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Something interesting that I learned recently from a former Dean of the Industrial Labor Relations School at Cornell: Worry over automation destroying jobs is

Something interesting that I learned recently from a former Dean of the Industrial Labor Relations School at Cornell: Worry over automation destroying jobs is almost as old as automation itself. Researchers have yet to find solid evidence that automation has ever destroyed jobs. Now, that of course, doesn't mean that this is some immutable law of the universe that automation will never destroy jobs. But it does mean we should look very skeptically at all the hand wringing over the impending robot job stealing. It's also important to note that this result is global, not local. The employment situation in the US is obviously different today than it was in the 70s. That may well be due to technology / automation. But jobs haven't been destroyed, they've just moved to different places.

ThomPete 10y ago
Automation used to be about simply replacing physical labour with more automated systems. The problem with your Deans teaching is that it's not not just physical labour but intellectual capacity. And so unless you have some other level of complexity that make humans special it is in fact going to be more or less impossible to think of a thing an AI wont be able to do better than humans.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  > And so unless you have some other level of complexity that make humans special it is in fact going to be more or less impossible to think of a thing an AI wont be able to do better than humans. If we reach the point where AI can do all human jobs better than humans, that would put us firmly in a post-scarcity world, where humans no longer need to work jobs at all.
  - ThomPete 10y ago
    You are looking at this the wrong way. No job require all human skills. Most jobs requires only subsets of human skills.
    - JoshTriplett 10y ago
      I didn't suggest otherwise; however, the comment I replied to said: > it is in fact going to be more or less impossible to think of a thing an AI wont be able to do better than humans But we necessarily can't reach the point where AI can do all human jobs without having completely general human-level (or beyond-human-level) AI. Until then, AI can only replace a subset of human jobs, and I've seen many convincing arguments (including analogies to past advances) that the net gain will provide more (and better) opportunities.
      - ThomPete 10y ago
        There is no net gain, the number of jobs have only been growing because the market have been growing, but in the west the number of actual jobs are declining. In the US, 95% of jobs are temp jobs and the definition of when someone is said to have a job have been widened substantially since Bush. The number of new jobs created have gone down decade after decade since ww2
        icantdrive55 10y ago
        I cringe whenever I hear the low unemployment number. That sector of workers who can work, but just gave up is staggering. I truely believe Trump got elected because he was pretty much the only person who said someting is really wrong with this economy, and it's been wrong for awhile. (I don't like the man, but on the economy I think he's right.)
        MagnumOpus 10y ago
        > 95% of jobs are temp jobs False. At best 40% are - and given that a full-time worker has only one job and a part-time temp can have half a dozen at a time, even this is an upward distortion. > The definition of when someone is said to have a job have been widened substantially since Bush Also false.
        ThomPete 10y ago
        95% of jobs created since 2008. https://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/nearly-95-of-all-job-growth-during-obama-era-part-time,-contract-work-449057 https://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/nearly-95-of-all... And yes the definition got widened substantially under bush and Obama kept it. You can see the definition here. It's quite wide. https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
  - gpawl 10y ago
    unless that AI relies on an energy source that is fenced off by capitalists
deleted 10y ago
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noonespecial 10y ago
The difference is that previous automation was a force multiplier. Today's automation is a mind multiplier. This is unprecedented territory. It really is different this time. I hate all of the "singularity" hokum, but it's getting really hard to predict what's going to happen.
- oh_sigh 10y ago
  The computer itself has been a mind multiplier since the beginning. So I don't think it's fair to say that this is something completely new.
  - ThomPete 10y ago
    The new thing is that computers can learn to learn.
    - q3r3qr3q 10y ago
      You mean the machine learning stuff, that's been around since 1959?
      - gpawl 10y ago
        and now is finally energy efficient enough for practical usage.
      - mamp 10y ago
        In theory, but we didn't have enough data or computing power for machines to compete with human performance (also algorithmic improvements). I feel that the disruption isn't going to be completely new compared to past changes but probably across more industries at the same time because machines can soon move and think e.g. Driving, diagnosis, planning (through better prediction), assembly.
      - taneq 10y ago
        That machine learning stuff which has been around for the past 60 years out of humanity's, what, 10,000 years of 'modern' humans (starting with the invention of agriculture)? That's only really reached parity with humans on a broad range of cognitive tasks in the past within the last 5-10 years? Yes, that stuff.
losteric 10y ago
Robots don't destroy jobs, but that rapid change can lead to high unemployment when the labor market can't effectively retrain or relocate. America is in a particularly bad place. High consumer debt, poor adult education access, low taxes on the wealthy, global market for low-skill labor, naively blaming job loss on immigrants/"globalization"...
fullshark 10y ago
Most individuals care less about jobs in aggregate and just care about their own particular job. They especially don't care about the number of jobs at the global level. There are many people whose job will be replaced by robots and whatever expertise they've learned over the years will become useless. They will need to transition to an entirely new career and start over. If they are over the age of 40 they have to also fight ageism and the fact that their future work output potential is more limited to an employer's eyes. This whole idea that we don't have to worry because automation creates new jobs seems totally ignorant of this reality (and the political consequences).
- mattnewton 10y ago
  Agreed, the jobs are moving to new places and skillsets, but many US voting demographics aren't.
  - Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox
  - crdoconnor 10y ago
    In many cases abroad. Apple (among other tech companies) indirectly created 1.3 million jobs at Foxconn in China, for instance. Most economic models (including the Ball State U "study" by Michael J. Hicks and Srikant Devara, MBA) that counted "jobs lost to robots" define productivity as GDP/number of employees employed in America. This indicates upon shallow inspection that Apple, for instance, has a very high productivity (high contribution to GDP/employees). Or, in other words, economists' models used to declare an impending magic robot revolution right now are defining the 1.2 million Foxconn employees used to make iPhones as robots in their assumptions. Foxconn itself regularly threatens to replace its 1.2 million employees with magic robots. For instance, see this threat from 2011 made at an employee dance party for some bizarre reason: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/foxconn-to-replace-human-workers-with-one-million-robots http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robot... Since then they increased their headcount implying that the threat was made for some other reason than it being say, the truth.
glangdale 10y ago
How many distinct 'experiments' (as it were) have we actually seen with respect to automation? I often wonder whether we are drawing from a very small sample here, where we look at a handful of distinct automation cases and conclude that we're all pretty safe. Is our experience with automation that old or varied? Have we ever faced the prospect of a range of "considerably less routine" manual labor (e.g. driving) being automated at the same time as a large number of white/pink collar tasks? The industrial revolution isn't that old in some senses.
pcmaffey 10y ago
While I don't prescribe to the hand-wringing, I would say that a major difference now is that the speed of technological innovation is now far outpacing education from generation to generation.
- the_cyber_pass 10y ago
  I would go further than that. Even if you try to keep up, it's becoming difficult to follow where everything is going now. I highly doubt that many people even here have a deep understanding of many subjects in the CS wider field outside of their niche. I don't think it's a stretch to say ycombinator represents a very skilled subset in the field. What about all the rest of those programmers who don't come here or worse they have a family which sucks away a few hours of study time every day. Much of the industry still produces stuff like CRUD apps and toils away in layers of abstraction in "Enterprise Software" Additionally we are facing the reality that being a good programmer is not enough anymore near the upper percentiles and this will trickle down in time to the rest of the industry. You can't just be a programmer, you have to be a statistician with a strong understanding of a hard science like biochemistry/genetics. Given all this how the hell is a 40 year old married steel mill worker with kids supposed to just switch jobs to something that fills these requirements. At most the government might pay for an undergrad and that is quickly becoming not enough, not that places are eager to higher fresh young graduates from anywhere but Stanford anyways. How is the average younger graduate supposed to compete when we are now weeding out more and more of the top 10% for even basic hireability. Where getting a masters degree at a B/C list school might as well have you be wearing a dunce cap. This is completely ignoring issues like the pedigree system we have set up where if a new graduate takes a job at a boring Java shop they might get passed over by top companies later for being "Not good enough"
pcmaffey 10y ago
While I don't prescribe to the hand-wringing, I would say that a major difference now is that the speed of technological innovation is now far outpacing education from generation to generation.
Houshalter 10y ago
They don't need to destroy jobs. Just lower wages by competing with human workers. Arguably this may have already happened, if you look at how wages have fallen or remained stagnate over the past few decades. Once the value of human labor falls below minimum wage, then there is unemployment. There is no law of economics that says technology can't compete with human workers or that wages can't fall. Look what happened 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". I wonder if horse economists thought that technology couldn't take horse jobs and could only increase them. 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. What happened? It's not like cars can do everything horses can do. They can't use grass as fuel, or be used on the vast majority of natural terrain, etc. But cars were just good enough to fill the majority of the economic demand for horses. Trains, cable cars, bicycles, they just weren't good enough. But once technology hit a certain threshold "this time it's different" became true. 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. Just like most horses didn't become race horses - they became glue.
- visarga 10y ago
  Even if AI can program computers, it's still difficult to replace programmers because programming comes hand in hand with analysis - process analysis, system analysis, design, security, interfacing with old projects and interacting with human teams. AI won't replace a programmer's external knowledge before it reaches the level of AGI. A horse or an assembly line worker do lots of repetitive work. A programmer does lots of non-repetitive/creative work. It's a whole different game. There are examples of creative AI but it is clearly inferior to humans in music, painting, poetry, translation and many other tasks, while in programming it's completely incapable as of yet. Maybe if conversational agents become good enough to replace lots of websites and apps - that could make a dent. Yet chatbots are quite limited today and in the next few years. It could take 5-10 years before they can be good enough to threaten app makers, and in the meantime there is a glut of unused apps. The largest threat to programmers is Wordpress, Facebook and Ebay in my opinion. Instead of paying for a new website, Joe Business Owner would suffice with just a FB page or a Wordpress blog. Instead of making an online store, he would prefer being a simple Amazon or Ebay reseller.
sigmar 10y ago
>Researchers have yet to find solid evidence that automation has ever destroyed jobs. This is completely untrue. Ball State University found that job loss in the 2000s due to automation dwarfed the loss caused by free trade[1]. There is tons of other research that corroborates that[2]. [1] http://projects.cberdata.org/reports/MfgReality.pdf http://projects.cberdata.org/reports/MfgReality.pdf [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs-killer-is-not-china-its-automation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs...
- phkahler 10y ago
  It's easy to see and I've said this here before. As a business owner doing manufacturing (for example) replacing manual labor with automation costs less. That's less in terms of TCO, so that includes setup, operation, energy, and maintenance. The idea that the low-skilled assembly jobs are just replaced by high-skilled jobs is untrue. Those high-skilled jobs pay more - perhaps 2-5x more, and if the TCO is actually less that means significantly fewer man-hours due to the higher hourly rate. The notion of replacing low-skilled jobs with high-skilled, better paying ones is true. However since the TCO to the one purchasing the automation is LOWER it says a lot about the total number of people to maintain the system. This of course neglects any secondary effects where lower costs may increase volume and wider use of the product. But to a first approximation automation destroys jobs. Obviously.
  - gpawl 10y ago
    automation creates jobs when there's aggregate demand for more products and services. When people reach their finite limit of consumption (Example: boredom is obsoleted by digital media tech), and wages are depressed to subsistence by laissez faire capitalism, you've got a bunch of unemployed people with nothing to do for the poor people who would like to pay them for stuff
  - winstonewert 10y ago
    I think you are engaging a straw man here. Obviously, given a fixed amount of output, automation will reduce the man-hours required. That's the whole point. And yes, that will, by itself, reduce the amount of work available. Who do you think is saying otherwise?. The question isn't whether automation decreases the amount of work neccessary to produce the same output, obviously it does. The question is whether we can reallocate workers somewhere in the economy so that we can produce even more output with the same input.
SilasX 10y ago
And the same was true of horses, until it wasn't. There really are worrisome phenomena that only have to happen once, and never happen before. Try that in any other context: "People have worried about nuclear weapons since before the first atom bomb. But they have yet to come up with any evidence of a civilization ended by a nuclear attack."
hackinthebochs 10y ago
