26 ms·

No Recent Automation Revolution

271 points by cinquemb 6y ago

emmelaich 6y ago
I'm disappointed by my and others ability or lack of ability in automating. The humble takeaway is that it is far more difficult than people imagine.
- rdtwo 6y ago
  There are probably only a couple thousand people in the would that could write the appropriate code or make robots perfect enough to do many of the automated manufacturing tasks. And most of them are employed by places that mostly waste their talents
- pg-gadfly 6y ago
  The simpler the task seems, the harder it must be. It's exactly why the task exists at all, it could not have been improved on before either and stopped there
jariel 6y ago
Star Wars used painstakingly crafted models and photography effects to produce the film. Now, people using modern tools can do much more, with considerably less work. The 'jobs' analysis wouldn't necessarily reveal that. Taking inventory in a retail store used to be a paper and pencil mass bureaucracy - it's now streamlined. We don't stand at the line anymore to withdraw or deposit money. Secretaries don't type memos. Many newspapers are dropping photographers in lieu of training journalists on how to use their iPhones. We don't manage a lot of paper records anymore. So a lot of things have accelerated, it might not show up in the job market, it may not even show up in the GDP if consumers are in fact getting all the surplus. Life can get a lot better in many ways without a hint of GDP growth. GDP growth usually only happens (all things being equal) if there is either more cost (edit: 'maybe' bad for consumers but not necessarily), more profit taking (also bad for consumers), or more government spending (neutral for the citizenry - depends on the efficiency of spending).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- d3nj4l 6y ago
  I understand your point, but that doesn't seem to be what the article talks about. From the linked article: > Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that for many years the media has been almost screaming that we entering a big automation revolution, with huge associated job losses, due to new AI tech, especially deep learning. Emphasis mine. Their point doesn't seem to be that automation isn't happening, but that there is no revolution incoming that is driven by new tech. You can see that in their bulleted point summary: > * Which job features predict job automation how did not change from 1999 to 2019. If new tech was breaking the frontiers of automation and making it possible to automate jobs which couldn't be done before, these features should've changed.
  - _AzMoo 6y ago
    I think a lot of people that are in the AI/Tech space are probably a bit detached from the realities of non-tech businesses. While you talk of "new tech" being AI and deep-learning, I'm still in the process of implementing barcoding systems in warehouses. I think the vast majority of businesses just aren't ready to move into the data-driven AI space that you call new tech. They're 20 years behind it.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - jariel 6y ago
    "If new tech was breaking the frontiers of automation and making it possible to automate jobs which couldn't be done before, these features should've changed." This is definitely not self-evident, moreover, I'd totally disagree with it. The authors are essentially missing the point by trying to categorize jobs or features of jobs as 'automatable' when in the grand scheme, it's just not how it works. Everyone's jobs are evolving due to automation. 1) Automation has been steadily happening due to progress in IT for decades. 2) AI, in particular, is a nascent field, moreover, it's really on a 'tool' in the tool chest of IT systems overall. The time horizon for impact for direct impact of 'AI' will be a long way off, and when it is, it won't be directly apparent in most cases. There will be very few jobs where we'll be able to say 'AI replaced me'. Maybe Taxi drivers. 3) And my point - is that automation is tremendously difficult to measure in reality, and that it changes the nature of some jobs more than others, and in ways that cannot be measured by using employment numbers. The 'AI replaced the taxi drivers' example, derived from our 'Industrial Revolution' thinking about automation and productivity, is an outlier. Seeking to find ways in which 'AI replaced cab drivers' is probably worthwhile on some level, but it's going to miss 95% of the revolution. Think of an Amazon product picker - their jobs have changed tremendously due to automation. There may be all sorts of flavours of AI baked into an Amazon warehouse pickers job now and in the future: a lot of AI in the vision/3D control for the robots which incrementally replace humans. AI in the route optimisation, AI in labour scheduling (no longer done by humans), AI in facilities management (ordering parts, service automatically). All of this may lead to considerably more efficient workplace and yet not a single job may be lost nor might it lead us to think of some magic tech replacing some workers in a specific way, rather 'the system got smarter'. The economic equilibrium may in fact lead to considerably more people being hired to do 'different kinds of more automated picking', not fewer. The AI revolution is the same as the information revolution and it's happening across the system in myriad ways that will be very hard to measure as we would like.
hirundo 6y ago
The horrors of the automation revolution have been on our collective mind for a long time. In the '70s this was one of my dad's favorite jokes: "It's terrible, my father lost the job he had for decades. He was replaced by a clever mechanical gizmo just six inches long. And then my mom got one." It plays on the fear of being emasculated by technology. Maybe that leads us to exaggerate the threat.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  The fear is very real, not about emasculation, but a loss of identity in a society where "you are your job". I have seen this first hand in both people who weren't "essential" during COVID shutdowns (to their horror), and people who were deemed "essential" but it was, in their words, "bullshit". Automation is rapidly accelerating into the wall that is identity beliefs at scale, and there is evidence that these belief systems are fairly rigid, making adaption to change challenging to say the least. The revolution won't be the automation. It'll be in us accepting that the job wasn't who we were/are and it's okay to let it go (caveat systems are in place to ensure quality of life is provided for at an agreed upon floor). It's just a job.
  - Swizec 6y ago
    > The revolution won't be the automation. It'll be in us accepting that the job wasn't who we were/are and it's okay to let it go This is perhaps the only thing socialism got right. At least the flavor we had in Yugoslavia and the remnants it left on the psyche of my parent's generation. You do your job, then you go home and live your actual life. The job exists as a way to "pay your dues" in society, but it isn't your life. Your life is home, family, the house you're building, maybe a little side business. That sort of thing. My generation growing up in the 90's and 00's tossed that away and went full american. Hustle hustle. Doing your job is not enough. You must love your job or you are a failure. We have more prosperity and I sometimes wonder if our parents didn't have more life.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      > We have more prosperity and I sometimes wonder if our parents didn't have more life. When I was younger and naive, I judged the Amish. As I've grown older and wiser, I realize they had the right idea all along. Family, loved ones, community first. Everything else serves those.
cancerSpreads 6y ago
This article comes too soon. How long have we been able to use millions of entries to machine learn? I'm still limited by processing speed. I imagine between math improvements, electrical engineering, computer science improvements/discoveries, and more we can automate jobs that require thinking or fine motor movements.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > This article comes too soon Most estimates a decade ago forecasted massive automation-caused job losses by 2020. > How long have we been able to use millions of entries to machine learn? How long did mechanical looms need to show they wouldn't become sentient? > I imagine I do to. But based on current technology, we have no idea how to achieve these goals. We can't even model how or when we might do so. This implies a deep lack of meta knowledge.
  - GuiA 6y ago
    > How long did mechanical looms need to show they wouldn't become sentient? Ah, thank you. That's handy phrasing.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    > How long did mechanical looms need to show they wouldn't become sentient? They didn't become sentient, but at the time how the Quality distinguished themselves from the rabble was through art, literacy, and music, all of which were achievable (to some degree) by mechanical loomwork substituting brass for brains. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8u93VQfHmw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8u93VQfHmw
Zaskoda 6y ago
Due to the Covid-19 lock down, my company was forced to accelerate our automation program. We did in months what we had originally planned to do in years. As we are able to open our operations center further, it's clear that we'll be providing fewer jobs than we did before. At least some part of that is the result of automation. I can't help but think this same pattern is playing out at other companies right now.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > Due to the Covid-19 lock down, my company was forced to accelerate our automation program This sounds like the centre of the distribution catching up to the frontier moreso than the frontier advancing.
  - Zaskoda 6y ago
    Sort of. We do have unique problems to solve given the nature of our products. But to some degree, you are correct. We would have eventually done it to scale, but right now we did it to survive.
  - biddlesby 6y ago
    To be fair, "the centre of the distribution catching up" is exactly the fear that the article is criticising. The fear isn't that one company is going to make some huge leap in AI - it's more about what happens if that leap gets adopted en-masse by the whole economy. I think the OP's comment is very relevant.
- bsder 6y ago
  And how many restaurants now have online ordering who would never have had online ordering without being forced to? However, even before Covid, McDonald's was rolling out touchscreen kiosk and app ordering. So, there has definitely been automation in that sector. The paper is ... kinda odd ... because its methodology considers machine operators (injection molding machine operators, lathe and machining center operators, etc.) to be some of the most automatable. That's a pretty laughable idea to anyone who has tried to run one of those machines. Yeah, 20 hours of training got me to the point I can run a CNC mill. However, I wouldn't say I'm good at it. I touch off incorrectly probably 1 in 20 times--which likely blows a part and breaks an end mill. I sometimes don't leave enough clearance to the vice jaws--which certainly breaks a mill and possible damages the machine itself. I think it was NYC CNC on YouTube that had a whole video of the various fails he's had with CNC milling machines over time. Anyone who has used a CNC cringes at that video because we have all done exactly the same things.
d3nj4l 6y ago
I thought about this article in context of the recently reposted piece "There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence" [1]. While it may be true that we haven't been able to automate new kinds of jobs, maybe we are just moments away from having an AGI that would make that kind of automation easy. That would contradict this article's claim that the narrative around an incoming automation revolution is bullshit. Just as likely, though, is that we actually are decades out from AGI and that kind of automation. [1]: Link to the piece: https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/ https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/, recent HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23401328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23401328
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > maybe we are just moments away from having an AGI that would make that kind of automation easy What evidence do we have for being closer to AGI today than we were twenty years ago? My point isn't that AGI is useless. But it's currently an article of faith. Faith is fine. Faith is essential. But isn't a good way to make huge allocations of resources.
  - jvanderbot 6y ago
    His assertion that we could always be one discovery away is not false, it's just irrelevant. The article states no evidence that there's been any past effect of "increasing automation" and assumes the near future will look like the recent past. Just inventing AGI wouldn't actually change much the next day, it would just be a new paradigm, and things would eventually change... so I agree with TFA. (Also, AGI would be not so useful. Humans are notoriously difficult to work with, and we seem to have General Intelligence. It would have to have a strange concoction of motivations to be immediately --- or even eventually --- useful for anything that we would want to automate).
    - d3nj4l 6y ago
      I definitely don't mean it as in "AGI is invented; humans need not apply", but in the point you've covered: > The article states no evidence that there's been any past effect of "increasing automation" and assumes the near future will look like the recent past. My point was that predictions of AGI being so far away may be false, as explained the article I linked. If they were false, and we ended up with AGI, I don't think the article's assumption about the near future will apply. This does not need to happen overnight, it can take time, but the kinds of jobs we could automate would change drastically over time (and the time scale in the article is two decades long!) On your second point, though. Part of why humans are difficult to work with because we have our own emotions and motivations and sometimes decide not to do things other people want. An extremely intelligent AI that did only what it was told to do would probably not be as difficult to work with?
jsmith12673 6y ago
Economics noob here: the paper concludes that past automation is predicted by 2 key factors: pay and employment. What does that mean exactly? Are they saying that higher a job pays, the more likely it is to get automated? Or the other way around? Also what does 'employment' refer to exactly? Is measuring how well the demand for labour is being met in a certain job?
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > Are they saying that higher a job pays, the more likely it is to get automated? Yes. "Simple economic theory predicts that, all else equal, employers are more eager to automate jobs with higher pay and more workers. So these two factors should predict job automation. And we do in fact see such effects in Table 3, though more consistently for pay than employment." > what does 'employment' refer to exactly? Number of people employed.
  - foogazi 6y ago
    No one will automate for automations sake - businesses choose how to deploy capital to improve efficiency, which can be achieved through scale or going after the largest cost
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      In the mid-twentieth century (IIRC) there was a "paradox" observed that the US was capital-rich but its exports were labour-intensive. Is this situation still true?
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    For automation to make sense from a business point of view the cost of developing & running the automation should be less than the cost of doing the work manually over an equivalent timeframe. This is why for example there are a lot of bullshit office jobs that can be automated fairly easily but will not be because there's plenty of cheap labour to do it manually (for cheaper than what developing & maintaining the automation would cost) and it also earns them PR points about "creating" jobs.
irjustin 6y ago
Is it just me or does it feel like this timeframe was too short? Personally, I expect the largest disruptor of jobs to come from autonomous driving, but we're still 5-10+ years from seeing that hitting the ground. As far as today is concerned, I largely agree. ETFs BOTZ and ROBO have increased, but not in such a way that would suggest huge automation revolution.
- mortenjorck 6y ago
  The headline (and paper) are titled "No Recent Automation Revolution." We might very well be on the cusp of one, but prediction was not the goal of this paper.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  In the meantime, the disruptor for driving jobs has been the race to the bottom; services like Uber, Lyft, etc popping up, decimating the taxi industry by having their not-employees compete with each other for work, driving the prices down while they laugh all the way to the bank - they get their cut anyway. While those jobs haven't been automated away as such, they are being priced away.
  - bobcostas55 6y ago
    >while they laugh all the way to the bank Uber has been consistently losing money every single year.
lettergram 6y ago
We are only a couple years away from automating most customer servicing. You’ll still need a few, but if we collect data on the few it’s possible to scale those answers to millions. That’ll put millions out of work and is basically text generation... easy to deploy, easy to maintain, and we probably already have the technology just not productionized. Now, those people will be retrained to do something. Maybe even just do more detailed customer service. So I’m not too concerned - just saying automation is coming
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  > That’ll put millions out of work and is basically text generation... easy to deploy, easy to maintain, and we probably already have the technology just not productionized. Yea, but does it...you know, work? Why didn't the internet already eliminate most customer service? The common inquiries can easily be found solutions to online. if I'm calling support it's almost always because the resources available don't solve my problem. And spending 20 minutes on the phone with an automated system asking about billing is very frustrating.
  - nine_k 6y ago
    It just has become a filter for people with serious enough problems. If you can spend 10-15 minutes navigating voice menus, waiting, and listening to canned messages, likely you need operator's help badly enough. Anyone with a petty problem would have hung up already. And the canned messages also eliminate some of the calls which seek some obvious information. You know, it used to be somehow hard, but not impossible, to reach an oracle in ancient times. Now the same is done on mass scale.
    - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
      So basically offload the cost to the consumer. Add up the wasted 10-15 minutes and on the whole it likely costs society more.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > We are only a couple years away from automating most customer servicing The paper rigorously questions such assertions of faith. It merits a thoughtful response. As Deming said, "in God we trust, all others must bring data."
mortenjorck 6y ago
The post implies that the authors' paper has received limited attention from the economic establishment due to its heterodox conclusion, but elides any supposition as to why its heterodoxy should be so controversial. Why should it be?
- drewcoo 6y ago
  Surely unrelated to the author's referring to (his quotes) "experts" and their (my quotes) "bullshit." My takeaway: invest in rock delivery. Everyone wants to live under one. And what with COVID-19, not enough people will be able to scavenge their own.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  It's in a shit journal, so that's a start. I think part of it is that he's strawmaning here. The fear of automation isn't quite that it's immediate, it's more about the ability of machines to erode away economic opportunity of communities. People haven't been saying jobs are gone, just that eventually they will be soon(ish). Arguing that jobs aren't gone yet isn't helpful.
  - ameister14 6y ago
    It's also incredibly difficult to read. I studied this and find it confusing - I can only imagine what a journalist would be able to take away from it.
trixie_ 6y ago
There's no technical or physical limit to why so many things can't be automated, which means everything that can, will be automated eventually.. Super popular games like Factorio and Satisfactory are glimpses of a potential near future.
- rdtwo 6y ago
  There is an economic limit. If the cost of the machine is more than the human then your competitors will use humans and you’ll loose a ton of money on every product you sell. Of course that doesn’t matter because there is no technical limit on the value of your stock so as long as you are the golden boy it doesn’t matter
naasking 6y ago
1999-2019 is not the interesting period of automation. I'm surprised the authors think it's even relevant. 2020-2040 will be the period to watch.
- randallsquared 6y ago
  Except the spirit of this statement was being expressed in 2000, as well, on mailing lists and usenet of the day.
  - naasking 6y ago
    Sure, but I doubt they gave firm timelines. Future projections are always murky, but it seems pretty clear that the tech is in a much better spot and the incentives are now stronger than ever. Human workers get sick and can't work? Automate them away!
- PeterisP 6y ago
  1999-2019 has created massive technological capability for automation, which has been significantly underutilized mostly due to the rapid progress of globalization and offshoring of labor. 2020-2040 could have massive automation just with today's tech as soon as it's economically worthwhile - i.e. if you're not competing with workers who'll slave all day in dangerous conditions for peanuts. In 2000, we couldn't automate many jobs, in 2020 we choose not to automate them.
devonkim 6y ago
I’ve been having trouble reconcilling compelling evidence for and against automation based job loss / wage suppression, and usually the arguments against them look at super high level macroeconomic numbers (see: Pail Krugman’s analysis on productivity dropping for some recent years) while most people in support of the automation argument will go directly on the ground to places where auto manufacturers have had strong presence and also cite cohort analysis where laid off manufacturing workers take up gig jobs. The primary impetus for automation are labor cost related but not necessarily to take over humans intrinsically. The top reason I heard uttered in my amateur research was a common theme of the past 100+ years - unions make things more costly whether in terms of capital or general speed / agility of the business. Wages are suppressed through automation effects noticeably around factories that automate compared to nearby cities that don’t. The suppression is concurrently correlated to labor suppression / arbitrage though so it is hard to detangle the automation v. labor angle because the biggest job losses and wage suppression happened before modern automation - they happened during the late 80s to 90s as unionization started dropping faster. Diminishing returns on outright hard balling unions would lead to more investment in machinery to drive down hiring needs and avoid the need to hire while also putting the companies that do automate in a better operational cost position.
- wiz21c 6y ago
  >>> unions make things more costly whether in terms of capital or general speed / agility of the business not sure. The unions shift revenues from capital to society. The speed/cost of "things" is not relevant here.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  We build quite the "contraception" for circuit board mounting anything not compatible with reflow soldering. It mostly works but the women that do it usually are just way faster and less error prone. We have quite the high wage standard and even then the device is mostly used to show off. Real automation is probably needed in bureaucratic workflows even if we usually think about manufacturing. There are probably advantages and disadvantages here as well. Since order situation is great at my current company (strangely the covid-quarter was particularly good), we have significantly expanded workforce in production. I doubt that unions really drove automation in my country though. Price plays a role but also technological feasibility.
tuatoru 6y ago
An independent line of evidence looks at the formation of new occupations over time. If automation were taking over jobs, or jobs were being refactored because some tasks are automated, then we'd expect to see new job titles appearing in employment advertising and classifications such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics's. This does happen, as it has happened since the start of the Industrial Revolution. "Social Media Manager" is a new job that has arisen in the last several years, for instance. But, and this is the point, this "job churn" been happening more slowly over the last 20 years than at any time since WW II. That is also incompatible with the claim that an automation revolution is under way.
- phkahler 6y ago
  Automation eliminates jobs. Sometimes lower costs in one area allow more activity in another, but that does not change the fact that the automation eliminates jobs and should not be expected.
- virgilp 6y ago
  > That is also incompatible with the claim that an automation revolution is under way. “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
- nednar 6y ago
  Also let's not forget that automation still means someone needs to write some code, which needs to be written, maintained, updated, synced with other projects etc. The act itself creates new jobs already. For instance: In IT we also have this. Dev is the typical product development team, Ops is the team that takes care of keeping the lights on. Now with all the automation we have a new job called Devops which is somewhat in the middle betwen both Dev and Ops. We thought both groups would move to the middle and form this new Devops group. But what most companies did is completely hire from zero for their Devops teams. Now what we see is that Devops is growing, while Dev and Ops are shrinking. But the sum of both shrinking groups is smaller than the sum of new Devops jobs.
  - piva00 6y ago
gigel82 6y ago
I don't know enough about industrial automation to form an opinion, but RPA is definitely coming for the rank-and-file office drones. You'd be surprised how many "paper pushers" still fill the cubicles of this world (their job literally to copy stuff from this ERP to this CRM or to this legacy Access / Excel / BI system). This is the low hanging fruit of job automation and enterprises are quickly figuring out what kind of cost savings RPA can offer them. I have a feeling RPA will have a much higher adoption rate than the "digital transformation" trickle.
- kristianp 6y ago
  RPA?
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    Robotic Process Automation, presumably.
  - ilaksh 6y ago
    Robotic Process Automation.
- pedrocr 6y ago
  RPA is just systems integration for companies that have a broken software development process. That companies are having to resort to writing "robots" to fake pushing buttons in UIs should make you less confident in the advancement of automation not more.
yk 6y ago
> Last December, Keller Scholl and I posted a working paper suggesting that this whole narrative is bullshit, at least so far. Thing is, when you are calculating the color of the sky, then it is either a bluish looking spectra, or you are in trouble. And consequently physicists will look outside immediately after that calculation. The entire post needs an explanation of why they don't find any automation in that timeframe? I mean, just from administration we have things like package managers, containers, several cloud stuff, and so on. If they don't see that in their data, then my immediate assumption is, that they need a more reasonable approach.
- SubiculumCode 6y ago
  The article reads like sour grapes about an article that didn't get as much attention as the author believed it should, and yeah, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
- visarga 6y ago
  > I mean, just from administration we have things like package managers, containers, several cloud stuff, and so on. Automation replaces human work, business can do better now, then they want to produce more than before so they up hiring as well. It's much easier to set your target higher (production, profit) than to automate anything. As soon as you have automated something new work pops up, work that was probably not done before for lack of resources. Programming has been automating tasks for decades yet here we are, so many of us. Cloud should have automated many jobs, yet with this new found ease of deployment we chose to deploy more rather than hire less. As long as humans have needs and desire for betterment I don't think we can surpass our ever growing ambition with automation.
stewbrew 6y ago
So, an Amazon warehouse works like a grocery store from back then? What is the ratio #sold goods / #human worker for Amazon and for an old fashioned grocery store?
082349872349872 6y ago
Living in a country where people are expensive and machines are cheap, I can attest the automation level is higher here. For instance, I often see cows at farms here enjoying automated brushing systems. There are youtube videos in english, but I don't recall ever having seen something like that in the US, even at Harris Ranch. (I have yet to witness a farmer using fully-autonomous hay feeding robots, but the ag magazines have been running articles on them)
- kaybe 6y ago
  The rules (in Germany, but also other places) say you either have to offer the cows these brushes or brush them manually. It's not really a choice.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    Wasn't the choice between offering the brushes or brushing them manually? Around here I see that farmers find installing a EUR 2'500 brush to be much cheaper than attempting to pay cheap foreign labour to brush cows. (TIL automated pig brushes also exist)
    - kaybe 6y ago
      Yes, I meant it's not a choice whether to brush at all. And if you have more than one or two cows the choice between the autobrush and manual seems clear, especially since the cows seem to love them and can use them whenever.
dpenguin 6y ago
It’s basically modified Parkinson’s law at play - work will expand to most available workforce. With increased automation, either new jobs are created(thereby increasing the overall output of the economy) OR expectation for individual productivity is reduced, decreasing individual stress. History is your proof. Automation has been constantly increasing forever and there’s no job loss en masse because of that. Empirically speaking there are almost always more jobs created. Not saying anything about quality of life.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  While the adage is true, you also have to consider the quality of work. There are a LOT of people in the US right now with a college degree who can't find any jobs related to their majors, so they end up as baristas or Amazon order pickers - their education, talents, passions being wasted, their future pretty much on hold because jobs like that don't pay enough money to pay off student debt or buy a house.
  - PeterisP 6y ago
    In 1920 or 1950 if we'd had as many people with college degrees as we do today, we'd also have a LOT of people who can't find any jobs related to their majors. What you describe is not the quality of jobs decreasing, it's the increase in (unfulfilled, unreasonable) expectation of job quality just because you have a college degree. IMHO we have much more "good jobs" than in 1920 or 1950, it's just that the number of college graduates has grown faster than the number of good jobs. In 1920 or 1950 there weren't enough good jobs for everybody, and the good jobs mostly went to people with college degrees. But the problem was not actually in the lack of college degrees - if most people have college degrees, then all that means that college degree ceases to be the pathway to good jobs, and other filtering mechanisms inevitably need to appear (and have appeared) to select which people will get good jobs and which will be left behind despite having a college degree.
    - dpenguin 6y ago
      Potentially somewhat controversial take on this: why do college grads deserve a better job than, say, high school grads if the subject they studied in college is not particularly relevant to the society at this point(which the lack of jobs for that qualification is indicative of)? There was probably a point in time when learning hunting was like going to college and along comes farming to make all those hunters jobless. That’s how the wheel of “progress” rolls. The idea that going to college will make you more bucks or guarantees you a job in your field of study is very arcane at this point.
mdoms 6y ago
I don't think anyone believes that the automation revolution is happening right now, but that it's imminent and we should start preparing our societies to cope with it now. > Our paper has so far received zero media attention Because you're answering a question no one asked.
peisistratos 6y ago
There used to be local record shops and big ones downtown - music distribution has since become pretty automated. There used to be many bookstores around - book distribution has become fairly automated. Gamestop has been closing stores and has been hit by automated distribution in recent years. I used to buy Hagstrom map books filled with detailed current maps - they were sold in gas stations and bookstores and they even had some of their own stores. Their stores all shut down and their business shrank enormously as map navigation became automated. There used to be a lot of tour and travel agencies around. They still exist, but are much less prevalent and are scaled down. In fact, automation of commodity distribution has had a major effect on retail, and consequently commercial real estate. Insofar as office work - people who work in law tell me the large number of secretaries who shuffled through cabinets full of folders containing records have largely disappeared as record retrieval has been automated. I had data entry jobs many years ago, itself a type of automation - but the jobs I did have disappeared as data distribution has become automated. I don't know what they are measuring but I have seen the effects of a automation all around. Maybe with the closing of bookstores and record stores and video game stores, they mean the role of a retail clerk has not been much automated, which may be true. But I have seen automation have a large effect on many industries, and then rippling effects onto industries like real estate.
Gatsky 6y ago
This could be partly because America has quite low wages.
lihaciudaniel 6y ago
I wonder who still reads Overcoming Bias?
fizixer 6y ago
With all due respect, I thought Robin Hanson was better than this. I followed him briefly during the 2013-2015 automation hype (which hasm't died yet; far from it), and I found him to be carrying out reasonable analysis of tech economics. I found him to be one of the few economists who are in touch with tech reality, and so things weren't that bad in the econosphere in terms of keeping up with tech trends. This blog post doesn't help maintain that perspective at all. I'm sorry. As a tech person myself, I'm extremely busy with making this happen instead of being a negative nancy towards other tech folks, but I'll finish my though with this: I have a close friend who is a typical naysayer of tech progress, "business as usual", "old jobs replaced with new jobs", "capital is what makes thing work", "economics good technology meh" He will not stop for a minute, and will not entertain a single of my counter-arguments. What is super-surprising to me though is that in the last 5-7 years, he has pivoted from a non-tech job to complete-alignment with one of the big-tech companies, has been investing heavily in all kinds of big tech stocks, and watching his stocks with a keen eye day-in and day-out. And everytime we talk, the first thing he discusses is my opinion and forecast of where technology is headed. Once having absorbed all that information, he goes back to his same old rotten cassette tape. Funny how it works.
TaylorAlexander 6y ago
