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Watching that, especially that part starting at 1:23 makes you realize quickly that in about 10 years, 95% of all jobs can be replaced by machines. Scary and in

Watching that, especially that part starting at 1:23 makes you realize quickly that in about 10 years, 95% of all jobs can be replaced by machines. Scary and interesting at the same time.

edvinbesic 11y ago
Does that mean we live in a happy utopia where 95% of the tedious/dangerous work has been taken care of and we instead get to spend our time focusing on what we find inspirational/creative, or do we live in a dystopia where 95% of job opportunities have vanished and we can no longer sustain a consumption based economy. Maybe those are one and the same.
- bobajeff 11y ago
  There's a TV show (haven't watched it yet) about a future where society is split between something like 15% employed and 85% unemployed. The unemployed live in this desert wasteland or whatever while the employed are living in a big o'l building structure. I would say it's far fetched and unlikely except that's kind of how the world is today.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Zardoz!
- dillon 11y ago
  To extend your point. The jobs that are easily programmable like farming, and warehousing are easily replaceable. Some tasks may even require using humans and robots together like construction or search and rescue. Some things are indeed not replaceable by robots and I think "most" professions* may not be able to be replaced by robots. These could be things like professional chefs (not fast food), programmers, and masseuse. *By professions I mean the raw number of unique jobs not the number of people who work in those positions. That being said in the U.S. with the "College Driven" economy I doubt it will ever affect 95% of the population at once. Generally professions will disappear one by one, but those people can retrain and if they don't it won't matter as the next generation will obviously not train to fill positions that don't exist (that's not logical). Eventually the new generations train to fill different job positions.
  - Futurebot 11y ago
    That's far from guaranteed, and looks less likely all the time. See, the "Luddite Fallacy Fallacy." Gwern gives it a nice treatment here: http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes?cx=009114923999563836576%3Adv0a4ndtmly&cof=FORID%3A11&q=chunking#neo-luddism http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes?cx=009114923999563836576%3Adv0...
- diskcat 11y ago
  Well when the cars were invented did people start living in a dystopia where the car moguls owned mobility itself or did people just got around much faster and had better lives in general.
  - txdv 11y ago
    horses have had a pretty rough run http://www.humanesociety.org/assets/pdfs/hsp/soaiv_07_ch10.pdf http://www.humanesociety.org/assets/pdfs/hsp/soaiv_07_ch10.p...
  - TulliusCicero 11y ago
    It was mixed. People got around faster and stuff was cheaper. On the other hand, we got fat and dependent on cars, which is particularly bad for the poor (since cars are inherently expensive), and for kids' independence. That's why you're seeing many metro areas starting to prioritize walking, biking, and transit. On balance the development of cars was good, obviously, but let's not kid ourselves, the downsides were significant.
    - davidiach 11y ago
      I'm not sure if it is an established fact that people got fat because cars came along (before cars there were carriages). I'd rather bet that diet is the culprit.
      - TulliusCicero 11y ago
        Probably both, but I think they've shown at least a correlation between car commute time and obesity.
  - seren 11y ago
    If we look at agriculture mechanization, we went from 80% of the population to 5% to feed everyone. While this is good for everyone, I don't think farmers are living some sort of utopia. Rather most of them are indebted for decades to pay for their complex equipment. I believe the introduction of robot will follow a similar pattern, some industry will see their number of employee reduced drastically but they won't necessarily increase their margin. The customer will likely win. The thing is that people who were employed in farms moved to factory. Nowadays I don't know where people who lost their job to robots will move.
- visarga 11y ago
  First will come the dystopia, the utopia might be later. In the early years the best positioned companies will reap the huge benefits of this new field. In time, the benefits will trickle down to ordinary people. The same was with cars and computers. Even when ordinary people will reap benefits from robotization, the big bucks will go to the Google or Apple of the day. We might have our daily needs met by the future economy, but big companies will dominate the finances. We'll get to play with the new toys, though.
waiseristy 11y ago
This is the first video that has actually given me that feeling. Maybe it's because of how anthropomorphic they've made it's movement compared to other robots, but I can see this guy doing very real work in the very near future.
noobermin 11y ago
10 years for 95% of all jobs is kind of too much too soon I'd argue. Big dog debuted 10 years ago for instance...even supposing non-linear growth, thinking that something like atlas in 10 years waiting tables, cooking gourmet food, greeting hotel guests, making plants, etc... A portion? Yes. 95%?
nightski 11y ago
I think you vastly underestimate how expensive that robot would be to manufacture and maintain. Of course, costs could come down over time but it's going to take a lot of work to make it economically viable for the types of jobs you are considering replacing.
- elsewhen 11y ago
  it seems that it might be close to doing what a low-skill laborer would do in a factory setting. remember that it should be able to work for longer hours, and not require benefits etc. i suspect that companies would start to purchase such a device at $100k. that price seems achievable, probably within a few years. as quantities increase, i suspect that the price will fall dramatically thereafter.
  - Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
    The rule of thumb is you have to recoup capital costs in 2 years to make it worthwhile.
    - knowaveragejoe 11y ago
      Given the above assumptions that seems doable to me. 2 years of working nearly 24/7 with virtually no costs(compared to wages/benefits) would more than pay for itself. But I don't think the above assumptions are necessarily correct, that sounds a bit too cheap to me.
      - nightski 11y ago
        It may be doable, I am not trying to be overly negative. It's just that I probably wouldn't target minimum wage workers with this robot. Also you say "no costs" but do you honestly think these would be maintenance free? There would probably be a fairly significant cost to keep a fleet of these robots running as they are incredibly complex as compared to say an amazon warehouse robot.
tlrobinson 11y ago
Perhaps why YC is funding research on basic income... https://blog.ycombinator.com/basic-income https://blog.ycombinator.com/basic-income
agumonkey 11y ago
Datacenters for information crunching, cyborgs for physical crunching... heaven is coming. Or is it.
ghshephard 11y ago
I'd suggest 20 years, and 10% of jobs can be replaced by machine is a more accurate assessment. The latest revision of the Atlas is an interesting technology demo - but I think progress in this space will be much, much slower than automated driving (which I expect to see 25% penetration in 10 years - that is, 25% of all driving, based on miles driven, will be hands/foot free). Even something as simple (and very, very low cost) as making up a room in a hotel, is probably 25-30 years off at least.
- davidiach 11y ago
  I think you're right. And I would add that part of the challenge is not just the technology, but the cost as well. You don't just need a robot that can make up a room as good as a human does it, it also needs to be cheaper than that human to "hire".
  - slfnflctd 11y ago
    This whole current thing with foaming at the mouth over bots taking all our jobs in the next few years reminds me a lot of how VR was being talked about in the early 90s. It's still early in the game, folks. This stuff is not small. The cost reductions achieved through shrinking transistors are irrelevant here. You can only go so cheap with moving parts that need to be strong and durable. For widespread adoption, cost is probably the biggest factor. Actually getting close to the same performance of a full time worker who grosses under $20k a year for a lower price is going to take a lot longer than many people seem to think. Throughout human history, we've repeatedly solved labor problems by throwing heaps of desperately poor human slaves at them, and we continue to do so-- competing with that model will be difficult.
    - ghshephard 11y ago
