23 ms·

Why the tech sector may not solve America’s looming automation crisis

112 points by tekacs 8y ago

KineticLensman 8y ago
TL;DR: it's hard to retrain people into jobs that require different skill sets (e.g. from trucker to s/w engineer), and there may be not as many jobs offering equivalent salaries. Interesting supporting info graphics, as well.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- nine_k 8y ago
  The graphics are very nice. I wish it was possible to link to them directly (with an #-anchor in URL). The article is formatted more as a video clip, though.
- mkirklions 8y ago
  Ive heard this about trucks being automated for 3 years now. Truck drivers have probably heard this for a few years longer than that. At what point do you blame the individual for not learning any skill in this time period?
jaxn 8y ago
There is no where for CEOs to go.
- brixon 8y ago
  Maybe part of the reason for Golden parachutes.
  - jaxn 8y ago
    I think this is true for startup founders too. It's either win or reinvent.
usermac 8y ago
Do yourself a favor and visit this link. The transitions are so good.
- amelius 8y ago
  If we keep pouring software development resources into such silly things, I can totally understand why we're in an automation crisis.
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    Marketing and style are the short term profit hack deployed when a company has decided that "money now" is supposedly better than "sustainable money later"
  - douglaswlance 8y ago
    Did you do a split test on this design and find that the page without these transitions provides more value? No?
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      Do you really believe this stuff improves reading?
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  On my Android phone with Brave browser it's pretty terrible. Does anyone who wants to read things actually enjoy sites that hijack scrolling? I can see nothing positive in it. Maybe it looks neat but in terms of usability it's just terrible. Maybe we need less designers and more writers?
- taneq 8y ago
  I found the endless scrolling for dribs and drabs of content to be horribly annoying, and the graphs didn't seem especially meaningful to me.
- ptero 8y ago
  IMO do yourself a favor and visit the link for an example of how not to present information. On my screen (firefox, Linux, 30" monitor), scrolling and page up/down puts text boxes at random places. Most of the time the screen is 90% empty with a small text box that is not even displayed fully. If possible, I am all for elegance in presenting information, but I almost always prefer to have less eye candy and more content. My 2c.
stephengillie 8y ago
Interesting to see the automation of truck driving used again as an example in this discussion. From what my dad tells me, the trucking industry is hurting for long-haul drivers. Few men want to spend days on the road, far from their families and homes. It's such an unsatisfying job that women largely refuse to consider it. Even fewer want the nomadic lifestyle idolized by many on HN. How will the trucking industry deal with both this threat to their jobs, and also a lack of human interest in doing the job?
- gaius 8y ago
  I can see the use cases for a “road train” of a single human driver operating a convoy of semi-autonomous vehicles. Once co-existence with other road users can be addressed such as splitting and rejoining. I think this is far more likely to be the model than completely automated trucks
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  This is not quite true. What's happened recently is a combination of more effective enforcement on the regulatory side, combined with a ruthless pursuit of efficiency on the industry side. This combination of factors has increased the number of trucking jobs beyond what was historically necessary. (That's right. Ironically, all of the automation being added in the trucking industry has actually increased the number of drivers necessary substantially.) Think what would happen if tomorrow the government said from now on every doctor can see no more than 2 patients per day. (Oh, and by the way, we're installing cameras in every hospital, urgent care, clinic, and private practice office to verify that no one exceeds that limit.) Now imagine that at the same time hospitals said they would no longer work with off site providers of any sort because it increases efficiency to have all of their physicians on site full time. Well, all of a sudden you would need about 6 to 8 times the number of doctors you have today. (At a minimum.) This is somewhat of a simplification, and it doesn't get across the full depth and implications of the changes, but it gives you a good idea of what's happened to the trucking industry over the past few years.
  - pixl97 8y ago
    >Think what would happen if tomorrow the government said from now on every doctor can see no more than 2 patients per day. Well, if doctors were killing patients at the rate truckers were killing other drivers then, yea, hopefully we would. (Honestly tired doctors kill a lot in the US as it is, medical mistakes are the 3rd leading cause of death).
TheBobinator 8y ago
If you look at IQ and the kinds of jobs people sub-100 IQ can retain, you begin to realize very quickly that about half of the population is going to need to be retrained in some kind of intellectual job going forward. That forces public schooling to train children for intellectual persuits, and children who are gifted need to have programs tailored for them. It also means you are going to have post-scarcity politics. The scarcity of resources forces social interaction and gives value to life, relationships and property. Universal income is horrific in the fact it dissolves those relationships, and politicans can decide to revoke people's food or shelter on a whim and also the public can decide to support it. You also realize that things like firearms ownership become very important as that becomes one of the few things that forces people to have value for each other at a very basic level.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- sewercake 8y ago
  > The scarcity of resources forces social interaction and gives value to life, relationships and property. Are you saying that the 'cognitive elite' will live unsatisfied, lonely existences, and that's the price they have to pay for material success? It seems like you're equating material scarcity with a 'mythic' view of human struggle. I.e: we need to challenge ourselves to grow and become better people. I'm not denying that struggle is 'good' for bettering yourself, but I think there are ways to provide this kind of challenge that doesn't involve encouraging or maintaining material scarcity for vast swaths of the human population.
- pjc50 8y ago
  > firearms ownership become very important as that becomes one of the few things that forces people to have value for each other at a very basic level ... what? Fear at a basic level, perhaps, but making murder weapons widely available is the opposite of respect for human life.
  - enraged_camel 8y ago
    Furthermore, just because someone is acting respectfully towards you doesn't mean they actually respect you.
ckoglmeier 8y ago
Great visualization and topic. If you are interested in helping to understand and be part of solving this issue, come join us at Guild Education in Denver. We're a venture backed B-corporation working to connect the future of work with (company funded) education opportunities - from the skilled trades + nursing to data scientists. Email me at ck @ guildeducation.com for more info.
- 6cd6beb 8y ago
  >Email me at ID @ DOMAIN.TLD for more info. Generally, if you have to obfuscate the thing you want to post because you need to avoid a filter, it's unlikely that what you're posting is welcome in the place you're trying to post it.
  - ndiscussion 8y ago
    What about avoiding email scrapers?
    - ateesdalejr 8y ago
      Any marginally smart email scraper wouldn't fall for that trick.
Chathamization 8y ago
"Automation crisis" reminds me of "peak oil." Take a current problem (high unemployment, high oil prices), ignore the reasons for them (the global financial crisis, disruption oil supply along with increased oil demand), and instead construct a strange eschatological reason for the problem (machines are taking all of our jobs, we're almost out of oil). Let's look at actual measures of automation - productivity growth. It's been very low over the past decade[1] when compared to decades past. Prime age employment has been returning to pre-crisis highs[2] - despite people claiming that the old jobs were gone and new jobs wouldn't replace them (the machines were supposedly going to take them all). [1] https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm [2] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300060 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300060
- harshreality 8y ago
  I believe this is the second graph you should have used: The labor force participation rate. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 Unless you believe more people are wealthy enough to live fine without needing to work (the opposite seems to be true[1]), what matters is not the employment rate, but labor participation rate. That's not even considering whether average wages for those who are employed are are keeping pace with rising living costs. The good news is that, eventually, automation will reduce living costs. The bad news is that fewer people will have jobs enabling them to afford even those reduced living costs. From the BLS website glossary: '"Productivity": A measure of economic efficiency that shows how effectively economic inputs are converted into goods and services.' I don't see why productivity as an economic measure would increase in the early stages of a process where narrow AI and robotics start to take over human jobs. Until costs come down, when AI software and robotics becomes more generic, and standardized, and adopted outside of narrow industries, the economic effects won't be as dramatic. The only escape from narrow AI and robots taking human jobs is the creation of more bullshit jobs (see: Graeber), or genuinely new job sectors, but I have yet to read any compelling predictions of new job sectors that will employ large numbers of people and can't be automated. Creator jobs? How many people on youtube, or patreon, or self-publishing books, earn even minimum wage from the time they put in? If you dumped 1 million, or 10 million, additional people onto those platforms and told them their new job is to create full time, how many of those additional people could make a living wage, or even minimum wage, for the time they spend? Service jobs? While the wealthy (let's say, upper middle class and above) might want human waiters, human voice support on the telephone, etc., I think that's vastly overplayed as an opportunity for human labor. I don't think that many wealthy people would prefer to deal with humans over good AI, and I don't think it would create that many service jobs even if wealthy people did mostly prefer to pay a premium for human service. [1] With increasing numbers of people working beyond retirement age, more debt, and more couples both working (I have nothing against that, I'm just pointing out the labor statistical reality that families' standard of living requires that more, now).
gumby 8y ago
That looked like it might be an interesting article but implementing it as tiny fragments of boxed text that fly by as you scroll (and obscure the graphs) pretty much destroys the point of publishing an article. Can anyone point at the original data of which this is presumably a summary? grump.
- KineticLensman 8y ago
  This is the pudding [0] house style. Luckily for us, if its not our Jam, we can preach. I kid you not. [0] https://pudding.cool/ https://pudding.cool/
  - gumby 8y ago
    Wow, that's insane.
rayiner 8y ago
Does anyone really think this site design is a good idea? The images are all dynamic anyway. It adds literally nothing to a traditional static page with captions below diagrams and images.
- cowpig 8y ago
  I'd say it very much detracts from the experience... to the point where I can't be bothered to mess with any of the what look like beautiful presentations of data
- zwieback 8y ago
  Worst website design I've seen this year, maybe I'm just too old for this type of thing.
- wtracy 8y ago
  Some of the diagrams don't fit on the screen on my phone. Since the diagrams are fixed in place and don't scroll, there are parts that I literally can't read.
HillaryBriss 8y ago
>...truckers and developers have relatively few similarities in terms of the competencies necessary for their respective jobs. also, given the age, culture, geographical location of applicants and their families, what percentage of former truck drivers turned software developers will be hired by a tech startup or a FANG company?
jackcosgrove 8y ago
Tech sector as the solution to the looming automation crisis? It's the cause of the looming automation crisis.
- mkirklions 8y ago
  Seeing how much free content exists on youtube, I imagine the future is going to be creative/hobby based. It wont pay as much as programmers who eliminate jobs, but given how starvation is over, people live alone, and I watch my friends with tons of college debt spend money on bars and activities, the future will be entertainment/human based.
oliv__ 8y ago
Kind of meta but this website looks like an unreadable version of a nice NYTimes article.
imron 8y ago
The funky scrolling makes this site is unreadable to me.
JDiculous 8y ago
The underlying assumption of course is that everybody needs to be working in some kind of drudgery to justify their own existence. We really need a mental paradigm shift here. If a robot can now do a job that used to require 2 million workers, why should that not result in 2 million people being freed to enjoy this increased leisure rather than having to desperately find new "jobs" or otherwise face destitution. What are we working towards again, GDP growth? Regarding the article, to be completely blunt: no sh*t. Software engineering in the U.S. is already very saturated, just less so than every other field (eg. marketing, finance, law) so nobody frames it as such. One of my ex-coworkers just went through 6 technical interviews and a coding project only to have his offer rescinded by an HR lady at the parent company due to a minor mistake on his original resume (against the will of everyone who actually interviewed him). Coding bootcamp placement rates right now are awful. Do people really think the 2 million truck drivers can just become software engineers (without some kind of massive government-sponsored jobs program akin to a "New Deal")? Taking a step back, why is that even something we should socially desire? Do society really need more Javascript monkeys?

112 points by tekacs 8y ago

TL;DR: it's hard to retrain people into jobs that require different skill sets (e.g. from trucker to s/w engineer), and there may be not as many jobs offering equivalent salaries. Interesting supporting info graphics, as well.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
nine_k 8y ago
The graphics are very nice. I wish it was possible to link to them directly (with an #-anchor in URL). The article is formatted more as a video clip, though.
mkirklions 8y ago
Ive heard this about trucks being automated for 3 years now. Truck drivers have probably heard this for a few years longer than that. At what point do you blame the individual for not learning any skill in this time period?

jaxn 8y ago

There is no where for CEOs to go.

brixon 8y ago
Maybe part of the reason for Golden parachutes.
- jaxn 8y ago
  I think this is true for startup founders too. It's either win or reinvent.

usermac 8y ago

Do yourself a favor and visit this link. The transitions are so good.

amelius 8y ago
If we keep pouring software development resources into such silly things, I can totally understand why we're in an automation crisis.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  Marketing and style are the short term profit hack deployed when a company has decided that "money now" is supposedly better than "sustainable money later"
- douglaswlance 8y ago
  Did you do a split test on this design and find that the page without these transitions provides more value? No?
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Do you really believe this stuff improves reading?
maxxxxx 8y ago
On my Android phone with Brave browser it's pretty terrible. Does anyone who wants to read things actually enjoy sites that hijack scrolling? I can see nothing positive in it. Maybe it looks neat but in terms of usability it's just terrible. Maybe we need less designers and more writers?
taneq 8y ago
I found the endless scrolling for dribs and drabs of content to be horribly annoying, and the graphs didn't seem especially meaningful to me.
ptero 8y ago
IMO do yourself a favor and visit the link for an example of how not to present information. On my screen (firefox, Linux, 30" monitor), scrolling and page up/down puts text boxes at random places. Most of the time the screen is 90% empty with a small text box that is not even displayed fully. If possible, I am all for elegance in presenting information, but I almost always prefer to have less eye candy and more content. My 2c.

