8 ms·

Things don't have to be fully automated to mean big changes. The factory that makes Ikea bookcases employs twice the number of people it did in the 1980s but th

Things don't have to be fully automated to mean big changes. The factory that makes Ikea bookcases employs twice the number of people it did in the 1980s but they make 37x as many bookcases [1] We're looking at a similar situation in the programming, ops, and IT support areas. A friend of mine Tweeted this the other night: "I'm sleepless so I just created a voice-based health tracker using Google Assistant in about 20 minutes that took me wks to write 3 yrs ago." [2] I've heard numerous anecdotes of "A Zapier account and 20 minutes of fiddling with things just replaced a SAAS app/consultant, etc. we were paying for." This is what automation looks like: the top 10% in a profession doing 100x the work previously done. To date the appetite for more and more software development (eating the world) has sufficed, but there is no guarantee that will always be the case. 1 - http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38747485 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38747485 2 - https://twitter.com/Raelshark/status/843776684407111680 https://twitter.com/Raelshark/status/843776684407111680

jordwest 10y ago
I don't understand the constant focus on the upcoming automation crunch. Efficiency improvements (through automation and otherwise) have been happening over the past several decades - more output with less jobs - where the majority of the benefits go to the owners of the clockwork. Now we're in a situation where we produce most goods that society needs (and a lot that we don't need) yet there are fewer jobs. This is absolutely going to get worse, but we shouldn't be thinking of robots as any different to the market forces that have been going on for years. Something has to give.
- macawfish 10y ago
  People like Ray Kurzweil prophecy about a time when human "intelligence" is replaced in value. But what about human work? It is something deeper and at least as precious, our freedom to be physically integrated with one another and and with the physical environment we are embedded in. Karl Marx, etc already wrote about a kind of devastating "singularity" that is here and now at the roots of many social, physical and spiritual ills.
  - musha68k 10y ago
    Aristotle would have been OK with that. Work simply is "non-leisure" and therefore shouldn't be aspired to per-se. As per Josef Pieper – it's all about leisure. School especially so: "The Greek word for leisure (σχολή) is the origin of Latin scola, German Schule, English school. The names for the institutions of education and learning mean leisure." In this potential world of abundant leisure we just need to get back to good old sharing – because sharing means caring!
    - throwaway2048 10y ago
      I doubt the multi billionares are going to be open to the idea of sharing.
    - rubidium 10y ago
      Never thought I'd see Pieper referenced on HN. Great point and reference. For everyone else, Leisure the basis of culture is worth reading and relevant here. But finding a realistic economic system where the benefits of automation don't just benefit the top x% and lead to a morlocks and Eloi society is HARD!
      - RobertoG 10y ago
        It's not so hard to find it, it just it sounds too much as socialism. There are all kind of possible ideas. Just the other day I read about, instead of taxing corporations, make that a minority percentage is owned by the society. Not without its problems, but sounds like it would line up some bad incentives that we see now in action. At the end of the day, we always go back to who owns the means of production. As is always the case with humans, change it's not going to happen until we are in real trouble. Maybe not even then.
    - flukus 10y ago
      I'm not sure if we should be taking lessons from people who's leisure time was created from slavery. Arisotle was the ancient equialent of billionaires who's family can live forever off of interest/investments
- bsder 10y ago
  > I don't understand the constant focus on the upcoming automation crunch. Efficiency improvements (through automation and otherwise) have been happening over the past several decades - more output with less jobs - where the majority of the benefits go to the owners of the clockwork. Before, automation only impacted the jobs of blue collar workers so nobody cared. Now it impacts the jobs of white collar workers so everybody is starting to whine.
  - vacri 10y ago
    To be fair, I think a modern day professional carpenter would much rather work with modern power tools than what carpenters had to use at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Modern-day miners much prefer using their heavy machinery than swinging a pickaxe and pushing a trolley. I can't see many modern-day blue-collar workers volunteering to go back to the old ways in order to increase employment counts.
    - gremlinsinc 10y ago
      Pretty sure the carpenter will complain when anything made w/ wood can just be put through a 3d 'wood' printer and come out flawless, or a device that basically can take a block of wood, or 4x4s and construct just about anything without any human intervention. Won't be long before mining operations are all manned by drones and not a single human. This isn't sci-fi, it's near-future tech.
      - flukus 10y ago
        Mining is already there, bringing a mine online is human intensive, but when that's done most of the mining is automated.
        candiodari 10y ago
        But when AIs start to program we as programmers have a simple solution : we simply bring them into a meeting with marketing and product management and let the result natural suicidal impulse take care of those suckers.
- deelowe 10y ago
  We have an individual sitting in the leadership position for the most powerful nation on earth who won on promises that he will build a literal wall across the border based on FUD regarding illegal immigrants taking the jobs of workers in the nation. This happened despite the fact that the number of illegal immigrants is on a steep decline. People are not reacting rationally to what's going on. That is the concern.
  - ianai 10y ago
    Maybe people don't react rationally? Maybe we wind up in a world where you don't want to be in anything remotely seeming part of the government. Think French Revolution.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Kaizyn 10y ago
  The new focus on the 'automation push' is for political reasons and not for any other real concerns. Ask yourself what changes in society are being agitated for the most? What is being put forward for the solution to the automation push? It is not very different than the political handling of man-made global warming. The solution is for affluent nations like the US to reduce its standard of living and cede more control to international bodies. We can debate the merits of the science all we want, but the solution put forward promotes a pre-determined political agenda. We're seeing the same type of thing starting now with the talk of the automation crunch. Ideas like UBI are declared the solution and a shift to greater reliance on government because we will all soon be unable to have good enough jobs to look after ourselves.
  - coolgeek 10y ago
    > The solution is for affluent nations like the US to reduce its standard of living and cede more control to international bodies. We can debate the merits of the science all we want, but the solution put forward promotes a pre-determined political agenda Where is this solution put forward? By what politicians is this "political handling" being done? What legislation has been proposed, let alone passed?
- pilsetnieks 10y ago
  > we shouldn't be thinking of robots as any different to the market forces that have been going on for years It's not that they're so different as such; it's the scale and speed of change that's different.
learc83 10y ago
How many programmers did commercial Operating Systems put out of work? Every new level of abstraction leads to new capabilities and new demands. You may have to learn new technology or move in a different direction, but I'm pretty sure software development as an industry is pretty safe unless we develop strong AI. Higher levels of abstraction allow people to build virtual goods that are more complex and there is no foreseeable limit to the desire for more complex goods virtual goods, and no real physical limit.
- smilliken 10y ago
  > How many programmers did commercial Operating Systems put out of work? Programmers ended up getting more work. Whatever the computers displaced is where the jobs diminished.
- fjdlwlv 10y ago
  At some point we'll collapse under our inability to manage complexity, both on the production side and the consumption side.
legulere 10y ago
This is Jevon's paradox, which states that efficiency increases can lead to higher resource usage. Here the resource is human labour https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
dualogy 10y ago
> A friend of mine Tweeted this the other night: "I'm sleepless so I just created a voice-based health tracker using Google Assistant in about 20 minutes that took me wks to write 3 yrs ago." Sounds like someone scripted an Ajax-Json-API-Call to Google Servers.. today's equivalent of writing a small shell script.. "wow, I piped grep, had I done this by hand in C this would have taken me days" would have been the tweet in the 80s.. what did they call it back then, Gopher?
- cortesoft 10y ago
  I am not sure what your point is? Reusable tools ARE what make things easier to do today than they were yesterday. The fact that there are a lot more easy to use tools today means things are easier to do today, and are going to keep getting easier.
  - intrasight 10y ago
    It's not that the tools are easier to use (I'd argue they aren't). It's that the function call you make are much richer, and you can deploy at global web scale just as easily as running that function in a local script.
    - cortesoft 10y ago
      Sorry, you are right. I said 'easier to use' when I should have said 'can accomplish more with the same effort.'
  - visarga 10y ago
    External servers and API offered by some other company cannot be considered the same as actual tools. They are not guaranteed to exist tomorrow. A hammer that you own, or a compiler in your computer are real tools.
    - bryanrasmussen 10y ago
      I agree that owning your own hammer, if it is a good one, is preferable to borrowing your neighbor's; but when everything looks like a nail wherever you get your hammer does not keep it from working as such.
