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The naive picture of automation is always to picture a room full of 10 doctors (or lawyers, or burger flippers, or what have you) and imagine that until we can

The naive picture of automation is always to picture a room full of 10 doctors (or lawyers, or burger flippers, or what have you) and imagine that until we can replace all 10 doctors with a machine then nothing is happening. Instead, what really happens is that someone makes an incremental advance that allows 9 doctors plus a machine (plus, probably, some tiny increment of people servicing the machines) to do the work of 10. All it takes is to find the most routine aspect of some job and automate that away... You provide the perfect example in your utterly incorrect summary of the effect of office software. This almost entirely wiped out a huge number of secretarial jobs.

emmab 9y ago
> Instead, what really happens is that someone makes an incremental advance that allows 9 doctors plus a machine (plus, probably, some tiny increment of people servicing the machines) to do the work of 10. All it takes is to find the most routine aspect of some job and automate that away... Isn't there a shortage of doctors already? Doesn't seem like the most vulnerable field to incremental automation.
- chrisco255 9y ago
  Wiping out 10% of the work would probably not have a discernible impact, however, what's another 10-50 years of AI advancement going to achieve? A 20-40% level of automation would be devastating for any industry.
  - lucozade 9y ago
    > A 20-40% level of automation would be devastating for any industry. Devastating to an industry in its current form. Taking medicine as an example, I just don't see any reason to expect that, if you automated away 50%+ of the current job, you'd require less, highly trained, medical staff. Sure they'd be doing quite different jobs, for the most part. Sure some of the current crop won't want those new jobs. But everything I've seen wrt automation encroaching on highly skilled employment would suggest that there's little to no reduction in employment. Quite the opposite. I tend to look at it a different way. What is the likely limit on the need for medical expertise ad how far away are we from that limit? I would suggest that we're currently a very long way from capacity for medical expertise and you could automate away a significant portion of the current roles without substantially affecting numbers. I could, of course, be wrong. And, of course, one can extrapolate to a point where AI has perfect knowledge of all human anatomy, natural and enhanced, as well as having innovation and design skills well in advance of humanity. But we're an awful long way away from that.

emmab 9y ago

> Instead, what really happens is that someone makes an incremental advance that allows 9 doctors plus a machine (plus, probably, some tiny increment of people servicing the machines) to do the work of 10. All it takes is to find the most routine aspect of some job and automate that away... Isn't there a shortage of doctors already? Doesn't seem like the most vulnerable field to incremental automation.

chrisco255 9y ago
Wiping out 10% of the work would probably not have a discernible impact, however, what's another 10-50 years of AI advancement going to achieve? A 20-40% level of automation would be devastating for any industry.
- lucozade 9y ago
  > A 20-40% level of automation would be devastating for any industry. Devastating to an industry in its current form. Taking medicine as an example, I just don't see any reason to expect that, if you automated away 50%+ of the current job, you'd require less, highly trained, medical staff. Sure they'd be doing quite different jobs, for the most part. Sure some of the current crop won't want those new jobs. But everything I've seen wrt automation encroaching on highly skilled employment would suggest that there's little to no reduction in employment. Quite the opposite. I tend to look at it a different way. What is the likely limit on the need for medical expertise ad how far away are we from that limit? I would suggest that we're currently a very long way from capacity for medical expertise and you could automate away a significant portion of the current roles without substantially affecting numbers. I could, of course, be wrong. And, of course, one can extrapolate to a point where AI has perfect knowledge of all human anatomy, natural and enhanced, as well as having innovation and design skills well in advance of humanity. But we're an awful long way away from that.