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I don't understand how people so smart can be fooled by the idea that automation will permanently take jobs away from the economy. Jobs will shift, but thinkin

by m52go 9y ago

I don't understand how people so smart can be fooled by the idea that automation will permanently take jobs away from the economy. Jobs will shift, but thinking we need cash handouts for people to live on (because all the jobs will just POOF, disappear!) is just naive. Just as farmers & bowling-pin-setters found new jobs in the past, taxi-drivers will find new jobs in the future. Zuckerberg is right that people should be more entrepreneurial, but I see no reason why the labor transformation we're undergoing now will reduce overall jobs in the market. It never has.

justicezyx 9y ago
The tipping point of AI having human-equivalent capability in specialized area is coming. The past industrial transformation has never had that trait.
jrs95 9y ago
The issue now is that the cost of getting the training to find a new job is going to be substantially higher than it has been during previous iterations of automation. The market is already falling short here -- there's a lot of people doing stuff that falls way short of their potential. If we're going to make it through the next few decades without substantial increases in the welfare state, that's a problem we need to solve before it gets to be too late and the political scales have tipped past the point of no return.
- m52go 9y ago
  Yeah, if you're talking about underemployment, that's a huge issue, but I think that's more market-driven than skills-driven. People are generally over-qualified than under-qualified. Too many people are taking on obscene levels of debt to get a college degree, but most aren't really distinguishing themselves by doing that...they're joining a crowd of other people who've proven they have the same skills (on paper). Do we need more of that? Hence the need to be entrepreneurial. Everyone doesn't have to create the next Instagram, but if they can just acquire a skill to offer their communities some kind of a service, like the world worked before limited liability and the 401(k), they should be alright. Many (most?) of these skills don't require $200k to acquire. What is different in today's situation is that we're asking people to do more than they did in their past: learning a new skill and offering it to others is damn hard. Leaving a farm to work in a factory where someone tells you what to do all day is easy (not literally, but it doesn't require your livelihood to depend on your creativity/luck).
- valuearb 9y ago
  it's easier and cheaper to train programmers than ever before.
Hannan 9y ago
CGP Grey has a video that discusses the automation issue, including the "Why is it different this time?" question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
Clubber 9y ago
It's not automation in and of itself, it's the speed at which it's happening. To use a strange analogy, in the past it has been a leaky faucet. Sometimes it's leaked a lot, sometimes it's leaked a little, but it's always been understood how to fix it. Automation (and offshoring) is affecting so many industries at such a fast pace, it's a river flood rather than a leaky faucet. A current example is the number of truck drivers. 3.5 million. What are they going to do? That's just one of many.
- harryh 9y ago
  The US adds 200k jobs per month during non recession times. 3.5 million is 17 months worth. Considering that truck driving jobs will disappear over many many years that's no big deal.
  - luckydata 9y ago
    This is the kind of comment that shows the wisdom of keeping "code monkeys" as far away from decisions that matters as humanly possible. Thank you for helping the cause of "pointy haired bosses" everywhere, keep it up.
    - abiox 9y ago
      the comment seems to presume that 'X jobs per month' will persist into the future. apparently automation will only ever impact truck drivers.
      - kasey_junk 9y ago
        It presumes that it will because it has so far. We've already seen lots of automation and the "jobs per month" numbers have held up. A better critique of the argument is about the quality of the jobs, not the numbers.
        abiox 9y ago
        > It presumes that it will because it has so far. that's the point though. seems like a standard example of the problem of induction.
SolarNet 9y ago
Because we have never had machines capable of doing human metal labor. That is making executive decisions, displaying creativity, learning over time etc. These are fundamental human capabilities that machines are becoming capable of. It will be impossible for the human labor market to shift when nearly every job has an AI that can do it better, faster, with less mistakes, and most importantly for cheaper. On what aspects are humans supposed to compete? I also recommend the CGP grey video.
HiroshiSan 9y ago
Just because it hasn't in the past, doesn't mean it won't in the future.
zitterbewegung 9y ago
Yes, we should expect blue collar workers to be our Uber drivers or our postmate deliverers or Etsy sellers. The new jobs created in this economy pale in comparison to what they were doing before.
mytherin 9y ago
