5 ms·

>perhaps the answer is that there is no barrier, and we're about to get flooded with supply. One of my earliest memories is listening to my old grandpa give mu

by zeteo 13y ago

>perhaps the answer is that there is no barrier, and we're about to get flooded with supply. One of my earliest memories is listening to my old grandpa give multiple arguments as to why computers were a passing fad. Needless to say, he was somewhat incorrect. Just because something is on the ascendant doesn't mean it will hit the corresponding descendant anytime soon. What killed autoworkers' jobs more than anything was automation. They had simple, repetitive jobs that anyone could do; and one day that anyone included robots. It costs nothing to write software with software, you don't need big hulking robots to do it. But it's also a job that basically involves solving frustrating, novel problems each day. Not something to be easily replaced by a robot. To boot, the number and kinds of computers in existence is significantly increasing each year. Smartphones, which became wildly popular in a mere six years, are the most egregious example. The number of developers may be growing a lot, but their tasks are not getting fewer either.

bluedino 13y ago
>> What killed autoworkers' jobs more than anything else was automation. Many, many things killed autoworkers jobs but automation was the least of their worries. If you want to credit it to one thing, it'd be competition. The non-American automakers made cars that lasted longer, got better mileage, and were more reliable. The Big Three could just shovel shit onto dealer lots and it was gobbled up. Everyone has getting rich. Then it came to an end.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  The Japanese car makers are even more into automation than we North Americans and Europeans are. And the results are actually better: people make mistakes, they are not precise; machines on the other hand are very precise. Automation most definitely was killing the American auto worker...then China comes along and starts killing automation with very cheap labor. But we don't buy cars from China, the same Japanese cars that we laud in the states are derided in China for being unreliable (given that they are made in Chinese factories without automation). There is a lesson somewhere in that.
  - bluedino 13y ago
    We joked about Korean cars for a while, it will take time but Chinese cars are coming.
    - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
      The Koreans likewise adopted automation. The Chinese cars are not getting good until they get over their addiction to cheap labor, and they still have vast reservoirs of that.
  - redact207 13y ago
    I'm not so sure about that. Most car factories operate in a pretty similar way ever since the Toyota way and total quality management come out decades ago. Although parts of the assembly line are fully machine driven (chassis welding, spray booth), there are a lot of human zones for assembly. Yes people do make mistakes, but if you've seen their procedures on how to work, they get instructions right down to how many rotations a bolt requires, then where to put the spanner back down. Sounds micro-managed, but it's how the robotic sensors detect if people are working to the procedure and hence quality targets are being achieved. China isn't much different (nor Thailand). Back in the 80s & 90s when Japanese electronics and cars were flooding the market everyone saw them like 'cheap junk' akin to how we see China's products. But over time management learns and products get better.
    - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
      Toyota's reputation here in China is much lower than I remember it being in the states, and the only difference are the Chinese JV factories, which I guess are just inferior in quality. The level of automation in Chinese factories is much lower than in Japan or North America given that (a) labor is cheap and (b) importing machinery is tariffed and very expensive. But Toyota's reputation is nowhere near as bad as that of Chinese brands. No one wants to drive a Xiali even if it is essentially a Corolla in design. Japanese electronics and cars were already considered to be very good by the mid 80s. Japan ALWAYS had a strong culture in design and quality, and it was only post war where they had to play catch up again; there is no mystery about Japanese success. The Chinese, on the other hand, have a much greater problem of converting from a primarily rural to an industrial economy, a problem Japan did not have post war (the Meiji restoration already happened while the Chinese were going through late Qing chaos). I'm not experienced with Thailand's auto industry (beyond that they dominate in pickup trucks).
michaelochurch 13y ago
It costs nothing to write software with software, you don't need big hulking robots to do it. But it's also a job that has lots of variety; each day you have to solve unexpected, frustrating, novel problems. Not a task for the average robot (or even the average person IMHO). We have software "robots" that write software and many of us use them frequently. They're called compilers. They do the repetitive and detailed stuff, often better than we can, due to pre-programmed knowledge. Programming is still challenging. That won't end in the next 50 years.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  > We have software "robots" that write software and many of us use them frequently. They're called compilers. Compilers automate a simple but tedious translation process. They do not "write programs", they merely translate (hopefully in a deterministic way) one stream of text (PL code) into another stream of text (machine code). They apply no creativity to the problem, and indeed was once done by hand with what were essentially secretary pools (Grace Hopper got her start there, thankfully she moved up pretty quickly). Compilers eliminated this work, but the persons handing the high-level programs to the "human compilers" (the former usually men, the latter usually women, the 50s were pretty sexist) still had a job that was relatively the same (just now they had to deal with punchcards). > Programming is still challenging. That won't end in the next 50 years. Programming ends as a profession of course once we hit singularity, which is anywhere from 20 to 100 years away depending on who you ask. We already do not code many systems by hand, but instead meta-code algorithms to generate these systems from corpus training inputs (aka machine learning). No one would try and build a speech recognition system by hand anymore. We will see machine learning increasingly encroaching on what used to be pure programming tasks.
- kamaal 13y ago
  >>Programming is still challenging. That won't end in the next 50 years. So is building cars. Or anything for that matter. Problems in every profession have just gone to a whole new level. When automation kicks in, you won't need humans to go and solve trivial issues. And there fore what will be left is jobs for people who would like to work on things that can't be automated. Stuff like solving problems no one else has solved before. And creating something or improving something. And things on those lines. Such jobs are always going to stressful, with high chances of failure, will require thinking and working very hard, with repeated sacrifice to your personal and social life. But at the end if you do it right, you might win big. Currently that is programming, tomorrow it will something else. So as long as our species exists we will have problems to solve. And that won't end in the next 50,000 years or probably ever.

