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This is all you need to read from the article: > Advances in artificial intelligence will lead to job losses, but new forms of employment will take their place

by josho 10y ago

This is all you need to read from the article: > Advances in artificial intelligence will lead to job losses, but new forms of employment will take their place...History, though, has demonstrated that technological breakthroughs lead to new employment opportunities -- IBM CEO Ginni Rometty But, I think we are approaching (if we haven't already crossed this point) the time where new jobs created by technology advancements will be fewer than old jobs displaced. My example here is Instagram, a company of a dozen staff or so when acquired, is the digital replacement of photo labs in every city. New technologies are not the job creator that they once were and I haven't read anything to contradict that statement or posit that new tech is going to drive jobs growth.

kbenson 10y ago
> My example here is Instagram, a company of a dozen staff or so when acquired, is the digital replacement of photo labs in every city. While not trying to dispute your main point, I hardly think Instagram replaces all of what photo labs do, such as large size prints, professional correction, and specialty products such as cards and books. There are other companies online that do compete in these spaces though. I think most labs are probably getting by with their services targeted towards professionals, who want a bit more accountability than they are likely to get using a large service. That may just mean a semi-large to large lab though, so small labs likely have a hard time of it.
- creaghpatr 10y ago
  Instagram also enabled some business to be created or to grow based on ease of access and low/no overhead costs for its service. Instagram 'models' come to mind.
ar15saveslives 10y ago
Instagram is not replacement for photo labs, digital cameras are.
- mtgx 10y ago
  So smartphones? I thinking looking at this from the point of view of a single product category is too simplistic and likely inaccurate. A better way of looking at this may be "one new ecosystem of jobs is replacing another". If you look at it this way, it's possible that the new ecosystem is just as big in terms of number of jobs. I think a bigger problem may be that the pace of change is accelerating and people used to sticking to a job for a decade or longer may find themselves having to do more drastic career changes every few years.
cryptoz 10y ago
I agree. It all seems so obvious to me that I feel like I must be the fool in the room, but that can't be. Technology and progress in science changes the kinds of work we do. The processes are accelerating, and we're reaching a point where work is better done by machines. I can see no viable future for humans other than Universal Basic Income, with options for additional creativity and work unbounded by time spent doing menial tasks to earn wages for shelter and food and clothing. Yes that all sounds utopian, but what other futures are there? The masses won't have jobs - the machines will. What will people do when there are no jobs? We'll have UBI and we'll have the strongest entrepreneurship and artistic discovery we've ever had. It doesn't matter what side of the politics you're on - UBI is going to be the future simply because it has to be. "Job creator" is the most intense insult I can think of to call a politician but everyone else seems to love it. Aren't we supposed to be destroying jobs as fast as possible so that automation can make our lives easier and provide higher quality of life to all? Creating jobs sounds like the worst possible path for people to take - and for CEOs like Rometty to encourage the idea that jobs are here to stay seems dangerous. Jobs are not here to stay, even as the work changes and some new jobs are created along the way, the numbers of jobs will decline to 0.
- kbenson 10y ago
  I think part of what drives your view on this is a particular idea of what a "job" is. It's likely that the meaning, in aggregate, will shift somewhat over time. Another way to look at it is that some people like working, and find having a job fulfilling, regardless of whether it pays the bills or not (many senior people get simple jobs after retiring because they like it). If we think of a "job" as a means for acquiring the resources for happiness (all too often money for basic needs, but also often a feeling of advancement and status among peers), then it's not something we necessarily want to do away with. It may be that it's less based on money and more on some other capital (social?) instead though.
- nine_k 10y ago
  So the only future you see for humans if something like Ian Banks' Culture universe, where machines completely run the world, but are benevolent enough to harbor, nourish, and otherwise care for humans?
tdb7893 10y ago
Tech never creates as many jobs as it destroys buy it doesn't have to. When there were less farming the economy compensated by creating manufacturing jobs so I don't think that the worst case scenario is a given, at least in the reasonably foreseeable future
- Pamar 10y ago
  Manufacturing jobs did not require enormously sophisticated skills (i.e. the equivalent of a PhD) to be performed. So "moving up" or "moving to" the new jobs was still possible. If automated trucks replace 1000 truckers, how many of them will be able to transition to "automated truck programmer"? (And note: they cannot move to "automated truck mechanic" because those jobs are already taken by "non-automated truck mechanics")
  - pbalau 10y ago
    Please try to not dismiss my question, but what skills does a truck driver have that can't be learned in a couple of weeks? On the other side, I agree with the manufacturing comment. There is a British documentary about building steam locomotives on Youtube. Watch what the skilled workers do, they just move things from side to side so a machine can do the hard work. Hell, I can learn to do that in a week.
    - Pamar 10y ago
      I am not dismissing it, but I don't see your point. Yes, to become a truck driver your basic qualification is "driving license" (for trucks, if your country treats it differently from driving cars). You may have extra skills, e.g. a foreign language would help you qualify for driving across the border, maybe, but it is not required. So when your main/only skill is "driving a truck" what can you pick up as a new job when "driving a truck" has been automated?
      - pbalau 10y ago
        The point is that at the moment we will replace all truck driving jobs in US, we are not going to replace 3.5 million individual workers, with skills that took a life to master, but 3.5 million jobs that a big slice of the 7 billion humans could learn to do in a couple of weeks (let's not start a debate about how far away we are from actually starting to have automatic trucks...). I don't see the point of feeling bad for these people loosing their jobs. As I don't feel bad for all the breakers that were put out of a job by the invention of air brakes (did you know that US railways took forever - and many casualties - to adopt air brakes, because they didn't want to fire breakers?) Reading and writing where a skill at some point. So was driving. But at this point, they are necessities (maybe not driving, if you live in a civilized country). We shouldn't keep jobs around just because some people really can't do anything else. I'm not saying that we shouldn't find a way for these people to live, but keeping them employed in jobs that hold humanity back, just because, is beyond stupid.