I think the difficulty in seeing how this time really is different is that increasing technology is exponential at replacing human labor. But exponential growth is extremely unintuitive. It initially looks linear, and this approximately linear phase can last an arbitrary amount of time. But eventually, a wall is hit and seemingly overnight the explosion is unstoppable. I feel we've been in the approximately linear phase all this time which is why we have so many naysayers saying this time isn't any different. We'll never have the political will to make changes until a third of the country is unemployable.
wwarner 10y ago
I happen to agree with this. Have a listen to the last twimlai.com podcast about "deep genomics". From an ML point of view, they're still finding their way, but from an economic point of view two things seem clear. 1) ML + genetics are going to have a massive economic impact. 2) Not a single job will be lost as a result of advancement, as the sector doesn't yet exist. Whenever I hear someone say there won't be any jobs after AI surpasses some threshold, I always ask them how many jobs were lost as a result of railroads? Was it so awful that the Pony Express went out of business after the transcontinental railroad was finished? Or that all those scribes had to quit copying their mistakes over and over again after the printing press came around?
- ewjordan 10y ago
  And every person that tells you that there won't be any jobs after AI passes a threshold has already considered your railroad question, and decided that for various reasons the AI shift is different. There's a big difference between crossing a threshold where machines do one or two specific things better than we do and crossing one where they do everything better. There's certainly an argument about whether or not that's likely or imminent, but it's impossible to deny that strong, singularity-style AI, if discovered, would be a lot more of a disruption to our usefulness than railroads were.
  - wwarner 10y ago
    And genomics?
  - ianai 10y ago
    They probably won't do tasks that people want a human to do better. i.e. I think there will always be human card dealers because, despite being able to gamble against a machine just as well, some people prefer to gamble against a human. There are many customer-centric jobs such as that. I've got no idea how that will work out.
  - wwarner 10y ago
    I'm simply pointing out that there are lots of applications of AI that will create work. And to those that say that machines will just solve all those problems by themselves, I would ask them to produce some evidence besides an estimated trajectory.
simonsarris 10y ago
> Researchers have yet to find solid evidence that automation has ever destroyed jobs. Horse jobs (horses are a special and strange kind of human) are nil. Before there were lots of jobs they could do, now there are no essential tasks. Turnspit dog[0] jobs (another very strange kind of human) are nil, in fact they are so nil that the dogs went extinct. There were no tasks left for them to do, their jobs were automated away. Jobs for very very intellectually slow people are nil or nearly nil. This was not true in say, 1600. In 1600 even the most dimwitted human could be helpful: At the very least he could do essential tasks like chop wood and carry water. Today there are zero essential tasks. If one has a job, it is usually because someone is humoring him or her, or that we as a society have just decided to be nice, economics of it be damned [1]. Very few humans under 10 in the united states have jobs. This was not always true. Very few humans over 80 have jobs. There are no essential tasks that we have for these classes of people, just like the horses and very slow people. (We could consider this a victory that there aren't any jobs for 10 year olds but that's beside the point here) There are classes of humans already boxed out of any possible job in some economies. Gradations of humans must exist nearly all the way up the chain. Saying that automation has not destroyed jobs is simply a lack of imagination on the part of these researchers. Maybe not all humans will be obsolete in the job market, but we already have to permit that some are. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_dog [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_Industries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_Industries
- jdoliner 10y ago
  The statements about jobs not being destroyed is about _aggregate_ jobs. If you pick any specific group of people (or animals) you can find many examples of groups losing jobs. Hopefully this doesn't come as a surprise to you and hopefully you can see how these are different things. Markets shift, that's the whole point of markets, and when they do it's very painful for those they shift away from. The most poignant example of this is that a smaller percentage of Americans have jobs now than they did in the 70s (and even as recently as 2008). But those jobs have gone to other countries and perhaps there's a good reason for that. > Saying that automation has not destroyed jobs is simply a lack of imagination on the part of these researchers. I honestly burst out laughing at this, what do you think these researchers have failed to imagine? The idea of confining their view strictly to horse employment and not considering the employment as a whole? Researchers shouldn't be imaginative in how they approach experiments, they should be scientific and precise. If they don't like the results they get they shouldn't imagine new definitions of employment that justify their preconceived notions.

