5 ms·

Are Robots Coming for Your Job? Eventually, Yes

EB66 8y ago
Is it just me or did the article not offer much in the way of how or why said robots would take our jobs? The article only seemed to say that it would happen eventually and, as a result, the labor force of the future will require more software engineering skills.
3minus1 8y ago
I see a lot of news stories and anecdotes about automation via robots. Are there any statistics that describe this trend?
- wetpaws 8y ago
  You must be new here
blfr 8y ago
Hopefully, they will start with the job of writing "robots will take your job" articles because they seem to be exactly the kind of boring task best suited for robots. Rewording McKinsey's content marketing should be possible even today.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Even if we take the source as completely trustworthy, the estimate is one-third of jobs -- a lot, but not the totally jobless world the headline suggets.
droidist2 8y ago
I wonder when this will become a major issue in a US presidential election. Also I wonder what the major parties' stances will be on how to deal with the effects of automation.
- mattnewton 8y ago
  I wouldn’t hold your breath- this seems unlikely to me because a) the boil is very slowly heating up and by the time the frog notices it will already be really hot and b) there is probably significant political will to keep automation progressing as long as it’s profitible. So people aren’t riled up, but companies could be if you outlawed their cost savings, so it seems like a loser of an issue.
- teeray 8y ago
  It will be a big deal once we have a robotic presidential candidate :)
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    As long as he likes blackjack and hookers I'm sure the electorate will be just fine with him (:
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  I think it already has. A lot of 2016’s drama was in the rust belt. And while some of those jobs went to China and Mexico, probably even more of them were automated away.
subjectHarold 8y ago
Maybe I am just an idiot...but I don't understand what the fuss is. Through 1870-90, the economy went through a similar phase and the world didn't end...and this was with no unemployment protection. If anything that period was more severe than anything that can happen next: productivity in some industries went up more than ten times pretty much overnight (cigarette production is the archetypal example). The only thing that doesn't appear to function well now is education, which appears to be stuck in the post-WW2 mentality of a job for life and which the author does identify as a problem. That doesn't seem like a particularly big deal however (at least half of the problem is convincing people that they need to keep learning). The real concern for me is people constantly predicting the end of the world. Politicians are taking it seriously and they will inevitably fuck it up. Also, the world that journalists seem to live in has pretty much never existed. The only reason a "job for life" occurred after WW2 was because of the huge barriers on trade/capital that were put in place around this period. No competition, high prices...yes, the true glory days.
- blfr 8y ago
  The fuss is over whether one of these phases will be the last for human workers. Education is an extremely hard problem to solve because it doesn't seem to be working in general. That is, the effects of shared environment are small and completely dwarfed by genetics and sheer randomness.
  - gm-conspiracy 8y ago
    Somehow humanity survived using one room schoolhouses, though.
    - blfr 8y ago
      If schools don't do much beyond warehousing kids, which seems to be the case, then one room schoolhouses are just as good, if less comfortable, as multiroom schoolhouses.
  - subjectHarold 8y ago
    I don't understand...you are saying the problem is everyone stops working? If that happened then none of this would be a problem. The point of production is consumption, if no labour is required to subsist then work has no function, production has no value, and none of this matters...that isn't going to happen, and it isn't what the author is saying will happen. I am not sure what you mean about education (I don't know what "shared environment" or "randomness" means in this context). I am sure everyone here knows there are tons of issues...it comes down to: if you had to build the education system today, would it look like what we have now? No, quite clearly not. The situation in every country is obviously very different but that is what it comes down to: inertia. There is nothing intrinsically difficult though, we have got this far after all.
skrebbel 8y ago
tl;dr: (Not a typo, it's just that if you summarize this article, there's nothing left. No point, no insight, no argument, just some rambling, a submarine, and some links to other headlines)
cyc116 8y ago
Are Robots Coming for Your Job? Eventually, Yes Is The Bull Market Coming to an End? Eventually, Yes Does my cat like Sushi rolls? Eventually, Yes Does Titles like these bother You? Eventually, Yes
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  Your cat might (and probably will) die before they like sushi roles, so your understanding of eventually might not be canonical.
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > Your cat might (and probably will) die before they like sushi roles, so your understanding of eventually might not be canonical. Do you... have a cat? It's harder to get them not to eat the fish you don't want them to have.
    - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
      As far as I know, most cats won’t eat rice.
  - mLuby 8y ago
    Given infinite time, something called your cat will eventually like sushi roles [sic]. #Pedantic
    - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
      No, there are definitely diffeeences in timescales. “It will eventually rain today” is very different in its truthiness when compared to “it will eventually rain this year”. It’s the same when comparing statements with a close by deadline (the expected death of a cat) and one that is much farther off (the dissolution of the USA). Beyond that, Boltzmann brains tell us that some things aren’t possible given an infinite amount of time.
dev_dull 8y ago
