8 ms·

These sorts of articles and the subsequent threads always end up nitpicking which job will get automated and which jobs are safe without considering that the mo

These sorts of articles and the subsequent threads always end up nitpicking which job will get automated and which jobs are safe without considering that the more we automate away jobs, the less society will be able to pay for the goods and services that aren't automated. Maybe tradespeople are safe this decade, maybe not... but one thing is for sure, there will be a smaller subset of people able to pay for renovations by 2030 because their jobs will have been automated.

gcatalfamo 6y ago
Assuming your job/role is unmodifiable is a more serious problem that is only slightly aggravated by it being automated. Some jobs are more easily automated than others, sure, but the problem is that some people don't realise the market might render your current job useless much before automation comes, so you should be ready to adapt always, and in any case. We like to talk about pivoting business models on this website, but when it applies to what a person considers "sacred" everything falls apart. (not just here, as the automation discourse is happening globally) edit: typo sacred
- hobs 6y ago
  probably sacred
  - gcatalfamo 6y ago
    yes, thanks!
- frockington1 6y ago
  Globally it may have hit harder. Most of the simple tasks that were offshored in the early 00's are the first to come back onshore and be automated away
- i_haz_rabies 6y ago
  I am fully aware that my job as a CRUD API developer has an expiration date and I have no idea what to do about it. At this point, I don't think the onus is on the workers... automation is too widespread and fast to plan.
  - eecks 6y ago
    Do you just spend all day making CRUD API endpoints? Surely there is business (e.g. domain) knowledge in there.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dragontamer 6y ago
Ultimately, automation is good because it means more goods and/or services to more people. More goods and services means that society as a whole can support more people. A lot of American life is tied down to your job however. That seems to be the problem: health care is tied to your job, retirement benefits are often tied to your job (401k or pension), etc. etc. One can argue that its the overemphasis of your job that's the problem... not the grossly improved productivity due to inventions.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Indeed. Provide robust safety nets and universal healthcare and we can proceed with Automating All The Things with wild abandon. Until then, based on the automation you’re building and deploying into the marketplace, you’re relegating subsets of workers to possible long term or permanent unemployment, despair, and possibly death (people die without health insurance, which many can’t get without an employer or holding on until they’re eligible for Medicare at 65, in the US). At some point, we have to move past the concept of jobs as the measure.
  - chii 6y ago
    > Provide robust safety nets and universal healthcare and the question becomes "who" does the providing? In the US, the going mentality is 'user pays' (which leads to insurance, which leads to insurance company dealing with healthcare provider, which leads to employers providing good insurance as a side benefit to compensation). The US populous can't easily change their mentality to "society pays". Therefore, this is where the issue should be tackled.
  - tuatoru 6y ago
    If housing, healthcare, education, clothing, and food were free, and I still had income, I could spend it on fitness trainers, life coaches, interior designers, personal shoppers, performance artists, geanealogists, ... There are a lot of potential mass-market service industries that don't exist because all the benefits of productivity growth (and slightly more than all, now) go to the top 0.1%. There are still plenty of potential jobs - jobs that we will never have because of inequality. And we should keep the eusocial aspects of jobs in mind. They provide life structure, self respect, and respectability in the eyes of others as well as a means of subsistence. Edit: I would love to live in a world where tens of thousands of people have "street party organizer" as their job.
ardy42 6y ago
> without considering that the more we automate away jobs, the less society will be able to pay for the goods and services that aren't automated. That may not matter to those making these automation decisions. Ultimately, ownership is about power and control, not about actually satisfying the needs of the masses. As long as the owners at the top maintain their power and have their personal wants met, they may find the situation acceptable where the market ignores an expanding pool of penniless masses and focuses on a shrinking pool of other elites who still have money (see North Korea for a similar stable result from a different economic system).
- i_haz_rabies 6y ago
  I agree with you and fully expect this to happen.
- ajsnigrutin 6y ago
  For this to work, you need a huge, well paid and loyal army. America has a huge army, but their people have more guns, and pretty much everyone else has less army. By some theories, when a day comes, that fathers are unable too feed their children, the revolution starts, and those usually don't end very well for the elites.
- realce 6y ago
  I look at the videogame market and see the future of ownership: you don't get to have any. What happens when most of what we use isn't made by humans or ever really owned by any consumer?
  - Viliam1234 6y ago
    > I look at the videogame market and see the future of ownership: you don't get to have any. Everything you have will be only a service... and sometimes people will get locked out of their accounts. Sometimes it will mean losing your videogames, sometimes losing your e-mails (and contacts) and documents saved in cloud... and sometimes losing your home and money. That will be fun.
marcosdumay 6y ago
It's way more complicated than that. Societies get richer by automating things. How much money people have to pay for things is completely dependent on how much they produce, and as a consequence, how automated is their work. The more automation, the more of everything going around. But automation has a strong short term effect on wealth distribution. How health your economy will be by 2030 depends completely on how your society deals with this effect. And "stop automating" is not a viable course.
- i_haz_rabies 6y ago
  It's not true that productivity is correlated with purchasing power. This hasn't been true since the 70s. This is true for an economy in general, but not for individuals.
  - humanrebar 6y ago
    It's more complicated than that. How much were pocket supercomputers back then? Or cordless phones? Or chicken pox vaccinations? Or cars designed to protect childrens' lives and health? What did almond milk cost in Duluth? How much were encyclopedias? Some things are absolutely more expensive, but we definitely have improvements since then, and automation (like modern logistics) contribute to almost all of them. To put it another way, I would rather have the median income today while doing day-to-day activities now than any past decade. And to the extent that there are downsides in those decisions, I think it's odd to say automation is to blame versus other forces like anemic growth in housing supply.
jfengel 6y ago
Not necessarily. Every dollar saved on automation is a dollar still in the pocket of the automation owner. The money supply doesn't go down. The type of demand shifts, but it doesn't vanish. Oh, sure, you've got the risk of an unemployable underclass full of dystopian ennui. But before the guillotines come out, the .01%ers will have lots of cash for buying art, personalized AAA video games, solid gold plumbing fixtures, and the like. There's good reason to think that we need to reconsider the value of human life in an automated era, when there is plenty of stuff to keep people alive if only we could distribute it just a little bit. We've actually been doing that for well over a century, and there's good reason to think that we've avoided the torches and pitchforks so far only because of that. The aggregate demand of "society" needn't go down without it. It just might behoove us to consider that the median might be more important than the sum.
- i_haz_rabies 6y ago
  The money supply doesn't go down, but the distribution of that wealth matters a lot. The 0.01%ers don't spend the same way everyone else does. They hoard. The more they get, the more they will hoard and for the rest of society, that means there will be less to go around.
  - hhjj 6y ago
    If the money is never spent, it is worth 0 and doesn't effect the rest of economy. If Mr Bezos begins to buy every yellow plastic duck at $100, you surely will see their price spiking, until then nothing happens. Same goes with whole economy. Another way to see it: if Jeff is only allowed to spend $100K/$1M/$10M a day, how his total worth is effecting the whole economy ?
    - throwaway2245 6y ago
      But it's not the this level of wealth is never spent - it is being ("invested") used in hoarding valuable resources, that others cannot then use.
      - 6y ago
credit_guy 6y ago
Automation has been going on for 300 years. Jobs have disappeared, but other jobs appeared. People can be replaced with automation, or with other cheaper people. What difference does it make if you lose your job because your output can be done now more efficiently by a script, or by someone in Mumbai, or by a kid fresh out of school? I personally came to terms with the idea that at some point in my career I will be subject to a round of layoffs. I am not looking forward for that moment, but if/when that happens, I'm sure I'll feel so happy when I'll deposit my first paycheck from my new job. It's like being young again. What's not to like ;) ?
- trilinearnz 6y ago
  Agreed. A ready example is the jobs created by those who would produce, maintain and improve upon such automated solutions. Ubiquitous automation would imply robotics, permitting demand for classes of non-knowledge worker labour, who are typically viewed as the victim of this kind of shift in society.
- chii 6y ago
  The only problem tho, is if the person becoming obsolete cannot retrain to something else. I personally don't believe this to be true - humans are insanely adaptable. Learning new skills is part of it. If an AI is able to automate and produce everything humans need, there would still be jobs that need a human. For example, prostitution. Or premium service jobs like butlers, etc.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
flubert 6y ago
I wonder how communities like the Amish fit into the larger scheme of things. It seems like they've decided to ignore anything later than the 1700's technology. Are there other groups with different technology cut-off dates? If not, any theories as to why not? Do you need a religious component to keep you cohesive over the generations? I think I might be OK with regressing to a 1980's level of technology. I wonder how large of a group of people would you need to be mostly self-sufficient at various technology levels. It seems like you might need a lot of people, if you wanted to have even very old-school integrated circuits. Probably quite a bit fewer if you only had discrete transistors. It seems like sustaining at a previous level should be easier than inventing it in the first place, since the knowledge is already available. And you could siphon off a bit from the more advanced society (e.g. you can potentially use scrap materials left over from the advanced society, instead of maintaining your own mining technology, etc.). And you could still have some (lopsided) trade between the societies (anyone want a bespoke Walkman produced by a skilled 1980's artisan?). Any thoughts on the estimates below? - 1700's, 100's of people in your community (crude metalworking) - 1800's, 1000's of people in your community (machines needing more metalworking and machining skills) - 1900-1940, 100,000 people (radio) - 1940-1980, 1,000,000 people (TV, automobiles) - 1980-2000, 10,000,000 people (personal computer, mass air travel)
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  I sued to go shopping at an Amish market and it seemed that they were just very deliberate in their use of technology. They used trucks to get their stuff to the market, they had cell phones, they had freezers. I think their society is just very focused and rejects distraction. But it’s not all golden. There were a lot of stories of spousal and child abuse but they stay hidden.
  - handol 6y ago
    Who did you sue?
    - spaetzleesser 6y ago
      “Used”
visarga 6y ago
> there will be a smaller subset of people able to pay for renovations by 2030 because their jobs will have been automated That's assuming new jobs are not going to replace the old ones. Human society has a tendency to use up all the available capacity by scaling up its goals. Do you think we'll stop inflating our expectations? Even if our expectations don't drive up demand for new jobs, the government can. The transition to full automation, not to mention the global warming crisis, are hard work and require lots of jobs. The premise of the article supports this idea - the decline in jobs happens mostly in companies that avoid automation because they lose out on quality, price or are less innovative. In the extreme case that companies automate almost all jobs, then we're left with billions of people with no ability to earn an income. But they have lots of free time and unfulfilled needs. So they will use that sweet automation to solve most of their needs by working for themselves and being less reliant on external help. There's always work to do when there are people, especially when they are forced to be self reliant. Of course I don't wish self reliance to look like North Korea, hopefully we can do this in a humane way.

gcatalfamo 6y ago

Assuming your job/role is unmodifiable is a more serious problem that is only slightly aggravated by it being automated. Some jobs are more easily automated than others, sure, but the problem is that some people don't realise the market might render your current job useless much before automation comes, so you should be ready to adapt always, and in any case. We like to talk about pivoting business models on this website, but when it applies to what a person considers "sacred" everything falls apart. (not just here, as the automation discourse is happening globally) edit: typo sacred

hobs 6y ago
probably sacred
- gcatalfamo 6y ago
  yes, thanks!
frockington1 6y ago
Globally it may have hit harder. Most of the simple tasks that were offshored in the early 00's are the first to come back onshore and be automated away
i_haz_rabies 6y ago
I am fully aware that my job as a CRUD API developer has an expiration date and I have no idea what to do about it. At this point, I don't think the onus is on the workers... automation is too widespread and fast to plan.
- eecks 6y ago
  Do you just spend all day making CRUD API endpoints? Surely there is business (e.g. domain) knowledge in there.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dragontamer 6y ago

Ultimately, automation is good because it means more goods and/or services to more people. More goods and services means that society as a whole can support more people. A lot of American life is tied down to your job however. That seems to be the problem: health care is tied to your job, retirement benefits are often tied to your job (401k or pension), etc. etc. One can argue that its the overemphasis of your job that's the problem... not the grossly improved productivity due to inventions.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Indeed. Provide robust safety nets and universal healthcare and we can proceed with Automating All The Things with wild abandon. Until then, based on the automation you’re building and deploying into the marketplace, you’re relegating subsets of workers to possible long term or permanent unemployment, despair, and possibly death (people die without health insurance, which many can’t get without an employer or holding on until they’re eligible for Medicare at 65, in the US). At some point, we have to move past the concept of jobs as the measure.
- chii 6y ago
  > Provide robust safety nets and universal healthcare and the question becomes "who" does the providing? In the US, the going mentality is 'user pays' (which leads to insurance, which leads to insurance company dealing with healthcare provider, which leads to employers providing good insurance as a side benefit to compensation). The US populous can't easily change their mentality to "society pays". Therefore, this is where the issue should be tackled.
- tuatoru 6y ago
  If housing, healthcare, education, clothing, and food were free, and I still had income, I could spend it on fitness trainers, life coaches, interior designers, personal shoppers, performance artists, geanealogists, ... There are a lot of potential mass-market service industries that don't exist because all the benefits of productivity growth (and slightly more than all, now) go to the top 0.1%. There are still plenty of potential jobs - jobs that we will never have because of inequality. And we should keep the eusocial aspects of jobs in mind. They provide life structure, self respect, and respectability in the eyes of others as well as a means of subsistence. Edit: I would love to live in a world where tens of thousands of people have "street party organizer" as their job.

ardy42 6y ago

> without considering that the more we automate away jobs, the less society will be able to pay for the goods and services that aren't automated. That may not matter to those making these automation decisions. Ultimately, ownership is about power and control, not about actually satisfying the needs of the masses. As long as the owners at the top maintain their power and have their personal wants met, they may find the situation acceptable where the market ignores an expanding pool of penniless masses and focuses on a shrinking pool of other elites who still have money (see North Korea for a similar stable result from a different economic system).

i_haz_rabies 6y ago
I agree with you and fully expect this to happen.
ajsnigrutin 6y ago
For this to work, you need a huge, well paid and loyal army. America has a huge army, but their people have more guns, and pretty much everyone else has less army. By some theories, when a day comes, that fathers are unable too feed their children, the revolution starts, and those usually don't end very well for the elites.
realce 6y ago
I look at the videogame market and see the future of ownership: you don't get to have any. What happens when most of what we use isn't made by humans or ever really owned by any consumer?
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  > I look at the videogame market and see the future of ownership: you don't get to have any. Everything you have will be only a service... and sometimes people will get locked out of their accounts. Sometimes it will mean losing your videogames, sometimes losing your e-mails (and contacts) and documents saved in cloud... and sometimes losing your home and money. That will be fun.

marcosdumay 6y ago

It's way more complicated than that. Societies get richer by automating things. How much money people have to pay for things is completely dependent on how much they produce, and as a consequence, how automated is their work. The more automation, the more of everything going around. But automation has a strong short term effect on wealth distribution. How health your economy will be by 2030 depends completely on how your society deals with this effect. And "stop automating" is not a viable course.

i_haz_rabies 6y ago
It's not true that productivity is correlated with purchasing power. This hasn't been true since the 70s. This is true for an economy in general, but not for individuals.
- humanrebar 6y ago
  It's more complicated than that. How much were pocket supercomputers back then? Or cordless phones? Or chicken pox vaccinations? Or cars designed to protect childrens' lives and health? What did almond milk cost in Duluth? How much were encyclopedias? Some things are absolutely more expensive, but we definitely have improvements since then, and automation (like modern logistics) contribute to almost all of them. To put it another way, I would rather have the median income today while doing day-to-day activities now than any past decade. And to the extent that there are downsides in those decisions, I think it's odd to say automation is to blame versus other forces like anemic growth in housing supply.

jfengel 6y ago

Not necessarily. Every dollar saved on automation is a dollar still in the pocket of the automation owner. The money supply doesn't go down. The type of demand shifts, but it doesn't vanish. Oh, sure, you've got the risk of an unemployable underclass full of dystopian ennui. But before the guillotines come out, the .01%ers will have lots of cash for buying art, personalized AAA video games, solid gold plumbing fixtures, and the like. There's good reason to think that we need to reconsider the value of human life in an automated era, when there is plenty of stuff to keep people alive if only we could distribute it just a little bit. We've actually been doing that for well over a century, and there's good reason to think that we've avoided the torches and pitchforks so far only because of that. The aggregate demand of "society" needn't go down without it. It just might behoove us to consider that the median might be more important than the sum.

