6 ms·

If that ever happens (which I highly doubt, there is little to no evidence) it is a very long ways off. Hundreds of years at a minimum.

ThomPete 11y ago
There is a lot of evidence that this is how things are moving. What most people get wrong about a job is that they confuse the human doing them with the job they human is doing. Most if not all jobs only require you to be a subset of a human to actually be useful. And so there is a general misconception that computers would need a general intelligence to take over a job when in fact most of the jobs we do require only a fraction of our abilities as humans and normally can be broken down in smaller subsets.
- notahacker 11y ago
  There was a lot of evidence that this was how things were moving a century ago, but the predictions made at the time look more than a little bit wrong. Not only have the sons of the increasingly obsolete production line employees mostly found jobs, but so have their daughters! Trouble with breaking down jobs into smaller subsets is that you need an awful lot of robots, and suddenly the rental on those doesn't look an awful lot better than the cost of hiring unskilled labour. I mean, the core role of the average fast food service employee in exchanging cash for heated product was rendered obsolete by the heated coin-operated dispensing machine more than a century ago, but it turns out that they're also quite good at upselling to larger items, dealing with unusual requests, getting rid of unruly customers and removing stains from locations you'd need a robot with really impressive articulated limbs and computer vision to adequately deal with. And they don't cost very much per month compared with specialist business process software licenses, never mind hardware. So fast food vendors, with some of the most obsessive attention to process optimization imaginable and some of the least highly-regarded employees, continue to be huge employers
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    No there wasn't a lot of evidence because back then the human intellect wasn't being outcompeted by the machines. This is what is happening now. Machines are gradually moving further and further up the abstraction ladder. So unless you are aware of another human ability used to do a job it kind of stops there.
    - nightski 11y ago
      As someone who is trying very hard to keep up with the latest improvements in machine learning and artificial intelligence, I see very little evidence to say we have made strides in reasoning on the level of a human intellect. Machine learning is still unfortunately limited to very specific tasks. Even though the means through which those tasks are accomplished may be very general (neural networks, Bayesian statistics, etc...) the end result is still very limited. Let's not fool ourselves with how far along the technology is and instead embrace it for what it is.
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    Fast food vendors are already now starting to look for ways to automate as they continue to push the prices down on their products. Prices that needs to keep going down in order for them to 1) survive the competition, 2) deliver affordable food from the majority of their customers who are making less and less money.
    - notahacker 11y ago
      The Automat has been around since before most of the fast food chains, yet half a century of continuous innovation in process optimization has continued to conclude that paying a bunch of people to mostly stand behind counters exchanging cooked food for cash is worth the money. And unlike the average service industry employee the fast food worker isn't even expected to be a particularly good generalist, is mocked for perceived lack of social skill and isn't operating in a role where new tasks can be invented to supplant tasks which have largely been automated away.
      - ThomPete 11y ago
        This is changing which is exactly why you have the whole discussion about minimum wage. It basically affect how employers can make money and it will be the very reason why you would se an even bigger move towards automation of the actual service. You keep using history as if it's any indication of the future even though the very underlying premise why have been how they have historically is changing. It's ok you don't want accept this but that doesn't mean it's not happening. Anyone who sits u little further up than the people who work on the floor will tell you that there are in fact plenty of plans to reduce the work force to be able to keep competing by keep making it cheaper. Ignoring that problem won't make it go away.
        notahacker 11y ago
        Fast food restaurants with no human servers existed decades ago, but the Automats were actually killed off by the more profitable franchise outlets that used people rather than technology. And there's nothing remotely new about the fast food industry's investment in process optimization, or indeed their lobbying against minimum wages "This time it'll be different" is never a good argument, especially not when deployed with condescension in lieu of evidence.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > There was a lot of evidence that this was how things were moving a century ago, but the predictions made at the time look more than a little bit wrong. Not only have the sons of the increasingly obsolete production line employees mostly found jobs, but so have their daughters! No, actually, a century ago there was reason to think things would head that way at some time in the future; now, there is evidence that it is actually happening. Real average hourly wages of production and nonsupervisory private-sector employees peaked in January 1973, and for the manufacturing sector in January 1978. Sure, there's still jobs, but more of the value they produce is going into providers of the capital necessary to do them than the labor, as labor is marginalized.
    - nightski 11y ago
      I'd reckon it probably did not peak globally. You can't ignore the effects of globalization when making such an argument.
      - ThomPete 11y ago
        Outsourcing is just the last step before automation. In the same period the US lost 4mio jobs to China, the Chinese lost 15mio jobs to the robots. Globalization is only easing the overarching trend ever so slightly until it's cheaper to do it automated.
      - dragonwriter 11y ago
        Which would be relevant, if the level at which UBI was being proposed as a policy was the world government, rather than that of the US.
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11631418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11631418

