8 ms·

Probably worth calling out the two of the biggest observable negative effects of automation that have occurred over time: 1. We've decimated the bottom end of

Probably worth calling out the two of the biggest observable negative effects of automation that have occurred over time: 1. We've decimated the bottom end of the skills market in developed countries. Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common. That's ~15% of the population who are close to un-employable. 2. People who spend years or decades on a skillset see it devalued and their income drops. It is often difficult to get a "second shot" at a new career in your 40s and can be deeply disruptive to you and your family's lives. Growing up I watched this happen to the parents of several friends who'd made careers in things like printing that were obsoleted by digital revolution. None of those people achieved the monetary success they might have in an un-disrupted industry.

irrational 4y ago
Number 1 is my big concern. I have a son that is on the autism spectrum. He graduated from high school with a modified diploma when he was 20 and they decided to just send him along. He has managed to get a job doing baggage at the airport, which is pretty the limit of his abilities. What if all similar jobs were automated?
- aldarisbm 4y ago
  "Manual" jobs, per the OpenAI whitepaper, seem to be the least susceptible to being automated. The robotics just isn't there yet. Blessings to your family.
  - johnchristopher 4y ago
    As in "Manual jobs that weren't made obsolete in the previous automation revolution" I suppose ? Like construction machines and lavor-saving tools ? On the top of my head I am thinking hair dresser, nail care (I wouldn't risk going to hair dresser or barber robot shop).
  - vkou 4y ago
    Manual mid-range jobs were the first that were automated, due to the industrial revolution, and later during the robotics revolution. They've been automated for so long and so thoroughly that you didn't even think of them as 'having been automated away'. Look at any commercial kitchen, any farm, inside any factory. Look at the grocery store, and its self-checkout machines. Look at parking attendants and toll booths. Look at the labour-saving devices employed at any construction site. Look at the demise of cottage industries - which used to be the economic driver of productive output, and are now limited to kitschy crafts on Etsy. Look at the cargo-container shipping yard, where a hundred dock-workers are now do the work that used to take tens of thousands. Look at the answering machine, and the utter insanity that is the modern automated customer support directory. What hasn't been automated are jobs like janitors - where the work that they do is highly varied, and requires manipulation of different tools, in different spaces. We can automate a floor-mopping machine, or a vaccum cleaner, but we can't (yet) build a robot that will vaccum, and water the plants, and scrub a toilet, and clean up vomit, and refill the paper towel dispenser, all in one package.
    - eep_social 4y ago
      > grocery store, and its self-checkout machines Which aren’t automation or even new technology. The stores just cleverly moved the work that must be done to unpaid laborers. The self-checkout machines are an inferior tool with an escape hatch (customer service is on the way) to the real tool which must be operated by an employee.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        Surely the ability to easily type and search for items is new technology. Customers do not have to memorize the codes, they can look them up. I find self checkout very beneficial, as I frequently have few items to purchase, and there are more self checkout registers available more consistently than there would be staff. For the same ~20 to 30 items I normally purchase, it takes me very little time to self checkout. For people with cartloads of items, they can go to the manned conveyor belts. For everyone else, they can go to one of the many self checkouts.
  - Avicebron 4y ago
    The question seems to be, will those manual jobs be valued and economically rewarded, or will automation increasingly concentrate wealth into smaller and smaller groups while manual work will be low paying with low social mobility.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Depends on the supply of labor for those manual jobs. Jobs that require skill and/or have low quality of life at work such as requiring traveling/crawl spaces/outdoors/sewers/dangerous machinery/hazardous materials will probably pay well. Manual jobs that are relatively safe, close to home, steady, and easy to learn will probably have a lot of people vying for them, hence lower pay.
- Loquebantur 4y ago
  The minimum level of cognitive ability necessary for employment providing a reasonable degree of autonomy is bound to rise inexorably. So this concern will be shared by ever growing numbers. The contemporary habit of envisioning people as some sort of disposable artifice is dehumanising at its core and just serves to rid those in lucky positions of superfluence from responsibility. Society needs to learn to recognize interpersonal differences in terms other than self-serving judgemental dismissal.
- lp4vn 4y ago
  The scariest thing of all is how the average citizen is in a certain sense not reaping the benefits of automation. You would think that automating your job would make you free to work less. No, of course not, you end up either unemployed or working at least as much as you used to or more. A lot of the comments here on this thread are already pessimistic in relation to the automation because people low key know that in the last decades almost all societal changes have come to the detriment of general population.
  - betaby 4y ago
    Western ideology is mostly about taxing the salaries. While xUSSR was mostly about redistribution of the goods. But then again xUSSR "did't work" and capitalism "worked". How it even possible to reap anything from the automation if tax base is people's salaries and VAT?
    - bradDonniger 4y ago
      USSR style communism was really an authoritarian dictatorship. In capitalist west, capitalism was also about distribution of goods but literally being nice about it. Working together. The language is meaningless gibberish. The tone and emotional spin, roleplay are what’s important. In the US we’re enabling iron fisted oligarchs like the USSR once had. Those who refuse to share without extreme deference and idolatry, not because they’re that important to the well being of billions (they’re not) but because they’re important to the political actors that insulate them from taxation.
