4 ms·

One taboo on HN is pointing out that even though software is a huge lever, there's no sign of the end of raw human labor. In every industry you can point to job

by three14 11y ago

One taboo on HN is pointing out that even though software is a huge lever, there's no sign of the end of raw human labor. In every industry you can point to jobs being lost to automation, yet you still need many, many people in health care, or construction, or manufacturing, or police, or teaching, or mining, or working for utilities, etc. It's complete speculation to suggest that jobs are disappearing faster than they could be replaced. It's not surprising that people who used to work for big auto manufacturers can't continue to work for those same manufacturers, and that says nothing about whether those same people could find low-skill jobs in other industries, nor whether investment in sectors other than GM or Ford could create more unskilled jobs. If there was a larger market for unskilled labor, the competition for workers would tend to drive up wages and lower inequality.

randcraw 11y ago
When jobs move from a developed / high wage country to one with cheaper labor, they effectively disappear. That pattern then repeats until the job finally ends up in the least regulated sweatshop in the darkest corner of the planet. Eventually automation will 'outsource' that job too, thereby completing the defragging process. Does another job necessarily arise to replace each lost job? That's a question that only a religious person would answer.
- three14 11y ago
  This is exactly the taboo I'm talking about. Police, health care, mining, teaching, and surprisingly many others aren't going overseas right now. A lot of jobs are disappearing, and a lot aren't. Why assume that e.g. the American economy won't have enough jobs in the near future? There's no data on HN in all these discussions, and no real trends to extrapolate from except in very specific sectors.
  - zanny 11y ago
    Mining is becoming heavily automated. The work of a dozen men even twenty years ago can now often be done by two with a good computer model. We are pushing very hard for computer vision, which is the real barrier to practical robotics that could replace your electrician, plumber, nurse, miner, driver, etc. There is no sacred cow of labor besides what is mandated by the molasses slow state (because I would absolutely argue that learning systems like Khan's Academy, the availability of resources online, and the technological organizational potential of software solve all the criteria to substitute teachers with a security guard watching the kids while they listen to robo-instructor, solve the problems themselves, and ask the neural-net for help when they run into problems - and the kids are of course not all in the same room in an expensive upkeep building called a school). That kind of change though must also be culturally accepted since a lot of effort goes into separating public education from market forces. Point is, the jobs that we could not send overseas have tremendous pressure on them as a result to be absolved entirely by AI, robotics, and software. It is why the pencil pusher desk job of 1980 - rows of typists at typewriters transcribing documents - went the way of the Dodo and did generate a ton of unemployment that we still have not seamlessly solved.
    - three14 11y ago
      Pressure, yes, but I want numbers - what percentage of jobs have disappeared over, say, the past 20 years, and could increased demand realistically replace those jobs in other sectors? You can't simply say "manual labor is over, because... singularity." There's no singularity yet. Until then, you need data before you can really extrapolate from current trends. The easiest things to automate are already automated, and harder things are coming along slowly. It might be true that jobs disappear faster than prices fall from the automation, or prices might fall fast enough that most people can have jobs that don't pay much, and still get by.
      - zanny 11y ago
        http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/23/middle-class-jobs-machines_n_2532639.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/23/middle-class-jobs-m... http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-bots-are-taking-away-jobs-2014-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-bots-are-taking-aw... http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/smart-machines-job-article-1.1246522 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/smart-machines-job-... Most relevantly to this direct topic: http://fortune.com/2015/02/25/5-jobs-that-robots-already-are-taking/ http://fortune.com/2015/02/25/5-jobs-that-robots-already-are... Like I said, there are demonstrable mechanisms, and in-lab and even in-market examples of how these technologies are going to replace almost all these jobs. This is not science fiction. This is market adoption at this point. And we are not at the start of the process, we are in the middle of it.
        three14 11y ago
        None of this really answers the question. Of course technology eliminates jobs. This has been happening since before Ford was founded and before all those automotive jobs were originally created. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite for instance. The question isn't whether specific jobs are being destroyed, but rather whether all unskilled jobs are being destroyed, and none of those links even begin to give any data on the subject.
        11y ago
golergka 11y ago
> replaced This word implies creation of new jobs, but all examples that you discussed in the rest of your comment seem to be about the jobs that already exist, not new ones.
MaysonL 11y ago
Given Bloom's two sigma problem[0], the potential market for teachers is nowhere near saturation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_Sigma_Problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_Sigma_Problem
wcummings 11y ago
>One taboo on HN is pointing out that even though software is a huge lever, there's no sign of the end of raw human labor. I think people in technologist circles tend overstate the effects of automation and understate the effects of global labor arbitrage (aided by telecommunications).

