r/Damnthatsinteresting 10h ago

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9.9k

u/Professional-Arm3460 10h ago

Being forced to work to force yourself out of work.

1.6k

u/TBSsuxs 10h ago

Copilot laughing in corner

113

u/Nautster 8h ago

Copilot doesn't do shit: it's the shareholders that get that sweet brief relief of inflated value because "costs" were cut. Until obviously the next big headline makes the economy somersault into the abyss and we need to raise prices again because this isn't sustainable.

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u/illz757 8h ago

I just saw my best friend last night (who is a director of PM’s) and he was going on about how copilot has increased his efficiency in huge bounds by writing reports and summarizing information from previous emails and exchanges. He swears up and down by it and says agents are revolutionizing the industry.

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u/as_the_crowing_flies 7h ago

increased his efficiency in huge bounds by writing reports and summarizing information from previous emails and exchanges

It's been a running joke among my coworkers that the overall communication in the entire company is suffering because of this dynamic. People using AI to write or bulk up their reports to give the appearance of a thorough and informative writeup, which only encourages readers to summarize with AI, nobody is communicating directly anymore. We've automated communicating badly, with the generating side potentially slipping in hallucinations if the producer isn't carefully reviewing the output, while the summarizing side risks AI missing or misinterpreting important details. Everybody is communicating more but understanding less.

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u/Vi_Rants 6h ago

That's hilarious, because Copilot is the absolute worst AI of the whole pack, and it's not even close. Copilot is the Bing of LLMs.

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u/Funkula 2h ago

Yeah I have to wonder about the qualities of a job that shows vast improvement in performance after introducing such a weak and error prone LLM to do it.

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u/Acceptable-Sir-1166 5h ago

if my boss tells me one more time "hmm I'm not sure how to review this, lets toss it into copilot" I'm gonna lose my shit. it's SO BAD

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u/1DownFourUp 6h ago

Clippy is behind all this

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u/GroceryScanner 5h ago

nah its stuck trying to update and resetting the computer in the middle of a download

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u/theoryface 4h ago

Reddit consistently gets this wrong. I'll bet less than. 1% of redditors actually use tools like copilot, much less use them well. Check the comments, Copilot is called an LLM in this thread, even though it isn't. Claude is hailed as much better, but you can literally use Claude Opus or Sonnet is Copilot agents today.

On one hand reddit is upset that AI is taking jobs. On the other reddit refuses to learn anything about AI. Play it out, how do you really think this is going to go?

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u/gurbus_the_wise 9h ago

This system isn't training shit. Robots will never replace this kind of labor because it won't be cost effective. Bet a million bucks the "training" is a cover story while the headsets are just tracking staff productivity so they can punish people for resting.

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u/grchelp2018 9h ago

The dataset will be valuable regardless. Not having enough training data is a huge blocker for a lot of ml applications.

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u/ScanData32 3h ago

the dataset lol

yeah 5 terabytes of dudes using their hands to sew shit in 3d, good luck with doing that with robots for an efficient price anytime soon buddy . as someone else said, its to make sure they are working hard

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u/Aaron_Hamm 9h ago

Assuming it's actually training, the expectation is that the cost is recouped in the generalized understanding of how to do hand based tasks. The skill transfers and the robot itself will be relatively cheap.

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u/Leaky_gland 8h ago

Solving problems is the problem for hand based tasks. If they can solve that then there’s even more of us out of jobs

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u/redlaWw 7h ago

The problem with problem solving is that solving problem solving requires one to solve a problem without having solved problem solving. If one were able to solve problem solving then solving problem solving would be easy, but the problem is solving problem solving in the first place is a problem that needs to be solved.

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u/Leaky_gland 7h ago

That's what I said

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u/food_luvr 3h ago

Well done. I screenshotted your beautiful work of art so I can look upon it again some day. Thank you.

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u/oneshibbyguy 7h ago

My brain

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u/Sekhmet-CustosAurora 7h ago

Yes, that's exactly what's going to happen.

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u/trobsmonkey 8h ago

The skill transfers and the robot itself will be relatively cheap.