      - ben_w 4y ago
        Nothing's so clear-cut as history lessons might have you believe. The USSR et al had many more problems than most people in the west, at least of my generation, properly appreciate — the Holomodor and the irony of the Berlin Wall's official name (≈ anti-fascist protection barrier) being the most pertinent in my mind. Conversely, while the USA was a symbol of hope and freedom in my childhood, that childhood was oblivious to the official segregation of the USA even in the 60s, let alone the unofficial segregation whose continued existence was the basis for the term "woke" prior to it being appropriated by all the political talking heads to mean everything and nothing. The oligarchy in the USA today is not one I favour, but it is kinder than the… I was going to reference the events of the Homestead strike, but it turns out I must remember my own words, for that too is less clear-cut than I had heard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike But yeah, reality is a complicated mess. My opinion is that laissez-faire capitalism is BS, that the Roosevelt New Deal marked an end to that era for the same reason that the equivalent living conditions ended Soviet-style communism; that other forms of communism and capitalism exist; that both over-simplify human nature and that a superior alternative to both can be designed with careful effort; that such a thing probably won't be taken seriously until the current system is utterly broken because of those with power in the current system; and that by default AI and robotics is a lot closer to communism than anything else because "from each according to ability" requires much less personal consideration when everyone has a dozen droid servitors at their disposal.
- bilater 4y ago
  Contrary point - technology enables people with disabilities to match or even exceed their peers? Someone in a wheelchair 50 years ago could not do a lot of jobs vs now that's not even a factor in a software job.
  - waboremo 4y ago
    Does that even matter when they still aren't being hired? Hiring statistics for those with disabilities are really horrible. We still hold biases about what makes one "productive" that stem from our very early hunter gatherer days, and these are still to this day negatively affecting the hiring potential of those with disabilities.
- iamerroragent 4y ago
  Government can/does provide aid to those with disabilities that prevent them from being able to attain and keep regular employment. In the U.S. I believe it's through Social Security. So as more jobs are automated and the base level of ability required to get hired goes up so does the need to expand who qualifies for social programs. Productivity will be increasing with automation so it's a matter of distributing resources more efficiently and fairly than it is about making sure there is labor for everyone to get a job.
  - satellites 4y ago
    Social Security in the U.S. is typically for retired people age ~65 or older. There are other social programs for low-income people, but they are abysmally insufficient for what we’re talking about. Usually disabled people are paid by “disability insurance” but you have to get a job first to even qualify for that. So that’s usually for injuries etc. If you don’t live in the U.S. it’s hard to grasp just how hostile the political/economic system is towards the lower and middle classes. The idea of a UBI program to support people whose jobs get automated and lack the skills to work elsewhere is completely out of the question. A trip to the hospital can easily bankrupt the average American family ffs, but we can’t even fix that. There is zero political will to provide robust social programs here, despite any evidence that shows it might improve society. Sorry for the rant. TL;DR if you look at the last few decades of politics in the U.S. you can see there is close to zero chance of the solutions you’re describing.
    - Loquebantur 4y ago
      You too over-generalize when extrapolating past behavior linearly into the future. Being conscious intelligent creatures, humans ought to be able to learn from their mistakes and implement change accordingly. This presupposes one refrains from defeatist refusal to engage those problems of course.
      - satellites 4y ago
        How long have you been following politics and economics in a serious capacity? > Being conscious intelligent creatures, humans ought to be able to learn from their mistakes and implement change accordingly. We sure ought to, I agree with you there.
- akokanka 4y ago
  The scariest thing is that they will eventually allow euthanasia for your child and others like him. Economically unpleasant people are not needed in capitalism. The governments are already starting to prepare laws on it .
  - jvanderbot 4y ago
    I think it's scarier that you believe this.
  - tarboreus 4y ago
    Canada's MAID is well ahead of the curve on this. You can qualify just for saying you're depressed in some cases.
  - vkou 4y ago
    1. Utter nonsense, please scrub whomever told you this from your list of reliable sources. 2. Capitalists require consumers to actually buy shit, owning capital doesn't get you anything if you don't have proles to sell to.
- LambdaComplex 4y ago
  > What if all similar jobs were automated? Hopefully, we would reach a Star Trek-like utopia where people aren't required to work in order to live. More realistically, the middle class just disappears, and we have nothing but the super-rich and the destitute left.
phkahler 4y ago
>> Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common I think Jordan Peterson quoted the stats as people with IQ under 83 are completely unemployable i.e. even the army can't get a net positive out of them. I found that deeply concerning in several ways. IMHO we need to work on reducing the cost of living so people can mostly opt-out without losing their home and dying. Instead it's always push harder, more growth, etc...
- phphphphp 4y ago
  [flagged]
antod 4y ago
