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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 t

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.
      - johnchristopher 4y ago
        > 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. Except if they have never used self checkout before. Or if they have 15 items in the store's cart but they haven't brought their shopping bags so they take 15 minutes to fill their arms and pockets and hats with their groceries. Those people are eating time saved by self-checkout ! I tolerate the young ones who comes in pack of 6 individuals, especially if only one of them buy their unique can of coke. It makes the queue looks longer than it is and I am out sooner than the SUCKERS in the other queue. HA ! (/s ? /s)
        lotsofpulp 4y ago
        Sure, but in my experience, there are so many self checkout stalls that I never have to wait long.
- 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.

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.
    - johnchristopher 4y ago
      > 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. Except if they have never used self checkout before. Or if they have 15 items in the store's cart but they haven't brought their shopping bags so they take 15 minutes to fill their arms and pockets and hats with their groceries. Those people are eating time saved by self-checkout ! I tolerate the young ones who comes in pack of 6 individuals, especially if only one of them buy their unique can of coke. It makes the queue looks longer than it is and I am out sooner than the SUCKERS in the other queue. HA ! (/s ? /s)
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        Sure, but in my experience, there are so many self checkout stalls that I never have to wait long.
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.