Flood Fill vs. The Magic Circle

https://www.robinsloan.com/winter-garden/magic-circle/

by tobr • 5 months ago

100 36 5 months ago

Dylan168074• 5 months ago

This assumes very slow AI progress. I'm not one to hype up LLMs, but I would never claim it'll take 200 years before an AI can untangle a sewing machine with robot hands. Stuffing an envelope and applying a stamp? My bet is less than 20 years. That's a level of tactility that can do a tremendous amount of real-world activity. And the capability of a high end robot controlled by a human keeps expanding, so in the hypothetical "AGI" scenario the flood fill gets pretty big.

dandellion2• 5 months ago

Self-driving looks like a much easier problem, it has gotten a massive amount of investment in the last decade, and it's not fully solved yet. Compared to that your 20 years estimate sounds way too optimistic.

Dylan168074• 5 months ago

I don't think driving looks easier than untangling. You can untangle nice and slow with little outside involvement. When it comes to self-driving at 25mph without traffic, it pretty much is a solved problem.

card_zero3• 5 months ago

I guess it's time to bring up "Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45392922

Wowfunhappy• 5 months ago

Overall, I love this essay. However, the entire argument hinges on one assertion, buried about halfway through:

Robots are improving fast, but I do not believe that this cute fellow will be stuffing envelopes or affixing stamps anytime soon.

Is this correct? I don't feel qualified to say. But if it's wrong... well, then there's a missing pixel in the magic circle, and flood fill will make the whole thing unrecognizable.

juancn• 5 months ago

The sensing part is really really hard.

Hands, mechanically are fairly simple to mimic, touch? the way skin feels micron-level shifts and subtle temperature changes is plain tough.

michaelt• 5 months ago

Hands, mechanically are fairly simple to mimic

I can assure you they are not.

Human hands have absolutely crazy performance. Human hands have 15+ degrees of freedom. Sub-millimeter precision, no backlash. Strong enough to lift 100 lbs. Gentle enough to catch a thrown egg without breaking it. Rigid enough to hammer a nail without dropping the hammer. A compact forearm for reaching into tight spaces. Water- and dust-proof. Oh, and it'll last for decades without maintenance.

Even a $100k robot hand like a Shadow Hand can't compare.

card_zero3• 5 months ago

Like Rodney Brooks says, "No one has managed to get articulated fingers (i.e., fingers with joints in them) that are robust enough, have enough force, nor enough lifetime, for real industrial applications."

Here, I'll link to that piece directly, it's long and detailed and illustrated, and it also counters the idea of just throwing AI at the problem until robot dexterity emerges from whatever physical parts.

https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...

"there have now been fifteen different families of neurons discovered that are involved in touch sensing and that are found in the human hand" ... "a human hand has about 17,000 low-threshold mechanoreceptors" ... "These receptors come in four varieties (slow vs fast adapting, and a very localized area of sensitivity vs a much larger area)"

You might ask, do robots that interact with the real world need such complicated bio-mimicking physical tech, or can they cut corners? But they can't cut all the corners, anyway. Somebody has to make a high-bandwidth robot hand with flexible strength and a self-repair ability. Or, hey, cyborgs maybe? Reanimate cadavers with AI, that could do the trick.

munificent2• 5 months ago

I also love this essay, but I think there's a much larger, scarier breach in the magic circle.

We humans consume information on the Internet, it changes our ideas, and those ideas directly inform our very physical and material behavior. We ourselves are essentially 3D printers for our thoughts, running 24/7.

Flashmobs, scenic spots that get overrun with tourists after an Instagram post goes viral, teens eating tide pods, adults failing to cure COVID with Ivermectin, fashion trends, everyone kind of getting into sourdough during the pandemic, Kate Bush making almost half a million bucks in two weeks because of Stranger Things, the death of Payton Isabella Leutner, millions of people protesting for Black Lives Matter, and thousands more are real-world events that would not have happened without the Internet infecting brains.

