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The Next Industrial Revolution Could Put Millions Out of Work

70 points by edward 10y ago

mikebelanger 10y ago
The next industrial revolution doesn't even have to automate jobs to kill them. It just has to make them all so specialized that it will be highly improbable that there's any people who have that specialization.
coldtea 10y ago
...and it might not auto-magically create new jobs, something which some people repeat as if it is as inevitable as a law of nature. Also, a large part (40-50%?) of the population might not be needed, or even desired, e.g. poor and older people that put a strain in the economy, so, they might be delegated to "b class" citizen status, and might end up living in some developing world like wasteland/slums in the next 50 years or so, while another big percentage has service jobs, and a 10-20% of luckier people live in closed communities. It's not some sci-fi fantasy, it's already in development, and even the norm in lots of parts of the world, nothing (and surely not naive techno-optimism) prevents it from coming to the West.
- tdb7893 10y ago
  As of right now both views seem to just be idle speculation. I'm not an economist but every other time similar things have happened in industry the economy has balanced out. What I don't get is how what is happening now is fundamentally different to the point where the economy won't correct?
  - thecrow1213 10y ago
    I could give you my take but I think CGP Grey really explains it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >I'm not an economist but every other time similar things have happened in industry the economy has balanced out. "The economy" did not "balance out". "The economy" is not an active agent. The economy was politically managed -- for instance, via the Fed's original mandate to encourage full employment. What prevents similar management taking place today is ideological opposition to it.
    - daniel_levine 10y ago
      The Fed adding improving employment to natural zero to it's mandate post Great Recession alongside controlling inflation, seems to imply that the ideological opposition isn't that strong.
  - joepie91_ 10y ago
    CGPGrey's "Humans Need Not Apply" video addresses precisely that question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU EDIT: Bah. Too late.
    - thecrow1213 10y ago
      Hehe I think you might have actually been first!
  - humanrebar 10y ago
    > What I don't get is how what is happening now is fundamentally different to the point where the economy won't correct? Used to be, worse came to worst, you'd just go be a hired hand for someone: a farmhand, a servant, a soldier, a sailor, etc. It also used to be that four walls and a roof was a home and bread and what-you-can-grow was food. Our standards of living are different now, at least in developed nations. We also had social structures that included multi-generational communities. So the grandparents, older relatives, etc. would watch the children, help around the house, etc. Also, people ate worse, got sick more, and died younger.
  - goda90 10y ago
    But haven't those other corrections been somewhat painful for many people? I think the fear here is that this is so much larger because instead of letting one person do the work of 10, leaving the other 9 to do something new, this is just replacing all 10 across numerous classes of work, leaving few to no new jobs. It's going to be a lot more painful for a lot more people than previous corrections. It could result in violence, starvation, and the collapse of the middle class, leaving the have-not's entirely at the mercy of the haves with no recourse to get out of that situation.
  - deaddodo 10y ago
    Really? AI-assisted automation has happened in the past? If so, I missed that portion in my history classes.
    - daniel_levine 10y ago
      Much worse! Completely, strategically dominant replacement of human and animal muscle with the steam engine.
      - deaddodo 10y ago
        Yet, without brains.
        krapp 10y ago
        Still, arguably, a very primitive form of "artificial intelligence."
  - anexprogrammer 10y ago
    If robots and AI are eliminating an entire sector (starting with driving for instance), what other manual or low skill jobs are there that aren't already targeted for AI replacement? We don't need 2m more car mechanics or farm workers. This time it seem likely a certain class of job is going away. Half the population is below average intelligence, and perhaps 25% (total guess) might be best suited to a manual or semi-skilled role. What are we going to do with them? When similar things have happened previously, the once semi-skilled (eg) shipbuilder becomes a low wage driver or call centre worker. Many in an area didn't get those few roles, so became unemployed (and often depressed) for the rest of their careers. Some steel or shipbuilding towns haven't fully recovered even today. Longer ago the farmhand could get any number of manual roles in the growing industries. Blacksmiths became car mechanics, fuel attendants and so on. Also when it's only a number of regional cities affected, like with coal, steel or shipbuilding, it's much easier politically than when it's national.
    - daniel_levine 10y ago
      Relatively low margin, fragmented service jobs. Waiters/waitresses, fitness instructors, barbers etc. Those jobs are often still better than the jobs being automated away (truck driving), just less economic to build such specialty robots, at least in the near term.
      - anexprogrammer 10y ago
        Aren't most of those already down at min wage? At least a proportion of waiting jobs will be going away too. Can they absorb another 10m (or however many there are) truck and van drivers who probably made quite a bit more? I know it won't be overnight, but it seems to be rapidly becoming a political rather than economic question. Like must we learn to run at 20-25% unemployment instead of <10? We'd probably have to learn to stop viewing them as scroungers too and adjust welfare somewhat.
        daniel_levine 10y ago
        Many are, but not all. And I suspect waiting jobs as ratio compared with eating out gross revenue is shrinking (though eating out is growing and is more labor intensive than a grocery store still). Part of that is labor organization, the truckers have unions. And unions were (and are) a big political issue.
  - zubat 10y ago
    It's not that it won't correct, it's that the correction offers no guarantee of being humane. In the 20th century, the population of horses (in the US) started declining rapidly, from a high of over 20 million in 1920 to under 5 million in 1960. Industry decided the horse was unnecessary after thousands of years of history, thus they were slaughtered in short order. The only difference between me and a horse from the market's view is that I do different jobs and consume human goods. To the extent that I am necessary it is because the market will need someone to move goods and services to, but left to its own devices it might well decide to sell weapons that I get killed with. Markets are honest, not smart.
    - daniel_levine 10y ago
      Citation on horse slaughtering in the mid-1900s that probably was relatively unrelated to the Great Depressions? Legitimately interested.
      - zubat 10y ago
        I don't have a detailed source on hand for the slaughtering operations specifically, but this is a good overview article of where the meat went: https://priceonomics.com/when-americans-ate-horse-meat/ https://priceonomics.com/when-americans-ate-horse-meat/
        daniel_levine 10y ago
        Just to be clear for everyone who doesn't click through. The car was one (and seemingly a very small one) amongst many reasons people ate horses, coupled with varying economic recessions, shortages of other meat, and changing consumer taste.
        maxerickson 10y ago
        Yeah, over 40 years it would be easy to reduce the number of horses simply by attrition.
  - pyrale 10y ago
    Could you explain what you mean by "the economy", and how it is of importance that it has "balanced out" ? I mean, one could probably say that the economy has balanced out after the great depression, after WW2, after the 2008 crisis, and so on. Many people did not.
  - tpeo 10y ago
    Well, if it takes some time for workers to shift sectors and if "creatively destructive" technological innovation on the other hand happens to accelerate, it's conceivable that at a certain point, the absolute majority of workers will be redundant. There won't be an equilibrium, because the workers are trying to chase an accelerating point while moving at a constant velocity. There doesn't need to be anything "fundamentally different" except that we finally reached the exponential part of technological progress, which up until now seemed like a linear process. Just like population growth until 1800s, or economic growth until the 1820s. Those two were pretty much linear and not very different from zero until they weren't. I don't actually subscribe to this rationale, though. I'm just putting it out like this because it's pretty much what everybody says and I recognize that it's quite plausible, given the two first hypotheses.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > There doesn't need to be anything "fundamentally different" except that we finally reached the exponential part of technological progress, which up until now seemed like a linear process. Most processes involving people (and lots of others, besides) that look exponential at some point are really logistic, so even in that case, there's probably some equilibrium point somewhere in the future, though its possible that its many generations down the line from the point where the appearance of exponential change first occurs.
      - tpeo 10y ago