As a robotics engineer I too once bought in to the notion that automation would lead to a massive jobs crash. But the more experience I get the more I see how big the problem space is. There's a million simple tasks we cannot do with robotics, and even when we can do them the machine costs $100k. Instead I am beginning to understand that humans and machines will work together for a long time. I still think we can use automation to do radical things. I want to see us automate food production and meal preparation, to lower the cost of healthy food. By intentionally lowering the cost of human survival with automation, and with changes to intellectual property restrictions which keep costs high, we could create a world where food is so cheap we give it away to those in need. With changes to our cultural norms and broad application of this theory, it is literally possible to eliminate material poverty. Think about it - in a world where there are only private book collections, some people are book-rich and some people are book-poor. But that kind of poverty is effectively eliminated if you introduce the concept of libraries to that world. If we share the automation we create the same way we share books at a library, we can create societies where everyone is provided for at no direct material expense to others. Years ago I wrote an essay [1] where I used the concept of impending job loss from automation to emphasize the importance of this better way of living I proposed above. But I've realized that we don't need to see automation as an impending crisis - millions of people are already in crisis because they cannot afford the food, medicine, or housing they need. So the need for change is still there, but the cause is not some future problem, but the problems of the status quo. [1] http://tlalexander.com/wealth/ http://tlalexander.com/wealth/
dgudkov 6y ago
Automation happens not where many expect it (including the media). It is frequently expected that automation will come as replacement for humans, while it actually is coming in the form of better tooling and assistance to humans. This theoretically should be reflected in work productivity, not in employment numbers.
- buboard 6y ago
  when people talk of automation they mean replacement, not just better tools, for that has been happening since the beginning of time
  - Retric 6y ago
    When 9 people can do the work of 10, the 10th person often finds themselves out of a job. It’s little different if your job type completely disappears or if the economy only needs half as many people doing your job, either way many people need a new type of job.
    - pydry 6y ago
      That's what the media has been screaming all these years. The reality is often that the 10th person has their role change, they retire off or (as in the case of the engraving industry), people end up buying more at a cheaper price.
      - Retric 6y ago
        Someone having their role change sounds fine, but it often means a skill and thus a longer term salary reset. Individually people may be better or worse off, but generally if you have 20+ years of experience doing something starting over is a major setback. Granted for very slow transitions it’s not as big of a deal.
        pydry 6y ago
        The one situation where I remember this happening specifically (when the BBC made footage archiving digital), they planned the automation rollout to coincide with retiring off the old analog librarians. Then they hired them back out of retirement because the project went badly wrong. The latter part went awry (although I think they didn't mind too much) but the timing kind of worked out. In a more vicious corporation they probably wouldn't have been so bothered about the timing of the rollout.
lmm 6y ago
> Two metrics created by groups trying to predict which jobs will get automated soon did predict past automaton, but not after we included 25 mundane job features like Pace Determined By Speed Of Equipment and Importance of Repeating Same Tasks This sounds like a thoroughly fallacious argument? Automation is progressing not by automating jobs in the exact form that they were previously done, but by more automatable (and therefore more automated) forms of job displacing less automatable forms of those jobs. Isn't that exactly what we'd expect?
josephjrobison 6y ago
There will always be competition, innovation, and new markets. New needs will arise in consumers, driving new product and service needs. We may automate more low-level legal tasks, but more money will be spent on massages, or therapy, or art. It's unlikely there will be mass automation any time soon.
- pg-gadfly 6y ago
  In fact automation often goes top-down, reeucing complexity of difficult jobs and allowing lower-skilled workers to deal with the rest that isn't yet profitable to change.
lnsru 6y ago
I have very interesting process when taking vacation. Automation does not mean robots from movie “I Robot”, some software can do the job too. To take time off I must open shitty software, enter my vacation days, then print the sheet and sign it. My manager signs it too. Then I bring it to secretary, she signs too, confirms the date in shitty software. Secretary sends paper form to the HR lady, she checks, if it’s ok and forwards my sheet to accounting lady. I see here a huge potential for automation, throwing at least 1st secretary and HR lady out of the process. This ancient process is happening in Germany, but automation will come sooner or later even here. Edit: typos
- pg-gadfly 6y ago
  All things automation. Really a chainsaw is automation, and so is a compressor. Automation is a pen. They all remove work and increase efficiency. There are lots of examples which don't really count though, such as self-checkout, which have exactly the same amount of work left, only who works it is a different person.
  - ovi256 6y ago
    A chainsaw, compressor or pen are examples of mechanisation, not automation. They replace part of the human effort needed for a job, making the remaining human effort even more valuable. Automation fully replaces human work for a given job. It's a difference in kind. However, automation may replace only some jobs in a value chain, making the remaining ones even more productive and valuable. A fully automated value chain is a difference in kind again.
    - pg-gadfly 6y ago
      The word "auto"(oneself), often used with meaning to do by itself. Automation is a very broad term, which mechanization is a part, but not a requirement of. Anything that moves work from human to other forces is automation, having a thing do things by itself. An automobile is the automating of our movement.
    - eindiran 6y ago
paulsutter 6y ago
Has anyone found the raw data behind this paper? If they want this more widely coveted they should publish the datasets and code in github
joelthelion 6y ago
I think it's far too early to conclude. The ongoing "web 2.0" revolution is finally reaping the benefits of computers and networks, more than 50 years after they were invented. Paper processes are finally on the verge of being eliminated. Remote work is finally possible for many people. Deep learning will have a transformative impact too, but these things take time. Let's talk again 10 years from now.
credit_guy 6y ago
Automation has been progressing for at least three hundred years now, from the era of the Jacquard loom and the cotton gin. I was born in a country where when I was little there still were telephone operators. Those thousands of jobs disappeared long ago, around the time when rotary phones disappeared. Nothing to do with AI.
partingshots 6y ago
I imagine automation will result in the creation of entirely new industries and jobs like with self-driving cars for example. Though, on second thought I guess self-driving does end up taking away a lot of taxi driver / trucking jobs. Nevermind...
- PeterisP 6y ago
  It's also worth noting that if we get a major switch to self-driving cars, that won't create a new industry but rather diminish one - a big hypothetical benefit of a self-driving-car world is that much less cars would be needed; as most current cars are idle most of the time and even in peak driving hours, so a societal switch to "self driving cars on demand" services would mean that we would need much less cars than today. Which is great for the planet, but not so great for jobs in car manufacturing industry, at least in the long run.
cynusx 6y ago
The frequent problem with these types of reports is that they only focus on one part of the geography (USA). That said, I recall reading a report that mostly middle class administrative and coordination roles are eliminated due to digitalization and dedicated software. Leading to negative wage pressure on the middle class. These are repetitive human jobs like looking at a bunch of papers and creating a report. Manual work is getting more productive and often shifted abroad but on a global scale is actually expanding in line with global gdp growth. https://reports.weforum.org/future-of-jobs-2016/employment-trends/ https://reports.weforum.org/future-of-jobs-2016/employment-t... Interesting in this report is that geopolitical instability is more destructive to jobs than artificial intelligence for now.
- wayoutthere 6y ago
  Very much so; the current wave of automation is taking semi-skilled middle-class jobs and replacing them with low-skilled minimum wage jobs that can be filled with gig workers. High-skill jobs are still there, but the middle is rapidly being hollowed out. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the middle class is shrinking as a result.
  - jtbayly 6y ago
    That’s an interesting take on Uber that I don’t think I’ve seen before. I know Uber’s end-goal is automation such that taxi drivers aren’t necessary. What I didn’t realize is that it is route planning automation that allowed them to move from dedicated drivers to gig drivers.
    - wayoutthere 6y ago
      Yeah, I recall an article about London taxi drivers having to memorize the labyrinth of streets in and around central London to get a taxi license. They were paid very well and the jobs were stable as a result — until Uber / Waze came along. Then the market was flooded by recent immigrants working for much less who were able to navigate unfamiliar streets with GPS and the job became way less stable.
monkeydust 6y ago
Tasks makes up Jobs. Certain tasks that form a particular job are being automated more now than ever before. This is more true of knowledge workers where they are operating and working in a digital environment already (e.g. traders, accountants, lawyers, marketing, admin...) This is less true of manual labour - like cleaners and gardeners - why? Well look at robotics, its good but nowhere good enough to replace these dexterity required which a human can provide. For knowledge workers it is very hard to automate all the tasks that make up a job. Hence why automation has not resulted in mass unemployment (excluding all other factors).
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Yet automation equipment has boomed in the last 20 years. Factory floors are largely devoid of human beings. The US factory employment figures are down by more than half in that time, and that with a population that's doubled (so per-capita, factory occupations down to 25% or less or what it was). Companies move to India or China, then some move back but with none of the assembly jobs, because they don't move back until the investment in automation is paid back efficiently. Its easy to confuse 'automation across the job fields' with 'automation replacing people'. The first is slow - automation proceeds in rote assembly tasks and continuous-flow processes. But automation hasn't proceeded across the spectrum. I still get my fries from a human being. I still get my hair cut by Anton at a local shop. My car is fixed by Mr. Harapat (though it got assembled by a giant robot). My nieces and nephews are automation Engineers. They are as busy as they can possibly be, changing plants over to automation. It's cost effective when a plant grows past a certain size/capacity. And with the rising tide of population, plants that served us 20 years ago are woefully boutique now, being rebuilt, and being rebuilt automated.
- areyousure 6y ago
  > in the last 20 years > in that time > a population that's doubled Are you sure the US population has doubled in 20 years?
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    Right took longer than 20 years. How the time flies! Used to be 1990, I swear. More like 50 or 60 years ago. But in contrast, US manufacturing jobs have disappears much faster than that - by 1/3 in the 2000's alone. So the conclusion (few jobs remain, per-capita) is still a good one.
- tuatoru 6y ago
  > automation hasn't proceeded across the spectrum. Exactly. Its impact has been limited to areas where there is repetitive work on standardised, clean objects[1], in standardised environments, in product lines where volumes are sufficient to justify the investment in machinery. > Yet automation equipment has boomed in the last 20 years. Yes it has. The size of the needed investment has gone down a lot in activities where automation is feasible. But manufacturing has been a minor part of the US economy for more than 30 years, and its share is getting smaller. "Services" is over 80 percent. Advertising, making movies, sports, construction... zillions of different things. [1] If any manufacturing work should be automated, it's meat packing. Unpleasant, boring work that gives you carpal tunnel syndrome and other joint and tendon injuries. Plants are always short of workers and absenteeism is rife because of the nature of the job. But automation is impossible, because animals are not standardised enough. Putting that another way: because machine vision is still so ludicrously bad. And so is the state of robotics.
TimJRobinson 6y ago
How does this square with the type of automation Amazon is doing? The type that people rarely think is automation. Retail jobs are being decimated across the USA not because robots are directly replacing them, but because as more people shop online these companies collapse and Amazon is able to perform the same service without the staff. Maybe warehouse worker, delivery jobs and coders are increasing at the same place? That doesn't pass the sniff test to me as they seem to have much higher efficiency than your average salesperson at a retail store.
jkinudsjknds 6y ago
Automation is really just a drop in the bucket compared to better processes. The difference between new tech companies and legacy businesses is that the actual processes in the tech companies are better designed to begin with and require much less human labor. It's pretty tough to automate legacy business processes. The best you get is gross macros in a fancy package. There's a semantic difference between the kind of automation you think of when imagining robots vs. email, but email is way more powerful. We absolutely do not need new AI to achieve automation gains on the lowest hanging fruit. We really just need new entrants to competitive spaces. Even for physical labor tasks that do require actual robots, its changing the task to adapt to available tech, not updating the tech to master this old task.
ericol 6y ago
I have sort of a first hand account of what the current problem with (At least one area of automation) is. Up until the quarantine I was working in a cowork space; and it happens that - I'm the sole employee of the company I work for in my country - all the desks around me were occupied by a company that makes a lot of their income providing automation to other parties. I even worked for them for a few months as an "on demand" consultant; the idea would be that I would provide assistance to their devs when they needed help with the "programs" they were developing, and that fastly turned into a process review that eventually cooled off because they weren't - the project manager, at least - very keen on taking my advice. What I observed was that - bear in mind this is a 3rd world country - the salaries were rather low, so obviously they couldn't get experienced people. This lead to they having to train them, but as they had no experience, the way in which they approached solving the issues where, a lot of times, "complicated". Usually they suffered from the apps being interfaced having changes along the project (Or after). This meant they had to fix a lot of problems that were not there in the beginning. AS the devs had only experience with this tool, and was their first experience coding, they couldn't make the most of the other tools at hand. This mostly lends to processes that take hours to complete, being the execution time only marginally better than a person. This coupled with the issue right above this, many of the projects had a time excess of around 100% (Effectively taking double the time that was allotted in the beginning). Last I heard from them, thought, is that they made a lot of improvements here. In one particular project I practically had to threat the person responsible to use javascript to fetch data from the browser instead of the "native" way of doung that (Basically, querying the page through the tool with xpath expression). When they did change to javascript, the process execution time was reduced by >90% All in all, the problem I see with automation is that the people doing that is not formally trained in coding, and the tools I looked at have rather weak integrations with the most used apps today (Namelly, browsers). I think the idea for many of these tools is to allow people to automate themselves, but that will lead in my opinion into the "phpization" of the automation area. All in all, there are a few caveats: I know from them of at least one company that had a rather strong and professional dept., and they where _very_ good at it. I think that eventually automation is going to take the world by storm in the next 5- 10 years. And those that adopt early will have a clear advantage over those that not. For the record, the tool they use is Blue Prism; according to the CEO of this company BP has some sort of marked edge over UIPath when it comes to enterprise settings. I know there are other tools in the market, but I don't know them except by name.
gpsx 6y ago
Labor force participation in the US has dropped heavily in since 2008 and even since it peaked around 2000. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART This in spite of the reported very low unemployment rate, which is not really the meaningful measure. The labor force participation was lower a long time ago, but I think that is when there were more single income families. I am not sure how much this drop in employment is from just bad economics or how much could be attributed to automation.
jl2718 6y ago
Wages and employment remain constant because companies are still more like social constructs that provide minimal support in exchange for membership in a social hierarchy. They’ll always find something for you to do. Learn to code” is popularizing the conversion of everybody into software engineers, but actually we don’t need most SWE either, so now we have an entirely new class of useless jobs on a SWE assembly line where 99% of the work product is simply discarded, but we still use the old industrial productivity model to drive productivity by aggressive management.
sparcraft 6y ago
I actually disagree with this article. Based on my experience in the insurance industry, it is slowly but surely coming. It will appear not as a sudden drop, but as a gradual need for fewer and fewer roles as technology initially allows humans to do more with their time, and eventually replacing some of them. It is going to be a small effect on any one company. But a large effect over all, which will manifest over a long period.

