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It's so fascinating that physical labor seems to be the main concern when it comes to robots doing it better/cheaper than humans. If anything, we know that auto

• anonporridge 5y ago
  https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
  • fekunde 5y ago
    This story has stuck with me since I read it many years back. And then seeing it come to life in so many ways where machines are "optimizing" processes and workflows for humans is scary.
• newhouseb 5y ago
  100%. Even before you need language models, though, there's an insane amount of "digital manual labor" that involved people shuttling files around and validating / cross referencing data in ways that would be done far more correctly and efficiently by software. In my opinion, low code tooling threatens many more jobs than AI does in the short term.
  • mxuribe 5y ago
    > ...low code tooling threatens many more jobs than AI does in the short term. THIS 100%!
    • Msw242 5y ago
      I don't buy it. Low code can make ICs much more productive, but you don't fire the other three... They have a ton of institutional and domain knowledge. You just find things for them to do that wouldn't have been worthwhile without the leverage that came from low code.
      • mxuribe 5y ago
        While i'm not in favor of firing folks (especially if they do have institutional, domain knowledge)...i firmly believe that orgs will endeavor to force or influence or sneakily trick folks who have domain knowledge into codifying such knowledge which gets input into digital processes which will - also think - get codified by low code tools. As a technologist i like the automation part, but as sympathetic human, i hate that humans will be impacted. By impacted of course i mean that crappy orgs won;t try to find more relevant roles for these impacted humans, they'll resort to crappy things likke layoffs. (Separately, i do believe very much in universal basic income...and in fact having something like UBI in place keeps both my tech brain and human brain happy in a sort of win-win scenario where we get more aujtomation, but humans are taken care of.)
  • judge2020 5y ago
    This is how competition is snuffed out - the companies that realize this have already completed the switch or have started it and they'll be the ones to outlast all their competitors that have fallen behind with slower processes.
  • majormajor 5y ago
    This seems like one of those problems where the last 5% is going to take 99% of the effort and time. A lot of people would be out of jobs if data was truly interchangeable, and there were robust ways of formatting data that would work for everything people wanted to do, and software was bug-free and exported/imported perfectly every time, but... even something "standard" like date/time data is all sorts of hard to have people and their systems actually do correctly in a general way.
    • newhouseb 5y ago
      There's definitely a lot of spaces where this is true but a huge fraction of spaces are not even that complicated. I volunteer my time for various pandemic assistance and basic income work and the number of finance companies (banks, payment processors, etc) that rely on a human being regularly downloading a CSV from one system and uploading it unchanged to another is _absolutely_asinine_.
      • majormajor 5y ago
        That does sound near-trivial to automate, but then I've got to wonder how frequently "regular" is? Saving someone 15 minutes a day is gonna be hard to justify spending programmer time on - or paying for a 3rd party solution? Are there people moving those spreadsheets for like 20+hrs a week?
        • 41b696ef1113 5y ago
          >Are there people moving those spreadsheets for like 20+hrs a week? I am reminded of the Reddit thread[0] where one guy confessed to having automated his entire job. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tenoq/reddit_my_friends_call_me_a_scumbag_because_i/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tenoq/reddit_my_...
        • eyelidlessness 5y ago
          When I temped at Bank of America, there were 20s of people who effectively just shuttled CSVs between points A and B, and a whole on premise army of programmers who made our work redundant. So...
  • lumost 5y ago
    This has been true for as long as people have written software. We eliminate ops with clouds, assembly with compilers, code with libraries, software with SaaS and platforms. What makes low-code/no-code different from everything else?
    • newhouseb 5y ago
      I consider it yet another tool in the abstraction stack that allows folks without software backgrounds to use their expertise to fill their operational needs. Disclaimer: my intention with low/no-code tooling is likely broader and includes everything from WYSWIG form builders to Airtable automations, etc. The key to me is the usage of (1) syntax-free (2) domain-specific tooling to (3) configure software to meet (4) custom business needs (what a mouthful).
    • marcosdumay 5y ago
      I don't think the GP means that low-code will eliminate programmer jobs, but that it will eliminate other office jobs. Seems quite probable to me, as it's their entire goal.
• nojito 5y ago
  This doesn’t make much sense at all. Excel is a great example of how new technology created more jobs than it destroyed.
  • thinkagainbro 5y ago
    Majority of Excel jobs I have seen in regulated industries are because people use the tools that they are familiar with for everything. Do you really need a spreadsheet to generate reports? Project Management Tracking? Timesheets? Task Lists? Calendars and Schedules? The majority of the jobs people do are updating crap in spreadsheets that don’t need to be there. If it weren’t for SOPs and audits, this stuff could be wiped out easily. The only protection for these office workers is the status quo and inertia to change. Excel provides some task automation but still requires recurring human input and maintenance. The new wave of AI does NOT.
    • nojito 5y ago
      Sure in 2022...but when spreadsheet software first arose....many people lost their jobs and many many more people were hired in jobs that never existed before.
• ksdale 5y ago
  I think you're right about automation coming for office jobs, but it's not that odd that physical labor would be the focus, a couple hundred years ago, like 95% of people worked in agriculture, and automation is the reason only 1% of people do today. It's harder to suss out how many factory jobs have been automated away compared to how many are just being done elsewhere, but a lot of factory labor has been automated as well. It's almost like automation is coming for office jobs because it already claimed the low-hanging fruit elsewhere.
  • another_story 5y ago
    I think your last assumption is correct. Agriculture, textiles, automobiles, and food production (not restaurants) have all seen significant automation, while office jobs have actually increased.
  • TapWaterBandit 5y ago
    Very good point, the physical labour we still see has survived 100+ years of attempted automation so is very resilient to it (relatively speaking). Whereas there is still a lot of office works that you can look at and quite easily think "there must be a way for a machine to handle that".
    • dgb23 5y ago
      Only if the wages keep increasing across the board and globally. Else there is no incentive for investment.
  • dgb23 5y ago
    Human computers were automated by computers and created the programming jobs. But we have many more of those than ever and it seems to increase even more. There are types of jobs that don’t necessarily get reduced even though productivity is increased. For example the number of military soldiers is mostly a political decision. Managers, lawyers and other bureaucrats are increasing in numbers and power despite having better educated workers and more sophisticated tools. The economic and political games we play are not aligning with reducing work time to pre industrial levels. Technological progress cannot be thought of as independent of societal factors.
• UnpossibleJim 5y ago
  You don't even have to think about the eventuality of replacements. Just look at the realities of telephone work in modern societies: https://www.nber.org/papers/w28061 https://www.nber.org/papers/w28061
• ModernMech 5y ago
  I dunno, the job of customer service phone rep seems like it should be easy to automate, and they've been attempting to do so for decades, but how many people get absolutely frustrated with such systems?
  • jjoonathan 5y ago
    Is the customer service rep meant to serve you or make you go away? Sometimes it's the latter. I wouldn't be so sure it's a bug.
  • qnsi 5y ago
    I interned in sales. One of my jobs was logging into CRM, counting how many people have tasks to do today / tomorrow / overdue. Count how many deals moved since last day. Count deals value in the basket for specific stages. It would take me 15 minutes a day, before I spent 15 minutes automating it. I know this is extreme example, but one that happened in my job. That was a startup with some of the best VCs in Europe. Another international unicorn, had me create a marketing campaign and then copy the data from the marketing software into an excel. Just copy it like date, name of campaign, number of target users. I guess I spent like 30 minutes a day doing this. Just copying stuff from one web app to a spreadsheet. Automating customer service is hard, but work is so manual people in the programming field I think have no idea. Also made me unable to work in marketing or sales as I would just want to spend time automating stuff.
• usui 5y ago
  I disagree on the order of things. Both are equally on the chopping block. Physical labor has reasons to be focused first compared to office jobs because as a society we've scaled that up far more (more jobs that involve physical labor than office jobs/those that don't), all that physical labor and scale comes at a large cost, and physical labor is at times easier to automate compared to office work. You can decompose the steps of delivering food to a table or lifting a box and dropping it down somewhere else. Naturally, we've converged to optimize for simplicity when it comes to physical labor because people in physical labor don't like wasted effort or operations that change all the time, whereas office jobs can have many conditional branches unpruned.
• gigel82 5y ago
  RPA is definitely a rapidly growing market; look at UIPath's meteoric rise, or the things coming out of Microsoft like Power Automate.
• kmeisthax 5y ago
  We've been automating away office jobs for a lot longer than we've been putting ML in robots to automate factory work, though. For example, the way business mail used to work was that the bureaucrat in question would record their message onto a tape, and then send that tape off to a special department full of typists to actually turn that voice recording into a letter. That whole concept is not only gone, but it's such a foreign idea that it sounds like something you'd write for a dieselpunk novel. The moment we started putting computers on people's desks, we expected everyone to know how to type. Same thing goes for a lot of other office tasks, which are now comfortably managed by software suites we literally call "Office". That being said, the new wave of machine-learning powered automation scares me. Not because I'm worried that my job will be taken by software, but because said software will barely work. For factory jobs, the risks are obvious; that's why we put these robots in cages[0]. However, these office jobs are still making critical decisions that will increasingly be handled by automation. We already know how much having to deal with Google sucks; and they are pretty much addicted to automating away all their support staff. In your manuscript example, it could be that the ML model just starts burying specific genres of book or books with specific types of characters in them, for stupid reasons. [0] Or if you're Amazon, you put the workers in cages, because Dread Pirate Bezos hates them.
  • oceanplexian 5y ago
    > Not because I'm worried that my job will be taken by software, but because said software will barely work. If said automation works like most corporate initiatives I've been a part of, it'll require 5 employees to implement, update, and maintain for every 1 that it saves, meanwhile costing millions of dollars per year to some vendor for a support license. Some workers might be let go but they were on the chopping block anyway. A few years later the whole thing is scrapped and the cycle starts over again.
    • pydry 5y ago
      One of the most interesting automations I saw was a system intended to let the company handle more calls with fewer people by pushing people into not talking to a human. Except the reason they had so many calls in the first place was largely because every other business process was fucked, which kinda meant you needed a human.
• danvoell 5y ago
  Agree. Robotics get the bad rap because it can physically be pointed at vs. an AI in the cloud. Robots mostly take redundant physical labor whereas software is taking the cush jobs away.
• dogman144 5y ago
  There are a few publishing companies in NYC that pitch manuscript ideas and ghost writers are hired to write it. Currently a profitable company, only works around cookbooks and logical book ideas that AI could pick up (what's trending on google, etc), but either way it's coming.
• mint2 5y ago
  Remember the rooms full of people who would calculate numbers all day? What happened to those office jobs? This automation is not new.
  • mateo411 5y ago
    Many of those people were called computers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) They were eventually replaced with ... computers.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  I've noticed that many articles in the financial news are obviously written by bots.
• nitwit005 5y ago
  What you'll find in a lot of workplaces you can't automate judgement of something like a book, because of the management's ever shifting definition of what they want. Twilight is a big hit, and suddenly they want a bunch of teen paranormal romance, and it's even fine if it's poorly written by normal standards if it has the right themes. Your AI from before is largely useless.
• ehnto 5y ago
  Summary maybe, but a judgement I doubt. Your robot would have to be able to address how the book fits into the current zeitgeist which is not something written down. It's ephemeral and intrinsic to the climate of current affairs, pop culture and most challenging, how people actually feel about the combination of all those facts. Humans can fail to grasp all that too, but I think you vastly underestimate the complexity of culture and it's tendency to change rapidly.
• vba616 5y ago
  >we know that automation is coming after office desk jobs first. Those jobs are much easier to automate I would like to hear peoples' experiences with taking non-programming jobs and automating them.