9 ms·

Jobs Involving Routine Tasks Aren't Growing

133 points by sebgr 11y ago

atemerev 11y ago
What's wrong with that? This is called "progress".
- mrrrgn 11y ago
  Progress implies moving toward a goal. What goal are we moving toward? Our society and economy aren't optimized for scenarios involving large scale unemployment. What use is automation if it only leads to mass human suffering?
  - draugadrotten 11y ago
    > Progress implies moving toward a goal. What goal are we moving toward? The goal seems to be making the rich even richer. You are right in that the goal is key, because much time and effort will be spent towards the goal. When Kennedy said we should go to the moon, we did. Our leaders today have other goals, and they too will reach their goals. Choose wisely.
    - atemerev 11y ago
      Quite right. Almost everyone is quite rich in terms of available goods and services per median income, compared to 100 years ago. Even by 50 years old standards, I am super-rich, having the ability to travel though Europe many times per year, flexible working schedule, and having, say, an on-demand driver available on call by the push of the button on my portable phone... this is insanely rich even by original Wall Street movie standards! And I am not a Wall Street trader, I am just a self-educated software engineer, coming from relatively poor family. My wife is a mathematician, also enjoying similar privileges. So yes, I am looking forward to get even more richer in time. Like most of people. And this is way easier than it ever was before.
  - exit 11y ago
    for the vast majority employment is mass human suffering
  - atemerev 11y ago
    Luddites were saying the same around 200 years ago, but it turned out better than expected. Lots of new jobs were created, replacing manual labor.
    - a_humean 11y ago
      To counter the unfair Luddite bashing: The problem the Luddites had is that they were skilled labour facing the possibility of destitution with no welfare state to provide time and money for retraining into new occupations. They could see that there was no future for their occupation, but they were arguing for better terms with their employers so that their short-medium term future wasn't so bleak (e.g. their family being sent to the [workhouse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workhouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workhouse), and likely a drawn out and dehumanising death). We have a welfare state now in all developed countries (by varying degrees), so the problems that the Luddites faced have been greatly mitigated from those past extremes. However, all welfare states assume that any state of unemployment is merely temporary, and provides on that basis. The past is not a wholly reliable indicator for the future, and present indications are that with increasing automation there won't be enough good (interpret as you will) new jobs. Further, many of the new good jobs will be out of reach for a significant portion of our populations without the luck of latent ability and/or the luck being born into the right (well-off) family with access to high quality education and social connections. The institutions that solved the Luddite problem can't solve a problem of truly long-term/permanent unemployment or very irregular employment.
    - ska 11y ago
      Not for the Luddites. This is one of the most consistently misunderstood and misused historical lessons I run into in tech circles. The true lesson of the Luddites isn't that "things will turn out better than you thought", it is that "there will be casualties". The Luddites were basically correct - they were trading "good jobs" for fundamental unemployment. Demographically speaking the families involved did not on average recover from the damage for a few generations. So while from a global perspective the overall change may be positive over time, you can't discount people out of hand for saying "wait a minute, we're going to get screwed hard here". They may well be right. It may still be the right thing to do. What the policy implications of such are or should be is a separable issue. Another potentially deep issue: the industrial revolution creating a bunch of new jobs and job categories does not demonstrate that the same will be true of a putative automation revolution that we are entering....
  - tomjen3 11y ago
    Please look out the nearest window that overlooks a street. Then compare with the next couple of minutes of this video (https://youtu.be/uYmbyOrM4gs?t=543 https://youtu.be/uYmbyOrM4gs?t=543). Compare the amount of human suffering. The difference is 116 years of the automation you so hate. Unfortunately I can't show you what life was like before the industrial revolution, because we don't have images or movies from that time, suffice to say that life then "was short, brutish and hard". Child mortality was rampant, according to Adam Smith it was not unusual that a woman who had had 10 children didn't see any of them grew up to be adults. There is no goal, but progress is moving as far away from that condition as humanely possible, as fast as possible. This is best achieved with capitalism. If you want full scale employment just create another world war, so that we can draft everybody and piss all our wealth away.
    - a_humean 11y ago
      I'm afraid you have completely misunderstood him/her. I'm pretty certain that he believes the industrial revolution eventually brought about amazing social change and genuine life improvements for everyone that made life much much less 'short, brutish, and hard'. The point wasn't that automation is bad (it clearly is not), but that if we continue to automate without a plan for how we deal with mass unemployment, then automation will lead to mass human suffering of a different kind.
