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There's a lot believers in technological unemployment here on HN and one thing I think that viewpoint misses is just how darn resilient humans are to changes in

by cjlars 10y ago

There's a lot believers in technological unemployment here on HN and one thing I think that viewpoint misses is just how darn resilient humans are to changes in the economy. In the past 150 years, we've seen human manual labor replaced by mechanical labor. Think about that -- a lot of early California settlers walked here, and now you're commanding power roughly equivalent to 100 horses when you hop into your car. Agricultural employment went from 90%+ of the population to ~1% over a few generations. People using computers at work went from less than 1% to complete ubiquity in 30 years. And against all of this, unemployment is still near its target rate. Is the large scale rollout of predictive algorithms really a bigger wave than those that have come previously?

youdounderstand 10y ago
Unemployment is only part of it. What about wages?
- cjlars 10y ago
  It's all speculation. Increases in productivity (GDP per hour worked) are typically accompanied by rising wages. So you're likely to see job losses in impacted industries accompanied by rising wages in aggregate. It's not obvious which direction inequality would head.
  - cmurf 10y ago
    It's not speculation, stagnant wages is a real problem we've been experiencing for decades. As far as I know, no one disputes this fact, it's just that no one really knows what to do about it.
ergothus 10y ago
unemployment calculated how? As I understand it, we measure based on how many people are looking for work and have it. So if our social safety nets (retirement) and cultural expectations have kept pace with people being employed less, (be it in hours/day, hours/week, or just what years you'll be working), I'd expect unemployment numbers to not show the effects of technological unemployment. Of course, it's too simplistic to just assert what I have and ignore forces on the other side (for example, dual income households are now the norm). That is, however, my point: Looking at the unemployment numbers is a poor measure of any effects upon people's ability to work as it has so much else lumped in there.
athenot 10y ago
There is also a large proportion of people whose standard of living is a step back from being self-sufficient modest farmers living with family off their own land. I'll all for technological advancement. As a society, we've accomplished marvelous things. But it's useful to remember whether individuals are actually improving their standard of living or not. > now you're commanding power roughly equivalent to 100 horses when you hop into your car The flipside of this is that (for most US) you must have a car to perform basic necessities such as purchasing food to eat. Food that would have otherwise been in your vegetable garden/chicken coop/pond. Our society is immensely better for well-off city dwellers, but there are large portions of the population whose level of freedom is only slighly better than servitude.
- cutler 10y ago
  You're telling me. My partner here in London works full-time as a cleaning supervisor and after she has paid her rent, bills and travel costs she has a paltry £65 with which to shop for food. And that's renting a room in a house. A 1-bed flat for her is out of the question. I think my parents in the early 60s were better off than her in real terms.
burkaman 10y ago
The Industrial Revolution caused a lot of suffering for a lot of people. I don't think "eventually society adapted" is good enough. The point is that we need to learn from history and develop responsible policies so that we don't screw over most of the planet with massive inequality. That doesn't mean technology and AI are bad, just that we have the benefit of hindsight and we don't have to just blindly plunge ahead and hope it all works out eventually.
- drcode 10y ago
  The problem with these sort of blanket policies is that they often have unexpected consequences- For instance, if we hand out lots of checks to the underemployed it MIGHT make their lives better or it MIGHT cause macroeconomic disruptions tied to the labor market that triggers inflation on basic staples, making the underemployed worse off than they were before the new policies. I'm sympathetic do the idea of saying "we've go to do something" but history unfortunately shows instances where "doing something" is often worse than "doing nothing" so you have to be very very careful.
- cjlars 10y ago
  > In 1760, the lowest 65 percent received about 29 percent of total income in Britain; in 1860, their share was down only four percentage points to 25 percent. So the lowest 65 percent were substantially better off, with an increase in average real income of more than 70 percent. [1] Despite what Dickens may have written, the period was marked by faster gains for the lower classes than the previous century. And perhaps in part due to what he's written, we now have a social safety net -- I'll admit the quality of this system could be improved. What concerns me is making broad, major social changes in anticipation of a completely speculative (and very specific) view of the future. I'd be curious about your answer to this: If conditions for the bottom third improve -- instead of falter -- as this trend develops, does that change your policy recommendations (about presumably, UBI)? [1] http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/IndustrialRevolutionandtheStandardofLiving.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/IndustrialRevolutionandth...
  - burkaman 10y ago
yawz 10y ago
The extent of adaptability depends on the scale and the pace of the change. Arguably, every generation is experiencing more drastic changes than the previous one. And if the ML/DL/AI combo could deliver on its promises, there aren't many job sectors that can't be improved(!). E.g. taxi drivers' becoming Uber/Lyft drivers is one thing, getting rid of drivers in cars/trucks is another.
chaostheory 10y ago
Yes, one example I like to point out is that there used to be people who's sole job was to tap on your windows in the weekday mornings to wake you up, before alarm clocks were cheap & affordable to everyone.
vthallam 10y ago
