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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 w

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.
- ZenoArrow 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." Putting aside my dislike for considering horses as tools, you're missing an important point. Economies only have to function for those at the top in order to be promoted. You could say that the majority of humans are just seen as 'tools' to the people in power that are driven by profit. To them, as long as they get to maintain their quality of life, what do they care about the masses? If you think this is far fetched, look at what's happening in places like Flint, Michigan. People were drinking poisoned water for decades, and those in charge knew about it. There's even a story that GM had to get a factory in Flint connected to the Detroit water supply because the Flint water was damaging their parts. Plus Flint is not an isolated case. Some people put profit ahead of people, and sadly a high number of those people are in positions of power.
  - kbenson 10y ago
    > Putting aside my dislike for considering horses as tools Well, I labeled humans as tools as well, so I'm not treating horses any differently in that respect than I am people, so I think you inferred a slightly different connotation for tool than I meant. Interestingly, the ability to see horses as non-tools is possible largely because their usefulness as a tool was surpassed by other technology. The same with cats and dogs. > You could say that the majority of humans are just seen as 'tools' to the people in power that are driven by profit. Yes, that is one aspect of the current system. The main difference is that it's not the only aspect, as it was for significant periods of history for significant portions of the world. > If you think this is far fetched, look at what's happening in places like Flint, Michigan. People were drinking poisoned water for decades, and those in charge knew about it. This is only a counter-example if the problem comes out, everyone wants a change, and nothing happens, and then only somewhat, depending on how much people actually care. I'm not arguing that the world has magically eradicated corruption, negligence and shortsightedness, but I do believe that once exposed the public then gets to steer the response if they care enough. Special interests will still have a disproportionate amount of influence, but when the populace cares enough, that disproportionate influence is a drop in the bucket compared to the influence of an incited populace.
Alex3917 10y ago
> I like the comparison to horses. I haven't seen any data, but my guess is that the average person's commute is roughly the same as it was 150 years ago. And if at some point we have self-driving cars or flying cars, we'll still spend roughly the same time commuting as we do today.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > I haven't seen any data, but my guess is that the average person's commute is roughly the same as it was 150 years ago. I think you'd probably be wrong (though it may depend strongly on which average you take); even with the industrial revolution, working at home, or essentially so (whether yeoman farming or living upstairs from the shop) was a lot more common 150 years ago than it is now, though it may be more common now than it was just before telecommuting.
semi-extrinsic 10y ago
> I can not imagine any jobs that an average, unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do. Whenever I hear statements like this, I cannot help but think that the person making the statement has never done a week of work as "unskilled labour" themselves. (No offense intended.) Be it flipping burgers or building houses, there is improvisation both when it comes to high-level intelligence and in the ranges of motion the human limbs go through that make robots a complete non-starter. Adding to that, a cheap robot arm that can lift as much as a four-year-old is $20k purchase price, plus another $20k for the controller/AI system, and probably $2k-$3k a year in maintenance. Figure four year depreciation when run 8 hours each day, you're looking at a yearly cost of $12k. That's compared to ~$15k for someone working full time on minimum wage. Take into account the huge process of switching your business over to robots, and it just doesn't look good. Also, we don't need AI to take a customers order, you just need a touchscreen, or even just an app. The tech has been here for more than a decade. Why don't restaurants do this?
- monk_e_boy 10y ago
  They are rolling out touch screen ordering for our local macdonalds. I don't think they fire anyone, but throughput is higher (so I guess that is one or two less jobs per customer served)
  - vkou 10y ago
    They've rolled out touch screen grocery checkout... Pretty much everywhere over the last decade. My local QFC used to employ a dozen cashiers - now, they employ 4. What jobs have been created by this automation? This certainly didn't create 8 (times the # of stores) jobs for software engineers - otherwise, this wouldn't have been profitable for QFC. Does anyone seriously think that those 8 people went on to do work that paid better, or was more valuable then putting groceries into plastic bags? If so, why haven't they done that before they were put out of work by a machine? Do engineers not see a connection between this, and the fact that they get to step over human excrement on their way to work?
    - 10y ago
Bombthecat 10y ago
I like to put it this way: humans were never able to employ a seven year old human for a Specialized Task for cheap. And no one complained (child work) now we are able to do exactly that.
euyyn 10y ago
> The vast majority of humans can not be trained to be computer programmers. I disagree with the general sentiment. What makes humans different is that we can become skilled. Imagine the big slave population that was used to build the pyramids in ancient Egypt. Suddenly, modern construction machinery appears over there, making them "unemployed" (slaves had a cost too). I would bet only a very very small part of those slaves couldn't be trained to do something more skilled than pushing rocks around. Unskilled labor, as in repetitive, boring work where little creativity, reasoning, or dexterity is involved, is an infliction humans have to endure, for the moment. It's a waste of our real ability.
- TheCoreh 10y ago
  Nitpick: Contrary to popular belief, the pyramids were actually built by well paid, reasonably skilled workers that were treated decently, and not by slaves: http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids-html http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids-ht...
dharma1 10y ago
I'm not so sure about that. I think there are plenty of manual jobs that I don't think will be done by robots any time soon. Plumbers, electricians - just don't see it happening. Digital or easily digitised jobs on the other hand - lawyers, accountants, possibly certain type of programming jobs - will be automated
- K0SM0S 10y ago
  > Plumbers, electricians - just don't see it happening. Like many other "optimistics" about AI I think reality will be much more of a hybrid one, i.e. plumbers or electricians will be aided, not replaced, by AI and robots. It's like the 100 horses in your car, it didn't kill the transportation industry but took it to a whole other level. Imagine as a plumber having an army of tiny drones to fix things you can't even see, let alone reach, as a human; from diagnosis to actual repair. You would wield such power that eventually one man could fix/maintain a whole skyscraper alone and still be home for dinner with the kids. It's the difference between what an office worker could do with pen and paper and the post office, and what they could do once came the telephone: suddenly you could talk to hundreds of people every day without moving. Then came computers, internet, now AI and robots... A century ago, thousands of men couldn't do some of what you alone accomplish in your office today. The most menial tasks will be automated for sure, however whether or not a given job is entirely made of such tasks is another matter entirely. I, for one, don't think it a bad thing that we eliminate brainless or skill-less jobs, I'd much rather pay for UBI for these people until they learn new skills more likely to be rewarding on a self-growth level. I also think it a good thing that we supplement most professions with ever better tools -- think what a doctor or lawyer can do with a computer and a few ad hoc databases that they couldn't do without. Even as an assistant, if you are freed from most menial tasks (e.g. "computer, send a thank you email to these customers with our classic style") then you can focus on creating more value for the person you assist. You can reclaim your worth as a highly-functioning human being, add much more value to the table, while robots and AI takes care of things your kid could do (but never will, and that is a good thing). It's basically what allowed civilizations to work twice less (in time, work hours) and actually keep growing that GDP. I don't know where AI takes us in this regard, but I wouldn't be surprised if on average we could eventually maintain the same level of growth working orders of magnitude less. But since humans love doing stuff, I'm sure most won't work less, they'll just do so much more --and we might yet reconnect with double-digit growth in western countries.
Chathamization 10y ago
> A robot will soon be able to be trained to flip burgers, or drive a car, or take a customer's order, etc, etc. From what I've read, we're not going to have completely driverless cars anytime soon (too much difficulty with all the potential edge cases). If we look at productivity growth, it's actually somewhat slow at the moment. People are claiming that soon it will be rapidly increasing, but they've been claiming that for several years now and it's yet to materialize. The evidence of a "robot revolution" is pretty weak at the moment. And that's not even getting into the question of what effect this would have on the job market. The horse population might have crashed, but that's because you can't retool horse to weld skyscrapers or make advertisements. You can use humans for a variety of tasks, and until we have a post-scarcity society there's always going to be a desire for more production. And even in a post-scarcity society there will probably be a demand for more researchers or artists. Sure, you might not be able to imagine what people of the future will do, but that's not surprising. If you told someone 150 years ago that less than 2% of the population would be involved with agriculture, they probably would imagine a mass employment catastrophe. They wouldn't imagine jobs like social media manager or video game developer, nor would they probably imagine that there would be enough offices to provide employment to so many administrative assistants. If you go back far enough, people would probably have a hard time believing that so many people could be employed in work that required reading and writing - surely the vast majority of humans can not be trained to read and write!
dualogy 10y ago
> I can't imagine robots being able to program computers for awhile. This actually puzzles me (especially since writing code requires no physical robot, just "an intelligence"). Just recently, we had some AI beat the world's Go champion? Poker, chess and countless other games are long done. Programming, in many languages for many tasks, isn't that much of a stretch. In all these games you have a number of primitive operations, sets/rules of valid and invalid state, a goal to work toward.. "same as much of programming, in principle" ;) I guess at this point the only things holding AI back are (A) the impossibility of parsing human-formulated requirements and specs accurately (we suck at this to, but we're also for now "the only alternative" and can be talked to by same-species inconcise/inconsistent spec-writers painstakingly), and (B) how to deal successfully with all the glitches bugs inconsistencies incompatibilities and special-cases in the various unavoidable-for-interop-required-by-specs human-made APIs, libraries, tools, stale repos, protocols, frameworks..
- Cyph0n 10y ago
  I think you're comparing apples to oranges. Writing code is nothing like playing a board game. A more apt comparison would be having an AI create board games that have logical rules, are enjoyable, and are extremely deep. In this case, specifying a fitness function becomes non-trivial. Like with designing a board game, how do you know if the program you are writing is getting closer to the goal? Let's say you use the number of unit tests passed as a metric. Ok, but who wrote those unit tests? And more importantly, how do you know you're getting closer to passing some unit test? In summary, we are still far away from an AI that can fully replace software developers, unless we get a general AI out of nowhere, of course.
- thibauts 10y ago
  Writing complete non-ambiguous specs looks absolutely equivalent to writing code.
bobajeff 10y ago
> Maybe skilled professions will be protected - I can't imagine robots being able to program computers for awhile. In the popular "Humans Need Not Apply" video about this subject. It was suggested that there are signs that "creative" jobs are already being replaced by automation and that professionals are the ones creating tools that replace themselves.
cityhall 10y ago
It should be easier to automate a web developer's job than a handyman's. A lot of less skilled jobs call on people to understand instruction, look at what's in front of them, and use common sense. Skilled work often just involves having people do something repetitive using obscure knowledge.

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.

ZenoArrow 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." Putting aside my dislike for considering horses as tools, you're missing an important point. Economies only have to function for those at the top in order to be promoted. You could say that the majority of humans are just seen as 'tools' to the people in power that are driven by profit. To them, as long as they get to maintain their quality of life, what do they care about the masses? If you think this is far fetched, look at what's happening in places like Flint, Michigan. People were drinking poisoned water for decades, and those in charge knew about it. There's even a story that GM had to get a factory in Flint connected to the Detroit water supply because the Flint water was damaging their parts. Plus Flint is not an isolated case. Some people put profit ahead of people, and sadly a high number of those people are in positions of power.
- kbenson 10y ago
  > Putting aside my dislike for considering horses as tools Well, I labeled humans as tools as well, so I'm not treating horses any differently in that respect than I am people, so I think you inferred a slightly different connotation for tool than I meant. Interestingly, the ability to see horses as non-tools is possible largely because their usefulness as a tool was surpassed by other technology. The same with cats and dogs. > You could say that the majority of humans are just seen as 'tools' to the people in power that are driven by profit. Yes, that is one aspect of the current system. The main difference is that it's not the only aspect, as it was for significant periods of history for significant portions of the world. > If you think this is far fetched, look at what's happening in places like Flint, Michigan. People were drinking poisoned water for decades, and those in charge knew about it. This is only a counter-example if the problem comes out, everyone wants a change, and nothing happens, and then only somewhat, depending on how much people actually care. I'm not arguing that the world has magically eradicated corruption, negligence and shortsightedness, but I do believe that once exposed the public then gets to steer the response if they care enough. Special interests will still have a disproportionate amount of influence, but when the populace cares enough, that disproportionate influence is a drop in the bucket compared to the influence of an incited populace.

Alex3917 10y ago

> I like the comparison to horses. I haven't seen any data, but my guess is that the average person's commute is roughly the same as it was 150 years ago. And if at some point we have self-driving cars or flying cars, we'll still spend roughly the same time commuting as we do today.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> I haven't seen any data, but my guess is that the average person's commute is roughly the same as it was 150 years ago. I think you'd probably be wrong (though it may depend strongly on which average you take); even with the industrial revolution, working at home, or essentially so (whether yeoman farming or living upstairs from the shop) was a lot more common 150 years ago than it is now, though it may be more common now than it was just before telecommuting.

semi-extrinsic 10y ago

> I can not imagine any jobs that an average, unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do. Whenever I hear statements like this, I cannot help but think that the person making the statement has never done a week of work as "unskilled labour" themselves. (No offense intended.) Be it flipping burgers or building houses, there is improvisation both when it comes to high-level intelligence and in the ranges of motion the human limbs go through that make robots a complete non-starter. Adding to that, a cheap robot arm that can lift as much as a four-year-old is $20k purchase price, plus another $20k for the controller/AI system, and probably $2k-$3k a year in maintenance. Figure four year depreciation when run 8 hours each day, you're looking at a yearly cost of $12k. That's compared to ~$15k for someone working full time on minimum wage. Take into account the huge process of switching your business over to robots, and it just doesn't look good. Also, we don't need AI to take a customers order, you just need a touchscreen, or even just an app. The tech has been here for more than a decade. Why don't restaurants do this?

monk_e_boy 10y ago
They are rolling out touch screen ordering for our local macdonalds. I don't think they fire anyone, but throughput is higher (so I guess that is one or two less jobs per customer served)
- vkou 10y ago
  They've rolled out touch screen grocery checkout... Pretty much everywhere over the last decade. My local QFC used to employ a dozen cashiers - now, they employ 4. What jobs have been created by this automation? This certainly didn't create 8 (times the # of stores) jobs for software engineers - otherwise, this wouldn't have been profitable for QFC. Does anyone seriously think that those 8 people went on to do work that paid better, or was more valuable then putting groceries into plastic bags? If so, why haven't they done that before they were put out of work by a machine? Do engineers not see a connection between this, and the fact that they get to step over human excrement on their way to work?
  - 10y ago

Bombthecat 10y ago

I like to put it this way: humans were never able to employ a seven year old human for a Specialized Task for cheap. And no one complained (child work) now we are able to do exactly that.

euyyn 10y ago

> The vast majority of humans can not be trained to be computer programmers. I disagree with the general sentiment. What makes humans different is that we can become skilled. Imagine the big slave population that was used to build the pyramids in ancient Egypt. Suddenly, modern construction machinery appears over there, making them "unemployed" (slaves had a cost too). I would bet only a very very small part of those slaves couldn't be trained to do something more skilled than pushing rocks around. Unskilled labor, as in repetitive, boring work where little creativity, reasoning, or dexterity is involved, is an infliction humans have to endure, for the moment. It's a waste of our real ability.

TheCoreh 10y ago
Nitpick: Contrary to popular belief, the pyramids were actually built by well paid, reasonably skilled workers that were treated decently, and not by slaves: http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids-html http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids-ht...

dharma1 10y ago

I'm not so sure about that. I think there are plenty of manual jobs that I don't think will be done by robots any time soon. Plumbers, electricians - just don't see it happening. Digital or easily digitised jobs on the other hand - lawyers, accountants, possibly certain type of programming jobs - will be automated

K0SM0S 10y ago
> Plumbers, electricians - just don't see it happening. Like many other "optimistics" about AI I think reality will be much more of a hybrid one, i.e. plumbers or electricians will be aided, not replaced, by AI and robots. It's like the 100 horses in your car, it didn't kill the transportation industry but took it to a whole other level. Imagine as a plumber having an army of tiny drones to fix things you can't even see, let alone reach, as a human; from diagnosis to actual repair. You would wield such power that eventually one man could fix/maintain a whole skyscraper alone and still be home for dinner with the kids. It's the difference between what an office worker could do with pen and paper and the post office, and what they could do once came the telephone: suddenly you could talk to hundreds of people every day without moving. Then came computers, internet, now AI and robots... A century ago, thousands of men couldn't do some of what you alone accomplish in your office today. The most menial tasks will be automated for sure, however whether or not a given job is entirely made of such tasks is another matter entirely. I, for one, don't think it a bad thing that we eliminate brainless or skill-less jobs, I'd much rather pay for UBI for these people until they learn new skills more likely to be rewarding on a self-growth level. I also think it a good thing that we supplement most professions with ever better tools -- think what a doctor or lawyer can do with a computer and a few ad hoc databases that they couldn't do without. Even as an assistant, if you are freed from most menial tasks (e.g. "computer, send a thank you email to these customers with our classic style") then you can focus on creating more value for the person you assist. You can reclaim your worth as a highly-functioning human being, add much more value to the table, while robots and AI takes care of things your kid could do (but never will, and that is a good thing). It's basically what allowed civilizations to work twice less (in time, work hours) and actually keep growing that GDP. I don't know where AI takes us in this regard, but I wouldn't be surprised if on average we could eventually maintain the same level of growth working orders of magnitude less. But since humans love doing stuff, I'm sure most won't work less, they'll just do so much more --and we might yet reconnect with double-digit growth in western countries.