  - paulryanrogers 11y ago
    Ecological sustainability would be nice. Though it seems our current means of automating are more often at the expense of our environment.
dante9999 11y ago
I wonder if you can reliably classify jobs into "nonroutine" and "routine". There is element of routine in every work, and I'm pretty sure that even most boring and repetitive job can be done better with some degree of creativity. It would be really interesting to read more about reasoning behind classification presented in this article. I mean can you seriously say there is no "routine" in programming or management?
- ktRolster 11y ago
  Here's a better article that discusses that: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/04/08/is-your-job-routine-if-so-its-probably-disappearing/ http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/04/08/is-your-job-routin... If your work is just following instructions, then it's probably routine. As for me, I'd like to see most middle management go away, since I largely see it as a waste (basically, if people know how to manage themselves, you can get rid of most middle-managers).
  - kristianc 11y ago
    It's not a knowledge problem it's a process problem. You can get rid of most middle managers but only once you have the conditions in the business where people can be both autonomous and aligned to the business goals. Most middle managers end up achieving neither, but a layer of management is the default solution that companies most end up with.
    - ktRolster 11y ago
      That is an interesting thought. I would suggest that one of the goals of the company should be to teach people to be autonomous and aligned to the business goals.
  - iamcurious 11y ago
    You still need management as a way of reducing communication costs. Without any management you need (n!) communication channels in the worst case. With proper management you can achieve (n*C ~).
ktRolster 11y ago
I really like Mike Rowe's viewpoint on unemployment: http://profoundlydisconnected.com/ http://profoundlydisconnected.com/
- Johnnybe 11y ago
  It's disconnected alright. There's only 3 companies advertising for jobs on his careers page. And one of them is a franchising company (Mr. Sparky). Trades are very competitive. Just look up the number of electricians in your area. It's a race to the bottom in the trades.
  - Futurebot 11y ago
    Do you have more sources on this? I've been looking for good data on the competitiveness of traditional blue-collar "trade" jobs/industry since it started becoming the go-to panacea to all our job woes a few years ago. It seems like plumbing, electrician work, HVAC, etc. would be pretty easily saturated areas; how many plumbing jobs can be sustained per neighborhood, for example?
jkot 11y ago
With self-driving cars, drone delivery.. unemployment will get even worse.
erikb 11y ago
Oh well, please let us not connect softwaredevelopment and management too much with non-routine work. On a daily basis I see so many people who work on less than 50% of their capabilities because they haven't created routines in their work, thinking that their work is 90% non-routine. Think about the last time you heard how a developer tells you that you don't need to learn the ten finger system to program well, or that he is capable of using 10-20 programming languages. How can a person think about usability of his software and a debuggable architecture, if he has to think about how to put an "i" and an "f" in the text editor? How much time is left for genius ideas when he has to look up all the time if the current language requires him to write a try-catch or a try-except block?
- leereeves 11y ago
  I touch type ("ten finger system") but I can see a point to the argument that it's not necessary to program well. Typing is only a small part of programming, and touch typing isn't a huge benefit even for that part, considering all the numbers and symbols used, auto-complete for identifiers and keywords, and macros for common idioms. And it painfully overworks the right pinky.
  - Swizec 11y ago
    As a self-taught somewhat-ten-finger-system typist that bangs out 120 words per minute in English ... I disagree. Being able to think through my fingers has helped a lot. It's hard to explain so let's use a driving analogy. Think back to how good your driving was when shifting wasn't muscle memory, when you had to think about the clutch every time, or when you had to think about just how much brake to apply and how much throttle in various situations. Or even when you had to think about how much to turn the wheel. When all those basic tasks required higher-level brain function involvement. How much did you actually focus on the road? How much could you think about choosing the most optimal lane? Etc. Even something as simple as keeping appropriate safety distance for the speed you're driving. When it becomes intuitive, you're free to think about other stuff. Same for typing. When I think "string template" and `foo ${bar}` flies out on its own. That helps. It means I can think about more important things. If you don't like my driving analogy. Pick up a skateboard. Or rollerblades. Or a hoverboard. And try to hold a conversation while you learn how to ride.
kristianc 11y ago
I'm interested by the classification here. Many backend jobs involve routine work from people who could be doing non-routine work if the CRUD routine job was automated. Within an industry or a profession it seems like there could be a mix of routine and non-routine work. Similarly, how many people's jobs have changed from being routine jobs to non-routine jobs through either retraining or automation allowing them to take on higher order work? Again, doesn't say. Also, interesting to note that the actual unemployment rate for routine congnitive, routine manual etc 2009 shock aside doesn't actually look anomalous compared to much of the last two decades of the graph is to be believed.