We rode horses for millenia, and that never changed until the car came along and suddenly nobody rode horses anymore. The same thing will happen to human labor. Automation will make it obsolete. The only question is how we as a society will deal with humans being made "unnecessary".
- m52go 9y ago
  That's a terrible analogy. You're using 1 job as a parallel for all of human capital.
  - dkonofalski 9y ago
    Why is that a terrible analogy? It applies to almost every industry out there...
    - m52go 9y ago
      Because human capital is a market of jobs, and the analogy attempts to compare that entire market to 1 job/industry within that market (horses). When horses became obsolete, the car industry rose, and tens of thousands of people were needed to engineer, produce, sell, and repair cars. So as automation takes over, the jobs it affects will disappear, but others will emerge to take their places.
      - dkonofalski 9y ago
        Except that automation is entirely unique from what's happened in the past because it requires far fewer people to do those tasks. You're displacing industries where the target doesn't require nearly as many people as the source industry. I mean... even in the example that you give, with the car industry rising, we're already seeing fewer and fewer jobs as all the electricians (as an example) that were once hired were replaced by a single automated machine and that machine only requires a single person to service it (or maybe a handful, at most). The issue is that your last statement is correct but vastly understated - the jobs affected will disappear, others will emerge to take their place, but not in the quantities necessary to keep the same percent of the population employed. Add to that the fact that the population and number of people requiring jobs is going to continue to increase and you're just cracking the tip of the iceberg.
abiox 9y ago
> Just as farmers & bowling-pin-setters found new jobs in the past, taxi-drivers will find new jobs in the future. this seems like something of a religious view, and seems to downplay the nature and scope of technological advancement. mechanization obviated a lot of physical labor. this made human expansion into mental labor and services more practical. however technology is fast approaching a point where substantial amounts of mental labor and services will be subject to automation. most 'new jobs' won't necessarily go to humans, as they'll be ripe for automation from the start.
- valuearb 9y ago
  if post civil war legislators were told their ultimate effects on farm employment, they would have banned any mechanical farming technologies. Would that have made the world better, or worse?
- johngalt 9y ago
  Mechanization has always obviated mental labor as well. Turning the same screw on an assembly line 100 times as day is vastly less mental labor than building a car as an artisan. Advances in technology and business processes are often made specifically to allow for less brain labor. There are tens of thousands of people in retail banking who can't calculate an amortization table without a computer. This has only resulted in more jobs in banking not fewer. Certainly automation may replace some jobs entirely, but in most cases it's merely an increase in efficiency.
- cgmg 9y ago
  What on earth does it have to do with religion?
  - abiox 9y ago
    'religious view' was an epistemic reference.
jlarocco 9y ago
You're focusing on the long term and ignoring the fact that automation job losses affect people in the present and short term. A person who's job is replaced by automation is screwed in the short term. Nobody will hire them for their primary skills (because the job can be done better/faster by automation), and so they have to learn something new while also working some kind of job to support themselves and families in the meantime. "Just innovate and come up with a new job and work for yourself" is easy to say, but it's a huge cop out. If it were just that simple then everybody would already be doing that.
Gargoyle 9y ago
Which jobs cannot be automated?
- lcnmrn 9y ago
  None, each job or service can be replaced by an automated one.
seibelj 9y ago
Yep, despite all the armchair futurists attacking your view, it is exactly correct. Anyone disagreeing please shoot me an email (in profile) and we can make a bet with an ethereum contract about the unemployment rate at 5, 10, 20, any year period you want and I'll put my money up against you. I've been meaning to make a website to automate this process because I've been hearing these arguments for so long and they will always be wrong, and I want to get rich off people being dumb
- nathan_f77 9y ago
  Ha, that's a good idea about the ethereum contract. How can you make a contract based on the unemployment rate? Can you write code that downloads a csv from somewhere?
  - seibelj 9y ago
    The concept is called an "oracle", or a trusted contract that will put real data into the blockchain, then other contracts can query it. For example, the NYSE stock exchange would publish closing prices daily of stocks in an official NYSE contract, and other contracts could trust it. This does rely on a third-party intermediary. I think there is a business model here to allow internet commenters to easily put their money where their mouth is. Like on reddit, 2 guys get into a long argument chain, and nothing ever comes of it. If it was easy to just say, "Bet me here if you are so sure," and all the other readers of the chain could as well, there is certainly a lot of takers. I know I would. I'm just so crazy busy right now to implement this, but maybe I'll find some time.
