5 ms·

If there's toilets in the future, then there will be sewers, and if there's sewers then there will always be a guy required to go down there and dislodge stuff.

If there's toilets in the future, then there will be sewers, and if there's sewers then there will always be a guy required to go down there and dislodge stuff. And he won't want to do that for just the hell of it... Therefore jobs.

Retric 4y ago
Seems like the kind of thing we could automate… I doubt we will ever get rid of work, but it’s not completely ridiculous over very long timescales. At some point we might stop say medical R&D because we finished. Todays chat bots suck, but conceivably they might eventually take over creative jobs leaving only hobbyists. etc etc. Work may still exist in 30,000 years, but jobs as a concept could disappear.
- bboygravity 4y ago
  Sounds like the thing that is already partly automated (search term "pigging"): https://www.rigzone.com/images/howitworks/HIW_pigging_3.jpg https://www.rigzone.com/images/howitworks/HIW_pigging_3.jpg
- yourapostasy 4y ago
  I'm not sure the numbers pencil out with our current state of automation implementation for say, small towns; pigging as pointed out elsewhere in the thread does this, but the equipment is pretty expensive, and you have to have sewer lines designed to take the pressure (especially when they run over aquifers) when some old infrastructures were not designed with that kind of pressure in mind along the joints as a regular occurrence. Current state of the art from what I can see is automation of this sort of work is more of "let's create a tool that does X task or at best tasks in a narrow range", and less of creating a Moravec-class android, or Mote In God's Eye-reminiscent Engineer/Watchmaker Motie-style creatures-but-as-bots. Developing world humans in their near-innumerable billions will always be economically (though arguably not organizationally nor for innovation-wise) cheaper than narrow automation for much "blue collar" work like this for as long as we leave Moravec's Paradox on the table, and not an evolving/improving science and engineering solution in the market. Once I get into equipment to automate manual work (especially any commercial grade kit), I quickly discover the cost hurdle to clear is quite high. I either need lots of people I want to free up for another part of my business, or use the automation as close to around the clock as possible, or both before the capex and opex fall below the financial benefits. The ongoing maintenance of the new tool is a part that usually is not accurately accounted for in many people's opex calculations. I suspect this is why well-capitalized large companies are leveraging automation benefits sooner and we're seeing increasingly more emergent oligopolies, and Moravec-class automation when it ever arrives might be very profitable to the suppliers and disruptive to these incumbents.
  - Retric 4y ago
    When it specifically comes to sewer automation that’s teething pains. Infrastructure built in X years is going to be built with this kind of automation in mind and everything before that point will eventually be replaced. Moravec's Paradox was coined in the 1980’s, today’s systems can do vision from cameras fairly well and are only improving over time. Which is really the point I was going for. Even without AGI, it looks like we are going to start building special purpose hardware with very human like capabilities. On top of this physics has limits on how much physical devices can be improved. If the hypothetical iPhone 732 is eventually the last iPhone ever, then the R&D costs about automating construction fall to zero. Thus robots that build robots which maintain robots etc. A fully lights out factory across potentially geologic timescales. But, that same automation could be applied to everything from recycling, construction, and farming to healthcare.
    - yourapostasy 4y ago
      > ...today’s systems can do vision from cameras fairly well and are only improving over time. When we replace Roombas with Moravec-class androids that perform common domestic chores, then I think we'll really be tackling the paradox. Right now I am guessing we're at the approximate equivalent of perhaps say, just before the early Cambrian Period, when vision systems started to show up in the fossil record. So I'm hoping for an exponential development explosion that delivers androids that do laundry (sort, wash, fold, put up, identify for recycling), clean and prep food ingredients, dust/vacuum/mop/cleaning in general, return items to their places, make beds, take out and return rubbish and recycling bags and bins, etc. Even with a developed world income well above the 90th percentile, I cannot cost justify spending ~$0.5-1.0K USD for small slices of each of these capabilities with specialized equipment to automate them, which seems to be about the threshhold they're introduced at.
      - Retric 4y ago
        That’s fair. It took ~100 years for wireless video phones to go from science fiction to something sitting in most peoples pockets. Hell, Paramotor’s are about the most disappointing way we could get flying jet packs. So, I don’t expect this transition to happen in my lifetime but the future is a long time.
drclau 4y ago
Why do you think robots would not be able to do those tasks?
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  Robots need to be programmed.
  - bboygravity 4y ago
    Why do you think robots (or AI) won't be able to program robots?
    - felipemnoa 4y ago
      And this is how we get the terminator ending.
    - haspok 4y ago
      And who programs the robots programming the robots? AI doesn't exist, and at the moment it is unclear IF, not when it ever will. Don't believe the hype, the Emperor is still naked, only conceals it better.
      - DeathArrow 4y ago
        >AI doesn't exist, and at the moment it is unclear IF, not when it ever will. My guess is never.
        grugagag 4y ago
        It may get very close to the real thing and that thought alone makes me shudder, maybe we’ll become the tool to fill in the gaps.
    - DeathArrow 4y ago
      Because AI isn't actually intelligent.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
marginalia_nu 4y ago
Could solve the problem of getting stuff done nobody wants to do through a model where you do a 3-4 year tour of civil service. Could be less of a job and more of the entrance fee to the perks of adulthood. Service guarantees citizenship, except unironically.
- nlitened 4y ago
  To make the math work, more like 40 years tour of civil service as an entrance fee to the perks of adulthood. Wait, that's called retirement!
  - luckylion 4y ago
    I'll start the SHAE movement: serve hard, adulthood early.
  - Llamamoe 4y ago
    Oh, really? Because I'm pretty sure we didn't strictly need that much labor for essential jobs even before any meaningful automation.
    - nlitened 4y ago
      Humans' consumption infinitely expands to fill all available productivity growth, that what has always happened, and what will keep happening unless someone starts forcing billions into GULAGs, in my opinion.
      - Llamamoe 4y ago
        No it didn't, not for the basic goods. Nobody is drinking "all available productivity growth" worth of water, eating the equivalent of food, buying house after house, or compulsively commuting. About luxury goods, don't you think that humans being blasted with aggressive advertising and other manipulation in every single space of our lives has something to do with it? Don't forget that most of the things we purchase don't even need to be owned by every single person - if they could be meaningfully shared, you definitely don't need a 100 cars per 100 families, most tools are needed but rarely, even entertainment is only consummerism-centric because a lot of money is going into making it so, while very little goes into enabling humans to just hang out together.
blackoil 4y ago
Seems like the first thing we'll want to automate.
latexr 4y ago
Other replies have pointed out this is the type of task we could automate, but I’ll assume you’ve taken (what I consider to be) a valid retort into consideration: Yes, we could automate it but machines break and the last option in fixing is always to send in humans, even if just to manually operate other machines to unlock what stopped the automation. Thus jobs. I don’t know if it would be societally possible to have those people without jobs, but I believe it could happen. Think how many of us love to tinker with and improve complex system for the hell of it (open-source), and would welcome doing more of it for free if only we didn’t have an obligation (a job) which takes us away from it. Even when no one needs to work, many will choose to.
- imgabe 4y ago
  There are people who literally simulate the entire air traffic control system for fun, so it's not hard to believe someone would want to work on sewer cleaning robots as a hobby.
- luckylion 4y ago
  > Think how many of us would love to tinker with and improve complex system for the hell of it (open-source), and would welcome doing more of it for free if only we didn’t have an obligation (a job) which takes us away from it. How often are you fixing Wordpress sites where people have been using WYSIWYG editors and now all the content is full of crazy HTML and someone ran a bunch of search and replace with wrong regexps and it's just a terrible mess and someone needs to sort it out and that someone needs to know HTML and JS and they need to be focused on the task at hand to make sure they don't delete something that was supposed to be kept. In other words: there's a world of work out there and nobody loves to tinker with that because it's not "improving complex systems", it's robbing through the sewers with a plunger. I doubt that you'll find plenty of volunteers for that. The "we'll automate everything" approach is pretty boring in my opinion: we're nowhere close, yet people are talking about it as if it was a thing that's happening until 2030 and we need to be prepared for the societal consequences of it and we need to make changes now (surprisingly, it's always those changes they intuitively like that we desperately need to enact, otherwise everything will be automated and we'll all starve). Let's talk about that when we can actually see it on the horizon.
yazaddaruvala 4y ago
There will always be toilets but likely in home processing plants will treat it and return safe water and fertilizer to your garden. Anything else would be emptied into your garbage can once a month. Your job, replace the fillers in your house or some such thing.
- docdeek 4y ago
  Someone is still collecting the garbage, though, right? I think there are some current jobs people will do as hobbies in aid of others and tech will help in ways, including as you suggest, but I think there'll still be someone in that society doing a 'dirty job'.
  - yazaddaruvala 4y ago
    Side note: My household generates compost but almost no garbage. It seems to me like taking out the garbage will also be relatively solved by robots. It’s exactly the same problem as restaurant food delivery. I press an app on my phone saying “I have something to deliver” a robot shows up in front of my house. I drop off my garbage with an address labeled “the dump”. “What if that robot breaks down or becomes a giant mess?” “Won’t there still be people at the dump?” I promise you there is no problem I can’t imagine a tech solution for! I do agree we are a bit far away from “all labor is eliminated”. Probably a little more than 100 years, but definitely sooner than 1000 years.
- dazilcher 4y ago
  > Your job, replace the fillers in your house or some such thing. What about your job when the fancy "in home processing plant" lines get clogged or start leaking? Time to call the guy who deals with that shit for a living.
  - yazaddaruvala 4y ago
    I mean i really think you’re missing the point of the main story. It’s talking about a future where all construction and plumbing is automated by robots and is trying to explore the time period after that and what happens beyond. You seem to disagree that it is at all possible and want to explore the time period before that time. Which is fine, I agree there are a lot of details to get right! But if you try a little, it really is easy to imagine todays robots getting to a point that they will diagnose and fix all plumbing issues.
kaskakokos 4y ago
In my childhood I lived in a small town with old pipes that got clogged from time to time, we didn't call a worker to unblock them, we did it ourselves to save a few hundred euros, it wasn't so bad, you put a T-shirt around your mouth and nose and you did it. We are losing not only the ability to do but the ability to imagine alternatives.
- whstl 4y ago
  Kids today can film it and put it on Youtube to rack millions of views. Like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV9dOHRDb3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV9dOHRDb3c
- kybernetyk 4y ago
  > it wasn't so bad, you put a T-shirt around your mouth and nose and you did it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide
- dazilcher 4y ago
  Reminds me of this joke: Moshe is an apprentice septic tank cleaner. When his shop gets an emergency call, he and his senior head out to the site. The place is a mess. The experienced septic cleaner wastes no time, pulls up his shirt and dives right in, head first. After a while, he pops back out and reaches with his hand: "I need the Channellock pliers". Moshe hands him the pliers, and the expert dives back in. Then, out he pops again: "Jumbo plunger, now!". Moshe hands him the plunger, and the old man disappears once more. Finally, he re-emerges and pulls himself up with a tired-but-content look on his face: "See, Moshe, if you don't take it seriously and apply yourself to this job, you're going to carry that toolbox all your life."
pjc50 4y ago
From the text version not the video: the talk is really about the distinction between "work", which is almost anything that's not leisure, including cleaning the sewers, and capital J "Jobs". His argument is that things like the "gig economy" are not capital-J Jobs. So you're not necessarily going to have people with "sewer cleaner" as a Job, with a pay scale for Sewer Cleaner (Second Grade) and a pension, you might instead find it posted on Taskrabbit or something.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  I got the same impression and he oddly seems to be arguing that this will somehow be better which couldn't be further from the truth.
sktrdie 4y ago
I volunteer for a dog shelter and have to pick up and clean dog shit. For free. It brings me joy and belonging, not the picking up dog excrements, but the feeling that I can help someone or groups unconditionally, without expecting anything back.

Retric 4y ago

Seems like the kind of thing we could automate… I doubt we will ever get rid of work, but it’s not completely ridiculous over very long timescales. At some point we might stop say medical R&D because we finished. Todays chat bots suck, but conceivably they might eventually take over creative jobs leaving only hobbyists. etc etc. Work may still exist in 30,000 years, but jobs as a concept could disappear.

bboygravity 4y ago
Sounds like the thing that is already partly automated (search term "pigging"): https://www.rigzone.com/images/howitworks/HIW_pigging_3.jpg https://www.rigzone.com/images/howitworks/HIW_pigging_3.jpg
yourapostasy 4y ago
I'm not sure the numbers pencil out with our current state of automation implementation for say, small towns; pigging as pointed out elsewhere in the thread does this, but the equipment is pretty expensive, and you have to have sewer lines designed to take the pressure (especially when they run over aquifers) when some old infrastructures were not designed with that kind of pressure in mind along the joints as a regular occurrence. Current state of the art from what I can see is automation of this sort of work is more of "let's create a tool that does X task or at best tasks in a narrow range", and less of creating a Moravec-class android, or Mote In God's Eye-reminiscent Engineer/Watchmaker Motie-style creatures-but-as-bots. Developing world humans in their near-innumerable billions will always be economically (though arguably not organizationally nor for innovation-wise) cheaper than narrow automation for much "blue collar" work like this for as long as we leave Moravec's Paradox on the table, and not an evolving/improving science and engineering solution in the market. Once I get into equipment to automate manual work (especially any commercial grade kit), I quickly discover the cost hurdle to clear is quite high. I either need lots of people I want to free up for another part of my business, or use the automation as close to around the clock as possible, or both before the capex and opex fall below the financial benefits. The ongoing maintenance of the new tool is a part that usually is not accurately accounted for in many people's opex calculations. I suspect this is why well-capitalized large companies are leveraging automation benefits sooner and we're seeing increasingly more emergent oligopolies, and Moravec-class automation when it ever arrives might be very profitable to the suppliers and disruptive to these incumbents.
- Retric 4y ago
  When it specifically comes to sewer automation that’s teething pains. Infrastructure built in X years is going to be built with this kind of automation in mind and everything before that point will eventually be replaced. Moravec's Paradox was coined in the 1980’s, today’s systems can do vision from cameras fairly well and are only improving over time. Which is really the point I was going for. Even without AGI, it looks like we are going to start building special purpose hardware with very human like capabilities. On top of this physics has limits on how much physical devices can be improved. If the hypothetical iPhone 732 is eventually the last iPhone ever, then the R&D costs about automating construction fall to zero. Thus robots that build robots which maintain robots etc. A fully lights out factory across potentially geologic timescales. But, that same automation could be applied to everything from recycling, construction, and farming to healthcare.
  - yourapostasy 4y ago
    > ...today’s systems can do vision from cameras fairly well and are only improving over time. When we replace Roombas with Moravec-class androids that perform common domestic chores, then I think we'll really be tackling the paradox. Right now I am guessing we're at the approximate equivalent of perhaps say, just before the early Cambrian Period, when vision systems started to show up in the fossil record. So I'm hoping for an exponential development explosion that delivers androids that do laundry (sort, wash, fold, put up, identify for recycling), clean and prep food ingredients, dust/vacuum/mop/cleaning in general, return items to their places, make beds, take out and return rubbish and recycling bags and bins, etc. Even with a developed world income well above the 90th percentile, I cannot cost justify spending ~$0.5-1.0K USD for small slices of each of these capabilities with specialized equipment to automate them, which seems to be about the threshhold they're introduced at.
    - Retric 4y ago
      That’s fair. It took ~100 years for wireless video phones to go from science fiction to something sitting in most peoples pockets. Hell, Paramotor’s are about the most disappointing way we could get flying jet packs. So, I don’t expect this transition to happen in my lifetime but the future is a long time.

drclau 4y ago

Why do you think robots would not be able to do those tasks?

DeathArrow 4y ago
Robots need to be programmed.
- bboygravity 4y ago
  Why do you think robots (or AI) won't be able to program robots?
  - felipemnoa 4y ago
    And this is how we get the terminator ending.
  - haspok 4y ago
    And who programs the robots programming the robots? AI doesn't exist, and at the moment it is unclear IF, not when it ever will. Don't believe the hype, the Emperor is still naked, only conceals it better.
    - DeathArrow 4y ago
      >AI doesn't exist, and at the moment it is unclear IF, not when it ever will. My guess is never.
      - grugagag 4y ago
        It may get very close to the real thing and that thought alone makes me shudder, maybe we’ll become the tool to fill in the gaps.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    Because AI isn't actually intelligent.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

marginalia_nu 4y ago

Could solve the problem of getting stuff done nobody wants to do through a model where you do a 3-4 year tour of civil service. Could be less of a job and more of the entrance fee to the perks of adulthood. Service guarantees citizenship, except unironically.

nlitened 4y ago
To make the math work, more like 40 years tour of civil service as an entrance fee to the perks of adulthood. Wait, that's called retirement!
- luckylion 4y ago
  I'll start the SHAE movement: serve hard, adulthood early.
- Llamamoe 4y ago
  Oh, really? Because I'm pretty sure we didn't strictly need that much labor for essential jobs even before any meaningful automation.
  - nlitened 4y ago
    Humans' consumption infinitely expands to fill all available productivity growth, that what has always happened, and what will keep happening unless someone starts forcing billions into GULAGs, in my opinion.
    - Llamamoe 4y ago
      No it didn't, not for the basic goods. Nobody is drinking "all available productivity growth" worth of water, eating the equivalent of food, buying house after house, or compulsively commuting. About luxury goods, don't you think that humans being blasted with aggressive advertising and other manipulation in every single space of our lives has something to do with it? Don't forget that most of the things we purchase don't even need to be owned by every single person - if they could be meaningfully shared, you definitely don't need a 100 cars per 100 families, most tools are needed but rarely, even entertainment is only consummerism-centric because a lot of money is going into making it so, while very little goes into enabling humans to just hang out together.

blackoil 4y ago

Seems like the first thing we'll want to automate.

latexr 4y ago

Other replies have pointed out this is the type of task we could automate, but I’ll assume you’ve taken (what I consider to be) a valid retort into consideration: Yes, we could automate it but machines break and the last option in fixing is always to send in humans, even if just to manually operate other machines to unlock what stopped the automation. Thus jobs. I don’t know if it would be societally possible to have those people without jobs, but I believe it could happen. Think how many of us love to tinker with and improve complex system for the hell of it (open-source), and would welcome doing more of it for free if only we didn’t have an obligation (a job) which takes us away from it. Even when no one needs to work, many will choose to.

imgabe 4y ago
There are people who literally simulate the entire air traffic control system for fun, so it's not hard to believe someone would want to work on sewer cleaning robots as a hobby.
luckylion 4y ago
> Think how many of us would love to tinker with and improve complex system for the hell of it (open-source), and would welcome doing more of it for free if only we didn’t have an obligation (a job) which takes us away from it. How often are you fixing Wordpress sites where people have been using WYSIWYG editors and now all the content is full of crazy HTML and someone ran a bunch of search and replace with wrong regexps and it's just a terrible mess and someone needs to sort it out and that someone needs to know HTML and JS and they need to be focused on the task at hand to make sure they don't delete something that was supposed to be kept. In other words: there's a world of work out there and nobody loves to tinker with that because it's not "improving complex systems", it's robbing through the sewers with a plunger. I doubt that you'll find plenty of volunteers for that. The "we'll automate everything" approach is pretty boring in my opinion: we're nowhere close, yet people are talking about it as if it was a thing that's happening until 2030 and we need to be prepared for the societal consequences of it and we need to make changes now (surprisingly, it's always those changes they intuitively like that we desperately need to enact, otherwise everything will be automated and we'll all starve). Let's talk about that when we can actually see it on the horizon.

yazaddaruvala 4y ago

There will always be toilets but likely in home processing plants will treat it and return safe water and fertilizer to your garden. Anything else would be emptied into your garbage can once a month. Your job, replace the fillers in your house or some such thing.

docdeek 4y ago
Someone is still collecting the garbage, though, right? I think there are some current jobs people will do as hobbies in aid of others and tech will help in ways, including as you suggest, but I think there'll still be someone in that society doing a 'dirty job'.
- yazaddaruvala 4y ago
  Side note: My household generates compost but almost no garbage. It seems to me like taking out the garbage will also be relatively solved by robots. It’s exactly the same problem as restaurant food delivery. I press an app on my phone saying “I have something to deliver” a robot shows up in front of my house. I drop off my garbage with an address labeled “the dump”. “What if that robot breaks down or becomes a giant mess?” “Won’t there still be people at the dump?” I promise you there is no problem I can’t imagine a tech solution for! I do agree we are a bit far away from “all labor is eliminated”. Probably a little more than 100 years, but definitely sooner than 1000 years.
dazilcher 4y ago
> Your job, replace the fillers in your house or some such thing. What about your job when the fancy "in home processing plant" lines get clogged or start leaking? Time to call the guy who deals with that shit for a living.
- yazaddaruvala 4y ago
  I mean i really think you’re missing the point of the main story. It’s talking about a future where all construction and plumbing is automated by robots and is trying to explore the time period after that and what happens beyond. You seem to disagree that it is at all possible and want to explore the time period before that time. Which is fine, I agree there are a lot of details to get right! But if you try a little, it really is easy to imagine todays robots getting to a point that they will diagnose and fix all plumbing issues.

kaskakokos 4y ago

In my childhood I lived in a small town with old pipes that got clogged from time to time, we didn't call a worker to unblock them, we did it ourselves to save a few hundred euros, it wasn't so bad, you put a T-shirt around your mouth and nose and you did it. We are losing not only the ability to do but the ability to imagine alternatives.

whstl 4y ago
Kids today can film it and put it on Youtube to rack millions of views. Like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV9dOHRDb3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV9dOHRDb3c
kybernetyk 4y ago
> it wasn't so bad, you put a T-shirt around your mouth and nose and you did it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide
dazilcher 4y ago
Reminds me of this joke: Moshe is an apprentice septic tank cleaner. When his shop gets an emergency call, he and his senior head out to the site. The place is a mess. The experienced septic cleaner wastes no time, pulls up his shirt and dives right in, head first. After a while, he pops back out and reaches with his hand: "I need the Channellock pliers". Moshe hands him the pliers, and the expert dives back in. Then, out he pops again: "Jumbo plunger, now!". Moshe hands him the plunger, and the old man disappears once more. Finally, he re-emerges and pulls himself up with a tired-but-content look on his face: "See, Moshe, if you don't take it seriously and apply yourself to this job, you're going to carry that toolbox all your life."

pjc50 4y ago

From the text version not the video: the talk is really about the distinction between "work", which is almost anything that's not leisure, including cleaning the sewers, and capital J "Jobs". His argument is that things like the "gig economy" are not capital-J Jobs. So you're not necessarily going to have people with "sewer cleaner" as a Job, with a pay scale for Sewer Cleaner (Second Grade) and a pension, you might instead find it posted on Taskrabbit or something.

throwaway4aday 4y ago
I got the same impression and he oddly seems to be arguing that this will somehow be better which couldn't be further from the truth.

sktrdie 4y ago

I volunteer for a dog shelter and have to pick up and clean dog shit. For free. It brings me joy and belonging, not the picking up dog excrements, but the feeling that I can help someone or groups unconditionally, without expecting anything back.