25 ms·

Machines Already Took Our Jobs

61 points by tmfi 6y ago

rakkhi 6y ago
A friend and I debate this topic all the time Is this time really different? Pro: 1) Automation and Ai is replacing white collar work this time. There could truly be insufficient job creation as we see already with the gig economy 2) As Charles Murray wrote preciently in the 90s a great spoil of the wealth goes to people of higher intelligence. People in these walled gardens (literally sometimes) cannot relate to life on the outside. E.g. article today on front page about more Americans than working 2 jobs and the top comments there [A]. Also seen with the increasing wealth gap and increasing in wealth for the uber rich after covid and 08. There is no catching up especially with fed policies that reward existing asset owners 3) There may come a time where there is no marginal use for labour at a living wage 4) The ubi has already started and will now just accelerate. E.g. earth as portrayed in the expanse Con: 5) Libertarian argument: this has all happened before. Human wants and needs are unlimited. Labour is a scarce and valuable resource. There will always be jobs maybe at lower nominal wages but higher real wages if govts stop controlling interest rates and let prices fall I'm on the con side of the argument but I can't think of anything more compelling Hope this article becomes popular as I look forward to expanding my horizons via the educated hacker News crowd [A] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26184012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26184012
- fbn79 6y ago
  "Automation and Ai is replacing white collar work this time." I think that If your daily work can be truly replaced by a graphic card running pattern matching software you should find a better way to invest your life.
  - rakkhi 6y ago
    Till they come for your job :) Ive seen a lot of jobs that have been automated that are not pattern matching even in IT security. Even where the job is not fully automated like firewall admin it is greatly reduced and the labour is not replaced. E.g 10 years ago at an Aussie bank we had 40 people performing firewall changes and 30 security designers writing and reviewing the rules nedded. Algosec came along, we did software defined networking , things moved to AWS and there are zero dedicated firewall admins anymore and all the designers were absorbed into the architecture and consulting teams and eventually returned to its original size of 20 i.e those 30 security design jobs disappeared
  - watt 6y ago
    Point is, you can't find not just a better way, but you can't find any way. You either own the CPU farm, or you're out.
    - rakkhi 6y ago
      Yeah this is the Charles Murray point. We can't all be AI repair or developers. A lot is capped by intelligence. A greater proportion of the gains go to those with the most intelligence and everyone on the bottom gets left behind. That is the real outcome of automation this time. You can see it in the shrinking middle class in the developed world. In the smaller proportion of productivity gains going to labour in the last 60 year ala Piketty
      - ilaksh 6y ago
        You are conflating things. The gains go to people who have privilege. For example, developers in less-wealthy countries can earn a fraction of what those in richer countries earn. Or those born to wealthy parents who don't really need to work and so go into business rather than engineering. Also, in general the idea that greater intelligence means higher income is false. And the assumption many scientists and engineers make is that within a certain number of generations, maybe one, maybe ten, is that we will have AI much smarter than humans. That means smarter than you, and much better at your job than you (whether its "AI repair" or anything else). Smart guy.
        cbozeman 6y ago
        > Also, in general the idea that greater intelligence means higher income is false. No it isn't. This is only one study of dozens, possibly even hundreds, that have been conducted over the years: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289607000219#:~:text=The%20numbers%20suggest%20that%20IQ,income%20is%203.6%20times%20lower https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602.... The findings are always the same... the more IQ you have, the better off you end up doing, once you control for every other variable. But I get why no one on HN wants to hear that. IQ is something you didn't earn. It's not yours. It was given to you, and not only was it given to you, you're not allowed to refuse it either. You either have it or you don't. And what's worse, even if you want to be smarter, that's almost nothing you can do that'll raise IQ by a few points - at best. Someone with a 100 IQ will never be able to study enough or learn enough to match someone with a 160 IQ. Its a lifelong, glaring, undeniable reminder that the Universe is not fucking fair and does not fucking care about anyone. And I've known enough people that are the demographic of HN to know that, not only does this intrinsically eat at their core because you can't deny it or evade it, but it also shatters their utopian ideals - that if we just eliminate all <insert social justice term of the zeitgeist here> that we can lift everyone up. Well you can't. And you won't. Life's not fair and there's literally nothing you can do about it right now.
  - lm28469 6y ago
    Most people can't, and more and more people are thrown in these jobs. This is a direct consequence of automation... and this is why we're in for a bad time unless we rethink our concept or work
    - rakkhi 6y ago
      Thus the Expanse. The only palatable solution for government is print money (ie. tax everyone's purchasing power) and pay it in increased welfare. E.g 1400 cheques and more coming. As long as everyone prints there is no debasement of currencies.
      - cbozeman 6y ago
        Well look, if all this is becoming The Expanse, I'd like to make my way to the Ring Gate to a new world sooner rather than later. I find the idea of exploring strange new worlds far more enticing than getting my 1400 credits, or even worse, my €$ Eurodollars.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        If everyone prints, there is no relative debasement across currencies. There’s a massive debasement against hard/productive assets.
  - i_am_proteus 6y ago
