4 ms·

The 7 Stages of Robot Replacement

50 points by bennesvig 15y ago

saulrh 15y ago
Roboticist here. Thankfully, if the robots learn how to do my job, I have much, much bigger things to worry about.
- suivix 15y ago
  Since your job is to make non-sentient robots, I don't think there'd be big problems.
  - invalidOrTaken 15y ago
    Are you sure about that?
    - suivix 15y ago
      I apologize, I should have said something like "presumably to make".
  - loup-vaillant 15y ago
    The point isn't sentience, but recursive self conception, which opens the door for recursive self improvement. "robots" or "AI", it makes little matter: you may trigger an intelligence explosion anyway. And Friendliness under those circumstances indeed is a Big Problem.
po 15y ago
Every now and then managers get the idea that they can outsource a programmer's job: be it to untrained workers who churn out code or by buying into the latest code generation techniques being sold by big vendors. They think "ok we've solved the problem once, lets just describe it so that we can hire 500 programmers to do it 500 more times!" The thing is that the very definition of 'computer programmer' is to do the part that cannot yet be simplified or automated. Every good programmer has an automation toolbox full of languages and data structures and will replace anything that can be simplified to a set of rules with running code. There is a certain job security in programming but it means a life of continual hill climbing.
- alnayyir 15y ago
  My company, in the midst of what could only be called a hiring crisis in which we're in desperate need of actual programmers, chose to hire a VP of Eng when we already had a PM that set our priorities. Mind you, there are two engineers. Now we have more management than programmers and the new VP of Eng is trying to shove every shitty (and I do mean shitty) corporate off-the-shelf solution into everything we do. Worse, he's now trying to get outsourcers with no experience with any of the technology we use to contribute to work that involves a lot of deep integration.
Kliment 15y ago
This is a question that has been bothering me for a while now. I think we have a cultural problem, as a society, with automation. In the industrial world, wealth creation is being decoupled from (human) work through automation. In the social world, trading work for money is still the primary way of obtaining wealth. At some point, this is going to be unsustainable (many argue it already is). Personally, I thrive on automation. I love building machines and writing programs that do work I believe too humiliating, boring, dangerous or difficult for humans. But I keep encountering people who seem to spend most of their life looking for their next temp job. I can figure out a number of alternative income sources for myself, but I try to think of some for them and it's not easy. I'm not sure what can be done here.
- Tichy 15y ago
  I've thought about it recently, and I suspect the reason it works out for the most part (so far) is that the population self regulates to some degree. That is, people tend to have children when it makes sense for them. Leaving aside the "third world" (I think they might have different reasons), that means they tend to have children when they have jobs and therefore enough money to take care of the children. Then there is a certain likelihood that the same kind of jobs they had are also available for their children. It happens now and then that entire industries break away, leaving millions of people jobless, but on average it seems to work out. That doesn't imply it will continue to work like that in the future, though. In theory it is easy to imagine a world in which no human work is required anymore, which would call for new arrangements of society.
  - Kliment 15y ago
    I like imagining that world. Trouble is, I don't see a clear political and societal path from here to there. (I do see a technical path.) So the question is, how can we, as a society, become less dependent on jobs at at least the same rate we are becoming more dependent on products of automation?
    - dlikhten 15y ago
      Imagine a world where home-made items are being manufactured by machines using increasingly less and less human power. Humans are only doing work that we don't know how to make machines do. This was the industrial revolution. Now it is the IR part Deux. Same shit, more complexities.
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50 points by bennesvig 15y ago

saulrh 15y ago

Roboticist here. Thankfully, if the robots learn how to do my job, I have much, much bigger things to worry about.

suivix 15y ago
Since your job is to make non-sentient robots, I don't think there'd be big problems.
- invalidOrTaken 15y ago
  Are you sure about that?
  - suivix 15y ago
    I apologize, I should have said something like "presumably to make".
- loup-vaillant 15y ago
  The point isn't sentience, but recursive self conception, which opens the door for recursive self improvement. "robots" or "AI", it makes little matter: you may trigger an intelligence explosion anyway. And Friendliness under those circumstances indeed is a Big Problem.

po 15y ago

Every now and then managers get the idea that they can outsource a programmer's job: be it to untrained workers who churn out code or by buying into the latest code generation techniques being sold by big vendors. They think "ok we've solved the problem once, lets just describe it so that we can hire 500 programmers to do it 500 more times!" The thing is that the very definition of 'computer programmer' is to do the part that cannot yet be simplified or automated. Every good programmer has an automation toolbox full of languages and data structures and will replace anything that can be simplified to a set of rules with running code. There is a certain job security in programming but it means a life of continual hill climbing.

alnayyir 15y ago
My company, in the midst of what could only be called a hiring crisis in which we're in desperate need of actual programmers, chose to hire a VP of Eng when we already had a PM that set our priorities. Mind you, there are two engineers. Now we have more management than programmers and the new VP of Eng is trying to shove every shitty (and I do mean shitty) corporate off-the-shelf solution into everything we do. Worse, he's now trying to get outsourcers with no experience with any of the technology we use to contribute to work that involves a lot of deep integration.

Kliment 15y ago

This is a question that has been bothering me for a while now. I think we have a cultural problem, as a society, with automation. In the industrial world, wealth creation is being decoupled from (human) work through automation. In the social world, trading work for money is still the primary way of obtaining wealth. At some point, this is going to be unsustainable (many argue it already is). Personally, I thrive on automation. I love building machines and writing programs that do work I believe too humiliating, boring, dangerous or difficult for humans. But I keep encountering people who seem to spend most of their life looking for their next temp job. I can figure out a number of alternative income sources for myself, but I try to think of some for them and it's not easy. I'm not sure what can be done here.

Tichy 15y ago
I've thought about it recently, and I suspect the reason it works out for the most part (so far) is that the population self regulates to some degree. That is, people tend to have children when it makes sense for them. Leaving aside the "third world" (I think they might have different reasons), that means they tend to have children when they have jobs and therefore enough money to take care of the children. Then there is a certain likelihood that the same kind of jobs they had are also available for their children. It happens now and then that entire industries break away, leaving millions of people jobless, but on average it seems to work out. That doesn't imply it will continue to work like that in the future, though. In theory it is easy to imagine a world in which no human work is required anymore, which would call for new arrangements of society.
- Kliment 15y ago
  I like imagining that world. Trouble is, I don't see a clear political and societal path from here to there. (I do see a technical path.) So the question is, how can we, as a society, become less dependent on jobs at at least the same rate we are becoming more dependent on products of automation?
  - dlikhten 15y ago
    Imagine a world where home-made items are being manufactured by machines using increasingly less and less human power. Humans are only doing work that we don't know how to make machines do. This was the industrial revolution. Now it is the IR part Deux. Same shit, more complexities.

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