petra 10y ago
In what scenario will the appetite for software will go down ?
JamesBarney 10y ago
Programming is two things. Figuring out what to build, and than building it. We've made much more progress on the latter than the former.
- flukus 10y ago
  I wonder if we could create a limited AI that could prompt users to define requirements better? Something where the output to would be a bunch of user stories.
mtdewcmu 10y ago
The demand for new programs will not abate unless people stop thinking of new things to do with computers. The number of useful things that a computer could do might be infinite -- or it might not. We're unlikely to ever hit that point, because will probably be a long tail that never quite reaches zero. I don't think that programming is a good opportunity for automation, because I think programming is something that humans are actually very good at. In order to write a program, you have to figure out what functionality would be useful to a person, both to elicit latent specifications and to intuit what would be acceptable for things that are not precisely specified. Anticipating what a person would want requires having a theory of mind and understanding the experience of being human. That's about the hardest task in all of computer science. It's also the thing that people are probably best at. On top of just making it work, it has to work well enough be cost-competitive with employing a person. If we ever get to that point, there will be so few jobs left for humans that almost everyone on earth will be a programmer. So it won't cost very much to employ one.
- lr4444lr 10y ago
  Very much agree. And I think the corollary, which you describe more than state outright, is that as the tooling and technology gets better, the human value-add would likely demand the talents of the more imaginative, "right-brained", and creatively extroverted - not the stereotypical techie profile. Knuth thought he could do it with literate programming, which didn't take off, to say the least. Maybe it won't ever be that way. Interesting times ahead!
  - laughfactory 10y ago
    I agree, and will add that I believe this is the secret sauce in the truly exceptional data scientists, engineers, and developers: people who take the tech skill set and remix with heavy doses of creativity and interpersonal skills.
  - mtdewcmu 10y ago
    Actually, if you consider programs that can be considered art, like video games, that may create an infinite demand for programmers, because the demand for art is infinite. In art, the fact that something has never been done before can be the sole justification for doing it. With respect to creativity becoming more important relative to technical ability-- I think that both will be important.
greenhouse_gas 10y ago
If you think about it, how many web designers were knocked out by WordPress? How many programmers were knocked out by C?
- rhizome 10y ago
  It probably affected the DMV and grocery hiring pools more. Not that WP is for dummies, but it absorbed many people who back in the day were underemployed, intellectually and creatively.
  - greenhouse_gas 10y ago
    But you don't need to be a programmer to install (and keep up to date) WordPress. In fact, you can be a business owner, set aside a Sunday, and you're done. You don't need to hire anyone
    - rhizome 10y ago
      But you don't need to be a programmer to install (and keep up to date) WordPress. That was essentially my point.
- onion2k 10y ago
  If you think about it, how many web designers were knocked out by WordPress? Are you assuming it's a small number? It seems reasonable to assume that without WordPress we might have another 10,000 web designers. Or 100,000. Or 0. Or -10,000 if WP theme design increased the size of the web industry. We don't know. These sorts of notionally statistical questions breakdown when you try to use "common sense" or logic-but-without-data to answer them. We have no way of knowing what might have happened without WordPress.
  - greenhouse_gas 10y ago
    No I don't. I think it's a huge number. Think about all those diners, souvenir shops, whatever, who need websites no longer go to mom-and-pop website designers but click, click, click and they have a decent WordPress installation. Remember those "website for $100” ads? All gone.
andrewchambers 10y ago
Not to mention, 20 minutes always means at least a few hours when a developer is telling you how easy something was.
- raelshark 10y ago
  (Friend who tweeted this here) In this case, I actually did create it that quick while lying in bed, and used nothing more than IFTTT and a Google Spreadsheet. I probably should have mentioned "without coding" in the original tweet to be clear about that, cause I think it's a pretty big factor. Literally anyone with the least bit of tech savvy and a recent Android phone could do this, and it's actually more effective than the original web app I used. Edit: clarified the time it took
mike_ivanov 10y ago
> A Zapier account and 20 minutes of fiddling > with things just replaced a SAAS app/consultant Just wait until things go wrong (for whatever reason).
ainiriand 10y ago
My two cents about this and back to work: I do code deployments to production with the click of a button and some years ago it required a lot of careful planning and time.

