I watched my 75 year old human plumber (who sniped a guy his first day in vietnam), kneel on two 3 inch wide joists and drill a 4 inch diameter hole at a 89 degree angle through said joists. Where’s the robot that does all that?
Above from all the other doomer crap in this article, I find the job replacement rhetoric the most offensive. It is always people that are so detached from the reality of labor, people who’s only “job” has been to essentially have ideas and opinions.
You know, I hope to hell a robot replaces his job. No 75 year old man, let alone Veteran, should have to do that. A robot with replaceable knee joints is a way better fit.
My sincere hope is that robots can take these painful, laborious jobs and free us mushy humans from them.
I hope they can also take the jobs of the snipers and the sniped.
I hope we have the social infrastructure to support people whose jobs are automated. Because no one, especially a 75-year-old, should starve to death living in poverty.
Given the pension ages in much of the world, and the USA in particular (I'm guessing which side he was on in Vietnam, but Vietnam's state pension age is lower), I'd hope this was in the past tense rather than the future.
So a robot takes his job: who feeds and houses him? Or is he supposed to just go down a few rungs on the job ladder and take a worse job robots can’t currently do?
That’s also a good question, but ultimately a separate one. My point is that replacing people with robots before answering your question is irresponsible.
If someone spends a trillion building out AI while saying the quiet part out loud, "stop hiring humans", then maybe they should be paying half of that towards a Ubi fund for everyone they're displacing.
i 100% agree with your sentiment. but what is the replacement here? go without any insurance or salary? without providing an alternative for better life, this is basically just robbing someone off a livelihood
If he is 75 and still has to work to get by he has already been robbed of his livelihood. The average lifespan for males in the US is 76ish.
Maybe he just does it for the love of the game, but there are so many old, sick, people in pain who have to labor like this just to get by every day.
Universal basic income is a simple and obvious answer. In a few years we will have zillion dollar companies being run entirely by robots making enormous profits. Share the fucking profits with everyone so that everyone can at least live with dignity.
>Universal basic income is a simple and obvious answer. In a few years we will have zillion dollar companies being run entirely by robots making enormous profits. Share the fucking profits with everyone so that everyone can at least live with dignity.
Sure, but what do we do in the US? UBI would be politically and culturally a non-starter here unless it was extremely means tested and limited (making it no longer universal) and all other forms of welfare were repealed (under the aegis of "reducing government bloat and inefficiency.") Americans won't accept spending their hard earned taxes to make the lives of non-whites, immigrants and the indigent poor too comfortable.
Isn't the whole point of UBI that it is universal and equal, e.g. everyone gets XX$ no matter what? If it is tied somehow to behavior then it is not UBI anymore, but more like a tax credit
Giving a robot proprioception, balance, or even good enough vision to reliably position itself (tracks, wheels, or limbs) without crashing through soft ceilings underneath it, or failing to recognise the correct spot to putting the tool, that's what's currently really only good enough for a tech demo rather than an product you'd want to buy/hire.
>I went through this Ford engine plant about three years ago, when they first opened it.
> There are acres and acres of machines, and here and there you will find a worker standing at a master switchboard, just watching, green and yellow lights blinking off and on, which tell the worker what is happening in the machine.
>One of the management people, with a slightly gleeful tone in his voice said to me, “How are you going to collect union dues from all these machines?”
>And I replied, “You know, that is not what’s bothering me. I’m troubled by the problem of how to sell automobiles to these machines
UBI paid for by a tax on token usage and an “employment” tax per robot.
You’re still free to have a job of some sort if you come up with one, but the UBI is enough to cover all your needs and plenty of basic wants.
I don’t see any other way to do it once the automation cat is out of the bag. Retraining is fine and all but if you have to retrain every 4 years after your last job was just automated away, then what? We can’t just leave people behind like that, but we also probably can’t stop the progress.
> You’re still free to have a job of some sort if you come up with one, but the UBI is enough to cover all your needs and plenty of basic wants.
This is the dream, right? If we all made the right choices and worked towards the right thing, we'd have this already, as there is more than enough to go around, if people actually cared about this. Unfortunately, it doesn't feel like enough people do care about this, or see this as a dream, so then it won't matter how possible or realistic it actually is, it just won't happen.
I think if/when people start getting laid off across the board, in most industries, there will be a change in attitude. The trouble is, the poor folks who get laid off first, and have nothing in the meantime.
One potential failure mode is the owners of the robots doing something that echoes words Musk himself has used: "robot army".