by three14 11y ago

randcraw 11y ago

When jobs move from a developed / high wage country to one with cheaper labor, they effectively disappear. That pattern then repeats until the job finally ends up in the least regulated sweatshop in the darkest corner of the planet. Eventually automation will 'outsource' that job too, thereby completing the defragging process. Does another job necessarily arise to replace each lost job? That's a question that only a religious person would answer.

three14 11y ago
This is exactly the taboo I'm talking about. Police, health care, mining, teaching, and surprisingly many others aren't going overseas right now. A lot of jobs are disappearing, and a lot aren't. Why assume that e.g. the American economy won't have enough jobs in the near future? There's no data on HN in all these discussions, and no real trends to extrapolate from except in very specific sectors.
- zanny 11y ago
  Mining is becoming heavily automated. The work of a dozen men even twenty years ago can now often be done by two with a good computer model. We are pushing very hard for computer vision, which is the real barrier to practical robotics that could replace your electrician, plumber, nurse, miner, driver, etc. There is no sacred cow of labor besides what is mandated by the molasses slow state (because I would absolutely argue that learning systems like Khan's Academy, the availability of resources online, and the technological organizational potential of software solve all the criteria to substitute teachers with a security guard watching the kids while they listen to robo-instructor, solve the problems themselves, and ask the neural-net for help when they run into problems - and the kids are of course not all in the same room in an expensive upkeep building called a school). That kind of change though must also be culturally accepted since a lot of effort goes into separating public education from market forces. Point is, the jobs that we could not send overseas have tremendous pressure on them as a result to be absolved entirely by AI, robotics, and software. It is why the pencil pusher desk job of 1980 - rows of typists at typewriters transcribing documents - went the way of the Dodo and did generate a ton of unemployment that we still have not seamlessly solved.
  - three14 11y ago
    Pressure, yes, but I want numbers - what percentage of jobs have disappeared over, say, the past 20 years, and could increased demand realistically replace those jobs in other sectors? You can't simply say "manual labor is over, because... singularity." There's no singularity yet. Until then, you need data before you can really extrapolate from current trends. The easiest things to automate are already automated, and harder things are coming along slowly. It might be true that jobs disappear faster than prices fall from the automation, or prices might fall fast enough that most people can have jobs that don't pay much, and still get by.
    - zanny 11y ago
      http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/23/middle-class-jobs-machines_n_2532639.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/23/middle-class-jobs-m... http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-bots-are-taking-away-jobs-2014-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-bots-are-taking-aw... http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/smart-machines-job-article-1.1246522 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/smart-machines-job-... Most relevantly to this direct topic: http://fortune.com/2015/02/25/5-jobs-that-robots-already-are-taking/ http://fortune.com/2015/02/25/5-jobs-that-robots-already-are... Like I said, there are demonstrable mechanisms, and in-lab and even in-market examples of how these technologies are going to replace almost all these jobs. This is not science fiction. This is market adoption at this point. And we are not at the start of the process, we are in the middle of it.
      - three14 11y ago
        None of this really answers the question. Of course technology eliminates jobs. This has been happening since before Ford was founded and before all those automotive jobs were originally created. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite for instance. The question isn't whether specific jobs are being destroyed, but rather whether all unskilled jobs are being destroyed, and none of those links even begin to give any data on the subject.
        11y ago

golergka 11y ago

> replaced This word implies creation of new jobs, but all examples that you discussed in the rest of your comment seem to be about the jobs that already exist, not new ones.

MaysonL 11y ago

Given Bloom's two sigma problem[0], the potential market for teachers is nowhere near saturation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_Sigma_Problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_Sigma_Problem

wcummings 11y ago

>One taboo on HN is pointing out that even though software is a huge lever, there's no sign of the end of raw human labor. I think people in technologist circles tend overstate the effects of automation and understate the effects of global labor arbitrage (aided by telecommunications).