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I work in business development in the public sector. First we did digitzation, turning paper archives into something digital. Then we started standardizing and

I work in business development in the public sector. First we did digitzation, turning paper archives into something digital. Then we started standardizing and connecting the archives while improving worker interaction with them. These days we're doing automation. None of this has led to people getting fired. It has cost a massive amount of jobs though. All unnoticed because we simply didn't rehire for positions when someone retired because the digitization hadn't eaten whole workflows but only 5 minutes here and there. The next thing we're going to do is AI. We've already begun the proofs of concepts. We've gone through 6 million case files with 5-70 page documents, and sorted them in a particular way. A process which too 25 full time jobs half a year to do. Our proof of concept AI and 1000 servers in azure, did the same thing in 5 hours. Computers didn't really change the office landscape like robots did to the assembly lines. AI will. At one point in our history, one of the most important jobs in a large city, was removing the endless tones of horse shit from the streets every day. Cars made those guys as obsolete as AI will do almost everything. Sure there will be new jobs as well, but technology stopped creating more jobs than it ate almost 10 years ago, and it's an exponential curve.

mdorazio 9y ago
> we simply didn't rehire for positions when someone retired because the digitization hadn't eaten whole workflows but only 5 minutes here and there I think this is a very important part of automation in the knowledge worker sector that people often miss. Automation doesn't have to get a single person fired to lead to high unemployment, it just has to make managers stop and ask, "do we really need to replace that person who left?". I've been seeing the same thing as you over the last decade with companies I've consulted with where headcount gets pared down here and there every year, and the remaining employees are expected to use more technology tools and wear more hats to fill in the gaps.
goatlover 9y ago
> At one point in our history, one of the most important jobs in a large city, was removing the endless tones of horse shit from the streets every day. Cars made those guys as obsolete as AI will do almost everything. Which was replaced by lots of mechanics, factory workers, marketers, office workers and salesmen. A lot of jobs were created by automating away the horse. I wonder how many people predicted that back then? I don't see much evidence yet that AI is going to automate most existing jobs, unless Google, FB, Hitachi, etc is secretly on the cusp of AGI. The current machine learning isn't anywhere near that. This is being blown out of proportion, but it's always been since the beginnings of AI. Maybe someday. Or 20 years from now, along with cold fusion and flying cars.
- eksemplar 9y ago
  A lot of digitization and AI potential isn't really that advanced. Most of it is simply removing non-creativethink requiring tasks from the workspace. Those task take up a lot of time though, and that's why it's going to change the world. I already talked about how nobody noticed that jobs were being lost to retirement, but that's really only part of it. Another important factor has been the size of workforce generations, which had been decreasing for the past decades, meaning that our overall unemployment rates didn't go up. We're at the bottom of that curve though, and if you look at unemployment rates solely for young people, then you'll notice how they have exploded.

mdorazio 9y ago

> we simply didn't rehire for positions when someone retired because the digitization hadn't eaten whole workflows but only 5 minutes here and there I think this is a very important part of automation in the knowledge worker sector that people often miss. Automation doesn't have to get a single person fired to lead to high unemployment, it just has to make managers stop and ask, "do we really need to replace that person who left?". I've been seeing the same thing as you over the last decade with companies I've consulted with where headcount gets pared down here and there every year, and the remaining employees are expected to use more technology tools and wear more hats to fill in the gaps.

goatlover 9y ago

> At one point in our history, one of the most important jobs in a large city, was removing the endless tones of horse shit from the streets every day. Cars made those guys as obsolete as AI will do almost everything. Which was replaced by lots of mechanics, factory workers, marketers, office workers and salesmen. A lot of jobs were created by automating away the horse. I wonder how many people predicted that back then? I don't see much evidence yet that AI is going to automate most existing jobs, unless Google, FB, Hitachi, etc is secretly on the cusp of AGI. The current machine learning isn't anywhere near that. This is being blown out of proportion, but it's always been since the beginnings of AI. Maybe someday. Or 20 years from now, along with cold fusion and flying cars.

eksemplar 9y ago
A lot of digitization and AI potential isn't really that advanced. Most of it is simply removing non-creativethink requiring tasks from the workspace. Those task take up a lot of time though, and that's why it's going to change the world. I already talked about how nobody noticed that jobs were being lost to retirement, but that's really only part of it. Another important factor has been the size of workforce generations, which had been decreasing for the past decades, meaning that our overall unemployment rates didn't go up. We're at the bottom of that curve though, and if you look at unemployment rates solely for young people, then you'll notice how they have exploded.