ThomPete 10y ago

Automation used to be about simply replacing physical labour with more automated systems. The problem with your Deans teaching is that it's not not just physical labour but intellectual capacity. And so unless you have some other level of complexity that make humans special it is in fact going to be more or less impossible to think of a thing an AI wont be able to do better than humans.

JoshTriplett 10y ago
> And so unless you have some other level of complexity that make humans special it is in fact going to be more or less impossible to think of a thing an AI wont be able to do better than humans. If we reach the point where AI can do all human jobs better than humans, that would put us firmly in a post-scarcity world, where humans no longer need to work jobs at all.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  You are looking at this the wrong way. No job require all human skills. Most jobs requires only subsets of human skills.
  - JoshTriplett 10y ago
    I didn't suggest otherwise; however, the comment I replied to said: > it is in fact going to be more or less impossible to think of a thing an AI wont be able to do better than humans But we necessarily can't reach the point where AI can do all human jobs without having completely general human-level (or beyond-human-level) AI. Until then, AI can only replace a subset of human jobs, and I've seen many convincing arguments (including analogies to past advances) that the net gain will provide more (and better) opportunities.
    - ThomPete 10y ago
      There is no net gain, the number of jobs have only been growing because the market have been growing, but in the west the number of actual jobs are declining. In the US, 95% of jobs are temp jobs and the definition of when someone is said to have a job have been widened substantially since Bush. The number of new jobs created have gone down decade after decade since ww2
      - icantdrive55 10y ago
        I cringe whenever I hear the low unemployment number. That sector of workers who can work, but just gave up is staggering. I truely believe Trump got elected because he was pretty much the only person who said someting is really wrong with this economy, and it's been wrong for awhile. (I don't like the man, but on the economy I think he's right.)
      - MagnumOpus 10y ago
        > 95% of jobs are temp jobs False. At best 40% are - and given that a full-time worker has only one job and a part-time temp can have half a dozen at a time, even this is an upward distortion. > The definition of when someone is said to have a job have been widened substantially since Bush Also false.
        ThomPete 10y ago
        95% of jobs created since 2008. https://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/nearly-95-of-all-job-growth-during-obama-era-part-time,-contract-work-449057 https://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/nearly-95-of-all... And yes the definition got widened substantially under bush and Obama kept it. You can see the definition here. It's quite wide. https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
- gpawl 10y ago
  unless that AI relies on an energy source that is fenced off by capitalists

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

noonespecial 10y ago

The difference is that previous automation was a force multiplier. Today's automation is a mind multiplier. This is unprecedented territory. It really is different this time. I hate all of the "singularity" hokum, but it's getting really hard to predict what's going to happen.

oh_sigh 10y ago
The computer itself has been a mind multiplier since the beginning. So I don't think it's fair to say that this is something completely new.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  The new thing is that computers can learn to learn.
  - q3r3qr3q 10y ago
    You mean the machine learning stuff, that's been around since 1959?
    - gpawl 10y ago
      and now is finally energy efficient enough for practical usage.
    - mamp 10y ago
      In theory, but we didn't have enough data or computing power for machines to compete with human performance (also algorithmic improvements). I feel that the disruption isn't going to be completely new compared to past changes but probably across more industries at the same time because machines can soon move and think e.g. Driving, diagnosis, planning (through better prediction), assembly.
    - taneq 10y ago
      That machine learning stuff which has been around for the past 60 years out of humanity's, what, 10,000 years of 'modern' humans (starting with the invention of agriculture)? That's only really reached parity with humans on a broad range of cognitive tasks in the past within the last 5-10 years? Yes, that stuff.

