base of the human plumber's neck. To say nothing of the amusing drainage schematics (water flows up?)...

momojo

How is this on the front page? Its not a YC company. They have no internet presence besides a Claude website. 0 followers on X/twitter. No public mentions of funding or votes-of-trust. No names to vouch for them. Can OP or founders comment?

jawns

There's obviously a strong incentive for homeowners to participate: they don't have to pay for a service that is often valued at hundreds of dollars. But what is the incentive for contractors to participate, and how does it overcome the enormous disincentive of "You are training your replacement"? My guess is that truly skilled contractors in these trades are not hurting for work. So I doubt they're going to be swayed by just a few more extra jobs added to their docket. Less skilled contractors who are desperate for work might be taken in, but then the quality of their output is likely to be worse, and the value of that training data is likely to be low. My guess is that people in skilled trades who are used to working with their hands are going to be even more skeptical than white-collar folks about an AI revolution, and more guarded against change in that direction.

colesantiago

It is known that the AI labs are going for all economically useful work. Creatives and all white collar jobs are the easiest to target first, with AI labs basically pitching individuals and businesses: "AI will free you up with more time to do 'other meaningful things'" If you find yourself laid off or work has run dry from a previous gig because AI can do it better than you, you'll naturally consider a role which AI hasn't touched... yet Then you see AI and robotics labs going after the margins of blue collar jobs, which then they will also say again to the blue collar workers: "AI will free you up with more time to do 'other meaningful things'" I can't imagine what the world will look like if you repeat this N times, or even in 10 years. Because you need to pay your rent, and bills right? Unless rent, bills and all the rest of it doesn't mean anything anymore in this 'AI abundance' age.

FLeXMurphy

I'm seeing a lot of surprised people on this thread. Have a look at the more recent YC batches of startups. Count all the non-AI ones, and subtract from total. And don't pretend to not know what the end game of something like YC is here. And YC is not the only one. One company doesn't need to do everything. But 100-1000 smaller companies, each taking on a piece of every-day work that people are paid to do and replacing it with AI, is definitely doable and can pay very well if deployed at scale. It doesn't have to be perfect all the time either - just cheap, fast, and good enough. As it always has been. You didn't really think they are training vision models so they can just drive your car around, or that they are training robots to perform physical tasks so they can just use them in factories, did you?

SuperSixFour

HVAC tech here. Good luck. There are so many times where I have to reach somewhere and can't actually see what I'm looking for and have to go off feel alone. And I only know what it feels like because I've felt that particular part hundreds of times before. I think there are some things that could maybe work, but they would be incredibly basic tasks that are probably just cheaper to have a human do. In any case good luck.

rickydroll

I'm a little surprised that no one has mentioned the Isaac Asimov's story "Profession." https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/SF/AST/AST_1957_...