- petra 11y ago
  >> Many backend jobs involve routine work from people who could be doing non-routine work if the CRUD routine job was automated Interesting, could you please expand ?
  - netcan 11y ago
    I'm not the OP, but I think he means this: A bookkeeper/accountant might be manually entering invoices into a system, emailing managers to approve payments and such. It takes 3 hours per day. This work is "routine" in the relevant sense (it can be automated) but our young, congenial and soon-to-be-replaced-by-robots accounts payable woman (her name's Lynne) also does and is capable of doing "non-routine" tasks. She can call up suppliers to negotiate payment terms, have lunch with the manager in the next office to clandestinely suss out some questionable expense charges, etc. Calling Lynne a "routine worker" is kind of problematic. She does routine work because it needs doing. When that work disappears, she's not out of work by default. Generally when technology creates efficiencies, the unemployment rate does not just increase by the number of people that did that work yesterday. People who are capable of doing other useful things do those things, if it's useful to do more of those things. There's still a question of whether the economy can use up these newly available Lynne hours. Often it can. What happens when some technology automates a lot of "routine" programming work? Programmers make more program(s).
    - 11y ago
x5n1 11y ago
All of this points to the fact that work is a consumer good. We need to manufacture work just like we manufacture products. You buy work with time, and in return you get money; after all time is money. It should be work that we actually want to do, in an environment which we find to be psychologically positive. We need to just call it a day for capitalism and all the other garbage that goes with it. Let's throw away idiotic ideas like efficiency and productivity. And let's focus on meaning. Maybe we can build a fulfilling society rather than this madness and busi-ness we have created to produce garbage at breaknecks speeds so capital owners can do more of the same. For instance this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_currency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_currency
- brbsix 11y ago
  Not everyone's time is worth the same. Some people have more experience, intelligence, or can simply brute-force the task with determination. Productive societies reward people as such, and for good reason. You're talking about obliterating incentives as we know them. Perhaps you can test your hypotheses in a voluntary society before advocating for a coercive state to enact such policies.
  - x5n1 11y ago
    It's easy to account for this in terms of education. Number of years of education should be added into the calculation for that. For instance for every year of schooling you get a a certain percentage more currency in terms of hours worked than someone with less schooling. And I am for all sorts of pilot programs to explore how else we can organize society. As for "productive societies", I don't know what that will actually mean in the near future. Automation is 100% productive. It needs no people for that. These terms have meaning for industrial society where people are treated like robots. It has little meaning for society where robots produce more of the goods. And everything else is about simply organizing society so that people feel some sense of meaning and contentment. At the end of the day in motivated people with money, and engineering society in that direction, we actually get a lot of ills like burnout, alcoholism, workaholics, etc. Yes people can be coerced by money, but often it's not for their own good. It for the good of the owners of money so they can make more profit. But at the same time, this sort of thing ruins the experience of life for the worker.
pluma 11y ago
The site's layout seems to treat my 10" android tablet in landscape mode as if it were a first generation iPhone in portrait mode. I wonder what happens. Faaulty browser sniffing?
crdoconnor 11y ago
Note that they were growing faster than any other kind of job: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/28/business/economy/recovery-has-created-far-more-low-wage-jobs-than-better-paid-ones.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/28/business/economy/recovery-...
awinter-py 11y ago
Scary parallel here with the recent jeff dean talk about NN. He claims he won't let his team touch any 'research task' that takes more than a week, and prefers to stick to experiments that take under a day to set up and run -- that there's so much low-hanging fruit that every ML project should be simple. Very very scary if tech that most of us still haven't touched is also in a sense routine. I hope I'm misquoting him. But my takeaway is that between manually coding processes that could be solved with ML & doing infrastructure profiling, most devs are spending half their time fixing problems that are 'routine' at the big three.
- savanaly 11y ago
  >Very very scary if tech that most of us still haven't touched is also in a sense routine. Isn't that more properly regarded as exciting than scary? The long term benefits to automation have rarely failed to outweigh the temporary costs. I would personally be very happy if my own current job- software developer- were somehow automated out of existence. Not only would it allow me to put my money where my mouth is regarding praising automation but it would mean huge gains for the human race.
  - FilterSweep 11y ago
    > but it would mean huge gains for the human race. This entirely depends on the model the human race is running off of. With the current state of mass-centralization in tech (see, again, the big 3), you will never get to experience such gains. In fact, you would quickly grow dependent on someone else to feed and shelter you, considering you can no longer provide a benefit to society that puts food on the table. In fact, most people wouldn't provide value anymore. > The long term benefits to automation have rarely failed to outweigh the temporary costs. For some people, yes. You are correct when it comes to the numbers. GDP increases. A nation has more "wealth" to work with altogether. But the other side of the coin is that wealth disparity becomes more extreme. Big however - If we ran off a decentralized model - arguably the way the Web was originally intended, I could see how the human race would be placed in an unprecedented position for future growth, and humanity would really thrive. Granted, regarding the current state as ""exciting"" boils down to what you value, I guess. When (not if) I automate myself out of existence, I'm sure as hell not telling anyone I did it.
debacle 11y ago
Isn't that the purposeful outcome of technology? "I could replace everything you do with a script." I know for a fact that work I have done has contributed to the demise of many positions. Could you imagine the industry for "Internet Cataloging" if we didn't have search engines? Email if we didn't have Gmail? Technology is a job killer. That idea is something that's been a part of society and literature for hundreds of years, sometimes in violent fashion. Our economy needs to evolve in such a way that the destruction of jobs is a net positive for society.
- tomjen3 11y ago
  Most of the population having access to most of the worlds knowledge in the palm of their hand is a gigantic boon to society. What we should accept is that the time is approaching where a) it is possible for skill and lucky people to make many millions of times more money than those who are neither and that b) the cost communication has decreased so much that in many cases it no longer makes sense to employ people, instead it makes more sense to contract the work out. This means we should do two things: stop talking about income differences and focus on making sure the poorest have tolerable lives and b) make it much, much, much easier to start your own small business. This means tax cuts but above all simplifications of the relevant law.
  - gphil 11y ago
    I was with you until the last sentence: > This means tax cuts but above all simplifications of the relevant law. How do you pay for the poorest to have tolerable lives with tax cuts? Or are you talking about cutting out regressive taxes on the working poor?
    - dangerlibrary 11y ago
      Maybe he believes we're somewhere to the right of the peak of the Laffer curve. There's literally no evidence whatsoever for that, but evidence isn't what causes people to advocate for tax cuts for people making "many millions of times more money" than those who aren't lucky or talented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
btbuildem 11y ago
Assisting or caring for others is not a low-skill job! It may not require a doctorate in theoretical physics, but it requires a lot of emotional intelligence, stamina and ability to be present with other people. It's far from routine! This immediate nitpick aside - I think it's great that routine task jobs are going away. The bulk of those are mind-numbing, dead-end jobs - do we really need to keep subjecting people to 40h/wk routine boredom?
- seangrant 11y ago
  I think it was a poor choice of words. "Caring for others" can include things like making food, washing cars, and cleaning. Essentially another way of saying "labor for others."
- Dain42 11y ago
  I completely agree. My grandmother is in the Alzheimer's wing at her local nursing home, and I cannot begin to understand how the staff can do their jobs day after day. It's almost like running a daycare for elderly people. They are so kind, and helpful, both to residents and their families, and they are just so superb at what are really difficult jobs. They deserve much more than most of them are making. They're some of the higher-paying jobs in the town, but relatively speaking, they're not high-paying. Back when I was in middle and high school, my other grandmother was in the same home, though not in the Alzheimer's wing, and they seemed to take really good care of her, too. I wasn't as cognizant of it at the time, but talking to my parents and looking back, I can see that it's the case. I know that I couldn't do their job.
- JeremyNT 11y ago
  > This immediate nitpick aside - I think it's great that routine task jobs are going away. The bulk of those are mind-numbing, dead-end jobs - do we really need to keep subjecting people to 40h/wk routine boredom? Sure, it's great that we are gaining this capability, and the people working towards it should be lauded for their progress. The issue is that many people rely on the ability to exchange 40h/wk of routine boredom for the basic necessities of living. Our society assumes that most people will contribute enough value from their "work" that they can exchange for the things they need in life. If their work loses all value, then we need to figure out what else we can do for/with these people. At this point, it seems as if our engineering ability is advancing beyond the pace of our social structures and legal system.

