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I worked at a ski resort and used an automation script to reduce my night audit role down to an hour of work per night. I used the remaining 7+ hours to learn h

I worked at a ski resort and used an automation script to reduce my night audit role down to an hour of work per night. I used the remaining 7+ hours to learn how to code. Then I got a job in tech. I have been automating my roles since I started working and have never had a problem telling people about my tools. Never seemed wrong to me to become more productive through automation. I estimate my tools replace 15 hours of work per week. I still end up working well above 40 hours per week so these tools just keep me barely above water. The only thing automation seems to give me is more productivity, which eventually lands something else on my plate that I need to automate and the cycle begins again.

grugagag 7y ago
Fair point. But let’s think again. When you automated the audit role you took advantage of the remaining time so you could learn programming. You had an opportunity and seized it. Now a new guy like you won’t have the oportunity because you did it first. You inadvertently kicked the ladder. Before long all the low hanging fruits will be collected and newcomers will have a hard time getting an opportunity because things are already automated, no need for a new guy. Hold off you say, there are many things to automate, and thats true to some extent. Eventually they will exhaust too at some point. Im not bashing you for automating anything, in fact I did the same thing as you. Most of us automated something at some point. My point is, we are automating our jobs away. It will take a while though...
- chii 7y ago
  > You inadvertently kicked the ladder....no need for a new guy. and so would you argue the same for the farmer who planted fields? Did that farmer kick the ladder for the hunter-gatherer? The new guy _should_ have a different education, and provide value in a different way. May be instead of doing automate-able jobs, he/she now works as an entertainer, paid for by the guy who did the automation (as they are richer now, and can afford to do so). The thinking that 'automation' destroys jobs is too narrow. The pie grows bigger when work is automated.
  - smallnamespace 7y ago
    > Did the farmer kick the ladder for the hunter-gatherer? looks around Certainly seems that way. How many tribes, peoples, and nations no longer exist because they had a less efficient means of production than their neighbors?
    - jcranmer 7y ago
      While the answer is difficult to ascertain, anthropological comparisons between farmers and hunter-gatherers suggests that the answer is rather close to 0. Fun fact: hunter-gatherer lifestyles require far less work to maintain self-sufficiency than agricultural lifestyles. In fact, it wasn't until around 1900 or so that agricultural societies caught up to hunter-gatherer societies in metrics such as life expectancy and general health welfare.
      - laurentnotsaint 7y ago
        https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/17/heart-bolivian-hunter-gatherers-atherosclerosis/ https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/17/heart-bolivian-hunter-ga...
      - smallnamespace 7y ago
        What happens when hunter-gatherers and farmers come into conflict over land, which the latter utilize far more efficiently (in a calories / sq km sense)? Note that as population densities rise, land becomes a bottleneck for a population more than number of available hours.
  - Jolter 7y ago
    It does grow bigger, assuming that the education level of workers is increasing. This is one of the founding tenets of Scandinavian social democracy. Eventually society will expect every citizen to go to at least college. This becomes more or less tenable with tuition-free higher education.
    - adrianN 7y ago
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
  We're already seeing the consequences and have been for decades. Crappy service jobs have sprung up to fill the avoid. Even those are being automated. McDonald's has claimed a $15[1] minimum wage will force them to roll out robots to replace the expensive cashiers. These robots are already being rolled out, the $15 minimum wage would only move their timeline. There's not much time before a lot of mundane service jobs get priced out of existence by crud terminals with a cash slot and chip reader. Grocery stores, gas stations, liquor stores, hotel front desks, and fast food will be the first. My guess is substantial disruption (>50% decrease in hours worked) within the next ten year's for these fields. Then I see bars and restaurants in major metros following. A table clearing, dish washing, order taking and delivering robot could be today with off the shelf parts and some talented computer vision engineers backed by a fleet of underpaid contracted out data labelers. Up front probably cost in the low tens of billion and 3-10 years to get a production ready prototype. Roll out over 3-10 years before mass adoption. Conveyor belt style restaurants and bars could pop up far sooner and completely undercut the incumbents with an Amazon model of burning cash until the competition is gone. In 50-100 years there won't be much to automate. Drone delivery will happen soon unless the drones kill a ton of people. Same with driverless trucks. Uber might go under first but someone will figure it out. Between service jobs, warehouse jobs, unskilled manufacturing jobs, and driving jobs there's going to be tens of millions of jobs lost with virtually nothing to replace them. As jobs are made simpler by machines the value added by the machine goes entirely to the machines owner. This is a net loss for society and a net loss for the economy. 100 years ago, just sending this message to everyone of you who reads this would have taken countless man hours. Think of the paper that needs to be made, the trees fell for the paper, writing each letter and delivering them to the post office. Where someone sorts them and they get distributed to the various routes they go along. Hundreds of man hours, for a message to go around the world. Thanks to technology this message is virtually free. But the technology replaced countless jobs to get us here. We, as a society, have robbed our countrymen of opportunity by allowing technologies fruits to be captured by a select few people who are no more special than any other human on earth. 1. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/mcdonalds-ex-ceo-15hr-minimum-wage-will-unleash-the-robot-rebellion/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/mcdon...
  - 7y ago
- lzol 7y ago
  I'm not sure this is entirely true. While I agree that we might be automating our work away, it's not zero-sum. New technologies and industries will develop creating new spaces to automate. There are tons of things that computer scientists in the 70s couldn't even dream of. I'm sure there will be things we couldn't even imagine in 50 years. I'm not saying the rates of growth and decay are the same, but it's definitely not just all decay.
mr_toad 7y ago
> The only thing automation seems to give me is more productivity, which eventually lands something else on my plate that I need to automate and the cycle begins again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