True. Humans definitely will find a way to figure out what to do next if AI takes away lot of jobs. But the important thing is that the rate of which these jobs go. With the recent advances in deep learning or AI in general, the rate of loss of jobs across manufacturing, logistics, agriculture or construction is way more and i don't think we are ready to do something about it.
- ahartman00 10y ago
  "rate of loss of jobs across ... construction" Where are you getting that information??? "Skilled labor shortage will continue to plague construction companies" [1] 1. http://www.constructiondive.com/news/10-construction-industry-trends-to-watch-in-2016/411402/ http://www.constructiondive.com/news/10-construction-industr...
mariusz79 10y ago
People tend to forget about one thing - in previous industrial revolutions jobs changed, but people were added and removed from the pool slowly and predictably. This time automatons not only take jobs from people, they are also in a sense added to the economy as additional workers. Think about it this way - previously if someone came up with a more efficient way to do a given job, out of 10 people 9 lost employment, but you still needed that one person to do the job. With automation you get rid of 10 people, and add one additional "worker" to the pool of workers. So now 10 people have to compete not only with themselves but also with one robot that can do job of 10 people.
- cmurf 10y ago
  I thoroughly expect anti-automation protectionism to emerge, akin to the H1B protectionist policy. https://www.engadget.com/2017/01/16/new-york-driver-groups-push-for-autonomous-car-ban/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/01/16/new-york-driver-groups-p...
  - mariusz79 10y ago
    it will be tried, but it's really impossible to implement. first reason - you can't force all countries to do the same. second - how do you define automation? will i need to pay taxes on scripts I use to automate some of my jobs? Will I need to pay automation tax on my roomba? or dishwasher? If the robot does not replace any worker, but makes job or current workers easier and faster will it be taxed?
    - cmurf 10y ago
      No different than how H1B's are implemented, you'll see a "no automated cars for hire" law, if necessary it'll happen city by city if the political will isn't there Federally. It will be a very specific proscription, likely very industry specific, because only a large number of impacted workers will have the political clout to establish such laws. And it might even be only city by city, rather than at a Federal level. There are ways in which H1B is imperfect, doesn't work, and isn't fair. There will be ways in which making automated cars for hire illegal will be imperfect, doesn't work, and isn't fair. But those attributes haven't driven the former into the dustbin yet. If anything it's about to get stronger under the current political climate, so there's no reason to think the later won't be successful, at the least as a delay tactic so that automation isn't as disruptive as hypothesized. Also, as a country establishes a more isolationist attitude, it matters less what the rest of the world does, and the rhetoric right now is distinctly a more isolationist attitude.
cmurf 10y ago
This is sufficiently simplistic to be tone deaf to what's going on. The rhetoric has been "jobs!" but this isn't a complaint that there are no jobs; the complaint is two fold, a.) lack of work that utilize people's interest and/or skills b.) lack of work that pays what people expect or even need to get ahead. Wage stagnation is a real problem. It's a kind of vectorized unemployment where everyone in the middle class on down is partially unemployed through a combination of more part time work rather than full time, and stagnant wages. The broadness of the problem makes it seem like we have good employment numbers, but wage stagnation is a big problem, especially in contrast to the rise in cost of living, in particular housing.
- cutler 10y ago
  I don't hear much discussion of real income in this thread. The working class in the UK and USA are being impoverished from 2 directions at once - plummeting real income and escalating property prices/rents. I'd like to see some data which factors in all of these variables.
shmageggy 10y ago
There's a crucial difference this time around, though. After the industrial revolution, there were still plenty of jobs that people could do that machines were no good at. By definition, human-level AI is as good as or better than a human at some task. Therefore, an AI revolution means, by definition, that there won't be any jobs that can be done by a human that can't be automated. Adaptability won't help, since there will be nothing left to adapt to.
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
>And against all of this, unemployment is still near its target rate. Unemployment is a synthetic measure. A mom working 39 hour shifts at Walmart so she doesn't get benefits isn't the same as a cush office job that's rolling in benefits. When we look at post-industrial societies, we look at late stage job creation being problematic. There's a lot of Mcjobs, temp jobs, and contract jobs. Technically those people are employed, but its not sustainable for them. Yes, the US has done well but its an exception for the most part due to the massive economy at work here and the relative lack of competition, until recently, from other regions. French youth unemployment hit 26% a few months ago. Spain and Greece are just as bad, if not worse. Jobs in many European economies are lifer jobs because if you leave, your chances of getting a new one is slim. The real question is, when is the camel's back going to break. Another good career job replaced by a McJob thanks to automation won't change the unemployment stats, but it will make people unhappy. It will drive down the economy with less spending and other issues. In other words, wages matter, not just employment numbers. I would not assume we are sitting pretty right now. This dam is going to break. Arguably, the surprise win of anti-automation, anti-liberal, anti-globalization, and anti-intellectual candidates in the UK and the USA are the first signs of a major fault.
Houshalter 10y ago