Elections are decided based on what people learn online, and those elections have world-sized potentially catastrophic impact when you consider things like climate change policy.

I fear there is no meaningful separation between the digital world and the physical world, because it's really about the separation between ideas and material reality. Living beings exist entirely to span that bridge.

card_zero3• 5 months ago

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds was published in 1841, though the internet amplifies everything (including rationality).

staticshock• 5 months ago

the death of Payton Isabella Leutner

she's alive, so "attempted murder" would be more appropriate.

i really enjoyed the "we are 3D printers for our thoughts" framing!

martin-t• 5 months ago

Even if the assertion is correct, what would life be like with computers incomprehensibly smarter and faster thinking than humans?

All management decisions from the top down to individual manual workers handled by an AI (LLM or otherwise)?

Owner has a company-wide AI, instructs it to maximize profit and lets it run. It handles hiring and firing, marker research, advertisement, ordering supplies, ... It generates individualized instructions for each worker what to do throughout the day. Any communication between humans would be redundant, the AI would have microphones and cameras everywhere, humans would only be needed for physical interaction with the world. Even communication with other companies, suppliers and clients, would by done between AIs, they would be better and faster at negotiating.

1) It sounds like a dystopian nightmare - constant surveillance and taking orders from a machine which only cares your productivity.

2) Would it lead to a devolution of the human race? What makes us different from other animals is intelligence. If all humans are good at (= economical to use for) is manual labor, would intelligence stop being a sexually attractive trait?

3) It would completely remove any social mobility. If those who own companies continue owning them after an AI revolution and there's little economic value in human labor except the most menial, then there would be a 2 class society with almost no way for non-owners to become owners.

foxylad• 5 months ago

His (compelling) evidence for that assertion is that printers still jam after 40 years. For humans, writing something on a piece of paper is absolutely trivial, and if something goes wrong, grabbing a new piece of paper or a pen is also trivial. Computers _can_ now write on paper tolerably fast and well, but they absolutely can't handle even simple failure modes. And the real world is _massively_ failure-prone, in contrast to the digital domain.

Think about Tesla's pivot to "AI robots". My guess is that they'll get to something that can very slowly pick up a dropped sock and put it in the washing basket. But that it will fall over occasionally on the stairs, wrecking your kid's photos and the vase standing at the bottom, and dinging the wall. It might do a passable job of picking up the shards of pottery, but gluing the picture frames together, plastering the wall and repainting it... well maybe in in Elon's chemical dreams.

nkrisc2• 5 months ago

I like to think about it this way: why do printers need me to give it more paper? Why do I need to go buy paper from the store? These at the most trivial real-world things a human can do but I can’t imagine any robot doing that for a very long time.

Forget self-driving cars, how about a printer I don’t have to unjam or fill with paper?

But I doubt that kind of thing will happen in my lifetime.

lelanthran• 5 months ago

However, the entire argument hinges on one assertion, buried about halfway through:
> Robots are improving fast, but I do not believe that this cute fellow will be stuffing envelopes or affixing stamps anytime soon.

Okay, lets presume he is correct; the conclusion is still "We will do the unthinking manual work requiring physical dexterity while the computers will direct us".

That's not a positive outcome.

direwolf20• 5 months ago

It turns out there's a counter–magic circle, and that's the economy. Even if people are happy to move to a commune without internet, they won't produce efficiently, so they won't be able to pay property taxes. The system consumes everything that doesn't already follow it.

nkrisc2• 5 months ago

Which brings us neatly to why many people are opposed to “AI” and automation.

We’re automating away the pleasurable work and leaving the drudgery for humans, when it should be the other way around.

Robots should be toiling while humans create art and music and whatever else they desire.