133 points by sebgr 11y ago

atemerev 11y ago

What's wrong with that? This is called "progress".

mrrrgn 11y ago
Progress implies moving toward a goal. What goal are we moving toward? Our society and economy aren't optimized for scenarios involving large scale unemployment. What use is automation if it only leads to mass human suffering?
- draugadrotten 11y ago
  > Progress implies moving toward a goal. What goal are we moving toward? The goal seems to be making the rich even richer. You are right in that the goal is key, because much time and effort will be spent towards the goal. When Kennedy said we should go to the moon, we did. Our leaders today have other goals, and they too will reach their goals. Choose wisely.
  - atemerev 11y ago
    Quite right. Almost everyone is quite rich in terms of available goods and services per median income, compared to 100 years ago. Even by 50 years old standards, I am super-rich, having the ability to travel though Europe many times per year, flexible working schedule, and having, say, an on-demand driver available on call by the push of the button on my portable phone... this is insanely rich even by original Wall Street movie standards! And I am not a Wall Street trader, I am just a self-educated software engineer, coming from relatively poor family. My wife is a mathematician, also enjoying similar privileges. So yes, I am looking forward to get even more richer in time. Like most of people. And this is way easier than it ever was before.
- exit 11y ago
  for the vast majority employment is mass human suffering
- atemerev 11y ago
  Luddites were saying the same around 200 years ago, but it turned out better than expected. Lots of new jobs were created, replacing manual labor.
  - a_humean 11y ago
    To counter the unfair Luddite bashing: The problem the Luddites had is that they were skilled labour facing the possibility of destitution with no welfare state to provide time and money for retraining into new occupations. They could see that there was no future for their occupation, but they were arguing for better terms with their employers so that their short-medium term future wasn't so bleak (e.g. their family being sent to the [workhouse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workhouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workhouse), and likely a drawn out and dehumanising death). We have a welfare state now in all developed countries (by varying degrees), so the problems that the Luddites faced have been greatly mitigated from those past extremes. However, all welfare states assume that any state of unemployment is merely temporary, and provides on that basis. The past is not a wholly reliable indicator for the future, and present indications are that with increasing automation there won't be enough good (interpret as you will) new jobs. Further, many of the new good jobs will be out of reach for a significant portion of our populations without the luck of latent ability and/or the luck being born into the right (well-off) family with access to high quality education and social connections. The institutions that solved the Luddite problem can't solve a problem of truly long-term/permanent unemployment or very irregular employment.
  - ska 11y ago
    Not for the Luddites. This is one of the most consistently misunderstood and misused historical lessons I run into in tech circles. The true lesson of the Luddites isn't that "things will turn out better than you thought", it is that "there will be casualties". The Luddites were basically correct - they were trading "good jobs" for fundamental unemployment. Demographically speaking the families involved did not on average recover from the damage for a few generations. So while from a global perspective the overall change may be positive over time, you can't discount people out of hand for saying "wait a minute, we're going to get screwed hard here". They may well be right. It may still be the right thing to do. What the policy implications of such are or should be is a separable issue. Another potentially deep issue: the industrial revolution creating a bunch of new jobs and job categories does not demonstrate that the same will be true of a putative automation revolution that we are entering....
- tomjen3 11y ago
  Please look out the nearest window that overlooks a street. Then compare with the next couple of minutes of this video (https://youtu.be/uYmbyOrM4gs?t=543 https://youtu.be/uYmbyOrM4gs?t=543). Compare the amount of human suffering. The difference is 116 years of the automation you so hate. Unfortunately I can't show you what life was like before the industrial revolution, because we don't have images or movies from that time, suffice to say that life then "was short, brutish and hard". Child mortality was rampant, according to Adam Smith it was not unusual that a woman who had had 10 children didn't see any of them grew up to be adults. There is no goal, but progress is moving as far away from that condition as humanely possible, as fast as possible. This is best achieved with capitalism. If you want full scale employment just create another world war, so that we can draft everybody and piss all our wealth away.
  - a_humean 11y ago
    I'm afraid you have completely misunderstood him/her. I'm pretty certain that he believes the industrial revolution eventually brought about amazing social change and genuine life improvements for everyone that made life much much less 'short, brutish, and hard'. The point wasn't that automation is bad (it clearly is not), but that if we continue to automate without a plan for how we deal with mass unemployment, then automation will lead to mass human suffering of a different kind.
- paulryanrogers 11y ago
  Ecological sustainability would be nice. Though it seems our current means of automating are more often at the expense of our environment.

