My idea—long before any thoughts of using AI—is to make a device that actually climbs up a tree and cuts off the limbs on its way up, and when it gets to the top starts slicing off the top of the trunk, slice-by-slice letting it fall to the ground. Anyone who has used a chainsaw knows that chainsaws get stuck—bind—so easily that the actual cutting is a difficult challenge. It’s not as simple as sticking a chainsaw on a mechanical climber. I have figured out a solution to the chainsaw problem, which I’m optimistic about, so I’ve started fabricating my contraption recently.
My contraption, and my whole concept is NOT truly “robotic,” nor does it have to be. By this I mean it does not have to think or sense or do anything by itself. And it doesn’t even need to be remote control, since the biggest tree would only need 100 feet of wire for any controls. So it’s just a mechanical thing with long wires, but a tricky one.
So when a news show said that AI was advancing exponentially, and we must all learn it, I thought, what a great challenge… have it try to solve my problem. I submitted the following simple request to Anthropic’s Claude. It was the first time I’ve used Claude, and I hadn’t learned a single thing about how to use it, just downloaded it moments before:
“Show design for a remote control mechanical tree surgeon.”
OMG. Although it didn’t tackle, let alone solve, the challenge of chainsaw binding, it did…
Properly understand the obscure mechanical matter
Make a structural design with multiple stages and axes
Include features I never thought about, such as a remote camera
Include actual “robotic” features similar to remote-control drones, such as “return home.”
Suggest not just a chain saw, but a pruner! Great idea for smaller cuts. And the control panel has a button to switch tools.
Conceive a “benefits” list that I never put into words myself
Make me think of a totally different approach to the problem, one that is even more conducive to adaptation by existing machine manufacturers!
This is a huge level of real-world thinking in my opinion. It figured out to use a base like the most modern “spider lifts.” It contrived a system with multiple technologies. It created enough of a concept that a person who had no imagination or background in either trees or mechanics could stand in front of an audience and pretend to have an idea of what to create. Could this person answer any question of even moderate difficulty??? Who knows.
What’s the takeaway?
AI is going to tackle one element after another of human cognition.
Before it replaces whole jobs, it will replace parts of white-collar jobs thereby reducing the headcount.
In my experience, current “chatbot” help systems NEVER answer questions that we actually need help with… providing only moronic, rote repetition of circumstances in which systems work properly. When we need help it’s because a system isn’t working properly. I predict that AI will probably do better at digging out answers to actual problems because it will look beyond the trite data.
But we’ll probably be saying the following sentence even more often than we do now: “SPEAK TO A $&@^$%@ AGENT.”
Finally, we didn’t need to invent AI to confront the following truth:
Every day it takes fewer people to produce the same amount of goods and services.
The difference is that technology before AI produced 1 new job for every 10 it replaced. But AI will produce 1 new job for every 100 it replaces. Sooner or later we must accept that technology concentrates wealth, and it’s been doing it since the advent of farming. Every day, the notion of “jobs that pay a living wage” becomes more of an artifact of the past, one that we must replace somehow. We’ve been doing this for a few hundred years, by legislating that certain activities be paid for by the populous as a whole—such as trash collection—but we try to ignore the fact that these are society-created jobs, not free-market jobs. We can’t ignore that anymore.
Below are the controls interface mockup, and the specifications list. that that asshole Claude came up with… the one who’s going to steal your job.