by zeteo 13y ago

bluedino 13y ago

>> What killed autoworkers' jobs more than anything else was automation. Many, many things killed autoworkers jobs but automation was the least of their worries. If you want to credit it to one thing, it'd be competition. The non-American automakers made cars that lasted longer, got better mileage, and were more reliable. The Big Three could just shovel shit onto dealer lots and it was gobbled up. Everyone has getting rich. Then it came to an end.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
The Japanese car makers are even more into automation than we North Americans and Europeans are. And the results are actually better: people make mistakes, they are not precise; machines on the other hand are very precise. Automation most definitely was killing the American auto worker...then China comes along and starts killing automation with very cheap labor. But we don't buy cars from China, the same Japanese cars that we laud in the states are derided in China for being unreliable (given that they are made in Chinese factories without automation). There is a lesson somewhere in that.
- bluedino 13y ago
  We joked about Korean cars for a while, it will take time but Chinese cars are coming.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    The Koreans likewise adopted automation. The Chinese cars are not getting good until they get over their addiction to cheap labor, and they still have vast reservoirs of that.
- redact207 13y ago
  I'm not so sure about that. Most car factories operate in a pretty similar way ever since the Toyota way and total quality management come out decades ago. Although parts of the assembly line are fully machine driven (chassis welding, spray booth), there are a lot of human zones for assembly. Yes people do make mistakes, but if you've seen their procedures on how to work, they get instructions right down to how many rotations a bolt requires, then where to put the spanner back down. Sounds micro-managed, but it's how the robotic sensors detect if people are working to the procedure and hence quality targets are being achieved. China isn't much different (nor Thailand). Back in the 80s & 90s when Japanese electronics and cars were flooding the market everyone saw them like 'cheap junk' akin to how we see China's products. But over time management learns and products get better.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    Toyota's reputation here in China is much lower than I remember it being in the states, and the only difference are the Chinese JV factories, which I guess are just inferior in quality. The level of automation in Chinese factories is much lower than in Japan or North America given that (a) labor is cheap and (b) importing machinery is tariffed and very expensive. But Toyota's reputation is nowhere near as bad as that of Chinese brands. No one wants to drive a Xiali even if it is essentially a Corolla in design. Japanese electronics and cars were already considered to be very good by the mid 80s. Japan ALWAYS had a strong culture in design and quality, and it was only post war where they had to play catch up again; there is no mystery about Japanese success. The Chinese, on the other hand, have a much greater problem of converting from a primarily rural to an industrial economy, a problem Japan did not have post war (the Meiji restoration already happened while the Chinese were going through late Qing chaos). I'm not experienced with Thailand's auto industry (beyond that they dominate in pickup trucks).

michaelochurch 13y ago

It costs nothing to write software with software, you don't need big hulking robots to do it. But it's also a job that has lots of variety; each day you have to solve unexpected, frustrating, novel problems. Not a task for the average robot (or even the average person IMHO). We have software "robots" that write software and many of us use them frequently. They're called compilers. They do the repetitive and detailed stuff, often better than we can, due to pre-programmed knowledge. Programming is still challenging. That won't end in the next 50 years.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
> We have software "robots" that write software and many of us use them frequently. They're called compilers. Compilers automate a simple but tedious translation process. They do not "write programs", they merely translate (hopefully in a deterministic way) one stream of text (PL code) into another stream of text (machine code). They apply no creativity to the problem, and indeed was once done by hand with what were essentially secretary pools (Grace Hopper got her start there, thankfully she moved up pretty quickly). Compilers eliminated this work, but the persons handing the high-level programs to the "human compilers" (the former usually men, the latter usually women, the 50s were pretty sexist) still had a job that was relatively the same (just now they had to deal with punchcards). > Programming is still challenging. That won't end in the next 50 years. Programming ends as a profession of course once we hit singularity, which is anywhere from 20 to 100 years away depending on who you ask. We already do not code many systems by hand, but instead meta-code algorithms to generate these systems from corpus training inputs (aka machine learning). No one would try and build a speech recognition system by hand anymore. We will see machine learning increasingly encroaching on what used to be pure programming tasks.
kamaal 13y ago
>>Programming is still challenging. That won't end in the next 50 years. So is building cars. Or anything for that matter. Problems in every profession have just gone to a whole new level. When automation kicks in, you won't need humans to go and solve trivial issues. And there fore what will be left is jobs for people who would like to work on things that can't be automated. Stuff like solving problems no one else has solved before. And creating something or improving something. And things on those lines. Such jobs are always going to stressful, with high chances of failure, will require thinking and working very hard, with repeated sacrifice to your personal and social life. But at the end if you do it right, you might win big. Currently that is programming, tomorrow it will something else. So as long as our species exists we will have problems to solve. And that won't end in the next 50,000 years or probably ever.