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This is a suspicious article. > nearly half of U.S. jobs would be vulnerable to automation within 20 years. But “computers aren’t good at simulating human inte

This is a suspicious article. > nearly half of U.S. jobs would be vulnerable to automation within 20 years. But “computers aren’t good at simulating human interaction,” Deming said. That means a job as a manager or consultant is harder to automate, and the skills those jobs require become more valuable. If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also. > Women are getting jobs that require more social skills. If the share of jobs that require interpersonal skill has in fact increased over the years just as the author postulates, is it really a wonder that share of women who hold these types of jobs have also increased ? Why exactly did the author show only the graph representing how the nature of jobs has changed for women ? Is the author trying to prove women are naturally better at these things ? > Although cognitive skills don’t vary by gender, Deming cites research from psychology showing that women consistently score higher on tests of emotional intelligence and social perceptiveness. This is a dangerous line of thinking. If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things. This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality.

donkeyd 11y ago
> This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also. I think human skills remain important in order to figure out what the customer wants. Computers might do a lot of the work, but these computers still need to be programmed. You need to understand the customer's needs and translate these into a user friendly experience. The essence of this change seems to be that it's 'easy' to program a computer. It's harder to know what to program so that people will want to use it.
- FilterSweep 11y ago
  >I think human skills remain important in order to figure out what the customer wants. I'd be careful with that one, the greatest value in Google and Facebook analytics are just that.
MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
I agree its a puff piece. They are basically saying 1+1 > 1+0 - of course its better to have tech skills AND social skills on top instead of just tech, but thats trivial. 10 years ago at university a professor in economics told us that skills like design and social competence would become more important, as the actual tech would be outsourced to India or east europe, and focusing on tech would be unwise. When I look at the programmer consulting rates, the opposite has happened. Glad I made the right choice.
- signaler 11y ago
  Outsourced to India, with easter eggs in the code that even the savviest San Francisco net geek can't spot?
  - nroets 11y ago
    The savviest San Francisco net geek is too valuable to be looking for easter eggs. Or bugs in OpenSSL for that matter.
synthmeat 11y ago
> This is a suspicious article. Agreed. But what I put to even more suspicions are your arguments... > If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also. No, when non-human tasks get delegated to non-humans, human skills will be where humans will be most needed, and this goes in line with data presented, and is fairly self-evident. > Is the author trying to prove women are naturally better at these things? Author gives research in support to that and you quote quotation of it yourself. > If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things. There's no need to stretch anything, that's a fact. It is dangerous thinking, I agree. But so is atomic energy, AI, gene splicing... Besides being dangerous, it's also inevitable. > This could be impede our quest to bring about gender equality. I resent generalization our without further specification on who exactly.
- stdbrouw 11y ago
  > No, when non-human tasks get delegated to non-humans, human skills will be where humans will be most needed, and this goes in line with data presented, and is fairly self-evident. The point of simula67 is that the quintessential job that requires good interpersonal skills is management. Managers are there to manage technical workers. If there is less of a need for technical workers, managers have fewer people to manage, and you don't need interpersonal skills to machine-manage. The end result might be that we can cut out all of middle management, and that this "purge" will offset the higher (relative) demand for people with interpersonal skills in other areas of the workforce. All very hypothetical and full of assumptions of course, but then, so is the original article.
  - synthmeat 11y ago
    There's orders of magnitude more consumer-facing jobs than there are managers, who, basically by definition, are always in smaller numbers. Analysis of statement "quintessential job that requires good interpersonal skills is management" will give me food for thought today, thanks. Not sure what I think about that. Some could argue that it's even anti-social role in a way.
mark_integerdsv 11y ago
>This is a dangerous line of thinking. If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things. Does anyone truly believe that this is not the case? People are different, sets of people differ along various, sometimes similar parameters. >This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality. It really shouldn't though. Differing from one subset of people should not impact your rights as a human being. 'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights. Am I not getting this?
- omonra 11y ago