briholt 9y ago
No, robots will take literally every job. Every single task a human can perform, a computer will eventually do better. We're horses and James Watt just built his steam engine. Enjoy a few more decades of relevance before getting put out to pasture.
- jlarocco 9y ago
  Not sure I understand. Being able to spend my time however I want instead of wasting my life away at work sounds awesome. The real problem seems to be that our society puts so much emphasis on jobs and working. I guess it's a good way to keep people in line.
- IanDrake 9y ago
  That's a dream world that's always a few decades away. Do you really know what it takes to make something? Like something as simple as a hammer? Iron ore must be located. Will we have autonomous robots scan the earth for ore deposits?Then a quarry must be set up, explosives must be brought in, mining equipment is needed. Now step back. We need robots to make explosives, transport them to the mine, drill holes to put them in, take the explosives out of the packaging, insert them into holes, blow it, clear the rubble and decide if it's time to process the debris or just move it. Now step back again. You need robots the find the materials to make the explosives, to package them up and deliver them to the factory. Now step back again. You need robots to make and maintain all these other robots. Despite the ease of robots doing everything there is still a finite amount of resources on earth, so some sort of economic triage is needed to decide if iron ore gets shipped to the hammer factory or another factory. I guess that would be some sort of AI? The sheer scale of making a simple hammer from scratch with nothing but robots is immense. We are way, way, way further away than you think. The future is humans and robots working together.
  - m52go 9y ago
    I already up-voted you, but thank you again for articulating so well what I couldn't elsewhere in this thread.
  - goda90 9y ago
gnaritas 9y ago
The past is not prologue, thinking machines have never happened before in the past, so it's rather irrelevant that past automation for simple manual labor type things just shifted humans to new jobs. You're really not thinking clearly, you can only push humans to new jobs if the robots can't also do the new jobs. Jobs will not just shift, they are being eliminated entirely and new jobs will not displace them because said new work will be automated from the start. When robots can "think", then automation doesn't just shift jobs, it kills them forever. Human labor both physical and mental is now being obsoleted, this has never happened before, industrialization was not remotely the same.
- m52go 9y ago
  Still, the concept of robots killing jobs forever is exaggerated. AI is incredible and only going to become even more incredible. But the creativity of the human spirit will always reign supreme. A robot cannot start a new venture to fill a human need. Only a human can. A robot cannot write a new novel, make a new movie, or craft a new play. Only a human can. A robot cannot solve a human's medical crisis. Only a human can. A robot cannot govern a people. Only a human can. A robot cannot create a video game from start to finish. Only a human can. I could go on forever. Because almost everything a robot can do must be started + guided + improved by a human before it can be consumed by a human. And ultimately, humans consume, not robots--so that's never going to change. So while it's true automation can greatly help in all those endeavors, and eliminate lots of jobs in the process (and probably concentrate the value created much more than it was in the past), there will always be more opportunities for humans to be valuable. Perhaps that means the companies of the future will be smaller and more focused. Perhaps not. But it does not mean that human beings will be worthless. > Human labor both physical and mental is now being obsoleted, this has never happened before, industrialization was not remotely the same. I don't buy it.
  - gnaritas 9y ago
    Virtually everything you said "only a human can" is a religious belief. Robots will be able to write novels and make movies and craft plays and solve medical crisis (all of these are being done already in simplistic forms). Bitcoin is already an implementation of an algorithm governing people, you could go on forever making incorrect statements, but they'd still be incorrect. > There will always be more opportunities for humans to be valuable. This simply isn't remotely true. While there will always be a place for the smartest and most creative humans, most humans aren't that smart or that creative and won't be able to compete with AI labor. Stop thinking in anecdotes and see the bigger picture, in a world of thinking machines, there will be little need for human labor, certainly not enough need to keep most humans employed at the levels needed to support themselves. > So while it's true automation can greatly help in all those endeavors, and eliminate lots of jobs in the process (and probably concentrate the value created much more than it was in the past), there will always be more opportunities for humans to be valuable. Not as many as have been eliminated; that's the point you seem to miss, new jobs will not be added at the rate they're being eliminated in a world of smart machines because the smart machines will be doing those new jobs as well. > I don't buy it. It's true none the less.
dkonofalski 9y ago
Why do you think they're being fooled? We already have masses of people that have been displaced by automation. I mean, just look at Uber. Taxi drivers nearly revolted over the shift that Uber caused because it caused a lot of them to lose their jobs. The immediate response is "but look at how many people had jobs because of Uber. The jobs weren't lost, they were just moved to a different sector." What happens when Uber automates all their vehicles, though? What sector are all those jobs going to move to?
outlace 9y ago
With all due respect, I don't understand how smart people think they can predict the future from a single period in history. When is a sample size of 1 with very dubious generalizability ever enough? Yet, for those who share your views, it's not only enough evidence but sufficient to resist even thinking about the potential for future harms due to mass automation.
- m52go 9y ago
  I used the farming example because it's the most accessible one, but labor shifts happen all the time. This is far from a sample size of 1. Don't take my comments as a proclamation that "NOTHING SHALL CHANGE, AS THERE IS NO NEED TO WORRY." Quite the contrary...I do think changes in training, etc. need to be made. I just don't think it's a markedly different shift from anything we've had so far.
  - outlace 9y ago
    Thanks for your clarification and polite response. I was referring to the entire period of the industrial revolution. But in any case, your argument is inductive and has all the issues as such. Since we have no reliable explanatory model of economics, you're never justified in making a claim with such certainty on the basis of some number of past observations. At any time the dynamics can change. Hence, at the very least it seems prudent to put some serious thought into the potential for things to go badly.
bigtunacan 9y ago
Plenty of farmers didn't find new jobs which is likely a large factor in why farmers are committing suicide at such an alarming rate. http://www.farmandranchguide.com/entertainment/country_living/farm_and_ranch_life/suicide-rate-of-farmers-higher-than-any-other-group/article_e1ee8bfc-5b13-11e6-a1cc-cfffc7592815.html http://www.farmandranchguide.com/entertainment/country_livin...
petra 9y ago
>> no reason why the labor transformation we're undergoing now will reduce overall jobs in the market. It never has. In Ancient Rome, access to cheap slaves, created a very high unemployment among the plebs, who than became dependent on support from the state. Than the question becomes: could technology create a "cheap slave" equivalent ?
sumedh 9y ago
> taxi-drivers will find new jobs in the future. Will these new jobs be skilled and require a high amount of education. They probably will, do you really think lot of people are going to retrain themselves.
beisner 9y ago
The problem isn't that everyone's jobs will be replaced in the short term. The problem is that enough people's jobs will be replaced that the negotiating power of workers in more and more labor markets will be broken. This happened with manufacturing in the 1970s. Unions had a huge amount of power in the 1950s and 1960s, and could halt production if minimum standards of compensation weren't met. But the advent of the computer (along with major policy shifts and cultural shifts) basically eliminated this power, as it became easier to automate or outsource labor. Automation and outsourcing are two sides of the same coin: once the price of domestic labor eclipses the price of a non-domestic alternative, negotiating power vanishes. Entire classes of people move from stable positions in which they have bargaining power and sufficient protections to the positions we see today, which are often short-term, at-will, unstable, and often very low paying. This leads to what seems to me to be the most serious result: when you feel that your job is insecure, but your livelihood depends on that job, you are much more susceptible to exploitation. People in the service industry are beginning to feel this, and more and more industries will feel this in the coming years.
gremlinsinc 9y ago
Most economists, and business experts have pegged the job loss at 40% by 2030 -- that's permanent non-replaceable jobs by automation. This isn't the same as the industrial revolution, this is going to be much harder, even President Obama addressed this in an interview, and lots of other people much smarter than me, like Elon Musk and Bill Gates. It's not a matter of IF, but when.
namlem 9y ago
The problem is that this time automation is cognitive in nature. The AIs are reaching the point where they are better than a certain portion of the population at just about any job. Not every taxi driver is smart enough to become a programmer.

by m52go 9y ago

justicezyx 9y ago

The tipping point of AI having human-equivalent capability in specialized area is coming. The past industrial transformation has never had that trait.

jrs95 9y ago

The issue now is that the cost of getting the training to find a new job is going to be substantially higher than it has been during previous iterations of automation. The market is already falling short here -- there's a lot of people doing stuff that falls way short of their potential. If we're going to make it through the next few decades without substantial increases in the welfare state, that's a problem we need to solve before it gets to be too late and the political scales have tipped past the point of no return.

m52go 9y ago
Yeah, if you're talking about underemployment, that's a huge issue, but I think that's more market-driven than skills-driven. People are generally over-qualified than under-qualified. Too many people are taking on obscene levels of debt to get a college degree, but most aren't really distinguishing themselves by doing that...they're joining a crowd of other people who've proven they have the same skills (on paper). Do we need more of that? Hence the need to be entrepreneurial. Everyone doesn't have to create the next Instagram, but if they can just acquire a skill to offer their communities some kind of a service, like the world worked before limited liability and the 401(k), they should be alright. Many (most?) of these skills don't require $200k to acquire. What is different in today's situation is that we're asking people to do more than they did in their past: learning a new skill and offering it to others is damn hard. Leaving a farm to work in a factory where someone tells you what to do all day is easy (not literally, but it doesn't require your livelihood to depend on your creativity/luck).
valuearb 9y ago
it's easier and cheaper to train programmers than ever before.

Hannan 9y ago

CGP Grey has a video that discusses the automation issue, including the "Why is it different this time?" question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

Clubber 9y ago

It's not automation in and of itself, it's the speed at which it's happening. To use a strange analogy, in the past it has been a leaky faucet. Sometimes it's leaked a lot, sometimes it's leaked a little, but it's always been understood how to fix it. Automation (and offshoring) is affecting so many industries at such a fast pace, it's a river flood rather than a leaky faucet. A current example is the number of truck drivers. 3.5 million. What are they going to do? That's just one of many.

harryh 9y ago
The US adds 200k jobs per month during non recession times. 3.5 million is 17 months worth. Considering that truck driving jobs will disappear over many many years that's no big deal.
- luckydata 9y ago
  This is the kind of comment that shows the wisdom of keeping "code monkeys" as far away from decisions that matters as humanly possible. Thank you for helping the cause of "pointy haired bosses" everywhere, keep it up.
  - abiox 9y ago
    the comment seems to presume that 'X jobs per month' will persist into the future. apparently automation will only ever impact truck drivers.
    - kasey_junk 9y ago
      It presumes that it will because it has so far. We've already seen lots of automation and the "jobs per month" numbers have held up. A better critique of the argument is about the quality of the jobs, not the numbers.
      - abiox 9y ago
        > It presumes that it will because it has so far. that's the point though. seems like a standard example of the problem of induction.

SolarNet 9y ago

Because we have never had machines capable of doing human metal labor. That is making executive decisions, displaying creativity, learning over time etc. These are fundamental human capabilities that machines are becoming capable of. It will be impossible for the human labor market to shift when nearly every job has an AI that can do it better, faster, with less mistakes, and most importantly for cheaper. On what aspects are humans supposed to compete? I also recommend the CGP grey video.

HiroshiSan 9y ago

Just because it hasn't in the past, doesn't mean it won't in the future.

zitterbewegung 9y ago

Yes, we should expect blue collar workers to be our Uber drivers or our postmate deliverers or Etsy sellers. The new jobs created in this economy pale in comparison to what they were doing before.

mytherin 9y ago

We rode horses for millenia, and that never changed until the car came along and suddenly nobody rode horses anymore. The same thing will happen to human labor. Automation will make it obsolete. The only question is how we as a society will deal with humans being made "unnecessary".

m52go 9y ago
That's a terrible analogy. You're using 1 job as a parallel for all of human capital.
- dkonofalski 9y ago
  Why is that a terrible analogy? It applies to almost every industry out there...
  - m52go 9y ago
    Because human capital is a market of jobs, and the analogy attempts to compare that entire market to 1 job/industry within that market (horses). When horses became obsolete, the car industry rose, and tens of thousands of people were needed to engineer, produce, sell, and repair cars. So as automation takes over, the jobs it affects will disappear, but others will emerge to take their places.
    - dkonofalski 9y ago
      Except that automation is entirely unique from what's happened in the past because it requires far fewer people to do those tasks. You're displacing industries where the target doesn't require nearly as many people as the source industry. I mean... even in the example that you give, with the car industry rising, we're already seeing fewer and fewer jobs as all the electricians (as an example) that were once hired were replaced by a single automated machine and that machine only requires a single person to service it (or maybe a handful, at most). The issue is that your last statement is correct but vastly understated - the jobs affected will disappear, others will emerge to take their place, but not in the quantities necessary to keep the same percent of the population employed. Add to that the fact that the population and number of people requiring jobs is going to continue to increase and you're just cracking the tip of the iceberg.

abiox 9y ago

> Just as farmers & bowling-pin-setters found new jobs in the past, taxi-drivers will find new jobs in the future. this seems like something of a religious view, and seems to downplay the nature and scope of technological advancement. mechanization obviated a lot of physical labor. this made human expansion into mental labor and services more practical. however technology is fast approaching a point where substantial amounts of mental labor and services will be subject to automation. most 'new jobs' won't necessarily go to humans, as they'll be ripe for automation from the start.

valuearb 9y ago
if post civil war legislators were told their ultimate effects on farm employment, they would have banned any mechanical farming technologies. Would that have made the world better, or worse?
johngalt 9y ago
Mechanization has always obviated mental labor as well. Turning the same screw on an assembly line 100 times as day is vastly less mental labor than building a car as an artisan. Advances in technology and business processes are often made specifically to allow for less brain labor. There are tens of thousands of people in retail banking who can't calculate an amortization table without a computer. This has only resulted in more jobs in banking not fewer. Certainly automation may replace some jobs entirely, but in most cases it's merely an increase in efficiency.
cgmg 9y ago
What on earth does it have to do with religion?
- abiox 9y ago
  'religious view' was an epistemic reference.

jlarocco 9y ago

You're focusing on the long term and ignoring the fact that automation job losses affect people in the present and short term. A person who's job is replaced by automation is screwed in the short term. Nobody will hire them for their primary skills (because the job can be done better/faster by automation), and so they have to learn something new while also working some kind of job to support themselves and families in the meantime. "Just innovate and come up with a new job and work for yourself" is easy to say, but it's a huge cop out. If it were just that simple then everybody would already be doing that.

Gargoyle 9y ago

Which jobs cannot be automated?

lcnmrn 9y ago
None, each job or service can be replaced by an automated one.

seibelj 9y ago

Yep, despite all the armchair futurists attacking your view, it is exactly correct. Anyone disagreeing please shoot me an email (in profile) and we can make a bet with an ethereum contract about the unemployment rate at 5, 10, 20, any year period you want and I'll put my money up against you. I've been meaning to make a website to automate this process because I've been hearing these arguments for so long and they will always be wrong, and I want to get rich off people being dumb

nathan_f77 9y ago
Ha, that's a good idea about the ethereum contract. How can you make a contract based on the unemployment rate? Can you write code that downloads a csv from somewhere?
- seibelj 9y ago
  The concept is called an "oracle", or a trusted contract that will put real data into the blockchain, then other contracts can query it. For example, the NYSE stock exchange would publish closing prices daily of stocks in an official NYSE contract, and other contracts could trust it. This does rely on a third-party intermediary. I think there is a business model here to allow internet commenters to easily put their money where their mouth is. Like on reddit, 2 guys get into a long argument chain, and nothing ever comes of it. If it was easy to just say, "Bet me here if you are so sure," and all the other readers of the chain could as well, there is certainly a lot of takers. I know I would. I'm just so crazy busy right now to implement this, but maybe I'll find some time.

briholt 9y ago

No, robots will take literally every job. Every single task a human can perform, a computer will eventually do better. We're horses and James Watt just built his steam engine. Enjoy a few more decades of relevance before getting put out to pasture.

jlarocco 9y ago
Not sure I understand. Being able to spend my time however I want instead of wasting my life away at work sounds awesome. The real problem seems to be that our society puts so much emphasis on jobs and working. I guess it's a good way to keep people in line.
IanDrake 9y ago
That's a dream world that's always a few decades away. Do you really know what it takes to make something? Like something as simple as a hammer? Iron ore must be located. Will we have autonomous robots scan the earth for ore deposits?Then a quarry must be set up, explosives must be brought in, mining equipment is needed. Now step back. We need robots to make explosives, transport them to the mine, drill holes to put them in, take the explosives out of the packaging, insert them into holes, blow it, clear the rubble and decide if it's time to process the debris or just move it. Now step back again. You need robots the find the materials to make the explosives, to package them up and deliver them to the factory. Now step back again. You need robots to make and maintain all these other robots. Despite the ease of robots doing everything there is still a finite amount of resources on earth, so some sort of economic triage is needed to decide if iron ore gets shipped to the hammer factory or another factory. I guess that would be some sort of AI? The sheer scale of making a simple hammer from scratch with nothing but robots is immense. We are way, way, way further away than you think. The future is humans and robots working together.
- m52go 9y ago
  I already up-voted you, but thank you again for articulating so well what I couldn't elsewhere in this thread.
- goda90 9y ago

gnaritas 9y ago

The past is not prologue, thinking machines have never happened before in the past, so it's rather irrelevant that past automation for simple manual labor type things just shifted humans to new jobs. You're really not thinking clearly, you can only push humans to new jobs if the robots can't also do the new jobs. Jobs will not just shift, they are being eliminated entirely and new jobs will not displace them because said new work will be automated from the start. When robots can "think", then automation doesn't just shift jobs, it kills them forever. Human labor both physical and mental is now being obsoleted, this has never happened before, industrialization was not remotely the same.

m52go 9y ago
Still, the concept of robots killing jobs forever is exaggerated. AI is incredible and only going to become even more incredible. But the creativity of the human spirit will always reign supreme. A robot cannot start a new venture to fill a human need. Only a human can. A robot cannot write a new novel, make a new movie, or craft a new play. Only a human can. A robot cannot solve a human's medical crisis. Only a human can. A robot cannot govern a people. Only a human can. A robot cannot create a video game from start to finish. Only a human can. I could go on forever. Because almost everything a robot can do must be started + guided + improved by a human before it can be consumed by a human. And ultimately, humans consume, not robots--so that's never going to change. So while it's true automation can greatly help in all those endeavors, and eliminate lots of jobs in the process (and probably concentrate the value created much more than it was in the past), there will always be more opportunities for humans to be valuable. Perhaps that means the companies of the future will be smaller and more focused. Perhaps not. But it does not mean that human beings will be worthless. > Human labor both physical and mental is now being obsoleted, this has never happened before, industrialization was not remotely the same. I don't buy it.
- gnaritas 9y ago
  Virtually everything you said "only a human can" is a religious belief. Robots will be able to write novels and make movies and craft plays and solve medical crisis (all of these are being done already in simplistic forms). Bitcoin is already an implementation of an algorithm governing people, you could go on forever making incorrect statements, but they'd still be incorrect. > There will always be more opportunities for humans to be valuable. This simply isn't remotely true. While there will always be a place for the smartest and most creative humans, most humans aren't that smart or that creative and won't be able to compete with AI labor. Stop thinking in anecdotes and see the bigger picture, in a world of thinking machines, there will be little need for human labor, certainly not enough need to keep most humans employed at the levels needed to support themselves. > So while it's true automation can greatly help in all those endeavors, and eliminate lots of jobs in the process (and probably concentrate the value created much more than it was in the past), there will always be more opportunities for humans to be valuable. Not as many as have been eliminated; that's the point you seem to miss, new jobs will not be added at the rate they're being eliminated in a world of smart machines because the smart machines will be doing those new jobs as well. > I don't buy it. It's true none the less.