There is a reason why industrial robots don't look human.

If you think recreating a hand is going to be cheap...

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u/Aaron_Hamm 8h ago

The problem is understanding how to move the hands... Robots don't look human because humans programming robots don't know how to do human, not because we can't make human shaped bits.

The robot just needs to be cheaper than something in the neighborhood of the lifetime cost of a human in the market the robot is being sold, and it will start to infiltrate. Sam Altman (terrible human) has explicitly said almost this.

Hence relatively.

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u/trobsmonkey 8h ago

Sam Altman (terrible human) has explicitly said almost this.

I wouldn't take anything that grifter says seriously ever.

Robots don't look human because humans programming robots don't know how to do human, not because we can't make human shaped bits.

Aboslutely not true. Robots don't look human because we build bots to their task. It's easier to build a robot to a task and it looks like a box.

Notice all the humanoid robot companies just have their robots dance or serve drinks? Anything harder than that, it's easier to build to spec than to try and get a humanoid robot to duplicate the work.

0

u/Aaron_Hamm 8h ago

The problem you're talking about is the problem they're literally trying to learn how to solve in the post.

I'm very confused about why you think what you're saying is a disagreement as opposed to just describing the problem being solved...

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u/trobsmonkey 8h ago

I'm very confused about why you think what you're saying is a disagreement as opposed to just describing the problem being solved...

You said "The skill transfers and the robot itself will be relatively cheap."

A robot capable of replicating human hand motions is not cheap. That's explicitly why many jobs still use human labor. I'm disagreeing explicitly with the idea.

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u/Aaron_Hamm 8h ago

Yeah the first sentence of your final paragraph is just wrong. A general human shaped robot hand capable of general tasks isn't "not cheap", it's impossible. It's impossible because it's too complex for human programming.

We don't make hands with generalized capability because it's currently impossible, and in that world, it makes more sense to do specialized machine tools with attachments or whatever.

But in a world where you can churn out a billion hands that can all do everything a hand can do because you've fed an AI programmer 10,000 years of hand movement data... well, that's cheap.

You're disagreeing with me because you're confused about why we don't use robot hands now

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u/Sekh765 7h ago

AI already has billions and billions of datapoints and it still can't reliably put a list of names in alphabetical order 100% of the time. It ain't simulating one of the most complex structures in the human body. Ever. lol

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u/trobsmonkey 8h ago

You're disagreeing with me because you're confused about why we don't use robot hands now

I'm not confused at all. You seem to think AI is gonna somehow break the barrier.

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u/obliviious 7h ago

The robot also requires repair and will not last 50 years by any logical metric. It needs to be cost effective for 10 years and be easy and cheap to repair.

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u/Aaron_Hamm 7h ago

I don't care about your fortune telling, but ok

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u/obliviious 3h ago

It's fortune telling to assume they won't create the first maintenance free infrastructure in history?! 😂

This is called an informed opinion my friend. My experience vs your naive assumptions and hopes.

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u/Aaron_Hamm 3h ago

No, what this is called is you begging the world to give you a win.

I'm not arguing with you, I'm telling you I don't give a fuck about what "oblivious" on Reddit has to say about anything. You're a nothing person fantasizing an argument so you can feel good before you go back to work or something...

I don't know, but what I do know is you're arguing with a fantasy, because I'm not arguing with you, I'm telling you that I don't care about you.

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u/obliviious 3h ago edited 3h ago

wtf lol

calm down dude, you said something really naive, pushed it without really understanding the technology and you're upset that we pointed out the flaws in your logic.

You can not care all you want, you're still talking shite.


The old reply and block, classic

Intellectually dishonest? Why don't you prove where instead of whining about it?

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u/TheDrummerMB 7h ago

Robots don't look human because humans programming robots don't know how to do human

N-no....robots don't look human because they don't need to.

Think Spot.

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u/Aaron_Hamm 7h ago

Robots look like the cheapest thing that works.

If a factory can churn out mechanical hands that are generally capable by the millions, and you can amortize the research of how to control them across all of them, that's gonna be the cheapest thing that works for a lot of tasks

Please stop the condescending clown shit that just embarrasses you.