jedbrown 10y ago
The bottleneck here is education. There will always be demand for employees in the emerging industries, but the required skillset will increasingly be out of reach of the masses, partly due to the time needed to learn these skills (compounded with age and expected time working in that field) and partly due to aptitude. I think UBI is the only ethical long-term solution, but ironically, the people most passionately opposed to such programs are also the people least equipped to be competitive in the emerging economies.
- Pamar 10y ago
  Yes, this is exactly the point that I argued in a previous discussion about the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12876133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12876133
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
>History, though, has demonstrated that technological breakthroughs lead to new employment opportunities Except history has never had to content with automation and AI. Sure, back in the old days you took farmers and showed them how to make steel. Then took the steel workers and showed them how to work in a cubicle in a service economy. Now we're not that far away from the machines doing cubicle work. What's past the service economy? What's past creative and technical work? I think its a little naive to think we'll always find work for people to do. There has to be an endgame here and this might be it. Just because certain people were wrong in the past doesn't mean the end of labor as we know it won't ever happen. Considering we live in a political environment paranoid about "job stealing" and a POTUS who reflects those views, well, of course IBM mouthpieces are parroting those views. IBM doesn't want to become the posterboy for job loss via automation. They want you to think its the other guys.
- josho 10y ago
  > Except history has never had to content with automation and AI It's taken me awhile to wrap my head around this. I think I'm starting to understand the fundamental difference. In the past technology revolutionized processes. E.g. Replace horse with trains and cars. But, the human skills were never touched--they all required a driver. Whereas today, technology is reaching the point of replacing human skills. E.g. autonomous cars. So, this time as you say it is different because it is the human skills that are being revolutionized by technology.
  - pbalau 10y ago
    Air brakes replaced human breakers on trains.
    - slededit 10y ago
      The decision to brake was always made by the engineer.
wtvanhest 10y ago
Instagram is an amazing example. > My example here is Instagram, a company of a dozen staff or so when acquired, is the digital replacement of photo labs in every city. New technologies are not the job creator that they once were and I haven't read anything to contradict that statement or posit that new tech is going to drive jobs growth. Photo labs (places where physical photos were developed and edited) were replaced by digital post processing. Some of which is done by the photographers themselves, some is done in specialty shops, some is even done overseas. We can imagine that demand for the output (finished commercial photographs for products, offices etc) has likely continued to increase as the number of products, offices etc. have increased globally. While many physical labs have shut down, many digital post processing shops have started. And where they haven't started, the photogs themselves are either doing the work or hiring people to do the work for them. The net effect of digital photography is likely more jobs overall (post processing, web design, etc.) and product delivered for a lower price, but people who used to work for physical labs are completely screwed unless they completely learned a new skill. Then comes along Instagram! Well, all of the sudden, there is a new place to display high & low quality images and some new editing tools. I am sure that some professional editing is now just a simple filter, but most finished commercial photography projects are still highly post processed by paid professionals. So what about all those images? Well, Instagram has actually resulted in multiple new business models, including "Instagram models" etc. My guess (no data) is that the number of people producing commercial digital images has increased, not decreased and that instagram probably helps create demand for finished images. At the same time, instragram has likely helped launched new businesses without us even realizing it (access to random food blogs etc.) While this is all great, and increases global net jobs, it doesn't help the poor guy who owns a photo lab in Missouri. That guy/girl is completely screwed and when people talk about technology jobs, he will have his photo on CNN.com, taken by an unpaid photographer who post processes his images himself. He was/is not newsworthy, but CNN now creates clickbait. In other words, there was never going to be a professional paid to shoot that guy in the past, but now there is a new market for previously worthless content. He will be photographed and CNN will make like $3 on the post in ad revenue. This can go on and on and on and on.
- josho 10y ago
  We can argue this all day long since neither of us has data to back up our assertions. So, I'll reframe this somewhat. Technology in the past created new more efficient processes, freeing people to create new processes. That describes your example above and technology advancements largely to date. What's different now is not that we are making more efficient processes, rather technology is displacing human skills. Concretely, when the horse was replaced with a car both still required a driver. But, the driver was so much more productive thanks to the advancement in the process. However, today, it is not the process that is advanced it is the human skill that is replaced--ie. there will be no driver. So, it is the human skills that technology is encroaching on. So, anything that I can physically do, we could soon engineer a robot to do as well. Price/performance may not make sense today, but we know tech gets cheaper/better every year, labour doesn't. So, it is not processes that are being replaced but human skill. So, with this in mind, I don't think you can argue that we'll have full employment in 100 years time.
snarf21 10y ago
I agree, we have moved from farming (subsistence) to manufacturing (subsistence and consumption) to services (pure consumption). What is there to move to next? Everyone says we will create new jobs but the question is doing what? We all can't either program the robots or serve at Starbucks. (and can't that be automated away too?) Where will the 3M jobs that automated trucking will remove come from? I don't think it is all doom and gloom but it begs the question of what fuels the consumption. If employment is super low, then we need money from somewhere to continue to live, so is that universal basic income? Or will things be so automated that everything will effectively be free? Very interesting time to be alive and wonder what might be yet to come.
pbae 10y ago
Thanks for posting that quote and saving me the trouble of reading it. I thought he might have actually had some original insight to bring to this issue.

