17 ms·

The growing need for human robot-minders could juice the remote workforce

141 points by phront 7y ago

mothsonasloth 7y ago
It's a lot easier to dehumanize a person when you are sitting behind the screen of Twitter / Instagram / UAV (unmanned air vehicle), pushing buttons... When you rob someone of their humanity, then you too lose your humanity, making us all robots that can be disposed of anytime...
- ClutchBand 7y ago
  When have we not been seen as disposable. The common man has been reduced to just a cog in the machine, with the exceptions being our concerted fights for what little protections we have.
- pytester 7y ago
  This is essentially the idea behind alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
- mikelyons 7y ago
  This is made possible by people's inherent self-bias: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMqNRUILvHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMqNRUILvHc
- swiley 7y ago
  The modern person in a developed country seems to me more human than ever. Think about the pin makers at the beginning of John Adams' "The Wealth of Nations." Atomation of meanieal tasks like these means the pin makers are replaced by educated generalists (at least to some extent) who operate and maintain machines.
noodlesUK 7y ago
...remote operation could allow companies to outsource driving, construction and service jobs to call centers in cheaper labor markets. This terrifies me. The speed of light RTT from the west coast to India and back again is around 100msec. This is on the order of human reaction time. Real world latency we are talking way more than that. I get wacky routes to India traversing most of the world, so I get pings >400msec from the US to India. 400msec is more than enough latency to kill you. Teleop is a silly idea for big fast death machines on wheels (cars), especially if there’s significant latency in the teleop.
- jsty 7y ago
  Not that I think it'd necessarily be a great idea, but you could probably get a decent bounded latency by using dedicated / leased lines, which is e.g. good enough for remote robot-assisted surgery in some places.
  - a-priori 7y ago
    The Earth is 134ms around at the speed of light. That's how long it takes to communicate in real time with the other side of the world (your antipode). No technology or routing policies can change that. This sort of real-time control would probably have to be done on the same continent at most, because of purely physical limitations.
    - 1_person 7y ago
      I think it's worth introducing to the discussion that human reaction time to an unanticipated stimulus is somewhere around 150-250ms. The ~140-150ms practically achievable latency over a hemispheric arc in real world IP networks is already fairly close to the limit imposed by the human element. However, latency in IP networks is measured as RTT while human reaction time to a stimulus is given as the one way path latency. The more accurate comparison would be between the ~70ms one way path latency of the optical terrestrial network with the same 150-250ms of one way path latency for the human to react to a directly applied stimulus. At the extreme of the range of human factors and accounting for the differing scale, human factors are responsible for up to 80% of the reaction latency.
      - a-priori 7y ago
        But if you're talking about having human operators in the loop then any communications latency would be in addition to the reaction time of the operator.
        TomMarius 7y ago
        What if you make it an anticipated stimulus? E.g. have operators grouped by event kind.
cleansy 7y ago
I hope they do not start using remote controlled cars on highways. A car going at 60mph (~100kmh) travels at 26m/second. 4G has a ping of ~70ms* on top of the time from the cell tower to the operator's computer. However, I found quite a variance in pings when browsing on the phone, anywhere from 200-300ms at times (maybe due to changing the tower). So round trip might be at 600ms. Then we account for variance in bandwidth, human reaction time etc. All in all we might be looking at a delay of at least 1s. Guesstimating, of course. That's still 26m of a 2 ton vehicle going at 100kmh without oversight. * According to https://www.4g.co.uk/news/4g-injecting-new-lease-life-online-gaming-mobile-broadband/ https://www.4g.co.uk/news/4g-injecting-new-lease-life-online...
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  I don't think realtime control will be much of a thing; keep in mind that companies don't actually want to pay people, that's why they're investing so heavily in automation and robots. At best it's going to be humans that will direct, tell a vehicle how to handle a situation it doesn't know yet. But all of the basics - driving, steering, avoiding obstacles - should and will be automated.
- jeroenhd 7y ago
  This is why connected cars are hoping for a quick spread of 5G. A fully-fledged 5G network would have transmitters placed on every other lamp post with a stable connection to the backbone. With such a system, the rtt should come down to sub-50ms for high priority traffic if properly set up. The obvious downside is the amount of transmitters and fiber you need to set up for this, but the smart vehicle people are seemingly quite confident in their ability to convince operators to install such a network. A 200ms round-trip would still be comparable to some drivers on the highways right now, but it's certainly suboptimal.