i_haz_rabies 6y ago
The money supply doesn't go down, but the distribution of that wealth matters a lot. The 0.01%ers don't spend the same way everyone else does. They hoard. The more they get, the more they will hoard and for the rest of society, that means there will be less to go around.
- hhjj 6y ago
  If the money is never spent, it is worth 0 and doesn't effect the rest of economy. If Mr Bezos begins to buy every yellow plastic duck at $100, you surely will see their price spiking, until then nothing happens. Same goes with whole economy. Another way to see it: if Jeff is only allowed to spend $100K/$1M/$10M a day, how his total worth is effecting the whole economy ?
  - throwaway2245 6y ago
    But it's not the this level of wealth is never spent - it is being ("invested") used in hoarding valuable resources, that others cannot then use.
    - 6y ago

credit_guy 6y ago

Automation has been going on for 300 years. Jobs have disappeared, but other jobs appeared. People can be replaced with automation, or with other cheaper people. What difference does it make if you lose your job because your output can be done now more efficiently by a script, or by someone in Mumbai, or by a kid fresh out of school? I personally came to terms with the idea that at some point in my career I will be subject to a round of layoffs. I am not looking forward for that moment, but if/when that happens, I'm sure I'll feel so happy when I'll deposit my first paycheck from my new job. It's like being young again. What's not to like ;) ?

trilinearnz 6y ago
Agreed. A ready example is the jobs created by those who would produce, maintain and improve upon such automated solutions. Ubiquitous automation would imply robotics, permitting demand for classes of non-knowledge worker labour, who are typically viewed as the victim of this kind of shift in society.
chii 6y ago
The only problem tho, is if the person becoming obsolete cannot retrain to something else. I personally don't believe this to be true - humans are insanely adaptable. Learning new skills is part of it. If an AI is able to automate and produce everything humans need, there would still be jobs that need a human. For example, prostitution. Or premium service jobs like butlers, etc.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

flubert 6y ago

I wonder how communities like the Amish fit into the larger scheme of things. It seems like they've decided to ignore anything later than the 1700's technology. Are there other groups with different technology cut-off dates? If not, any theories as to why not? Do you need a religious component to keep you cohesive over the generations? I think I might be OK with regressing to a 1980's level of technology. I wonder how large of a group of people would you need to be mostly self-sufficient at various technology levels. It seems like you might need a lot of people, if you wanted to have even very old-school integrated circuits. Probably quite a bit fewer if you only had discrete transistors. It seems like sustaining at a previous level should be easier than inventing it in the first place, since the knowledge is already available. And you could siphon off a bit from the more advanced society (e.g. you can potentially use scrap materials left over from the advanced society, instead of maintaining your own mining technology, etc.). And you could still have some (lopsided) trade between the societies (anyone want a bespoke Walkman produced by a skilled 1980's artisan?). Any thoughts on the estimates below? - 1700's, 100's of people in your community (crude metalworking) - 1800's, 1000's of people in your community (machines needing more metalworking and machining skills) - 1900-1940, 100,000 people (radio) - 1940-1980, 1,000,000 people (TV, automobiles) - 1980-2000, 10,000,000 people (personal computer, mass air travel)

spaetzleesser 6y ago
I sued to go shopping at an Amish market and it seemed that they were just very deliberate in their use of technology. They used trucks to get their stuff to the market, they had cell phones, they had freezers. I think their society is just very focused and rejects distraction. But it’s not all golden. There were a lot of stories of spousal and child abuse but they stay hidden.
- handol 6y ago
  Who did you sue?
  - spaetzleesser 6y ago
    “Used”

visarga 6y ago

> there will be a smaller subset of people able to pay for renovations by 2030 because their jobs will have been automated That's assuming new jobs are not going to replace the old ones. Human society has a tendency to use up all the available capacity by scaling up its goals. Do you think we'll stop inflating our expectations? Even if our expectations don't drive up demand for new jobs, the government can. The transition to full automation, not to mention the global warming crisis, are hard work and require lots of jobs. The premise of the article supports this idea - the decline in jobs happens mostly in companies that avoid automation because they lose out on quality, price or are less innovative. In the extreme case that companies automate almost all jobs, then we're left with billions of people with no ability to earn an income. But they have lots of free time and unfulfilled needs. So they will use that sweet automation to solve most of their needs by working for themselves and being less reliant on external help. There's always work to do when there are people, especially when they are forced to be self reliant. Of course I don't wish self reliance to look like North Korea, hopefully we can do this in a humane way.