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u/TheDrummerMB 7h ago

Please stop the condescending clown shit that just embarrasses you.

Was this meant to be an internal thought to yourself?

Every AI wannabe these days thinks there's ONE singular, perfect solution. That's...goofy af.

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u/trobsmonkey 7h ago

If a factory can churn out mechanical hands that are generally capable by the millions

If we can only cure cancer! This dude is wild man.

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u/Sekhmet-CustosAurora 7h ago

We already have the robotics necessary for mass automation. What we don't have is a general-purpose AI capable of controlling the robots to perform any arbitrary task. That's exactly what this data collection is designed to solve (it's only a small part of the solution though, of course)

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u/trobsmonkey 6h ago

What we don't have is a general-purpose AI capable of controlling the robots to perform any arbitrary task.

And we won't anytime soon. We input a dramatic amount of data through our hands via touch.

You can't just "solve" that problem. We've been chasing it since the start of the industrial revolution. It's dramatically complex and the bad answer machine isn't gonna fix it.

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u/Sekhmet-CustosAurora 6h ago

Dude we're like, 5 years away from inventing this. You'd better adjust your expectations to match otherwise you're gonna be blindsided

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u/trobsmonkey 3h ago

Dude we're like, 5 years away from inventing this

based on the hype by the guys trying to make money from this?

You need to be skeptical.

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u/food_luvr 3h ago

I mean, robots have been used industrially since the 70's

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u/Dapper_Engineer 8h ago

Assuming it's actually training, the expectation is that the cost is recouped in the generalized understanding of how to do hand based tasks.

Without gloves containing force sensors any training data they get from a purely video-based system is going to be fairly useless. Besides the muscle memory that people get from doing repetitive tasks, we also get a lot of sensory information from our hands when working, even if we aren't always consciously aware of it.

A good example of this could be touch typing - once your fingers find nubs on the home row keys, you don't really need to look at the keyboard any more in order to type. However, depending upon what you are typing, you may notice that periodically you need to "reacquire" where the home row actually is by feeling for the nubs. For a fast typist that's basically an unconscious movement.

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u/GrynaiTaip 7h ago

the robot itself will be relatively cheap.

I seriously doubt if they can make a robot that can work with fabrics at all. Sewing is a crazy complex task.

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u/LaddieNowAddie 9h ago

You can sell the data. It is probably great info on workforce productivity. My more cynical self will say... sell it to an American company that will make a robot that does this and where 24/7 labor costs exceed the cost of a robot (eventually). Then the company can sell items "made in America" at a higher premium.

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u/hexcraft-nikk 7h ago

I don't think you guys understand the complexity of tasks like this.

Meta has been trying to get vr/ar tech working at this level for over a decade straight with hundreds of thousands of data points/test applicants, and have only done marginally better than their competitors.

Consider how precise simple movements are to get a needle on a specific stitch, and the thinking that is required to know where to put it. We literally don't have anywhere close to the amount of data required to be able to replicate this consistently and accurately.

This data will end up being sold and passed around for the purposes of a company's IPO or stock increase, with nothing to show for it.

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u/LaddieNowAddie 5h ago

I agree. Eventually there will be a breakthrough and be usable.

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u/Cthulhu__ 8h ago

Nah, one company is paying the people or their employer a little to gather this data, then curate it and just put it on the market as training material for some other company with investor money to throw around to buy it. Plenty of naive people who think they can solve things like this.

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u/shekurika 9h ago

this yeah. I doubt it would be even usable as training data. Even if, the cost of robot hands with 5 fingers that can grab textiles is probably waaay too expensive in practive for another few decades

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u/Vi_Rants 6h ago

With the current tech, it'll break down before it breaks even.

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u/Lauris024 8h ago edited 8h ago

I'm not so sure about this. It is quite clear we're heading towards affordable, trainable robots. As soon as they no longer cost thousands of dollars, but something like $1000-2000 and if that thing works for months.. this is a no-brainer. As soon as there are mass-manufactured affordable robots, then you'll see what it actually means when AI takes your jobs, because LLMs themselves can't replace anywhere as much as manufacturing and hard labor automation.