AI image generation doesn’t “democratize” art. Art has always been available to everyone. Anyone can learn to make art. AI image generation devalues artists and robs everyone else of the desire to learn art skills themselves.

mtneglZ• 5 months ago

I have worked with automation robots for over 15 years in manufacturing. Robust robots have only one degree of freedom, robust robots aren't very useful. Useful robots have two or three degrees of freedom, useful robots breakdown all the time from use and need a pit crew to repair them. I'm sure the use of robotic automation is about to explode, but robotics are limited.

akoboldfrying• 5 months ago

A robot that automatically untangles a rope is pretty much the coolest project idea I have ever heard of. It hits all the right buttons: extremely technically difficult with many design possibilities, completely novel, and of marginal utility. You cannot say that it would never be useful!

aaronbrethorst2• 5 months ago

Does anyone know how this works?

I wanted a way to track letters sent via First Class mail. USPS doesn’t provide this directly, a la parcel tracking, but it does scan those letters — all of them — and the data is available, but you have to wire everything up yourself, jumping through a few hoops along the way.

lordgrenville• 5 months ago

I asked AI and it found me this repo: https://github.com/1997cui/envelope

The linked site has a nice FAQ section: https://envelopetracker.com/intro

aaronbrethorst2• 5 months ago

thanks! :)

aleksiy123• 5 months ago

it just me or are all these arguments in this essay sort of not convincing?

It doesn't work now, and it's hard so it can't be don't.

Printers don't perfectly connect digital and physical with no issues?

"So what?" Better than doing it by hand or any other solution we have.

That's the only thing that matters, relative value.

Maybe I'm just not getting how they connect with the current reality? Or how they even make an argument against it?

The world can exist without humanity, but humanity cannot exist without the world.

"Ok, so what?"

arjie• 5 months ago

Well, applying a new tool to an intractable problem is certainly something that will take skill. Someone who finds a general purpose way to do it will become very rich. For my part, I was sufficiently thrilled when Claude Code could self-iterate on a simple device to hold board game cards for me. The more sophisticated modeling isn't so easy with it, but the fact that I could use a machine intelligence to construct surfaces for me is amazing to me. 5 years ago if you had told me this I would have called you a bullshitter.

https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-11/Modeling_Wit...

foota• 5 months ago

I've been having much the same thoughts. What will work look like, say, 10 years from now? I'm beginning to think that we might have all the knowledge worker type jobs largely filled, or filled with significantly less workers, (hopefully) more free time for everyone, and the remaining people working in more physical positions.

In many ways, I think this is probably better for society than the opposite, since in general there are fewer knowledge workers than not.

program_whiz• 5 months ago

It will only in the same way computers and machines that automated past work such as farming and textiles has created lots of free time for today's workers.

lemoing2• 5 months ago

I’ve taken the last year off from software engineering and have worked a mix of jobs that primarily exist outside the magic circle of the internet. I think one thing that surprised me was just how little computers were used; there was some basic scheduling and retail management software, but the meat of the job was in the real world. Not only that, but most of the community was similar: their jobs were based in the physical world and computers were kept at an arm’s length. Even bookings were made over the phone, not online. It was eye-opening coming from my service-based economy bubble just how little computers (and because of that, LLMs) affected life in certain pockets of the world, some of them very large. A step further than that is to realize that all the value we extract at the software level comes from value produced in the real world at some stage.

What the article says about sprinkling in a bit of the physical world into your work was one of my takeaways from my year off as well; even without worrying about AI and job security, it just feels more rewarding.

enricozb• 5 months ago

What sorts of jobs, out of curiosity?

lemoing2• 5 months ago

I worked at a family-owned bike shop, at a fancy hotel as a valet/porter, and picked up a few shifts at breweries/events. I’ll be jumping back into software in a few months but it’s been a refreshing year of doing something different.

bananaflag• 5 months ago

Robots are improving fast, but I do not believe that this cute fellow will be stuffing envelopes or affixing stamps anytime soon.

Well, the one and only thing which is constantly improving robots is human ingenuity, and if that is replaced by (yes, symbols-in, symbols-out) artificial superintelligence, I expect that improving to improve quite fast.

emil-lp• 5 months ago

Someone has been sipping from Tegmark's cool-aid.

Flood Fill vs. The Magic Circle

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