    Some people have spent decades investing in skills and careers that become obviated in a matter of years by new technology. It's easy to see today which lines of work can be better done by computers than by humans-- today. What's less obvious is which lines of work will be automated in two decades. Having your job description written out of the economy by software is a non-event when you're 26, rough when you're 36, and a disaster when you're 46.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      The problem is that company funded training is dead. There are some leftover countries like Germany that do formal apprenticeships with reduced pay and they tend to have lower youth unemployment but they are the exception. I know some people who just did an apprenticeship in their 30s and got a new job that way. The alternative would be to have a government mandated long term unemployment insurance program that funds education. It would be a general solution to career loss of any kind. I personally dislike that coal worker communities are being protected by the government. If there was an effective program that helped these people get better jobs we wouldn't even have to worry about protectionism. The big unsolved problem is people who are 10 years away from retirement. They can't just spend 3-5 years retraining without delaying their retirement.
  - hansor 6y ago
    Programming, remote surgery, judging(law), farming. Hardly "bad investment" from society point of view! It is well known bias(supported by numerous studies) that 90% people with your "attitude" are certain that THEIR job is somehow special and immune to automatization.
    - cbozeman 6y ago
      It's the same old shit, hansor... no one considers a problem to be "their" problem, right up until it becomes their problem.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - superbcarrot 6y ago
    I think that it's okay to say this to yourself and look for a different type of work. Saying this to other people misses a couple of important points. - If you can reskill, you're very fortunate. Not everyone is in the same position. - It doesn't scale to large numbers. The demand in the market for people with skills that can't yet be automated isn't necessarily enough to absorb all the people who are losing their jobs to automation.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    I spent 3 months at a small court room last summer. 99% of what was ~done (or not done depending on how you see it) could fit on a laptop. The whole service, if in digital form would require near zero human intervention. These people are mostly trying to navigate bad software, bad bosses, bad archives and bad workflow. Oh and angry users of course. The computational needs are not even GPU worthy. I'm not advocating a digital future[1], but a humongous amount of tasks at the service layer are really nil. [1] humanly and sociologically I'd be much more happier keeping most of the system, people contributing to society together, but with better tools and better team spirit (achievable through a little cultural shift), I don't see value in replacing all tasks and letting people idle or live 100 years of leisure, I don't even think it's mentally sane.
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
    Computer was once a job title. People used to get paid to shine shoes and press clothes everyday. Banks used to employee hundreds of people to staff their operations. The DMV is a sprawling human operated date entry firm fronting for a database and camera. Paralegals and research assistants are being replaced by the dozens. Entire factory campuses that employed towns are now operated by mere dozens. Fields that took dozens to manage can now be handled by a few people and traveling farm hands. Hedge funds are out performed by indexes. Many are cooking their books. Self driving cars will happen and displace millions of jobs over what, a decade? Two or three max? I'll bet my current retirement that it happens within the century. Jobs like shelf stocking, burger flipping, and the like could be automated today if the displaced employees wouldn't lead a violent revolution. That's the political reality. How the fuck do you keep 200 million working people happy without repressing them or inciting a revolution?
    - DebtDeflation 6y ago
      >The DMV is a sprawling human operated date entry firm fronting for a database and camera This one really hit home. I went to the DMV a few months ago for the first time in over a decade to upgrade my drivers license to a Real ID (must be done in person, previous renewals were done by mail). The entire process was unchanged from when I first got my license almost 30 years ago. Stand in one line to check in. Sit down. Wait for your name to be called to stand in a second line to have them manually keypunch the paper form you have to fill out into their computer system. Sit down. Wait for your name to be called to stand in a third line to get your picture taken. Sit down. Wait for your name to be called to stand in a fourth line to pay (slight change here in that they now accept credit cards, up until a few years ago it was cash or checks only). Sit down. Wait for your name to be called to stand in a fifth line to pick up your new license. Leave after several hours. This whole transaction could have been accomplished with kiosks, 1/10th the number of employees, and 1/4 the amount of floor space in 5 minutes or less.
      - Tarsul 6y ago
        sounds a little like an experience out of another time, like a live museum with actors.
- toyg 6y ago
  > a great spoil of the wealth goes to people of higher intelligence. I think you mistyped "people born into greater wealth and connections, whose outcomes can be amplified through better education".
  - rakkhi 6y ago
    No I typed higher intelligence :) Yes higher starting wealth helps but these days you can't get one of these higher paying jobs E.g most people here without higher intelligence. This is by far the majority benefiting from automation and speeding its adoption not those who inherited their wealth
    - lm28469 6y ago
      > This is by far the majority benefiting for automation and speeding its adoption not those who inherited their wealth Can you elaborate ?
      - rakkhi 6y ago
        I can't do a better job than the much maligned Charles Murray. To not be accused of being racist in this book he only looked at white Americans: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book)
        lm28469 6y ago
        Either I misunderstood you or I'm missing something because it seems to support the opposite of your point. The "majority" doesn't benefit from automation, they're thrown into more and more meaningless jobs at the bottom of the ladder while the people working on automation and the companies implementing automation are thriving. Wealth inequalities being at an all time high would agree with that > Meanwhile, real family income for families in the middle was flat. Just about all of the benefits of economic growth from 1970-2010 went to people in the upper half of the income distribution. https://alexandbooks.com/archive/coming-apart-by-charles-murray https://alexandbooks.com/archive/coming-apart-by-charles-mur...
- jimbokun 6y ago
  Comes down to whether you think computers will surpass humans in intelligence across the board in the near future. You can make the libertarian argument, if you believe there will still be jobs for which humans are better suited than machines. But that breaks down, when the machines are better at everything.
- imtringued 6y ago
