Twitter's cleaners fired without severance pay, in December

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But who cleans the robot?

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sleeper
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One of the threads that I have seen running through the Elon Twitter discourse is that part of this is about the billionaires in Elon’s orbit (and Elon himself) wanting to make a giant, pointed “fuck you, you are nobody” to workers at all levels after the pandemic gains in labor activism.

This does nothing to convince me that take is wrong

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As ChatGPT is showing us, the tech workers at Twitter will be obsolete long before cleaners will be. A lot of coders will be encouraged to pick up a mop before long…

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From a cursory internet search,

Offices and Lobby Cleaning

  1. Empty all trash receptacles, replace liners, as needed, and remove trash to a collection point. (Client to furnish liners)
  2. Vacuum carpeting. company will not be responsible for removal of staples from carpets.
  3. Clean and polish drinking fountain/water cooler.
  4. Thoroughly dust all horizontal surfaces, including desktops, files, windowsills, chairs, tables, pictures and all manner of furnishings.
  5. Damp wipe all horizontal surfaces to remove coffee rings and spillage, as needed.
  6. Dust telephones.
  7. Dust mop hard surface floors with a treated dust mop.
  8. Damp mop hard surface floors to remove any spillage from soiled areas.
  9. Damp wipe entryway and clean fingerprints from entrance glass.
  10. Spot clean partition glass.
  11. Inspect and pick up, as needed, building entrance area.

But who cares if the windows are smudgy? It’s not really a health hazard. Gee, Elon, why are all the best talent getting jobs across the street. In that, bright, tidy, shiny building?

That’s just office areas.

Restroom Cleaning

  1. Stock towels, tissue, and hand soap. (Client to furnish)
  2. Empty sanitary napkin receptacles and wipe with a disinfectant.
  3. Empty trash receptacles and wipe if needed.
  4. Clean and polish mirrors.
  5. Wipe towel cabinet covers.
  6. Toilets and urinals to be cleaned and sanitized inside and outside. Polish bright work.
  7. Toilet seats to be cleaned on both sides using a disinfectant.
  8. Scour and sanitize all basins. Polish bright work.
  9. Dust partitions, top of mirrors, and frames.
  10. Remove splash marks from walls around basins.
  11. Mop and rinse restroom floors with a disinfectant.

Robots can’t do that. Maybe someday, but not next month, not next year.

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With that sort of easygoing charm, ‘someone from Mr Musk’s team’ seems ripe for replacement by Microsoft’s Tay.

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Well I will give you that GPTChat definitely can code better than Elon.

But it still can’t write code - just cargo cult it with occasional hits

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Self-driving cars entire point from the corporate world is not a rich person toy, it’s to replace every cabbie/Uber driver/bus driver/truck driver in the world.

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And also something he made up on the spot for Tesla because Uber was talking about it.

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So there’s a Roomba… for cleaning floors.
There’s Tesla… which makes cars and “robots” and stuff.

At the risk of boring everyone here with the “it took us ages to put wheels on luggage! why oh why?!?” trope, I now have to ask the obvious:

Where is Toilet-ba?

ETA: I am not asking for the cure for cancer. I am not even asking for fully automated luxury gay space communism. (Other impossible requests: a decent cup of coffee from a vending machine, how to break the drought here in Texas, and the end to these current pandemics.)

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I’ve really got to question the motivation of anyone still working at Twitter. Even the rabid Muskites must start to have second thoughts when the trash starts piling up and they have to sleep on couches dragged together, while being asked to do the jobs of 30+ people. Is someone holding them at gunpoint?

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Yes, but if people are sitting around unemployed, they’ll have more time to tweet. More fourth dimensional chess.

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Good luck with that. Chunks of code that “look pretty good” isn’t quite the same as the real thing.

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Granted, and it’s well outside my wheelhouse. I strongly suspect, though, that state of the art attempts at creating a cleanerbot are leagues further away than how close this freely available AI bot is to replicating knowledge work.

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Probably going to either have to hire under the table workers, or just give everyone a spray bottle and sponge and tell everyone they have to clean stuff as well.

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This is like when your hard drive is running out of space, but the only things you have left that you can afford to get rid of is old Excel files and pdfs. Things must be worse than they seem.

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I don’t know what you mean. We are going to have fully functional humanoid robots that can do anything (including fuck) in 6 months!

(I kid - the neurolink implant definitely does not turn you into a mindless organo-bot that Elon controls using an old RC car controller. Probably)

(Oh my God. He already made spandex robot costumes…now he is putting chips in heads…fuck…is actually a real thing!?)

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At one place, after the cleaners, the next step was being the last person out the door at night, phoning the alarm company because I couldn’t get a green light, and finding out that they’d canceled the contract a couple months ago.

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Twitter Headquarters: 225 employees, 3 AIs (one of whom’s job is to repair the other two.), and 100 Roombas.

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Our company leases two different offices and we have to provide our own cleaning/maintenance staff.

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