      Absolutely correct - keeping in mind that most of the (often undocumented) people cleaning your room in places like California are making around $10K/year or less. Fully automated "Cleaning a hotel room" is actually an insanely complex task across tons of disciplines - solving that problem will also result in you solving a lot of the Artificial Intelligence challenges. I think what we'll see much earlier, is a hybrid solution, where automated bots that can do 99% of the tasks send an interrupt to a controller when they encounter something they aren't certain of, such as, "Is that a lifelike doll laying on the floor, or a child lying very quietly."
ghshephard 11y ago
I'd suggest 20 years, and 10% of jobs can be replaced by machine is a more accurate assessment. The latest revision of the Atlas is an interesting technology demo - but I think progress in this space will be much, much slower than automated driving (which I expect to see 25% penetration in 10 years - that is, 25% of all driving, based on miles driven, will be hands/foot free). Even something as simple (and very, very low cost) as making up a room in a hotel, is probably 25-30 years off at least.
melling 11y ago
Yeah, I know what you mean. We'll have several dozen heading off to Mars, various moons of Jupiter, and perhaps the outer planets. Because humans won't be going, it'll be a fraction of the cost.' Btw, why do people always worry about the jobs technology will take away? The good old days when everyone was a farmer.
- zardo 11y ago
  >Btw, why do people always worry about the jobs technology will take away? Because if technology destroys your industry you lose. Automating textile work lead to greater wealth for the world as a whole, but it didn't make textile workers better off. The fact that a new job was created somewhere doesn't matter to them if they can't do it.
sunpazed 11y ago
Robots - they took our jobs! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZBYLIUqmIs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZBYLIUqmIs
alkonaut 11y ago
I think in 20 years it's still much easier and cheaper to rebuild a human workplace to be suitable for (very dumb) robots, than it is to use humanoid robots for human tasks. We already replaced humans for many tasks such as assembly etc. The next step is cognitively challenging but physically easy tasks like driving cars. A lot of "simple" human tasks such as making sandwiches in a restaurant require fine motor skills, creativity and other very difficult robotic traits. Those jobs will be done by robots long long after we as humans stopped driving cars or building them. Given the budgetary difference between making a sandwich and going into battle, we can be pretty sure sandwiches will come last. If anyone is still around to eat them by then that is.
- kenshaw 11y ago
  Purpose-built robots for things like "making sandwiches" will always be cheaper than general purpose robots. There really isn't a culinary task today that can't be fully automated (you can look at the frozen food section of a grocery store for examples of almost every cuisine type). The reason this hasn't happened at your corner diner is that manual labor remains much more inexpensive in the short and long term for low volume production (ie, restaurant vs food factory). Additionally, before it becomes cost efficient to build a customized culinary robot for a restaurant, it is still less expensive to design a custom culinary tool for use by the human staff that will net 99% of the efficiency of the purpose-built robot. Barring "replicators" (a la Star Trek), or labor costs rocketing through the roof (perhaps from something like a "minimum income") I don't expect the general composition of restaurant staff to change in the next hundred or even two hundred years.
gene-h 11y ago
The part at 1:23 is not that impressive. It is a carefully controlled lab environment, all flat surfaces, no obstacles, with a cubical box that has carefully placed AR tags which tell of the box's exact position and orientation. Not to mention this is a video which is inherently disingenuous. It may have failed 10 times before they got it right. It isn't even using its lidar. Now what would be more impressive would be for it to get down on it's knees and autonomously change a tire. 4/10 if it does this in a controlled environment, 8/10 if it adapts to tools/bolts being dropped, 10/10 if it does all the above outside on the side of a road. One thing to keep in mind is that many 'menial' tasks are more complicated than they seem. Because much of the control is done subconsciously they don't seem that hard and they are harder to reverse engineer.