Chathamization 10y ago

> A robot will soon be able to be trained to flip burgers, or drive a car, or take a customer's order, etc, etc. From what I've read, we're not going to have completely driverless cars anytime soon (too much difficulty with all the potential edge cases). If we look at productivity growth, it's actually somewhat slow at the moment. People are claiming that soon it will be rapidly increasing, but they've been claiming that for several years now and it's yet to materialize. The evidence of a "robot revolution" is pretty weak at the moment. And that's not even getting into the question of what effect this would have on the job market. The horse population might have crashed, but that's because you can't retool horse to weld skyscrapers or make advertisements. You can use humans for a variety of tasks, and until we have a post-scarcity society there's always going to be a desire for more production. And even in a post-scarcity society there will probably be a demand for more researchers or artists. Sure, you might not be able to imagine what people of the future will do, but that's not surprising. If you told someone 150 years ago that less than 2% of the population would be involved with agriculture, they probably would imagine a mass employment catastrophe. They wouldn't imagine jobs like social media manager or video game developer, nor would they probably imagine that there would be enough offices to provide employment to so many administrative assistants. If you go back far enough, people would probably have a hard time believing that so many people could be employed in work that required reading and writing - surely the vast majority of humans can not be trained to read and write!

dualogy 10y ago

> I can't imagine robots being able to program computers for awhile. This actually puzzles me (especially since writing code requires no physical robot, just "an intelligence"). Just recently, we had some AI beat the world's Go champion? Poker, chess and countless other games are long done. Programming, in many languages for many tasks, isn't that much of a stretch. In all these games you have a number of primitive operations, sets/rules of valid and invalid state, a goal to work toward.. "same as much of programming, in principle" ;) I guess at this point the only things holding AI back are (A) the impossibility of parsing human-formulated requirements and specs accurately (we suck at this to, but we're also for now "the only alternative" and can be talked to by same-species inconcise/inconsistent spec-writers painstakingly), and (B) how to deal successfully with all the glitches bugs inconsistencies incompatibilities and special-cases in the various unavoidable-for-interop-required-by-specs human-made APIs, libraries, tools, stale repos, protocols, frameworks..

Cyph0n 10y ago
I think you're comparing apples to oranges. Writing code is nothing like playing a board game. A more apt comparison would be having an AI create board games that have logical rules, are enjoyable, and are extremely deep. In this case, specifying a fitness function becomes non-trivial. Like with designing a board game, how do you know if the program you are writing is getting closer to the goal? Let's say you use the number of unit tests passed as a metric. Ok, but who wrote those unit tests? And more importantly, how do you know you're getting closer to passing some unit test? In summary, we are still far away from an AI that can fully replace software developers, unless we get a general AI out of nowhere, of course.
thibauts 10y ago
Writing complete non-ambiguous specs looks absolutely equivalent to writing code.

bobajeff 10y ago

> Maybe skilled professions will be protected - I can't imagine robots being able to program computers for awhile. In the popular "Humans Need Not Apply" video about this subject. It was suggested that there are signs that "creative" jobs are already being replaced by automation and that professionals are the ones creating tools that replace themselves.

cityhall 10y ago

It should be easier to automate a web developer's job than a handyman's. A lot of less skilled jobs call on people to understand instruction, look at what's in front of them, and use common sense. Skilled work often just involves having people do something repetitive using obscure knowledge.