  >Human wants and needs are unlimited. Before someone gets the funny idea that they aren't. It's literally government policy to hit at least 2% CPI inflation. CPI inflation measures the ratio between demand of consumer goods and services versus its supply. 2% inflation means there a tiny bit more demand for economic activity than can actually be supported by the economy. This means there is an incentive for companies to grow and try to max out the production capacity of the entire country. This is especially important since production capacity cannot be saved in the literal sense. Money is just a piece of paper that says someone owes you a certain share of their production capacity. If you don't make sure the production capacity exists by the time you retire your money is worthless, which is why deflation is generally considered a death sentence for economies. Low demand causes companies to reduce their production capacity, which reduces employment and lowers demand in a vicious circle. Demand side inflation through government stimulus can be effective way of accelerating the recovery of an economy with high underemployment. By doing pointless busy work like investing into better internet, upgrading the electric grid, building out renewables or even building public housing you can make sure that there is a baseline of employment. Since this work is funded through government debt it is increasing the supply of money. As I already have said. Inflation is what happens when you exceed the production capacity of your nation it tends to accelerate during full employment. Once there is enough work for everyone people get to choose their employers and they obviously pick the highest paying ones. Governments raise interest rates to make sure that only the most productive companies get funding. Inflation goes down and hits the 2% target again. The big question is why does the central bank engage in ineffective policy? Why would it keep dropping interest rates when most corporations are already well funded and their biggest problem is that there isn't enough demand for their products? You need to give money to people but if they aren't credit worthy how isn't this just a central bank driven pump and dump since you're only giving money to those who don't need it?
pizza234 6y ago
This article is a very interesting example of capitalization on the Lump of labour fallacy. Two examples made it very obvious: 1. there's only one diagram, and it looks catastrophic. the article is designed to give the reader the impression that there is a catastrophe going on, by hiding the counterpart (that is, jobs created in the meanwhile) 2. cleverly, what the article doesn't show, it describes, in ridiculous terms: > from the point of view of, say, a 10th century farmer, over > 90% of the jobs we do now are effectively made up–make-work > stopgaps that simply prove, in the words of Mark Twain, that > "civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary > necessaries." so, 90% of the jobs that didn't exist in the 10th century are essentially... vanity.
- rakkhi 6y ago
  I thought the article was a good balanced perspective without providing a conclusion either way. Thus wanting to start the debate here :)
toyg 6y ago
This is a tangent, but: > The secretarial pool? The secretarial pool is sorely missed. The few times in my work life when I had access to a secretary (either official or de-facto), it was a productivity multiplier and ensured a baseline quality in all communication. The result of killing that sector is terrible marketing done in Word and boss emails like IVE NOT HERD FROM HIM MAYB ITS NOT GOOD.
- rakkhi 6y ago
  Everyone wants the secretary. No one wants to be the secretary. Especially the men:) Basically the market and government eliminated it ie productivity the job creates is too low for the marginal wage except for top management. Sit down you pleb developer and type :)
  - rm_-rf_slash 6y ago
    We just call them executive assistants now.
    - rakkhi 6y ago
      And pay them more and require they have higher education and have less of them and only give them to senior management. Other than that nothing has changed :)
    - cbozeman 6y ago
      No one wants to be them either.
  - triceratops 6y ago
    > No one wants to be the secretary I find it hard to believe all the underemployed baristas (of any gender) with art or literature degrees wouldn't jump at an office job with benefits. Companies don't want to pay for secretaries anymore.
js8 6y ago
I have a theory that automation can be reframed as an imbalance between natural resources and labor. Economy at large is either constrained by available supply of labor or supply of natural resources. The automation causes the labor constraint to disappear, and economy is then only constrained by supply of natural resources. So we can see effects of this imbalance elsewhere in the world, in some poor countries, where there is too much available labor and not enough natural resources (or accumulated capital that can extract those). In such countries, additional jobs are created, but they are of the type that requires very little additional resource input, typically service jobs. This creates huge inequality, where large amounts of people are either left out or are lucky enough to cater for the small minority. Similar with automation, I suspect that while it is true that "jobs" can be created as much as needed (there is always a place for another person to be some kind of special servant to the rich capital owners), the inequality in society is going to rise (unless people themselves rise and revolt against such system).
- lm28469 6y ago
  > I have a theory that automation can be reframed as an imbalance between natural resources and labor. Economy at large is either constrained by available supply of labor or supply of natural resources. The automation causes the labor constraint to disappear, and economy is then only constrained by supply of natural resources. At some point we'll have to get out of this mental framework. Is the only mission of humanity on this earth to consume as much and as many natural ressources to produce more for "the economy" ? What's the end goal ? Automate everything and consume everything as quickly as we can ? What do we do when we're done ?
  - js8 6y ago
    Yeah, I agree, when I write "economy" I mean "capitalist economy". However, I think it is a really difficult to accomplish, people are almost always trying to up one another, and that drives this process.
  - hoseja 6y ago
    The only mission is to produce enough so that the guy next door can't come and take it. The guy next door of course does the same. The end goal lies in infinity because the Red Queen's race can't be stopped. If you stop you will be overtaken and destroyed. This is all followed by the heat death.
lm28469 6y ago