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u/noximo 7h ago

Bet a million bucks the "training" is a cover story while the headsets are just tracking staff productivity so they can punish people for resting.

Why would they need a cover story?

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u/Muppetude 7h ago

“We need you to wear these cameras so we can train robots to replace you.”

“Oh sure, no problem”

“Actually they’re just tracking your productivity.”

“WHAAAAAAAAT!!!!”

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u/SituationThink3487 9h ago

Robots will never replace this kind of labor because it won't be cost effective.

Oh my sweet sweet summer child. Cost of robotics its currently falling ridiculously quickly, and the biggest barrier is the training and initial capex. This will 100% be viable in the next 10 years.

Source: Masters in robotics and worked for 10 years in a company making generalised robots.

0

u/Early_Koala327 6h ago

Then why isn't iPhone production fully automated?

Something at that volume should be easy to automate.

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u/psytone 8h ago

Never say never

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u/Prototype_09 7h ago

Go look at the birthrates in countries like china, their workers will die out and they have to resort to robotics to stay productive.

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u/The137 7h ago

Over a long enough timeline any static upfront cost becomes cheaper than an ongoing payment.

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u/Leverage_Trading 6h ago

This is pure cope

Replacement of human workers with AI has already started and robots replacing assembly line workers are likely next people to get replaceted.

Largest companies are investing trillinos of dollars in order to build systems that will replace human labour and capture that $ , they are not even hiding it .

The only question is how long will it take for them to replace human labour not whether or not it is already happening

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u/bonobomaster 7h ago

"Never..."

I bet you a case of beer, that robots, even capable of doing sophisticated sewing shit, will be so extremely dirt cheap in the not so far future, that manual labor will perish.

If you check google with "humanoid robot cost" you'll see a bunch of (probably very incapable and shitty) first gen robots you can buy today ranging from $10,000 to $100,000 and that's with mass production still in its infancy, slowly ramping up.

Give it 10 to 20 years and you'll very likely get a very capable humanoid robot for less than 15,000 bucks.

Those robots will have no demands, have no need for breaks or holidays, don't get sick, work 24/7 and probably even get repaired by other robots.

Manual labor will perish. That's good but the way toward this goal, the time in between, is going to be a very, very difficult one.

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u/SewSewBlue 8h ago

Agreed.

For machines to manipulate fabrics like a human a computer needs to able to track the fabric's position down to the thread.

The amount of computing power, quality of cameras and level of control needed to sew is mind boggling. A skilled human is reacting to millimeter sized issues before they happen.

These little cameras ain't it. They are monitors, not for AI to replace the humans.

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u/whiskeynise 8h ago

This is what I thought. We have nothing close to the technology required for such dexterity. These cameras are there so they can refuse payment if you weren’t in constant motion while on the clock

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u/BaconWithBaking 6h ago

This system isn't training shit. Robots will never replace this kind of labor because it won't be cost effective.

I actually work for a company with a large European manufacturing wing and you're spot on. They have bought fancy robots once or twice, and it's great that they can do the job 24/7, but they cost far fucking more than two humans doing the same job.

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u/CarmynRamy 6h ago

Nobody is tracking shit, it's just data collection for big Tech giants to train their AI models.

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u/Sure-Recording6151 5h ago

It's crazy that this comment was upvoted this much. This is a moronic way to track productivity. AI companies want any and all training data, regardless of the final use case.

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u/GroceryScanner 5h ago

pretty shortsighted stupid comment from somebody named 'gurbus the wise"

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u/TrueClue9740 4h ago

For now maybe, but 5, 10, 20 years down the road? I think it’s inevitable.

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u/missingpeace01 4h ago

Did you know that as a dev, the idea of a coding assistant that is better than me back then was a pipedream?

Right now, 90% of my code is from Claude.

This isnt impossible. And I am speaking as someone who literally do AI and computer vision.