Yeah, I think something that gets missed by the decriers of pessimism is that over time we really do seem to be throwing a new strata currently at the bottom of the workforce onto the scrapheap. The "optimists" might not take notice because they've been in the layers that can keep playing musical chairs and adjust, and things might even seem good - especially when the pool of money available gets more concentrated. What has been a slow gradual frog boiling process could very well accelerate with AI reaching this level though. I can't think of earlier developments being as widely applicable and moving as fast as this before. I worry for my kids generation, and personally wish I was 10yrs closer to retirement.
slg 4y ago
More generally the number of jobs hasn't seemed to drop drastically during any of these waves of automation, but the number of people employed in certain fields has including some jobs disappearing entirely. That means automation doesn't present a problem for the economy overall, but it does present a problem for individuals who need to exist in the transitioning economy. The US in particular has done an awful job easing those individuals during the transition. The economy becoming more efficient is good. We should use some of the surplus value of increased efficiency to care for the people harmed by that transition.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
> Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common. That's ~15% of the population who are close to un-employable. This is because we decide it's better to pay people to do nothing than to clean streets and medians and countless other things that need done.
- MagicMoonlight 4y ago
  And ironically by paying them just for existing, they are ending up as the only group capable of reproducing at higher than replacement rate. We are artificially selecting the worst people to reproduce and dooming ourselves.
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    >We are artificially selecting the worst people to reproduce and dooming ourselves. The fallacy of eugenics is that 'smart' people have 'smart' children and the same for 'dumb' people. I think 90% of this forum believes themselves to be smarter than their parents, so maybe pump the brakes.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
      Also the rate at which people with lower IQs reproduce isn't really alarmist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence#:~:text=International%20research,-Map%20of%20countries&text=Lynn%20and%20Harvey%20(2008)%20found,for%20the%20years%201950%E2%80%932000 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence#:....
    - akavi 4y ago
      Both "smart people have smart children" and 90% of this forum being smarter than their parents could be true if "being on this forum" was selected on intelligence. I don't have the time to work through the math concretely, but intuitively, imagine that the intelligence of parents is normally distributed, and the intelligence of their children is a tighter normal distribution around the parents' intelligence. Set the cutoff for "participating on HN" to to some threshold. Given the right set of parameters, most of the "weight" in the aggregate child distribution above the threshold will come from the long tails of the child distributions of parents in the fat part of the parent distribution.
quijoteuniv 4y ago
No one talks about the lift attendants! «The person who operated the lifts (elevators) in old shopping houses or buildings was called an "elevator operator" or "lift attendant." Their primary responsibility was to manually control the elevator, ensuring that it stopped accurately at each floor and that passengers were transported safely. They would also assist passengers by opening and closing the elevator doors and providing information about the different floors or departments within the building.»
bee_rider 4y ago
I understand that the market is mysterious and confusing, but it has always struck me as bizarre that our society is structured in such a way that automating a task away has ended up as a bad thing. The thing you were doing has been done, therefor society as a whole at least wouldn’t be harmed by just paying you (Your old salary - amortized yearly cost of the machine) to do nothing.
- klipt 4y ago
  Paying someone to idle is certainly harmful to society if you could pay them the same to do something productive.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    But it is strictly better than the pre-automation situation.
    - klipt 4y ago
      Maybe if you ignore the effects of competition. If you're paying someone you no longer need and your competitors (who have access to the same automation) aren't, they'll outcompete you.
      - int_19h 4y ago
        This matters from the perspective of one specific competitor, but not from the perspective of society as a whole - the latter still has the same gross economic output and the same number of people to support it with. Therefore, the disconnect between the two is due to the way society is structured (i.e. who reaps the economic benefits and how), and not intrinsic.
        klipt 4y ago
        > the latter still has the same gross economic output Well no, if we still had the same gross economic output as 1000 years ago quality of living would be much lower. The point of competition is that it drives up total economic output. Of course it sucks for the people who get outcompeted. Certainly getting them productive again in another capacity is good for society. Letting them simply idle is not.
meh8881 4y ago
1. Is completely wrong. We have vastly grown the bottom end of the skills market by automating jobs to levels so simple that anyone can do it. They are bad jobs. But there are many of them. The problem is that we have people with normal IQs doing these jobs too, because there is not enough jobs above them.
- DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
  You’re arguing in March of 2023 that the issue is a lack of jobs?
  - klyrs 4y ago
    I'd summarize their comment as "the issue is a lack of skilled jobs."
  - meh8881 4y ago
    The ratio of skilled : unskilled jobs. As well as the general decline in what constitutes a skilled job.
- Hermitian909 4y ago
  People with these IQs under 85 are generally not employable in some of the lowest end jobs available: warehouseman, packer, or package delivery. I'm not sure what jobs you're imagining that are simpler than those, but I think I'm going to agree with the data on this point.
  - meh8881 4y ago