        Good point. It's quite possible that there's a fundamental limit to technological achievement and that we just haven't reached it yet. On the other hand, I'd like to say that it's also possible that some particular processes can follow exponential laws without any restriction. It might be somewhat hazy, but what if outside of a few measures (infant mortality, life expectancy, etc) economic progress is nothing more than a subjective measurement of how present consumers value past output? I'm not saying anything new here, both Easterlin's paradox and the idea of a "hedonic treadmill" support the idea that more income doesn't necessarily equate into increased happiness. And specially in the case of economic innovation, which might not actually be technically interesting or require any "new physics" at all - just mashing some current technologies into a marketable product - it might never ever stop, and will just degenerate into an endless chase of ever changing fads. Past economies wouldn't be particular poor, just particularly quaint, and a repository of dead fads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterlin_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterlin_paradox
  - Futurebot 10y ago
    It's very far from idle speculation at this point; many prominent economists and economic researchers[1] have grappled with the issue. Both the Lump of Labor Fallacy and Luddite Fallacy may prove themselves to be fallacious in the new era. Gwern has a good post with links: http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes?cx=009114923999563836576%3Adv0a4ndtmly&cof=FORID%3A11&q=chunking#neo-luddism http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes?cx=009114923999563836576%3Adv0... Here are a few prominent ones: http://economics.mit.edu/files/5554 http://economics.mit.edu/files/5554 https://hbr.org/2015/06/the-great-decoupling https://hbr.org/2015/06/the-great-decoupling http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-technological-innovation-has-always-delivered-more-long-run-employment-not-less http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-tec... http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2014/08/28/1942571/david-autors-guide-to-labour-and-the-machine/ http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2014/08/28/1942571/david-autors-g... http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/autor-autor/?_r=0 http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/autor-autor/?_r=... http://www.asymptosis.com/are-machines-replacing-humans-or-am-i-a-luddite.html http://www.asymptosis.com/are-machines-replacing-humans-or-a... [1] Autor, Ford, Cowen, Krugman, Acemoglu, Brynjolfsson, McAfee just to name a few
    - tdb7893 10y ago
      I think some of these are good insights. There is no question that society will change a lot over this century, I'll be curious to see if it changes in a way that anyone predicted.
- bencollier49 10y ago
  Send them to Mars!
- witty_username 10y ago
  It depends on what things become cheaper. I don't see how poor would endup in wasteland/slum scenario, unless the revolution is so disparate that it only benefits some people and completely excludes other people. (Remember, even if say programmers benefit from automation, non-programmers also reap the benefits of automation). Wasteland/slum scenario seems unlikely; if 40-50% of all people did not live in a proper house[0], there would be a lot of empty houses. (0) as opposed to a hut/shed
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Yeah, if you have robot factories and practical batteries, the only thing holding back abundant energy becomes the political will to make abundant energy available.
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    Why wouldn't the poor end up in a slum, even if it's 50% of the population? You seem to forget that "slums" were not always slums. They used to be reasonably nice places to live. (Some of them in the US used to be really nice, posh places to live.) All it takes to turn a nice neighborhood into a slum is a lack of income to keep the houses maintained properly. Human habitats fall apart pretty quickly when they're abandoned or neglected.
    - ikt 10y ago
      Because if significant amounts of the workforce are replaced there's an implicit assumption that a significant amount of things would be cheaper to provider, if the only cost of creating and supplying food is robot maintenance that means food should be significantly cheaper to produce than now. Coming 2046: P2P food sharing.
      - ryandrake 10y ago
        > Because if significant amounts of the workforce are replaced there's an implicit assumption that a significant amount of things would be cheaper to provider That's a wild assumption. I would predict that it's more likely all that additional value will be captured by already-rich business owners and shareholders, not consumers.
- justaman 10y ago
  I think, given modern progressive ideals. We will see shorter work weeks and multiple people with the same job. Instead of 2nd and 3rd shift, maybe we Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday shifts. At least, I hope.
  - chiph 10y ago
    My sister does job-sharing. She works Mon-Wed, and her job partner works Wed-Fri (one day overlap for meetings and handover). This lets her spend more time with her family, something that's important to her. She gets healthcare coverage through her husband's job. It works well, but you'd have to commit to a less-expensive lifestyle because you're not working 40+ hours a week. It has benefits to the company as well, as they get two people for the cost of a little more than one (and don't have to pay expensive benefits to either of them).
    - rjsw 10y ago
      This will have a problem if you are no longer earning enough to be able to afford to live near to your job. I still think that Basic Income at a level that will allow you to live somewhere inexpensive will be a better solution.
      - daniel_levine 10y ago
        why not just an increase in the earned income tax credit?
        kingbruce90 10y ago
        Because you have to have a job to get eitc.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    That would need some serious political intervention. For companies it is more efficient to have one employee work longer hours because it reduces the communication overhead. I also don't see how such an arrangement will help, for example, taxi or truck drivers who will be completely replaced by autonomous cars in the near future.
- turar 10y ago
  > nothing (and surely not naive techno-optimism) prevents it from coming to the West. Well, if you stop dividing people into "West" and not West, and consider the whole world without artificial borders as just humanity, it's already the case.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    I was making a point for those that feel that they are the "West", and that "it can't happen here". That said, the world is not without borders, artificial or not, so it's not wise to see it as such in determining the future. It might be wise to want to abolish those borders (and that remains to be proven -- empires are even less democratic than nation states, and civil wars are just as bloody, if not more, than wars between states), but not to live in la-la-land where they don't exist.
- BurningFrog 10y ago
  Jobs have rapidly been disappearing for 250 years, consistently resulting in equally rapidly increasing living standards. You have to (1) demonstrate that you understand how this very counterintuitive historical fact happened and (2) give a plausible theory for why it's different now, for me to even begin taking talk like this seriously.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    For "250 years" jobs have been replaced (first with factory jobs --Ford, Taylorism, etc.-- and then with office and service sector jobs), they haven't been actually disappearing. Now and in the future, with software, robotic automation, and even more so AI, jobs are actually disappearing for the first time ("software is eating the world" so to speak). Examples from the era of the steam engine and the advent of electricity when faced with what's possible with advanced technology like AI, modern automation and 21st century internet and software are not really applicable. That said, it's not that mankind cannot manage this. But it cannot manage it in the ways it had in the past -- this will only lead to the marginalization of large parts of society. It can only manage it with political action: 4 and 3 day work weeks being mandatory, universal income schemes and other such measures.
    - BurningFrog 10y ago
      The jobs have always disappeared first, then new ones have appeared. People have always not known where the new jobs would come from, and they have always appeared. Even right now, when software is eating the world, unemployment in the US is low and decreasing. The disaster is a bit like that my new diet, it always is happening soon :)
      - coldtea 10y ago
        >The jobs have always disappeared first, then new ones have appeared. People have always not known where the new jobs would come from, and they have always appeared. That's less like actual history, and more like a retelling of it as some inevitable repeated story. If by people, you mean the ones whose jobs/skills became deprecated, then yes, they didn't know where new jobs will come from, and tons of them didn't get new jobs anyway. But the industrialists in general knew they will have needs for tons of workers in the new factories -- and in fact the government then (in England, etc) passed laws that made sure they "encouraged" (forced) millions of farmers and such to urbanize and become factory workers. The difference is that now we know of no such need. >Even right now, when software is eating the world, unemployment in the US is low and decreasing. Mostly by cheating: counting tons of low quality, low pay, part time (not as a choice) jobs, not counting people who have worked in the past X months, not counting tons of people outside certain narrow criteria that still don't translate to actual jobs, etc :) E.g.: The unemployment rate dropped because people unable to find jobs ceased looking and are no longer counted as being in the labor force. If you are unemployed but not considered part of the labor force, you are not included when unemployment is measured. The BLS says that in May there were 1.7 million Americans who “wanted and were available for work,” but “were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.” In other words, the unemployment rate is a useless measure of unemployment, just as the consumer price index no longer measures inflation. What were once useful statistical measures have been converted into good news propaganda. http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/06/employment-lies/ http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/06/employment-lies/
- r2dnb 10y ago