losteric 10y ago

Robots don't destroy jobs, but that rapid change can lead to high unemployment when the labor market can't effectively retrain or relocate. America is in a particularly bad place. High consumer debt, poor adult education access, low taxes on the wealthy, global market for low-skill labor, naively blaming job loss on immigrants/"globalization"...

fullshark 10y ago

Most individuals care less about jobs in aggregate and just care about their own particular job. They especially don't care about the number of jobs at the global level. There are many people whose job will be replaced by robots and whatever expertise they've learned over the years will become useless. They will need to transition to an entirely new career and start over. If they are over the age of 40 they have to also fight ageism and the fact that their future work output potential is more limited to an employer's eyes. This whole idea that we don't have to worry because automation creates new jobs seems totally ignorant of this reality (and the political consequences).

mattnewton 10y ago
Agreed, the jobs are moving to new places and skillsets, but many US voting demographics aren't.
- Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  In many cases abroad. Apple (among other tech companies) indirectly created 1.3 million jobs at Foxconn in China, for instance. Most economic models (including the Ball State U "study" by Michael J. Hicks and Srikant Devara, MBA) that counted "jobs lost to robots" define productivity as GDP/number of employees employed in America. This indicates upon shallow inspection that Apple, for instance, has a very high productivity (high contribution to GDP/employees). Or, in other words, economists' models used to declare an impending magic robot revolution right now are defining the 1.2 million Foxconn employees used to make iPhones as robots in their assumptions. Foxconn itself regularly threatens to replace its 1.2 million employees with magic robots. For instance, see this threat from 2011 made at an employee dance party for some bizarre reason: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/foxconn-to-replace-human-workers-with-one-million-robots http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robot... Since then they increased their headcount implying that the threat was made for some other reason than it being say, the truth.

glangdale 10y ago

How many distinct 'experiments' (as it were) have we actually seen with respect to automation? I often wonder whether we are drawing from a very small sample here, where we look at a handful of distinct automation cases and conclude that we're all pretty safe. Is our experience with automation that old or varied? Have we ever faced the prospect of a range of "considerably less routine" manual labor (e.g. driving) being automated at the same time as a large number of white/pink collar tasks? The industrial revolution isn't that old in some senses.

pcmaffey 10y ago

While I don't prescribe to the hand-wringing, I would say that a major difference now is that the speed of technological innovation is now far outpacing education from generation to generation.

the_cyber_pass 10y ago
I would go further than that. Even if you try to keep up, it's becoming difficult to follow where everything is going now. I highly doubt that many people even here have a deep understanding of many subjects in the CS wider field outside of their niche. I don't think it's a stretch to say ycombinator represents a very skilled subset in the field. What about all the rest of those programmers who don't come here or worse they have a family which sucks away a few hours of study time every day. Much of the industry still produces stuff like CRUD apps and toils away in layers of abstraction in "Enterprise Software" Additionally we are facing the reality that being a good programmer is not enough anymore near the upper percentiles and this will trickle down in time to the rest of the industry. You can't just be a programmer, you have to be a statistician with a strong understanding of a hard science like biochemistry/genetics. Given all this how the hell is a 40 year old married steel mill worker with kids supposed to just switch jobs to something that fills these requirements. At most the government might pay for an undergrad and that is quickly becoming not enough, not that places are eager to higher fresh young graduates from anywhere but Stanford anyways. How is the average younger graduate supposed to compete when we are now weeding out more and more of the top 10% for even basic hireability. Where getting a masters degree at a B/C list school might as well have you be wearing a dunce cap. This is completely ignoring issues like the pedigree system we have set up where if a new graduate takes a job at a boring Java shop they might get passed over by top companies later for being "Not good enough"

pcmaffey 10y ago

While I don't prescribe to the hand-wringing, I would say that a major difference now is that the speed of technological innovation is now far outpacing education from generation to generation.

