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Having respect for the skills of a worker and also believing that they are possible to automate are not mutually exclusive. It's no different from people sayin

Having respect for the skills of a worker and also believing that they are possible to automate are not mutually exclusive. It's no different from people saying the same thing about chess and chess players, or go and go players, before the problem was solved. And it's not just blue collar workers that are a target of this idea. We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and into the commercial realm, e.g. GitHub copilot.

dylan604 5y ago
Is a computer iterating through every possible chess move "skill" or just being able to compute the best odds?
- throwaways885 5y ago
  Is this any different from what a human is doing? I would also say that the approaches taken by something like AlphaGo are more interesting, too. Because unlike chess the solution space for Go is too large to simply look at all possible moves.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    a computer iterating through things isn't skill per se, TO ME, because it's just what it was built to do. No more skill involved than a machine cutting wood. A human doing this is a skill as they have honed that ability with hours upon hours of studying and reading and playing etc. A computer can do this from the first time the devs get the bugs worked out. Is that the same?
Grakel 5y ago
Programming will be automated long before brick laying. We can barely print a document with confidence.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Printing is hard primarily because of misaligned business incentives, which form a bubble of suck that's eerily resilient to market optimization. Automating programming definitely seems like an easier target in comparison.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    Printing works really well. It's print drivers (software) that are an utter and complete mess. I've never had a printer that didn't work: I've had plenty that wanted the correct offering to the HP website to be made and several hundred megs of adware installed before a postscript file made it to the actual hardware.
- Overton-Window 5y ago
  Programming is the conversion of ambiguous human requirements into machine readable instructions. To automate, computers would need to understand ambiguous human requirements. This is AGI. By comparison, brick laying is trivial.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    This plays exactly into the OP's comment - but if that is your sincerely held belief there are ~4,000 bricklayers~[1] in America today and you could make a whole boatload of money if you could automate their work. 1. According to the BLS link below it's actually closer to 50,000.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
      No one is even thinking about trying to completely automate coding. There's tons of "no code" solutions - but these are all just different versions of coding and programming languages - usually with GUIs and pictures instead of words. There's more than 60,000 SWEs that work in my company. Amazon, Google, Apple, and MSFT could make >$10Bn/year each if they could automate coding. The fact that none of them are even trying - when it sort of goes with their core businesses - should give you some indication that this is something unlikely to be automated any time soon. The reason bricklaying ISN'T automated is probably because there's ONLY 59,000 bricklayers in the US (a $3B market), it's not generalizable, and even if it was - the cost to move a machine, set it up, and maintain it - it's hard to imagine massive cost savings - 50% seems generous. If there were >1M bricklayers - and/or they made >$400k/year on average, the work was generalizable, and automating would bring huge cost-savings that could be captured - there would be a LOT more effort into automating bricklaying. But none of these are true. How much of brick laying is generalizable (building a new house) vs custom (repairing some old wall with non-standard bricks)? I have no idea - but I'm guessing not a lot more than 50%. That's a $1.5B market. You'd be luck to cut the costs by 50% - that's maybe $750M. It could easily cost more than than to automate bricklaying! Why even try?? No one is interested in investing in that risk / reward. On the contrary - most of Radiology could be automated and most of it is generalizable. Since hospitals are monopolies and healthcare is a mess - you might be able to capture all the cost savings - which would be close to 100%! Since there's ~35k Radiologists, and they're some of the highest paid workers in the world - there are a lot of efforts to actually automate this (and they're doing quite well). If you think automating radiology is easier than building a hamburger-cooking robot, you're naive. If you think AGI is easier to achieve than building a tomato-harvesting machine, you're clueless. There's just simply not hundreds of billions to be made automating cooking hamburgers and harvesting tomatoes more efficiently. And it's not easy to generalize and automate cooking or harvesting EVERYTHING. And even if there was, restaurants and groceries are commodities - not monopolies. You couldn't capture all the savings. A race to the bottom on prices would eventually just pass the savings on to the customer - not juice profits. That's not something you want to spend massive, risky R&D on. That's why we haven't automated cooking hamburgers and harvesting tomatoes. Not because it's harder than protein folding, fusion energy, or true AGI... From another point of view - we've had machines that mop floors for decades - and there's still a lot of people employed to mop floors. Is this because mopping floors is incredibly complex and creative? No - it's because people who mop floors get paid minimum wage, and they do a lot of other things, too.
narag 5y ago
It's no different from people saying the same thing about chess and chess players, or go and go players... Well, car assembling plants are older than Deep Blue, IIRC and they are very complex and "very robotic" in a physical sense.
willbw 5y ago
I think it is different from people saying we couldn't automate chess or go. The difference is between a purely data domain, chess or go, where it can both be translated 1-1 into a computer simulation of the game AND the inputs are data. I realise that you could define everything as data - laying a brick, you take the inputs of where to position the brick, etc. However I think we can make the distinction between chess where the data is "Pawn is on e4" and the much greater complexity of the real world where we are dealing with billions of atoms. Perhaps not everyone agrees with me.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  A big part of ML in robotics is actually making nearly 1:1 simulations of the world and the actuators. It's fairly sucessful. We can simulate for example driving a car really well. Simulating human behaviour is harder, but simulating brick laying is not that hard, we have the technology to do so already.
  - bumby 5y ago
    >We can simulate for example driving a car really well. Can you qualify this more specifically? In many domains (particularly safety critical ones) “reasonably well” may not be sufficient
    - meowkit 5y ago
      Self driving hours having a lower incident rate than human drivers. That’s the minimum. Having a 99.9x% success rate (put as many 9s as you desire) is your qualifier and that’s a standard measure in operational uptime.
      - afrodc_ 5y ago
        I've heard the opposite of this in that self driving cars underperform compared to human drivers across the board. The sample size of self driving cars doing everything a driver does is also miniscule. Do you have a source?
cratermoon 5y ago
Where's the robot that can actually pick up and move pieces on standard chessboard, with no special guidelines or restrictions on pieces?
- jpindar 5y ago
  Seriously? There's lots of them on YouTube. Here's one with two different robots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65YDAXfSAWw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65YDAXfSAWw
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    Nope. Those are pre-programmed to know "the board is here", "the pieces start here". Give them a random (but still legal) position, ask them to make the best legal move. See if they can even find a piece Quick test: replace any pawn with a queen. See if the bot notices.
    - jpindar 5y ago
      There are plenty of other videos that demonstrate computer vision detecting chess pieces.
h0l0cube 5y ago
> We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and into the commercial realm, e.g. GitHub copilot. As soon as GitHub was acquired by Microsoft I knew their intentions were for automated coding tools. I wasn't concerned about this affecting my livelihood in the short to medium term, because state-of-the-art ANNs won't be able to grasp the context of business requirements without developing adult human level intelligence. Thus, even a full program built by such a system would need to be verified by a human to be sure it will behave as desired, obviating any gain in terms of automation. Even the rudimentary boilerplate that copilot spits out suffers from this problem.
- ehnto 5y ago
  I started thinking about how you might automate game development, and I think it's a pretty good thought excercise on the topic. I feel like the end result is just what we already have, game engines with visual programming and drag and drop editors. You don't add much value by automating the programming since you still have to define the input and outcome. The real win was building the complex logic and state editor into a good UX.
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    This video really amazed me in terms of automated game development. My fantasies are something like this and GPT-3 plus a couple decades of progress. I think we'll get to genuinely open ended sand box games. https://youtu.be/udPY5rQVoW0 https://youtu.be/udPY5rQVoW0
    - h0l0cube 5y ago
      Predicting the next frame from previous frames and learnt sequences is a neat trick, but I think automated game development is already very possible with simple techniques like genetic algorithms, or even a PRNG. I mean Rogue and it's descendants are very much automated game development, but GPT-3 could be useful for something like dynamic quest generation, world-building, narrative, adaptive NPCs (including dialogue) etc.
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
Code has been getting automated since basically day one of programming. The funny thing about automation in programming - it has always opened up more doors - and led to more employment in programming. We are so far from anything that resembles real automated coding - that coding automation should continue to be celebrated by engineers for a long time. GitHub Co-Pilot and VS Code aren't going to replace you - they're just going to let your company offer a better product, release a new version sooner, test different versions, etc.
- gilbetron 5y ago
  > Code has been getting automated since basically day one of programming. Comments like these make me wonder if you actually code. Code is automation, that's what it does. You don't write the same code twice. Ever.
  - tclancy 5y ago
    As long as you never learn a second language.
  - jjeaff 5y ago
    Frameworks like react are a type of automation of coding. Any framework. Or any higher level language. Anything that isn't just entering ones and zeroes is already a level of automation in coding.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  Automated tools will lower the difficulty of coding to the point where it'll be easy to pick up and be massively productive. Developers will be replaced by domain experts becoming productive developers easily with automated tools.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Ha ha. I remember people making those claims about 4GLs and visual programming tools 30 years ago. It wasn't true then and won't be true in our lifetimes. Domain experts typically lack the mindset to think through edge cases and failure modes.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kragen 5y ago
We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and into the commercial realm, e.g. IBM's "FORTRAN Automatic Coding System", whose name is an abbreviation of "FORmula TRANslator". This is an enormous effort. John Backus, a longtime proponent of such "automatic programming" systems who is leading the project, reported in 1955 that in its first edition, in early 1956, "FORTRAN" is expected to include eight to ten thousand instructions. It will be distributed to all lessees of the IBM 704 high-speed electronic digital computer in 1957. Though many programmers are skeptical of the quality of programs produced by the so-called "compiler", experience has shown that it only takes 2-3 days to learn, and the programs output by "FORTRAN" are often better than those written by expert programmers! One of the great improvements in the second edition of FORTRAN, FORTRAN II, is that an application program can be written not as the output of a single compilation, but of many separate compilations. [The above is liberally quoted and reorganized from the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 6(1), 01984.]
dragonwriter 5y ago
> We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and into the commercial realm Every step in programming tooling since programs stopped being input as manual hardware configuration has been automation of programming, and its just made more work, and higher paying work, for programmers.
- petra 5y ago
  The main reason there's more programming work, is because machines are capable to do more(connectivity, mobility, ux, marketing, etc).
  - mdtusz 5y ago
    What do you think enabled these things?
    - eru 5y ago
      Advances in hardware and software.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Not the same programmers though nor the same job though. The job of programmer-by-plugging-in-wires was still eliminated.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Not the same programmers though nor the same job though. The details of job changed, as more low level pieces of it were automated leaving the higher-level, more abstract bits, but for most of the changes, while some either bailed for other work or rode the dying embers of the old way to retirement, programmers generally adapted.
morpheos137 5y ago
Actually it is realy different since games like chess or go are closed problems, i.e. they are deterministic. The number of parameters necessary to integrate to turn an ostensibly open real world problem like "driving" into a deterministic game like computer chess or go is far greater.
coding123 5y ago
Are we sure that the ML experts that wanted to beat real human chess players actually respected them? Wouldn't they know that at some point the enjoyment of chess itself might fade if the best in the world is a computer? Maybe chess is having a moment right now due to Netflix, perhaps maybe it's a permanent upswing. But long term, I don't know if it will remain interesting to people.
- EthanHarv 5y ago
  I personally doubt chess will fade. As far as I can tell, the enjoyment of high-level chess is less to do with reaching objective perfection, rather it's more the "thrill" of seeing a _human_ who has poured their life into the pursuit of improving their game. It doesn't really matter that a computer can beat them, we care about them because people like seeing other people's talents. And on a casual level, nothing changes if the best in the world is a human or computer, so the casual player isn't particularly affected.
- eru 5y ago
  Chess is now more popular than ever before. Not sure how important Netflix is here? There are lots of chess players on YouTube, too. Go also get much more popular in the West for a while when Alphago came along.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  Dunno, but people are still into competitive weightlifting even though the forklift has been around for over a hundred years.

dylan604 5y ago

Is a computer iterating through every possible chess move "skill" or just being able to compute the best odds?

throwaways885 5y ago
Is this any different from what a human is doing? I would also say that the approaches taken by something like AlphaGo are more interesting, too. Because unlike chess the solution space for Go is too large to simply look at all possible moves.
- dylan604 5y ago
  a computer iterating through things isn't skill per se, TO ME, because it's just what it was built to do. No more skill involved than a machine cutting wood. A human doing this is a skill as they have honed that ability with hours upon hours of studying and reading and playing etc. A computer can do this from the first time the devs get the bugs worked out. Is that the same?

Grakel 5y ago

Programming will be automated long before brick laying. We can barely print a document with confidence.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
Printing is hard primarily because of misaligned business incentives, which form a bubble of suck that's eerily resilient to market optimization. Automating programming definitely seems like an easier target in comparison.
- XorNot 5y ago
  Printing works really well. It's print drivers (software) that are an utter and complete mess. I've never had a printer that didn't work: I've had plenty that wanted the correct offering to the HP website to be made and several hundred megs of adware installed before a postscript file made it to the actual hardware.
Overton-Window 5y ago
Programming is the conversion of ambiguous human requirements into machine readable instructions. To automate, computers would need to understand ambiguous human requirements. This is AGI. By comparison, brick laying is trivial.
- munk-a 5y ago
  This plays exactly into the OP's comment - but if that is your sincerely held belief there are ~4,000 bricklayers~[1] in America today and you could make a whole boatload of money if you could automate their work. 1. According to the BLS link below it's actually closer to 50,000.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    No one is even thinking about trying to completely automate coding. There's tons of "no code" solutions - but these are all just different versions of coding and programming languages - usually with GUIs and pictures instead of words. There's more than 60,000 SWEs that work in my company. Amazon, Google, Apple, and MSFT could make >$10Bn/year each if they could automate coding. The fact that none of them are even trying - when it sort of goes with their core businesses - should give you some indication that this is something unlikely to be automated any time soon. The reason bricklaying ISN'T automated is probably because there's ONLY 59,000 bricklayers in the US (a $3B market), it's not generalizable, and even if it was - the cost to move a machine, set it up, and maintain it - it's hard to imagine massive cost savings - 50% seems generous. If there were >1M bricklayers - and/or they made >$400k/year on average, the work was generalizable, and automating would bring huge cost-savings that could be captured - there would be a LOT more effort into automating bricklaying. But none of these are true. How much of brick laying is generalizable (building a new house) vs custom (repairing some old wall with non-standard bricks)? I have no idea - but I'm guessing not a lot more than 50%. That's a $1.5B market. You'd be luck to cut the costs by 50% - that's maybe $750M. It could easily cost more than than to automate bricklaying! Why even try?? No one is interested in investing in that risk / reward. On the contrary - most of Radiology could be automated and most of it is generalizable. Since hospitals are monopolies and healthcare is a mess - you might be able to capture all the cost savings - which would be close to 100%! Since there's ~35k Radiologists, and they're some of the highest paid workers in the world - there are a lot of efforts to actually automate this (and they're doing quite well). If you think automating radiology is easier than building a hamburger-cooking robot, you're naive. If you think AGI is easier to achieve than building a tomato-harvesting machine, you're clueless. There's just simply not hundreds of billions to be made automating cooking hamburgers and harvesting tomatoes more efficiently. And it's not easy to generalize and automate cooking or harvesting EVERYTHING. And even if there was, restaurants and groceries are commodities - not monopolies. You couldn't capture all the savings. A race to the bottom on prices would eventually just pass the savings on to the customer - not juice profits. That's not something you want to spend massive, risky R&D on. That's why we haven't automated cooking hamburgers and harvesting tomatoes. Not because it's harder than protein folding, fusion energy, or true AGI... From another point of view - we've had machines that mop floors for decades - and there's still a lot of people employed to mop floors. Is this because mopping floors is incredibly complex and creative? No - it's because people who mop floors get paid minimum wage, and they do a lot of other things, too.

narag 5y ago

It's no different from people saying the same thing about chess and chess players, or go and go players... Well, car assembling plants are older than Deep Blue, IIRC and they are very complex and "very robotic" in a physical sense.

willbw 5y ago

I think it is different from people saying we couldn't automate chess or go. The difference is between a purely data domain, chess or go, where it can both be translated 1-1 into a computer simulation of the game AND the inputs are data. I realise that you could define everything as data - laying a brick, you take the inputs of where to position the brick, etc. However I think we can make the distinction between chess where the data is "Pawn is on e4" and the much greater complexity of the real world where we are dealing with billions of atoms. Perhaps not everyone agrees with me.

sudosysgen 5y ago
A big part of ML in robotics is actually making nearly 1:1 simulations of the world and the actuators. It's fairly sucessful. We can simulate for example driving a car really well. Simulating human behaviour is harder, but simulating brick laying is not that hard, we have the technology to do so already.
- bumby 5y ago
  >We can simulate for example driving a car really well. Can you qualify this more specifically? In many domains (particularly safety critical ones) “reasonably well” may not be sufficient
  - meowkit 5y ago
    Self driving hours having a lower incident rate than human drivers. That’s the minimum. Having a 99.9x% success rate (put as many 9s as you desire) is your qualifier and that’s a standard measure in operational uptime.
    - afrodc_ 5y ago
      I've heard the opposite of this in that self driving cars underperform compared to human drivers across the board. The sample size of self driving cars doing everything a driver does is also miniscule. Do you have a source?

cratermoon 5y ago

Where's the robot that can actually pick up and move pieces on standard chessboard, with no special guidelines or restrictions on pieces?

jpindar 5y ago
Seriously? There's lots of them on YouTube. Here's one with two different robots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65YDAXfSAWw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65YDAXfSAWw
- cratermoon 5y ago
  Nope. Those are pre-programmed to know "the board is here", "the pieces start here". Give them a random (but still legal) position, ask them to make the best legal move. See if they can even find a piece Quick test: replace any pawn with a queen. See if the bot notices.
  - jpindar 5y ago
    There are plenty of other videos that demonstrate computer vision detecting chess pieces.

h0l0cube 5y ago

> We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and into the commercial realm, e.g. GitHub copilot. As soon as GitHub was acquired by Microsoft I knew their intentions were for automated coding tools. I wasn't concerned about this affecting my livelihood in the short to medium term, because state-of-the-art ANNs won't be able to grasp the context of business requirements without developing adult human level intelligence. Thus, even a full program built by such a system would need to be verified by a human to be sure it will behave as desired, obviating any gain in terms of automation. Even the rudimentary boilerplate that copilot spits out suffers from this problem.

ehnto 5y ago
I started thinking about how you might automate game development, and I think it's a pretty good thought excercise on the topic. I feel like the end result is just what we already have, game engines with visual programming and drag and drop editors. You don't add much value by automating the programming since you still have to define the input and outcome. The real win was building the complex logic and state editor into a good UX.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  This video really amazed me in terms of automated game development. My fantasies are something like this and GPT-3 plus a couple decades of progress. I think we'll get to genuinely open ended sand box games. https://youtu.be/udPY5rQVoW0 https://youtu.be/udPY5rQVoW0
  - h0l0cube 5y ago
    Predicting the next frame from previous frames and learnt sequences is a neat trick, but I think automated game development is already very possible with simple techniques like genetic algorithms, or even a PRNG. I mean Rogue and it's descendants are very much automated game development, but GPT-3 could be useful for something like dynamic quest generation, world-building, narrative, adaptive NPCs (including dialogue) etc.

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago

Code has been getting automated since basically day one of programming. The funny thing about automation in programming - it has always opened up more doors - and led to more employment in programming. We are so far from anything that resembles real automated coding - that coding automation should continue to be celebrated by engineers for a long time. GitHub Co-Pilot and VS Code aren't going to replace you - they're just going to let your company offer a better product, release a new version sooner, test different versions, etc.

gilbetron 5y ago
> Code has been getting automated since basically day one of programming. Comments like these make me wonder if you actually code. Code is automation, that's what it does. You don't write the same code twice. Ever.
- tclancy 5y ago
  As long as you never learn a second language.
- jjeaff 5y ago
  Frameworks like react are a type of automation of coding. Any framework. Or any higher level language. Anything that isn't just entering ones and zeroes is already a level of automation in coding.
ALittleLight 5y ago
Automated tools will lower the difficulty of coding to the point where it'll be easy to pick up and be massively productive. Developers will be replaced by domain experts becoming productive developers easily with automated tools.
- nradov 5y ago
  Ha ha. I remember people making those claims about 4GLs and visual programming tools 30 years ago. It wasn't true then and won't be true in our lifetimes. Domain experts typically lack the mindset to think through edge cases and failure modes.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kragen 5y ago

We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and into the commercial realm, e.g. IBM's "FORTRAN Automatic Coding System", whose name is an abbreviation of "FORmula TRANslator". This is an enormous effort. John Backus, a longtime proponent of such "automatic programming" systems who is leading the project, reported in 1955 that in its first edition, in early 1956, "FORTRAN" is expected to include eight to ten thousand instructions. It will be distributed to all lessees of the IBM 704 high-speed electronic digital computer in 1957. Though many programmers are skeptical of the quality of programs produced by the so-called "compiler", experience has shown that it only takes 2-3 days to learn, and the programs output by "FORTRAN" are often better than those written by expert programmers! One of the great improvements in the second edition of FORTRAN, FORTRAN II, is that an application program can be written not as the output of a single compilation, but of many separate compilations. [The above is liberally quoted and reorganized from the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 6(1), 01984.]

dragonwriter 5y ago

> We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and into the commercial realm Every step in programming tooling since programs stopped being input as manual hardware configuration has been automation of programming, and its just made more work, and higher paying work, for programmers.

petra 5y ago
The main reason there's more programming work, is because machines are capable to do more(connectivity, mobility, ux, marketing, etc).
- mdtusz 5y ago
  What do you think enabled these things?
  - eru 5y ago
    Advances in hardware and software.
exporectomy 5y ago
Not the same programmers though nor the same job though. The job of programmer-by-plugging-in-wires was still eliminated.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Not the same programmers though nor the same job though. The details of job changed, as more low level pieces of it were automated leaving the higher-level, more abstract bits, but for most of the changes, while some either bailed for other work or rode the dying embers of the old way to retirement, programmers generally adapted.

morpheos137 5y ago

Actually it is realy different since games like chess or go are closed problems, i.e. they are deterministic. The number of parameters necessary to integrate to turn an ostensibly open real world problem like "driving" into a deterministic game like computer chess or go is far greater.

coding123 5y ago

Are we sure that the ML experts that wanted to beat real human chess players actually respected them? Wouldn't they know that at some point the enjoyment of chess itself might fade if the best in the world is a computer? Maybe chess is having a moment right now due to Netflix, perhaps maybe it's a permanent upswing. But long term, I don't know if it will remain interesting to people.

EthanHarv 5y ago
I personally doubt chess will fade. As far as I can tell, the enjoyment of high-level chess is less to do with reaching objective perfection, rather it's more the "thrill" of seeing a _human_ who has poured their life into the pursuit of improving their game. It doesn't really matter that a computer can beat them, we care about them because people like seeing other people's talents. And on a casual level, nothing changes if the best in the world is a human or computer, so the casual player isn't particularly affected.
eru 5y ago
Chess is now more popular than ever before. Not sure how important Netflix is here? There are lots of chess players on YouTube, too. Go also get much more popular in the West for a while when Alphago came along.
stickfigure 5y ago
Dunno, but people are still into competitive weightlifting even though the forklift has been around for over a hundred years.