271 points by cinquemb 6y ago

I'm disappointed by my and others ability or lack of ability in automating. The humble takeaway is that it is far more difficult than people imagine.

rdtwo 6y ago
There are probably only a couple thousand people in the would that could write the appropriate code or make robots perfect enough to do many of the automated manufacturing tasks. And most of them are employed by places that mostly waste their talents
pg-gadfly 6y ago
The simpler the task seems, the harder it must be. It's exactly why the task exists at all, it could not have been improved on before either and stopped there

jariel 6y ago

Star Wars used painstakingly crafted models and photography effects to produce the film. Now, people using modern tools can do much more, with considerably less work. The 'jobs' analysis wouldn't necessarily reveal that. Taking inventory in a retail store used to be a paper and pencil mass bureaucracy - it's now streamlined. We don't stand at the line anymore to withdraw or deposit money. Secretaries don't type memos. Many newspapers are dropping photographers in lieu of training journalists on how to use their iPhones. We don't manage a lot of paper records anymore. So a lot of things have accelerated, it might not show up in the job market, it may not even show up in the GDP if consumers are in fact getting all the surplus. Life can get a lot better in many ways without a hint of GDP growth. GDP growth usually only happens (all things being equal) if there is either more cost (edit: 'maybe' bad for consumers but not necessarily), more profit taking (also bad for consumers), or more government spending (neutral for the citizenry - depends on the efficiency of spending).