by josho 10y ago

kbenson 10y ago

> My example here is Instagram, a company of a dozen staff or so when acquired, is the digital replacement of photo labs in every city. While not trying to dispute your main point, I hardly think Instagram replaces all of what photo labs do, such as large size prints, professional correction, and specialty products such as cards and books. There are other companies online that do compete in these spaces though. I think most labs are probably getting by with their services targeted towards professionals, who want a bit more accountability than they are likely to get using a large service. That may just mean a semi-large to large lab though, so small labs likely have a hard time of it.

creaghpatr 10y ago
Instagram also enabled some business to be created or to grow based on ease of access and low/no overhead costs for its service. Instagram 'models' come to mind.

ar15saveslives 10y ago

Instagram is not replacement for photo labs, digital cameras are.

mtgx 10y ago
So smartphones? I thinking looking at this from the point of view of a single product category is too simplistic and likely inaccurate. A better way of looking at this may be "one new ecosystem of jobs is replacing another". If you look at it this way, it's possible that the new ecosystem is just as big in terms of number of jobs. I think a bigger problem may be that the pace of change is accelerating and people used to sticking to a job for a decade or longer may find themselves having to do more drastic career changes every few years.

cryptoz 10y ago

I agree. It all seems so obvious to me that I feel like I must be the fool in the room, but that can't be. Technology and progress in science changes the kinds of work we do. The processes are accelerating, and we're reaching a point where work is better done by machines. I can see no viable future for humans other than Universal Basic Income, with options for additional creativity and work unbounded by time spent doing menial tasks to earn wages for shelter and food and clothing. Yes that all sounds utopian, but what other futures are there? The masses won't have jobs - the machines will. What will people do when there are no jobs? We'll have UBI and we'll have the strongest entrepreneurship and artistic discovery we've ever had. It doesn't matter what side of the politics you're on - UBI is going to be the future simply because it has to be. "Job creator" is the most intense insult I can think of to call a politician but everyone else seems to love it. Aren't we supposed to be destroying jobs as fast as possible so that automation can make our lives easier and provide higher quality of life to all? Creating jobs sounds like the worst possible path for people to take - and for CEOs like Rometty to encourage the idea that jobs are here to stay seems dangerous. Jobs are not here to stay, even as the work changes and some new jobs are created along the way, the numbers of jobs will decline to 0.