  >Also, a large part (40-50%?) of the population might not be needed, or even desired, e.g. poor and older people that put a strain in the economy, so, they might be delegated to "b class" citizen status, and might end up living in some developing world like wasteland/slums in the next 50 years or so, while another big percentage has service jobs, and a 10-20% of luckier people live in closed communities. I think this is very possible. And I suspect that the overwhelming majority of the b-citizens will be people not knowing how to write a software. I say it continually to those I love (close friends, family etc...) : unless very specific career choices, starting in life today and deciding that "having no clue about coding is fine", is at best a dangerous gamble, at worth a suicide. I think Darwin kind of applies in our modern society but people do not notice it. For example, what led me to doing engineering studies was pure survival instinct. I have a business profile - and am a business owner today - still heavily writing code, and intending to keep doing it. Since I'm about 12, I knew that my stuff was starting companies, business strategy, product design, corporate finance and this kind of stuff. That's what I was toying with in my spare time. But a pragmatic analysis of the world led me to quickly realize that I'd be better off being proficient in technology stuff, to avoid being at a big disadvantage since all the stuff I'd be selling and designing were going to be technology-based. At the time, I said in the way children speak : "I want to be able to build what I will be selling so that I do not have to depend on the good will of anyone". And this was the smartest move I ever made in my life. And this kind of thinking is what continually puts me ahead. I think it would be interesting to find a way to measure the "survival instinct" of people, and see if there's a correlation with those who do "well" and those who find themselves surprised at every recession and industrial revolution.
  - jonathansizz 10y ago
    You think millions of unskilled and semi-skilled workers can be retrained as software developers and that there'll be employment opportunities for these millions of new programmers? I think it's much more likely that many existing programming jobs will also be automated away.
    - r2dnb 10y ago
      The concept of spending a life being employed is rather new. In the future the majority of people will be business owners... like in the old days. And what I'm saying is that these businesses will likely be software-based, and that those being software-illiterate will have a life as comfortable as the one lived by illiterate people before them. Software is becoming the new paper, this is what I am saying. Today, we on HN are like the Lords and the clergy who were the only ones able to read and write and hereby be involved in the important business of their times. The history only repeat itself. And it will always.
- johngalt 10y ago
  > some people repeat as if it is as inevitable as a law of nature. It's just happened every other time something like this has happened. For tens of thousands of years. > wasteland/slums in the next 50 years or so Standards of living are rising globally. Even if comparative wealth drops vs other humans, most people will still see significant improvement in their lifetime.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >It's just happened every other time something like this has happened. For tens of thousands of years. Nothing like this has happened before. For one, people in 17th century didn't live much differently than people in 500 A.D. or 500 B.C -- the huge majority lived in the country, milked their own milk, work with manual tools, etc. The process we're discussing started mostly with the industrial revolution. With the advent of the steam engine and crude early factories, for the first 2 centuries of the Industrial revolution, as factories and factory assembly lines still needed tons of manual labor (see Taylorism). Then, as automation advanced, around the mid-20th century, and there was not the same demand for factory workers anymore (a lot of production lines became more efficient and less manual), people were given office and service sector jobs -- because that was another underdeveloped sector. Today, software and the internet makes lots of office jobs and procedures obsolete, advanced robotic automation makes tons of factory jobs deprecated, and with advances in smart software, business networks, etc, lots of service jobs are not needed anymore either. Advanced AI software and hardware will only make this worse. And there's no next step to go besides either creating useless busywork or reducing work-hours/days (so work provided meets the actual work needs). And even that will still leave tons of people not needed to work anyways. I'm not sure how anyone in a technology forum can believe technology can't get us to a point where a much smaller number or very few needs to work anymore, because "it never happened in the past". That's exactly the idea behind innovation, to not get the same thing you had in the past... >Standards of living are rising globally. Even if comparative wealth drops vs other humans, most people will still see significant improvement in their lifetime. We're not talking about whether millions rural chinese person improved their "standards of living" in the 20th and early 21st century by getting work in a factory, but whether they'd still be needed in 2025 or 2030. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966
wklauss 10y ago
I guess it is a great time to start researching basic income and other new economic aproaches for society.
eitaporra 10y ago
The Next Industrial Revolution Could Put Millions Out of Work ... Just as every other ones
- throw20160915 10y ago
  What comes after automated knowledge work?
  - eternalban 10y ago
    Relatively dumb human nodes in an AI mesh. We're already seeing this with captcha-crunching porn surfers. So not exactly batteries for the matrix but rather the soft organic bits that come factory equipped with some excellent bio-hardware [& -software].
    - Ant1jr 10y ago
      Interestingly enough, that was sort of the original plot of the Matrix: using humans as a giant supercomputer. It was scrapped in favor of batteries because at the time, it was a more understandable concept for most people despite being less plausible.
- wooter 10y ago
  the luddites never learn
  - DonaldFisk 10y ago
    The Luddites were highly skilled workers. If computer systems do most of the thinking, and users don't understand how they work, I'm concerned that people will lose those cognitive skills. We're already seeing this happen with calculators (mental arithmetic) and satellite navigation systems (orienteering/navigation). Driving a car and learning a foreign language might be next. Some, probably most, people will give up, while the rest will pursue the gradually dwindling number of things computers can't do. So it could well be that most people, rather than the new Luddites who will try to keep the old skills alive, might never learn, because they don't need to.
Findeton 10y ago
... or not.
acqq 10y ago
Somehow I don't see it to insightful... It seems she gives examples of AI-powered voice chat-bots instead of call center workers, the robotic burger flippers instead of humans. The cause: because "minimal wages will raise." Have I missed something?
- criddell 10y ago
  I think you did. Basically, no jobs are immune to the next wave of automation. I think entertainers and sex workers will still make money, but I'm not sure what else will.
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
A consequence of roboticisation is the decreasing military value of large populations. If robots can build tanks and fly planes and shoot soldiers, having more people isn't an advantage. Having more robots is. Given how our civilisations ultimately compete through force, this raises interesting questions around optimal design. Namely, every civilisation will have to choose between subsidising their poor or quarantining them. (If we are honest, we already do this to some extent with borders and welfare and immigration controls.)
- bertil 10y ago
  An outcome will probably emerge not with the existing nations warring, but new ones with advantages at birth getting more influential, namely (for profit) city-States.
- branchless 10y ago
  That's an interesting angle. The same is true of general workers. Before the establishment too a slice of labour but in a fully automated world this is not required.
- return0 10y ago
  But someone will have to fund those robot armies, right? Could be a bunch of billionaires living in a libertarian floating city, or another bunch of bilionaires living in the most religious corners of the desert.
- devonkim 10y ago
  Modern wars in the first world are fought more over economic reasons to maintain a population's standard of living rather than for physical defense of the populace. We could have a country with just Congress as the population and we'd declare war against everyone else if 2 billion robots could do the fighting if it ever endangered our American exceptionalism. Similar goes for Russia as well. It is almost more like an exercise of military might is an expression of economic superiority.
- daniel_levine 10y ago
  We've already gotten pretty far along that path with nuclear weapons at the extreme, with ICBMs and air dominance not far behind. Israel is likely to show up relatively quickly on a ranking of most powerful militaries for all of those reasons.
codegeek 10y ago
Say What ? I don't understand this line of reasoning. For every job that is lost, a new one is potentially created due to these industrial revolutions. For example, when Cars were invented, I am sure a lot of buggy drivers lost their jobs. But they probably learned to drive and moved on. Yes when the transition happens, there may be a period of adjustment but why not. That is how we have been able to progress from the stone age till now. If things like Robots take over blue collar jobs, I bet we will need the same humans to operate those Robots at some capacity. Computers, anyone ? And yes, may be AI will change things a bit more but I am sure we will come up with a way to manage that as well.
- imglorp 10y ago
  First up: 10 million truckers in the US; cabbies and bus drivers to a lesser extent. Where will those people go?
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    Back to University or go and do other jobs ? Create their own companies and new services ? Why would they necessarily end up as homeless on the streets?
    - Grishnakh 10y ago
      For the same reason they haven't already gone to school to get a better job than the one they currently have: they either don't have the money or the mental capability to do it. What makes you think this is going to change?
      - ekianjo 10y ago
        Erm... online education being now a thing, for one. Them having more resources now after having worked for x years than when they started without education. Them being probably married after a while and therefore having a safety net inside the family to be able to take some time off to learn new skills. Many things are plausible.
ekianjo 10y ago
> The main reason is machine intelligence, a general-purpose technology that can be used anywhere, from driving cars to customer service, and it’s getting better very, very quickly Oh, that's why we are still dealing with the crappy automated support from Google or Steam that does not seem to be working much if at all ?
- excalibur 10y ago
  I think it's the other way around. There was a big rush to implement machine intelligence before it was ready, which has resulted in increased focus on its development and improvement.
- aioprisan 10y ago
  Providing customer support isn't a business decision for them, in the sense that the won't put billions of dollars and decade(s) of thousands of engineers' time to win this zero sum game.
grecy 10y ago
Great! We can finally get that quality of life increase we were promised way back in the day when we bought into this "go to work more" stuff. We can average it all out, and everyone can work 3-4 days a week and have way more time to explore our passions and side projects. Imagine how much better the world will be when people have time to spend with their kids, to learn other languages, to write that book they dreamed of, etc. Bring it on, I say!
- balabaster 10y ago
  ...and no money to afford all the consumables or pay their mortgages. I agree with you, but we need to make a plan for all those that will put out of their existing jobs and make it possible for them to transition to jobs that can't be replaced by technology. Technology is what drives us forward. It's necessary and is the only way we can legitimately effect our advance as a species - aside from other more controversial topics. But we cannot be blind to those it will leave behind if we allow it. They cannot be lost in the shuffle or we all lose.
paulftw 10y ago
"AI will replace all jobs" is the new "safe nuclear energy is only 10 years away"
- intopieces 10y ago
  Safe nucelear energy is here, and has been for years. The number of people who have died from exposure to coal dust is far higher than those who have been harmed by nuclear anything.
  - paulftw 10y ago
    I'm referring to promises of reliable, cheap and zero waste cold fusion or plasma or whatever reactors that were promised to 100% replace fossil fuels. A handful of reactors here and there while an awesome achievement in itself doesn't really meet the expectations people of the sixties had for the year 2000. Other analogies I considered using but was too lazy to mention in my comment were jet packs, space tourism, cure for cancer and HIV. (and you could say all of these have also been delivered... to some extent)
- pitt1980 10y ago
  I don't get the reference nuclear energy appears to be the safest energy option, and has been for many years now
  - jimlawruk 10y ago
    Fukushima is pretty recent. Nuclear is indeed relatively safe but not fail-proof.
jdmoreira 10y ago
Yeah, but by then Elon Musk will have made humans an interplanetary species and we'll be ready for the first wave of interplanetary immigration :) Mars, the land of opportunities for the next industrial revolution?
- justaman 10y ago
  http://i.imgur.com/GDxqs2c.jpg http://i.imgur.com/GDxqs2c.jpg
djschnei 10y ago
https://fee.org/articles/the-curse-of-machinery/ https://fee.org/articles/the-curse-of-machinery/
JDDunn9 10y ago
I think the biggest potential threat here is the rising skill requirements. AI / robots are eliminating the least skilled jobs, and creating highly skilled jobs. Out of work truck drivers aren't going to get jobs working at Google's self-driving car team. No new jobs will be created for humans that a robot could do, just like no one thinks about using a horse to power a machine. At some point, the bottom 10-20% in intelligence and education could be unemployable through no fault of their own.
- wolfgke 10y ago
  > At some point, the bottom 10-20% in intelligence and education could be unemployable through no fault of their own. If their parents are not people of high intelligence, these people should rather complain to their parents that they gave them birth: Knowing that in the future a lot less people of bottom but much more of high intelligence are necessary, the parents willingly produced children of genetic material that is probably badly suited for the future. Thus the "bad guy" is not the political system, but people of low intelligence producing children of low intelligence (in statistical average).
  - jonathansizz 10y ago
    So you're advocating forced sterilization of undesirable segments of society?
    - wolfgke 10y ago
      I am against forced sterilization (this would be a violation of the basic right of physical integrity). This does not contradict that it would perhaps not a bad idea to give a financial incentive for sterilization (though I have to think more about the best way of implementing this). Nevertheless I see the much larger problem in the fact that many pairs choose to bring children to the world because this is the action that is encouraged in society (most people are simply conformists). If we could make it the default that it is frowned upon if a couple, for which it will be rather likely "from available data" that the children will be in a bad position in future society, nevertheless decides to have some, I think a large part of the problem would be solved. I also would encourage children from the bottom quantiles of intelligence or earnings to say clear words to their parents that they are part of their problem.
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
The reason this time is different is that the pace of change is faster than the workforce can respond to it. In the past, a displaced worker could transfer their skills or pick up a new skill relatively quickly (6mo-1yr). Today though, it's much harder for a high-school educated person to completely change their skill set to building ML systems. I think this is solvable through education programs and shifts in how humans can train machines, but so far those systems aren't being built or deployed.
kolbe 10y ago
'Millions' is actually an understatement.
abz10 10y ago
I wish they would stop calling it "machine intelligence." It's a crappy made up buzzword by people who wanted to call "machine learning" "artificial intelligence" (AI) but couldn't without being ridiculed. Now that AI is cool again we no longer need the term Machine Intelligence. If you want to be taken seriously by practitioners you call it ML if you want to extract money from investors call it AI.
aurizon 10y ago
Become a pet to a robot, have it feed you, rub ur ears etc, and put you to sleep when you are suffering...
mtrn 10y ago
Can anyone recommend an a good paper or essay on this subject? This development looks like an amazing economical shift and I would love to read semi-sci-fi-ish scenarios by serious economists studying past and present systems.
pdog 10y ago
Could? It's already happening.
denisd 10y ago
I don't think people really grasp what is going on here, people won't have any other jobs to move to, even if new type of jobs are created, AI will be able to do them too. Just as cars replaced almost all functions horses had, AI will replace all functions we humans have.
- krapp 10y ago
  People are under the likely false assumption that they won't be replaced by AI, because their jobs require too much intelligence or creativity. At one time, rug weavers believed the same thing, and now it seems to be programmers, designers and artists. But I think you're right - as a general trend, any job that can be automated, will be automated, as long as consumers find the product acceptable. Of course, you can't automate everything because someone, somewhere, needs money to spend on the goods and services, but with a global consumer base and efficient automation, companies can probably still make a profit in the midst of mass unemployment.
johngalt 10y ago
How many programmers were put out of work when compilers became common?
kamaal 10y ago
Most fears in the comments here are uncalled for. Let me narrate to you an alternate view from a formerly a socialist country, India. Prior to the mid 90's there was immense resentment towards computers, there were heavy import duties on computer products and anything related to them in general. It was so expensive to work with automation that it almost throttled the economic growth for a good two decades. I hear a lot anecdotes from my dad from around 80's. Unions in India called for a national strike, like a total shutdown when the prime minister wanted to introduce computers to the country. It was believed job losses would be so immense it will impossible for the ordinary person on the streets to meet the basic needs. Also around about that time, most factory assembly workers used to protest against PCB assembly machines all the time, government offices hated digital record keeping etc. I remember even in the 90's telephone connections used to take years to get, and things like TV's/Refigerators used to be considered very expensive to own. When Washing Machines came around most people used to identify the lazy with those buying these machines. Yet today all of this is common. Every house hold has these devices. And the introduction of computers and automation only increased jobs and overall quality of living has only improved.
stonemetal 10y ago
Meh. That industrial revolution already happened. The number of workers needed by a factory is already 25% of what it was in the 60s. Will it fall further? Sure, as we learn how to automate more jobs. But it will be much slower, The low hanging highly profitable fruit has already been consumed.

70 points by edward 10y ago

The next industrial revolution doesn't even have to automate jobs to kill them. It just has to make them all so specialized that it will be highly improbable that there's any people who have that specialization.

coldtea 10y ago

...and it might not auto-magically create new jobs, something which some people repeat as if it is as inevitable as a law of nature. Also, a large part (40-50%?) of the population might not be needed, or even desired, e.g. poor and older people that put a strain in the economy, so, they might be delegated to "b class" citizen status, and might end up living in some developing world like wasteland/slums in the next 50 years or so, while another big percentage has service jobs, and a 10-20% of luckier people live in closed communities. It's not some sci-fi fantasy, it's already in development, and even the norm in lots of parts of the world, nothing (and surely not naive techno-optimism) prevents it from coming to the West.

tdb7893 10y ago
As of right now both views seem to just be idle speculation. I'm not an economist but every other time similar things have happened in industry the economy has balanced out. What I don't get is how what is happening now is fundamentally different to the point where the economy won't correct?
- thecrow1213 10y ago
  I could give you my take but I think CGP Grey really explains it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >I'm not an economist but every other time similar things have happened in industry the economy has balanced out. "The economy" did not "balance out". "The economy" is not an active agent. The economy was politically managed -- for instance, via the Fed's original mandate to encourage full employment. What prevents similar management taking place today is ideological opposition to it.
  - daniel_levine 10y ago
    The Fed adding improving employment to natural zero to it's mandate post Great Recession alongside controlling inflation, seems to imply that the ideological opposition isn't that strong.
- joepie91_ 10y ago
  CGPGrey's "Humans Need Not Apply" video addresses precisely that question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU EDIT: Bah. Too late.
  - thecrow1213 10y ago
    Hehe I think you might have actually been first!
- humanrebar 10y ago
  > What I don't get is how what is happening now is fundamentally different to the point where the economy won't correct? Used to be, worse came to worst, you'd just go be a hired hand for someone: a farmhand, a servant, a soldier, a sailor, etc. It also used to be that four walls and a roof was a home and bread and what-you-can-grow was food. Our standards of living are different now, at least in developed nations. We also had social structures that included multi-generational communities. So the grandparents, older relatives, etc. would watch the children, help around the house, etc. Also, people ate worse, got sick more, and died younger.
- goda90 10y ago
  But haven't those other corrections been somewhat painful for many people? I think the fear here is that this is so much larger because instead of letting one person do the work of 10, leaving the other 9 to do something new, this is just replacing all 10 across numerous classes of work, leaving few to no new jobs. It's going to be a lot more painful for a lot more people than previous corrections. It could result in violence, starvation, and the collapse of the middle class, leaving the have-not's entirely at the mercy of the haves with no recourse to get out of that situation.
- deaddodo 10y ago
  Really? AI-assisted automation has happened in the past? If so, I missed that portion in my history classes.
  - daniel_levine 10y ago
    Much worse! Completely, strategically dominant replacement of human and animal muscle with the steam engine.
    - deaddodo 10y ago
      Yet, without brains.
      - krapp 10y ago
        Still, arguably, a very primitive form of "artificial intelligence."
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  If robots and AI are eliminating an entire sector (starting with driving for instance), what other manual or low skill jobs are there that aren't already targeted for AI replacement? We don't need 2m more car mechanics or farm workers. This time it seem likely a certain class of job is going away. Half the population is below average intelligence, and perhaps 25% (total guess) might be best suited to a manual or semi-skilled role. What are we going to do with them? When similar things have happened previously, the once semi-skilled (eg) shipbuilder becomes a low wage driver or call centre worker. Many in an area didn't get those few roles, so became unemployed (and often depressed) for the rest of their careers. Some steel or shipbuilding towns haven't fully recovered even today. Longer ago the farmhand could get any number of manual roles in the growing industries. Blacksmiths became car mechanics, fuel attendants and so on. Also when it's only a number of regional cities affected, like with coal, steel or shipbuilding, it's much easier politically than when it's national.
  - daniel_levine 10y ago
    Relatively low margin, fragmented service jobs. Waiters/waitresses, fitness instructors, barbers etc. Those jobs are often still better than the jobs being automated away (truck driving), just less economic to build such specialty robots, at least in the near term.
    - anexprogrammer 10y ago
      Aren't most of those already down at min wage? At least a proportion of waiting jobs will be going away too. Can they absorb another 10m (or however many there are) truck and van drivers who probably made quite a bit more? I know it won't be overnight, but it seems to be rapidly becoming a political rather than economic question. Like must we learn to run at 20-25% unemployment instead of <10? We'd probably have to learn to stop viewing them as scroungers too and adjust welfare somewhat.
      - daniel_levine 10y ago
        Many are, but not all. And I suspect waiting jobs as ratio compared with eating out gross revenue is shrinking (though eating out is growing and is more labor intensive than a grocery store still). Part of that is labor organization, the truckers have unions. And unions were (and are) a big political issue.
- zubat 10y ago
  It's not that it won't correct, it's that the correction offers no guarantee of being humane. In the 20th century, the population of horses (in the US) started declining rapidly, from a high of over 20 million in 1920 to under 5 million in 1960. Industry decided the horse was unnecessary after thousands of years of history, thus they were slaughtered in short order. The only difference between me and a horse from the market's view is that I do different jobs and consume human goods. To the extent that I am necessary it is because the market will need someone to move goods and services to, but left to its own devices it might well decide to sell weapons that I get killed with. Markets are honest, not smart.
  - daniel_levine 10y ago
    Citation on horse slaughtering in the mid-1900s that probably was relatively unrelated to the Great Depressions? Legitimately interested.
    - zubat 10y ago
      I don't have a detailed source on hand for the slaughtering operations specifically, but this is a good overview article of where the meat went: https://priceonomics.com/when-americans-ate-horse-meat/ https://priceonomics.com/when-americans-ate-horse-meat/
      - daniel_levine 10y ago
        Just to be clear for everyone who doesn't click through. The car was one (and seemingly a very small one) amongst many reasons people ate horses, coupled with varying economic recessions, shortages of other meat, and changing consumer taste.
        maxerickson 10y ago
        Yeah, over 40 years it would be easy to reduce the number of horses simply by attrition.
- pyrale 10y ago
  Could you explain what you mean by "the economy", and how it is of importance that it has "balanced out" ? I mean, one could probably say that the economy has balanced out after the great depression, after WW2, after the 2008 crisis, and so on. Many people did not.
- tpeo 10y ago
  Well, if it takes some time for workers to shift sectors and if "creatively destructive" technological innovation on the other hand happens to accelerate, it's conceivable that at a certain point, the absolute majority of workers will be redundant. There won't be an equilibrium, because the workers are trying to chase an accelerating point while moving at a constant velocity. There doesn't need to be anything "fundamentally different" except that we finally reached the exponential part of technological progress, which up until now seemed like a linear process. Just like population growth until 1800s, or economic growth until the 1820s. Those two were pretty much linear and not very different from zero until they weren't. I don't actually subscribe to this rationale, though. I'm just putting it out like this because it's pretty much what everybody says and I recognize that it's quite plausible, given the two first hypotheses.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > There doesn't need to be anything "fundamentally different" except that we finally reached the exponential part of technological progress, which up until now seemed like a linear process. Most processes involving people (and lots of others, besides) that look exponential at some point are really logistic, so even in that case, there's probably some equilibrium point somewhere in the future, though its possible that its many generations down the line from the point where the appearance of exponential change first occurs.
    - tpeo 10y ago
      Good point. It's quite possible that there's a fundamental limit to technological achievement and that we just haven't reached it yet. On the other hand, I'd like to say that it's also possible that some particular processes can follow exponential laws without any restriction. It might be somewhat hazy, but what if outside of a few measures (infant mortality, life expectancy, etc) economic progress is nothing more than a subjective measurement of how present consumers value past output? I'm not saying anything new here, both Easterlin's paradox and the idea of a "hedonic treadmill" support the idea that more income doesn't necessarily equate into increased happiness. And specially in the case of economic innovation, which might not actually be technically interesting or require any "new physics" at all - just mashing some current technologies into a marketable product - it might never ever stop, and will just degenerate into an endless chase of ever changing fads. Past economies wouldn't be particular poor, just particularly quaint, and a repository of dead fads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterlin_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterlin_paradox
- Futurebot 10y ago
  It's very far from idle speculation at this point; many prominent economists and economic researchers[1] have grappled with the issue. Both the Lump of Labor Fallacy and Luddite Fallacy may prove themselves to be fallacious in the new era. Gwern has a good post with links: http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes?cx=009114923999563836576%3Adv0a4ndtmly&cof=FORID%3A11&q=chunking#neo-luddism http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes?cx=009114923999563836576%3Adv0... Here are a few prominent ones: http://economics.mit.edu/files/5554 http://economics.mit.edu/files/5554 https://hbr.org/2015/06/the-great-decoupling https://hbr.org/2015/06/the-great-decoupling http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-technological-innovation-has-always-delivered-more-long-run-employment-not-less http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-tec... http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2014/08/28/1942571/david-autors-guide-to-labour-and-the-machine/ http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2014/08/28/1942571/david-autors-g... http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/autor-autor/?_r=0 http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/autor-autor/?_r=... http://www.asymptosis.com/are-machines-replacing-humans-or-am-i-a-luddite.html http://www.asymptosis.com/are-machines-replacing-humans-or-a... [1] Autor, Ford, Cowen, Krugman, Acemoglu, Brynjolfsson, McAfee just to name a few
  - tdb7893 10y ago
    I think some of these are good insights. There is no question that society will change a lot over this century, I'll be curious to see if it changes in a way that anyone predicted.
bencollier49 10y ago
Send them to Mars!
witty_username 10y ago
It depends on what things become cheaper. I don't see how poor would endup in wasteland/slum scenario, unless the revolution is so disparate that it only benefits some people and completely excludes other people. (Remember, even if say programmers benefit from automation, non-programmers also reap the benefits of automation). Wasteland/slum scenario seems unlikely; if 40-50% of all people did not live in a proper house[0], there would be a lot of empty houses. (0) as opposed to a hut/shed