stephengillie 8y ago

Interesting to see the automation of truck driving used again as an example in this discussion. From what my dad tells me, the trucking industry is hurting for long-haul drivers. Few men want to spend days on the road, far from their families and homes. It's such an unsatisfying job that women largely refuse to consider it. Even fewer want the nomadic lifestyle idolized by many on HN. How will the trucking industry deal with both this threat to their jobs, and also a lack of human interest in doing the job?

gaius 8y ago
I can see the use cases for a “road train” of a single human driver operating a convoy of semi-autonomous vehicles. Once co-existence with other road users can be addressed such as splitting and rejoining. I think this is far more likely to be the model than completely automated trucks
bilbo0s 8y ago
This is not quite true. What's happened recently is a combination of more effective enforcement on the regulatory side, combined with a ruthless pursuit of efficiency on the industry side. This combination of factors has increased the number of trucking jobs beyond what was historically necessary. (That's right. Ironically, all of the automation being added in the trucking industry has actually increased the number of drivers necessary substantially.) Think what would happen if tomorrow the government said from now on every doctor can see no more than 2 patients per day. (Oh, and by the way, we're installing cameras in every hospital, urgent care, clinic, and private practice office to verify that no one exceeds that limit.) Now imagine that at the same time hospitals said they would no longer work with off site providers of any sort because it increases efficiency to have all of their physicians on site full time. Well, all of a sudden you would need about 6 to 8 times the number of doctors you have today. (At a minimum.) This is somewhat of a simplification, and it doesn't get across the full depth and implications of the changes, but it gives you a good idea of what's happened to the trucking industry over the past few years.
- pixl97 8y ago
  >Think what would happen if tomorrow the government said from now on every doctor can see no more than 2 patients per day. Well, if doctors were killing patients at the rate truckers were killing other drivers then, yea, hopefully we would. (Honestly tired doctors kill a lot in the US as it is, medical mistakes are the 3rd leading cause of death).

TheBobinator 8y ago

If you look at IQ and the kinds of jobs people sub-100 IQ can retain, you begin to realize very quickly that about half of the population is going to need to be retrained in some kind of intellectual job going forward. That forces public schooling to train children for intellectual persuits, and children who are gifted need to have programs tailored for them. It also means you are going to have post-scarcity politics. The scarcity of resources forces social interaction and gives value to life, relationships and property. Universal income is horrific in the fact it dissolves those relationships, and politicans can decide to revoke people's food or shelter on a whim and also the public can decide to support it. You also realize that things like firearms ownership become very important as that becomes one of the few things that forces people to have value for each other at a very basic level.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sewercake 8y ago
> The scarcity of resources forces social interaction and gives value to life, relationships and property. Are you saying that the 'cognitive elite' will live unsatisfied, lonely existences, and that's the price they have to pay for material success? It seems like you're equating material scarcity with a 'mythic' view of human struggle. I.e: we need to challenge ourselves to grow and become better people. I'm not denying that struggle is 'good' for bettering yourself, but I think there are ways to provide this kind of challenge that doesn't involve encouraging or maintaining material scarcity for vast swaths of the human population.
pjc50 8y ago
> firearms ownership become very important as that becomes one of the few things that forces people to have value for each other at a very basic level ... what? Fear at a basic level, perhaps, but making murder weapons widely available is the opposite of respect for human life.
- enraged_camel 8y ago
  Furthermore, just because someone is acting respectfully towards you doesn't mean they actually respect you.

ckoglmeier 8y ago

Great visualization and topic. If you are interested in helping to understand and be part of solving this issue, come join us at Guild Education in Denver. We're a venture backed B-corporation working to connect the future of work with (company funded) education opportunities - from the skilled trades + nursing to data scientists. Email me at ck @ guildeducation.com for more info.

6cd6beb 8y ago
>Email me at ID @ DOMAIN.TLD for more info. Generally, if you have to obfuscate the thing you want to post because you need to avoid a filter, it's unlikely that what you're posting is welcome in the place you're trying to post it.
- ndiscussion 8y ago
  What about avoiding email scrapers?
  - ateesdalejr 8y ago
    Any marginally smart email scraper wouldn't fall for that trick.