kbenson 10y ago
I think part of what drives your view on this is a particular idea of what a "job" is. It's likely that the meaning, in aggregate, will shift somewhat over time. Another way to look at it is that some people like working, and find having a job fulfilling, regardless of whether it pays the bills or not (many senior people get simple jobs after retiring because they like it). If we think of a "job" as a means for acquiring the resources for happiness (all too often money for basic needs, but also often a feeling of advancement and status among peers), then it's not something we necessarily want to do away with. It may be that it's less based on money and more on some other capital (social?) instead though.
nine_k 10y ago
So the only future you see for humans if something like Ian Banks' Culture universe, where machines completely run the world, but are benevolent enough to harbor, nourish, and otherwise care for humans?

tdb7893 10y ago

Tech never creates as many jobs as it destroys buy it doesn't have to. When there were less farming the economy compensated by creating manufacturing jobs so I don't think that the worst case scenario is a given, at least in the reasonably foreseeable future

Pamar 10y ago
Manufacturing jobs did not require enormously sophisticated skills (i.e. the equivalent of a PhD) to be performed. So "moving up" or "moving to" the new jobs was still possible. If automated trucks replace 1000 truckers, how many of them will be able to transition to "automated truck programmer"? (And note: they cannot move to "automated truck mechanic" because those jobs are already taken by "non-automated truck mechanics")
- pbalau 10y ago
  Please try to not dismiss my question, but what skills does a truck driver have that can't be learned in a couple of weeks? On the other side, I agree with the manufacturing comment. There is a British documentary about building steam locomotives on Youtube. Watch what the skilled workers do, they just move things from side to side so a machine can do the hard work. Hell, I can learn to do that in a week.
  - Pamar 10y ago
    I am not dismissing it, but I don't see your point. Yes, to become a truck driver your basic qualification is "driving license" (for trucks, if your country treats it differently from driving cars). You may have extra skills, e.g. a foreign language would help you qualify for driving across the border, maybe, but it is not required. So when your main/only skill is "driving a truck" what can you pick up as a new job when "driving a truck" has been automated?
    - pbalau 10y ago
      The point is that at the moment we will replace all truck driving jobs in US, we are not going to replace 3.5 million individual workers, with skills that took a life to master, but 3.5 million jobs that a big slice of the 7 billion humans could learn to do in a couple of weeks (let's not start a debate about how far away we are from actually starting to have automatic trucks...). I don't see the point of feeling bad for these people loosing their jobs. As I don't feel bad for all the breakers that were put out of a job by the invention of air brakes (did you know that US railways took forever - and many casualties - to adopt air brakes, because they didn't want to fire breakers?) Reading and writing where a skill at some point. So was driving. But at this point, they are necessities (maybe not driving, if you live in a civilized country). We shouldn't keep jobs around just because some people really can't do anything else. I'm not saying that we shouldn't find a way for these people to live, but keeping them employed in jobs that hold humanity back, just because, is beyond stupid.

jedbrown 10y ago

The bottleneck here is education. There will always be demand for employees in the emerging industries, but the required skillset will increasingly be out of reach of the masses, partly due to the time needed to learn these skills (compounded with age and expected time working in that field) and partly due to aptitude. I think UBI is the only ethical long-term solution, but ironically, the people most passionately opposed to such programs are also the people least equipped to be competitive in the emerging economies.

Pamar 10y ago
Yes, this is exactly the point that I argued in a previous discussion about the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12876133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12876133

drzaiusapelord 10y ago

>History, though, has demonstrated that technological breakthroughs lead to new employment opportunities Except history has never had to content with automation and AI. Sure, back in the old days you took farmers and showed them how to make steel. Then took the steel workers and showed them how to work in a cubicle in a service economy. Now we're not that far away from the machines doing cubicle work. What's past the service economy? What's past creative and technical work? I think its a little naive to think we'll always find work for people to do. There has to be an endgame here and this might be it. Just because certain people were wrong in the past doesn't mean the end of labor as we know it won't ever happen. Considering we live in a political environment paranoid about "job stealing" and a POTUS who reflects those views, well, of course IBM mouthpieces are parroting those views. IBM doesn't want to become the posterboy for job loss via automation. They want you to think its the other guys.

josho 10y ago
> Except history has never had to content with automation and AI It's taken me awhile to wrap my head around this. I think I'm starting to understand the fundamental difference. In the past technology revolutionized processes. E.g. Replace horse with trains and cars. But, the human skills were never touched--they all required a driver. Whereas today, technology is reaching the point of replacing human skills. E.g. autonomous cars. So, this time as you say it is different because it is the human skills that are being revolutionized by technology.
- pbalau 10y ago
  Air brakes replaced human breakers on trains.
  - slededit 10y ago
    The decision to brake was always made by the engineer.

wtvanhest 10y ago

Instagram is an amazing example. > My example here is Instagram, a company of a dozen staff or so when acquired, is the digital replacement of photo labs in every city. New technologies are not the job creator that they once were and I haven't read anything to contradict that statement or posit that new tech is going to drive jobs growth. Photo labs (places where physical photos were developed and edited) were replaced by digital post processing. Some of which is done by the photographers themselves, some is done in specialty shops, some is even done overseas. We can imagine that demand for the output (finished commercial photographs for products, offices etc) has likely continued to increase as the number of products, offices etc. have increased globally. While many physical labs have shut down, many digital post processing shops have started. And where they haven't started, the photogs themselves are either doing the work or hiring people to do the work for them. The net effect of digital photography is likely more jobs overall (post processing, web design, etc.) and product delivered for a lower price, but people who used to work for physical labs are completely screwed unless they completely learned a new skill. Then comes along Instagram! Well, all of the sudden, there is a new place to display high & low quality images and some new editing tools. I am sure that some professional editing is now just a simple filter, but most finished commercial photography projects are still highly post processed by paid professionals. So what about all those images? Well, Instagram has actually resulted in multiple new business models, including "Instagram models" etc. My guess (no data) is that the number of people producing commercial digital images has increased, not decreased and that instagram probably helps create demand for finished images. At the same time, instragram has likely helped launched new businesses without us even realizing it (access to random food blogs etc.) While this is all great, and increases global net jobs, it doesn't help the poor guy who owns a photo lab in Missouri. That guy/girl is completely screwed and when people talk about technology jobs, he will have his photo on CNN.com, taken by an unpaid photographer who post processes his images himself. He was/is not newsworthy, but CNN now creates clickbait. In other words, there was never going to be a professional paid to shoot that guy in the past, but now there is a new market for previously worthless content. He will be photographed and CNN will make like $3 on the post in ad revenue. This can go on and on and on and on.

josho 10y ago
We can argue this all day long since neither of us has data to back up our assertions. So, I'll reframe this somewhat. Technology in the past created new more efficient processes, freeing people to create new processes. That describes your example above and technology advancements largely to date. What's different now is not that we are making more efficient processes, rather technology is displacing human skills. Concretely, when the horse was replaced with a car both still required a driver. But, the driver was so much more productive thanks to the advancement in the process. However, today, it is not the process that is advanced it is the human skill that is replaced--ie. there will be no driver. So, it is the human skills that technology is encroaching on. So, anything that I can physically do, we could soon engineer a robot to do as well. Price/performance may not make sense today, but we know tech gets cheaper/better every year, labour doesn't. So, it is not processes that are being replaced but human skill. So, with this in mind, I don't think you can argue that we'll have full employment in 100 years time.

snarf21 10y ago

I agree, we have moved from farming (subsistence) to manufacturing (subsistence and consumption) to services (pure consumption). What is there to move to next? Everyone says we will create new jobs but the question is doing what? We all can't either program the robots or serve at Starbucks. (and can't that be automated away too?) Where will the 3M jobs that automated trucking will remove come from? I don't think it is all doom and gloom but it begs the question of what fuels the consumption. If employment is super low, then we need money from somewhere to continue to live, so is that universal basic income? Or will things be so automated that everything will effectively be free? Very interesting time to be alive and wonder what might be yet to come.

pbae 10y ago

Thanks for posting that quote and saving me the trouble of reading it. I thought he might have actually had some original insight to bring to this issue.