dante9999 11y ago

I wonder if you can reliably classify jobs into "nonroutine" and "routine". There is element of routine in every work, and I'm pretty sure that even most boring and repetitive job can be done better with some degree of creativity. It would be really interesting to read more about reasoning behind classification presented in this article. I mean can you seriously say there is no "routine" in programming or management?

ktRolster 11y ago
Here's a better article that discusses that: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/04/08/is-your-job-routine-if-so-its-probably-disappearing/ http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/04/08/is-your-job-routin... If your work is just following instructions, then it's probably routine. As for me, I'd like to see most middle management go away, since I largely see it as a waste (basically, if people know how to manage themselves, you can get rid of most middle-managers).
- kristianc 11y ago
  It's not a knowledge problem it's a process problem. You can get rid of most middle managers but only once you have the conditions in the business where people can be both autonomous and aligned to the business goals. Most middle managers end up achieving neither, but a layer of management is the default solution that companies most end up with.
  - ktRolster 11y ago
    That is an interesting thought. I would suggest that one of the goals of the company should be to teach people to be autonomous and aligned to the business goals.
- iamcurious 11y ago
  You still need management as a way of reducing communication costs. Without any management you need (n!) communication channels in the worst case. With proper management you can achieve (n*C ~).

ktRolster 11y ago

I really like Mike Rowe's viewpoint on unemployment: http://profoundlydisconnected.com/ http://profoundlydisconnected.com/

Johnnybe 11y ago
It's disconnected alright. There's only 3 companies advertising for jobs on his careers page. And one of them is a franchising company (Mr. Sparky). Trades are very competitive. Just look up the number of electricians in your area. It's a race to the bottom in the trades.
- Futurebot 11y ago
  Do you have more sources on this? I've been looking for good data on the competitiveness of traditional blue-collar "trade" jobs/industry since it started becoming the go-to panacea to all our job woes a few years ago. It seems like plumbing, electrician work, HVAC, etc. would be pretty easily saturated areas; how many plumbing jobs can be sustained per neighborhood, for example?

jkot 11y ago

With self-driving cars, drone delivery.. unemployment will get even worse.

erikb 11y ago

Oh well, please let us not connect softwaredevelopment and management too much with non-routine work. On a daily basis I see so many people who work on less than 50% of their capabilities because they haven't created routines in their work, thinking that their work is 90% non-routine. Think about the last time you heard how a developer tells you that you don't need to learn the ten finger system to program well, or that he is capable of using 10-20 programming languages. How can a person think about usability of his software and a debuggable architecture, if he has to think about how to put an "i" and an "f" in the text editor? How much time is left for genius ideas when he has to look up all the time if the current language requires him to write a try-catch or a try-except block?

leereeves 11y ago
I touch type ("ten finger system") but I can see a point to the argument that it's not necessary to program well. Typing is only a small part of programming, and touch typing isn't a huge benefit even for that part, considering all the numbers and symbols used, auto-complete for identifiers and keywords, and macros for common idioms. And it painfully overworks the right pinky.
- Swizec 11y ago
  As a self-taught somewhat-ten-finger-system typist that bangs out 120 words per minute in English ... I disagree. Being able to think through my fingers has helped a lot. It's hard to explain so let's use a driving analogy. Think back to how good your driving was when shifting wasn't muscle memory, when you had to think about the clutch every time, or when you had to think about just how much brake to apply and how much throttle in various situations. Or even when you had to think about how much to turn the wheel. When all those basic tasks required higher-level brain function involvement. How much did you actually focus on the road? How much could you think about choosing the most optimal lane? Etc. Even something as simple as keeping appropriate safety distance for the speed you're driving. When it becomes intuitive, you're free to think about other stuff. Same for typing. When I think "string template" and `foo ${bar}` flies out on its own. That helps. It means I can think about more important things. If you don't like my driving analogy. Pick up a skateboard. Or rollerblades. Or a hoverboard. And try to hold a conversation while you learn how to ride.