> RELAX. MACHINES ALREADY TOOK OUR JOBS I don't think the analogy holds at all, people used to be moved from intensive labor jobs (mines/fields) to less intensive and less physical jobs (factories, &c.) and earned workers rights, vacations, min wages &c. in the process. Now they're moved from low skill min wage jobs (factories, warehouses) to precarity and meaningless jobs, min wages aren't rising, retirement age is increasing, quality of life is stagnating [0] ... Automation is fine as long as it brings something positive to the workers, today it doesn't bring anything to the workers. The only people benefiting from it are the people designing the tools and the companies replacing workers with these tools, I doubt this would represent more than 10% of the global population. If we don't rethink our concept or "work and "jobs" we're going to have a real bad time, we can already see it today with growing inequalities and it's only going to accelerate. Instead of talking about how a machine can harvest more potatoes than a farmer we should talk about how much social misery is created. It's more of a moral and social problem than a technical one. [0] Don't come to me with "people have netflix and 4k TV so their lives are better now than 50 years ago"
- Aerroon 6y ago
  >[0] Don't come to me with "people have netflix and 4k TV so their lives are better now than 50 years ago" Why not? Communication is cheaper. In the past if you moved abroad or simply far enough then you would lose contact with your family. That's not the case anymore. Remember long distance calls? Transportation is cheaper/safer. Cars of today are way better than those from the past. Let alone anything preceding that. Food is cheaper. Cheaper transport means cheaper food. When is the last time a developed country had a famine? Can you even imagine something like that? Our immediate ancestors did. Life expectancy is significantly higher than it was before. Life expectancy in 1950 was 68 years in the US, 72 years in 1975, 76 in 2000, and almost 79 in 2021. In my country life expectancy at birth has gone up 10 years during my lifetime! There's less violent crime. Violent crime has halved in the US since 1993. This might not seem related to automation and quality of life, but I think it is - if people are living better lives then crime should decrease. Housing has become more expensive, but housing seems to scale with income - if people have more disposable income in the area, then housing is going to be more expensive. >retirement age is increasing Perhaps this was unsustainable in the first place? They were effectively borrowing from future generations. Virtually every country in the world has been increasing retirement age significantly. Retirement policies were created at a time where the expectation was an ever increasing population. That has changed.
pydry 6y ago
If machines were taking a disproportionate number of jobs a pretty easy way to mitigate this would be to lower retirement age. Older workers who can't retrain as easily could be phased out of the workforce with minimal inflationary impact. If your reaction to lowering retirement age is to fret about rising life expectancy and "where is the money going to come from?" then congrats - you don't really believe jobs are being automated. It's interesting that the media drives both mutually contradictory narratives at the same time.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  What would senior do ? I think people prefer to stay in the group they worked but as a different kind of role, elder/wise still being part of the field but without as much pressure and more of a transmission/consulting role.
wazoox 6y ago
The problem of how to clean a house with robots is completely unsolved. Mopping the floor properly and dusting small objects on shelves will remain an unsolved AI problem for a long time; in the meanwhile, more AI means more exploitation (see Uber, or Mechanical Turk, etc), with people getting their orders from robots. So yeah, somehow Marx is still right, at some point or another that's the modicum of unshakable human work that makes everything works, i.e. gives it any meaning of value. What we're seeing is the good old replacement of "living work" by "dead work" (machinery), to compensate (so far successfully) for the tendency of the rate of profit to fall[1]. Before anyone says that "labour theory of value" has been proven false, please take a few seconds to read in the OP article, or most article on these matters, or the way any capitalist enterprise works: it may be false from some POV but absolutely everyone behaves like if it were true... Weird isn't it? 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...
- tuatoru 6y ago
  > Before anyone says that "labour theory of value" has been proven false Or: take a random sample of n > 1000 products from the MIT Billion Price Project, and establish the labour content of each. I guarantee the correlation coefficient between labour content and price will be over 0.9. In social science, academics take anything over 0.3 as strong proof of a claim.
  - wazoox 6y ago
    Thank you, I didn't know of this project, that sounds really interesting :)
DC1350 6y ago
Good. The most realistic future is one where the wealthy class replaces all the labour with machines, then all the poor people die, and the descendants of the rich can live under utopian Star Trek communism. 100 years from then it won’t matter if the wealth was spread equitably at the beginning or not.
- Ajedi32 6y ago
  Haha, that's a really unique take on the issue. Dripping with cynicism, yet also hopelessly optimistic at the same time. I think I agree that even in a worst-case scenario the long term outcomes of automation are still positive. Though it's probably still worth considering how best to avoid or mitigate any pain it might cause in the short term.
thebigspacefuck 6y ago
What I’ve noticed is that cost of housing, landscaping, and home repairs are getting incredibly expensive. Maybe they always were. But practically everything else is really cheap. You can get all your entertainment from library books and movies or cheap monthly subscriptions. Food and clothing are inexpensive if you aren’t looking for the best. Transportation is not expensive. I think people will continue working 40 hours a week until they can afford a decent house. At least that’s what I would do. It’s practically my retirement plan, work until I can afford a house then find a low stress fulfilling job to work part time and explore my hobbies. Hopefully AI can solve this problem next.
- esoterica 6y ago
  Housing is not getting that much more expensive outside of superstar metros. Services provided through labor-intensive and low-productivity jobs have gotten more expensive due to Baumol's cost disease (not just landscaping and home repairs, but also education and healthcare).
gumby 6y ago
Not jobs but tasks. Chauffeurs used not only to drive but maintain the vehicles. Later cars became more reliable, the skill to drive them became more widespread and some tasks (e.g. signaling) mechanized, and the maintenance more specialized. Automation did the same with calculation and I doubt anyone misses that. “Job” is scary, “task” generally less so.
dfilppi 6y ago
I'm still bitter about the wheel.
FL33TW00D 6y ago
Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