Houshalter 10y ago

They don't need to destroy jobs. Just lower wages by competing with human workers. Arguably this may have already happened, if you look at how wages have fallen or remained stagnate over the past few decades. Once the value of human labor falls below minimum wage, then there is unemployment. There is no law of economics that says technology can't compete with human workers or that wages can't fall. Look what happened 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". I wonder if horse economists thought that technology couldn't take horse jobs and could only increase them. 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. What happened? It's not like cars can do everything horses can do. They can't use grass as fuel, or be used on the vast majority of natural terrain, etc. But cars were just good enough to fill the majority of the economic demand for horses. Trains, cable cars, bicycles, they just weren't good enough. But once technology hit a certain threshold "this time it's different" became true. 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. Just like most horses didn't become race horses - they became glue.

visarga 10y ago
Even if AI can program computers, it's still difficult to replace programmers because programming comes hand in hand with analysis - process analysis, system analysis, design, security, interfacing with old projects and interacting with human teams. AI won't replace a programmer's external knowledge before it reaches the level of AGI. A horse or an assembly line worker do lots of repetitive work. A programmer does lots of non-repetitive/creative work. It's a whole different game. There are examples of creative AI but it is clearly inferior to humans in music, painting, poetry, translation and many other tasks, while in programming it's completely incapable as of yet. Maybe if conversational agents become good enough to replace lots of websites and apps - that could make a dent. Yet chatbots are quite limited today and in the next few years. It could take 5-10 years before they can be good enough to threaten app makers, and in the meantime there is a glut of unused apps. The largest threat to programmers is Wordpress, Facebook and Ebay in my opinion. Instead of paying for a new website, Joe Business Owner would suffice with just a FB page or a Wordpress blog. Instead of making an online store, he would prefer being a simple Amazon or Ebay reseller.

sigmar 10y ago

>Researchers have yet to find solid evidence that automation has ever destroyed jobs. This is completely untrue. Ball State University found that job loss in the 2000s due to automation dwarfed the loss caused by free trade[1]. There is tons of other research that corroborates that[2]. [1] http://projects.cberdata.org/reports/MfgReality.pdf http://projects.cberdata.org/reports/MfgReality.pdf [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs-killer-is-not-china-its-automation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs...

phkahler 10y ago
It's easy to see and I've said this here before. As a business owner doing manufacturing (for example) replacing manual labor with automation costs less. That's less in terms of TCO, so that includes setup, operation, energy, and maintenance. The idea that the low-skilled assembly jobs are just replaced by high-skilled jobs is untrue. Those high-skilled jobs pay more - perhaps 2-5x more, and if the TCO is actually less that means significantly fewer man-hours due to the higher hourly rate. The notion of replacing low-skilled jobs with high-skilled, better paying ones is true. However since the TCO to the one purchasing the automation is LOWER it says a lot about the total number of people to maintain the system. This of course neglects any secondary effects where lower costs may increase volume and wider use of the product. But to a first approximation automation destroys jobs. Obviously.
- gpawl 10y ago
  automation creates jobs when there's aggregate demand for more products and services. When people reach their finite limit of consumption (Example: boredom is obsoleted by digital media tech), and wages are depressed to subsistence by laissez faire capitalism, you've got a bunch of unemployed people with nothing to do for the poor people who would like to pay them for stuff
- winstonewert 10y ago
  I think you are engaging a straw man here. Obviously, given a fixed amount of output, automation will reduce the man-hours required. That's the whole point. And yes, that will, by itself, reduce the amount of work available. Who do you think is saying otherwise?. The question isn't whether automation decreases the amount of work neccessary to produce the same output, obviously it does. The question is whether we can reallocate workers somewhere in the economy so that we can produce even more output with the same input.