kristianc 11y ago

I'm interested by the classification here. Many backend jobs involve routine work from people who could be doing non-routine work if the CRUD routine job was automated. Within an industry or a profession it seems like there could be a mix of routine and non-routine work. Similarly, how many people's jobs have changed from being routine jobs to non-routine jobs through either retraining or automation allowing them to take on higher order work? Again, doesn't say. Also, interesting to note that the actual unemployment rate for routine congnitive, routine manual etc 2009 shock aside doesn't actually look anomalous compared to much of the last two decades of the graph is to be believed.

petra 11y ago
>> Many backend jobs involve routine work from people who could be doing non-routine work if the CRUD routine job was automated Interesting, could you please expand ?
- netcan 11y ago
  I'm not the OP, but I think he means this: A bookkeeper/accountant might be manually entering invoices into a system, emailing managers to approve payments and such. It takes 3 hours per day. This work is "routine" in the relevant sense (it can be automated) but our young, congenial and soon-to-be-replaced-by-robots accounts payable woman (her name's Lynne) also does and is capable of doing "non-routine" tasks. She can call up suppliers to negotiate payment terms, have lunch with the manager in the next office to clandestinely suss out some questionable expense charges, etc. Calling Lynne a "routine worker" is kind of problematic. She does routine work because it needs doing. When that work disappears, she's not out of work by default. Generally when technology creates efficiencies, the unemployment rate does not just increase by the number of people that did that work yesterday. People who are capable of doing other useful things do those things, if it's useful to do more of those things. There's still a question of whether the economy can use up these newly available Lynne hours. Often it can. What happens when some technology automates a lot of "routine" programming work? Programmers make more program(s).
  - 11y ago

x5n1 11y ago

All of this points to the fact that work is a consumer good. We need to manufacture work just like we manufacture products. You buy work with time, and in return you get money; after all time is money. It should be work that we actually want to do, in an environment which we find to be psychologically positive. We need to just call it a day for capitalism and all the other garbage that goes with it. Let's throw away idiotic ideas like efficiency and productivity. And let's focus on meaning. Maybe we can build a fulfilling society rather than this madness and busi-ness we have created to produce garbage at breaknecks speeds so capital owners can do more of the same. For instance this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_currency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_currency

brbsix 11y ago
Not everyone's time is worth the same. Some people have more experience, intelligence, or can simply brute-force the task with determination. Productive societies reward people as such, and for good reason. You're talking about obliterating incentives as we know them. Perhaps you can test your hypotheses in a voluntary society before advocating for a coercive state to enact such policies.
- x5n1 11y ago
  It's easy to account for this in terms of education. Number of years of education should be added into the calculation for that. For instance for every year of schooling you get a a certain percentage more currency in terms of hours worked than someone with less schooling. And I am for all sorts of pilot programs to explore how else we can organize society. As for "productive societies", I don't know what that will actually mean in the near future. Automation is 100% productive. It needs no people for that. These terms have meaning for industrial society where people are treated like robots. It has little meaning for society where robots produce more of the goods. And everything else is about simply organizing society so that people feel some sense of meaning and contentment. At the end of the day in motivated people with money, and engineering society in that direction, we actually get a lot of ills like burnout, alcoholism, workaholics, etc. Yes people can be coerced by money, but often it's not for their own good. It for the good of the owners of money so they can make more profit. But at the same time, this sort of thing ruins the experience of life for the worker.

pluma 11y ago

The site's layout seems to treat my 10" android tablet in landscape mode as if it were a first generation iPhone in portrait mode. I wonder what happens. Faaulty browser sniffing?

crdoconnor 11y ago

Note that they were growing faster than any other kind of job: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/28/business/economy/recovery-has-created-far-more-low-wage-jobs-than-better-paid-ones.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/28/business/economy/recovery-...

awinter-py 11y ago

Scary parallel here with the recent jeff dean talk about NN. He claims he won't let his team touch any 'research task' that takes more than a week, and prefers to stick to experiments that take under a day to set up and run -- that there's so much low-hanging fruit that every ML project should be simple. Very very scary if tech that most of us still haven't touched is also in a sense routine. I hope I'm misquoting him. But my takeaway is that between manually coding processes that could be solved with ML & doing infrastructure profiling, most devs are spending half their time fixing problems that are 'routine' at the big three.

savanaly 11y ago
>Very very scary if tech that most of us still haven't touched is also in a sense routine. Isn't that more properly regarded as exciting than scary? The long term benefits to automation have rarely failed to outweigh the temporary costs. I would personally be very happy if my own current job- software developer- were somehow automated out of existence. Not only would it allow me to put my money where my mouth is regarding praising automation but it would mean huge gains for the human race.
- FilterSweep 11y ago
  > but it would mean huge gains for the human race. This entirely depends on the model the human race is running off of. With the current state of mass-centralization in tech (see, again, the big 3), you will never get to experience such gains. In fact, you would quickly grow dependent on someone else to feed and shelter you, considering you can no longer provide a benefit to society that puts food on the table. In fact, most people wouldn't provide value anymore. > The long term benefits to automation have rarely failed to outweigh the temporary costs. For some people, yes. You are correct when it comes to the numbers. GDP increases. A nation has more "wealth" to work with altogether. But the other side of the coin is that wealth disparity becomes more extreme. Big however - If we ran off a decentralized model - arguably the way the Web was originally intended, I could see how the human race would be placed in an unprecedented position for future growth, and humanity would really thrive. Granted, regarding the current state as ""exciting"" boils down to what you value, I guess. When (not if) I automate myself out of existence, I'm sure as hell not telling anyone I did it.

debacle 11y ago

Isn't that the purposeful outcome of technology? "I could replace everything you do with a script." I know for a fact that work I have done has contributed to the demise of many positions. Could you imagine the industry for "Internet Cataloging" if we didn't have search engines? Email if we didn't have Gmail? Technology is a job killer. That idea is something that's been a part of society and literature for hundreds of years, sometimes in violent fashion. Our economy needs to evolve in such a way that the destruction of jobs is a net positive for society.

tomjen3 11y ago
Most of the population having access to most of the worlds knowledge in the palm of their hand is a gigantic boon to society. What we should accept is that the time is approaching where a) it is possible for skill and lucky people to make many millions of times more money than those who are neither and that b) the cost communication has decreased so much that in many cases it no longer makes sense to employ people, instead it makes more sense to contract the work out. This means we should do two things: stop talking about income differences and focus on making sure the poorest have tolerable lives and b) make it much, much, much easier to start your own small business. This means tax cuts but above all simplifications of the relevant law.
- gphil 11y ago
  I was with you until the last sentence: > This means tax cuts but above all simplifications of the relevant law. How do you pay for the poorest to have tolerable lives with tax cuts? Or are you talking about cutting out regressive taxes on the working poor?
  - dangerlibrary 11y ago
    Maybe he believes we're somewhere to the right of the peak of the Laffer curve. There's literally no evidence whatsoever for that, but evidence isn't what causes people to advocate for tax cuts for people making "many millions of times more money" than those who aren't lucky or talented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

btbuildem 11y ago

Assisting or caring for others is not a low-skill job! It may not require a doctorate in theoretical physics, but it requires a lot of emotional intelligence, stamina and ability to be present with other people. It's far from routine! This immediate nitpick aside - I think it's great that routine task jobs are going away. The bulk of those are mind-numbing, dead-end jobs - do we really need to keep subjecting people to 40h/wk routine boredom?

seangrant 11y ago
I think it was a poor choice of words. "Caring for others" can include things like making food, washing cars, and cleaning. Essentially another way of saying "labor for others."
Dain42 11y ago
I completely agree. My grandmother is in the Alzheimer's wing at her local nursing home, and I cannot begin to understand how the staff can do their jobs day after day. It's almost like running a daycare for elderly people. They are so kind, and helpful, both to residents and their families, and they are just so superb at what are really difficult jobs. They deserve much more than most of them are making. They're some of the higher-paying jobs in the town, but relatively speaking, they're not high-paying. Back when I was in middle and high school, my other grandmother was in the same home, though not in the Alzheimer's wing, and they seemed to take really good care of her, too. I wasn't as cognizant of it at the time, but talking to my parents and looking back, I can see that it's the case. I know that I couldn't do their job.
JeremyNT 11y ago
> This immediate nitpick aside - I think it's great that routine task jobs are going away. The bulk of those are mind-numbing, dead-end jobs - do we really need to keep subjecting people to 40h/wk routine boredom? Sure, it's great that we are gaining this capability, and the people working towards it should be lauded for their progress. The issue is that many people rely on the ability to exchange 40h/wk of routine boredom for the basic necessities of living. Our society assumes that most people will contribute enough value from their "work" that they can exchange for the things they need in life. If their work loses all value, then we need to figure out what else we can do for/with these people. At this point, it seems as if our engineering ability is advancing beyond the pace of our social structures and legal system.