Yes, this time it is different. I like the comparison to horses. Steam engines and trains threatened to replace horses in the mid 1800s. A lot of things that were previously done by horses were replaced with trains and steam engines. Yet the horse population grew, and cities remained full of horses. There were countless transportation innovations in the 1800s, from canals to streetcars and omnibuses to bicycles. But the horse population kept growing and showed no signs of being threatened by this "automation". Whenever something took a horses job, there will always be other jobs that technology can't do yet, right? Then the car was invented, and within 2 decades the horse population crashed. Suddenly the price of feeding and maintaining a horse was much higher than the alternative. There is no law of economics that says the supply and demand of a good can't fall below the cost of maintaining it. Or that wages can't fall below minimum, in our case. Robotics has made incredible advancements over the past 50 years or more. They have taken over entire factories, doing countless routine tasks previously done by humans. But they are still very limited. They have 0 intelligence - they can't see, they can't learn. They can only perform a rote series of movements. So there is still tons of work available for humans. But with recent advancements in machine learning, this is about to change. A robot will soon be able to be trained to flip burgers, or drive a car, or take a customer's order, etc, etc. I can not imagine any jobs that an average, unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do. Maybe skilled professions will be protected - I can't imagine robots being able to program computers for awhile. But the vast majority of humans can not be trained to be computer programmers.
- kbenson 10y ago
  Horses are tools that people used. When there's no more use for the tool, it's usage may be reduces. People are not just tools, they are the reason we have an economy in the first place. A solution in some form will have to be put forth if one doesn't emerge. Another way of looking at this is that we weren't ever under threat of millions of displaced horses rising up and overthrowing the system. Since that is a possible outcome of too many unhappy people, changes will be made to ensure people have some base level of happiness on average to prevent that. It's one of the things that makes our current government as stable as it is - the need to respond to the people.
fabianhjr 10y ago
> how darn resilient humans are to changes in the economy Survivorship Bias; Not everyone is thriving under the current circumstances, not everyone was thriving during the Industrial Revolution or the Digital Revolution.
agumonkey 10y ago
I don't think the change is linear here. Industrial revolution pushed people behind desks because human still had brains while machines were dumb (sic). Then desk jobs were split between computerized backend and social interface done by people; this is what is gonna fall soon. Comptuers can now listen and answer to you; gather real world analog / organic data; rather than only dealing with structured data as since the 60s. Also, lots societies needs don't even require Alpha Go level of AI; and computer will make these tasks automatic. And these class of worker won't beat machines logic until a deep learning (sic sic) phase.
briholt 10y ago
The undeniable math is that machine productivity will grow exponentially faster than human productivity. Organics have had a few billion year head start on machines, so it's of no consequence that we've been able to scramble in front of our metallic friends for their few-hundred-year infancy. The day will come when machine productivity dwarfs that of humans by orders of magnitude. It would be absurd to task humans with new jobs when we have limitless machines that are infinitely smarter, stronger, and more reliable. The concept of a "new job" won't even exist because machines will immediately meet any new demand before humans are even aware it exists.
- cjlars 10y ago
  > The day will come when machine productivity dwarfs that of humans by orders of magnitude It already does. Have you tried to build a house without power tools? Strong-form, self perpetuating, Terminator style AI has not even been invented yet and you're jumping to the closing chapters.
  - briholt 10y ago
    This is a discussion about closing chapters isn't it? Are we merely disputing the date on which a billion power screwdrivers can direct themselves and then Instagram pics of their accomplishments? I give it 50-150 years.
    - cjlars 10y ago
      No. We're (or I, at least, am) debating whether the concept of 'new job' continues to exist.
  - Retric 10y ago
    I don't think several orders of magnitude is really true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P73REgj-3UE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P73REgj-3UE is slower than a modern house, but not that slow. Further, with just hand tools the Amish where known for raising a barn in one day.
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
As work became less and less physical, people generally retreated into more cognitive-based jobs. Now it seems that AI might be able to handle any mind-based job just fine, in a not too distant future. If that is indeed the case, what will human workers do?
Retric 10y ago
The 'unemployment rate' is fictional, and it takes a lot of hand waving to get to 5% unemployment rate. Some of which justified, but it's only useful for year to year comparisons not decade to decade as the number keep changing. Right now there are 121.5 million people working full time in the US. The population is 320 million people and 250 million adults and 200 million adults under 65. So actual employment is around 50% depending on how you slice it.
- cjlars 10y ago
  It does not take any hand waving -- you're trying to redefine a standard variable. U-3 is the 'headline' unemployment number which is near 5% right now. There are plenty of other ways to calculate it, including at least 5 published by the BLS. All of them tell the same story: people who want jobs, historically and barring recession, have been by and large able to get them, even if the job itself is not ideal. Your 50% number is more commonly called the 'labor force participation rate' and it's near 63% right now [1], but has trended down for the past few decades. I would argue (as Keynes did) that if work force participation falls and standards of living continues to rise (or stay flat) then society is having good results. [1] http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/94333000-not-labor-force-labor-force-participation-628 http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/94333000-not...