SilasX 10y ago

And the same was true of horses, until it wasn't. There really are worrisome phenomena that only have to happen once, and never happen before. Try that in any other context: "People have worried about nuclear weapons since before the first atom bomb. But they have yet to come up with any evidence of a civilization ended by a nuclear attack."

hackinthebochs 10y ago

I think the difficulty in seeing how this time really is different is that increasing technology is exponential at replacing human labor. But exponential growth is extremely unintuitive. It initially looks linear, and this approximately linear phase can last an arbitrary amount of time. But eventually, a wall is hit and seemingly overnight the explosion is unstoppable. I feel we've been in the approximately linear phase all this time which is why we have so many naysayers saying this time isn't any different. We'll never have the political will to make changes until a third of the country is unemployable.

wwarner 10y ago

I happen to agree with this. Have a listen to the last twimlai.com podcast about "deep genomics". From an ML point of view, they're still finding their way, but from an economic point of view two things seem clear. 1) ML + genetics are going to have a massive economic impact. 2) Not a single job will be lost as a result of advancement, as the sector doesn't yet exist. Whenever I hear someone say there won't be any jobs after AI surpasses some threshold, I always ask them how many jobs were lost as a result of railroads? Was it so awful that the Pony Express went out of business after the transcontinental railroad was finished? Or that all those scribes had to quit copying their mistakes over and over again after the printing press came around?

ewjordan 10y ago
And every person that tells you that there won't be any jobs after AI passes a threshold has already considered your railroad question, and decided that for various reasons the AI shift is different. There's a big difference between crossing a threshold where machines do one or two specific things better than we do and crossing one where they do everything better. There's certainly an argument about whether or not that's likely or imminent, but it's impossible to deny that strong, singularity-style AI, if discovered, would be a lot more of a disruption to our usefulness than railroads were.
- wwarner 10y ago
  And genomics?
- ianai 10y ago
  They probably won't do tasks that people want a human to do better. i.e. I think there will always be human card dealers because, despite being able to gamble against a machine just as well, some people prefer to gamble against a human. There are many customer-centric jobs such as that. I've got no idea how that will work out.
- wwarner 10y ago
  I'm simply pointing out that there are lots of applications of AI that will create work. And to those that say that machines will just solve all those problems by themselves, I would ask them to produce some evidence besides an estimated trajectory.

simonsarris 10y ago

> Researchers have yet to find solid evidence that automation has ever destroyed jobs. Horse jobs (horses are a special and strange kind of human) are nil. Before there were lots of jobs they could do, now there are no essential tasks. Turnspit dog[0] jobs (another very strange kind of human) are nil, in fact they are so nil that the dogs went extinct. There were no tasks left for them to do, their jobs were automated away. Jobs for very very intellectually slow people are nil or nearly nil. This was not true in say, 1600. In 1600 even the most dimwitted human could be helpful: At the very least he could do essential tasks like chop wood and carry water. Today there are zero essential tasks. If one has a job, it is usually because someone is humoring him or her, or that we as a society have just decided to be nice, economics of it be damned [1]. Very few humans under 10 in the united states have jobs. This was not always true. Very few humans over 80 have jobs. There are no essential tasks that we have for these classes of people, just like the horses and very slow people. (We could consider this a victory that there aren't any jobs for 10 year olds but that's beside the point here) There are classes of humans already boxed out of any possible job in some economies. Gradations of humans must exist nearly all the way up the chain. Saying that automation has not destroyed jobs is simply a lack of imagination on the part of these researchers. Maybe not all humans will be obsolete in the job market, but we already have to permit that some are. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_dog [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_Industries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_Industries

jdoliner 10y ago
The statements about jobs not being destroyed is about _aggregate_ jobs. If you pick any specific group of people (or animals) you can find many examples of groups losing jobs. Hopefully this doesn't come as a surprise to you and hopefully you can see how these are different things. Markets shift, that's the whole point of markets, and when they do it's very painful for those they shift away from. The most poignant example of this is that a smaller percentage of Americans have jobs now than they did in the 70s (and even as recently as 2008). But those jobs have gone to other countries and perhaps there's a good reason for that. > Saying that automation has not destroyed jobs is simply a lack of imagination on the part of these researchers. I honestly burst out laughing at this, what do you think these researchers have failed to imagine? The idea of confining their view strictly to horse employment and not considering the employment as a whole? Researchers shouldn't be imaginative in how they approach experiments, they should be scientific and precise. If they don't like the results they get they shouldn't imagine new definitions of employment that justify their preconceived notions.