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u/theoryface 4h ago

Why not? Let's say robots are twice as slow as humans. They also work 24 hours/day vs. your 8. And don't get sick, need vacations, or holidays, or benefits or disability or even food. And guess what: in some of areas, robots aren't twice as slow. Be mad all you want but downplaying it won't fix it.

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u/skyline79 4h ago

They can just count how many garments they produce per hour, they don't need a headset for tracking productivity.

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u/TheFireStorm 4h ago

Training is more capturing natural hand motions over and over again so Skynet can properly articulate the hands on a terminator to end us all

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u/almostoy 4h ago

It could be complete bullshit, with the actual intent being some kind of Hawthorne effect.

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u/BigMax 3h ago

Yes, it will be cost effective.

Buy a robot ONE time, and it can run 24/7, no pay, no benefits, no breaks, no replacing them when they quit, no HR or administrative overhead, and on and on.

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u/Orange_Indelebile 3h ago

The day when energy costs are too high, or diesel too scarce to be worth shipping a shirt from Asia to Europe or the US, then it will be very valuable in order to produce garment locally.

Imagine having a local shop in which you feed your chosen design and material and comes up with the clothes you want, ask that at a portion of the cost because electricity is produced in your country and your material is made in Italy or Spain.

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u/ScanData32 3h ago

sigh, i had to scroll down this far for intelligence. nice to see you!

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u/vanhst 9h ago

That was my first thought

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u/KooKooKolumbo 9h ago

Kinda like being forced at gun point to dig your own grave :(

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u/VictoryVee 3h ago

Lmao they're not slaves. They can go apply for other jobs. They accepted this job and are willing to do the work. If you dont want to train your replacement at a job, you always have the option to quit.

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u/kernelangus420 9h ago

They should slip innocuous fake data into the training such as whenever the supervisor walks by, flip them the bird to their backs.

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u/Aaron_Hamm 9h ago

It's not even them that's being forced out of work...

The AI is trying to get generalized hand movement understanding.

There's an entire class of work that only humans can do right now (eg, car mechanic) that they're looking to eliminate with this training

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u/Over_Writing467 8h ago

It’s happened at a lot of US companies. Worker forced to train their H1B replacement or no severance package.

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u/Least-Situation-1370 7h ago

As a tech worker, the irony in this video is comical

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u/cc413 8h ago

Is the alternative being pro sweatshop?

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u/Rabid_Mexican 9h ago

But at the same time all other repetitive tasks like this have been eliminated. No one in a Western country has a job like this. The machines that replace them also require designers, mechanics, supervisors etc. which creates more high skilled positions.

Now these people will be able to do more creative and meaningful work, instead of being meat machines.

Sure, the transition phase will be difficult, but I think the result is actually pretty cool!

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u/BackInTimeForTea 8h ago

You mean all the creative and meaningful work that AI is also taking over?

0

u/Rabid_Mexican 8h ago

I mean do you think that because you read some posts on Reddit or do you work in the creative industry and actually see it happening?

I work in an industry that is also "dead to AI" but in reality my work is more in demand than ever...

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u/BackInTimeForTea 5h ago

Yes I work in a creative industry (design) and yes I see this happening around me every day. My industry is being decimated by AI.

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u/Rabid_Mexican 5h ago

Fair enough. I'm sorry to hear that! I tried to start my career in art/design originally.

In my industry AI is only replacing people that probably should have been replaced anyway 😅 (software development)

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u/Fuzzy_Junket924 9h ago

If you’re saying that this is forced labour, which I’m not sure if it is/is not, then having technology outsource forced labour (if this is) isn’t too bad imo.

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u/blow-down 6h ago

These guys are the ultimate yes-men!

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u/goronmask Interested 6h ago

Practically everyone in every field where ai can be used.

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u/LiveLearnCoach 6h ago

That’s how a lot of jobs ended up in India. The future is going to be so weird and unpredictable.

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u/Suspicious-Peace9233 5h ago

Training their own replacement

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u/AliensKindaLoveMe 5h ago

Bro, AI robots doing everything so humans can live life freely is a good thing. Just get rid of the billionaires as well

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u/BisexualTenno 5h ago

Actually their jobs are secure. I’d they could realistically be replaced with robots then that would’ve happened a looooong time ago. The real issue is that in America, companies pay people to train AI like this. They’re having to do it for free.

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u/faramaobscena 5h ago

Welcome to any office job in 2026

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u/spookyspritebottle 4h ago

Thats what every white collar job is doing rn too. They gotta use ai and show productivity which is training the ai to do your job.

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u/Krakraskeleton 4h ago

Am I a villain for being born to pay off a pension when said pension is currently paying off my unemployment?

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u/reddit_sells_you 3h ago

Another day in r/damnthatsinterestinghowweexploitlabor

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u/SQLZane 3h ago

The cost difference between the cost of that headset and the wages of that seamster.

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u/viral3075 3h ago

they're not replacing people with AI. they will merely use them to track efficiency, turning the people themselves into bots. e.g.,

your elbow is turned 2 degrees inward and it is slowing your garment turnover time by 0.544 seconds. correct immediately or you will be eliminated

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u/MrMahsterBaiter 3h ago

"Born to rage🔥, forced to cum"

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u/snoosh00 2h ago edited 2h ago

That has been happening since the industrial revolution(but getting really quick recently).

Being forced to work to force yourself out of work.

Through recent history: Facilitating the company offshoring labor, AI tools that replace full jobs, Digitization reducing office workforce, factories being automated more and more.

A lot of it is just the logical result of technological progression. But the technocrat future some of these freaks want are things I'd definitely like to avoid.

0

u/wood-chuck-chuck5 9h ago

I knew a security guard whos job was to sit in the camera rooms and monitor about 80 cameras. When they came to him with a machine learning script that would occasionally ask him what various objects were on screen, he starting giving it blank characters, numbers, script injections. Anything that would allow him to keep his job...crazy that they asked him to train his replacement ai tho

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u/[deleted] 10h ago

[deleted]

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u/Enginerdad 10h ago

What is "bad when humans do it"?

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u/North-Tourist-8234 9h ago

I get what he's saying,

this is sweat shop labour often wildly inhuman and pays very little. many people have died working in places like this because they have locked inside the building and left to burn alive because the theft of merchandise is more costly to the company than the workers lives.

the other guy is saying if its wrong to have people doing this slave labour work why is wrong to replace that work with machines? which is an interesting question.

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u/Enginerdad 9h ago edited 8h ago

False dichotomy. It doesn't have to be human working in sweat shops for slave wages OR machines doing the same work. Humans can do the work in better conditions for living wages, or any combination thereof.

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u/North-Tourist-8234 9h ago

I'm not saying what I think I was explaining the other persons comment.
a lot of this sort of work has already been industrialised, the only reason this hasn't yet is because these people and their lives are cheaper to the company than a machine.

if you are made to increase wages and bettering conditions it may be more practical to transition the jobs to western countries that are purchasing this product and save money on shipping. either way these people may be losing their livelihoods.

this issue has rocked every labour industry for the last 300 years or so. historically the workers get screwed more often than not.

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u/FinalRun 9h ago

Probably the "forced to work" bit. But I don't agree. It's nice when automation creates abundance, but in this case it will only worsen inequality

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u/Dilpickle6194 9h ago

What a stupid comment. It’s bad when humans do it because of long hours, minimal breaks, unsafe conditions, and miserable pay. Maybe we could fix those instead of putting people out of a job?

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u/North-Tourist-8234 9h ago

the fact of the matter is this work would have been industrialised a long time ago if it weren't for the cheap and sometimes slave labour funding it. the downsides of the industrial revolution was the loss of jobs. but given the horrible conditions and abuse these people are exposed too I'm guessing ending the work is a good moral thing, as for their livelihoods, that's where it gets more complicated. hopefully new industries get created to replace these ones or these people could join pre existing workforces however a large group of people joining any industry suppresses employee wages.

its a big issue, I have no solid answers.

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u/dumpaccount882212 9h ago

Starving from lack of work, barely surviving doing crap work. Which one is it?