6 ms·

It's not difficult to imagine ultra-efficient warehouses that have no need for physical human labor, within our lifetime. Exciting stuff. But I have to ask: Ca

• lm28469 6y ago
  Harder to imagine a society in which we have no need for jobs though Unless we get something like UBI we'll always need shitty job to keep people busy. Automation for the sake of automation doesn't bring much if 70% of the population is still working 8 hours a day 5 days a week on more and more useless tasks. This isn't even talking about the fact that we're increasing productivity per unit of time but never reducing working hours, I wonder when this is going to end
  • djrogers 6y ago
    > we'll always need shitty job to keep people busy. That's a pretty darned condescending attitude to harbor there. I know a lot of people who have what you'd call s#### jobs, and they're happy, fulfilled, and proud of the work they do.
    • lm28469 6y ago
      Are they ? Amazon warehouse workers ? People working in slaughterhouses ? Starbucks "baristas" working 3 jobs at once while they're execs use every trick in the book to avoid taxes and make literal billions in profit ? Min wage people working insane hours to barely afford life ? I'm the condescending condescending one ? They're being shat on by capitalism. I wish only one thing, for their lives to get better. I'm not going to lie and pretend people working 8+ hours a day, doing back breaking repetitive tasks, with no real possibilities of evolving their career are living the dream... all of that to get paid wages that barely let them afford a decent life and never let them escape living pay-check to pay-check They've been tricked into being proud slaves, that all the pride there is in there. We could do so much better
      • sandworm101 6y ago
        The condesention is in the term "keep people busy". It is a suggestion that thier jobs are unproductive busy work. They arent. A less condesending phrase might be "keep them employed" or "keep them in work".
      • mym1990 6y ago
        This is an extremely black and white way of looking at it, I would suggest you find some grey areas in your thinking. For what its worth, a high percentage of people are living paycheck to paycheck, no matter how big that paycheck is. Many people will adjust their lifestyle to or above their means, so they have to live paycheck to paycheck to support that lifestyle.
      • oflannabhra 6y ago
        The sheer degree of superiority in your comment is stunning. I worked lots of jobs before my career in coding. Manual, sometime menial work. The fact that you deem me to be a “proud slave”, too stupid to even see my shackles might be the most stunning condescension I’ve heard, and there’s no shortage of it on the internet. There is a fulfillment I still miss in that work. I could see the effect of my work immediately, as it was grounded in the physical world. I could leave and the work wouldn’t follow me.
        • lm28469 6y ago
          I'm not attacking the people losing their life in these work infernos, I'm talking about the system which enslaved them and made them think this was their paradise > There is a fulfilment I still miss in that work. What work are you talking about ? Moving boxes of gadgets all day for lord Bezos while being tracked by optimisation software telling you when to pee or take a smoke break ? Slicing chicken breasts 10 hours a day in a slaughter house ? Driving your leased car for uber 12 hours a day to earn a semi decent wage ? Driving a delivery van, working crazy shifts and not being able to take restroom breaks ? I'm not talking about a guy making hand made wooden tables in his garage enjoying his craft and skills, I'm not talking about a plumber or a mechanic fixing real world problems, I'm talking about human beings used as robots, doing indecent work for indecent wages. People aren't stupid, they're lied too, since birth
  • anyonecancode 6y ago
    > Unless we get something like UBI we'll always need shitty job to keep people busy I find myself often making this assumption too, but I wonder if it's warranted? A "shit" job is often shorthand for a job you can grab someone off the street and more or less have them start working, an "unskilled" job. But the fact that pretty much anyone can do a job isn't the same as saying that someone doing a "shit" job is only capable of that kind of work. What if we did get to a point where nearly all the tedious, unskilled jobs were done by machines -- what exactly is the barrier to taking all the humans previously doing those jobs and leveling them up to do jobs machines can't do as well? I don't think it's human capability -- I'm quite skeptical of the idea that there's whole classes of people actually _unable_ to learn skills needed for better work. It seems the barrier is that generally it's not economically beneficial to do so -- training takes time and money. But if that's actually the problem, then its not an overall lack of money, it's a distribution question. Perhaps it's because I'm watching The Expanse now and remember the books, but I'm not completely sold on UBI. I think it gives up on the idea that masses of people can work better jobs. As a supplementary income program I can see it working, but as a replacement for having any job at all I'm not sure I'm on board.