61 points by tmfi 6y ago

A friend and I debate this topic all the time Is this time really different? Pro: 1) Automation and Ai is replacing white collar work this time. There could truly be insufficient job creation as we see already with the gig economy 2) As Charles Murray wrote preciently in the 90s a great spoil of the wealth goes to people of higher intelligence. People in these walled gardens (literally sometimes) cannot relate to life on the outside. E.g. article today on front page about more Americans than working 2 jobs and the top comments there [A]. Also seen with the increasing wealth gap and increasing in wealth for the uber rich after covid and 08. There is no catching up especially with fed policies that reward existing asset owners 3) There may come a time where there is no marginal use for labour at a living wage 4) The ubi has already started and will now just accelerate. E.g. earth as portrayed in the expanse Con: 5) Libertarian argument: this has all happened before. Human wants and needs are unlimited. Labour is a scarce and valuable resource. There will always be jobs maybe at lower nominal wages but higher real wages if govts stop controlling interest rates and let prices fall I'm on the con side of the argument but I can't think of anything more compelling Hope this article becomes popular as I look forward to expanding my horizons via the educated hacker News crowd [A] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26184012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26184012

fbn79 6y ago
"Automation and Ai is replacing white collar work this time." I think that If your daily work can be truly replaced by a graphic card running pattern matching software you should find a better way to invest your life.
- rakkhi 6y ago
  Till they come for your job :) Ive seen a lot of jobs that have been automated that are not pattern matching even in IT security. Even where the job is not fully automated like firewall admin it is greatly reduced and the labour is not replaced. E.g 10 years ago at an Aussie bank we had 40 people performing firewall changes and 30 security designers writing and reviewing the rules nedded. Algosec came along, we did software defined networking , things moved to AWS and there are zero dedicated firewall admins anymore and all the designers were absorbed into the architecture and consulting teams and eventually returned to its original size of 20 i.e those 30 security design jobs disappeared
- watt 6y ago
  Point is, you can't find not just a better way, but you can't find any way. You either own the CPU farm, or you're out.
  - rakkhi 6y ago
    Yeah this is the Charles Murray point. We can't all be AI repair or developers. A lot is capped by intelligence. A greater proportion of the gains go to those with the most intelligence and everyone on the bottom gets left behind. That is the real outcome of automation this time. You can see it in the shrinking middle class in the developed world. In the smaller proportion of productivity gains going to labour in the last 60 year ala Piketty
    - ilaksh 6y ago
      You are conflating things. The gains go to people who have privilege. For example, developers in less-wealthy countries can earn a fraction of what those in richer countries earn. Or those born to wealthy parents who don't really need to work and so go into business rather than engineering. Also, in general the idea that greater intelligence means higher income is false. And the assumption many scientists and engineers make is that within a certain number of generations, maybe one, maybe ten, is that we will have AI much smarter than humans. That means smarter than you, and much better at your job than you (whether its "AI repair" or anything else). Smart guy.
      - cbozeman 6y ago
        > Also, in general the idea that greater intelligence means higher income is false. No it isn't. This is only one study of dozens, possibly even hundreds, that have been conducted over the years: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289607000219#:~:text=The%20numbers%20suggest%20that%20IQ,income%20is%203.6%20times%20lower https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602.... The findings are always the same... the more IQ you have, the better off you end up doing, once you control for every other variable. But I get why no one on HN wants to hear that. IQ is something you didn't earn. It's not yours. It was given to you, and not only was it given to you, you're not allowed to refuse it either. You either have it or you don't. And what's worse, even if you want to be smarter, that's almost nothing you can do that'll raise IQ by a few points - at best. Someone with a 100 IQ will never be able to study enough or learn enough to match someone with a 160 IQ. Its a lifelong, glaring, undeniable reminder that the Universe is not fucking fair and does not fucking care about anyone. And I've known enough people that are the demographic of HN to know that, not only does this intrinsically eat at their core because you can't deny it or evade it, but it also shatters their utopian ideals - that if we just eliminate all <insert social justice term of the zeitgeist here> that we can lift everyone up. Well you can't. And you won't. Life's not fair and there's literally nothing you can do about it right now.
- lm28469 6y ago
  Most people can't, and more and more people are thrown in these jobs. This is a direct consequence of automation... and this is why we're in for a bad time unless we rethink our concept or work
  - rakkhi 6y ago
    Thus the Expanse. The only palatable solution for government is print money (ie. tax everyone's purchasing power) and pay it in increased welfare. E.g 1400 cheques and more coming. As long as everyone prints there is no debasement of currencies.
    - cbozeman 6y ago
      Well look, if all this is becoming The Expanse, I'd like to make my way to the Ring Gate to a new world sooner rather than later. I find the idea of exploring strange new worlds far more enticing than getting my 1400 credits, or even worse, my €$ Eurodollars.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      If everyone prints, there is no relative debasement across currencies. There’s a massive debasement against hard/productive assets.
- i_am_proteus 6y ago
  Some people have spent decades investing in skills and careers that become obviated in a matter of years by new technology. It's easy to see today which lines of work can be better done by computers than by humans-- today. What's less obvious is which lines of work will be automated in two decades. Having your job description written out of the economy by software is a non-event when you're 26, rough when you're 36, and a disaster when you're 46.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    The problem is that company funded training is dead. There are some leftover countries like Germany that do formal apprenticeships with reduced pay and they tend to have lower youth unemployment but they are the exception. I know some people who just did an apprenticeship in their 30s and got a new job that way. The alternative would be to have a government mandated long term unemployment insurance program that funds education. It would be a general solution to career loss of any kind. I personally dislike that coal worker communities are being protected by the government. If there was an effective program that helped these people get better jobs we wouldn't even have to worry about protectionism. The big unsolved problem is people who are 10 years away from retirement. They can't just spend 3-5 years retraining without delaying their retirement.
- hansor 6y ago
  Programming, remote surgery, judging(law), farming. Hardly "bad investment" from society point of view! It is well known bias(supported by numerous studies) that 90% people with your "attitude" are certain that THEIR job is somehow special and immune to automatization.
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    It's the same old shit, hansor... no one considers a problem to be "their" problem, right up until it becomes their problem.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- superbcarrot 6y ago
  I think that it's okay to say this to yourself and look for a different type of work. Saying this to other people misses a couple of important points. - If you can reskill, you're very fortunate. Not everyone is in the same position. - It doesn't scale to large numbers. The demand in the market for people with skills that can't yet be automated isn't necessarily enough to absorb all the people who are losing their jobs to automation.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  I spent 3 months at a small court room last summer. 99% of what was ~done (or not done depending on how you see it) could fit on a laptop. The whole service, if in digital form would require near zero human intervention. These people are mostly trying to navigate bad software, bad bosses, bad archives and bad workflow. Oh and angry users of course. The computational needs are not even GPU worthy. I'm not advocating a digital future[1], but a humongous amount of tasks at the service layer are really nil. [1] humanly and sociologically I'd be much more happier keeping most of the system, people contributing to society together, but with better tools and better team spirit (achievable through a little cultural shift), I don't see value in replacing all tasks and letting people idle or live 100 years of leisure, I don't even think it's mentally sane.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
  Computer was once a job title. People used to get paid to shine shoes and press clothes everyday. Banks used to employee hundreds of people to staff their operations. The DMV is a sprawling human operated date entry firm fronting for a database and camera. Paralegals and research assistants are being replaced by the dozens. Entire factory campuses that employed towns are now operated by mere dozens. Fields that took dozens to manage can now be handled by a few people and traveling farm hands. Hedge funds are out performed by indexes. Many are cooking their books. Self driving cars will happen and displace millions of jobs over what, a decade? Two or three max? I'll bet my current retirement that it happens within the century. Jobs like shelf stocking, burger flipping, and the like could be automated today if the displaced employees wouldn't lead a violent revolution. That's the political reality. How the fuck do you keep 200 million working people happy without repressing them or inciting a revolution?
  - DebtDeflation 6y ago
    >The DMV is a sprawling human operated date entry firm fronting for a database and camera This one really hit home. I went to the DMV a few months ago for the first time in over a decade to upgrade my drivers license to a Real ID (must be done in person, previous renewals were done by mail). The entire process was unchanged from when I first got my license almost 30 years ago. Stand in one line to check in. Sit down. Wait for your name to be called to stand in a second line to have them manually keypunch the paper form you have to fill out into their computer system. Sit down. Wait for your name to be called to stand in a third line to get your picture taken. Sit down. Wait for your name to be called to stand in a fourth line to pay (slight change here in that they now accept credit cards, up until a few years ago it was cash or checks only). Sit down. Wait for your name to be called to stand in a fifth line to pick up your new license. Leave after several hours. This whole transaction could have been accomplished with kiosks, 1/10th the number of employees, and 1/4 the amount of floor space in 5 minutes or less.
    - Tarsul 6y ago
      sounds a little like an experience out of another time, like a live museum with actors.
toyg 6y ago
> a great spoil of the wealth goes to people of higher intelligence. I think you mistyped "people born into greater wealth and connections, whose outcomes can be amplified through better education".
- rakkhi 6y ago
  No I typed higher intelligence :) Yes higher starting wealth helps but these days you can't get one of these higher paying jobs E.g most people here without higher intelligence. This is by far the majority benefiting from automation and speeding its adoption not those who inherited their wealth
  - lm28469 6y ago
    > This is by far the majority benefiting for automation and speeding its adoption not those who inherited their wealth Can you elaborate ?
    - rakkhi 6y ago
      I can't do a better job than the much maligned Charles Murray. To not be accused of being racist in this book he only looked at white Americans: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book)
      - lm28469 6y ago
        Either I misunderstood you or I'm missing something because it seems to support the opposite of your point. The "majority" doesn't benefit from automation, they're thrown into more and more meaningless jobs at the bottom of the ladder while the people working on automation and the companies implementing automation are thriving. Wealth inequalities being at an all time high would agree with that > Meanwhile, real family income for families in the middle was flat. Just about all of the benefits of economic growth from 1970-2010 went to people in the upper half of the income distribution. https://alexandbooks.com/archive/coming-apart-by-charles-murray https://alexandbooks.com/archive/coming-apart-by-charles-mur...
jimbokun 6y ago
Comes down to whether you think computers will surpass humans in intelligence across the board in the near future. You can make the libertarian argument, if you believe there will still be jobs for which humans are better suited than machines. But that breaks down, when the machines are better at everything.
imtringued 6y ago
>Human wants and needs are unlimited. Before someone gets the funny idea that they aren't. It's literally government policy to hit at least 2% CPI inflation. CPI inflation measures the ratio between demand of consumer goods and services versus its supply. 2% inflation means there a tiny bit more demand for economic activity than can actually be supported by the economy. This means there is an incentive for companies to grow and try to max out the production capacity of the entire country. This is especially important since production capacity cannot be saved in the literal sense. Money is just a piece of paper that says someone owes you a certain share of their production capacity. If you don't make sure the production capacity exists by the time you retire your money is worthless, which is why deflation is generally considered a death sentence for economies. Low demand causes companies to reduce their production capacity, which reduces employment and lowers demand in a vicious circle. Demand side inflation through government stimulus can be effective way of accelerating the recovery of an economy with high underemployment. By doing pointless busy work like investing into better internet, upgrading the electric grid, building out renewables or even building public housing you can make sure that there is a baseline of employment. Since this work is funded through government debt it is increasing the supply of money. As I already have said. Inflation is what happens when you exceed the production capacity of your nation it tends to accelerate during full employment. Once there is enough work for everyone people get to choose their employers and they obviously pick the highest paying ones. Governments raise interest rates to make sure that only the most productive companies get funding. Inflation goes down and hits the 2% target again. The big question is why does the central bank engage in ineffective policy? Why would it keep dropping interest rates when most corporations are already well funded and their biggest problem is that there isn't enough demand for their products? You need to give money to people but if they aren't credit worthy how isn't this just a central bank driven pump and dump since you're only giving money to those who don't need it?

pizza234 6y ago

This article is a very interesting example of capitalization on the Lump of labour fallacy. Two examples made it very obvious: 1. there's only one diagram, and it looks catastrophic. the article is designed to give the reader the impression that there is a catastrophe going on, by hiding the counterpart (that is, jobs created in the meanwhile) 2. cleverly, what the article doesn't show, it describes, in ridiculous terms: > from the point of view of, say, a 10th century farmer, over > 90% of the jobs we do now are effectively made up–make-work > stopgaps that simply prove, in the words of Mark Twain, that > "civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary > necessaries." so, 90% of the jobs that didn't exist in the 10th century are essentially... vanity.

rakkhi 6y ago
I thought the article was a good balanced perspective without providing a conclusion either way. Thus wanting to start the debate here :)

toyg 6y ago

This is a tangent, but: > The secretarial pool? The secretarial pool is sorely missed. The few times in my work life when I had access to a secretary (either official or de-facto), it was a productivity multiplier and ensured a baseline quality in all communication. The result of killing that sector is terrible marketing done in Word and boss emails like IVE NOT HERD FROM HIM MAYB ITS NOT GOOD.

rakkhi 6y ago
Everyone wants the secretary. No one wants to be the secretary. Especially the men:) Basically the market and government eliminated it ie productivity the job creates is too low for the marginal wage except for top management. Sit down you pleb developer and type :)
- rm_-rf_slash 6y ago
  We just call them executive assistants now.
  - rakkhi 6y ago
    And pay them more and require they have higher education and have less of them and only give them to senior management. Other than that nothing has changed :)
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    No one wants to be them either.
- triceratops 6y ago
  > No one wants to be the secretary I find it hard to believe all the underemployed baristas (of any gender) with art or literature degrees wouldn't jump at an office job with benefits. Companies don't want to pay for secretaries anymore.

js8 6y ago

I have a theory that automation can be reframed as an imbalance between natural resources and labor. Economy at large is either constrained by available supply of labor or supply of natural resources. The automation causes the labor constraint to disappear, and economy is then only constrained by supply of natural resources. So we can see effects of this imbalance elsewhere in the world, in some poor countries, where there is too much available labor and not enough natural resources (or accumulated capital that can extract those). In such countries, additional jobs are created, but they are of the type that requires very little additional resource input, typically service jobs. This creates huge inequality, where large amounts of people are either left out or are lucky enough to cater for the small minority. Similar with automation, I suspect that while it is true that "jobs" can be created as much as needed (there is always a place for another person to be some kind of special servant to the rich capital owners), the inequality in society is going to rise (unless people themselves rise and revolt against such system).

lm28469 6y ago
> I have a theory that automation can be reframed as an imbalance between natural resources and labor. Economy at large is either constrained by available supply of labor or supply of natural resources. The automation causes the labor constraint to disappear, and economy is then only constrained by supply of natural resources. At some point we'll have to get out of this mental framework. Is the only mission of humanity on this earth to consume as much and as many natural ressources to produce more for "the economy" ? What's the end goal ? Automate everything and consume everything as quickly as we can ? What do we do when we're done ?
- js8 6y ago
  Yeah, I agree, when I write "economy" I mean "capitalist economy". However, I think it is a really difficult to accomplish, people are almost always trying to up one another, and that drives this process.
- hoseja 6y ago
  The only mission is to produce enough so that the guy next door can't come and take it. The guy next door of course does the same. The end goal lies in infinity because the Red Queen's race can't be stopped. If you stop you will be overtaken and destroyed. This is all followed by the heat death.