It’s almost the end of 2018 — have you raised alarms bells yet for this years most hyped tech bogeymen? - deepface will change laws. - killing robots. - blockchains will make X obsolete. - AI will take your job. Am I missing something?
b3lvedere 8y ago
I wonder if the saboteur will also make a comeback then.
jl6 8y ago
When a job disappears due to automation, it’s bad for the person losing their job, but it seems to be good for everybody else. Is this always the case? Is there a tipping point where automation becomes not good for everyone else?
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  I think the world probably took a turn for the worse when surveillance became automated. Stasi were evil people but could only do what was humanly possible. Now look at what NSA can do.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  "When a job disappears due to automation, it’s bad for the person losing their job, but it seems to be good for everybody else. " Is it really better for everybody? Whole regions can get devastated that way. And with the trend towards income inequality only a few actually benefit.
barbecue_sauce 8y ago
What is the intended effect of articles like this? Motivate people to work harder a la John Henry? Motivate people to learn technical skills despite the negative net job creation of automation? Would having a more widely educated workforce even help?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jsgo 8y ago
  or could be a case of promoting planning for the "eventually, yes" to happen whether that is early retirement planning, career change, or anything else. I mean, I do pay into retirement and the like, but quite frankly, I personally approach my job as this career path will always be there for me if I so choose so I'd be in some degree of danger if my belief is proven wrong later in life.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  This is not a great article, but, in general, you can publish a news story just to describe reality, without intending to motivate anyone to do anything, and there is nothing wrong with that.
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  > What is the intended effect of articles like this? How about just promoting an understanding of changes which will happen between now and the next couple decades. Or should we just give up and accept our fate? :-)
Timmah 8y ago
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that "coming for your jobs " is completely overblown and no different than automation throughout the previous decades. Isn't there a separate shadow issue of lack of diversity in the market? I mean, we can't all be app developers, web designers, and project managers. Sure, you say, there will always be non-tech jobs. Ok, like lawyers? That will be decimated by strong AI-as-a-service eDisocvery and legal analysis bots that replace paralegals and associates. So now the firm is a partner or two, and a $14/hr runner who drives to court and files motions. Doctors? Ok they read their FDA-certified AI and make sure it's sane and send you to the ePharmacy where biometric auth and videos replace the pharmacist. The cleaning staff at both offices are replaced by smart-bots that auto mop and empty trash. So each building has a security/facilities person. Restaurants? Most have kiosks and a chef-bot. Just a hostess and manager to make sure the fryer doesn't burn the building down. Uber has long been automated. So again, what's left? Government jobs most likely. And going back to my original supposition, let's ignore how people make their money. Can we all be "data scientists" using AI to analyze customer behavior at restaurant kiosks to apply predictive suggestions for their dessert? Can we all write websites for the small businesses (that don't exist because they can't afford the AI services that BigCorp has)? What happens when Google computes every last datapoint about us? Facebook has reached complete saturation and there's no new info to sell to advertisers. How would our economy function if there's basically one industry left? You can't compute analytics about yourself or sell website services to website service people.
- pitaj 8y ago
  You left out the entire entertainment industry. I imagine that many people will end up doing creative endeavors, including art, engineering, philosophy, and science. Also, people (being more flexible than robots) could be the main actors behind space exploration.
CM30 8y ago
Honestly, I think the worries about AI taking jobs are overblown. Will AI get better? Yes. Will some jobs be doable by AI? Yes. May that eventually end up being all jobs? Guess so. But that doesn't mean people won't be able to find work or make money. I mean, you don't have to be the 'best' at something to get rich off of it, nor to even simply earn a living at it. I mean, think about it. Objectively the majority of products, services and businesses out there now are worse than at least one competitor. If people were always rational about what they were buying, said businesses/products/services would go broke. But they're not rational. People buy things and use products because of many things, whether that's convenience, location, price, name recognition/branding, marketing, word of mouth type marketing, social proof, quality of service/employees/whatever, pure luck or heck, without even thinking at all. So even if every market in existence gets AI involved in, it still won't necessarily mean old fashioned human run businesses can't compete and win customers. There's also the additional effect of branding that people never really think about here too. People don't just watch 'a' TV show or film or what not, they watch Star Wars or Game of Thrones or what not. Same with music, games, books, art, internet media and basically anything celebrity related in general. Eventually, the greats sell on their name alone, and that's one barrier that even the best use of AI may not compete with. Just look at a popular book for example, in some cases the author's name is literally more than double the size of the title! So that may also be another area where robots won't eventually come for jobs/take all the jobs. Perhaps we'll end up in a world where the 'Patreon' style model is the norm and the standards for success are how well you market your own brand rather than the exact quality of what you do...

EB66 8y ago

Is it just me or did the article not offer much in the way of how or why said robots would take our jobs? The article only seemed to say that it would happen eventually and, as a result, the labor force of the future will require more software engineering skills.

3minus1 8y ago

I see a lot of news stories and anecdotes about automation via robots. Are there any statistics that describe this trend?

wetpaws 8y ago
You must be new here

blfr 8y ago

Hopefully, they will start with the job of writing "robots will take your job" articles because they seem to be exactly the kind of boring task best suited for robots. Rewording McKinsey's content marketing should be possible even today.

emodendroket 8y ago
Even if we take the source as completely trustworthy, the estimate is one-third of jobs -- a lot, but not the totally jobless world the headline suggets.

droidist2 8y ago

I wonder when this will become a major issue in a US presidential election. Also I wonder what the major parties' stances will be on how to deal with the effects of automation.

mattnewton 8y ago
I wouldn’t hold your breath- this seems unlikely to me because a) the boil is very slowly heating up and by the time the frog notices it will already be really hot and b) there is probably significant political will to keep automation progressing as long as it’s profitible. So people aren’t riled up, but companies could be if you outlawed their cost savings, so it seems like a loser of an issue.
teeray 8y ago
It will be a big deal once we have a robotic presidential candidate :)
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  As long as he likes blackjack and hookers I'm sure the electorate will be just fine with him (:
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
I think it already has. A lot of 2016’s drama was in the rust belt. And while some of those jobs went to China and Mexico, probably even more of them were automated away.

subjectHarold 8y ago

Maybe I am just an idiot...but I don't understand what the fuss is. Through 1870-90, the economy went through a similar phase and the world didn't end...and this was with no unemployment protection. If anything that period was more severe than anything that can happen next: productivity in some industries went up more than ten times pretty much overnight (cigarette production is the archetypal example). The only thing that doesn't appear to function well now is education, which appears to be stuck in the post-WW2 mentality of a job for life and which the author does identify as a problem. That doesn't seem like a particularly big deal however (at least half of the problem is convincing people that they need to keep learning). The real concern for me is people constantly predicting the end of the world. Politicians are taking it seriously and they will inevitably fuck it up. Also, the world that journalists seem to live in has pretty much never existed. The only reason a "job for life" occurred after WW2 was because of the huge barriers on trade/capital that were put in place around this period. No competition, high prices...yes, the true glory days.

blfr 8y ago
The fuss is over whether one of these phases will be the last for human workers. Education is an extremely hard problem to solve because it doesn't seem to be working in general. That is, the effects of shared environment are small and completely dwarfed by genetics and sheer randomness.
- gm-conspiracy 8y ago
  Somehow humanity survived using one room schoolhouses, though.
  - blfr 8y ago
    If schools don't do much beyond warehousing kids, which seems to be the case, then one room schoolhouses are just as good, if less comfortable, as multiroom schoolhouses.
- subjectHarold 8y ago
  I don't understand...you are saying the problem is everyone stops working? If that happened then none of this would be a problem. The point of production is consumption, if no labour is required to subsist then work has no function, production has no value, and none of this matters...that isn't going to happen, and it isn't what the author is saying will happen. I am not sure what you mean about education (I don't know what "shared environment" or "randomness" means in this context). I am sure everyone here knows there are tons of issues...it comes down to: if you had to build the education system today, would it look like what we have now? No, quite clearly not. The situation in every country is obviously very different but that is what it comes down to: inertia. There is nothing intrinsically difficult though, we have got this far after all.

skrebbel 8y ago

tl;dr: (Not a typo, it's just that if you summarize this article, there's nothing left. No point, no insight, no argument, just some rambling, a submarine, and some links to other headlines)

cyc116 8y ago

Are Robots Coming for Your Job? Eventually, Yes Is The Bull Market Coming to an End? Eventually, Yes Does my cat like Sushi rolls? Eventually, Yes Does Titles like these bother You? Eventually, Yes

seanmcdirmid 8y ago
Your cat might (and probably will) die before they like sushi roles, so your understanding of eventually might not be canonical.
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > Your cat might (and probably will) die before they like sushi roles, so your understanding of eventually might not be canonical. Do you... have a cat? It's harder to get them not to eat the fish you don't want them to have.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    As far as I know, most cats won’t eat rice.
- mLuby 8y ago
  Given infinite time, something called your cat will eventually like sushi roles [sic]. #Pedantic
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    No, there are definitely diffeeences in timescales. “It will eventually rain today” is very different in its truthiness when compared to “it will eventually rain this year”. It’s the same when comparing statements with a close by deadline (the expected death of a cat) and one that is much farther off (the dissolution of the USA). Beyond that, Boltzmann brains tell us that some things aren’t possible given an infinite amount of time.