    • lumost 6y ago
      I think the question is what need does further economic development satisfy for the totality of the population. UBI can ensure no one has an unmet need for basics, but many people with nothing to do would likely lead to unmet fulfillment and security needs. UBI is unlikely to fund digital nomads in the short term, and unbounded travel isn't for everyone. The classic work for independence mindset that drove early settlers also becomes permanently non-viable. I'm a fan of UBI, but I think it brings us closer to asking the question of how do we structure a society where a 40 hour work week is optional? what will people who are satisfied with the basics do?
      • Pokepokalypse 6y ago
        >what will people who are satisfied with the basics do? The devil makes work for idle hands.
      • 6y ago
  • crazygringo 6y ago
    > we'll always need shitty job to keep people busy People have been worried we'll run out of jobs ever since farming started to decline from being 90% of jobs. People will always want better things, whether cell phones or TV shows. There are ALWAYS jobs to produce those better things. There's no need to "keep people busy". People just always want better things and will work for them.
    • lm28469 6y ago
      Is this the end game of humanity though ? Let's create more bs jobs so that people can continue to afford new shiny gadgets ? > ALWAYS Earth is a finite environment, with finite resources, at some point it won't scale anymore, especially with today's ecological concerns. The world isn't going to run on cells phones and TV shows indefinitely, and even if, I think we should strive for more than that > People just always want better things and will work for them. It hasn't always been the case and it won't be forever, capitalism is fairly new, I hope we'll reconcile with our humanity at some point, there is more to life than working 50%+ of our awake time to watch netflix and buy iphones
      • crazygringo 6y ago
        Nobody said better things require more resources. If anything, modern manufacturing uses far less than it did decades ago, with less pollution, people renting things more than wasteful owning, etc. E.g. when driverless taxis come along, expect to see car manufacturing plummet. > there is more to life than working 50%+ of our awake time to watch netflix and buy iphones Life is what you make of it. If you want to write poetry or symphonies in your free time, or watch Netflix and play Candy Crush, I'm not going to judge you either way. You have the choice to make your life what you want. You can focus on yourself and you don't need to judge others.
        • lm28469 6y ago
          > If anything, modern manufacturing uses far less than it did decades ago, with less pollution, people renting things more than wasteful owning, I don't think we live in the same world then, we've never imported/exported so much shit, third world countries are catching up with the west in term of how they want to live (personal cars, bigger houses, more electronics), we're polluting more than ever, &c. all the metrics are going up, not down > Life is what you make of it. Well, yeah, exactly, but what can you make of it when you work 8 hours a day 5 days a week for the 40 best years of your life > You can focus on yourself and you don't need to judge others Or I can think about myself _and_ others by thinking that the world would be a much better place for everyone including myself if people didn't have to work so much for so little.
  • thescriptkiddie 6y ago
    Guaranteeing employment by creating bullshit jobs is one of the big mistakes made by the late USSR. Doing so represented a fundamental shift in ideals from the egalitarian "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" to the puritanical "the who does not work, neither shall he eat". I keep thinking recently that the US looks more and more like the old jokes about the USSR. There is no fundamental reason that you need to "keep people busy" with unproductive labor. Due to increases of productivity, we could all be working 20 hour weeks today and enjoying the same standard of living as 50 years ago.
    • visarga 6y ago
      > we could all be working 20 hour weeks today and enjoying the same standard of living as 50 years ago But we want to enjoy the standard of living of today, we always want more, our desires fill up any level of productivity increase.
    • meddlepal 6y ago
      Dont worry we will all eventually just be working for the military-industrial complex in some form eventually, directly or indirectly. That’s basically the end state.
  • justinboogaard 6y ago
    I think there are some jobs where the role of the job is to - for lack of time to come up with a better phrase: "help humans struggle with human things". Yes, a nurse's role is to heal, but also to offer comfort to a patient, a teacher's job is to instruct, but also to try different ways of connecting with a student struggling to understand an idea. I don't know if people think those types of jobs are bad or not. I think some of my family members would have had better hospital experiences if they could have had more attention from staff, so I don't think I'd call it useless. I think that automation could lead to a world where more of the humans-dealing-with-human-things types of jobs are being done.
• hef19898 6y ago
  They do exist already, sort of. Fully automated pallet racks and automated warehouses for small articles do exist. They are very capital intensive so and scale not really good.
• tachyonbeam 6y ago
  I feel like, for a long while, you'd still need people to clean the place, to maintain the robots, install new equipment. There's also going to be occasional messes. Box was badly taped, falls apart, shampoo bottles get crushed on the floor, etc. Also, if you have a robot that puts things in boxes, you need someone to restock the boxes, unless you have another special-purpose robot just for that too. I'm sure we can eventually have truly general-purpose robots, but in the mean time, I'm kind of skeptical about how much cost and labor these things are going to save. Not to say this isn't impressive or cool, just saying that a completely fully automated warehouse is still pretty far away.
  • chiefalchemist 6y ago
    Save? Plenty. It means less parking spots, less HR, less toilets, and so on. They don't get ill, don't have good days and bad, they are fully trained the second they start, and so on. The most difficult part of business is the human element. For better or worse these mitigate that. The resources freed up from addressing the human element can focus on other opportunities.
    • spijdar 6y ago
      I mean, won't robots need repairs/maintenance, "training" in the form of programming or tweaking parameters, and other things? These may have lesser costs than their human equivalents, but I don't think they're magically zero-maintenance.
      • tachyonbeam 6y ago
        It's also questionable how much cheaper robot training is. Specialized programmers to write special-purpose code just for your specific application don't exactly come cheap... Especially when you're not paying them directly, but rather trough some external robotics company you're consulting with. We could easily be talking $300/hour.
    • sandworm101 6y ago
      Robots dont get ill? Talk to anyone who maintains complex moving machinery such as aircraft or industrial machines. They have bad days. They have lifespans and old age. Some develop long-term diseases (corrosion). Some even get viruses. They can be down for months, even years, as such faults are corrected.
• virmundi 6y ago
  Don’t worry. There won’t be a lot of people soon. Those who survive are wealthy enough to have their children artificially. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/male-infertility-threatening-future-human-race/ https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/male-infertility...
• Robotbeat 6y ago
  I don’t know. This doesn’t seem dramatically better than the Unimate industrial robot, which is over half a century old. It even used the same kind of suction tool: https://youtu.be/VdolSBpyCaU https://youtu.be/VdolSBpyCaU I mean, Boston Dynamics’ new robot is on (Mecanum?) wheels and it has some basic machine vision capability, but it really doesn’t seem like a dramatic, exponential departure from the 60 year old Unimate robot. (Boston Dynamics’ other robots are much more impressive from a technical standpoint, but I’m not terribly surprised a company that has been struggling to get profitable is turning to more mundane but practical robotics applications.) Which doesn’t mean I don’t think something like this isn’t practical. It just goes to show there’s still a ton of fairly virgin ground out there for increased automation and productivity growth just deploying technology from half a century ago and adding some minor tweaks. And I think part of the reason we HADN’T deployed this kind of automation tech earlier is because wages have just been too low, with wage growth fairly stagnant after the 1960s. Every day I’m less and less worried that automation will get rid of all our jobs and more and more frustrated at the slow uptake of productivity improvements we have just sitting in front of us, perhaps because companies don’t compensate their employees enough for it to be worthwhile.