    You think 15% of the population is too dumb to deliver packages? More than 1 in 10 people is not smart enough to pack things?
    - Hermitian909 4y ago
      I think the framing here has to be very careful: I agree with the general psychometric data that ~15% of struggle to get or keep a job delivering packages or packing things. This is not the same as packing something or delivering a package. Jobs require a certain speed of execution, ability to adapt to changing conditions, low rate of mistake, and a maximum training time. Remember, even the army during war time, which requires people fulfilling botho f these services won't hire people with such a low IQ.
CPLX 4y ago
If you're interested in topic #1 here I highly recommend the book "Dignity" by Chris Arnade. It's not like this concept was literally new to me but the grace with which he talks about it and the specific stories he encounters made me see things in an entirely different light. x
Aloha 4y ago
Another problem is, that minimum required IQ number keeps rising too. A healthy society needs to have means to support people of all intelligence levels, we need the equivalent of jobs for ditch diggers, and those jobs need to be respected lines of work for people. Work has more value than just money, and whether people like it or not, it gives value and meaning to peoples lives. The value we assign (and pay) for work shouldnt just be governed by the economic value it generates, it needs to be enough to meet basic needs, to engender respect. The basic point I'll make here, using ditch digging is - have you dug a ditch? I have, its hard work, and mine was just a small one in my back yard.
- area51org 4y ago
  Meanwhile, it's the knuckle-dragging cro mags who are having all the babies. I wonder how this ends.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Correlation!= causation. Our default is "lots of babies"; women getting more education and economic liberty decrease that number. Poor places don't generally have significant educational budgets or opportunities for women, but as that specific set of things changes — education and freedom, not even always money — there is a corresponding change to number of births per woman. It also means that rich couples in societies that lack women's lib still have more kids, even where you can infer high intellect without the convenient proxy of the women being allowed to go to university and giving you a test to score against.
    - klipt 4y ago
      In the short run, people can act against their own evolutionary fitness, but in the long run, evolutionary pressures should push those people to the wayside.
      - Aloha 4y ago
        I've also seen two parents of below average intelligence make children who are of above average intelligence, and thats not even uncommon.
ben_w 4y ago
> Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common. That's ~15% of the population who are close to un-employable. Although I was completely unaware of this literature, I have spent the last few years essentially making the same point with regard to automation: you don't need a super-duper ASI to cause severe employment problems, all you need is something with an IQ of 85 that costs at most minimum wage to run (modulo robotics keeping up and being part of that price), and then 16% of the population are permanently and irreversibly no longer economically employable.
- bloppe 4y ago
  There are many things a robot with "IQ" 85 cannot do that a human with "the same" IQ can: childcare / elder care, social work, basically anything that requires garnering trust and a lot of social interaction, but not necessarily complex skills. There will probably be more jobs like this in the future. Even now, people pay extra for handmade items when the technology to mass-produce the same thing for cheaper has been around for decades, so even if a robot can do your job, that doesn't necessarily make your skills worthless.
  - gecersiznick 4y ago
    It’s safe to talk about EQ in addition to IQ regarding some jobs then. It’s more and more going to be about EQ jobs where AI feels lacking now, emphasis on the now.
  - sharperguy 4y ago
    Automation in theory SHOULD, in the process of destroying jobs, make many things cheaper so people are able to afford things that were previously out of reach, creating new jobs in those sectors.
    - brunoborges 4y ago
      Last I checked, no grocery store got price drops thanks to self-checkout.
aidenn0 4y ago
I don't know to what degree automation was involved, but we also spent the last 60+ years socially devaluing jobs that don't require a college degree. My grandfather is about as smart as I am, but he never went to college (nor did well over 90% of his cohort). Now about half the population goes to college, and more than a third graduate. That's a massive transformation in two generations, and its exacerbated by the degree to which it segregates. I've never eaten lunch with an adult, my age or younger, who didn't attend college.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  > I've never eaten lunch with an adult, my age or younger, who didn't attend college https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin... It is completely wild to me how effectively society has self segregated to the point of just straight up never, not even once, interacting with the other group without even realizing it.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    The college thing is a much bigger divide than politics for my friend group. My wife is about as blue-tribe as you can get. My best-man is pretty darn red tribe (and not Mitt Romney red-tribe, but "likely to vote for Trump in the next Republican primary" red-tribe). They both have college degrees though. I have a few friends who dropped out of college, but none that never attended.
jalapenos 4y ago
On the second point, it's a good warning to never rest on your laurels. You're not owed that your profession stay relevant, and so you always have to keep an eye on trends, and if needed, adjust course.
trappist 4y ago
I think #1 is more attributable to the rising minimum wage. I read the other day that the one job that automation did successfully eliminate was the elevator operator, but I'm quite certain that - like the gas station attendant in states that don't mandate it - it fell victim to the rising minimum wage. It simply became illegal to pay people what these jobs are worth.

irrational 4y ago

Number 1 is my big concern. I have a son that is on the autism spectrum. He graduated from high school with a modified diploma when he was 20 and they decided to just send him along. He has managed to get a job doing baggage at the airport, which is pretty the limit of his abilities. What if all similar jobs were automated?

aldarisbm 4y ago
"Manual" jobs, per the OpenAI whitepaper, seem to be the least susceptible to being automated. The robotics just isn't there yet. Blessings to your family.
- johnchristopher 4y ago
  As in "Manual jobs that weren't made obsolete in the previous automation revolution" I suppose ? Like construction machines and lavor-saving tools ? On the top of my head I am thinking hair dresser, nail care (I wouldn't risk going to hair dresser or barber robot shop).
- vkou 4y ago
  Manual mid-range jobs were the first that were automated, due to the industrial revolution, and later during the robotics revolution. They've been automated for so long and so thoroughly that you didn't even think of them as 'having been automated away'. Look at any commercial kitchen, any farm, inside any factory. Look at the grocery store, and its self-checkout machines. Look at parking attendants and toll booths. Look at the labour-saving devices employed at any construction site. Look at the demise of cottage industries - which used to be the economic driver of productive output, and are now limited to kitschy crafts on Etsy. Look at the cargo-container shipping yard, where a hundred dock-workers are now do the work that used to take tens of thousands. Look at the answering machine, and the utter insanity that is the modern automated customer support directory. What hasn't been automated are jobs like janitors - where the work that they do is highly varied, and requires manipulation of different tools, in different spaces. We can automate a floor-mopping machine, or a vaccum cleaner, but we can't (yet) build a robot that will vaccum, and water the plants, and scrub a toilet, and clean up vomit, and refill the paper towel dispenser, all in one package.
  - eep_social 4y ago
    > grocery store, and its self-checkout machines Which aren’t automation or even new technology. The stores just cleverly moved the work that must be done to unpaid laborers. The self-checkout machines are an inferior tool with an escape hatch (customer service is on the way) to the real tool which must be operated by an employee.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Surely the ability to easily type and search for items is new technology. Customers do not have to memorize the codes, they can look them up. I find self checkout very beneficial, as I frequently have few items to purchase, and there are more self checkout registers available more consistently than there would be staff. For the same ~20 to 30 items I normally purchase, it takes me very little time to self checkout. For people with cartloads of items, they can go to the manned conveyor belts. For everyone else, they can go to one of the many self checkouts.
- Avicebron 4y ago
  The question seems to be, will those manual jobs be valued and economically rewarded, or will automation increasingly concentrate wealth into smaller and smaller groups while manual work will be low paying with low social mobility.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Depends on the supply of labor for those manual jobs. Jobs that require skill and/or have low quality of life at work such as requiring traveling/crawl spaces/outdoors/sewers/dangerous machinery/hazardous materials will probably pay well. Manual jobs that are relatively safe, close to home, steady, and easy to learn will probably have a lot of people vying for them, hence lower pay.
Loquebantur 4y ago
The minimum level of cognitive ability necessary for employment providing a reasonable degree of autonomy is bound to rise inexorably. So this concern will be shared by ever growing numbers. The contemporary habit of envisioning people as some sort of disposable artifice is dehumanising at its core and just serves to rid those in lucky positions of superfluence from responsibility. Society needs to learn to recognize interpersonal differences in terms other than self-serving judgemental dismissal.
lp4vn 4y ago
The scariest thing of all is how the average citizen is in a certain sense not reaping the benefits of automation. You would think that automating your job would make you free to work less. No, of course not, you end up either unemployed or working at least as much as you used to or more. A lot of the comments here on this thread are already pessimistic in relation to the automation because people low key know that in the last decades almost all societal changes have come to the detriment of general population.
- betaby 4y ago
  Western ideology is mostly about taxing the salaries. While xUSSR was mostly about redistribution of the goods. But then again xUSSR "did't work" and capitalism "worked". How it even possible to reap anything from the automation if tax base is people's salaries and VAT?
  - bradDonniger 4y ago
    USSR style communism was really an authoritarian dictatorship. In capitalist west, capitalism was also about distribution of goods but literally being nice about it. Working together. The language is meaningless gibberish. The tone and emotional spin, roleplay are what’s important. In the US we’re enabling iron fisted oligarchs like the USSR once had. Those who refuse to share without extreme deference and idolatry, not because they’re that important to the well being of billions (they’re not) but because they’re important to the political actors that insulate them from taxation.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      Nothing's so clear-cut as history lessons might have you believe. The USSR et al had many more problems than most people in the west, at least of my generation, properly appreciate — the Holomodor and the irony of the Berlin Wall's official name (≈ anti-fascist protection barrier) being the most pertinent in my mind. Conversely, while the USA was a symbol of hope and freedom in my childhood, that childhood was oblivious to the official segregation of the USA even in the 60s, let alone the unofficial segregation whose continued existence was the basis for the term "woke" prior to it being appropriated by all the political talking heads to mean everything and nothing. The oligarchy in the USA today is not one I favour, but it is kinder than the… I was going to reference the events of the Homestead strike, but it turns out I must remember my own words, for that too is less clear-cut than I had heard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike But yeah, reality is a complicated mess. My opinion is that laissez-faire capitalism is BS, that the Roosevelt New Deal marked an end to that era for the same reason that the equivalent living conditions ended Soviet-style communism; that other forms of communism and capitalism exist; that both over-simplify human nature and that a superior alternative to both can be designed with careful effort; that such a thing probably won't be taken seriously until the current system is utterly broken because of those with power in the current system; and that by default AI and robotics is a lot closer to communism than anything else because "from each according to ability" requires much less personal consideration when everyone has a dozen droid servitors at their disposal.
bilater 4y ago
Contrary point - technology enables people with disabilities to match or even exceed their peers? Someone in a wheelchair 50 years ago could not do a lot of jobs vs now that's not even a factor in a software job.
- waboremo 4y ago
  Does that even matter when they still aren't being hired? Hiring statistics for those with disabilities are really horrible. We still hold biases about what makes one "productive" that stem from our very early hunter gatherer days, and these are still to this day negatively affecting the hiring potential of those with disabilities.
iamerroragent 4y ago
Government can/does provide aid to those with disabilities that prevent them from being able to attain and keep regular employment. In the U.S. I believe it's through Social Security. So as more jobs are automated and the base level of ability required to get hired goes up so does the need to expand who qualifies for social programs. Productivity will be increasing with automation so it's a matter of distributing resources more efficiently and fairly than it is about making sure there is labor for everyone to get a job.
- satellites 4y ago
  Social Security in the U.S. is typically for retired people age ~65 or older. There are other social programs for low-income people, but they are abysmally insufficient for what we’re talking about. Usually disabled people are paid by “disability insurance” but you have to get a job first to even qualify for that. So that’s usually for injuries etc. If you don’t live in the U.S. it’s hard to grasp just how hostile the political/economic system is towards the lower and middle classes. The idea of a UBI program to support people whose jobs get automated and lack the skills to work elsewhere is completely out of the question. A trip to the hospital can easily bankrupt the average American family ffs, but we can’t even fix that. There is zero political will to provide robust social programs here, despite any evidence that shows it might improve society. Sorry for the rant. TL;DR if you look at the last few decades of politics in the U.S. you can see there is close to zero chance of the solutions you’re describing.
  - Loquebantur 4y ago
    You too over-generalize when extrapolating past behavior linearly into the future. Being conscious intelligent creatures, humans ought to be able to learn from their mistakes and implement change accordingly. This presupposes one refrains from defeatist refusal to engage those problems of course.
    - satellites 4y ago
      How long have you been following politics and economics in a serious capacity? > Being conscious intelligent creatures, humans ought to be able to learn from their mistakes and implement change accordingly. We sure ought to, I agree with you there.
akokanka 4y ago
The scariest thing is that they will eventually allow euthanasia for your child and others like him. Economically unpleasant people are not needed in capitalism. The governments are already starting to prepare laws on it .
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  I think it's scarier that you believe this.
- tarboreus 4y ago
  Canada's MAID is well ahead of the curve on this. You can qualify just for saying you're depressed in some cases.
- vkou 4y ago
  1. Utter nonsense, please scrub whomever told you this from your list of reliable sources. 2. Capitalists require consumers to actually buy shit, owning capital doesn't get you anything if you don't have proles to sell to.
LambdaComplex 4y ago
> What if all similar jobs were automated? Hopefully, we would reach a Star Trek-like utopia where people aren't required to work in order to live. More realistically, the middle class just disappears, and we have nothing but the super-rich and the destitute left.