  "'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights. Am I not getting this?" You're so 10 years behind the ball. Equality now means equality of results. Since everybody [important] knows that women have the same skills & work the same jobs & the same hours as men, their being paid less is only result of misogyny & sexism on part of their employers.
  - deleted 11y ago
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- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > 'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights. The GP was being very sarcastic (there's no way he/she actually meant this). What you wrote is what gender equality should be about. However, the gender equality being fought for and pushed in the media is the one of conveniently pretending there's no biological differences between genders when it suits you, and then complaining that different results must surely be a result of conspiracy of one gender against the other.
  - mark_integerdsv 11y ago
    I am not a smart man. It is slowly dawning on me that I am missing some not so subtle sarcasm.
omonra 11y ago
"This is a dangerous line of thinking. If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things. This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality." Good job comrade, drawing attention to someone (perhaps an innocent mistake - but we can't let these pass either) about to embark on danger-noticing and danger-think. Hopefully you will stay vigilant and the offender will not relapse.
littletimmy 11y ago
Do you honestly believe that women aren't naturally worse at certain things? How about physical strength? Any man ranked in the top 50 of the tennis pro tour can smoke pretty much any woman who plays tennis. You'll find the same is the case with squash, cricket, basketball, you name it. It is a natural inequality, and there is no point in denying it. "Equality" does not mean equality of results. It means equality of opportunity.
- violentvinyl 11y ago
  There is an argument to be made here. The majority of the money is in men's sports. Arguably that means that's where the best trainers, nutritionists, and sports doctors go. The edge that those things can give you cannot be discounted.
  - littletimmy 11y ago
    The onus would be on you to prove that this "edge" explains the entirety of men's domination in sports. I don't quite know how you'll explain away in social terms greater muscle mass, greater testosterone, and all other physical differences, but you are welcome to try.
  - paganel 11y ago
    The Williams sisters had a lot more money and access to better nutritionists than Karsten Braasch, who was placed a lowly ~200 in the ATP rankings (and he used to smoke cigarettes, also). Nevertheless, he beat them 6-1 6-2. From here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Braasch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Braasch: > Braasch competed in a "Battle of the Sexes" contest against Venus Williams and Serena Williams at the 1998 Australian Open when he was ranked 203. A decade and a half older than the sisters, Braasch was described by one journalist as "a man whose training regime centred around a pack of cigarettes and more than a couple bottles of ice cold lager."[2] He nonetheless defeated both sisters, playing a single set against each, beating Serena 6–1 and Venus 6–2.
- hodwik 11y ago
  The era of 'equality of opportunity' is over. The left-wing want equality of results.
jacalata 11y ago
He doesn't say or even suggest that they are naturally better. Anyone who has an interest in the topic knows that boys and girls are treated differently by parents and society. Perhaps if boys were given a chance to express any emotion other than anger and encouraged to resolve disputes without fighting they would also be better at these skills.
Qwertious 11y ago
>If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also. This doesn't cause a decline in jobs, any more than the decline of mainstream farming (90%+ of the population used to be farmers, but in the last few centuries it's less than 3%) caused the majority of the population to be unemployed. What it causes is more jobs in other areas. Or alternatively, it makes everything more profitable and therefore allows the relevant companies to bloat themselves up needlessly with more layers of management, because they can afford it.
- pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  Historically people moved from food generation to jobs that use up resources (energy for example) and produce goods. Western society has become consumption focussed and so the production of goods and services for consumers has swelled. But this has a natural end as the resources used to generate the goods run out. In short one might say that machines will enable us to produce even more and open even more areas of manufacture and consumption, areas that were previously unknown - we'll be in flying cars and every item of clothing will have a computer in it and ... - but that relies on infinite resources. Without sufficient resources there is a natural brake on our ability to produce out of such a crisis in jobs. Moreover there are certain costs to production that we have not paid, the current ecological state of the planet, the increased climate change, the other ecological impacts from chemical abuse (eg fracking), deforestation, stripping of raw materials - we haven't really paid for these things (proper filtering of toxins, development of renewable energy, clean-up of chemical impacts, planting of new forest, etc.) instead we've been on a relatively free ride. It's like a hoarder, they can keep being pathological and filling their house with crap but eventually they get sick and there's no more room in the house.
erikb 11y ago
Well how do you define "naturally better"? If you live in a world that is dominated by people who are not like you, with more political power, more money, and more physical strength, wouldn't it be logical that you would learn more how to handle people than them because you require their cooperation more than they require yours? I don't think "naturally better" must mean genetically better. In this case it would mean formed by society in that regard and therefore better. "Naturally better" could also mean a result of survival bias. There are hundreds of reasons why there are more male physicists than female ones in the line of history. But we see more of them. So one simple (but as we know now incorrect) conclusion might be that men are better at physics. In the same regard we could observe more socially skilled females in the work place because these are the ones that make it there.
picardo 11y ago
> If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things. This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality. It's more complex than that. Having natural ability does not mean those without that ability cannot excel in that area with hard work. Also, by the same token, some people with a lot of natural ability for certain things never take advantage of their talent because they never put the effort into realizing their potential. So, in summary, acknowledging that natural ability is real does not give an automatic debating point to the other side of the argument because it's often the case that what you do with that innate talent will be more important.
bmir-alum-007 11y ago
> If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also. Lower demand of workers and over-supply of candidates = employers' market = greater expectations placed on workers for lower pay. This would change nice-to-have attributes of excellent candidates from nice-to-have to compulsory as workers have to be even more perfect just to keep their job against the 100 other people lined up ready to take it from them. Besides, if there are 3 equally-qualified people with people skills and 5 without, it's a no brainer because the non-people-skilled folks are liabilities: they can kill the team dynamic, put people off and waste time & money (finding new coworkers to replace those that left whom will put up with their antics, finding new customers/vendors/partners/etc. that they put off, etc.). I know of a number of first-hand cases where some arrogant developers were passed over for hiring consideration at a successful enterprise startup because it was clear they would be too difficult to work with. In labor markets with a foreseeable overabundance of talent, the future of work may include a number of people willing to work even longer for free, far longer than internships, simply to showcase their chops, get real experience and edge out other candidates/employees. Let's hope it doesn't come to that, but it certainly seems headed down that path.
- 1971genocide 11y ago
  Its not a simple equilibrium as you make out to be. No one at this point can predict what automation will do to the workforce. I find it hyperbolic that off all people programmers are most paranoid of automation. Did commodity C compiler make compiler designer obsolete ? what will happen is productivity is going to shoot up for your average person on a per dollar basis. A bioinformatician can outproduce 10 farmers , etc. There is no shortage of things to do on the planet. There are still 3.5 billion people living on 10 dollars a day, have some perspective. We can take about the robotic dystopian future when we have succefully homed,clothed and fed every person on the planet. Also provide free healthcare for everyone. I can go on but this terrible paranoia about automation needs to stop before you let animalistic emotions stop progression of science and technology.
  - kefka 11y ago
swah 11y ago
Computers have learned to manage computers and people, and they learned to program themselves. Almost all job offerings are for professional huggers, preferably human.
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kaitai 11y ago
One thing it seems most of the comments replying to are missing is that women are trained, in the US, to be "nice", emotionally observant, and socially fluent. Even throwing innate differences to the wind, watch family interactions and see four-year-old Lucy get reprimanded for not hugging Grandma and four-year-old Lionel not hugging Grandma and everyone laughing and saying, "How cute, little man!" and giving him an out (a wave, a handshake). Through the power of social ostracism women have learned to act nice and be emotionally observant even when they don't feel it. Guys have their own pressures, of course, starting with the basic "don't cry" and "man up" and going from there. Imagine Lucy and Lionel scraping up their knees mildly on a rock: Lucy will get a lot of cuddles and hugs when she cries, and Lionel will be treated rather differently -- a range of responses from a briefer hug to "You're fine!" This definitely influences peoples' ideas of appropriate interpersonal interactions.
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TallGuyShort 11y ago
>> This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality. No, it should inform our quest to bring about gender equality. We should be hiring people based on who they are as an individual, and not because of their gender or some quota, right? So if it's a fact that gender brings with it a tendency to be better / worse at different things, we shouldn't ignore it. Knowing the difference can help us measure when a statistical difference is explainable with gender-related tendencies, and when it's clearly because of discrimination. Trying to force a 50/50 split in cases where gender-related tendencies are significant seems silly to me. edit: I do, however, agree that just dismissing something as "women are different" is bad, because people often fail to take into account what is an inherent chromosomal difference and what is because of stereotypes that people grew up with. So let's distinguish between biases and facts, but facts should not be considered "dangerous". It's what we do with the facts that matters.