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Yeah, if you have robot factories and practical batteries, the only thing holding back abundant energy becomes the political will to make abundant energy available.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  Why wouldn't the poor end up in a slum, even if it's 50% of the population? You seem to forget that "slums" were not always slums. They used to be reasonably nice places to live. (Some of them in the US used to be really nice, posh places to live.) All it takes to turn a nice neighborhood into a slum is a lack of income to keep the houses maintained properly. Human habitats fall apart pretty quickly when they're abandoned or neglected.
  - ikt 10y ago
    Because if significant amounts of the workforce are replaced there's an implicit assumption that a significant amount of things would be cheaper to provider, if the only cost of creating and supplying food is robot maintenance that means food should be significantly cheaper to produce than now. Coming 2046: P2P food sharing.
    - ryandrake 10y ago
      > Because if significant amounts of the workforce are replaced there's an implicit assumption that a significant amount of things would be cheaper to provider That's a wild assumption. I would predict that it's more likely all that additional value will be captured by already-rich business owners and shareholders, not consumers.
justaman 10y ago
I think, given modern progressive ideals. We will see shorter work weeks and multiple people with the same job. Instead of 2nd and 3rd shift, maybe we Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday shifts. At least, I hope.
- chiph 10y ago
  My sister does job-sharing. She works Mon-Wed, and her job partner works Wed-Fri (one day overlap for meetings and handover). This lets her spend more time with her family, something that's important to her. She gets healthcare coverage through her husband's job. It works well, but you'd have to commit to a less-expensive lifestyle because you're not working 40+ hours a week. It has benefits to the company as well, as they get two people for the cost of a little more than one (and don't have to pay expensive benefits to either of them).
  - rjsw 10y ago
    This will have a problem if you are no longer earning enough to be able to afford to live near to your job. I still think that Basic Income at a level that will allow you to live somewhere inexpensive will be a better solution.
    - daniel_levine 10y ago
      why not just an increase in the earned income tax credit?
      - kingbruce90 10y ago
        Because you have to have a job to get eitc.
- adrianN 10y ago
  That would need some serious political intervention. For companies it is more efficient to have one employee work longer hours because it reduces the communication overhead. I also don't see how such an arrangement will help, for example, taxi or truck drivers who will be completely replaced by autonomous cars in the near future.
turar 10y ago
> nothing (and surely not naive techno-optimism) prevents it from coming to the West. Well, if you stop dividing people into "West" and not West, and consider the whole world without artificial borders as just humanity, it's already the case.
- coldtea 10y ago
  I was making a point for those that feel that they are the "West", and that "it can't happen here". That said, the world is not without borders, artificial or not, so it's not wise to see it as such in determining the future. It might be wise to want to abolish those borders (and that remains to be proven -- empires are even less democratic than nation states, and civil wars are just as bloody, if not more, than wars between states), but not to live in la-la-land where they don't exist.
BurningFrog 10y ago
Jobs have rapidly been disappearing for 250 years, consistently resulting in equally rapidly increasing living standards. You have to (1) demonstrate that you understand how this very counterintuitive historical fact happened and (2) give a plausible theory for why it's different now, for me to even begin taking talk like this seriously.
- coldtea 10y ago
  For "250 years" jobs have been replaced (first with factory jobs --Ford, Taylorism, etc.-- and then with office and service sector jobs), they haven't been actually disappearing. Now and in the future, with software, robotic automation, and even more so AI, jobs are actually disappearing for the first time ("software is eating the world" so to speak). Examples from the era of the steam engine and the advent of electricity when faced with what's possible with advanced technology like AI, modern automation and 21st century internet and software are not really applicable. That said, it's not that mankind cannot manage this. But it cannot manage it in the ways it had in the past -- this will only lead to the marginalization of large parts of society. It can only manage it with political action: 4 and 3 day work weeks being mandatory, universal income schemes and other such measures.
  - BurningFrog 10y ago
    The jobs have always disappeared first, then new ones have appeared. People have always not known where the new jobs would come from, and they have always appeared. Even right now, when software is eating the world, unemployment in the US is low and decreasing. The disaster is a bit like that my new diet, it always is happening soon :)
    - coldtea 10y ago
      >The jobs have always disappeared first, then new ones have appeared. People have always not known where the new jobs would come from, and they have always appeared. That's less like actual history, and more like a retelling of it as some inevitable repeated story. If by people, you mean the ones whose jobs/skills became deprecated, then yes, they didn't know where new jobs will come from, and tons of them didn't get new jobs anyway. But the industrialists in general knew they will have needs for tons of workers in the new factories -- and in fact the government then (in England, etc) passed laws that made sure they "encouraged" (forced) millions of farmers and such to urbanize and become factory workers. The difference is that now we know of no such need. >Even right now, when software is eating the world, unemployment in the US is low and decreasing. Mostly by cheating: counting tons of low quality, low pay, part time (not as a choice) jobs, not counting people who have worked in the past X months, not counting tons of people outside certain narrow criteria that still don't translate to actual jobs, etc :) E.g.: The unemployment rate dropped because people unable to find jobs ceased looking and are no longer counted as being in the labor force. If you are unemployed but not considered part of the labor force, you are not included when unemployment is measured. The BLS says that in May there were 1.7 million Americans who “wanted and were available for work,” but “were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.” In other words, the unemployment rate is a useless measure of unemployment, just as the consumer price index no longer measures inflation. What were once useful statistical measures have been converted into good news propaganda. http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/06/employment-lies/ http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/06/employment-lies/
r2dnb 10y ago
>Also, a large part (40-50%?) of the population might not be needed, or even desired, e.g. poor and older people that put a strain in the economy, so, they might be delegated to "b class" citizen status, and might end up living in some developing world like wasteland/slums in the next 50 years or so, while another big percentage has service jobs, and a 10-20% of luckier people live in closed communities. I think this is very possible. And I suspect that the overwhelming majority of the b-citizens will be people not knowing how to write a software. I say it continually to those I love (close friends, family etc...) : unless very specific career choices, starting in life today and deciding that "having no clue about coding is fine", is at best a dangerous gamble, at worth a suicide. I think Darwin kind of applies in our modern society but people do not notice it. For example, what led me to doing engineering studies was pure survival instinct. I have a business profile - and am a business owner today - still heavily writing code, and intending to keep doing it. Since I'm about 12, I knew that my stuff was starting companies, business strategy, product design, corporate finance and this kind of stuff. That's what I was toying with in my spare time. But a pragmatic analysis of the world led me to quickly realize that I'd be better off being proficient in technology stuff, to avoid being at a big disadvantage since all the stuff I'd be selling and designing were going to be technology-based. At the time, I said in the way children speak : "I want to be able to build what I will be selling so that I do not have to depend on the good will of anyone". And this was the smartest move I ever made in my life. And this kind of thinking is what continually puts me ahead. I think it would be interesting to find a way to measure the "survival instinct" of people, and see if there's a correlation with those who do "well" and those who find themselves surprised at every recession and industrial revolution.
- jonathansizz 10y ago
  You think millions of unskilled and semi-skilled workers can be retrained as software developers and that there'll be employment opportunities for these millions of new programmers? I think it's much more likely that many existing programming jobs will also be automated away.
  - r2dnb 10y ago
    The concept of spending a life being employed is rather new. In the future the majority of people will be business owners... like in the old days. And what I'm saying is that these businesses will likely be software-based, and that those being software-illiterate will have a life as comfortable as the one lived by illiterate people before them. Software is becoming the new paper, this is what I am saying. Today, we on HN are like the Lords and the clergy who were the only ones able to read and write and hereby be involved in the important business of their times. The history only repeat itself. And it will always.
johngalt 10y ago
> some people repeat as if it is as inevitable as a law of nature. It's just happened every other time something like this has happened. For tens of thousands of years. > wasteland/slums in the next 50 years or so Standards of living are rising globally. Even if comparative wealth drops vs other humans, most people will still see significant improvement in their lifetime.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >It's just happened every other time something like this has happened. For tens of thousands of years. Nothing like this has happened before. For one, people in 17th century didn't live much differently than people in 500 A.D. or 500 B.C -- the huge majority lived in the country, milked their own milk, work with manual tools, etc. The process we're discussing started mostly with the industrial revolution. With the advent of the steam engine and crude early factories, for the first 2 centuries of the Industrial revolution, as factories and factory assembly lines still needed tons of manual labor (see Taylorism). Then, as automation advanced, around the mid-20th century, and there was not the same demand for factory workers anymore (a lot of production lines became more efficient and less manual), people were given office and service sector jobs -- because that was another underdeveloped sector. Today, software and the internet makes lots of office jobs and procedures obsolete, advanced robotic automation makes tons of factory jobs deprecated, and with advances in smart software, business networks, etc, lots of service jobs are not needed anymore either. Advanced AI software and hardware will only make this worse. And there's no next step to go besides either creating useless busywork or reducing work-hours/days (so work provided meets the actual work needs). And even that will still leave tons of people not needed to work anyways. I'm not sure how anyone in a technology forum can believe technology can't get us to a point where a much smaller number or very few needs to work anymore, because "it never happened in the past". That's exactly the idea behind innovation, to not get the same thing you had in the past... >Standards of living are rising globally. Even if comparative wealth drops vs other humans, most people will still see significant improvement in their lifetime. We're not talking about whether millions rural chinese person improved their "standards of living" in the 20th and early 21st century by getting work in a factory, but whether they'd still be needed in 2025 or 2030. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966