dev_dull 8y ago

It’s almost the end of 2018 — have you raised alarms bells yet for this years most hyped tech bogeymen? - deepface will change laws. - killing robots. - blockchains will make X obsolete. - AI will take your job. Am I missing something?

b3lvedere 8y ago

I wonder if the saboteur will also make a comeback then.

jl6 8y ago

When a job disappears due to automation, it’s bad for the person losing their job, but it seems to be good for everybody else. Is this always the case? Is there a tipping point where automation becomes not good for everyone else?

anoncoward111 8y ago
I think the world probably took a turn for the worse when surveillance became automated. Stasi were evil people but could only do what was humanly possible. Now look at what NSA can do.
maxxxxx 8y ago
"When a job disappears due to automation, it’s bad for the person losing their job, but it seems to be good for everybody else. " Is it really better for everybody? Whole regions can get devastated that way. And with the trend towards income inequality only a few actually benefit.

barbecue_sauce 8y ago

What is the intended effect of articles like this? Motivate people to work harder a la John Henry? Motivate people to learn technical skills despite the negative net job creation of automation? Would having a more widely educated workforce even help?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jsgo 8y ago
or could be a case of promoting planning for the "eventually, yes" to happen whether that is early retirement planning, career change, or anything else. I mean, I do pay into retirement and the like, but quite frankly, I personally approach my job as this career path will always be there for me if I so choose so I'd be in some degree of danger if my belief is proven wrong later in life.
emodendroket 8y ago
This is not a great article, but, in general, you can publish a news story just to describe reality, without intending to motivate anyone to do anything, and there is nothing wrong with that.
crispyambulance 8y ago
> What is the intended effect of articles like this? How about just promoting an understanding of changes which will happen between now and the next couple decades. Or should we just give up and accept our fate? :-)

Timmah 8y ago

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that "coming for your jobs " is completely overblown and no different than automation throughout the previous decades. Isn't there a separate shadow issue of lack of diversity in the market? I mean, we can't all be app developers, web designers, and project managers. Sure, you say, there will always be non-tech jobs. Ok, like lawyers? That will be decimated by strong AI-as-a-service eDisocvery and legal analysis bots that replace paralegals and associates. So now the firm is a partner or two, and a $14/hr runner who drives to court and files motions. Doctors? Ok they read their FDA-certified AI and make sure it's sane and send you to the ePharmacy where biometric auth and videos replace the pharmacist. The cleaning staff at both offices are replaced by smart-bots that auto mop and empty trash. So each building has a security/facilities person. Restaurants? Most have kiosks and a chef-bot. Just a hostess and manager to make sure the fryer doesn't burn the building down. Uber has long been automated. So again, what's left? Government jobs most likely. And going back to my original supposition, let's ignore how people make their money. Can we all be "data scientists" using AI to analyze customer behavior at restaurant kiosks to apply predictive suggestions for their dessert? Can we all write websites for the small businesses (that don't exist because they can't afford the AI services that BigCorp has)? What happens when Google computes every last datapoint about us? Facebook has reached complete saturation and there's no new info to sell to advertisers. How would our economy function if there's basically one industry left? You can't compute analytics about yourself or sell website services to website service people.

pitaj 8y ago
You left out the entire entertainment industry. I imagine that many people will end up doing creative endeavors, including art, engineering, philosophy, and science. Also, people (being more flexible than robots) could be the main actors behind space exploration.

CM30 8y ago

Honestly, I think the worries about AI taking jobs are overblown. Will AI get better? Yes. Will some jobs be doable by AI? Yes. May that eventually end up being all jobs? Guess so. But that doesn't mean people won't be able to find work or make money. I mean, you don't have to be the 'best' at something to get rich off of it, nor to even simply earn a living at it. I mean, think about it. Objectively the majority of products, services and businesses out there now are worse than at least one competitor. If people were always rational about what they were buying, said businesses/products/services would go broke. But they're not rational. People buy things and use products because of many things, whether that's convenience, location, price, name recognition/branding, marketing, word of mouth type marketing, social proof, quality of service/employees/whatever, pure luck or heck, without even thinking at all. So even if every market in existence gets AI involved in, it still won't necessarily mean old fashioned human run businesses can't compete and win customers. There's also the additional effect of branding that people never really think about here too. People don't just watch 'a' TV show or film or what not, they watch Star Wars or Game of Thrones or what not. Same with music, games, books, art, internet media and basically anything celebrity related in general. Eventually, the greats sell on their name alone, and that's one barrier that even the best use of AI may not compete with. Just look at a popular book for example, in some cases the author's name is literally more than double the size of the title! So that may also be another area where robots won't eventually come for jobs/take all the jobs. Perhaps we'll end up in a world where the 'Patreon' style model is the norm and the standards for success are how well you market your own brand rather than the exact quality of what you do...