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
>This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality. Ideally gender equality will be reached when we are judged by our own skills, without regard to our gender. Yes, a man may do better at X and a woman may do better by Y, but I'm hiring you because you are good at Z and I need someone good at Z and I don't care which gender is better in general, because you are the one I'm interviewing and you are good at Z.
- camelNotation 11y ago
  But we still need to factor in X and Y sometimes because there will always be areas where that X or Y advantage will cause disparity. Are we going to draw a hard line and say the military should be exactly 50/50 representation of men and women? That nursing, teaching, and other female-dominated fields should be 50/50 male/female and that engineering, computing should be 50/50 male/female? That doesn't sound like equality. That sounds like the type of compromise reached between parties that would other engage in violence against each other, not the sexes that are mutually necessary for human existence.
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    >But we still need to factor in X and Y sometimes because there will always be areas where that X or Y advantage will cause disparity. But why do we care about gender anymore than disparities that are the result of different X and Y when the population is divided by f. Why is f = gender treated differently than f = height, eye color, parental income, weight, amount of time spent playing games per week > 10, number of veggies grown in the garden last year < 20, or any other metric we can come up with? 10% of people have gene ABC123, then 10% of every group must be made up of people with that gene? Only madness lies down that path.
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bitwize 11y ago
Who is naturally better at lifting heavy objects -- men or women? Who is naturally better at bearing children -- men or women? Reality isn't gender-equal, or even finely balanced like a Starcraft game. Equality means equal rights, not equal abilities. (A strict belief in the latter gets us into Harrison Bergeron territory.) If we're talking cognitive skills, there is rough equality in ability, but a difference in approach which makes one sex better for a particular job than the other. If women tend more to seek social consensus, for instance, they would fare better in a software engineering job with a high degree of peer collaboration, as opposed to the same job in a more "cowboy coding" environment.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  "Who is naturally better at lifting heavy objects -- men or women?" Whichever one gets off their ass and stops stuffing their face with cheese doodles all day long.
  - jimworm 11y ago
    Seems plausible on the surface, but not supported by research. The average elite female athlete is only as strong as an average male. Quote: The results of female national elite athletes even indicate that the strength level attainable by extremely high training will rarely surpass the 50th percentile of untrained or not specifically trained men. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17186303 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17186303
- rayiner 11y ago
  My problem with this line of reasoning is the inferential leap. The other day my wife was surprised that I could box jump higher than her, even though I rarely work out, while she had been training for a stair climbing competition. Being a man has its advantages. But then we're going to make the jump from that to saying "and that explains why men just prefer/are better at programming and thus make up 90% of the industry!" My second problem is that men set the metrics in ways that benefit them. Let's take the stereotypes as an assumption. What is a good programming team? One full of cowboys and rockstars, or one full of people who can concentrate on detail work for long periods at a time and communicate with each other? Studies of children show that girls are better at the latter (which is why they get higher grades).
asgard1024 11y ago
> If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also. Here's my answer to this paradox. The humans vs machines is just another "good old boys club". Of course humans don't want to relinquish control and be managed by machines, they are not silly. So they create another layer of "soft skills" which prevents from machines (or people who understand them) taking over. Take a high-frequency trading company as an analog. The job is done by computers and technicians running them. Still, the CEO and investors into this are probably better paid than those technicians, and make all the important decisions. (In fact, today you could probably create a completely self-managed HFT company that would just put all the profit into hiring more technicians who manage its algorithms.) And I think this was always the case in human history (although not against machines, just against other social groups); and many technical people here seem to be in denial of this reality. What we can do though is to attempt to change this, but it will require political, not technological, solutions (that is people skills).