  - nradov 7y ago
    There's no such thing as a stable connection to the backbone. That's a myth. A single construction crew digging in the wrong spot can take out a whole bundle of fibers. Now your 5G network has a huge dead zone.
Jedi72 7y ago
My 2c, instead of building autonomous cars/robots which work in our current cities, we should just redesign our cities to cater for these new ideas. We could have an autonomous delivery system with current technology if we just put aside some dedicated space for them to operate. No fancy AI, just good old fashioned sensors and control systems. Put roughly pallet sized tunnels under the roads, and it doesnt even have to encroach on public space. Way less problems in the long run IMHO.
- Swizec 7y ago
  i agree, it’s ridiculous that not all subway trains are automated yet
  - matthewmacleod 7y ago
    No, it’s not ridiculous. It’s complex, time consuming, and expensive to retrofit fully automated systems on to existing lines. Like any other project, the costs (disruption, financial) must be balanced with the gains (capacity, safety). Automated systems will continue to be rolled out worldwide at a reasonable pace.
    - icebraining 7y ago
      I think Swizec's point is that the current pace, even accounting for those factors, is not reasonable. Let's not pretend those decisions have some sort of mathematically correct answer; how much to invest in public transit, for example, is a political choice that one can legitimately disagree with - and even find unreasonable.
  - semi-extrinsic 7y ago
    Why is it ridiculous? If you look at Transport for London as an example, the organization employs 25,000 people, of which 3,000 are train operators, with 600+ trains. The salary + indirect wage costs for those people is on the order of $250 million per year. Which I think is pretty cheap, compared to what you'd guesstimate for CAPEX and OPEX for an automated system. Now they are actually in the process of automating the trains, which has been criticised by many as a vanity project. Certainly it has not been shown that it makes financial sense. And it has been decided that they will retain a "captain" aboard the train, for safety reasons, as someone has to lead passenger evacuation in case of an emergency. So the total salary savings will be essentially zero. Fully level-4 automated may makes sense for new builds. But for retrofits, you can't satisfy the overall requirements without a human physically present.
Haga 7y ago
The headline alone communicates well what a left behind industrie industrial automation is.
pytester 7y ago
It appears the automation/AI revolution that was going to render millions jobless was smoke and mirrors after all.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  It's an in-between step. Already they're reducing costs by making work simpler, reducing the workforce, etc. One person can operate a dozen delivery robots, vs a dozen delivery people doing the same work. It's the common trend in automation and industrialization.
  - vidarh 7y ago
    Which also happens to provide training data ever time a human has to intervene...
- qkls 7y ago
  Less jobs will be available as fewer workers are required if one human can do multiple tasks remotely.
  - travisporter 7y ago
    When ATMs began rolling out, more branches opening increaesed the demand for bank tellers. This may happen here as well. http://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-robots-and-jobs/ http://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-r...
    - philipkglass 7y ago
      Yes, when they began rolling out. If you look at the first chart in that article, bank teller employment peaked at a bit over 600,000. If you follow the link to the BLS projections given near the end of the article[1], you'll see that bank teller jobs in 2018 are down to 472,000 and expected to decline by another 58,000 over the next decade. Bank teller jobs per capita is declining more rapidly, since population is still growing. [1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/office-and-administrative-support/tellers.htm#tab-6 https://www.bls.gov/ooh/office-and-administrative-support/te...
msantos 7y ago
Isn't that what some companies claiming to be AI/ML champions are doing when they are actually "employing" real humans through MTurk and the likes to do the work.
- simonswords82 7y ago
  Yep. One of the earliest examples of this I can recall is the VoxSci voicemail to text message fiasco that unfolded over ten years ago. They fraudulently claimed that they had some kind of machine learning system that enabled them to quickly, accurately and privately convert voice mail to text. The reality was that they had a call centre in India manually transcribing. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8163511.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8163511.stm
buboard 7y ago
There are actual startups that are "pretending to be robots", so the title is off: This article is about legitimate remote-operations work, and it's a really great thing, not something to be ridiculed as the title makes it. Some of them like postmates or remote driving seem like typical VC silliness but others could be lifesaving, like , imagine a remote-controlled da-vinci surgical machine.