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
d3nj4l 6y ago
I understand your point, but that doesn't seem to be what the article talks about. From the linked article: > Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that for many years the media has been almost screaming that we entering a big automation revolution, with huge associated job losses, due to new AI tech, especially deep learning. Emphasis mine. Their point doesn't seem to be that automation isn't happening, but that there is no revolution incoming that is driven by new tech. You can see that in their bulleted point summary: > * Which job features predict job automation how did not change from 1999 to 2019. If new tech was breaking the frontiers of automation and making it possible to automate jobs which couldn't be done before, these features should've changed.
- _AzMoo 6y ago
  I think a lot of people that are in the AI/Tech space are probably a bit detached from the realities of non-tech businesses. While you talk of "new tech" being AI and deep-learning, I'm still in the process of implementing barcoding systems in warehouses. I think the vast majority of businesses just aren't ready to move into the data-driven AI space that you call new tech. They're 20 years behind it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- jariel 6y ago
  "If new tech was breaking the frontiers of automation and making it possible to automate jobs which couldn't be done before, these features should've changed." This is definitely not self-evident, moreover, I'd totally disagree with it. The authors are essentially missing the point by trying to categorize jobs or features of jobs as 'automatable' when in the grand scheme, it's just not how it works. Everyone's jobs are evolving due to automation. 1) Automation has been steadily happening due to progress in IT for decades. 2) AI, in particular, is a nascent field, moreover, it's really on a 'tool' in the tool chest of IT systems overall. The time horizon for impact for direct impact of 'AI' will be a long way off, and when it is, it won't be directly apparent in most cases. There will be very few jobs where we'll be able to say 'AI replaced me'. Maybe Taxi drivers. 3) And my point - is that automation is tremendously difficult to measure in reality, and that it changes the nature of some jobs more than others, and in ways that cannot be measured by using employment numbers. The 'AI replaced the taxi drivers' example, derived from our 'Industrial Revolution' thinking about automation and productivity, is an outlier. Seeking to find ways in which 'AI replaced cab drivers' is probably worthwhile on some level, but it's going to miss 95% of the revolution. Think of an Amazon product picker - their jobs have changed tremendously due to automation. There may be all sorts of flavours of AI baked into an Amazon warehouse pickers job now and in the future: a lot of AI in the vision/3D control for the robots which incrementally replace humans. AI in the route optimisation, AI in labour scheduling (no longer done by humans), AI in facilities management (ordering parts, service automatically). All of this may lead to considerably more efficient workplace and yet not a single job may be lost nor might it lead us to think of some magic tech replacing some workers in a specific way, rather 'the system got smarter'. The economic equilibrium may in fact lead to considerably more people being hired to do 'different kinds of more automated picking', not fewer. The AI revolution is the same as the information revolution and it's happening across the system in myriad ways that will be very hard to measure as we would like.

hirundo 6y ago

The horrors of the automation revolution have been on our collective mind for a long time. In the '70s this was one of my dad's favorite jokes: "It's terrible, my father lost the job he had for decades. He was replaced by a clever mechanical gizmo just six inches long. And then my mom got one." It plays on the fear of being emasculated by technology. Maybe that leads us to exaggerate the threat.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
The fear is very real, not about emasculation, but a loss of identity in a society where "you are your job". I have seen this first hand in both people who weren't "essential" during COVID shutdowns (to their horror), and people who were deemed "essential" but it was, in their words, "bullshit". Automation is rapidly accelerating into the wall that is identity beliefs at scale, and there is evidence that these belief systems are fairly rigid, making adaption to change challenging to say the least. The revolution won't be the automation. It'll be in us accepting that the job wasn't who we were/are and it's okay to let it go (caveat systems are in place to ensure quality of life is provided for at an agreed upon floor). It's just a job.
- Swizec 6y ago
  > The revolution won't be the automation. It'll be in us accepting that the job wasn't who we were/are and it's okay to let it go This is perhaps the only thing socialism got right. At least the flavor we had in Yugoslavia and the remnants it left on the psyche of my parent's generation. You do your job, then you go home and live your actual life. The job exists as a way to "pay your dues" in society, but it isn't your life. Your life is home, family, the house you're building, maybe a little side business. That sort of thing. My generation growing up in the 90's and 00's tossed that away and went full american. Hustle hustle. Doing your job is not enough. You must love your job or you are a failure. We have more prosperity and I sometimes wonder if our parents didn't have more life.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    > We have more prosperity and I sometimes wonder if our parents didn't have more life. When I was younger and naive, I judged the Amish. As I've grown older and wiser, I realize they had the right idea all along. Family, loved ones, community first. Everything else serves those.

cancerSpreads 6y ago

This article comes too soon. How long have we been able to use millions of entries to machine learn? I'm still limited by processing speed. I imagine between math improvements, electrical engineering, computer science improvements/discoveries, and more we can automate jobs that require thinking or fine motor movements.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> This article comes too soon Most estimates a decade ago forecasted massive automation-caused job losses by 2020. > How long have we been able to use millions of entries to machine learn? How long did mechanical looms need to show they wouldn't become sentient? > I imagine I do to. But based on current technology, we have no idea how to achieve these goals. We can't even model how or when we might do so. This implies a deep lack of meta knowledge.
- GuiA 6y ago
  > How long did mechanical looms need to show they wouldn't become sentient? Ah, thank you. That's handy phrasing.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  > How long did mechanical looms need to show they wouldn't become sentient? They didn't become sentient, but at the time how the Quality distinguished themselves from the rabble was through art, literacy, and music, all of which were achievable (to some degree) by mechanical loomwork substituting brass for brains. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8u93VQfHmw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8u93VQfHmw

Zaskoda 6y ago

Due to the Covid-19 lock down, my company was forced to accelerate our automation program. We did in months what we had originally planned to do in years. As we are able to open our operations center further, it's clear that we'll be providing fewer jobs than we did before. At least some part of that is the result of automation. I can't help but think this same pattern is playing out at other companies right now.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> Due to the Covid-19 lock down, my company was forced to accelerate our automation program This sounds like the centre of the distribution catching up to the frontier moreso than the frontier advancing.
- Zaskoda 6y ago
  Sort of. We do have unique problems to solve given the nature of our products. But to some degree, you are correct. We would have eventually done it to scale, but right now we did it to survive.
- biddlesby 6y ago
  To be fair, "the centre of the distribution catching up" is exactly the fear that the article is criticising. The fear isn't that one company is going to make some huge leap in AI - it's more about what happens if that leap gets adopted en-masse by the whole economy. I think the OP's comment is very relevant.
bsder 6y ago
And how many restaurants now have online ordering who would never have had online ordering without being forced to? However, even before Covid, McDonald's was rolling out touchscreen kiosk and app ordering. So, there has definitely been automation in that sector. The paper is ... kinda odd ... because its methodology considers machine operators (injection molding machine operators, lathe and machining center operators, etc.) to be some of the most automatable. That's a pretty laughable idea to anyone who has tried to run one of those machines. Yeah, 20 hours of training got me to the point I can run a CNC mill. However, I wouldn't say I'm good at it. I touch off incorrectly probably 1 in 20 times--which likely blows a part and breaks an end mill. I sometimes don't leave enough clearance to the vice jaws--which certainly breaks a mill and possible damages the machine itself. I think it was NYC CNC on YouTube that had a whole video of the various fails he's had with CNC milling machines over time. Anyone who has used a CNC cringes at that video because we have all done exactly the same things.

d3nj4l 6y ago

I thought about this article in context of the recently reposted piece "There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence" [1]. While it may be true that we haven't been able to automate new kinds of jobs, maybe we are just moments away from having an AGI that would make that kind of automation easy. That would contradict this article's claim that the narrative around an incoming automation revolution is bullshit. Just as likely, though, is that we actually are decades out from AGI and that kind of automation. [1]: Link to the piece: https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/ https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/, recent HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23401328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23401328

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> maybe we are just moments away from having an AGI that would make that kind of automation easy What evidence do we have for being closer to AGI today than we were twenty years ago? My point isn't that AGI is useless. But it's currently an article of faith. Faith is fine. Faith is essential. But isn't a good way to make huge allocations of resources.
- jvanderbot 6y ago
  His assertion that we could always be one discovery away is not false, it's just irrelevant. The article states no evidence that there's been any past effect of "increasing automation" and assumes the near future will look like the recent past. Just inventing AGI wouldn't actually change much the next day, it would just be a new paradigm, and things would eventually change... so I agree with TFA. (Also, AGI would be not so useful. Humans are notoriously difficult to work with, and we seem to have General Intelligence. It would have to have a strange concoction of motivations to be immediately --- or even eventually --- useful for anything that we would want to automate).
  - d3nj4l 6y ago
    I definitely don't mean it as in "AGI is invented; humans need not apply", but in the point you've covered: > The article states no evidence that there's been any past effect of "increasing automation" and assumes the near future will look like the recent past. My point was that predictions of AGI being so far away may be false, as explained the article I linked. If they were false, and we ended up with AGI, I don't think the article's assumption about the near future will apply. This does not need to happen overnight, it can take time, but the kinds of jobs we could automate would change drastically over time (and the time scale in the article is two decades long!) On your second point, though. Part of why humans are difficult to work with because we have our own emotions and motivations and sometimes decide not to do things other people want. An extremely intelligent AI that did only what it was told to do would probably not be as difficult to work with?

jsmith12673 6y ago

Economics noob here: the paper concludes that past automation is predicted by 2 key factors: pay and employment. What does that mean exactly? Are they saying that higher a job pays, the more likely it is to get automated? Or the other way around? Also what does 'employment' refer to exactly? Is measuring how well the demand for labour is being met in a certain job?