Chathamization 8y ago

"Automation crisis" reminds me of "peak oil." Take a current problem (high unemployment, high oil prices), ignore the reasons for them (the global financial crisis, disruption oil supply along with increased oil demand), and instead construct a strange eschatological reason for the problem (machines are taking all of our jobs, we're almost out of oil). Let's look at actual measures of automation - productivity growth. It's been very low over the past decade[1] when compared to decades past. Prime age employment has been returning to pre-crisis highs[2] - despite people claiming that the old jobs were gone and new jobs wouldn't replace them (the machines were supposedly going to take them all). [1] https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm [2] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300060 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300060

harshreality 8y ago
I believe this is the second graph you should have used: The labor force participation rate. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 Unless you believe more people are wealthy enough to live fine without needing to work (the opposite seems to be true[1]), what matters is not the employment rate, but labor participation rate. That's not even considering whether average wages for those who are employed are are keeping pace with rising living costs. The good news is that, eventually, automation will reduce living costs. The bad news is that fewer people will have jobs enabling them to afford even those reduced living costs. From the BLS website glossary: '"Productivity": A measure of economic efficiency that shows how effectively economic inputs are converted into goods and services.' I don't see why productivity as an economic measure would increase in the early stages of a process where narrow AI and robotics start to take over human jobs. Until costs come down, when AI software and robotics becomes more generic, and standardized, and adopted outside of narrow industries, the economic effects won't be as dramatic. The only escape from narrow AI and robots taking human jobs is the creation of more bullshit jobs (see: Graeber), or genuinely new job sectors, but I have yet to read any compelling predictions of new job sectors that will employ large numbers of people and can't be automated. Creator jobs? How many people on youtube, or patreon, or self-publishing books, earn even minimum wage from the time they put in? If you dumped 1 million, or 10 million, additional people onto those platforms and told them their new job is to create full time, how many of those additional people could make a living wage, or even minimum wage, for the time they spend? Service jobs? While the wealthy (let's say, upper middle class and above) might want human waiters, human voice support on the telephone, etc., I think that's vastly overplayed as an opportunity for human labor. I don't think that many wealthy people would prefer to deal with humans over good AI, and I don't think it would create that many service jobs even if wealthy people did mostly prefer to pay a premium for human service. [1] With increasing numbers of people working beyond retirement age, more debt, and more couples both working (I have nothing against that, I'm just pointing out the labor statistical reality that families' standard of living requires that more, now).

gumby 8y ago

That looked like it might be an interesting article but implementing it as tiny fragments of boxed text that fly by as you scroll (and obscure the graphs) pretty much destroys the point of publishing an article. Can anyone point at the original data of which this is presumably a summary? grump.

KineticLensman 8y ago
This is the pudding [0] house style. Luckily for us, if its not our Jam, we can preach. I kid you not. [0] https://pudding.cool/ https://pudding.cool/
- gumby 8y ago
  Wow, that's insane.

rayiner 8y ago

Does anyone really think this site design is a good idea? The images are all dynamic anyway. It adds literally nothing to a traditional static page with captions below diagrams and images.

cowpig 8y ago
I'd say it very much detracts from the experience... to the point where I can't be bothered to mess with any of the what look like beautiful presentations of data
zwieback 8y ago
Worst website design I've seen this year, maybe I'm just too old for this type of thing.
wtracy 8y ago
Some of the diagrams don't fit on the screen on my phone. Since the diagrams are fixed in place and don't scroll, there are parts that I literally can't read.

HillaryBriss 8y ago

>...truckers and developers have relatively few similarities in terms of the competencies necessary for their respective jobs. also, given the age, culture, geographical location of applicants and their families, what percentage of former truck drivers turned software developers will be hired by a tech startup or a FANG company?

jackcosgrove 8y ago

Tech sector as the solution to the looming automation crisis? It's the cause of the looming automation crisis.

mkirklions 8y ago
Seeing how much free content exists on youtube, I imagine the future is going to be creative/hobby based. It wont pay as much as programmers who eliminate jobs, but given how starvation is over, people live alone, and I watch my friends with tons of college debt spend money on bars and activities, the future will be entertainment/human based.

oliv__ 8y ago

Kind of meta but this website looks like an unreadable version of a nice NYTimes article.

imron 8y ago

The funky scrolling makes this site is unreadable to me.

JDiculous 8y ago

The underlying assumption of course is that everybody needs to be working in some kind of drudgery to justify their own existence. We really need a mental paradigm shift here. If a robot can now do a job that used to require 2 million workers, why should that not result in 2 million people being freed to enjoy this increased leisure rather than having to desperately find new "jobs" or otherwise face destitution. What are we working towards again, GDP growth? Regarding the article, to be completely blunt: no sh*t. Software engineering in the U.S. is already very saturated, just less so than every other field (eg. marketing, finance, law) so nobody frames it as such. One of my ex-coworkers just went through 6 technical interviews and a coding project only to have his offer rescinded by an HR lady at the parent company due to a minor mistake on his original resume (against the will of everyone who actually interviewed him). Coding bootcamp placement rates right now are awful. Do people really think the 2 million truck drivers can just become software engineers (without some kind of massive government-sponsored jobs program akin to a "New Deal")? Taking a step back, why is that even something we should socially desire? Do society really need more Javascript monkeys?