nkrisc 7y ago
Who will be held accountable when one of these robots inevitably harms or injures someone? Since these sorts of robots seen to be semi-automated, does this effectively abstract away any real responsibility? Can robots only be responsible for nothing more than an "unfortunate accident"?
jileczech 7y ago
That remote controlled car idea is stupid. So many things can go wrong. What if the connection gets interrupted? And perhaps the most important thing - when there is a human driver, he is also responsible for his own life, so he will drive very carefully. This is a shit idea and it will fail.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- stri8ed 7y ago
  I don't think anyone is recommending remote controlled cars. It's about having a fallback to handle edge-case scenarios (e.g. toll ways, construction zones), likely at slower speeds, as AI is already quite good at reacting rapidly to sudden movements. The collusion avoidance will still be enabled while operated remotely, so a failed connection, can just result in the car pulling over and waiting.
i_am_proteus 7y ago
Concerns about ping assume all tasks will require real-time control by the human. Realistically, a supervisory system will have the human identifying hazards and gaps in the autonomous system's sensory capacity. Quick-reaction collision avoidance will be controlled by radar (77 GHz etc.) or lidar.
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
I don't see how replacing dozens of people with one robot and a human 'minder' is at all, juicing the workforce. Its just more automation.
dalbasal 7y ago
It's interesting the effect that uber, amazon a gig working have had. Where "traditional jobs^" are created, the immediate expectation is that this will be uberified... More like selling icecream during summer tourist season than working in trucking. ^Traditional in the "standardized job that 5k people do for us."
bcx 7y ago
There is some version of this that creates a dystopian future where AI software companies shed liability by outsourcing ethical decisions to armies of contractors. With AI currently set up as the "next big thing" this article is just another version of the "Natural Language Processing" and human augmented AI, that is being used by almost everyone to "fake it until you don't need humans any more" (see Apple, Amazon, Google listening to our audio as a backup for Siri, Alexa, and Now). A necessary stop gap. I think there is a big opportunity to look past the stop gap and talk about technologies that are going to 10x the things humans are already good at (creativity, empathy, intuitive problem solving, ...).
- skybrian 7y ago
  I don't think "the contractor did it" will get very far, either in court or as PR? Though, there is legal indemnification which could be used to get a contractor (the company) to pay when there is a screwup. But that's a matter of contract negotiations between companies.
Animats 7y ago
This will probably result in very few jobs. The number will decline as the technology gets better, too. The USPS's first machine sorting system had tens of thousands of people keying in the ZIP codes as envelopes went by. Then that was automated for machine-addressed mail with specific fonts. Then for all typed and printed ZIP codes. Then for all typed and printed full addresses. Then for clearer handwritten addresses. Now there's just one national center where a few people look at images of illegible addresses.[1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegible-addresses-goes-to-be-read.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegi...
- rthomas6 7y ago
  Right, but in industries that are not replaced (like mail), you're forgetting about the effect increased efficiency will have on demand. A counterexample would be when looms increased employment in textiles. Less people were needed per item, but it was so much cheaper to make textiles that the increased demand ended up employing more people in textile mills than ever.
  - MegaButts 7y ago
    This is fascinating. Can you please point me somewhere I can learn more about automation increasing employment? When I google it I just get a bunch of highly political pieces about robots stealing jobs.
    - gwy 7y ago
      Seems similar to the Jevons paradox, as discussed here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7pNJ9aQxRMrWAnkmf/thank-you-old-man-jevons-for-my-job https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7pNJ9aQxRMrWAnkmf/thank-you-...
      - MegaButts 7y ago
        > So anyways, my next post will explain why this is all a lie and you’re actually maybe doomed to lose your job to automation. If you’ve found the problem with this analysis already, feel free to leave it in the comments. That article is essentially refuting itself.
sebringj 7y ago
This reminds me of "god of the gaps" idea where the receding domain of things doesn't show a clear line of stopping. It seems more like a limitation of the current implementation as the opportunity but watch out for the next version.
test6554 7y ago
It would be an interesting proposition to have the option to drive yourself or to seamlessly switch it over to autonomous driving monitored by a remote driver for $0.0X per minute.

141 points by phront 7y ago

It's a lot easier to dehumanize a person when you are sitting behind the screen of Twitter / Instagram / UAV (unmanned air vehicle), pushing buttons... When you rob someone of their humanity, then you too lose your humanity, making us all robots that can be disposed of anytime...

ClutchBand 7y ago
When have we not been seen as disposable. The common man has been reduced to just a cog in the machine, with the exceptions being our concerted fights for what little protections we have.
pytester 7y ago
This is essentially the idea behind alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
mikelyons 7y ago
This is made possible by people's inherent self-bias: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMqNRUILvHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMqNRUILvHc
swiley 7y ago
The modern person in a developed country seems to me more human than ever. Think about the pin makers at the beginning of John Adams' "The Wealth of Nations." Atomation of meanieal tasks like these means the pin makers are replaced by educated generalists (at least to some extent) who operate and maintain machines.

noodlesUK 7y ago

...remote operation could allow companies to outsource driving, construction and service jobs to call centers in cheaper labor markets. This terrifies me. The speed of light RTT from the west coast to India and back again is around 100msec. This is on the order of human reaction time. Real world latency we are talking way more than that. I get wacky routes to India traversing most of the world, so I get pings >400msec from the US to India. 400msec is more than enough latency to kill you. Teleop is a silly idea for big fast death machines on wheels (cars), especially if there’s significant latency in the teleop.

jsty 7y ago
Not that I think it'd necessarily be a great idea, but you could probably get a decent bounded latency by using dedicated / leased lines, which is e.g. good enough for remote robot-assisted surgery in some places.
- a-priori 7y ago
  The Earth is 134ms around at the speed of light. That's how long it takes to communicate in real time with the other side of the world (your antipode). No technology or routing policies can change that. This sort of real-time control would probably have to be done on the same continent at most, because of purely physical limitations.
  - 1_person 7y ago
    I think it's worth introducing to the discussion that human reaction time to an unanticipated stimulus is somewhere around 150-250ms. The ~140-150ms practically achievable latency over a hemispheric arc in real world IP networks is already fairly close to the limit imposed by the human element. However, latency in IP networks is measured as RTT while human reaction time to a stimulus is given as the one way path latency. The more accurate comparison would be between the ~70ms one way path latency of the optical terrestrial network with the same 150-250ms of one way path latency for the human to react to a directly applied stimulus. At the extreme of the range of human factors and accounting for the differing scale, human factors are responsible for up to 80% of the reaction latency.
    - a-priori 7y ago
      But if you're talking about having human operators in the loop then any communications latency would be in addition to the reaction time of the operator.
      - TomMarius 7y ago
        What if you make it an anticipated stimulus? E.g. have operators grouped by event kind.

cleansy 7y ago

I hope they do not start using remote controlled cars on highways. A car going at 60mph (~100kmh) travels at 26m/second. 4G has a ping of ~70ms* on top of the time from the cell tower to the operator's computer. However, I found quite a variance in pings when browsing on the phone, anywhere from 200-300ms at times (maybe due to changing the tower). So round trip might be at 600ms. Then we account for variance in bandwidth, human reaction time etc. All in all we might be looking at a delay of at least 1s. Guesstimating, of course. That's still 26m of a 2 ton vehicle going at 100kmh without oversight. * According to https://www.4g.co.uk/news/4g-injecting-new-lease-life-online-gaming-mobile-broadband/ https://www.4g.co.uk/news/4g-injecting-new-lease-life-online...

Cthulhu_ 7y ago
I don't think realtime control will be much of a thing; keep in mind that companies don't actually want to pay people, that's why they're investing so heavily in automation and robots. At best it's going to be humans that will direct, tell a vehicle how to handle a situation it doesn't know yet. But all of the basics - driving, steering, avoiding obstacles - should and will be automated.
jeroenhd 7y ago
This is why connected cars are hoping for a quick spread of 5G. A fully-fledged 5G network would have transmitters placed on every other lamp post with a stable connection to the backbone. With such a system, the rtt should come down to sub-50ms for high priority traffic if properly set up. The obvious downside is the amount of transmitters and fiber you need to set up for this, but the smart vehicle people are seemingly quite confident in their ability to convince operators to install such a network. A 200ms round-trip would still be comparable to some drivers on the highways right now, but it's certainly suboptimal.
- nradov 7y ago
  There's no such thing as a stable connection to the backbone. That's a myth. A single construction crew digging in the wrong spot can take out a whole bundle of fibers. Now your 5G network has a huge dead zone.