wklauss 10y ago

I guess it is a great time to start researching basic income and other new economic aproaches for society.

eitaporra 10y ago

The Next Industrial Revolution Could Put Millions Out of Work ... Just as every other ones

throw20160915 10y ago
What comes after automated knowledge work?
- eternalban 10y ago
  Relatively dumb human nodes in an AI mesh. We're already seeing this with captcha-crunching porn surfers. So not exactly batteries for the matrix but rather the soft organic bits that come factory equipped with some excellent bio-hardware [& -software].
  - Ant1jr 10y ago
    Interestingly enough, that was sort of the original plot of the Matrix: using humans as a giant supercomputer. It was scrapped in favor of batteries because at the time, it was a more understandable concept for most people despite being less plausible.
wooter 10y ago
the luddites never learn
- DonaldFisk 10y ago
  The Luddites were highly skilled workers. If computer systems do most of the thinking, and users don't understand how they work, I'm concerned that people will lose those cognitive skills. We're already seeing this happen with calculators (mental arithmetic) and satellite navigation systems (orienteering/navigation). Driving a car and learning a foreign language might be next. Some, probably most, people will give up, while the rest will pursue the gradually dwindling number of things computers can't do. So it could well be that most people, rather than the new Luddites who will try to keep the old skills alive, might never learn, because they don't need to.

Findeton 10y ago

... or not.

acqq 10y ago

Somehow I don't see it to insightful... It seems she gives examples of AI-powered voice chat-bots instead of call center workers, the robotic burger flippers instead of humans. The cause: because "minimal wages will raise." Have I missed something?

criddell 10y ago
I think you did. Basically, no jobs are immune to the next wave of automation. I think entertainers and sex workers will still make money, but I'm not sure what else will.

JumpCrisscross 10y ago

A consequence of roboticisation is the decreasing military value of large populations. If robots can build tanks and fly planes and shoot soldiers, having more people isn't an advantage. Having more robots is. Given how our civilisations ultimately compete through force, this raises interesting questions around optimal design. Namely, every civilisation will have to choose between subsidising their poor or quarantining them. (If we are honest, we already do this to some extent with borders and welfare and immigration controls.)

bertil 10y ago
An outcome will probably emerge not with the existing nations warring, but new ones with advantages at birth getting more influential, namely (for profit) city-States.
branchless 10y ago
That's an interesting angle. The same is true of general workers. Before the establishment too a slice of labour but in a fully automated world this is not required.
return0 10y ago
But someone will have to fund those robot armies, right? Could be a bunch of billionaires living in a libertarian floating city, or another bunch of bilionaires living in the most religious corners of the desert.
devonkim 10y ago
Modern wars in the first world are fought more over economic reasons to maintain a population's standard of living rather than for physical defense of the populace. We could have a country with just Congress as the population and we'd declare war against everyone else if 2 billion robots could do the fighting if it ever endangered our American exceptionalism. Similar goes for Russia as well. It is almost more like an exercise of military might is an expression of economic superiority.
daniel_levine 10y ago
We've already gotten pretty far along that path with nuclear weapons at the extreme, with ICBMs and air dominance not far behind. Israel is likely to show up relatively quickly on a ranking of most powerful militaries for all of those reasons.

codegeek 10y ago

Say What ? I don't understand this line of reasoning. For every job that is lost, a new one is potentially created due to these industrial revolutions. For example, when Cars were invented, I am sure a lot of buggy drivers lost their jobs. But they probably learned to drive and moved on. Yes when the transition happens, there may be a period of adjustment but why not. That is how we have been able to progress from the stone age till now. If things like Robots take over blue collar jobs, I bet we will need the same humans to operate those Robots at some capacity. Computers, anyone ? And yes, may be AI will change things a bit more but I am sure we will come up with a way to manage that as well.