phkahler 4y ago

>> Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common I think Jordan Peterson quoted the stats as people with IQ under 83 are completely unemployable i.e. even the army can't get a net positive out of them. I found that deeply concerning in several ways. IMHO we need to work on reducing the cost of living so people can mostly opt-out without losing their home and dying. Instead it's always push harder, more growth, etc...

phphphphp 4y ago
[flagged]

antod 4y ago

Yeah, I think something that gets missed by the decriers of pessimism is that over time we really do seem to be throwing a new strata currently at the bottom of the workforce onto the scrapheap. The "optimists" might not take notice because they've been in the layers that can keep playing musical chairs and adjust, and things might even seem good - especially when the pool of money available gets more concentrated. What has been a slow gradual frog boiling process could very well accelerate with AI reaching this level though. I can't think of earlier developments being as widely applicable and moving as fast as this before. I worry for my kids generation, and personally wish I was 10yrs closer to retirement.

slg 4y ago

More generally the number of jobs hasn't seemed to drop drastically during any of these waves of automation, but the number of people employed in certain fields has including some jobs disappearing entirely. That means automation doesn't present a problem for the economy overall, but it does present a problem for individuals who need to exist in the transitioning economy. The US in particular has done an awful job easing those individuals during the transition. The economy becoming more efficient is good. We should use some of the surplus value of increased efficiency to care for the people harmed by that transition.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

> Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common. That's ~15% of the population who are close to un-employable. This is because we decide it's better to pay people to do nothing than to clean streets and medians and countless other things that need done.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago
And ironically by paying them just for existing, they are ending up as the only group capable of reproducing at higher than replacement rate. We are artificially selecting the worst people to reproduce and dooming ourselves.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  >We are artificially selecting the worst people to reproduce and dooming ourselves. The fallacy of eugenics is that 'smart' people have 'smart' children and the same for 'dumb' people. I think 90% of this forum believes themselves to be smarter than their parents, so maybe pump the brakes.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    Also the rate at which people with lower IQs reproduce isn't really alarmist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence#:~:text=International%20research,-Map%20of%20countries&text=Lynn%20and%20Harvey%20(2008)%20found,for%20the%20years%201950%E2%80%932000 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence#:....
  - akavi 4y ago
    Both "smart people have smart children" and 90% of this forum being smarter than their parents could be true if "being on this forum" was selected on intelligence. I don't have the time to work through the math concretely, but intuitively, imagine that the intelligence of parents is normally distributed, and the intelligence of their children is a tighter normal distribution around the parents' intelligence. Set the cutoff for "participating on HN" to to some threshold. Given the right set of parameters, most of the "weight" in the aggregate child distribution above the threshold will come from the long tails of the child distributions of parents in the fat part of the parent distribution.

quijoteuniv 4y ago

No one talks about the lift attendants! «The person who operated the lifts (elevators) in old shopping houses or buildings was called an "elevator operator" or "lift attendant." Their primary responsibility was to manually control the elevator, ensuring that it stopped accurately at each floor and that passengers were transported safely. They would also assist passengers by opening and closing the elevator doors and providing information about the different floors or departments within the building.»

bee_rider 4y ago

I understand that the market is mysterious and confusing, but it has always struck me as bizarre that our society is structured in such a way that automating a task away has ended up as a bad thing. The thing you were doing has been done, therefor society as a whole at least wouldn’t be harmed by just paying you (Your old salary - amortized yearly cost of the machine) to do nothing.

klipt 4y ago
Paying someone to idle is certainly harmful to society if you could pay them the same to do something productive.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  But it is strictly better than the pre-automation situation.
  - klipt 4y ago
    Maybe if you ignore the effects of competition. If you're paying someone you no longer need and your competitors (who have access to the same automation) aren't, they'll outcompete you.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      This matters from the perspective of one specific competitor, but not from the perspective of society as a whole - the latter still has the same gross economic output and the same number of people to support it with. Therefore, the disconnect between the two is due to the way society is structured (i.e. who reaps the economic benefits and how), and not intrinsic.
      - klipt 4y ago
        > the latter still has the same gross economic output Well no, if we still had the same gross economic output as 1000 years ago quality of living would be much lower. The point of competition is that it drives up total economic output. Of course it sucks for the people who get outcompeted. Certainly getting them productive again in another capacity is good for society. Letting them simply idle is not.

meh8881 4y ago

1. Is completely wrong. We have vastly grown the bottom end of the skills market by automating jobs to levels so simple that anyone can do it. They are bad jobs. But there are many of them. The problem is that we have people with normal IQs doing these jobs too, because there is not enough jobs above them.

DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
You’re arguing in March of 2023 that the issue is a lack of jobs?
- klyrs 4y ago
  I'd summarize their comment as "the issue is a lack of skilled jobs."
- meh8881 4y ago
  The ratio of skilled : unskilled jobs. As well as the general decline in what constitutes a skilled job.
Hermitian909 4y ago
People with these IQs under 85 are generally not employable in some of the lowest end jobs available: warehouseman, packer, or package delivery. I'm not sure what jobs you're imagining that are simpler than those, but I think I'm going to agree with the data on this point.
- meh8881 4y ago
  You think 15% of the population is too dumb to deliver packages? More than 1 in 10 people is not smart enough to pack things?
  - Hermitian909 4y ago
    I think the framing here has to be very careful: I agree with the general psychometric data that ~15% of struggle to get or keep a job delivering packages or packing things. This is not the same as packing something or delivering a package. Jobs require a certain speed of execution, ability to adapt to changing conditions, low rate of mistake, and a maximum training time. Remember, even the army during war time, which requires people fulfilling botho f these services won't hire people with such a low IQ.