Jedi72 7y ago

My 2c, instead of building autonomous cars/robots which work in our current cities, we should just redesign our cities to cater for these new ideas. We could have an autonomous delivery system with current technology if we just put aside some dedicated space for them to operate. No fancy AI, just good old fashioned sensors and control systems. Put roughly pallet sized tunnels under the roads, and it doesnt even have to encroach on public space. Way less problems in the long run IMHO.

Swizec 7y ago
i agree, it’s ridiculous that not all subway trains are automated yet
- matthewmacleod 7y ago
  No, it’s not ridiculous. It’s complex, time consuming, and expensive to retrofit fully automated systems on to existing lines. Like any other project, the costs (disruption, financial) must be balanced with the gains (capacity, safety). Automated systems will continue to be rolled out worldwide at a reasonable pace.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    I think Swizec's point is that the current pace, even accounting for those factors, is not reasonable. Let's not pretend those decisions have some sort of mathematically correct answer; how much to invest in public transit, for example, is a political choice that one can legitimately disagree with - and even find unreasonable.
- semi-extrinsic 7y ago
  Why is it ridiculous? If you look at Transport for London as an example, the organization employs 25,000 people, of which 3,000 are train operators, with 600+ trains. The salary + indirect wage costs for those people is on the order of $250 million per year. Which I think is pretty cheap, compared to what you'd guesstimate for CAPEX and OPEX for an automated system. Now they are actually in the process of automating the trains, which has been criticised by many as a vanity project. Certainly it has not been shown that it makes financial sense. And it has been decided that they will retain a "captain" aboard the train, for safety reasons, as someone has to lead passenger evacuation in case of an emergency. So the total salary savings will be essentially zero. Fully level-4 automated may makes sense for new builds. But for retrofits, you can't satisfy the overall requirements without a human physically present.

Haga 7y ago

The headline alone communicates well what a left behind industrie industrial automation is.

pytester 7y ago

It appears the automation/AI revolution that was going to render millions jobless was smoke and mirrors after all.

Cthulhu_ 7y ago
It's an in-between step. Already they're reducing costs by making work simpler, reducing the workforce, etc. One person can operate a dozen delivery robots, vs a dozen delivery people doing the same work. It's the common trend in automation and industrialization.
- vidarh 7y ago
  Which also happens to provide training data ever time a human has to intervene...
qkls 7y ago
Less jobs will be available as fewer workers are required if one human can do multiple tasks remotely.
- travisporter 7y ago
  When ATMs began rolling out, more branches opening increaesed the demand for bank tellers. This may happen here as well. http://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-robots-and-jobs/ http://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-r...
  - philipkglass 7y ago
    Yes, when they began rolling out. If you look at the first chart in that article, bank teller employment peaked at a bit over 600,000. If you follow the link to the BLS projections given near the end of the article[1], you'll see that bank teller jobs in 2018 are down to 472,000 and expected to decline by another 58,000 over the next decade. Bank teller jobs per capita is declining more rapidly, since population is still growing. [1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/office-and-administrative-support/tellers.htm#tab-6 https://www.bls.gov/ooh/office-and-administrative-support/te...

msantos 7y ago

Isn't that what some companies claiming to be AI/ML champions are doing when they are actually "employing" real humans through MTurk and the likes to do the work.

simonswords82 7y ago
Yep. One of the earliest examples of this I can recall is the VoxSci voicemail to text message fiasco that unfolded over ten years ago. They fraudulently claimed that they had some kind of machine learning system that enabled them to quickly, accurately and privately convert voice mail to text. The reality was that they had a call centre in India manually transcribing. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8163511.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8163511.stm

buboard 7y ago

There are actual startups that are "pretending to be robots", so the title is off: This article is about legitimate remote-operations work, and it's a really great thing, not something to be ridiculed as the title makes it. Some of them like postmates or remote driving seem like typical VC silliness but others could be lifesaving, like , imagine a remote-controlled da-vinci surgical machine.

nkrisc 7y ago

Who will be held accountable when one of these robots inevitably harms or injures someone? Since these sorts of robots seen to be semi-automated, does this effectively abstract away any real responsibility? Can robots only be responsible for nothing more than an "unfortunate accident"?

jileczech 7y ago

That remote controlled car idea is stupid. So many things can go wrong. What if the connection gets interrupted? And perhaps the most important thing - when there is a human driver, he is also responsible for his own life, so he will drive very carefully. This is a shit idea and it will fail.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
stri8ed 7y ago
I don't think anyone is recommending remote controlled cars. It's about having a fallback to handle edge-case scenarios (e.g. toll ways, construction zones), likely at slower speeds, as AI is already quite good at reacting rapidly to sudden movements. The collusion avoidance will still be enabled while operated remotely, so a failed connection, can just result in the car pulling over and waiting.

i_am_proteus 7y ago

Concerns about ping assume all tasks will require real-time control by the human. Realistically, a supervisory system will have the human identifying hazards and gaps in the autonomous system's sensory capacity. Quick-reaction collision avoidance will be controlled by radar (77 GHz etc.) or lidar.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

I don't see how replacing dozens of people with one robot and a human 'minder' is at all, juicing the workforce. Its just more automation.

dalbasal 7y ago

It's interesting the effect that uber, amazon a gig working have had. Where "traditional jobs^" are created, the immediate expectation is that this will be uberified... More like selling icecream during summer tourist season than working in trucking. ^Traditional in the "standardized job that 5k people do for us."

bcx 7y ago

There is some version of this that creates a dystopian future where AI software companies shed liability by outsourcing ethical decisions to armies of contractors. With AI currently set up as the "next big thing" this article is just another version of the "Natural Language Processing" and human augmented AI, that is being used by almost everyone to "fake it until you don't need humans any more" (see Apple, Amazon, Google listening to our audio as a backup for Siri, Alexa, and Now). A necessary stop gap. I think there is a big opportunity to look past the stop gap and talk about technologies that are going to 10x the things humans are already good at (creativity, empathy, intuitive problem solving, ...).

skybrian 7y ago
I don't think "the contractor did it" will get very far, either in court or as PR? Though, there is legal indemnification which could be used to get a contractor (the company) to pay when there is a screwup. But that's a matter of contract negotiations between companies.

Animats 7y ago

This will probably result in very few jobs. The number will decline as the technology gets better, too. The USPS's first machine sorting system had tens of thousands of people keying in the ZIP codes as envelopes went by. Then that was automated for machine-addressed mail with specific fonts. Then for all typed and printed ZIP codes. Then for all typed and printed full addresses. Then for clearer handwritten addresses. Now there's just one national center where a few people look at images of illegible addresses.[1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegible-addresses-goes-to-be-read.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegi...

rthomas6 7y ago
Right, but in industries that are not replaced (like mail), you're forgetting about the effect increased efficiency will have on demand. A counterexample would be when looms increased employment in textiles. Less people were needed per item, but it was so much cheaper to make textiles that the increased demand ended up employing more people in textile mills than ever.
- MegaButts 7y ago
  This is fascinating. Can you please point me somewhere I can learn more about automation increasing employment? When I google it I just get a bunch of highly political pieces about robots stealing jobs.
  - gwy 7y ago
    Seems similar to the Jevons paradox, as discussed here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7pNJ9aQxRMrWAnkmf/thank-you-old-man-jevons-for-my-job https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7pNJ9aQxRMrWAnkmf/thank-you-...
    - MegaButts 7y ago
      > So anyways, my next post will explain why this is all a lie and you’re actually maybe doomed to lose your job to automation. If you’ve found the problem with this analysis already, feel free to leave it in the comments. That article is essentially refuting itself.

sebringj 7y ago

This reminds me of "god of the gaps" idea where the receding domain of things doesn't show a clear line of stopping. It seems more like a limitation of the current implementation as the opportunity but watch out for the next version.

test6554 7y ago

It would be an interesting proposition to have the option to drive yourself or to seamlessly switch it over to autonomous driving monitored by a remote driver for $0.0X per minute.