jordwest 10y ago

I don't understand the constant focus on the upcoming automation crunch. Efficiency improvements (through automation and otherwise) have been happening over the past several decades - more output with less jobs - where the majority of the benefits go to the owners of the clockwork. Now we're in a situation where we produce most goods that society needs (and a lot that we don't need) yet there are fewer jobs. This is absolutely going to get worse, but we shouldn't be thinking of robots as any different to the market forces that have been going on for years. Something has to give.

macawfish 10y ago
People like Ray Kurzweil prophecy about a time when human "intelligence" is replaced in value. But what about human work? It is something deeper and at least as precious, our freedom to be physically integrated with one another and and with the physical environment we are embedded in. Karl Marx, etc already wrote about a kind of devastating "singularity" that is here and now at the roots of many social, physical and spiritual ills.
- musha68k 10y ago
  Aristotle would have been OK with that. Work simply is "non-leisure" and therefore shouldn't be aspired to per-se. As per Josef Pieper – it's all about leisure. School especially so: "The Greek word for leisure (σχολή) is the origin of Latin scola, German Schule, English school. The names for the institutions of education and learning mean leisure." In this potential world of abundant leisure we just need to get back to good old sharing – because sharing means caring!
  - throwaway2048 10y ago
    I doubt the multi billionares are going to be open to the idea of sharing.
  - rubidium 10y ago
    Never thought I'd see Pieper referenced on HN. Great point and reference. For everyone else, Leisure the basis of culture is worth reading and relevant here. But finding a realistic economic system where the benefits of automation don't just benefit the top x% and lead to a morlocks and Eloi society is HARD!
    - RobertoG 10y ago
      It's not so hard to find it, it just it sounds too much as socialism. There are all kind of possible ideas. Just the other day I read about, instead of taxing corporations, make that a minority percentage is owned by the society. Not without its problems, but sounds like it would line up some bad incentives that we see now in action. At the end of the day, we always go back to who owns the means of production. As is always the case with humans, change it's not going to happen until we are in real trouble. Maybe not even then.
  - flukus 10y ago
    I'm not sure if we should be taking lessons from people who's leisure time was created from slavery. Arisotle was the ancient equialent of billionaires who's family can live forever off of interest/investments
bsder 10y ago
> I don't understand the constant focus on the upcoming automation crunch. Efficiency improvements (through automation and otherwise) have been happening over the past several decades - more output with less jobs - where the majority of the benefits go to the owners of the clockwork. Before, automation only impacted the jobs of blue collar workers so nobody cared. Now it impacts the jobs of white collar workers so everybody is starting to whine.
- vacri 10y ago
  To be fair, I think a modern day professional carpenter would much rather work with modern power tools than what carpenters had to use at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Modern-day miners much prefer using their heavy machinery than swinging a pickaxe and pushing a trolley. I can't see many modern-day blue-collar workers volunteering to go back to the old ways in order to increase employment counts.
  - gremlinsinc 10y ago
    Pretty sure the carpenter will complain when anything made w/ wood can just be put through a 3d 'wood' printer and come out flawless, or a device that basically can take a block of wood, or 4x4s and construct just about anything without any human intervention. Won't be long before mining operations are all manned by drones and not a single human. This isn't sci-fi, it's near-future tech.
    - flukus 10y ago
      Mining is already there, bringing a mine online is human intensive, but when that's done most of the mining is automated.
      - candiodari 10y ago
        But when AIs start to program we as programmers have a simple solution : we simply bring them into a meeting with marketing and product management and let the result natural suicidal impulse take care of those suckers.
deelowe 10y ago
We have an individual sitting in the leadership position for the most powerful nation on earth who won on promises that he will build a literal wall across the border based on FUD regarding illegal immigrants taking the jobs of workers in the nation. This happened despite the fact that the number of illegal immigrants is on a steep decline. People are not reacting rationally to what's going on. That is the concern.
- ianai 10y ago
  Maybe people don't react rationally? Maybe we wind up in a world where you don't want to be in anything remotely seeming part of the government. Think French Revolution.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Kaizyn 10y ago
The new focus on the 'automation push' is for political reasons and not for any other real concerns. Ask yourself what changes in society are being agitated for the most? What is being put forward for the solution to the automation push? It is not very different than the political handling of man-made global warming. The solution is for affluent nations like the US to reduce its standard of living and cede more control to international bodies. We can debate the merits of the science all we want, but the solution put forward promotes a pre-determined political agenda. We're seeing the same type of thing starting now with the talk of the automation crunch. Ideas like UBI are declared the solution and a shift to greater reliance on government because we will all soon be unable to have good enough jobs to look after ourselves.
- coolgeek 10y ago
  > The solution is for affluent nations like the US to reduce its standard of living and cede more control to international bodies. We can debate the merits of the science all we want, but the solution put forward promotes a pre-determined political agenda Where is this solution put forward? By what politicians is this "political handling" being done? What legislation has been proposed, let alone passed?
pilsetnieks 10y ago
> we shouldn't be thinking of robots as any different to the market forces that have been going on for years It's not that they're so different as such; it's the scale and speed of change that's different.

