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This mantra is being repeated over and over: algorithms and automation are taking away the jobs. I'm still skeptical. Ultimately, work is about solving proble

by avz 10y ago

This mantra is being repeated over and over: algorithms and automation are taking away the jobs. I'm still skeptical. Ultimately, work is about solving problems which is a complex and multi-stage process: someone must identify the problem first, someone must formalize the problem into a domain in which algorithms can be applied, someone must code or train an automated solver, someone must deploy and maintain the code... I expect that a lot of future work will be what we would call today "managerial" type of work. People will identify problems and manage available resources to achieve the desired outcomes. In the past, a significant amount of those resources were other people. In future, more and more of the resources under management will consist of computing power, datasets, robots and only very few other people. And so I doubt we will run out of work to do. This would mean that somehow we ran out of problems to solve. On the contrary, we appear to be flooded with them: cancer, infectious diseases, global warming, clean energy, access to space... Maybe in some very far away future we will have a god-like super-AI that will seek and solve problems completely autonomously with no need for our involvement. This is very far off though.

vertex-four 10y ago
> Ultimately, work is about solving problems which is a complex and multi-stage process Err, not really. A very significant amount of work is "grunt work" which we haven't automated because it's too capital intensive or for other reasons - that is, many humans simply take the place of relatively simple robots where it wouldn't be cost-effective to build said robots due to short lifespan of each specific type of job, or other issues. As robots become more generalized, it becomes more cost-effective to fire the people. The programmers, the analysts, they're not the people anyone's worried about. In the UK, huge portions of the country still haven't gotten over the effects of Margaret Thatcher moving us from a manufacturing economy to a service one. Doing that on a global scale is only going to hurt even more.
- ralfd 10y ago
  > Margaret Thatcher moving us from a manufacturing economy to a service one Which as a German sounds strange in my ears. We are proud to have factories.
  - adwf 10y ago
    Manufacturing output didn't actually decline, it's at the highest levels ever, it just got fully automated. The real problem under Thatcher was that no-one put in place a decent plan for all the people losing their jobs. Take the steel industry crisis in the UK at the moment. The steel mills were having to close because they can't produce steel at a competitive price. No-one is buying. There are around 35,000 workers, and the figure for the government nationalising the industry was about £10bn. If instead, they let the foundry collapse and get sold off for pennies, they could use that £10bn to pay each and every worker over £285,000 each... That would be plenty enough to see the older people safely into retirement and a lot of the middle-aged into early retirement. The younger ones could use the money to retrain or start a business. It's a huge chunk of cash. What happened instead was they scraped together a private buyer with huge government subsidy and now people have jobs. Or at least some of them. It doesn't change the profitability of the steel... But apparently it's the job that's important, not the outcome.
    - Chris2048 10y ago
      > That would be plenty enough to see the older people safely into retirement and a lot of the middle-aged into early retirement. The younger ones could use the money to retrain or start a business. I'm sure the rest of the country wouldn't be too happy with that - Do we all get a safety net like this? And you think young steel workers are any more likely to start viable businesses than any other young person?
      - adwf 10y ago
        Of course it would never happen. Standard British crab mentality. You can waste £10bn nationalising a money losing industry for the benefit of just 35,000. But if those 35,000 were to get the equivalent cash in hand, nooooo.... The cost is the same however. And the payout plan is socially far better for the soon to be made redundant older workers. Sure the younger workers idea is a bit more sketchy - they might waste it, they might not - but it's better than just being laid off and sitting on the dole. Don't forget that this is all in just one location, without the steel mill the rest of Port Talbot will suffer also. Dole recipients don't typically have much money to spend.
Havoc 10y ago
>I'm still skeptical. I'm less sure. Not so long ago self-driving cars were considered an impossible feat and DARPA self driving cars kept ramming into fence posts... >a lot of future work will be what we would call today "managerial" type of work And what of the 80% of the population that has no experience (ability?) to manage complex systems? It probably won't be an issue soon, but it seems inevitable that a decent chunk of the population is unemployable.
- dforrestwilson 10y ago
  And yet we still have odd sections of the population like the Amish who somehow have not died of starvation. I think people are smarter than most pundits believe, and will either adapt and learn new skills or opt to live simpler lives.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    Great idea, let's start an underclass that is forced to live of the land to keep them occupied while the smart guys reap the benefits of automation.
    - TruthAndDare 10y ago
      > forced to live of the land Oh, no, living off the land! How could anyone ever do that?!
      - Chris2048 10y ago
        Yeah, things were way better when you die if your land can not produce!
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
twoquestions 10y ago
> On the contrary, we appear to be flooded with them: cancer, infectious diseases, global warming, clean energy, access to space... Trouble is, many of these types of problems are not profitable to solve as the beneficiaries lack the power (read: money) to demand a solution. That's what I'm worried about, is when there's tons of problems that could be solved, but few people have both the means and the will to solve them. I hope I'm wrong.
adrianN 10y ago
> cancer, infectious diseases, global warming, clean energy, access to space... The problems left to solve can be tackled by an increasingly smaller percentage of the population. The guys that currently work as taxi drivers or paper pushers can't be reeducated to do cutting edge research.
- thret 10y ago
  Some of them can be shuffled laterally into equally mundane jobs. I do think we're reaching the point where men with a sub-par IQ may struggle to find work even if they have other excellent qualities.
- hiou 10y ago
  But they can still compete on price. Migrant farm labor does that successfully in the present.
  - adwf 10y ago
    The marginal cost of software is close to zero. You can't compete with free. That's why it's different to the old luddite fallacy. Machinery and robotic factories throughout the ages have cost millions to replace 100's of jobs. Every time you want to build a factory, it costs money. With software that is not necessarily the case. You write it once and then distribute everywhere at little to no cost.
    - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
      The marginal cost of some software is free. Automation requires really understanding the process and formalizing it. It requires knowing all possible failure points, or at least having a "A Bad Thing Has Happened" failure point of last resort and learning the details of those over time. This will annoy people no end. The cost of bad software can be substantial.
      - adwf 10y ago
        Good point, but I'd add that the defining difference that's taking over the software world at the moment is that we're finally working out ways of not needing the programmer to do everything. Machine learning lets the computer learn some things on its own. And it's only getting better.
lostcolony 10y ago
>I expect that a lot of future work will be what we would call today "managerial" type of work. God, I hope not. We already have done something akin to that to avoid job loss from prior technology advances; hence the increase in unnecessary bureaucratic and administrative jobs across government and private industry. If the next evolution of the workforce is everyone is in management and the machines do all the work, then we're almost assuredly repeating the same mistake by giving people unfulfilling, pointless busy work (I've had managers who have viewed their responsibility as 'to bring leadership', and I've certainly seen plenty of middle managers whose existence was solely to take responsibility for failure and to pass bad news downwards; they had no decision making authority) just to generate a paycheck. Certainly, given the managers I've had, you're going to have a lot of bad ones, even if they're not pointless.
- antisthenes 10y ago
  I think you misinterpreted what the parent comment was trying to say. My take-away from it has been that the new "managerial" role will include much more responsibilities and more "hats" to wear. In other words, the manager will have to be the subject matter expert, the business analyst, the project manager and the administrator, all rolled into one. So, in the case of banking, the "manager" will identify the need to say, automate the underwriting process for handing out institutional loans. They will design a list of tasks, create functional requirements, create constraints and the desired outcomes based on input values. They will also be responsible for providing everything necessary for the actual engineer team and their interaction with the QA team, as well as reporting to the executives. In short - expect to see more overlap between senior IT roles and product/resource management, and more responsibilities rolled into single roles. People who can't adapt will be out of jobs.
- executesorder66 10y ago
  Well then mabye a huge portion of the population can go into the arts. I am a developer, but I really would not mind being paid to play guitar all day.
nine_k 10y ago
Not all jobs are taken by smart algorithms; some are taken by regulations: https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_our_jobs.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_ou...
CelestialTeapot 10y ago
On the clickbait scale from "Bankers destroyed your 401k" to "Robots destroyed your 401k" to "Algorithms destroyed your 401k", the last choice is the least sexy of all. >This mantra is being repeated over and over: algorithms and automation are taking away the jobs. I'm still skeptical. My current work involves determining pain points in office "grunt work" and developing automation tools to reduce the need for temporary (and permanent) staff. Those people have been displaced from the workplace. No new jobs were created as a result of this automation. A great number of office workers will be displaced to due automation and the pace at which this will happen is going to leave a lot of people very unhappy and very unemployed. Undoubtedly, I, or at least, people like me, will continue to have jobs. After all, someone must maintain the code, service the robots, et cetera. But that's a far cry from full employment of the workforce. >And so I doubt we will run out of work to do. This would mean that somehow we ran out of problems to solve. On the contrary, we appear to be flooded with them: cancer, infectious diseases, global warming, clean energy, access to space... How do you justify and fund higher education of all the out-of-work 40-, 50-, 60-year old truckers, office managers, office workers, and so on? Or will we just ignore them and wait for them to die?
Ma8ee 10y ago
I develop business systems. I take away jobs every day. You'd be surprised how many people still spend 38 hours per week shuffling numbers between excel sheets and maybe 2 hours doing some actually thinking.
TruthAndDare 10y ago
Will a self-improving AI not do all the things you mention?
AJ007 10y ago
Assuming that humans are the focus of demand, the economy should rebalance as human labor based jobs shrink. There is definitely a short term horizon here and a long term one. The long term one is pretty wacky and probably no one alive right now has the mental capacity to understand or discuss it in any meaningful manner besides what is written in science fiction novels, and it probably is a post-human era. You are right, there are still tons of problems to solve. Even those with a high standard of living continue to spend a large portion of time doing things they don't want to at home and work. There is a dichotomy between a reduction of wages and all prices rising beyond affordability. Trillionaires turning the entire world in to giant ranches and using raw materials to build the biggest yachts permitted by the laws of physics seems like a stretch. If we apply what happened to computing to other areas, and perhaps it isn't possible for everything but I imagine there are renewable/sustainable substitute goods for many things, prices should drop while power and quality increases by a lot. Deflation is scary to the "old school" because all government budgets are based on borrowing money while the economy aka GDP keeps getting bigger and bigger. There is a lot of pressure all over the world in government policies to create inflation. Prices are all relative, but messing with functional markets at best accomplishes nothing and at worst causes an incredible amount of misery. The other trend with job losses is that fertility rates in the developed world are dropping. The US continues trending down. Countries such as Japan are well in to their aging. There are going to be fewer people to do even the bare minimum required jobs to maintain existing infrastructure much less accomplish new things.
donkeyd 10y ago
There used to be a guy who mowed the lawn around our offices once every couple of weeks. Now there's a robot doing it. I used to want to hire a maid. Now I want a Roomba and a dishwasher. I doubt that people who were a maid or a gardener will start solving cancer. Also, 'solving cancer' is currently getting more automated. IBM Watson is being used to analyze huge amounts of data that would've been pretty much impossible for people.
basch 10y ago
how much duplicated effort is there in the workforce? people who are paid to solve the same problems as other people? a mesh of Ai's only has to come to a conclusion about a problem once and it can transfer and propagate that knowledge to all other AIs in seconds. instead of thousands and thousands of companies with the same problems, the same struggle, and the same conclusions, there will be very few problem solvers and they will have large reach and influence
intended 10y ago
The issue is not problems, its earning power. The same way the problem of famines is not the lack of food - Sen got a noble for pointing out that food was aplenty during the famine, but the poor didn't have the ability to purchase it. Problems don't necessarily full employment make.

by avz 10y ago

vertex-four 10y ago

> Ultimately, work is about solving problems which is a complex and multi-stage process Err, not really. A very significant amount of work is "grunt work" which we haven't automated because it's too capital intensive or for other reasons - that is, many humans simply take the place of relatively simple robots where it wouldn't be cost-effective to build said robots due to short lifespan of each specific type of job, or other issues. As robots become more generalized, it becomes more cost-effective to fire the people. The programmers, the analysts, they're not the people anyone's worried about. In the UK, huge portions of the country still haven't gotten over the effects of Margaret Thatcher moving us from a manufacturing economy to a service one. Doing that on a global scale is only going to hurt even more.

ralfd 10y ago
> Margaret Thatcher moving us from a manufacturing economy to a service one Which as a German sounds strange in my ears. We are proud to have factories.
- adwf 10y ago
  Manufacturing output didn't actually decline, it's at the highest levels ever, it just got fully automated. The real problem under Thatcher was that no-one put in place a decent plan for all the people losing their jobs. Take the steel industry crisis in the UK at the moment. The steel mills were having to close because they can't produce steel at a competitive price. No-one is buying. There are around 35,000 workers, and the figure for the government nationalising the industry was about £10bn. If instead, they let the foundry collapse and get sold off for pennies, they could use that £10bn to pay each and every worker over £285,000 each... That would be plenty enough to see the older people safely into retirement and a lot of the middle-aged into early retirement. The younger ones could use the money to retrain or start a business. It's a huge chunk of cash. What happened instead was they scraped together a private buyer with huge government subsidy and now people have jobs. Or at least some of them. It doesn't change the profitability of the steel... But apparently it's the job that's important, not the outcome.
  - Chris2048 10y ago
    > That would be plenty enough to see the older people safely into retirement and a lot of the middle-aged into early retirement. The younger ones could use the money to retrain or start a business. I'm sure the rest of the country wouldn't be too happy with that - Do we all get a safety net like this? And you think young steel workers are any more likely to start viable businesses than any other young person?
    - adwf 10y ago
      Of course it would never happen. Standard British crab mentality. You can waste £10bn nationalising a money losing industry for the benefit of just 35,000. But if those 35,000 were to get the equivalent cash in hand, nooooo.... The cost is the same however. And the payout plan is socially far better for the soon to be made redundant older workers. Sure the younger workers idea is a bit more sketchy - they might waste it, they might not - but it's better than just being laid off and sitting on the dole. Don't forget that this is all in just one location, without the steel mill the rest of Port Talbot will suffer also. Dole recipients don't typically have much money to spend.

Havoc 10y ago

>I'm still skeptical. I'm less sure. Not so long ago self-driving cars were considered an impossible feat and DARPA self driving cars kept ramming into fence posts... >a lot of future work will be what we would call today "managerial" type of work And what of the 80% of the population that has no experience (ability?) to manage complex systems? It probably won't be an issue soon, but it seems inevitable that a decent chunk of the population is unemployable.

dforrestwilson 10y ago
And yet we still have odd sections of the population like the Amish who somehow have not died of starvation. I think people are smarter than most pundits believe, and will either adapt and learn new skills or opt to live simpler lives.
- adrianN 10y ago
  Great idea, let's start an underclass that is forced to live of the land to keep them occupied while the smart guys reap the benefits of automation.
  - TruthAndDare 10y ago
    > forced to live of the land Oh, no, living off the land! How could anyone ever do that?!
    - Chris2048 10y ago
      Yeah, things were way better when you die if your land can not produce!
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]

twoquestions 10y ago

> On the contrary, we appear to be flooded with them: cancer, infectious diseases, global warming, clean energy, access to space... Trouble is, many of these types of problems are not profitable to solve as the beneficiaries lack the power (read: money) to demand a solution. That's what I'm worried about, is when there's tons of problems that could be solved, but few people have both the means and the will to solve them. I hope I'm wrong.

adrianN 10y ago

> cancer, infectious diseases, global warming, clean energy, access to space... The problems left to solve can be tackled by an increasingly smaller percentage of the population. The guys that currently work as taxi drivers or paper pushers can't be reeducated to do cutting edge research.

thret 10y ago
Some of them can be shuffled laterally into equally mundane jobs. I do think we're reaching the point where men with a sub-par IQ may struggle to find work even if they have other excellent qualities.
hiou 10y ago
But they can still compete on price. Migrant farm labor does that successfully in the present.
- adwf 10y ago
  The marginal cost of software is close to zero. You can't compete with free. That's why it's different to the old luddite fallacy. Machinery and robotic factories throughout the ages have cost millions to replace 100's of jobs. Every time you want to build a factory, it costs money. With software that is not necessarily the case. You write it once and then distribute everywhere at little to no cost.
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    The marginal cost of some software is free. Automation requires really understanding the process and formalizing it. It requires knowing all possible failure points, or at least having a "A Bad Thing Has Happened" failure point of last resort and learning the details of those over time. This will annoy people no end. The cost of bad software can be substantial.
    - adwf 10y ago
      Good point, but I'd add that the defining difference that's taking over the software world at the moment is that we're finally working out ways of not needing the programmer to do everything. Machine learning lets the computer learn some things on its own. And it's only getting better.

lostcolony 10y ago

>I expect that a lot of future work will be what we would call today "managerial" type of work. God, I hope not. We already have done something akin to that to avoid job loss from prior technology advances; hence the increase in unnecessary bureaucratic and administrative jobs across government and private industry. If the next evolution of the workforce is everyone is in management and the machines do all the work, then we're almost assuredly repeating the same mistake by giving people unfulfilling, pointless busy work (I've had managers who have viewed their responsibility as 'to bring leadership', and I've certainly seen plenty of middle managers whose existence was solely to take responsibility for failure and to pass bad news downwards; they had no decision making authority) just to generate a paycheck. Certainly, given the managers I've had, you're going to have a lot of bad ones, even if they're not pointless.