imglorp 10y ago
First up: 10 million truckers in the US; cabbies and bus drivers to a lesser extent. Where will those people go?
- ekianjo 10y ago
  Back to University or go and do other jobs ? Create their own companies and new services ? Why would they necessarily end up as homeless on the streets?
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    For the same reason they haven't already gone to school to get a better job than the one they currently have: they either don't have the money or the mental capability to do it. What makes you think this is going to change?
    - ekianjo 10y ago
      Erm... online education being now a thing, for one. Them having more resources now after having worked for x years than when they started without education. Them being probably married after a while and therefore having a safety net inside the family to be able to take some time off to learn new skills. Many things are plausible.

ekianjo 10y ago

> The main reason is machine intelligence, a general-purpose technology that can be used anywhere, from driving cars to customer service, and it’s getting better very, very quickly Oh, that's why we are still dealing with the crappy automated support from Google or Steam that does not seem to be working much if at all ?

excalibur 10y ago
I think it's the other way around. There was a big rush to implement machine intelligence before it was ready, which has resulted in increased focus on its development and improvement.
aioprisan 10y ago
Providing customer support isn't a business decision for them, in the sense that the won't put billions of dollars and decade(s) of thousands of engineers' time to win this zero sum game.

grecy 10y ago

Great! We can finally get that quality of life increase we were promised way back in the day when we bought into this "go to work more" stuff. We can average it all out, and everyone can work 3-4 days a week and have way more time to explore our passions and side projects. Imagine how much better the world will be when people have time to spend with their kids, to learn other languages, to write that book they dreamed of, etc. Bring it on, I say!

balabaster 10y ago
...and no money to afford all the consumables or pay their mortgages. I agree with you, but we need to make a plan for all those that will put out of their existing jobs and make it possible for them to transition to jobs that can't be replaced by technology. Technology is what drives us forward. It's necessary and is the only way we can legitimately effect our advance as a species - aside from other more controversial topics. But we cannot be blind to those it will leave behind if we allow it. They cannot be lost in the shuffle or we all lose.

paulftw 10y ago

"AI will replace all jobs" is the new "safe nuclear energy is only 10 years away"

intopieces 10y ago
Safe nucelear energy is here, and has been for years. The number of people who have died from exposure to coal dust is far higher than those who have been harmed by nuclear anything.
- paulftw 10y ago
  I'm referring to promises of reliable, cheap and zero waste cold fusion or plasma or whatever reactors that were promised to 100% replace fossil fuels. A handful of reactors here and there while an awesome achievement in itself doesn't really meet the expectations people of the sixties had for the year 2000. Other analogies I considered using but was too lazy to mention in my comment were jet packs, space tourism, cure for cancer and HIV. (and you could say all of these have also been delivered... to some extent)
pitt1980 10y ago
I don't get the reference nuclear energy appears to be the safest energy option, and has been for many years now
- jimlawruk 10y ago
  Fukushima is pretty recent. Nuclear is indeed relatively safe but not fail-proof.

jdmoreira 10y ago

Yeah, but by then Elon Musk will have made humans an interplanetary species and we'll be ready for the first wave of interplanetary immigration :) Mars, the land of opportunities for the next industrial revolution?

justaman 10y ago
http://i.imgur.com/GDxqs2c.jpg http://i.imgur.com/GDxqs2c.jpg

djschnei 10y ago

https://fee.org/articles/the-curse-of-machinery/ https://fee.org/articles/the-curse-of-machinery/

JDDunn9 10y ago

I think the biggest potential threat here is the rising skill requirements. AI / robots are eliminating the least skilled jobs, and creating highly skilled jobs. Out of work truck drivers aren't going to get jobs working at Google's self-driving car team. No new jobs will be created for humans that a robot could do, just like no one thinks about using a horse to power a machine. At some point, the bottom 10-20% in intelligence and education could be unemployable through no fault of their own.

wolfgke 10y ago
> At some point, the bottom 10-20% in intelligence and education could be unemployable through no fault of their own. If their parents are not people of high intelligence, these people should rather complain to their parents that they gave them birth: Knowing that in the future a lot less people of bottom but much more of high intelligence are necessary, the parents willingly produced children of genetic material that is probably badly suited for the future. Thus the "bad guy" is not the political system, but people of low intelligence producing children of low intelligence (in statistical average).
- jonathansizz 10y ago
  So you're advocating forced sterilization of undesirable segments of society?
  - wolfgke 10y ago
    I am against forced sterilization (this would be a violation of the basic right of physical integrity). This does not contradict that it would perhaps not a bad idea to give a financial incentive for sterilization (though I have to think more about the best way of implementing this). Nevertheless I see the much larger problem in the fact that many pairs choose to bring children to the world because this is the action that is encouraged in society (most people are simply conformists). If we could make it the default that it is frowned upon if a couple, for which it will be rather likely "from available data" that the children will be in a bad position in future society, nevertheless decides to have some, I think a large part of the problem would be solved. I also would encourage children from the bottom quantiles of intelligence or earnings to say clear words to their parents that they are part of their problem.

AndrewKemendo 10y ago

The reason this time is different is that the pace of change is faster than the workforce can respond to it. In the past, a displaced worker could transfer their skills or pick up a new skill relatively quickly (6mo-1yr). Today though, it's much harder for a high-school educated person to completely change their skill set to building ML systems. I think this is solvable through education programs and shifts in how humans can train machines, but so far those systems aren't being built or deployed.

kolbe 10y ago

'Millions' is actually an understatement.

abz10 10y ago

I wish they would stop calling it "machine intelligence." It's a crappy made up buzzword by people who wanted to call "machine learning" "artificial intelligence" (AI) but couldn't without being ridiculed. Now that AI is cool again we no longer need the term Machine Intelligence. If you want to be taken seriously by practitioners you call it ML if you want to extract money from investors call it AI.

aurizon 10y ago

Become a pet to a robot, have it feed you, rub ur ears etc, and put you to sleep when you are suffering...

mtrn 10y ago

Can anyone recommend an a good paper or essay on this subject? This development looks like an amazing economical shift and I would love to read semi-sci-fi-ish scenarios by serious economists studying past and present systems.

pdog 10y ago

Could? It's already happening.

denisd 10y ago

I don't think people really grasp what is going on here, people won't have any other jobs to move to, even if new type of jobs are created, AI will be able to do them too. Just as cars replaced almost all functions horses had, AI will replace all functions we humans have.

krapp 10y ago
People are under the likely false assumption that they won't be replaced by AI, because their jobs require too much intelligence or creativity. At one time, rug weavers believed the same thing, and now it seems to be programmers, designers and artists. But I think you're right - as a general trend, any job that can be automated, will be automated, as long as consumers find the product acceptable. Of course, you can't automate everything because someone, somewhere, needs money to spend on the goods and services, but with a global consumer base and efficient automation, companies can probably still make a profit in the midst of mass unemployment.

johngalt 10y ago

How many programmers were put out of work when compilers became common?

kamaal 10y ago

Most fears in the comments here are uncalled for. Let me narrate to you an alternate view from a formerly a socialist country, India. Prior to the mid 90's there was immense resentment towards computers, there were heavy import duties on computer products and anything related to them in general. It was so expensive to work with automation that it almost throttled the economic growth for a good two decades. I hear a lot anecdotes from my dad from around 80's. Unions in India called for a national strike, like a total shutdown when the prime minister wanted to introduce computers to the country. It was believed job losses would be so immense it will impossible for the ordinary person on the streets to meet the basic needs. Also around about that time, most factory assembly workers used to protest against PCB assembly machines all the time, government offices hated digital record keeping etc. I remember even in the 90's telephone connections used to take years to get, and things like TV's/Refigerators used to be considered very expensive to own. When Washing Machines came around most people used to identify the lazy with those buying these machines. Yet today all of this is common. Every house hold has these devices. And the introduction of computers and automation only increased jobs and overall quality of living has only improved.

stonemetal 10y ago

Meh. That industrial revolution already happened. The number of workers needed by a factory is already 25% of what it was in the 60s. Will it fall further? Sure, as we learn how to automate more jobs. But it will be much slower, The low hanging highly profitable fruit has already been consumed.