lm28469 6y ago

> RELAX. MACHINES ALREADY TOOK OUR JOBS I don't think the analogy holds at all, people used to be moved from intensive labor jobs (mines/fields) to less intensive and less physical jobs (factories, &c.) and earned workers rights, vacations, min wages &c. in the process. Now they're moved from low skill min wage jobs (factories, warehouses) to precarity and meaningless jobs, min wages aren't rising, retirement age is increasing, quality of life is stagnating [0] ... Automation is fine as long as it brings something positive to the workers, today it doesn't bring anything to the workers. The only people benefiting from it are the people designing the tools and the companies replacing workers with these tools, I doubt this would represent more than 10% of the global population. If we don't rethink our concept or "work and "jobs" we're going to have a real bad time, we can already see it today with growing inequalities and it's only going to accelerate. Instead of talking about how a machine can harvest more potatoes than a farmer we should talk about how much social misery is created. It's more of a moral and social problem than a technical one. [0] Don't come to me with "people have netflix and 4k TV so their lives are better now than 50 years ago"

Aerroon 6y ago
>[0] Don't come to me with "people have netflix and 4k TV so their lives are better now than 50 years ago" Why not? Communication is cheaper. In the past if you moved abroad or simply far enough then you would lose contact with your family. That's not the case anymore. Remember long distance calls? Transportation is cheaper/safer. Cars of today are way better than those from the past. Let alone anything preceding that. Food is cheaper. Cheaper transport means cheaper food. When is the last time a developed country had a famine? Can you even imagine something like that? Our immediate ancestors did. Life expectancy is significantly higher than it was before. Life expectancy in 1950 was 68 years in the US, 72 years in 1975, 76 in 2000, and almost 79 in 2021. In my country life expectancy at birth has gone up 10 years during my lifetime! There's less violent crime. Violent crime has halved in the US since 1993. This might not seem related to automation and quality of life, but I think it is - if people are living better lives then crime should decrease. Housing has become more expensive, but housing seems to scale with income - if people have more disposable income in the area, then housing is going to be more expensive. >retirement age is increasing Perhaps this was unsustainable in the first place? They were effectively borrowing from future generations. Virtually every country in the world has been increasing retirement age significantly. Retirement policies were created at a time where the expectation was an ever increasing population. That has changed.

pydry 6y ago

If machines were taking a disproportionate number of jobs a pretty easy way to mitigate this would be to lower retirement age. Older workers who can't retrain as easily could be phased out of the workforce with minimal inflationary impact. If your reaction to lowering retirement age is to fret about rising life expectancy and "where is the money going to come from?" then congrats - you don't really believe jobs are being automated. It's interesting that the media drives both mutually contradictory narratives at the same time.

agumonkey 6y ago
What would senior do ? I think people prefer to stay in the group they worked but as a different kind of role, elder/wise still being part of the field but without as much pressure and more of a transmission/consulting role.

wazoox 6y ago

The problem of how to clean a house with robots is completely unsolved. Mopping the floor properly and dusting small objects on shelves will remain an unsolved AI problem for a long time; in the meanwhile, more AI means more exploitation (see Uber, or Mechanical Turk, etc), with people getting their orders from robots. So yeah, somehow Marx is still right, at some point or another that's the modicum of unshakable human work that makes everything works, i.e. gives it any meaning of value. What we're seeing is the good old replacement of "living work" by "dead work" (machinery), to compensate (so far successfully) for the tendency of the rate of profit to fall[1]. Before anyone says that "labour theory of value" has been proven false, please take a few seconds to read in the OP article, or most article on these matters, or the way any capitalist enterprise works: it may be false from some POV but absolutely everyone behaves like if it were true... Weird isn't it? 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...

tuatoru 6y ago
> Before anyone says that "labour theory of value" has been proven false Or: take a random sample of n > 1000 products from the MIT Billion Price Project, and establish the labour content of each. I guarantee the correlation coefficient between labour content and price will be over 0.9. In social science, academics take anything over 0.3 as strong proof of a claim.
- wazoox 6y ago
  Thank you, I didn't know of this project, that sounds really interesting :)

DC1350 6y ago

Good. The most realistic future is one where the wealthy class replaces all the labour with machines, then all the poor people die, and the descendants of the rich can live under utopian Star Trek communism. 100 years from then it won’t matter if the wealth was spread equitably at the beginning or not.

Ajedi32 6y ago
Haha, that's a really unique take on the issue. Dripping with cynicism, yet also hopelessly optimistic at the same time. I think I agree that even in a worst-case scenario the long term outcomes of automation are still positive. Though it's probably still worth considering how best to avoid or mitigate any pain it might cause in the short term.

thebigspacefuck 6y ago

What I’ve noticed is that cost of housing, landscaping, and home repairs are getting incredibly expensive. Maybe they always were. But practically everything else is really cheap. You can get all your entertainment from library books and movies or cheap monthly subscriptions. Food and clothing are inexpensive if you aren’t looking for the best. Transportation is not expensive. I think people will continue working 40 hours a week until they can afford a decent house. At least that’s what I would do. It’s practically my retirement plan, work until I can afford a house then find a low stress fulfilling job to work part time and explore my hobbies. Hopefully AI can solve this problem next.

esoterica 6y ago
Housing is not getting that much more expensive outside of superstar metros. Services provided through labor-intensive and low-productivity jobs have gotten more expensive due to Baumol's cost disease (not just landscaping and home repairs, but also education and healthcare).

gumby 6y ago

Not jobs but tasks. Chauffeurs used not only to drive but maintain the vehicles. Later cars became more reliable, the skill to drive them became more widespread and some tasks (e.g. signaling) mechanized, and the maintenance more specialized. Automation did the same with calculation and I doubt anyone misses that. “Job” is scary, “task” generally less so.

dfilppi 6y ago

I'm still bitter about the wheel.

FL33TW00D 6y ago

Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU