8 ms·

At the core of it, the very core of it, tech is waged work. Just like in manufacturing, which was outsourced quite prolifically. Tech isn't special in this rega

by Fordec 5y ago

At the core of it, the very core of it, tech is waged work. Just like in manufacturing, which was outsourced quite prolifically. Tech isn't special in this regard. The thing that hasn't come about yet though is, sales, marketing, accounting can also be outsourced. Dare I say automated. It is at the end of the day, still waged work. Marketing is not an asset class. Accounting isn't capital ownership. Fabrication is a tool, tech is a tool, social media is a tool. The moment that this sort of stuff gets automated there will be a reckoning on how businesses are built in western society. I don't mean a saleforce competitor with a slicker UI, I mean completely abstracting away payroll and the like. Imagine for a moment: You could say to anyone, "I like the work you do want to work for me?" either in person, online, even here. They say yes. Now suddenly a pipeline process kicks off, like a CICD for recruitment. You have your budget metrics all in place, the receiver has their negotiation asks, etc. And AI hashes out a negotiation, in browser or on your phones etc. comes up with a negotiation contract, highlights the important bits or deal breakers that need a higher level sign off. "Click 'Yes' to work." Done. Hired. Here's your onboarding package and account credentials, your paycheck comes in at the end of the month. All the while, the two people at the table or on twitter have just been continuing on with their lives. Nobody talked to HR. Nobody had to manually do filings with the IRS. The business owner never opened a dashboard or logged in to their negotiation.ai account. It is not this easy at the moment. But no rule of physics says it can't be in the future. Entire classes of work could crumble while people could create in a much more competitive manner.