antisthenes 10y ago
I think you misinterpreted what the parent comment was trying to say. My take-away from it has been that the new "managerial" role will include much more responsibilities and more "hats" to wear. In other words, the manager will have to be the subject matter expert, the business analyst, the project manager and the administrator, all rolled into one. So, in the case of banking, the "manager" will identify the need to say, automate the underwriting process for handing out institutional loans. They will design a list of tasks, create functional requirements, create constraints and the desired outcomes based on input values. They will also be responsible for providing everything necessary for the actual engineer team and their interaction with the QA team, as well as reporting to the executives. In short - expect to see more overlap between senior IT roles and product/resource management, and more responsibilities rolled into single roles. People who can't adapt will be out of jobs.
executesorder66 10y ago
Well then mabye a huge portion of the population can go into the arts. I am a developer, but I really would not mind being paid to play guitar all day.

nine_k 10y ago

Not all jobs are taken by smart algorithms; some are taken by regulations: https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_our_jobs.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_ou...

CelestialTeapot 10y ago

On the clickbait scale from "Bankers destroyed your 401k" to "Robots destroyed your 401k" to "Algorithms destroyed your 401k", the last choice is the least sexy of all. >This mantra is being repeated over and over: algorithms and automation are taking away the jobs. I'm still skeptical. My current work involves determining pain points in office "grunt work" and developing automation tools to reduce the need for temporary (and permanent) staff. Those people have been displaced from the workplace. No new jobs were created as a result of this automation. A great number of office workers will be displaced to due automation and the pace at which this will happen is going to leave a lot of people very unhappy and very unemployed. Undoubtedly, I, or at least, people like me, will continue to have jobs. After all, someone must maintain the code, service the robots, et cetera. But that's a far cry from full employment of the workforce. >And so I doubt we will run out of work to do. This would mean that somehow we ran out of problems to solve. On the contrary, we appear to be flooded with them: cancer, infectious diseases, global warming, clean energy, access to space... How do you justify and fund higher education of all the out-of-work 40-, 50-, 60-year old truckers, office managers, office workers, and so on? Or will we just ignore them and wait for them to die?

Ma8ee 10y ago

I develop business systems. I take away jobs every day. You'd be surprised how many people still spend 38 hours per week shuffling numbers between excel sheets and maybe 2 hours doing some actually thinking.

TruthAndDare 10y ago

Will a self-improving AI not do all the things you mention?

AJ007 10y ago

Assuming that humans are the focus of demand, the economy should rebalance as human labor based jobs shrink. There is definitely a short term horizon here and a long term one. The long term one is pretty wacky and probably no one alive right now has the mental capacity to understand or discuss it in any meaningful manner besides what is written in science fiction novels, and it probably is a post-human era. You are right, there are still tons of problems to solve. Even those with a high standard of living continue to spend a large portion of time doing things they don't want to at home and work. There is a dichotomy between a reduction of wages and all prices rising beyond affordability. Trillionaires turning the entire world in to giant ranches and using raw materials to build the biggest yachts permitted by the laws of physics seems like a stretch. If we apply what happened to computing to other areas, and perhaps it isn't possible for everything but I imagine there are renewable/sustainable substitute goods for many things, prices should drop while power and quality increases by a lot. Deflation is scary to the "old school" because all government budgets are based on borrowing money while the economy aka GDP keeps getting bigger and bigger. There is a lot of pressure all over the world in government policies to create inflation. Prices are all relative, but messing with functional markets at best accomplishes nothing and at worst causes an incredible amount of misery. The other trend with job losses is that fertility rates in the developed world are dropping. The US continues trending down. Countries such as Japan are well in to their aging. There are going to be fewer people to do even the bare minimum required jobs to maintain existing infrastructure much less accomplish new things.

donkeyd 10y ago

There used to be a guy who mowed the lawn around our offices once every couple of weeks. Now there's a robot doing it. I used to want to hire a maid. Now I want a Roomba and a dishwasher. I doubt that people who were a maid or a gardener will start solving cancer. Also, 'solving cancer' is currently getting more automated. IBM Watson is being used to analyze huge amounts of data that would've been pretty much impossible for people.

basch 10y ago

how much duplicated effort is there in the workforce? people who are paid to solve the same problems as other people? a mesh of Ai's only has to come to a conclusion about a problem once and it can transfer and propagate that knowledge to all other AIs in seconds. instead of thousands and thousands of companies with the same problems, the same struggle, and the same conclusions, there will be very few problem solvers and they will have large reach and influence

intended 10y ago

The issue is not problems, its earning power. The same way the problem of famines is not the lack of food - Sen got a noble for pointing out that food was aplenty during the famine, but the poor didn't have the ability to purchase it. Problems don't necessarily full employment make.