ThomPete 11y ago

There is a lot of evidence that this is how things are moving. What most people get wrong about a job is that they confuse the human doing them with the job they human is doing. Most if not all jobs only require you to be a subset of a human to actually be useful. And so there is a general misconception that computers would need a general intelligence to take over a job when in fact most of the jobs we do require only a fraction of our abilities as humans and normally can be broken down in smaller subsets.

notahacker 11y ago
There was a lot of evidence that this was how things were moving a century ago, but the predictions made at the time look more than a little bit wrong. Not only have the sons of the increasingly obsolete production line employees mostly found jobs, but so have their daughters! Trouble with breaking down jobs into smaller subsets is that you need an awful lot of robots, and suddenly the rental on those doesn't look an awful lot better than the cost of hiring unskilled labour. I mean, the core role of the average fast food service employee in exchanging cash for heated product was rendered obsolete by the heated coin-operated dispensing machine more than a century ago, but it turns out that they're also quite good at upselling to larger items, dealing with unusual requests, getting rid of unruly customers and removing stains from locations you'd need a robot with really impressive articulated limbs and computer vision to adequately deal with. And they don't cost very much per month compared with specialist business process software licenses, never mind hardware. So fast food vendors, with some of the most obsessive attention to process optimization imaginable and some of the least highly-regarded employees, continue to be huge employers
- ThomPete 11y ago
  No there wasn't a lot of evidence because back then the human intellect wasn't being outcompeted by the machines. This is what is happening now. Machines are gradually moving further and further up the abstraction ladder. So unless you are aware of another human ability used to do a job it kind of stops there.
  - nightski 11y ago
    As someone who is trying very hard to keep up with the latest improvements in machine learning and artificial intelligence, I see very little evidence to say we have made strides in reasoning on the level of a human intellect. Machine learning is still unfortunately limited to very specific tasks. Even though the means through which those tasks are accomplished may be very general (neural networks, Bayesian statistics, etc...) the end result is still very limited. Let's not fool ourselves with how far along the technology is and instead embrace it for what it is.
- ThomPete 11y ago
  Fast food vendors are already now starting to look for ways to automate as they continue to push the prices down on their products. Prices that needs to keep going down in order for them to 1) survive the competition, 2) deliver affordable food from the majority of their customers who are making less and less money.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    The Automat has been around since before most of the fast food chains, yet half a century of continuous innovation in process optimization has continued to conclude that paying a bunch of people to mostly stand behind counters exchanging cooked food for cash is worth the money. And unlike the average service industry employee the fast food worker isn't even expected to be a particularly good generalist, is mocked for perceived lack of social skill and isn't operating in a role where new tasks can be invented to supplant tasks which have largely been automated away.
    - ThomPete 11y ago
      This is changing which is exactly why you have the whole discussion about minimum wage. It basically affect how employers can make money and it will be the very reason why you would se an even bigger move towards automation of the actual service. You keep using history as if it's any indication of the future even though the very underlying premise why have been how they have historically is changing. It's ok you don't want accept this but that doesn't mean it's not happening. Anyone who sits u little further up than the people who work on the floor will tell you that there are in fact plenty of plans to reduce the work force to be able to keep competing by keep making it cheaper. Ignoring that problem won't make it go away.
      - notahacker 11y ago
        Fast food restaurants with no human servers existed decades ago, but the Automats were actually killed off by the more profitable franchise outlets that used people rather than technology. And there's nothing remotely new about the fast food industry's investment in process optimization, or indeed their lobbying against minimum wages "This time it'll be different" is never a good argument, especially not when deployed with condescension in lieu of evidence.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > There was a lot of evidence that this was how things were moving a century ago, but the predictions made at the time look more than a little bit wrong. Not only have the sons of the increasingly obsolete production line employees mostly found jobs, but so have their daughters! No, actually, a century ago there was reason to think things would head that way at some time in the future; now, there is evidence that it is actually happening. Real average hourly wages of production and nonsupervisory private-sector employees peaked in January 1973, and for the manufacturing sector in January 1978. Sure, there's still jobs, but more of the value they produce is going into providers of the capital necessary to do them than the labor, as labor is marginalized.
  - nightski 11y ago
    I'd reckon it probably did not peak globally. You can't ignore the effects of globalization when making such an argument.
    - ThomPete 11y ago
      Outsourcing is just the last step before automation. In the same period the US lost 4mio jobs to China, the Chinese lost 15mio jobs to the robots. Globalization is only easing the overarching trend ever so slightly until it's cheaper to do it automated.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      Which would be relevant, if the level at which UBI was being proposed as a policy was the world government, rather than that of the US.
- ThomPete 11y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11631418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11631418