donkeyd 11y ago

> This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also. I think human skills remain important in order to figure out what the customer wants. Computers might do a lot of the work, but these computers still need to be programmed. You need to understand the customer's needs and translate these into a user friendly experience. The essence of this change seems to be that it's 'easy' to program a computer. It's harder to know what to program so that people will want to use it.

FilterSweep 11y ago
>I think human skills remain important in order to figure out what the customer wants. I'd be careful with that one, the greatest value in Google and Facebook analytics are just that.

MrBuddyCasino 11y ago

I agree its a puff piece. They are basically saying 1+1 > 1+0 - of course its better to have tech skills AND social skills on top instead of just tech, but thats trivial. 10 years ago at university a professor in economics told us that skills like design and social competence would become more important, as the actual tech would be outsourced to India or east europe, and focusing on tech would be unwise. When I look at the programmer consulting rates, the opposite has happened. Glad I made the right choice.

signaler 11y ago
Outsourced to India, with easter eggs in the code that even the savviest San Francisco net geek can't spot?
- nroets 11y ago
  The savviest San Francisco net geek is too valuable to be looking for easter eggs. Or bugs in OpenSSL for that matter.

synthmeat 11y ago

> This is a suspicious article. Agreed. But what I put to even more suspicions are your arguments... > If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also. No, when non-human tasks get delegated to non-humans, human skills will be where humans will be most needed, and this goes in line with data presented, and is fairly self-evident. > Is the author trying to prove women are naturally better at these things? Author gives research in support to that and you quote quotation of it yourself. > If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things. There's no need to stretch anything, that's a fact. It is dangerous thinking, I agree. But so is atomic energy, AI, gene splicing... Besides being dangerous, it's also inevitable. > This could be impede our quest to bring about gender equality. I resent generalization our without further specification on who exactly.

stdbrouw 11y ago
> No, when non-human tasks get delegated to non-humans, human skills will be where humans will be most needed, and this goes in line with data presented, and is fairly self-evident. The point of simula67 is that the quintessential job that requires good interpersonal skills is management. Managers are there to manage technical workers. If there is less of a need for technical workers, managers have fewer people to manage, and you don't need interpersonal skills to machine-manage. The end result might be that we can cut out all of middle management, and that this "purge" will offset the higher (relative) demand for people with interpersonal skills in other areas of the workforce. All very hypothetical and full of assumptions of course, but then, so is the original article.
- synthmeat 11y ago
  There's orders of magnitude more consumer-facing jobs than there are managers, who, basically by definition, are always in smaller numbers. Analysis of statement "quintessential job that requires good interpersonal skills is management" will give me food for thought today, thanks. Not sure what I think about that. Some could argue that it's even anti-social role in a way.

mark_integerdsv 11y ago

>This is a dangerous line of thinking. If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things. Does anyone truly believe that this is not the case? People are different, sets of people differ along various, sometimes similar parameters. >This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality. It really shouldn't though. Differing from one subset of people should not impact your rights as a human being. 'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights. Am I not getting this?

omonra 11y ago
"'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights. Am I not getting this?" You're so 10 years behind the ball. Equality now means equality of results. Since everybody [important] knows that women have the same skills & work the same jobs & the same hours as men, their being paid less is only result of misogyny & sexism on part of their employers.
- deleted 11y ago
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TeMPOraL 11y ago
> 'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights. The GP was being very sarcastic (there's no way he/she actually meant this). What you wrote is what gender equality should be about. However, the gender equality being fought for and pushed in the media is the one of conveniently pretending there's no biological differences between genders when it suits you, and then complaining that different results must surely be a result of conspiracy of one gender against the other.
- mark_integerdsv 11y ago
  I am not a smart man. It is slowly dawning on me that I am missing some not so subtle sarcasm.

omonra 11y ago

"This is a dangerous line of thinking. If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things. This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality." Good job comrade, drawing attention to someone (perhaps an innocent mistake - but we can't let these pass either) about to embark on danger-noticing and danger-think. Hopefully you will stay vigilant and the offender will not relapse.

littletimmy 11y ago

Do you honestly believe that women aren't naturally worse at certain things? How about physical strength? Any man ranked in the top 50 of the tennis pro tour can smoke pretty much any woman who plays tennis. You'll find the same is the case with squash, cricket, basketball, you name it. It is a natural inequality, and there is no point in denying it. "Equality" does not mean equality of results. It means equality of opportunity.

violentvinyl 11y ago
There is an argument to be made here. The majority of the money is in men's sports. Arguably that means that's where the best trainers, nutritionists, and sports doctors go. The edge that those things can give you cannot be discounted.
- littletimmy 11y ago
  The onus would be on you to prove that this "edge" explains the entirety of men's domination in sports. I don't quite know how you'll explain away in social terms greater muscle mass, greater testosterone, and all other physical differences, but you are welcome to try.
- paganel 11y ago
  The Williams sisters had a lot more money and access to better nutritionists than Karsten Braasch, who was placed a lowly ~200 in the ATP rankings (and he used to smoke cigarettes, also). Nevertheless, he beat them 6-1 6-2. From here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Braasch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Braasch: > Braasch competed in a "Battle of the Sexes" contest against Venus Williams and Serena Williams at the 1998 Australian Open when he was ranked 203. A decade and a half older than the sisters, Braasch was described by one journalist as "a man whose training regime centred around a pack of cigarettes and more than a couple bottles of ice cold lager."[2] He nonetheless defeated both sisters, playing a single set against each, beating Serena 6–1 and Venus 6–2.
hodwik 11y ago
The era of 'equality of opportunity' is over. The left-wing want equality of results.

jacalata 11y ago

He doesn't say or even suggest that they are naturally better. Anyone who has an interest in the topic knows that boys and girls are treated differently by parents and society. Perhaps if boys were given a chance to express any emotion other than anger and encouraged to resolve disputes without fighting they would also be better at these skills.

Qwertious 11y ago

>If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also. This doesn't cause a decline in jobs, any more than the decline of mainstream farming (90%+ of the population used to be farmers, but in the last few centuries it's less than 3%) caused the majority of the population to be unemployed. What it causes is more jobs in other areas. Or alternatively, it makes everything more profitable and therefore allows the relevant companies to bloat themselves up needlessly with more layers of management, because they can afford it.

pbhjpbhj 11y ago
Historically people moved from food generation to jobs that use up resources (energy for example) and produce goods. Western society has become consumption focussed and so the production of goods and services for consumers has swelled. But this has a natural end as the resources used to generate the goods run out. In short one might say that machines will enable us to produce even more and open even more areas of manufacture and consumption, areas that were previously unknown - we'll be in flying cars and every item of clothing will have a computer in it and ... - but that relies on infinite resources. Without sufficient resources there is a natural brake on our ability to produce out of such a crisis in jobs. Moreover there are certain costs to production that we have not paid, the current ecological state of the planet, the increased climate change, the other ecological impacts from chemical abuse (eg fracking), deforestation, stripping of raw materials - we haven't really paid for these things (proper filtering of toxins, development of renewable energy, clean-up of chemical impacts, planting of new forest, etc.) instead we've been on a relatively free ride. It's like a hoarder, they can keep being pathological and filling their house with crap but eventually they get sick and there's no more room in the house.