grugagag 7y ago

Fair point. But let’s think again. When you automated the audit role you took advantage of the remaining time so you could learn programming. You had an opportunity and seized it. Now a new guy like you won’t have the oportunity because you did it first. You inadvertently kicked the ladder. Before long all the low hanging fruits will be collected and newcomers will have a hard time getting an opportunity because things are already automated, no need for a new guy. Hold off you say, there are many things to automate, and thats true to some extent. Eventually they will exhaust too at some point. Im not bashing you for automating anything, in fact I did the same thing as you. Most of us automated something at some point. My point is, we are automating our jobs away. It will take a while though...

chii 7y ago
> You inadvertently kicked the ladder....no need for a new guy. and so would you argue the same for the farmer who planted fields? Did that farmer kick the ladder for the hunter-gatherer? The new guy _should_ have a different education, and provide value in a different way. May be instead of doing automate-able jobs, he/she now works as an entertainer, paid for by the guy who did the automation (as they are richer now, and can afford to do so). The thinking that 'automation' destroys jobs is too narrow. The pie grows bigger when work is automated.
- smallnamespace 7y ago
  > Did the farmer kick the ladder for the hunter-gatherer? looks around Certainly seems that way. How many tribes, peoples, and nations no longer exist because they had a less efficient means of production than their neighbors?
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    While the answer is difficult to ascertain, anthropological comparisons between farmers and hunter-gatherers suggests that the answer is rather close to 0. Fun fact: hunter-gatherer lifestyles require far less work to maintain self-sufficiency than agricultural lifestyles. In fact, it wasn't until around 1900 or so that agricultural societies caught up to hunter-gatherer societies in metrics such as life expectancy and general health welfare.
    - laurentnotsaint 7y ago
      https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/17/heart-bolivian-hunter-gatherers-atherosclerosis/ https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/17/heart-bolivian-hunter-ga...
    - smallnamespace 7y ago
      What happens when hunter-gatherers and farmers come into conflict over land, which the latter utilize far more efficiently (in a calories / sq km sense)? Note that as population densities rise, land becomes a bottleneck for a population more than number of available hours.
- Jolter 7y ago
  It does grow bigger, assuming that the education level of workers is increasing. This is one of the founding tenets of Scandinavian social democracy. Eventually society will expect every citizen to go to at least college. This becomes more or less tenable with tuition-free higher education.
  - adrianN 7y ago
Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
We're already seeing the consequences and have been for decades. Crappy service jobs have sprung up to fill the avoid. Even those are being automated. McDonald's has claimed a $15[1] minimum wage will force them to roll out robots to replace the expensive cashiers. These robots are already being rolled out, the $15 minimum wage would only move their timeline. There's not much time before a lot of mundane service jobs get priced out of existence by crud terminals with a cash slot and chip reader. Grocery stores, gas stations, liquor stores, hotel front desks, and fast food will be the first. My guess is substantial disruption (>50% decrease in hours worked) within the next ten year's for these fields. Then I see bars and restaurants in major metros following. A table clearing, dish washing, order taking and delivering robot could be today with off the shelf parts and some talented computer vision engineers backed by a fleet of underpaid contracted out data labelers. Up front probably cost in the low tens of billion and 3-10 years to get a production ready prototype. Roll out over 3-10 years before mass adoption. Conveyor belt style restaurants and bars could pop up far sooner and completely undercut the incumbents with an Amazon model of burning cash until the competition is gone. In 50-100 years there won't be much to automate. Drone delivery will happen soon unless the drones kill a ton of people. Same with driverless trucks. Uber might go under first but someone will figure it out. Between service jobs, warehouse jobs, unskilled manufacturing jobs, and driving jobs there's going to be tens of millions of jobs lost with virtually nothing to replace them. As jobs are made simpler by machines the value added by the machine goes entirely to the machines owner. This is a net loss for society and a net loss for the economy. 100 years ago, just sending this message to everyone of you who reads this would have taken countless man hours. Think of the paper that needs to be made, the trees fell for the paper, writing each letter and delivering them to the post office. Where someone sorts them and they get distributed to the various routes they go along. Hundreds of man hours, for a message to go around the world. Thanks to technology this message is virtually free. But the technology replaced countless jobs to get us here. We, as a society, have robbed our countrymen of opportunity by allowing technologies fruits to be captured by a select few people who are no more special than any other human on earth. 1. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/mcdonalds-ex-ceo-15hr-minimum-wage-will-unleash-the-robot-rebellion/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/mcdon...
- 7y ago
lzol 7y ago
I'm not sure this is entirely true. While I agree that we might be automating our work away, it's not zero-sum. New technologies and industries will develop creating new spaces to automate. There are tons of things that computer scientists in the 70s couldn't even dream of. I'm sure there will be things we couldn't even imagine in 50 years. I'm not saying the rates of growth and decay are the same, but it's definitely not just all decay.

mr_toad 7y ago

> The only thing automation seems to give me is more productivity, which eventually lands something else on my plate that I need to automate and the cycle begins again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox