4 ms·

I’ve been automating processes and systems (with software, not robotics) since my early days as a sysadmin. I would later mentor many juniors over the years and

I’ve been automating processes and systems (with software, not robotics) since my early days as a sysadmin. I would later mentor many juniors over the years and was often challenged by them about how good for our careers doing such a thing was. I would always respond that I felt our jobs were to try to automate ourselves out of being necessary, because then we could move on to bigger more challenging problems, now that we had gotten common repeatable issues out of the way. “There will always be bigger, better work for those with the skills required to automate their jobs out of existence”, I would tell them. Now 25 years later I find myself saying similar things when discussing the topic with people who fear automation displacing workers, and my initial response to this article was much the same. Then, a memory of a commercial I used to see as a kid popped into my head and for the first and only time I’ve felt myself being pulled to an anti-automation sentiment - and this is an isolated use case of automation I am feeling this way about, and it is all because of this commercial that apparently still occupies a place in my mind probably 40 years since it aired. https://youtu.be/CSiz6kbIZkw https://youtu.be/CSiz6kbIZkw

adrianN 4y ago
It's only a matter of time until automation replaces humans with normal IQ in a way that they're permanently out of jobs.
- throwaway473825 4y ago
  So far automation has only created more jobs. Why would this suddenly change?
  - langitbiru 4y ago
    "No model, regardless of size, outperformed the best-performing human on any task. However, for some tasks, the best-performing model beat the average human." https://read.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-150/ https://read.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-150/ To be fair, it's hard to predict the future.
  - ycombiredd 4y ago
    I don’t disagree at all. The point is I never really stopped to consider those folks who really will have a hard time moving up to better things, or even laterally. The video I linked, a commercial about a human doing the very job the AI/robotics project aims to do so instead. It’s short. I hope all commenters take 30 seconds to watch it, and maybe within the discussion in this thread, someone will make a salient point that explains away the nuance I referred to for this exact specific instance. It just gave me pause, and opened my eyes to that the issue - and my beliefs - can be more nuanced, in light of such things as the PSA from the 80’s I linked in my original post. What’s that guy supposed to do? He Eve said he learned it slowly but now he’s good at it. When all the sun-menial tasks are automated, what becomes of them? For the record I am a cynical technophile by any measure. I have been called callous (and much worse) for statements like “starvation is a self-solving problem. Eventually there will be enough food for all, as the population decreases”… don’t think me anti-automation; this edge case is a thing that makes me go “hmmm…”
    - suby 4y ago
      I agree that it's generally been true up until now that we've invented new jobs to replace those which we've automated away, but I don't think that is the whole story. Going back to at least the industrial revolution with for example handloom weavers, people who have had their jobs automated away were often impoverished for the rest of their lives. I don't have any statistics to back this up, but I'd argue that this will be true for most displaced workers today -- any career change later in life will put you behind the curve, and it's not like someone working as a coal miner is likely to learn how to code or whatever. My thought is that these new high-tech jobs we invent have been and will be performed by new generations leaving the displaced to suffer. I also don't think this trend of inventing new jobs will hold true forever. To the poster who asked why this would suddenly change, it's because we now have algorithms which can learn. We may be long dead (though perhaps not), but I am absolutely convinced that eventually we will invent machines which are able to perform any given task at or exceeding normal human ability. When that happens, and when we deploy it in mass across the economy, I think we'll have to face an existential crisis as a species. Today we want everyone to have a job because we want everyone to have a means of independently supporting themselves. We want each of us to contribute to society, to not be a burden. We want people to have a job because it often provides a sense of dignity and a sense of purpose. My thought is that, just as you say that normal people will find another job as automation advances, the attitude we will need to adopt instead will be that people in general disabled or not will need to find another means of providing meaning in their life. Because honestly, my thought when watching that commercial was not, "oh how nice that this individual is working." My thought was that the job looked terrible, is probably not good for health, and that it's not a job that human beings should even be doing. I generally think this about most jobs, but especially so about jobs where you're sorting through waste. Real people will suffer from automation, but I think the process is inevitable, and personally wished I existed in a time where automation freed all of us to pursue what we were interested in rather than serving the purposes of making the economic machine spin round. Let it spin on its own.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    Because eventually all the tasks that a normal human can do can be done cheaper by a machine. Whenever more automation enabled economic growth in the past, a (large) part of the new economic activity had to be done by humans. We were lucky that the growth was big enough that more new jobs were created than old jobs were lost. In the near future the fraction of new tasks that can be done by humans will shrink. It is plausible that economic growth as a whole will shrink too. And of course there are the short term effects to consider too. If truck driving is automated, a fifty year old truck driver is unlikely to find a similar job. Changing careers gets progressively harder as you grow older. Many people will be unemployed for the rest of their lives despite other new jobs being created.
jl2718 4y ago
I had a ‘special’ mailman at NASA Ames in 2007-2009. This guy was the best mailman ever; he was 100% focused on his job and did it with the seriousness of handling CBRN materials. You might wonder how someone can go from good to great at mail handling, especially to someone that doesn’t send or receive much mail. There were lots of unexpected things. Address errors always got to me. Mail was sorted by ‘importance’ in the box. Hand delivery of government mail and warnings about anything anomalous. I got the feeling that you could give this guy any small job and he would study the minutiae intensely, finding ways to get better long after any ‘normal’ person would have gotten bored and started thinking about something else. I see a lot of problems when people don’t employ them well. They often live institutionalized and do odd jobs part-time like grocery bagging. At Stop’n’Shop, they are switched around and perform poorly. At the Westford Market Basket, there was a special bagger that had a rough first few years, but learned everything about the store, and ended up managing it, superlatively imo. 100% focus on whatever they are told to do for years at a time. My mailman would have made a great project manager, a set of well-defined human tasks that are almost always ignored and subverted because of the power that comes with the position. Imagine a person in a power role that was actually focused on doing their job right.
martingab 4y ago
In my home-town there is a garage/factory which mainly recruits all kinds of disabled people. They produce e.g. wooden chairs, cup holders and the-like but also purely artistic decorative stuff. All on very different levels i.e. some people nail some wooden sticks together as they have been told, some have complex jobs (if they are able). For sure, all of the tasks they do during the day can be automated and in-fact are automated at the big facilities. However, people like to buy their products - not only because they like to support them and to give them the chance to contribute to the community (like it was said in the video: they pay taxes and everything) but also because there is a general market for hand-made stuff. There is always a small niche of consumers who prefer hand-made stuff because of its individual charm etc. over the soul-less mass-manufactured alternative. I believe that this demand exists precisely because of the rise of automation (and thus is unlikely to vanish is automation is pushed furhter). I'd also argue that working in a woodworking shop - being able to actually create something and (if the handicap/IQ allows for it) even be creative - has a much better effect on overall quality of live than working on a assembly-line bullshit job. I don't know of a handicap which does not allow you to work in any of these kind of jobs but does allow you to assort plastic from paper within reasonable amount of time (but I'm sure someone can give me an example; in that case I'd argue that its up to us to find or "invent" a suitable job or some helper-device to enable them to do so - we have the money to do this). So yes, maybe getting rid of that particular job is the best thing that could happen to the guy in the video - provided there is another job-alternative available that does not only let him add value to the consumer-society but also to the intellectual and creative parts of it as well as of himself (relative to his level of disability).
whatever1 4y ago
Yeah these are great insights in the macro-scale, but on the individual level automation can screw your life completely. Specially if you are older. What you as a 50 y.o. trucker are going to do when Waymo takes your job instead? There is no way you can get the same 6 figure job somewhere outside the truck-driving business.

adrianN 4y ago

It's only a matter of time until automation replaces humans with normal IQ in a way that they're permanently out of jobs.

throwaway473825 4y ago
So far automation has only created more jobs. Why would this suddenly change?
- langitbiru 4y ago
  "No model, regardless of size, outperformed the best-performing human on any task. However, for some tasks, the best-performing model beat the average human." https://read.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-150/ https://read.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-150/ To be fair, it's hard to predict the future.
- ycombiredd 4y ago
  I don’t disagree at all. The point is I never really stopped to consider those folks who really will have a hard time moving up to better things, or even laterally. The video I linked, a commercial about a human doing the very job the AI/robotics project aims to do so instead. It’s short. I hope all commenters take 30 seconds to watch it, and maybe within the discussion in this thread, someone will make a salient point that explains away the nuance I referred to for this exact specific instance. It just gave me pause, and opened my eyes to that the issue - and my beliefs - can be more nuanced, in light of such things as the PSA from the 80’s I linked in my original post. What’s that guy supposed to do? He Eve said he learned it slowly but now he’s good at it. When all the sun-menial tasks are automated, what becomes of them? For the record I am a cynical technophile by any measure. I have been called callous (and much worse) for statements like “starvation is a self-solving problem. Eventually there will be enough food for all, as the population decreases”… don’t think me anti-automation; this edge case is a thing that makes me go “hmmm…”
  - suby 4y ago
    I agree that it's generally been true up until now that we've invented new jobs to replace those which we've automated away, but I don't think that is the whole story. Going back to at least the industrial revolution with for example handloom weavers, people who have had their jobs automated away were often impoverished for the rest of their lives. I don't have any statistics to back this up, but I'd argue that this will be true for most displaced workers today -- any career change later in life will put you behind the curve, and it's not like someone working as a coal miner is likely to learn how to code or whatever. My thought is that these new high-tech jobs we invent have been and will be performed by new generations leaving the displaced to suffer. I also don't think this trend of inventing new jobs will hold true forever. To the poster who asked why this would suddenly change, it's because we now have algorithms which can learn. We may be long dead (though perhaps not), but I am absolutely convinced that eventually we will invent machines which are able to perform any given task at or exceeding normal human ability. When that happens, and when we deploy it in mass across the economy, I think we'll have to face an existential crisis as a species. Today we want everyone to have a job because we want everyone to have a means of independently supporting themselves. We want each of us to contribute to society, to not be a burden. We want people to have a job because it often provides a sense of dignity and a sense of purpose. My thought is that, just as you say that normal people will find another job as automation advances, the attitude we will need to adopt instead will be that people in general disabled or not will need to find another means of providing meaning in their life. Because honestly, my thought when watching that commercial was not, "oh how nice that this individual is working." My thought was that the job looked terrible, is probably not good for health, and that it's not a job that human beings should even be doing. I generally think this about most jobs, but especially so about jobs where you're sorting through waste. Real people will suffer from automation, but I think the process is inevitable, and personally wished I existed in a time where automation freed all of us to pursue what we were interested in rather than serving the purposes of making the economic machine spin round. Let it spin on its own.
- adrianN 4y ago
  Because eventually all the tasks that a normal human can do can be done cheaper by a machine. Whenever more automation enabled economic growth in the past, a (large) part of the new economic activity had to be done by humans. We were lucky that the growth was big enough that more new jobs were created than old jobs were lost. In the near future the fraction of new tasks that can be done by humans will shrink. It is plausible that economic growth as a whole will shrink too. And of course there are the short term effects to consider too. If truck driving is automated, a fifty year old truck driver is unlikely to find a similar job. Changing careers gets progressively harder as you grow older. Many people will be unemployed for the rest of their lives despite other new jobs being created.

jl2718 4y ago

I had a ‘special’ mailman at NASA Ames in 2007-2009. This guy was the best mailman ever; he was 100% focused on his job and did it with the seriousness of handling CBRN materials. You might wonder how someone can go from good to great at mail handling, especially to someone that doesn’t send or receive much mail. There were lots of unexpected things. Address errors always got to me. Mail was sorted by ‘importance’ in the box. Hand delivery of government mail and warnings about anything anomalous. I got the feeling that you could give this guy any small job and he would study the minutiae intensely, finding ways to get better long after any ‘normal’ person would have gotten bored and started thinking about something else. I see a lot of problems when people don’t employ them well. They often live institutionalized and do odd jobs part-time like grocery bagging. At Stop’n’Shop, they are switched around and perform poorly. At the Westford Market Basket, there was a special bagger that had a rough first few years, but learned everything about the store, and ended up managing it, superlatively imo. 100% focus on whatever they are told to do for years at a time. My mailman would have made a great project manager, a set of well-defined human tasks that are almost always ignored and subverted because of the power that comes with the position. Imagine a person in a power role that was actually focused on doing their job right.

martingab 4y ago

In my home-town there is a garage/factory which mainly recruits all kinds of disabled people. They produce e.g. wooden chairs, cup holders and the-like but also purely artistic decorative stuff. All on very different levels i.e. some people nail some wooden sticks together as they have been told, some have complex jobs (if they are able). For sure, all of the tasks they do during the day can be automated and in-fact are automated at the big facilities. However, people like to buy their products - not only because they like to support them and to give them the chance to contribute to the community (like it was said in the video: they pay taxes and everything) but also because there is a general market for hand-made stuff. There is always a small niche of consumers who prefer hand-made stuff because of its individual charm etc. over the soul-less mass-manufactured alternative. I believe that this demand exists precisely because of the rise of automation (and thus is unlikely to vanish is automation is pushed furhter). I'd also argue that working in a woodworking shop - being able to actually create something and (if the handicap/IQ allows for it) even be creative - has a much better effect on overall quality of live than working on a assembly-line bullshit job. I don't know of a handicap which does not allow you to work in any of these kind of jobs but does allow you to assort plastic from paper within reasonable amount of time (but I'm sure someone can give me an example; in that case I'd argue that its up to us to find or "invent" a suitable job or some helper-device to enable them to do so - we have the money to do this). So yes, maybe getting rid of that particular job is the best thing that could happen to the guy in the video - provided there is another job-alternative available that does not only let him add value to the consumer-society but also to the intellectual and creative parts of it as well as of himself (relative to his level of disability).

whatever1 4y ago

Yeah these are great insights in the macro-scale, but on the individual level automation can screw your life completely. Specially if you are older. What you as a 50 y.o. trucker are going to do when Waymo takes your job instead? There is no way you can get the same 6 figure job somewhere outside the truck-driving business.