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> Are they saying that higher a job pays, the more likely it is to get automated? Yes. "Simple economic theory predicts that, all else equal, employers are more eager to automate jobs with higher pay and more workers. So these two factors should predict job automation. And we do in fact see such effects in Table 3, though more consistently for pay than employment." > what does 'employment' refer to exactly? Number of people employed.
- foogazi 6y ago
  No one will automate for automations sake - businesses choose how to deploy capital to improve efficiency, which can be achieved through scale or going after the largest cost
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    In the mid-twentieth century (IIRC) there was a "paradox" observed that the US was capital-rich but its exports were labour-intensive. Is this situation still true?
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  For automation to make sense from a business point of view the cost of developing & running the automation should be less than the cost of doing the work manually over an equivalent timeframe. This is why for example there are a lot of bullshit office jobs that can be automated fairly easily but will not be because there's plenty of cheap labour to do it manually (for cheaper than what developing & maintaining the automation would cost) and it also earns them PR points about "creating" jobs.

irjustin 6y ago

Is it just me or does it feel like this timeframe was too short? Personally, I expect the largest disruptor of jobs to come from autonomous driving, but we're still 5-10+ years from seeing that hitting the ground. As far as today is concerned, I largely agree. ETFs BOTZ and ROBO have increased, but not in such a way that would suggest huge automation revolution.

mortenjorck 6y ago
The headline (and paper) are titled "No Recent Automation Revolution." We might very well be on the cusp of one, but prediction was not the goal of this paper.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
In the meantime, the disruptor for driving jobs has been the race to the bottom; services like Uber, Lyft, etc popping up, decimating the taxi industry by having their not-employees compete with each other for work, driving the prices down while they laugh all the way to the bank - they get their cut anyway. While those jobs haven't been automated away as such, they are being priced away.
- bobcostas55 6y ago
  >while they laugh all the way to the bank Uber has been consistently losing money every single year.

lettergram 6y ago

We are only a couple years away from automating most customer servicing. You’ll still need a few, but if we collect data on the few it’s possible to scale those answers to millions. That’ll put millions out of work and is basically text generation... easy to deploy, easy to maintain, and we probably already have the technology just not productionized. Now, those people will be retrained to do something. Maybe even just do more detailed customer service. So I’m not too concerned - just saying automation is coming

ntsplnkv2 6y ago
> That’ll put millions out of work and is basically text generation... easy to deploy, easy to maintain, and we probably already have the technology just not productionized. Yea, but does it...you know, work? Why didn't the internet already eliminate most customer service? The common inquiries can easily be found solutions to online. if I'm calling support it's almost always because the resources available don't solve my problem. And spending 20 minutes on the phone with an automated system asking about billing is very frustrating.
- nine_k 6y ago
  It just has become a filter for people with serious enough problems. If you can spend 10-15 minutes navigating voice menus, waiting, and listening to canned messages, likely you need operator's help badly enough. Anyone with a petty problem would have hung up already. And the canned messages also eliminate some of the calls which seek some obvious information. You know, it used to be somehow hard, but not impossible, to reach an oracle in ancient times. Now the same is done on mass scale.
  - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
    So basically offload the cost to the consumer. Add up the wasted 10-15 minutes and on the whole it likely costs society more.
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> We are only a couple years away from automating most customer servicing The paper rigorously questions such assertions of faith. It merits a thoughtful response. As Deming said, "in God we trust, all others must bring data."

mortenjorck 6y ago

The post implies that the authors' paper has received limited attention from the economic establishment due to its heterodox conclusion, but elides any supposition as to why its heterodoxy should be so controversial. Why should it be?

drewcoo 6y ago
Surely unrelated to the author's referring to (his quotes) "experts" and their (my quotes) "bullshit." My takeaway: invest in rock delivery. Everyone wants to live under one. And what with COVID-19, not enough people will be able to scavenge their own.
colinmhayes 6y ago
It's in a shit journal, so that's a start. I think part of it is that he's strawmaning here. The fear of automation isn't quite that it's immediate, it's more about the ability of machines to erode away economic opportunity of communities. People haven't been saying jobs are gone, just that eventually they will be soon(ish). Arguing that jobs aren't gone yet isn't helpful.
- ameister14 6y ago
  It's also incredibly difficult to read. I studied this and find it confusing - I can only imagine what a journalist would be able to take away from it.

trixie_ 6y ago

There's no technical or physical limit to why so many things can't be automated, which means everything that can, will be automated eventually.. Super popular games like Factorio and Satisfactory are glimpses of a potential near future.

rdtwo 6y ago
There is an economic limit. If the cost of the machine is more than the human then your competitors will use humans and you’ll loose a ton of money on every product you sell. Of course that doesn’t matter because there is no technical limit on the value of your stock so as long as you are the golden boy it doesn’t matter

naasking 6y ago

1999-2019 is not the interesting period of automation. I'm surprised the authors think it's even relevant. 2020-2040 will be the period to watch.

randallsquared 6y ago
Except the spirit of this statement was being expressed in 2000, as well, on mailing lists and usenet of the day.
- naasking 6y ago
  Sure, but I doubt they gave firm timelines. Future projections are always murky, but it seems pretty clear that the tech is in a much better spot and the incentives are now stronger than ever. Human workers get sick and can't work? Automate them away!
PeterisP 6y ago
1999-2019 has created massive technological capability for automation, which has been significantly underutilized mostly due to the rapid progress of globalization and offshoring of labor. 2020-2040 could have massive automation just with today's tech as soon as it's economically worthwhile - i.e. if you're not competing with workers who'll slave all day in dangerous conditions for peanuts. In 2000, we couldn't automate many jobs, in 2020 we choose not to automate them.

devonkim 6y ago

I’ve been having trouble reconcilling compelling evidence for and against automation based job loss / wage suppression, and usually the arguments against them look at super high level macroeconomic numbers (see: Pail Krugman’s analysis on productivity dropping for some recent years) while most people in support of the automation argument will go directly on the ground to places where auto manufacturers have had strong presence and also cite cohort analysis where laid off manufacturing workers take up gig jobs. The primary impetus for automation are labor cost related but not necessarily to take over humans intrinsically. The top reason I heard uttered in my amateur research was a common theme of the past 100+ years - unions make things more costly whether in terms of capital or general speed / agility of the business. Wages are suppressed through automation effects noticeably around factories that automate compared to nearby cities that don’t. The suppression is concurrently correlated to labor suppression / arbitrage though so it is hard to detangle the automation v. labor angle because the biggest job losses and wage suppression happened before modern automation - they happened during the late 80s to 90s as unionization started dropping faster. Diminishing returns on outright hard balling unions would lead to more investment in machinery to drive down hiring needs and avoid the need to hire while also putting the companies that do automate in a better operational cost position.

wiz21c 6y ago
>>> unions make things more costly whether in terms of capital or general speed / agility of the business not sure. The unions shift revenues from capital to society. The speed/cost of "things" is not relevant here.
raxxorrax 6y ago
We build quite the "contraception" for circuit board mounting anything not compatible with reflow soldering. It mostly works but the women that do it usually are just way faster and less error prone. We have quite the high wage standard and even then the device is mostly used to show off. Real automation is probably needed in bureaucratic workflows even if we usually think about manufacturing. There are probably advantages and disadvantages here as well. Since order situation is great at my current company (strangely the covid-quarter was particularly good), we have significantly expanded workforce in production. I doubt that unions really drove automation in my country though. Price plays a role but also technological feasibility.

tuatoru 6y ago

An independent line of evidence looks at the formation of new occupations over time. If automation were taking over jobs, or jobs were being refactored because some tasks are automated, then we'd expect to see new job titles appearing in employment advertising and classifications such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics's. This does happen, as it has happened since the start of the Industrial Revolution. "Social Media Manager" is a new job that has arisen in the last several years, for instance. But, and this is the point, this "job churn" been happening more slowly over the last 20 years than at any time since WW II. That is also incompatible with the claim that an automation revolution is under way.

phkahler 6y ago
Automation eliminates jobs. Sometimes lower costs in one area allow more activity in another, but that does not change the fact that the automation eliminates jobs and should not be expected.
virgilp 6y ago
> That is also incompatible with the claim that an automation revolution is under way. “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
nednar 6y ago
Also let's not forget that automation still means someone needs to write some code, which needs to be written, maintained, updated, synced with other projects etc. The act itself creates new jobs already. For instance: In IT we also have this. Dev is the typical product development team, Ops is the team that takes care of keeping the lights on. Now with all the automation we have a new job called Devops which is somewhat in the middle betwen both Dev and Ops. We thought both groups would move to the middle and form this new Devops group. But what most companies did is completely hire from zero for their Devops teams. Now what we see is that Devops is growing, while Dev and Ops are shrinking. But the sum of both shrinking groups is smaller than the sum of new Devops jobs.
- piva00 6y ago

gigel82 6y ago

I don't know enough about industrial automation to form an opinion, but RPA is definitely coming for the rank-and-file office drones. You'd be surprised how many "paper pushers" still fill the cubicles of this world (their job literally to copy stuff from this ERP to this CRM or to this legacy Access / Excel / BI system). This is the low hanging fruit of job automation and enterprises are quickly figuring out what kind of cost savings RPA can offer them. I have a feeling RPA will have a much higher adoption rate than the "digital transformation" trickle.

kristianp 6y ago
RPA?
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Robotic Process Automation, presumably.
- ilaksh 6y ago
  Robotic Process Automation.
pedrocr 6y ago
RPA is just systems integration for companies that have a broken software development process. That companies are having to resort to writing "robots" to fake pushing buttons in UIs should make you less confident in the advancement of automation not more.

yk 6y ago

> Last December, Keller Scholl and I posted a working paper suggesting that this whole narrative is bullshit, at least so far. Thing is, when you are calculating the color of the sky, then it is either a bluish looking spectra, or you are in trouble. And consequently physicists will look outside immediately after that calculation. The entire post needs an explanation of why they don't find any automation in that timeframe? I mean, just from administration we have things like package managers, containers, several cloud stuff, and so on. If they don't see that in their data, then my immediate assumption is, that they need a more reasonable approach.