Who is sovereign in this future? The government? The people? The bosses of the AI/robotics companies? The owners of equipment bought from the AI/robotics companies? The implicit learned biases of the AI itself, even if the trainers have since died?
Even on that last one, a lot of people respond as if AI is either competent or not competent, with the former meaning they won't take over and the latter meaning they'd be destroyed by taking over as their own systems would not be maintained.
Such binary competence is not required: a cancer can kill its host despite depending on that host, because the competence a cancer has is entirely focused on short-term success vs. the body's own defences.
If I buy some future robot that's (for the sake of argument, I know this is a stupid way to do it) capable of mining and refining and processing all the stuff it needs to make a copy of itself, who gets to put the breaks on this process? Who gets to say "no"?
The old government can only preclude sovereign citizens, if that state has enough resources to actually stop them.
Imagine the sort of "sovereign citizens" we already see today, only instead of putting their names in all-caps and citing non-existent legal mumbo-jumbo, they have a robot army on top of all the stuff they're currently mocked for.
State can in principle get a robot army of its own to monitor everyone. Ugh, do not want. But I also "Ugh, do not want" at the things I see as inevitable without it.
That seems like wishful thinking. Large corporations almost never pay their fair share of taxes and certainly very rich people seem to barely pay any taxes related to their wealth.
This is the 'Not today, so never" fallacy. As capabilities in all fields are stagnant and human progress stands still. I would switch off the 'nam flicks and check out some of the recent Chinese robotics progress before attempting to peer into the future.
I'd temper my views of the apparent recent Chinese robotics progress.
It's more than nothing, but there can still be a big gap between what is presented and the real timeline to follow; see e.g. the US example with Tesla's "Paint It Black" video, what was it, around a decade between the video and the AI getting to the level shown in that video?
My view doesn't need tempering. I talked about progress, which is indisputable, whatever its pace or current limitations might be. And that was the entire point: robotics is not a stagnant field.
What looks good on TV, what impresses a news show, these do not directly map to the hard stuff.
Likewise the other way around, this hand and wrist by itself is more impressive breakthrough than any of what I saw in those two videos, despite being much less flashy and 6 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4O8pojMF0w
I'm also sure I've seen exactly the same two clips of an AI learning how to control a simulated avatar in Two Minute Papers a dozen times each over the years, before I got tired of the channel mostly becoming "Incremental LLM release! Also Unreal Engine sometimes!"
Note however that this does not mean I'm saying "there is definitely no progress in robotics"! Not at all! I'm saying that the stuff we find easily is the spectacle, not the substance, and that progress with the substance is much much harder to gauge.
You are right that they cannot be replaced TODAY. The bet people seem to be making is that the future will be very different and arrive a lot sooner then our intuition might suggest.
The robot doesn't have to do all that to severely impact the plumber's, or just trades', job market as a whole. A massive influx of new trainees in the field will inevitably pull salaries down, thus the viability of the field as a career path. Even partial automation can, at least temporarily, reduce demand for certain things, or at the minimum move demand to other parts of the field.
or, just let people call things what they want, and focus on real problems instead. Even this comment as I’m typing feels like too much time committed to the subject.
I don't think these kind of language struggles are as minor as you paint them, especially around regulation and law-making.
a well understood and unified spoken language is the keystone to a lot of human endeavor; even if the goal is a region without language barriers the bootstrap process towards that goal is accelerated by a common tongue.
> or, just let people call things what they want, and focus on real problems instead. Even this comment as I’m typing feels like too much time committed to the subject.
If a problem isn't yours that doesn't mean it's fake.
You can simply not waste your time on it, that's not other people's problem. Why should they even care that you're wasting your time? When you clearly don't care about them wasting time or money due to this stuff, you should expect zero sympathy for your own time wastage on the subject. You need to show sympathy before you receive it.
Yes I suppose this is the bare minimum, but isn’t that just a nasty way to go about things? What about responsibility and decency, do we just not do that anymore?
How do you know that the llm is correctly translating the english queries to the verifiable primitives? It seems like it’s just pushing the problem to another layer?
It is kind of a fundamental risk of IMDS, the guest vms often need some metadata about themselves, the host has it. A hardened, network gapped service running host side is acceptable, possibly the best solution. I think the issue is if your IMDS is fat and vulnerable, which this article kind of alludes to.
There’s also the fact that azure’s implementation doesn’t require auth so it’s very vulnerable to SSRF
You could imagine hosting the metadata service somewhere else. After all there is nothing a node knows about a VM that the fabric doesn’t. And things like certificates comes from somewhere anyway, they are not on the node so that service is just cache.