  - Retric 10y ago
    U3 has political value, but from say a military standpoint it's not that useful. The reality is the employment rate is not 1 - U3. Further just looking at the published unemployment rate in the US there has been several changes to the definition over time. On top of that other countries use different metrics. So no you can point to U3 and call it a day.
retube 10y ago
> Is the large scale rollout of predictive algorithms really a bigger wave than those that have come previously? No of course it isn't. But because it's called "artificial intelligence" instead of "conditional probability" or "regression" or something people think otherwise. The reality is that this kind of technology will make us more productive, bring down the cost of products and services and make them available to a mass market, in exactly the same way literally every tech advance has done. Of course some jobs and disciplines will be lost, but they will be replaced with different, higher skilled jobs. Just look at the range of disciplines and jobs that the web has created over the last 20 years. I mean just look at Google. The world's largest "AI" platform has spawned entire industries. No evidence this trend won't continue.
- RA_Fisher 10y ago
  It seems like there's significant overlap between people that are afraid of AI and those that think e^x has a "knee in the curve." It's amazing they're not called out considering "the derivative of e^x is e^x" is memorized by HS calculus students daily. - [1] Elon Musk https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/702534707464896512 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/702534707464896512? - [2] Kurzweil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near#Exponential_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near#Expone... - [3] Gates apparently endorsed the book: http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/kurzweil.htm http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/kurzweil.htm
  - orangutango 10y ago
    I like this visual explanation of the illusion/fallacy: http://www.abarry.org/knee.htm http://www.abarry.org/knee.htm
    - RA_Fisher 10y ago
      Is the group-think in our industry really so bad that we can't call Musk on outing himself as failing basic calculus?
flukus 10y ago
One things that's different is that we've reached consumption limits. I can't eat more or much better. I don't have time to watch more TV and movies. I don't need more stuff or services. If I don't need more then there won't be jobs available to people to create more.
megablast 10y ago
There are two camps as I see it. People who recognise the threat from cheap AI and robot. And people who think there is some hand-wavy magical force that will ensure that people will always be employed. You can see that doesn't work now, you can see low income jobs are down, and while they are rising in China and India, those people are already being replaced by robots.
mncharity 10y ago
Examples of changes which may impact "everyone will lose their job" predictions: * Delocalization of work. The need for physical proximity is still a pervasive bottleneck. As that further relaxes (VR, remote work), what changes? Think "N weeks to get there" Roman empire vs current "call/email/tweet the world". Maybe a world without commutes? Without two-body problems? * More richly interwoven human/machine-learning hybrid work processes. Say CEO compensation plummets as you get jit virtual "CEO"s. What happens when most businesses can afford competent leadership? Management? Even if the number of businesses increases by an order of magnitude? Or three? * What does an economy look like if most people are scrambling, looking for opportunities, not working n-hour "jobs"? Where you can again pick up a "help wanted" "paper", and have a work a few hours later? Yes, it's easy to imagine dystopias. Especially with resurgent aristocracy, regulatory capture, a patent system I expect to remain broken my entire professional career, and so on. But it's also easy to forget just how much potential change is inbound. Modulo the usual dangers of stagnation and wreckage, "you've not seen anything yet". Maybe.
norea-armozel 10y ago
There's some big flaws in the argument that we'll find new jobs to employ many thousands of industrial workers in. First, retraining someone in their 40s or 50s that have been working at Coleman or some other firm isn't going to likely happen. Mostly because the workers themselves either never completed the equivalent of high school or barely got by. Most of that retraining would have to be in complex tasks and not old fashioned data entry (those kinds of jobs are the ones that are being replaced by software automation and auditing). So, that means fewer still can make the leap from working on a manufacturing line to software development or some other skills based position. You just can't drop the equivalent of Homer Simpson into a code camp. It's just not going to happen. Second, there's not enough demand for such people in such a new economy. For example, I've known people who've worked on all kinds of software from games to enterprise development and all instances when a product was finished the amount of staff ever needed to maintain it was many times smaller than what they had during development. It doesn't matter if you employ waterfall or agile development, if your product only needs 20 people versus 200 people to maintain a product after it's release and future releases then you're not going to hire 200 people ever again. Third, many modern jobs are shifting to what seems like contract work via employment agencies like Volt and Man Power which bothers me because the benefits are greatly reduced without the equivalent increase in wages to offset this (especially in healthcare). Unless there's something I'm not aware of that could absorb all those thousands of people, I'm just not buying this theory that we'll just create new jobs out of thin air. Past performance is never an indicator of future returns.

by cjlars 10y ago

youdounderstand 10y ago

Unemployment is only part of it. What about wages?

cjlars 10y ago
It's all speculation. Increases in productivity (GDP per hour worked) are typically accompanied by rising wages. So you're likely to see job losses in impacted industries accompanied by rising wages in aggregate. It's not obvious which direction inequality would head.
- cmurf 10y ago
  It's not speculation, stagnant wages is a real problem we've been experiencing for decades. As far as I know, no one disputes this fact, it's just that no one really knows what to do about it.

ergothus 10y ago

unemployment calculated how? As I understand it, we measure based on how many people are looking for work and have it. So if our social safety nets (retirement) and cultural expectations have kept pace with people being employed less, (be it in hours/day, hours/week, or just what years you'll be working), I'd expect unemployment numbers to not show the effects of technological unemployment. Of course, it's too simplistic to just assert what I have and ignore forces on the other side (for example, dual income households are now the norm). That is, however, my point: Looking at the unemployment numbers is a poor measure of any effects upon people's ability to work as it has so much else lumped in there.

athenot 10y ago

There is also a large proportion of people whose standard of living is a step back from being self-sufficient modest farmers living with family off their own land. I'll all for technological advancement. As a society, we've accomplished marvelous things. But it's useful to remember whether individuals are actually improving their standard of living or not. > now you're commanding power roughly equivalent to 100 horses when you hop into your car The flipside of this is that (for most US) you must have a car to perform basic necessities such as purchasing food to eat. Food that would have otherwise been in your vegetable garden/chicken coop/pond. Our society is immensely better for well-off city dwellers, but there are large portions of the population whose level of freedom is only slighly better than servitude.

cutler 10y ago
You're telling me. My partner here in London works full-time as a cleaning supervisor and after she has paid her rent, bills and travel costs she has a paltry £65 with which to shop for food. And that's renting a room in a house. A 1-bed flat for her is out of the question. I think my parents in the early 60s were better off than her in real terms.

burkaman 10y ago

The Industrial Revolution caused a lot of suffering for a lot of people. I don't think "eventually society adapted" is good enough. The point is that we need to learn from history and develop responsible policies so that we don't screw over most of the planet with massive inequality. That doesn't mean technology and AI are bad, just that we have the benefit of hindsight and we don't have to just blindly plunge ahead and hope it all works out eventually.

drcode 10y ago
The problem with these sort of blanket policies is that they often have unexpected consequences- For instance, if we hand out lots of checks to the underemployed it MIGHT make their lives better or it MIGHT cause macroeconomic disruptions tied to the labor market that triggers inflation on basic staples, making the underemployed worse off than they were before the new policies. I'm sympathetic do the idea of saying "we've go to do something" but history unfortunately shows instances where "doing something" is often worse than "doing nothing" so you have to be very very careful.
cjlars 10y ago
> In 1760, the lowest 65 percent received about 29 percent of total income in Britain; in 1860, their share was down only four percentage points to 25 percent. So the lowest 65 percent were substantially better off, with an increase in average real income of more than 70 percent. [1] Despite what Dickens may have written, the period was marked by faster gains for the lower classes than the previous century. And perhaps in part due to what he's written, we now have a social safety net -- I'll admit the quality of this system could be improved. What concerns me is making broad, major social changes in anticipation of a completely speculative (and very specific) view of the future. I'd be curious about your answer to this: If conditions for the bottom third improve -- instead of falter -- as this trend develops, does that change your policy recommendations (about presumably, UBI)? [1] http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/IndustrialRevolutionandtheStandardofLiving.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/IndustrialRevolutionandth...
- burkaman 10y ago

yawz 10y ago

The extent of adaptability depends on the scale and the pace of the change. Arguably, every generation is experiencing more drastic changes than the previous one. And if the ML/DL/AI combo could deliver on its promises, there aren't many job sectors that can't be improved(!). E.g. taxi drivers' becoming Uber/Lyft drivers is one thing, getting rid of drivers in cars/trucks is another.

chaostheory 10y ago

Yes, one example I like to point out is that there used to be people who's sole job was to tap on your windows in the weekday mornings to wake you up, before alarm clocks were cheap & affordable to everyone.

vthallam 10y ago

True. Humans definitely will find a way to figure out what to do next if AI takes away lot of jobs. But the important thing is that the rate of which these jobs go. With the recent advances in deep learning or AI in general, the rate of loss of jobs across manufacturing, logistics, agriculture or construction is way more and i don't think we are ready to do something about it.