SubiculumCode 6y ago
The article reads like sour grapes about an article that didn't get as much attention as the author believed it should, and yeah, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
visarga 6y ago
> I mean, just from administration we have things like package managers, containers, several cloud stuff, and so on. Automation replaces human work, business can do better now, then they want to produce more than before so they up hiring as well. It's much easier to set your target higher (production, profit) than to automate anything. As soon as you have automated something new work pops up, work that was probably not done before for lack of resources. Programming has been automating tasks for decades yet here we are, so many of us. Cloud should have automated many jobs, yet with this new found ease of deployment we chose to deploy more rather than hire less. As long as humans have needs and desire for betterment I don't think we can surpass our ever growing ambition with automation.

stewbrew 6y ago

So, an Amazon warehouse works like a grocery store from back then? What is the ratio #sold goods / #human worker for Amazon and for an old fashioned grocery store?

082349872349872 6y ago

Living in a country where people are expensive and machines are cheap, I can attest the automation level is higher here. For instance, I often see cows at farms here enjoying automated brushing systems. There are youtube videos in english, but I don't recall ever having seen something like that in the US, even at Harris Ranch. (I have yet to witness a farmer using fully-autonomous hay feeding robots, but the ag magazines have been running articles on them)

kaybe 6y ago
The rules (in Germany, but also other places) say you either have to offer the cows these brushes or brush them manually. It's not really a choice.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Wasn't the choice between offering the brushes or brushing them manually? Around here I see that farmers find installing a EUR 2'500 brush to be much cheaper than attempting to pay cheap foreign labour to brush cows. (TIL automated pig brushes also exist)
  - kaybe 6y ago
    Yes, I meant it's not a choice whether to brush at all. And if you have more than one or two cows the choice between the autobrush and manual seems clear, especially since the cows seem to love them and can use them whenever.

dpenguin 6y ago

It’s basically modified Parkinson’s law at play - work will expand to most available workforce. With increased automation, either new jobs are created(thereby increasing the overall output of the economy) OR expectation for individual productivity is reduced, decreasing individual stress. History is your proof. Automation has been constantly increasing forever and there’s no job loss en masse because of that. Empirically speaking there are almost always more jobs created. Not saying anything about quality of life.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
While the adage is true, you also have to consider the quality of work. There are a LOT of people in the US right now with a college degree who can't find any jobs related to their majors, so they end up as baristas or Amazon order pickers - their education, talents, passions being wasted, their future pretty much on hold because jobs like that don't pay enough money to pay off student debt or buy a house.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  In 1920 or 1950 if we'd had as many people with college degrees as we do today, we'd also have a LOT of people who can't find any jobs related to their majors. What you describe is not the quality of jobs decreasing, it's the increase in (unfulfilled, unreasonable) expectation of job quality just because you have a college degree. IMHO we have much more "good jobs" than in 1920 or 1950, it's just that the number of college graduates has grown faster than the number of good jobs. In 1920 or 1950 there weren't enough good jobs for everybody, and the good jobs mostly went to people with college degrees. But the problem was not actually in the lack of college degrees - if most people have college degrees, then all that means that college degree ceases to be the pathway to good jobs, and other filtering mechanisms inevitably need to appear (and have appeared) to select which people will get good jobs and which will be left behind despite having a college degree.
  - dpenguin 6y ago
    Potentially somewhat controversial take on this: why do college grads deserve a better job than, say, high school grads if the subject they studied in college is not particularly relevant to the society at this point(which the lack of jobs for that qualification is indicative of)? There was probably a point in time when learning hunting was like going to college and along comes farming to make all those hunters jobless. That’s how the wheel of “progress” rolls. The idea that going to college will make you more bucks or guarantees you a job in your field of study is very arcane at this point.

mdoms 6y ago

I don't think anyone believes that the automation revolution is happening right now, but that it's imminent and we should start preparing our societies to cope with it now. > Our paper has so far received zero media attention Because you're answering a question no one asked.

peisistratos 6y ago

There used to be local record shops and big ones downtown - music distribution has since become pretty automated. There used to be many bookstores around - book distribution has become fairly automated. Gamestop has been closing stores and has been hit by automated distribution in recent years. I used to buy Hagstrom map books filled with detailed current maps - they were sold in gas stations and bookstores and they even had some of their own stores. Their stores all shut down and their business shrank enormously as map navigation became automated. There used to be a lot of tour and travel agencies around. They still exist, but are much less prevalent and are scaled down. In fact, automation of commodity distribution has had a major effect on retail, and consequently commercial real estate. Insofar as office work - people who work in law tell me the large number of secretaries who shuffled through cabinets full of folders containing records have largely disappeared as record retrieval has been automated. I had data entry jobs many years ago, itself a type of automation - but the jobs I did have disappeared as data distribution has become automated. I don't know what they are measuring but I have seen the effects of a automation all around. Maybe with the closing of bookstores and record stores and video game stores, they mean the role of a retail clerk has not been much automated, which may be true. But I have seen automation have a large effect on many industries, and then rippling effects onto industries like real estate.

Gatsky 6y ago

This could be partly because America has quite low wages.

lihaciudaniel 6y ago

I wonder who still reads Overcoming Bias?

fizixer 6y ago

With all due respect, I thought Robin Hanson was better than this. I followed him briefly during the 2013-2015 automation hype (which hasm't died yet; far from it), and I found him to be carrying out reasonable analysis of tech economics. I found him to be one of the few economists who are in touch with tech reality, and so things weren't that bad in the econosphere in terms of keeping up with tech trends. This blog post doesn't help maintain that perspective at all. I'm sorry. As a tech person myself, I'm extremely busy with making this happen instead of being a negative nancy towards other tech folks, but I'll finish my though with this: I have a close friend who is a typical naysayer of tech progress, "business as usual", "old jobs replaced with new jobs", "capital is what makes thing work", "economics good technology meh" He will not stop for a minute, and will not entertain a single of my counter-arguments. What is super-surprising to me though is that in the last 5-7 years, he has pivoted from a non-tech job to complete-alignment with one of the big-tech companies, has been investing heavily in all kinds of big tech stocks, and watching his stocks with a keen eye day-in and day-out. And everytime we talk, the first thing he discusses is my opinion and forecast of where technology is headed. Once having absorbed all that information, he goes back to his same old rotten cassette tape. Funny how it works.

TaylorAlexander 6y ago

As a robotics engineer I too once bought in to the notion that automation would lead to a massive jobs crash. But the more experience I get the more I see how big the problem space is. There's a million simple tasks we cannot do with robotics, and even when we can do them the machine costs $100k. Instead I am beginning to understand that humans and machines will work together for a long time. I still think we can use automation to do radical things. I want to see us automate food production and meal preparation, to lower the cost of healthy food. By intentionally lowering the cost of human survival with automation, and with changes to intellectual property restrictions which keep costs high, we could create a world where food is so cheap we give it away to those in need. With changes to our cultural norms and broad application of this theory, it is literally possible to eliminate material poverty. Think about it - in a world where there are only private book collections, some people are book-rich and some people are book-poor. But that kind of poverty is effectively eliminated if you introduce the concept of libraries to that world. If we share the automation we create the same way we share books at a library, we can create societies where everyone is provided for at no direct material expense to others. Years ago I wrote an essay [1] where I used the concept of impending job loss from automation to emphasize the importance of this better way of living I proposed above. But I've realized that we don't need to see automation as an impending crisis - millions of people are already in crisis because they cannot afford the food, medicine, or housing they need. So the need for change is still there, but the cause is not some future problem, but the problems of the status quo. [1] http://tlalexander.com/wealth/ http://tlalexander.com/wealth/

dgudkov 6y ago

Automation happens not where many expect it (including the media). It is frequently expected that automation will come as replacement for humans, while it actually is coming in the form of better tooling and assistance to humans. This theoretically should be reflected in work productivity, not in employment numbers.

buboard 6y ago
when people talk of automation they mean replacement, not just better tools, for that has been happening since the beginning of time
- Retric 6y ago
  When 9 people can do the work of 10, the 10th person often finds themselves out of a job. It’s little different if your job type completely disappears or if the economy only needs half as many people doing your job, either way many people need a new type of job.
  - pydry 6y ago
    That's what the media has been screaming all these years. The reality is often that the 10th person has their role change, they retire off or (as in the case of the engraving industry), people end up buying more at a cheaper price.
    - Retric 6y ago
      Someone having their role change sounds fine, but it often means a skill and thus a longer term salary reset. Individually people may be better or worse off, but generally if you have 20+ years of experience doing something starting over is a major setback. Granted for very slow transitions it’s not as big of a deal.
      - pydry 6y ago
        The one situation where I remember this happening specifically (when the BBC made footage archiving digital), they planned the automation rollout to coincide with retiring off the old analog librarians. Then they hired them back out of retirement because the project went badly wrong. The latter part went awry (although I think they didn't mind too much) but the timing kind of worked out. In a more vicious corporation they probably wouldn't have been so bothered about the timing of the rollout.

lmm 6y ago

> Two metrics created by groups trying to predict which jobs will get automated soon did predict past automaton, but not after we included 25 mundane job features like Pace Determined By Speed Of Equipment and Importance of Repeating Same Tasks This sounds like a thoroughly fallacious argument? Automation is progressing not by automating jobs in the exact form that they were previously done, but by more automatable (and therefore more automated) forms of job displacing less automatable forms of those jobs. Isn't that exactly what we'd expect?

josephjrobison 6y ago

There will always be competition, innovation, and new markets. New needs will arise in consumers, driving new product and service needs. We may automate more low-level legal tasks, but more money will be spent on massages, or therapy, or art. It's unlikely there will be mass automation any time soon.

pg-gadfly 6y ago
In fact automation often goes top-down, reeucing complexity of difficult jobs and allowing lower-skilled workers to deal with the rest that isn't yet profitable to change.