erikb 11y ago

Well how do you define "naturally better"? If you live in a world that is dominated by people who are not like you, with more political power, more money, and more physical strength, wouldn't it be logical that you would learn more how to handle people than them because you require their cooperation more than they require yours? I don't think "naturally better" must mean genetically better. In this case it would mean formed by society in that regard and therefore better. "Naturally better" could also mean a result of survival bias. There are hundreds of reasons why there are more male physicists than female ones in the line of history. But we see more of them. So one simple (but as we know now incorrect) conclusion might be that men are better at physics. In the same regard we could observe more socially skilled females in the work place because these are the ones that make it there.

picardo 11y ago

> If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things. This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality. It's more complex than that. Having natural ability does not mean those without that ability cannot excel in that area with hard work. Also, by the same token, some people with a lot of natural ability for certain things never take advantage of their talent because they never put the effort into realizing their potential. So, in summary, acknowledging that natural ability is real does not give an automatic debating point to the other side of the argument because it's often the case that what you do with that innate talent will be more important.

bmir-alum-007 11y ago

> If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also. Lower demand of workers and over-supply of candidates = employers' market = greater expectations placed on workers for lower pay. This would change nice-to-have attributes of excellent candidates from nice-to-have to compulsory as workers have to be even more perfect just to keep their job against the 100 other people lined up ready to take it from them. Besides, if there are 3 equally-qualified people with people skills and 5 without, it's a no brainer because the non-people-skilled folks are liabilities: they can kill the team dynamic, put people off and waste time & money (finding new coworkers to replace those that left whom will put up with their antics, finding new customers/vendors/partners/etc. that they put off, etc.). I know of a number of first-hand cases where some arrogant developers were passed over for hiring consideration at a successful enterprise startup because it was clear they would be too difficult to work with. In labor markets with a foreseeable overabundance of talent, the future of work may include a number of people willing to work even longer for free, far longer than internships, simply to showcase their chops, get real experience and edge out other candidates/employees. Let's hope it doesn't come to that, but it certainly seems headed down that path.

1971genocide 11y ago
Its not a simple equilibrium as you make out to be. No one at this point can predict what automation will do to the workforce. I find it hyperbolic that off all people programmers are most paranoid of automation. Did commodity C compiler make compiler designer obsolete ? what will happen is productivity is going to shoot up for your average person on a per dollar basis. A bioinformatician can outproduce 10 farmers , etc. There is no shortage of things to do on the planet. There are still 3.5 billion people living on 10 dollars a day, have some perspective. We can take about the robotic dystopian future when we have succefully homed,clothed and fed every person on the planet. Also provide free healthcare for everyone. I can go on but this terrible paranoia about automation needs to stop before you let animalistic emotions stop progression of science and technology.
- kefka 11y ago

swah 11y ago

Computers have learned to manage computers and people, and they learned to program themselves. Almost all job offerings are for professional huggers, preferably human.

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kaitai 11y ago

One thing it seems most of the comments replying to are missing is that women are trained, in the US, to be "nice", emotionally observant, and socially fluent. Even throwing innate differences to the wind, watch family interactions and see four-year-old Lucy get reprimanded for not hugging Grandma and four-year-old Lionel not hugging Grandma and everyone laughing and saying, "How cute, little man!" and giving him an out (a wave, a handshake). Through the power of social ostracism women have learned to act nice and be emotionally observant even when they don't feel it. Guys have their own pressures, of course, starting with the basic "don't cry" and "man up" and going from there. Imagine Lucy and Lionel scraping up their knees mildly on a rock: Lucy will get a lot of cuddles and hugs when she cries, and Lionel will be treated rather differently -- a range of responses from a briefer hug to "You're fine!" This definitely influences peoples' ideas of appropriate interpersonal interactions.

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TallGuyShort 11y ago

>> This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality. No, it should inform our quest to bring about gender equality. We should be hiring people based on who they are as an individual, and not because of their gender or some quota, right? So if it's a fact that gender brings with it a tendency to be better / worse at different things, we shouldn't ignore it. Knowing the difference can help us measure when a statistical difference is explainable with gender-related tendencies, and when it's clearly because of discrimination. Trying to force a 50/50 split in cases where gender-related tendencies are significant seems silly to me. edit: I do, however, agree that just dismissing something as "women are different" is bad, because people often fail to take into account what is an inherent chromosomal difference and what is because of stereotypes that people grew up with. So let's distinguish between biases and facts, but facts should not be considered "dangerous". It's what we do with the facts that matters.

Lawtonfogle 11y ago

>This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality. Ideally gender equality will be reached when we are judged by our own skills, without regard to our gender. Yes, a man may do better at X and a woman may do better by Y, but I'm hiring you because you are good at Z and I need someone good at Z and I don't care which gender is better in general, because you are the one I'm interviewing and you are good at Z.

camelNotation 11y ago
But we still need to factor in X and Y sometimes because there will always be areas where that X or Y advantage will cause disparity. Are we going to draw a hard line and say the military should be exactly 50/50 representation of men and women? That nursing, teaching, and other female-dominated fields should be 50/50 male/female and that engineering, computing should be 50/50 male/female? That doesn't sound like equality. That sounds like the type of compromise reached between parties that would other engage in violence against each other, not the sexes that are mutually necessary for human existence.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  >But we still need to factor in X and Y sometimes because there will always be areas where that X or Y advantage will cause disparity. But why do we care about gender anymore than disparities that are the result of different X and Y when the population is divided by f. Why is f = gender treated differently than f = height, eye color, parental income, weight, amount of time spent playing games per week > 10, number of veggies grown in the garden last year < 20, or any other metric we can come up with? 10% of people have gene ABC123, then 10% of every group must be made up of people with that gene? Only madness lies down that path.

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bitwize 11y ago

Who is naturally better at lifting heavy objects -- men or women? Who is naturally better at bearing children -- men or women? Reality isn't gender-equal, or even finely balanced like a Starcraft game. Equality means equal rights, not equal abilities. (A strict belief in the latter gets us into Harrison Bergeron territory.) If we're talking cognitive skills, there is rough equality in ability, but a difference in approach which makes one sex better for a particular job than the other. If women tend more to seek social consensus, for instance, they would fare better in a software engineering job with a high degree of peer collaboration, as opposed to the same job in a more "cowboy coding" environment.

s73v3r 11y ago
"Who is naturally better at lifting heavy objects -- men or women?" Whichever one gets off their ass and stops stuffing their face with cheese doodles all day long.
- jimworm 11y ago
  Seems plausible on the surface, but not supported by research. The average elite female athlete is only as strong as an average male. Quote: The results of female national elite athletes even indicate that the strength level attainable by extremely high training will rarely surpass the 50th percentile of untrained or not specifically trained men. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17186303 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17186303
rayiner 11y ago
My problem with this line of reasoning is the inferential leap. The other day my wife was surprised that I could box jump higher than her, even though I rarely work out, while she had been training for a stair climbing competition. Being a man has its advantages. But then we're going to make the jump from that to saying "and that explains why men just prefer/are better at programming and thus make up 90% of the industry!" My second problem is that men set the metrics in ways that benefit them. Let's take the stereotypes as an assumption. What is a good programming team? One full of cowboys and rockstars, or one full of people who can concentrate on detail work for long periods at a time and communicate with each other? Studies of children show that girls are better at the latter (which is why they get higher grades).

asgard1024 11y ago

> If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also. Here's my answer to this paradox. The humans vs machines is just another "good old boys club". Of course humans don't want to relinquish control and be managed by machines, they are not silly. So they create another layer of "soft skills" which prevents from machines (or people who understand them) taking over. Take a high-frequency trading company as an analog. The job is done by computers and technicians running them. Still, the CEO and investors into this are probably better paid than those technicians, and make all the important decisions. (In fact, today you could probably create a completely self-managed HFT company that would just put all the profit into hiring more technicians who manage its algorithms.) And I think this was always the case in human history (although not against machines, just against other social groups); and many technical people here seem to be in denial of this reality. What we can do though is to attempt to change this, but it will require political, not technological, solutions (that is people skills).