novok 5y ago
So you mean, how work was done before the modern nation state, income tax, passports, visas and mass literacy? All of the work you describe was created by human bureaucracies for human bureaucracies. Beforehand you didn't need the paperwork.
- Fordec 5y ago
  The difference being, before there was no paperwork, at all. In such an automated system, the checks, balances and oversight all still exist. They're just invisible to the human eye rather than libertarian style just gone.
  - novok 5y ago
    You don't need AI or advanced software for automated background bureaucracy made well. All of that is possible today, and the amount of extra work it is today consuming human time is still ultimately a choice of humanity.
jdgoesmarching 5y ago
It’s kind of terrifying how few people in this industry take this seriously and dismiss unionizing and organization efforts. Every publicly owned company is incentivized to squeeze every possible penny out of their income statement and we know from history that corporations will fight hard to eliminate high wage labor whenever possible. Our salaries and power won’t last forever, and if we don’t turn around our culture of worshipping techno-aristocrats quickly then we’re all going to have a rough time in the next few decades.
- rawtxapp 5y ago
  To play the devil's advocate, that would also mean keeping things inefficient on purpose to avoid job losses. I want my taxes to be automatically by some computer without having to deal with a human that's more prone to errors. I want self-driving cars so that I don't have to deal with another human that's more prone to accidents, etc, etc. The list goes on. I think it's inevitable that we will see some kind of UBI, otherwise there would be big revolutions when most jobs are automated to some degree.
  - robocat 5y ago
    > I want my taxes to be automatically by some computer without having to deal with a human that's more prone to errors. This is already in progress in New Zealand. The government simplified taxation rules and everything is fairly automated now, the payments and the end-of-year. I got an email this year from our IRD (≈IRS) telling me that my annual tax return was already completed by them (electronically) and I just needed to login to confirm/authorise it.
    - tremon 5y ago
      Same in NL, your employer already supplies the tax service with your wage information, and banks already supply the tax service with year-in/year-out balance information on your accounts. You can login on their portal, verify the pre-filled data on the form, and submit it. You only need to enter your own deductibles, if relevant.
    - 5y ago
tgbugs 5y ago
The real trick will be to make sure that the AI negotiating on your behalf is really your advocate and has not somehow been subverted (by any variety of means).
- meowkit 5y ago
  Sounds like a business opportunity if 3rd party algorithms become a thing. Pick our negotiation bot! Will get you the best deal! Only $100 per analysis!
  - Fordec 5y ago
    Then go a step further and get ensemble negotiation bots that aggregate the negotiation providers. Or meta-negotiate the best deal among the negotiation AI providers.
- Fordec 5y ago
  Basically the same dilemma industries with actual union representation encounter when individuals are picking what union to join today. Some unions have lower membership prices, some have more negotiation strength, is the organization competent etc.
- sgt101 5y ago
  Also solving the complexity of dominant negotiation strategies in unconstrained settings algorithmically would be good
medium_burrito 5y ago
Automation is the next outsourcing. I'm one of the people making it happen. People forget that it doesn't need to be 100% automated. If I can automate 25% of the work of a staff-level engineer, that's amazing. If I can do 50% of a junior engineer, superb. Right now software engineering is still in baby steps as far as tools are concerned, but the next decade will see some remarkable stuff happen once we have a more solid foundation and start applying the previous few decades' progress in machine learning and statistics.
- brandonmenc 5y ago
  > People forget that it doesn't need to be 100% automated. If I can automate 25% of the work of a staff-level engineer, that's amazing. If I can do 50% of a junior engineer, superb. This has been the trend since ENIAC. And yet, the demand for programming is higher than ever. It could be another century before those lines intersect. Maybe longer. We keep automating ourselves up into higher levels, only to discover that there is a ton more work to be done up there. Which, imo, is a very good thing.
- groby_b 5y ago
  You know, I truly hope that's true. At the same point, that has been the mantra for a while. Back in the 80's, when I was but a wee lass, as it came time to choose a college path, my uncle warned me not to get into software engineering because his buddies at IBM told me that it'd be all automated away in the next decade. 4GLs happened, but the work didn't really become less. (And 5GL spectacularly face-planted) In the 90s, we got widespread adoption of the Internet and search engines, and the prognosis was we'd just be able to look up everything. In the aughts, it was javascript & frameworks that were going to eat everybody's lunch. In the 2010s, did we ever build fancy linear regressions^W^W^W machine learning solutions. We always talk about how that somehow would reduce the work, but instead we continue to build barely maintainable mountains of complexity at the outer edge of what we can handle. I wish you success. I'm not holding my breath it'll significantly reduce software engineering work. It'll shift what we do, no doubt. I'd be surprised if this is the decade where we make a significant dent. We'll just heap on more complexity.
  - 5y ago
LegitGandalf 5y ago
>The thing that hasn't come about yet though is, sales, marketing, accounting can also be outsourced. Dare I say automated. Yep, just consider how much sales, marketing and accounting work the App and Play store has automated. Not to mention software delivery and installation work.
Mengkudulangsat 5y ago
Sounds like a precursor to Distributed Autonomous Organizations. Although previous experiments in these have been disastrous to say the least, I find the idea very appealing.
- pm90 5y ago
  Would you know where I could read up more on Distributed Autonomous Organizations? Sounds fascinating.
  - zo1 5y ago
    Not quite what you were asking, but the first thing that popped into my head are "dispute resolution organizations" which come from Libertarianism and other schools of thought. Might be an interesting avenue of reading if you want to learn more about inter-actor relations and contracts in the absence of centralized control.
  - Mengkudulangsat 5y ago
    The DAO fiasco from a few years ago [1] comes to mind. Personally I think capital allocation is way too complex an endeavor to automate. Data annotations maybe... [1] https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao#section-the-dao-hack-remedy-forks-ethereum https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao#sec...
Noos 5y ago
But who would they sell things to? I mean, if we're just down to the capital class, there simply will not be enough of them to buy from each other to sustain an economy. Those payroll and hr people also happen to buy people's products, which AI never will. If there is no IRS and no tax filers, there goes a lot of purchasing power. You can't create or compete if no one is there to buy them.
- Fordec 5y ago
  Skipping over the same argument that comes up every time an industry gets threatened. Farmers, Textile workers, Miners, Machine Operators. It boils down to an inability to see what comes next and a fear for ones own quarter in the year the argument gets made. But why can't AI buy products? What makes a purchase more legitimate by the click of a human finger over the automated confirmation by a piece of software? Hierarchy of needs? Why can't automated systems that have energy, networking, AWS Bill's etc. not also have needs? And then there's a simple fact of there is a finite number of moths to feed. In the billions, but finite. Why can't an industry of trillions of digital actors, that scales far faster than biological ones, not be an even bigger economy in it's own right?
- mellavora 5y ago
  we could automate the purchasing? Remember the stories about self-driving taxis which would purchase their own maintenance out of their earnings? I think it was supposed to use blockchain. Our current economy seems to rely on "the modern consumer", as per your point-- and we are told that our main role is to "consume". Seems to me this would be extremely easy to automate. Then we don't need people any more, the robots can consume themselves! Anyone want a paperclip?
specialist 5y ago
1/2 of jobs are pointless. 1/2 of labor will be automated. Coincidence? It'd be amusing to re-score the highest risk jobs with the bullshit jobs criteria, measure the overlap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://willrobotstakemyjob.com/highest-risk-jobs https://willrobotstakemyjob.com/highest-risk-jobs I worry that automating bullshit jobs will embed those tasks deeper into our economy, like technical debt. Better to just eliminate the bullshit jobs.
- TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  I think it might not be a coincidence, just in the opposite direction you are suggesting. The non-bullshit jobs will be automated, the bullshit will remain. Many of categories of bullshit jobs are actually unusually resistant to automation. > flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants Impossible to automate. The whole point of the job is to be wasting a human's time to feed someone's ego. > goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists Automation will make your goons more effective, but the arms race against the other side's goons who also have automation will prevent the jobs from going away. > duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive If they aren't going to pay the upfront cost to fix the problem, they aren't going to pay the upfront cost to automate it either.
benhurmarcel 5y ago
It seems to me that you overestimate the cost of people making all that happen currently, and underestimate the difficulty of automating it (and maintain that automation). A lot of work isn't impossible to automate, it's just not worth the cost. Lots of people unfortunately earn very low salaries, they're cheaper than a machine. This is the case both in manufacturing, and administration.

by Fordec 5y ago

novok 5y ago

So you mean, how work was done before the modern nation state, income tax, passports, visas and mass literacy? All of the work you describe was created by human bureaucracies for human bureaucracies. Beforehand you didn't need the paperwork.

Fordec 5y ago
The difference being, before there was no paperwork, at all. In such an automated system, the checks, balances and oversight all still exist. They're just invisible to the human eye rather than libertarian style just gone.
- novok 5y ago
  You don't need AI or advanced software for automated background bureaucracy made well. All of that is possible today, and the amount of extra work it is today consuming human time is still ultimately a choice of humanity.

jdgoesmarching 5y ago

It’s kind of terrifying how few people in this industry take this seriously and dismiss unionizing and organization efforts. Every publicly owned company is incentivized to squeeze every possible penny out of their income statement and we know from history that corporations will fight hard to eliminate high wage labor whenever possible. Our salaries and power won’t last forever, and if we don’t turn around our culture of worshipping techno-aristocrats quickly then we’re all going to have a rough time in the next few decades.

rawtxapp 5y ago
To play the devil's advocate, that would also mean keeping things inefficient on purpose to avoid job losses. I want my taxes to be automatically by some computer without having to deal with a human that's more prone to errors. I want self-driving cars so that I don't have to deal with another human that's more prone to accidents, etc, etc. The list goes on. I think it's inevitable that we will see some kind of UBI, otherwise there would be big revolutions when most jobs are automated to some degree.
- robocat 5y ago
  > I want my taxes to be automatically by some computer without having to deal with a human that's more prone to errors. This is already in progress in New Zealand. The government simplified taxation rules and everything is fairly automated now, the payments and the end-of-year. I got an email this year from our IRD (≈IRS) telling me that my annual tax return was already completed by them (electronically) and I just needed to login to confirm/authorise it.
  - tremon 5y ago
    Same in NL, your employer already supplies the tax service with your wage information, and banks already supply the tax service with year-in/year-out balance information on your accounts. You can login on their portal, verify the pre-filled data on the form, and submit it. You only need to enter your own deductibles, if relevant.
  - 5y ago

tgbugs 5y ago

The real trick will be to make sure that the AI negotiating on your behalf is really your advocate and has not somehow been subverted (by any variety of means).

meowkit 5y ago
Sounds like a business opportunity if 3rd party algorithms become a thing. Pick our negotiation bot! Will get you the best deal! Only $100 per analysis!
- Fordec 5y ago
  Then go a step further and get ensemble negotiation bots that aggregate the negotiation providers. Or meta-negotiate the best deal among the negotiation AI providers.
Fordec 5y ago
Basically the same dilemma industries with actual union representation encounter when individuals are picking what union to join today. Some unions have lower membership prices, some have more negotiation strength, is the organization competent etc.
sgt101 5y ago
Also solving the complexity of dominant negotiation strategies in unconstrained settings algorithmically would be good

medium_burrito 5y ago

Automation is the next outsourcing. I'm one of the people making it happen. People forget that it doesn't need to be 100% automated. If I can automate 25% of the work of a staff-level engineer, that's amazing. If I can do 50% of a junior engineer, superb. Right now software engineering is still in baby steps as far as tools are concerned, but the next decade will see some remarkable stuff happen once we have a more solid foundation and start applying the previous few decades' progress in machine learning and statistics.