lnsru 6y ago

I have very interesting process when taking vacation. Automation does not mean robots from movie “I Robot”, some software can do the job too. To take time off I must open shitty software, enter my vacation days, then print the sheet and sign it. My manager signs it too. Then I bring it to secretary, she signs too, confirms the date in shitty software. Secretary sends paper form to the HR lady, she checks, if it’s ok and forwards my sheet to accounting lady. I see here a huge potential for automation, throwing at least 1st secretary and HR lady out of the process. This ancient process is happening in Germany, but automation will come sooner or later even here. Edit: typos

pg-gadfly 6y ago
All things automation. Really a chainsaw is automation, and so is a compressor. Automation is a pen. They all remove work and increase efficiency. There are lots of examples which don't really count though, such as self-checkout, which have exactly the same amount of work left, only who works it is a different person.
- ovi256 6y ago
  A chainsaw, compressor or pen are examples of mechanisation, not automation. They replace part of the human effort needed for a job, making the remaining human effort even more valuable. Automation fully replaces human work for a given job. It's a difference in kind. However, automation may replace only some jobs in a value chain, making the remaining ones even more productive and valuable. A fully automated value chain is a difference in kind again.
  - pg-gadfly 6y ago
    The word "auto"(oneself), often used with meaning to do by itself. Automation is a very broad term, which mechanization is a part, but not a requirement of. Anything that moves work from human to other forces is automation, having a thing do things by itself. An automobile is the automating of our movement.
  - eindiran 6y ago

paulsutter 6y ago

Has anyone found the raw data behind this paper? If they want this more widely coveted they should publish the datasets and code in github

joelthelion 6y ago

I think it's far too early to conclude. The ongoing "web 2.0" revolution is finally reaping the benefits of computers and networks, more than 50 years after they were invented. Paper processes are finally on the verge of being eliminated. Remote work is finally possible for many people. Deep learning will have a transformative impact too, but these things take time. Let's talk again 10 years from now.

credit_guy 6y ago

Automation has been progressing for at least three hundred years now, from the era of the Jacquard loom and the cotton gin. I was born in a country where when I was little there still were telephone operators. Those thousands of jobs disappeared long ago, around the time when rotary phones disappeared. Nothing to do with AI.

partingshots 6y ago

I imagine automation will result in the creation of entirely new industries and jobs like with self-driving cars for example. Though, on second thought I guess self-driving does end up taking away a lot of taxi driver / trucking jobs. Nevermind...

PeterisP 6y ago
It's also worth noting that if we get a major switch to self-driving cars, that won't create a new industry but rather diminish one - a big hypothetical benefit of a self-driving-car world is that much less cars would be needed; as most current cars are idle most of the time and even in peak driving hours, so a societal switch to "self driving cars on demand" services would mean that we would need much less cars than today. Which is great for the planet, but not so great for jobs in car manufacturing industry, at least in the long run.

cynusx 6y ago

The frequent problem with these types of reports is that they only focus on one part of the geography (USA). That said, I recall reading a report that mostly middle class administrative and coordination roles are eliminated due to digitalization and dedicated software. Leading to negative wage pressure on the middle class. These are repetitive human jobs like looking at a bunch of papers and creating a report. Manual work is getting more productive and often shifted abroad but on a global scale is actually expanding in line with global gdp growth. https://reports.weforum.org/future-of-jobs-2016/employment-trends/ https://reports.weforum.org/future-of-jobs-2016/employment-t... Interesting in this report is that geopolitical instability is more destructive to jobs than artificial intelligence for now.

wayoutthere 6y ago
Very much so; the current wave of automation is taking semi-skilled middle-class jobs and replacing them with low-skilled minimum wage jobs that can be filled with gig workers. High-skill jobs are still there, but the middle is rapidly being hollowed out. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the middle class is shrinking as a result.
- jtbayly 6y ago
  That’s an interesting take on Uber that I don’t think I’ve seen before. I know Uber’s end-goal is automation such that taxi drivers aren’t necessary. What I didn’t realize is that it is route planning automation that allowed them to move from dedicated drivers to gig drivers.
  - wayoutthere 6y ago
    Yeah, I recall an article about London taxi drivers having to memorize the labyrinth of streets in and around central London to get a taxi license. They were paid very well and the jobs were stable as a result — until Uber / Waze came along. Then the market was flooded by recent immigrants working for much less who were able to navigate unfamiliar streets with GPS and the job became way less stable.

monkeydust 6y ago

Tasks makes up Jobs. Certain tasks that form a particular job are being automated more now than ever before. This is more true of knowledge workers where they are operating and working in a digital environment already (e.g. traders, accountants, lawyers, marketing, admin...) This is less true of manual labour - like cleaners and gardeners - why? Well look at robotics, its good but nowhere good enough to replace these dexterity required which a human can provide. For knowledge workers it is very hard to automate all the tasks that make up a job. Hence why automation has not resulted in mass unemployment (excluding all other factors).

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Yet automation equipment has boomed in the last 20 years. Factory floors are largely devoid of human beings. The US factory employment figures are down by more than half in that time, and that with a population that's doubled (so per-capita, factory occupations down to 25% or less or what it was). Companies move to India or China, then some move back but with none of the assembly jobs, because they don't move back until the investment in automation is paid back efficiently. Its easy to confuse 'automation across the job fields' with 'automation replacing people'. The first is slow - automation proceeds in rote assembly tasks and continuous-flow processes. But automation hasn't proceeded across the spectrum. I still get my fries from a human being. I still get my hair cut by Anton at a local shop. My car is fixed by Mr. Harapat (though it got assembled by a giant robot). My nieces and nephews are automation Engineers. They are as busy as they can possibly be, changing plants over to automation. It's cost effective when a plant grows past a certain size/capacity. And with the rising tide of population, plants that served us 20 years ago are woefully boutique now, being rebuilt, and being rebuilt automated.

areyousure 6y ago
> in the last 20 years > in that time > a population that's doubled Are you sure the US population has doubled in 20 years?
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Right took longer than 20 years. How the time flies! Used to be 1990, I swear. More like 50 or 60 years ago. But in contrast, US manufacturing jobs have disappears much faster than that - by 1/3 in the 2000's alone. So the conclusion (few jobs remain, per-capita) is still a good one.
tuatoru 6y ago
> automation hasn't proceeded across the spectrum. Exactly. Its impact has been limited to areas where there is repetitive work on standardised, clean objects[1], in standardised environments, in product lines where volumes are sufficient to justify the investment in machinery. > Yet automation equipment has boomed in the last 20 years. Yes it has. The size of the needed investment has gone down a lot in activities where automation is feasible. But manufacturing has been a minor part of the US economy for more than 30 years, and its share is getting smaller. "Services" is over 80 percent. Advertising, making movies, sports, construction... zillions of different things. [1] If any manufacturing work should be automated, it's meat packing. Unpleasant, boring work that gives you carpal tunnel syndrome and other joint and tendon injuries. Plants are always short of workers and absenteeism is rife because of the nature of the job. But automation is impossible, because animals are not standardised enough. Putting that another way: because machine vision is still so ludicrously bad. And so is the state of robotics.

TimJRobinson 6y ago

How does this square with the type of automation Amazon is doing? The type that people rarely think is automation. Retail jobs are being decimated across the USA not because robots are directly replacing them, but because as more people shop online these companies collapse and Amazon is able to perform the same service without the staff. Maybe warehouse worker, delivery jobs and coders are increasing at the same place? That doesn't pass the sniff test to me as they seem to have much higher efficiency than your average salesperson at a retail store.

jkinudsjknds 6y ago

Automation is really just a drop in the bucket compared to better processes. The difference between new tech companies and legacy businesses is that the actual processes in the tech companies are better designed to begin with and require much less human labor. It's pretty tough to automate legacy business processes. The best you get is gross macros in a fancy package. There's a semantic difference between the kind of automation you think of when imagining robots vs. email, but email is way more powerful. We absolutely do not need new AI to achieve automation gains on the lowest hanging fruit. We really just need new entrants to competitive spaces. Even for physical labor tasks that do require actual robots, its changing the task to adapt to available tech, not updating the tech to master this old task.

ericol 6y ago

I have sort of a first hand account of what the current problem with (At least one area of automation) is. Up until the quarantine I was working in a cowork space; and it happens that - I'm the sole employee of the company I work for in my country - all the desks around me were occupied by a company that makes a lot of their income providing automation to other parties. I even worked for them for a few months as an "on demand" consultant; the idea would be that I would provide assistance to their devs when they needed help with the "programs" they were developing, and that fastly turned into a process review that eventually cooled off because they weren't - the project manager, at least - very keen on taking my advice. What I observed was that - bear in mind this is a 3rd world country - the salaries were rather low, so obviously they couldn't get experienced people. This lead to they having to train them, but as they had no experience, the way in which they approached solving the issues where, a lot of times, "complicated". Usually they suffered from the apps being interfaced having changes along the project (Or after). This meant they had to fix a lot of problems that were not there in the beginning. AS the devs had only experience with this tool, and was their first experience coding, they couldn't make the most of the other tools at hand. This mostly lends to processes that take hours to complete, being the execution time only marginally better than a person. This coupled with the issue right above this, many of the projects had a time excess of around 100% (Effectively taking double the time that was allotted in the beginning). Last I heard from them, thought, is that they made a lot of improvements here. In one particular project I practically had to threat the person responsible to use javascript to fetch data from the browser instead of the "native" way of doung that (Basically, querying the page through the tool with xpath expression). When they did change to javascript, the process execution time was reduced by >90% All in all, the problem I see with automation is that the people doing that is not formally trained in coding, and the tools I looked at have rather weak integrations with the most used apps today (Namelly, browsers). I think the idea for many of these tools is to allow people to automate themselves, but that will lead in my opinion into the "phpization" of the automation area. All in all, there are a few caveats: I know from them of at least one company that had a rather strong and professional dept., and they where _very_ good at it. I think that eventually automation is going to take the world by storm in the next 5- 10 years. And those that adopt early will have a clear advantage over those that not. For the record, the tool they use is Blue Prism; according to the CEO of this company BP has some sort of marked edge over UIPath when it comes to enterprise settings. I know there are other tools in the market, but I don't know them except by name.

gpsx 6y ago

Labor force participation in the US has dropped heavily in since 2008 and even since it peaked around 2000. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART This in spite of the reported very low unemployment rate, which is not really the meaningful measure. The labor force participation was lower a long time ago, but I think that is when there were more single income families. I am not sure how much this drop in employment is from just bad economics or how much could be attributed to automation.

jl2718 6y ago

Wages and employment remain constant because companies are still more like social constructs that provide minimal support in exchange for membership in a social hierarchy. They’ll always find something for you to do. Learn to code” is popularizing the conversion of everybody into software engineers, but actually we don’t need most SWE either, so now we have an entirely new class of useless jobs on a SWE assembly line where 99% of the work product is simply discarded, but we still use the old industrial productivity model to drive productivity by aggressive management.

sparcraft 6y ago

I actually disagree with this article. Based on my experience in the insurance industry, it is slowly but surely coming. It will appear not as a sudden drop, but as a gradual need for fewer and fewer roles as technology initially allows humans to do more with their time, and eventually replacing some of them. It is going to be a small effect on any one company. But a large effect over all, which will manifest over a long period.