Watching that, especially that part starting at 1:23 makes you realize quickly that in about 10 years, 95% of all jobs can be replaced by machines. Scary and interesting at the same time.

edvinbesic 11y ago

Does that mean we live in a happy utopia where 95% of the tedious/dangerous work has been taken care of and we instead get to spend our time focusing on what we find inspirational/creative, or do we live in a dystopia where 95% of job opportunities have vanished and we can no longer sustain a consumption based economy. Maybe those are one and the same.

bobajeff 11y ago
There's a TV show (haven't watched it yet) about a future where society is split between something like 15% employed and 85% unemployed. The unemployed live in this desert wasteland or whatever while the employed are living in a big o'l building structure. I would say it's far fetched and unlikely except that's kind of how the world is today.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Zardoz!
dillon 11y ago
To extend your point. The jobs that are easily programmable like farming, and warehousing are easily replaceable. Some tasks may even require using humans and robots together like construction or search and rescue. Some things are indeed not replaceable by robots and I think "most" professions* may not be able to be replaced by robots. These could be things like professional chefs (not fast food), programmers, and masseuse. *By professions I mean the raw number of unique jobs not the number of people who work in those positions. That being said in the U.S. with the "College Driven" economy I doubt it will ever affect 95% of the population at once. Generally professions will disappear one by one, but those people can retrain and if they don't it won't matter as the next generation will obviously not train to fill positions that don't exist (that's not logical). Eventually the new generations train to fill different job positions.
- Futurebot 11y ago
  That's far from guaranteed, and looks less likely all the time. See, the "Luddite Fallacy Fallacy." Gwern gives it a nice treatment here: http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes?cx=009114923999563836576%3Adv0a4ndtmly&cof=FORID%3A11&q=chunking#neo-luddism http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes?cx=009114923999563836576%3Adv0...
diskcat 11y ago
Well when the cars were invented did people start living in a dystopia where the car moguls owned mobility itself or did people just got around much faster and had better lives in general.
- txdv 11y ago
  horses have had a pretty rough run http://www.humanesociety.org/assets/pdfs/hsp/soaiv_07_ch10.pdf http://www.humanesociety.org/assets/pdfs/hsp/soaiv_07_ch10.p...
- TulliusCicero 11y ago
  It was mixed. People got around faster and stuff was cheaper. On the other hand, we got fat and dependent on cars, which is particularly bad for the poor (since cars are inherently expensive), and for kids' independence. That's why you're seeing many metro areas starting to prioritize walking, biking, and transit. On balance the development of cars was good, obviously, but let's not kid ourselves, the downsides were significant.
  - davidiach 11y ago
    I'm not sure if it is an established fact that people got fat because cars came along (before cars there were carriages). I'd rather bet that diet is the culprit.
    - TulliusCicero 11y ago
      Probably both, but I think they've shown at least a correlation between car commute time and obesity.
- seren 11y ago
  If we look at agriculture mechanization, we went from 80% of the population to 5% to feed everyone. While this is good for everyone, I don't think farmers are living some sort of utopia. Rather most of them are indebted for decades to pay for their complex equipment. I believe the introduction of robot will follow a similar pattern, some industry will see their number of employee reduced drastically but they won't necessarily increase their margin. The customer will likely win. The thing is that people who were employed in farms moved to factory. Nowadays I don't know where people who lost their job to robots will move.
visarga 11y ago
First will come the dystopia, the utopia might be later. In the early years the best positioned companies will reap the huge benefits of this new field. In time, the benefits will trickle down to ordinary people. The same was with cars and computers. Even when ordinary people will reap benefits from robotization, the big bucks will go to the Google or Apple of the day. We might have our daily needs met by the future economy, but big companies will dominate the finances. We'll get to play with the new toys, though.

waiseristy 11y ago

This is the first video that has actually given me that feeling. Maybe it's because of how anthropomorphic they've made it's movement compared to other robots, but I can see this guy doing very real work in the very near future.

noobermin 11y ago

10 years for 95% of all jobs is kind of too much too soon I'd argue. Big dog debuted 10 years ago for instance...even supposing non-linear growth, thinking that something like atlas in 10 years waiting tables, cooking gourmet food, greeting hotel guests, making plants, etc... A portion? Yes. 95%?

nightski 11y ago

I think you vastly underestimate how expensive that robot would be to manufacture and maintain. Of course, costs could come down over time but it's going to take a lot of work to make it economically viable for the types of jobs you are considering replacing.

elsewhen 11y ago
it seems that it might be close to doing what a low-skill laborer would do in a factory setting. remember that it should be able to work for longer hours, and not require benefits etc. i suspect that companies would start to purchase such a device at $100k. that price seems achievable, probably within a few years. as quantities increase, i suspect that the price will fall dramatically thereafter.
- Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
  The rule of thumb is you have to recoup capital costs in 2 years to make it worthwhile.
  - knowaveragejoe 11y ago
    Given the above assumptions that seems doable to me. 2 years of working nearly 24/7 with virtually no costs(compared to wages/benefits) would more than pay for itself. But I don't think the above assumptions are necessarily correct, that sounds a bit too cheap to me.
    - nightski 11y ago
      It may be doable, I am not trying to be overly negative. It's just that I probably wouldn't target minimum wage workers with this robot. Also you say "no costs" but do you honestly think these would be maintenance free? There would probably be a fairly significant cost to keep a fleet of these robots running as they are incredibly complex as compared to say an amazon warehouse robot.

tlrobinson 11y ago

Perhaps why YC is funding research on basic income... https://blog.ycombinator.com/basic-income https://blog.ycombinator.com/basic-income

agumonkey 11y ago

Datacenters for information crunching, cyborgs for physical crunching... heaven is coming. Or is it.

ghshephard 11y ago

I'd suggest 20 years, and 10% of jobs can be replaced by machine is a more accurate assessment. The latest revision of the Atlas is an interesting technology demo - but I think progress in this space will be much, much slower than automated driving (which I expect to see 25% penetration in 10 years - that is, 25% of all driving, based on miles driven, will be hands/foot free). Even something as simple (and very, very low cost) as making up a room in a hotel, is probably 25-30 years off at least.