CPLX 4y ago

If you're interested in topic #1 here I highly recommend the book "Dignity" by Chris Arnade. It's not like this concept was literally new to me but the grace with which he talks about it and the specific stories he encounters made me see things in an entirely different light. x

Aloha 4y ago

Another problem is, that minimum required IQ number keeps rising too. A healthy society needs to have means to support people of all intelligence levels, we need the equivalent of jobs for ditch diggers, and those jobs need to be respected lines of work for people. Work has more value than just money, and whether people like it or not, it gives value and meaning to peoples lives. The value we assign (and pay) for work shouldnt just be governed by the economic value it generates, it needs to be enough to meet basic needs, to engender respect. The basic point I'll make here, using ditch digging is - have you dug a ditch? I have, its hard work, and mine was just a small one in my back yard.

area51org 4y ago
Meanwhile, it's the knuckle-dragging cro mags who are having all the babies. I wonder how this ends.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Correlation!= causation. Our default is "lots of babies"; women getting more education and economic liberty decrease that number. Poor places don't generally have significant educational budgets or opportunities for women, but as that specific set of things changes — education and freedom, not even always money — there is a corresponding change to number of births per woman. It also means that rich couples in societies that lack women's lib still have more kids, even where you can infer high intellect without the convenient proxy of the women being allowed to go to university and giving you a test to score against.
  - klipt 4y ago
    In the short run, people can act against their own evolutionary fitness, but in the long run, evolutionary pressures should push those people to the wayside.
    - Aloha 4y ago
      I've also seen two parents of below average intelligence make children who are of above average intelligence, and thats not even uncommon.

ben_w 4y ago

> Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common. That's ~15% of the population who are close to un-employable. Although I was completely unaware of this literature, I have spent the last few years essentially making the same point with regard to automation: you don't need a super-duper ASI to cause severe employment problems, all you need is something with an IQ of 85 that costs at most minimum wage to run (modulo robotics keeping up and being part of that price), and then 16% of the population are permanently and irreversibly no longer economically employable.

bloppe 4y ago
There are many things a robot with "IQ" 85 cannot do that a human with "the same" IQ can: childcare / elder care, social work, basically anything that requires garnering trust and a lot of social interaction, but not necessarily complex skills. There will probably be more jobs like this in the future. Even now, people pay extra for handmade items when the technology to mass-produce the same thing for cheaper has been around for decades, so even if a robot can do your job, that doesn't necessarily make your skills worthless.
- gecersiznick 4y ago
  It’s safe to talk about EQ in addition to IQ regarding some jobs then. It’s more and more going to be about EQ jobs where AI feels lacking now, emphasis on the now.
- sharperguy 4y ago
  Automation in theory SHOULD, in the process of destroying jobs, make many things cheaper so people are able to afford things that were previously out of reach, creating new jobs in those sectors.
  - brunoborges 4y ago
    Last I checked, no grocery store got price drops thanks to self-checkout.

aidenn0 4y ago

I don't know to what degree automation was involved, but we also spent the last 60+ years socially devaluing jobs that don't require a college degree. My grandfather is about as smart as I am, but he never went to college (nor did well over 90% of his cohort). Now about half the population goes to college, and more than a third graduate. That's a massive transformation in two generations, and its exacerbated by the degree to which it segregates. I've never eaten lunch with an adult, my age or younger, who didn't attend college.

deleted 4y ago
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HDThoreaun 4y ago
> I've never eaten lunch with an adult, my age or younger, who didn't attend college https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin... It is completely wild to me how effectively society has self segregated to the point of just straight up never, not even once, interacting with the other group without even realizing it.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  The college thing is a much bigger divide than politics for my friend group. My wife is about as blue-tribe as you can get. My best-man is pretty darn red tribe (and not Mitt Romney red-tribe, but "likely to vote for Trump in the next Republican primary" red-tribe). They both have college degrees though. I have a few friends who dropped out of college, but none that never attended.

jalapenos 4y ago

On the second point, it's a good warning to never rest on your laurels. You're not owed that your profession stay relevant, and so you always have to keep an eye on trends, and if needed, adjust course.

trappist 4y ago

I think #1 is more attributable to the rising minimum wage. I read the other day that the one job that automation did successfully eliminate was the elevator operator, but I'm quite certain that - like the gas station attendant in states that don't mandate it - it fell victim to the rising minimum wage. It simply became illegal to pay people what these jobs are worth.