learc83 10y ago

How many programmers did commercial Operating Systems put out of work? Every new level of abstraction leads to new capabilities and new demands. You may have to learn new technology or move in a different direction, but I'm pretty sure software development as an industry is pretty safe unless we develop strong AI. Higher levels of abstraction allow people to build virtual goods that are more complex and there is no foreseeable limit to the desire for more complex goods virtual goods, and no real physical limit.

smilliken 10y ago
> How many programmers did commercial Operating Systems put out of work? Programmers ended up getting more work. Whatever the computers displaced is where the jobs diminished.
fjdlwlv 10y ago
At some point we'll collapse under our inability to manage complexity, both on the production side and the consumption side.

legulere 10y ago

This is Jevon's paradox, which states that efficiency increases can lead to higher resource usage. Here the resource is human labour https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

dualogy 10y ago

> A friend of mine Tweeted this the other night: "I'm sleepless so I just created a voice-based health tracker using Google Assistant in about 20 minutes that took me wks to write 3 yrs ago." Sounds like someone scripted an Ajax-Json-API-Call to Google Servers.. today's equivalent of writing a small shell script.. "wow, I piped grep, had I done this by hand in C this would have taken me days" would have been the tweet in the 80s.. what did they call it back then, Gopher?

cortesoft 10y ago
I am not sure what your point is? Reusable tools ARE what make things easier to do today than they were yesterday. The fact that there are a lot more easy to use tools today means things are easier to do today, and are going to keep getting easier.
- intrasight 10y ago
  It's not that the tools are easier to use (I'd argue they aren't). It's that the function call you make are much richer, and you can deploy at global web scale just as easily as running that function in a local script.
  - cortesoft 10y ago
    Sorry, you are right. I said 'easier to use' when I should have said 'can accomplish more with the same effort.'
- visarga 10y ago
  External servers and API offered by some other company cannot be considered the same as actual tools. They are not guaranteed to exist tomorrow. A hammer that you own, or a compiler in your computer are real tools.
  - bryanrasmussen 10y ago
    I agree that owning your own hammer, if it is a good one, is preferable to borrowing your neighbor's; but when everything looks like a nail wherever you get your hammer does not keep it from working as such.

petra 10y ago

In what scenario will the appetite for software will go down ?

JamesBarney 10y ago

Programming is two things. Figuring out what to build, and than building it. We've made much more progress on the latter than the former.

flukus 10y ago
I wonder if we could create a limited AI that could prompt users to define requirements better? Something where the output to would be a bunch of user stories.

mtdewcmu 10y ago

The demand for new programs will not abate unless people stop thinking of new things to do with computers. The number of useful things that a computer could do might be infinite -- or it might not. We're unlikely to ever hit that point, because will probably be a long tail that never quite reaches zero. I don't think that programming is a good opportunity for automation, because I think programming is something that humans are actually very good at. In order to write a program, you have to figure out what functionality would be useful to a person, both to elicit latent specifications and to intuit what would be acceptable for things that are not precisely specified. Anticipating what a person would want requires having a theory of mind and understanding the experience of being human. That's about the hardest task in all of computer science. It's also the thing that people are probably best at. On top of just making it work, it has to work well enough be cost-competitive with employing a person. If we ever get to that point, there will be so few jobs left for humans that almost everyone on earth will be a programmer. So it won't cost very much to employ one.

lr4444lr 10y ago
Very much agree. And I think the corollary, which you describe more than state outright, is that as the tooling and technology gets better, the human value-add would likely demand the talents of the more imaginative, "right-brained", and creatively extroverted - not the stereotypical techie profile. Knuth thought he could do it with literate programming, which didn't take off, to say the least. Maybe it won't ever be that way. Interesting times ahead!
- laughfactory 10y ago
  I agree, and will add that I believe this is the secret sauce in the truly exceptional data scientists, engineers, and developers: people who take the tech skill set and remix with heavy doses of creativity and interpersonal skills.
- mtdewcmu 10y ago
  Actually, if you consider programs that can be considered art, like video games, that may create an infinite demand for programmers, because the demand for art is infinite. In art, the fact that something has never been done before can be the sole justification for doing it. With respect to creativity becoming more important relative to technical ability-- I think that both will be important.

greenhouse_gas 10y ago

If you think about it, how many web designers were knocked out by WordPress? How many programmers were knocked out by C?

rhizome 10y ago
It probably affected the DMV and grocery hiring pools more. Not that WP is for dummies, but it absorbed many people who back in the day were underemployed, intellectually and creatively.
- greenhouse_gas 10y ago
  But you don't need to be a programmer to install (and keep up to date) WordPress. In fact, you can be a business owner, set aside a Sunday, and you're done. You don't need to hire anyone
  - rhizome 10y ago
    But you don't need to be a programmer to install (and keep up to date) WordPress. That was essentially my point.
onion2k 10y ago
If you think about it, how many web designers were knocked out by WordPress? Are you assuming it's a small number? It seems reasonable to assume that without WordPress we might have another 10,000 web designers. Or 100,000. Or 0. Or -10,000 if WP theme design increased the size of the web industry. We don't know. These sorts of notionally statistical questions breakdown when you try to use "common sense" or logic-but-without-data to answer them. We have no way of knowing what might have happened without WordPress.
- greenhouse_gas 10y ago
  No I don't. I think it's a huge number. Think about all those diners, souvenir shops, whatever, who need websites no longer go to mom-and-pop website designers but click, click, click and they have a decent WordPress installation. Remember those "website for $100” ads? All gone.

andrewchambers 10y ago

Not to mention, 20 minutes always means at least a few hours when a developer is telling you how easy something was.

raelshark 10y ago
(Friend who tweeted this here) In this case, I actually did create it that quick while lying in bed, and used nothing more than IFTTT and a Google Spreadsheet. I probably should have mentioned "without coding" in the original tweet to be clear about that, cause I think it's a pretty big factor. Literally anyone with the least bit of tech savvy and a recent Android phone could do this, and it's actually more effective than the original web app I used. Edit: clarified the time it took

mike_ivanov 10y ago

> A Zapier account and 20 minutes of fiddling > with things just replaced a SAAS app/consultant Just wait until things go wrong (for whatever reason).

ainiriand 10y ago

My two cents about this and back to work: I do code deployments to production with the click of a button and some years ago it required a lot of careful planning and time.