dkonofalski 9y ago

Why do you think they're being fooled? We already have masses of people that have been displaced by automation. I mean, just look at Uber. Taxi drivers nearly revolted over the shift that Uber caused because it caused a lot of them to lose their jobs. The immediate response is "but look at how many people had jobs because of Uber. The jobs weren't lost, they were just moved to a different sector." What happens when Uber automates all their vehicles, though? What sector are all those jobs going to move to?

outlace 9y ago

With all due respect, I don't understand how smart people think they can predict the future from a single period in history. When is a sample size of 1 with very dubious generalizability ever enough? Yet, for those who share your views, it's not only enough evidence but sufficient to resist even thinking about the potential for future harms due to mass automation.

m52go 9y ago
I used the farming example because it's the most accessible one, but labor shifts happen all the time. This is far from a sample size of 1. Don't take my comments as a proclamation that "NOTHING SHALL CHANGE, AS THERE IS NO NEED TO WORRY." Quite the contrary...I do think changes in training, etc. need to be made. I just don't think it's a markedly different shift from anything we've had so far.
- outlace 9y ago
  Thanks for your clarification and polite response. I was referring to the entire period of the industrial revolution. But in any case, your argument is inductive and has all the issues as such. Since we have no reliable explanatory model of economics, you're never justified in making a claim with such certainty on the basis of some number of past observations. At any time the dynamics can change. Hence, at the very least it seems prudent to put some serious thought into the potential for things to go badly.

bigtunacan 9y ago

Plenty of farmers didn't find new jobs which is likely a large factor in why farmers are committing suicide at such an alarming rate. http://www.farmandranchguide.com/entertainment/country_living/farm_and_ranch_life/suicide-rate-of-farmers-higher-than-any-other-group/article_e1ee8bfc-5b13-11e6-a1cc-cfffc7592815.html http://www.farmandranchguide.com/entertainment/country_livin...

petra 9y ago

>> no reason why the labor transformation we're undergoing now will reduce overall jobs in the market. It never has. In Ancient Rome, access to cheap slaves, created a very high unemployment among the plebs, who than became dependent on support from the state. Than the question becomes: could technology create a "cheap slave" equivalent ?

sumedh 9y ago

> taxi-drivers will find new jobs in the future. Will these new jobs be skilled and require a high amount of education. They probably will, do you really think lot of people are going to retrain themselves.

beisner 9y ago

The problem isn't that everyone's jobs will be replaced in the short term. The problem is that enough people's jobs will be replaced that the negotiating power of workers in more and more labor markets will be broken. This happened with manufacturing in the 1970s. Unions had a huge amount of power in the 1950s and 1960s, and could halt production if minimum standards of compensation weren't met. But the advent of the computer (along with major policy shifts and cultural shifts) basically eliminated this power, as it became easier to automate or outsource labor. Automation and outsourcing are two sides of the same coin: once the price of domestic labor eclipses the price of a non-domestic alternative, negotiating power vanishes. Entire classes of people move from stable positions in which they have bargaining power and sufficient protections to the positions we see today, which are often short-term, at-will, unstable, and often very low paying. This leads to what seems to me to be the most serious result: when you feel that your job is insecure, but your livelihood depends on that job, you are much more susceptible to exploitation. People in the service industry are beginning to feel this, and more and more industries will feel this in the coming years.

gremlinsinc 9y ago

Most economists, and business experts have pegged the job loss at 40% by 2030 -- that's permanent non-replaceable jobs by automation. This isn't the same as the industrial revolution, this is going to be much harder, even President Obama addressed this in an interview, and lots of other people much smarter than me, like Elon Musk and Bill Gates. It's not a matter of IF, but when.

namlem 9y ago

The problem is that this time automation is cognitive in nature. The AIs are reaching the point where they are better than a certain portion of the population at just about any job. Not every taxi driver is smart enough to become a programmer.