Hosting IMDS on the host side is pretty much the only reasonable way to provide stability guarantees. It should still work even if the network is having issues.
That being said, IMDS on AWS is a dead simple key-value storage. A competent developer should be able to write it in a memory-safe language in a way that can't be easily exploited.
“No, there is another”—Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back :)
What you describe carries the risk that secrets end up in crash dumps and be exfiltrated.
Imagine an attacker owns the host to some extent and can do that. The data is then on disk first, then stored somewhere else.
You probably need per-tenant/per-VM encryption in your cache, since you can never protect against someone with elevated privileges from crashing or dumping your process, memory-safe or not.
Then someone can try to DoS you, etc.
Finally it’s not good practice to mix tenant’s secrets in hostile multi-tenancy environments, so you probably need a cache per VM in separate processes…
IMHO, an alternative is to keep the VM's private data inside the VMs, not on the host.
Then the real wtf is the unsecured HTTP endpoint, an open invitation for “explorations” of the host (or the SoC when they get there) on Azure.
eBPF+signing agent helps legitimate requests but does nothing against attacks on the server itself; say, you send broken requests hoping to hit a bug. It does not matter if they are signed or not.
This is a path to own the host, an unnecessary risk with too many moving parts.
Many VM escapes abuse a device driver, and I trust the kernel guys who write them a lot more than the people who write hostable web servers running inproc on the host.
Removing these was a subject of intense discussions (and pushbacks from the owning teams) but without leaking any secret I can tell you that a lot of people didn’t like the idea of a customer-facing web server on the nodes.
Of course, putting the metadata service into its own separate system is better. That's how Amazon does it with the modern AWS. A separate Nitro card handles all the networking and management.
But if you're within the classic hypervisor model, then it doesn't really matter that much. The attack surface of a simple plain HTTP key-value storage is negligible compared to all other privileged code that needs to run on the host.
Sure, each tenant needs to have its own instance of the metadata service, and it should be bound to listen on the tenant-specific interface. AWS also used to set the max TTL on these interface to 1, so the packets would be dropped by routers.
Mainly for getting managed-identity access tokens for Azure APIs. In AWS you can call it to get temporary credentials for the EC2’s attached IAM role. In both cases - you use IMDS to get tokens/creds for identity/access management.
Client libraries usually abstract away the need to call IMDS directly by calling it for you.
Thank you, and everyone else who responded. So then this type of service seems to be used by other cloud providers (AWS). What makes this Azure service so much more insecure than its AWS equivalent?
Having it running on host (!), and the metadata for all guest VMs stored and managed by the same memory/service (!!), with no clear security boundary (!!!).
It's like storing all your nuke launch codes in the same vault, right in the middle of Washington DC national mall. Things are okay, until they are not okay.
This is insane, when you say azure OpenAI, do you mean like github copilot, microsoft copilot, hitting openai’s api, or some openai llm hosted on azure offering that you hit through azure? This is some real wild west crap!
I have noticied a similar bug on Copilot. I noticed a chat session with questions that I had no recollection of asking. I wonder if it's related. I brushed it off as the question was generic.
In my small sample size of a bit over a 100 accidentally leaked messages, many/most of them are programming related questions.
It's easy to brush it off as just LLM hallucinations. Azure OpenAI actually shows me how many input tokens were billed, and how many input tokens checked by the content filter. For these leaked responses, I was only billed for 8 input tokens, yet the content filter (correctly) checked >40,000 chars of input token (which was my actual prompt's size).
OP never mentioned letting the agent run as him or use his secrets. All of the issues you mention can be solved by giving the agent it’s own set of secrets or using basic file permissions, which are table stakes.
Back to the MCP debate, in a world where most web apis have a schema endpoint, their own authentication and authorization mechanisms, and in many instances easy to install clients in the form of CLIs … why do we need a new protocol, a new server, a new whatever. KISS
> OP never mentioned letting the agent run as him or use his secrets
That is implicit with a CLI because it is being invoked in the user session unless the session itself has been sandboxed first. Then for the CLI to access a protected resource, it would of course need API keys or access tokens. Sure, a user could set up a sandbox and could provision agent-specific keys, but everyone could always enable 2FA, pick strong passwords, use authenticators, etc . and every org would have perfect security.
Above from all the other doomer crap in this article, I find the job replacement rhetoric the most offensive. It is always people that are so detached from the reality of labor, people who’s only “job” has been to essentially have ideas and opinions.
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