davidiach 11y ago
I think you're right. And I would add that part of the challenge is not just the technology, but the cost as well. You don't just need a robot that can make up a room as good as a human does it, it also needs to be cheaper than that human to "hire".
- slfnflctd 11y ago
  This whole current thing with foaming at the mouth over bots taking all our jobs in the next few years reminds me a lot of how VR was being talked about in the early 90s. It's still early in the game, folks. This stuff is not small. The cost reductions achieved through shrinking transistors are irrelevant here. You can only go so cheap with moving parts that need to be strong and durable. For widespread adoption, cost is probably the biggest factor. Actually getting close to the same performance of a full time worker who grosses under $20k a year for a lower price is going to take a lot longer than many people seem to think. Throughout human history, we've repeatedly solved labor problems by throwing heaps of desperately poor human slaves at them, and we continue to do so-- competing with that model will be difficult.
  - ghshephard 11y ago
    Absolutely correct - keeping in mind that most of the (often undocumented) people cleaning your room in places like California are making around $10K/year or less. Fully automated "Cleaning a hotel room" is actually an insanely complex task across tons of disciplines - solving that problem will also result in you solving a lot of the Artificial Intelligence challenges. I think what we'll see much earlier, is a hybrid solution, where automated bots that can do 99% of the tasks send an interrupt to a controller when they encounter something they aren't certain of, such as, "Is that a lifelike doll laying on the floor, or a child lying very quietly."

ghshephard 11y ago

melling 11y ago

Yeah, I know what you mean. We'll have several dozen heading off to Mars, various moons of Jupiter, and perhaps the outer planets. Because humans won't be going, it'll be a fraction of the cost.' Btw, why do people always worry about the jobs technology will take away? The good old days when everyone was a farmer.

zardo 11y ago
>Btw, why do people always worry about the jobs technology will take away? Because if technology destroys your industry you lose. Automating textile work lead to greater wealth for the world as a whole, but it didn't make textile workers better off. The fact that a new job was created somewhere doesn't matter to them if they can't do it.

sunpazed 11y ago

Robots - they took our jobs! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZBYLIUqmIs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZBYLIUqmIs

alkonaut 11y ago

I think in 20 years it's still much easier and cheaper to rebuild a human workplace to be suitable for (very dumb) robots, than it is to use humanoid robots for human tasks. We already replaced humans for many tasks such as assembly etc. The next step is cognitively challenging but physically easy tasks like driving cars. A lot of "simple" human tasks such as making sandwiches in a restaurant require fine motor skills, creativity and other very difficult robotic traits. Those jobs will be done by robots long long after we as humans stopped driving cars or building them. Given the budgetary difference between making a sandwich and going into battle, we can be pretty sure sandwiches will come last. If anyone is still around to eat them by then that is.

kenshaw 11y ago
Purpose-built robots for things like "making sandwiches" will always be cheaper than general purpose robots. There really isn't a culinary task today that can't be fully automated (you can look at the frozen food section of a grocery store for examples of almost every cuisine type). The reason this hasn't happened at your corner diner is that manual labor remains much more inexpensive in the short and long term for low volume production (ie, restaurant vs food factory). Additionally, before it becomes cost efficient to build a customized culinary robot for a restaurant, it is still less expensive to design a custom culinary tool for use by the human staff that will net 99% of the efficiency of the purpose-built robot. Barring "replicators" (a la Star Trek), or labor costs rocketing through the roof (perhaps from something like a "minimum income") I don't expect the general composition of restaurant staff to change in the next hundred or even two hundred years.

gene-h 11y ago

The part at 1:23 is not that impressive. It is a carefully controlled lab environment, all flat surfaces, no obstacles, with a cubical box that has carefully placed AR tags which tell of the box's exact position and orientation. Not to mention this is a video which is inherently disingenuous. It may have failed 10 times before they got it right. It isn't even using its lidar. Now what would be more impressive would be for it to get down on it's knees and autonomously change a tire. 4/10 if it does this in a controlled environment, 8/10 if it adapts to tools/bolts being dropped, 10/10 if it does all the above outside on the side of a road. One thing to keep in mind is that many 'menial' tasks are more complicated than they seem. Because much of the control is done subconsciously they don't seem that hard and they are harder to reverse engineer.