brandonmenc 5y ago
> People forget that it doesn't need to be 100% automated. If I can automate 25% of the work of a staff-level engineer, that's amazing. If I can do 50% of a junior engineer, superb. This has been the trend since ENIAC. And yet, the demand for programming is higher than ever. It could be another century before those lines intersect. Maybe longer. We keep automating ourselves up into higher levels, only to discover that there is a ton more work to be done up there. Which, imo, is a very good thing.
groby_b 5y ago
You know, I truly hope that's true. At the same point, that has been the mantra for a while. Back in the 80's, when I was but a wee lass, as it came time to choose a college path, my uncle warned me not to get into software engineering because his buddies at IBM told me that it'd be all automated away in the next decade. 4GLs happened, but the work didn't really become less. (And 5GL spectacularly face-planted) In the 90s, we got widespread adoption of the Internet and search engines, and the prognosis was we'd just be able to look up everything. In the aughts, it was javascript & frameworks that were going to eat everybody's lunch. In the 2010s, did we ever build fancy linear regressions^W^W^W machine learning solutions. We always talk about how that somehow would reduce the work, but instead we continue to build barely maintainable mountains of complexity at the outer edge of what we can handle. I wish you success. I'm not holding my breath it'll significantly reduce software engineering work. It'll shift what we do, no doubt. I'd be surprised if this is the decade where we make a significant dent. We'll just heap on more complexity.
- 5y ago

LegitGandalf 5y ago

>The thing that hasn't come about yet though is, sales, marketing, accounting can also be outsourced. Dare I say automated. Yep, just consider how much sales, marketing and accounting work the App and Play store has automated. Not to mention software delivery and installation work.

Mengkudulangsat 5y ago

Sounds like a precursor to Distributed Autonomous Organizations. Although previous experiments in these have been disastrous to say the least, I find the idea very appealing.

pm90 5y ago
Would you know where I could read up more on Distributed Autonomous Organizations? Sounds fascinating.
- zo1 5y ago
  Not quite what you were asking, but the first thing that popped into my head are "dispute resolution organizations" which come from Libertarianism and other schools of thought. Might be an interesting avenue of reading if you want to learn more about inter-actor relations and contracts in the absence of centralized control.
- Mengkudulangsat 5y ago
  The DAO fiasco from a few years ago [1] comes to mind. Personally I think capital allocation is way too complex an endeavor to automate. Data annotations maybe... [1] https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao#section-the-dao-hack-remedy-forks-ethereum https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao#sec...

Noos 5y ago

But who would they sell things to? I mean, if we're just down to the capital class, there simply will not be enough of them to buy from each other to sustain an economy. Those payroll and hr people also happen to buy people's products, which AI never will. If there is no IRS and no tax filers, there goes a lot of purchasing power. You can't create or compete if no one is there to buy them.

Fordec 5y ago
Skipping over the same argument that comes up every time an industry gets threatened. Farmers, Textile workers, Miners, Machine Operators. It boils down to an inability to see what comes next and a fear for ones own quarter in the year the argument gets made. But why can't AI buy products? What makes a purchase more legitimate by the click of a human finger over the automated confirmation by a piece of software? Hierarchy of needs? Why can't automated systems that have energy, networking, AWS Bill's etc. not also have needs? And then there's a simple fact of there is a finite number of moths to feed. In the billions, but finite. Why can't an industry of trillions of digital actors, that scales far faster than biological ones, not be an even bigger economy in it's own right?
mellavora 5y ago
we could automate the purchasing? Remember the stories about self-driving taxis which would purchase their own maintenance out of their earnings? I think it was supposed to use blockchain. Our current economy seems to rely on "the modern consumer", as per your point-- and we are told that our main role is to "consume". Seems to me this would be extremely easy to automate. Then we don't need people any more, the robots can consume themselves! Anyone want a paperclip?

specialist 5y ago

1/2 of jobs are pointless. 1/2 of labor will be automated. Coincidence? It'd be amusing to re-score the highest risk jobs with the bullshit jobs criteria, measure the overlap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://willrobotstakemyjob.com/highest-risk-jobs https://willrobotstakemyjob.com/highest-risk-jobs I worry that automating bullshit jobs will embed those tasks deeper into our economy, like technical debt. Better to just eliminate the bullshit jobs.

TheCoelacanth 5y ago
I think it might not be a coincidence, just in the opposite direction you are suggesting. The non-bullshit jobs will be automated, the bullshit will remain. Many of categories of bullshit jobs are actually unusually resistant to automation. > flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants Impossible to automate. The whole point of the job is to be wasting a human's time to feed someone's ego. > goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists Automation will make your goons more effective, but the arms race against the other side's goons who also have automation will prevent the jobs from going away. > duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive If they aren't going to pay the upfront cost to fix the problem, they aren't going to pay the upfront cost to automate it either.

benhurmarcel 5y ago

It seems to me that you overestimate the cost of people making all that happen currently, and underestimate the difficulty of automating it (and maintain that automation). A lot of work isn't impossible to automate, it's just not worth the cost. Lots of people unfortunately earn very low salaries, they're cheaper than a machine. This is the case both in manufacturing, and administration.