ahartman00 10y ago
"rate of loss of jobs across ... construction" Where are you getting that information??? "Skilled labor shortage will continue to plague construction companies" [1] 1. http://www.constructiondive.com/news/10-construction-industry-trends-to-watch-in-2016/411402/ http://www.constructiondive.com/news/10-construction-industr...

mariusz79 10y ago

People tend to forget about one thing - in previous industrial revolutions jobs changed, but people were added and removed from the pool slowly and predictably. This time automatons not only take jobs from people, they are also in a sense added to the economy as additional workers. Think about it this way - previously if someone came up with a more efficient way to do a given job, out of 10 people 9 lost employment, but you still needed that one person to do the job. With automation you get rid of 10 people, and add one additional "worker" to the pool of workers. So now 10 people have to compete not only with themselves but also with one robot that can do job of 10 people.

cmurf 10y ago
I thoroughly expect anti-automation protectionism to emerge, akin to the H1B protectionist policy. https://www.engadget.com/2017/01/16/new-york-driver-groups-push-for-autonomous-car-ban/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/01/16/new-york-driver-groups-p...
- mariusz79 10y ago
  it will be tried, but it's really impossible to implement. first reason - you can't force all countries to do the same. second - how do you define automation? will i need to pay taxes on scripts I use to automate some of my jobs? Will I need to pay automation tax on my roomba? or dishwasher? If the robot does not replace any worker, but makes job or current workers easier and faster will it be taxed?
  - cmurf 10y ago
    No different than how H1B's are implemented, you'll see a "no automated cars for hire" law, if necessary it'll happen city by city if the political will isn't there Federally. It will be a very specific proscription, likely very industry specific, because only a large number of impacted workers will have the political clout to establish such laws. And it might even be only city by city, rather than at a Federal level. There are ways in which H1B is imperfect, doesn't work, and isn't fair. There will be ways in which making automated cars for hire illegal will be imperfect, doesn't work, and isn't fair. But those attributes haven't driven the former into the dustbin yet. If anything it's about to get stronger under the current political climate, so there's no reason to think the later won't be successful, at the least as a delay tactic so that automation isn't as disruptive as hypothesized. Also, as a country establishes a more isolationist attitude, it matters less what the rest of the world does, and the rhetoric right now is distinctly a more isolationist attitude.

cmurf 10y ago

This is sufficiently simplistic to be tone deaf to what's going on. The rhetoric has been "jobs!" but this isn't a complaint that there are no jobs; the complaint is two fold, a.) lack of work that utilize people's interest and/or skills b.) lack of work that pays what people expect or even need to get ahead. Wage stagnation is a real problem. It's a kind of vectorized unemployment where everyone in the middle class on down is partially unemployed through a combination of more part time work rather than full time, and stagnant wages. The broadness of the problem makes it seem like we have good employment numbers, but wage stagnation is a big problem, especially in contrast to the rise in cost of living, in particular housing.

cutler 10y ago
I don't hear much discussion of real income in this thread. The working class in the UK and USA are being impoverished from 2 directions at once - plummeting real income and escalating property prices/rents. I'd like to see some data which factors in all of these variables.

shmageggy 10y ago

There's a crucial difference this time around, though. After the industrial revolution, there were still plenty of jobs that people could do that machines were no good at. By definition, human-level AI is as good as or better than a human at some task. Therefore, an AI revolution means, by definition, that there won't be any jobs that can be done by a human that can't be automated. Adaptability won't help, since there will be nothing left to adapt to.

drzaiusapelord 10y ago

>And against all of this, unemployment is still near its target rate. Unemployment is a synthetic measure. A mom working 39 hour shifts at Walmart so she doesn't get benefits isn't the same as a cush office job that's rolling in benefits. When we look at post-industrial societies, we look at late stage job creation being problematic. There's a lot of Mcjobs, temp jobs, and contract jobs. Technically those people are employed, but its not sustainable for them. Yes, the US has done well but its an exception for the most part due to the massive economy at work here and the relative lack of competition, until recently, from other regions. French youth unemployment hit 26% a few months ago. Spain and Greece are just as bad, if not worse. Jobs in many European economies are lifer jobs because if you leave, your chances of getting a new one is slim. The real question is, when is the camel's back going to break. Another good career job replaced by a McJob thanks to automation won't change the unemployment stats, but it will make people unhappy. It will drive down the economy with less spending and other issues. In other words, wages matter, not just employment numbers. I would not assume we are sitting pretty right now. This dam is going to break. Arguably, the surprise win of anti-automation, anti-liberal, anti-globalization, and anti-intellectual candidates in the UK and the USA are the first signs of a major fault.

Houshalter 10y ago

Yes, this time it is different. I like the comparison to horses. Steam engines and trains threatened to replace horses in the mid 1800s. A lot of things that were previously done by horses were replaced with trains and steam engines. Yet the horse population grew, and cities remained full of horses. There were countless transportation innovations in the 1800s, from canals to streetcars and omnibuses to bicycles. But the horse population kept growing and showed no signs of being threatened by this "automation". Whenever something took a horses job, there will always be other jobs that technology can't do yet, right? Then the car was invented, and within 2 decades the horse population crashed. Suddenly the price of feeding and maintaining a horse was much higher than the alternative. There is no law of economics that says the supply and demand of a good can't fall below the cost of maintaining it. Or that wages can't fall below minimum, in our case. Robotics has made incredible advancements over the past 50 years or more. They have taken over entire factories, doing countless routine tasks previously done by humans. But they are still very limited. They have 0 intelligence - they can't see, they can't learn. They can only perform a rote series of movements. So there is still tons of work available for humans. But with recent advancements in machine learning, this is about to change. A robot will soon be able to be trained to flip burgers, or drive a car, or take a customer's order, etc, etc. I can not imagine any jobs that an average, unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do. Maybe skilled professions will be protected - I can't imagine robots being able to program computers for awhile. But the vast majority of humans can not be trained to be computer programmers.

kbenson 10y ago
Horses are tools that people used. When there's no more use for the tool, it's usage may be reduces. People are not just tools, they are the reason we have an economy in the first place. A solution in some form will have to be put forth if one doesn't emerge. Another way of looking at this is that we weren't ever under threat of millions of displaced horses rising up and overthrowing the system. Since that is a possible outcome of too many unhappy people, changes will be made to ensure people have some base level of happiness on average to prevent that. It's one of the things that makes our current government as stable as it is - the need to respond to the people.

fabianhjr 10y ago

> how darn resilient humans are to changes in the economy Survivorship Bias; Not everyone is thriving under the current circumstances, not everyone was thriving during the Industrial Revolution or the Digital Revolution.

agumonkey 10y ago

I don't think the change is linear here. Industrial revolution pushed people behind desks because human still had brains while machines were dumb (sic). Then desk jobs were split between computerized backend and social interface done by people; this is what is gonna fall soon. Comptuers can now listen and answer to you; gather real world analog / organic data; rather than only dealing with structured data as since the 60s. Also, lots societies needs don't even require Alpha Go level of AI; and computer will make these tasks automatic. And these class of worker won't beat machines logic until a deep learning (sic sic) phase.

briholt 10y ago

The undeniable math is that machine productivity will grow exponentially faster than human productivity. Organics have had a few billion year head start on machines, so it's of no consequence that we've been able to scramble in front of our metallic friends for their few-hundred-year infancy. The day will come when machine productivity dwarfs that of humans by orders of magnitude. It would be absurd to task humans with new jobs when we have limitless machines that are infinitely smarter, stronger, and more reliable. The concept of a "new job" won't even exist because machines will immediately meet any new demand before humans are even aware it exists.

cjlars 10y ago
> The day will come when machine productivity dwarfs that of humans by orders of magnitude It already does. Have you tried to build a house without power tools? Strong-form, self perpetuating, Terminator style AI has not even been invented yet and you're jumping to the closing chapters.
- briholt 10y ago
  This is a discussion about closing chapters isn't it? Are we merely disputing the date on which a billion power screwdrivers can direct themselves and then Instagram pics of their accomplishments? I give it 50-150 years.
  - cjlars 10y ago
    No. We're (or I, at least, am) debating whether the concept of 'new job' continues to exist.
- Retric 10y ago
  I don't think several orders of magnitude is really true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P73REgj-3UE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P73REgj-3UE is slower than a modern house, but not that slow. Further, with just hand tools the Amish where known for raising a barn in one day.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago

As work became less and less physical, people generally retreated into more cognitive-based jobs. Now it seems that AI might be able to handle any mind-based job just fine, in a not too distant future. If that is indeed the case, what will human workers do?

Retric 10y ago

The 'unemployment rate' is fictional, and it takes a lot of hand waving to get to 5% unemployment rate. Some of which justified, but it's only useful for year to year comparisons not decade to decade as the number keep changing. Right now there are 121.5 million people working full time in the US. The population is 320 million people and 250 million adults and 200 million adults under 65. So actual employment is around 50% depending on how you slice it.

cjlars 10y ago
It does not take any hand waving -- you're trying to redefine a standard variable. U-3 is the 'headline' unemployment number which is near 5% right now. There are plenty of other ways to calculate it, including at least 5 published by the BLS. All of them tell the same story: people who want jobs, historically and barring recession, have been by and large able to get them, even if the job itself is not ideal. Your 50% number is more commonly called the 'labor force participation rate' and it's near 63% right now [1], but has trended down for the past few decades. I would argue (as Keynes did) that if work force participation falls and standards of living continues to rise (or stay flat) then society is having good results. [1] http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/94333000-not-labor-force-labor-force-participation-628 http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/94333000-not...
- Retric 10y ago
  U3 has political value, but from say a military standpoint it's not that useful. The reality is the employment rate is not 1 - U3. Further just looking at the published unemployment rate in the US there has been several changes to the definition over time. On top of that other countries use different metrics. So no you can point to U3 and call it a day.

retube 10y ago

> Is the large scale rollout of predictive algorithms really a bigger wave than those that have come previously? No of course it isn't. But because it's called "artificial intelligence" instead of "conditional probability" or "regression" or something people think otherwise. The reality is that this kind of technology will make us more productive, bring down the cost of products and services and make them available to a mass market, in exactly the same way literally every tech advance has done. Of course some jobs and disciplines will be lost, but they will be replaced with different, higher skilled jobs. Just look at the range of disciplines and jobs that the web has created over the last 20 years. I mean just look at Google. The world's largest "AI" platform has spawned entire industries. No evidence this trend won't continue.

RA_Fisher 10y ago
It seems like there's significant overlap between people that are afraid of AI and those that think e^x has a "knee in the curve." It's amazing they're not called out considering "the derivative of e^x is e^x" is memorized by HS calculus students daily. - [1] Elon Musk https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/702534707464896512 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/702534707464896512? - [2] Kurzweil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near#Exponential_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near#Expone... - [3] Gates apparently endorsed the book: http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/kurzweil.htm http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/kurzweil.htm
- orangutango 10y ago
  I like this visual explanation of the illusion/fallacy: http://www.abarry.org/knee.htm http://www.abarry.org/knee.htm
  - RA_Fisher 10y ago
    Is the group-think in our industry really so bad that we can't call Musk on outing himself as failing basic calculus?

flukus 10y ago

One things that's different is that we've reached consumption limits. I can't eat more or much better. I don't have time to watch more TV and movies. I don't need more stuff or services. If I don't need more then there won't be jobs available to people to create more.

megablast 10y ago

There are two camps as I see it. People who recognise the threat from cheap AI and robot. And people who think there is some hand-wavy magical force that will ensure that people will always be employed. You can see that doesn't work now, you can see low income jobs are down, and while they are rising in China and India, those people are already being replaced by robots.

mncharity 10y ago

Examples of changes which may impact "everyone will lose their job" predictions: * Delocalization of work. The need for physical proximity is still a pervasive bottleneck. As that further relaxes (VR, remote work), what changes? Think "N weeks to get there" Roman empire vs current "call/email/tweet the world". Maybe a world without commutes? Without two-body problems? * More richly interwoven human/machine-learning hybrid work processes. Say CEO compensation plummets as you get jit virtual "CEO"s. What happens when most businesses can afford competent leadership? Management? Even if the number of businesses increases by an order of magnitude? Or three? * What does an economy look like if most people are scrambling, looking for opportunities, not working n-hour "jobs"? Where you can again pick up a "help wanted" "paper", and have a work a few hours later? Yes, it's easy to imagine dystopias. Especially with resurgent aristocracy, regulatory capture, a patent system I expect to remain broken my entire professional career, and so on. But it's also easy to forget just how much potential change is inbound. Modulo the usual dangers of stagnation and wreckage, "you've not seen anything yet". Maybe.

norea-armozel 10y ago

There's some big flaws in the argument that we'll find new jobs to employ many thousands of industrial workers in. First, retraining someone in their 40s or 50s that have been working at Coleman or some other firm isn't going to likely happen. Mostly because the workers themselves either never completed the equivalent of high school or barely got by. Most of that retraining would have to be in complex tasks and not old fashioned data entry (those kinds of jobs are the ones that are being replaced by software automation and auditing). So, that means fewer still can make the leap from working on a manufacturing line to software development or some other skills based position. You just can't drop the equivalent of Homer Simpson into a code camp. It's just not going to happen. Second, there's not enough demand for such people in such a new economy. For example, I've known people who've worked on all kinds of software from games to enterprise development and all instances when a product was finished the amount of staff ever needed to maintain it was many times smaller than what they had during development. It doesn't matter if you employ waterfall or agile development, if your product only needs 20 people versus 200 people to maintain a product after it's release and future releases then you're not going to hire 200 people ever again. Third, many modern jobs are shifting to what seems like contract work via employment agencies like Volt and Man Power which bothers me because the benefits are greatly reduced without the equivalent increase in wages to offset this (especially in healthcare). Unless there's something I'm not aware of that could absorb all those thousands of people, I'm just not buying this theory that we'll just create new jobs out of thin air. Past performance is never an indicator of future returns.