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What Undercover Boss and The Jetsons Tell Us About the Future of Jobs
- bgilroy26 13y agoA large volume of the jobs that are being automated are are invented with computers in mind. The more stringent accounting standards that were created over the last 20 years would have led to the demand for thousands upon thousands of white collar workers, if we still kept books and records the way we did in 1910. On the other hand, companies would not have been able to grow large enough to need new accounting standards in the first place, if not for the productivity increases since the introduction of the computer.
- d4nt 13y agoWhat's more, there would be a lot fewer people around if computers weren't helping us grow food, generate energy, cure diseases and move everything around just in time. The more I think about it, the more I think computers are a sort of virus and we're in a symbiotic relationship with them.
- crpatino 13y agoThe revolution, discovery of fossil fuels and antibiotics, international trade, etc, were all widespread before the invention of computers. You could argue that operations research (a branch of applied math that deals with logistics mostly) has evolved concurrently with computer technology, but the former has one or two decades of a head start in terms of adoption by private enterprises. I think it's more like computers allows us to do the same stuff faster and at a broader scale, but it has had little impact so far in which stuff do we choose to do.
- agilebyte 13y ago> I can imagine, for example, that "made (or served) by humans" could be the "organic" or "fair trade" of the future. Actually, I would see it the other way round, on one condition. If people had a guaranteed income (or housing, healthcare & food) then paying humans to do work that robots can do would seem like an unnecessary luxury to me.
- a3n 13y agoThere will be three jobs in the future: quants, CEOs that employ the quants, and members of Congress. Everyone else will be lazy good for nothing takers for not having a non-existent job and deserve nothing more than to starve in the gutter. At least, that's how it's going to be in the US.
- _random_ 13y agoEvolution is a bitch.
- sliverstorm 13y agoQuants don't create value, so without a healthy market a quant is powerless. Like a swimmer trying to swim in a dried-out lakebed. Thus the CEOs that employ the quants are also powerless.
- saosebastiao 13y agoI know tons of quants that create value. They just don't work in finance.
- cellis 13y agoNo, just robots. CEOs/politicians who control the robots, and people who do what the robots say and are provided with everything in return.
- Retric 13y ago"Organic" and "Fair Trade" are an unnecessary luxury to most people. Nobody is trying to keep hand crafted automobile assembly plants operating but some how innefecent farming is all the rage.
- crpatino 13y agoThe current use of automation in car manufacturing does not preclude the future capacity of building more cars by any means. Your so called "efficient farming" does increase the yield of calories per acre at the cost of killing of the microscopic ecosystems in the topsoil and bankrupting farmers. The only thing those practices are good at is to increase the margins of fertilizer and pesticide producers.
- _random_ 13y agoMy suggestion for the brand: "touched by humans". "Genuine Food - touched by humans". "Authentic Underwear - touched by humans". Robots don't spit in coffee. Robots don't under-cook your burger when they have an ambition crisis. Robots sew neat seams.
- oneweekwonder 13y ago"Robots will need to defend the one percent, when the ambition of the masses has turned into a pit of despair, like a animal trapped in a corner with no where to go and nothing to lose."
- crpatino 13y agoRobots don't spit in coffee... they spill it over your hand if you cannot hold the damned cup still with micro-metric precision.
- jmcdonald-ut 13y agoThe belief that the future will be this dark and gloomy place where one struggles to find work is understandable. Certainly there are things that can indicate this is right. Manufacturing is becoming more heavily automated for example. I think that we will see a period in the coming years that could be regarded as a "growing pain" for the human species. Jobs and professions could shift to be more inline with rapidly advancing technologies. During this time there will probably be people who find themselves either out of work, or unqualified. After this time I think that jobs and professions will again be available and that many people will be qualified for them. Perhaps even more jobs. Who knows, maybe I'm an optimist.
- DerpDerpDerp 13y ago> After this time I think that jobs and professions will again be available and that many people will be qualified for them. Perhaps even more jobs. Like what? The problem is that we're creeping up the capability ladder, and it will only be a few decades until the robots can do the math, science, design, engineering, and assembly of new robots, which can in turn produce any other objects. What's there for humans to do? The real problem is that robotics makes humans unnecessary for economies to function, and we'll need to change our social model to account for that. Or just let a huge swathe of the people starve.
- jedberg 13y agoI'm one of those people that prefer automation I'll actually wait slightly longer for the automated checkout at the market, mainly because I want to see it in more places.
- greeneggs 13y agoDo you mean self checkout (manual checkout)? I've never heard of automated checkout, but that would be amazing!
- JamesArgo 13y agoIt's possible with RFID. Just not cheap enough yet.
- gutnor 13y agoThey put RFID in one way underground ticket now. The time it is cheap enough to include everywhere is coming fast. However, I'm not quite sure that will be enough for shops to automate. The problem for shop is that an automated system most likely cause of failure is to miss items. That added to the likely need to remove some security features to simplify automation and the already existing shoplifting problem means shop owner will be more interested in more clever (read more obnoxious) self checkout system than automated ones.
- rfnslyr 13y agoI prefer automation because I don't like encountering people most of the time. Less anxiety.
- stephengillie 13y ago47 percent of U.S. jobs are “at risk” of being automated in the next 20 years. The other way to look at this, of course, is: 47 percent of our labor force will be freed from their menial tasks. Our societies will collectively be able to produce and accomplish almost double what we currently can.
- lazerwalker 13y agoThat sort of outlook implies a government and populace that's willing to embrace something resembling a functioning socialist state, rather than merely letting the "freed" labor force live in abject poverty. Based on the current political climate in the U.S., I'm highly skeptical such a thing would happen.
- stephengillie 13y agoNo, it implies some of them will become entrepreneurs and hire some of the others. And that some costs will go down from this newfound efficiency. You'll never convince me that Luddism is a progressive policy.
- gutnor 13y agoOnce one job has been automated away, all the people that were doing it need a realistic reconversion plan. A farm worker can convert easily into a factory worker, but cannot learn mandarin, software engineering or whatever overnight. (not even taking into account the legal challenge to convert. Whatever happens, if my job go to China, I will have massive legal hard time to follow it) Europe and the US have been historically bad at that. Europe hides those workers in "pre-pension" (loads of steel/mine worker get their state pension around 45), "long term unemployment"; US hides them in various disability assistance program. (source: there was an article here I think a few months back) Luddism want basically to stop progress in order to keep people employed, which was stupid 100 years ago, and is stupid now. GP on the other hand suggest to embrace the changes but accept some/lot people will need assistance.
- joe_the_user 13y agoThe only way that automation works is through creating a highly controlled environment where production can proceed in a predictable fashion. The only way to have a completely automated restaurant is have a big box that spits out meals. The alternative is no automation or a lot of little boxes that are used for pieces. The thing is that a restaurant would still needs counter-help and clean-up help so further. Let's assume the box reduces the cost of prep-labor by 50%. That reduces the labor past of your costs by 25% and your total costs by 12.5% assuming labor is 50% of costs. So it's a good savings but not an astronomical savings. But the counter-weight you have sell people on buying the food that comes out of the box. A few places compete on price alone but that's hard. Just consider that restaurants are already competing with microwave dinners in the frozen section that quite possibly are already spat out of a better, cleverer box at a central factory. It would seem restaurants compete on ambiance and human relations and a 12.5% prices savings might not compensate. Another thing about "food out of a box" restaurant is that the box might not have the flexibility of a human preparer. If you need to change your menu, you might find you have to do expensive retooling on your box rather than a quick retraining of your employees. If you have to close a given restaurant, you may find no one wants your box. You may find yourself more dependent on your small number of box-technicians than you were previously on a large number of easily replaced unskilled cooks and so-forth. The thing is that humans are a fabulous deal once you remove the price differential. Human comes with amazing skills, often train themselves with more, supervise and trouble-shoot each other, require little capital investment and manufacture themselves. This kind of thing is a good deal for nearly everything except production at a large scale (and the most important items, cars and iphones, are going to that large scale). The only unfortunate thing from the buyers perspective is that humans have a nasty habit of expect a share of the output instead of just a bare wage. But the solution to that problem is visible all around us ... humans.
- yafujifide 13y ago> The only way that automation works is through creating a highly controlled environment where production can proceed in a predictable fashion. That's true today, but don't you think artificial intelligence will change that?
- surrealize 13y ago> I can imagine, for example, that “made (or served) by humans” could be the “organic” or “fair trade” of the future. ... or the "handmade" of the future?
- svantana 13y agoI find this quote ironic. One of the main purposes of fairtrade is to avoid poor working conditions (for humans). If a particular brand of coffee was produced without any human labor, that could probably be considered fairtrade.
- bsenftner 13y agoThis is the future of automation: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm All you need is software that determines what needs to be done, and a minimum wage work force wearing headsets to receive task commands to carry out. Short circuits the need for ANY advancements in AI to enslave entire social classes. I would love this to be wrong.
- lgieron 13y agoI think the story got it wrong - that it's the "thinking" that is harder to automate (as opposed to "doing"). Once we have AI capable of managing a fast food restaurant, the workers will probably be long gone anyway (replaced by robots).
- waps 13y agoHaving done some automation with actual robots, I must disagree. Determining what needs doing is a policy problem. Sure there may be variables, but it seems to me essentially you have a priority list, a list of workers and other resources, and essentially a bucket fill algorithm. Further enhancement might be to verify that the store is actually operational during all the different times (e.g. at 6pm, refill the fries before you do the cash register counting, even though the cash register stuff is more important in the end). Add to that that you can make significant mistakes and not have real consequences. In fact you could screw up a few things and still have better overall results than a human planner. And manna like planners are pretty normal in Doesn't sound like it's a huge problem to me. Having a 3 segment robot arm pick up a salt shaker requires balancing 7 codependent feedback loops, while constantly checking if you're hitting anything and requires constant evaluation of forward and inverse kinematics. As if that problem is not bad enough, you have to do it not just fast, but in real-time (as in, you have to calculate all this at ~50hz at least. If a single decision takes 100 msec, you've just damaged or lost the robot). State of the art in robotics is picking up and unboiled egg 10 times without breaking it, and most robots can't do it. If you start to use those robots to hand people burgers, expect broken bones at least, casualties at worst. Replacing a burger flipper requires solving not one, but actually most unsolved AI problems. You need voice recognition + understanding. Okay that's one. Then you need to understand the meaning in what was actually said. You know, the problem that google's 35000 employees from amongst the "world's best" don't quite know how to solve. I mean, they're far ahead of the pack, but nowhere near open-ended conversations with a human, never mind doing so with social grace. If your robot can walk around you need to manage an unsolved 30-dimensional feedback loop problem. State of the art for that problem is pathetic as well[1][2]. If it can't walk around you have other problems, and it's still at least a 14-dimensional feedback problem (two six-dimensional arms + 2 grippers). There's the mechanical problem of creating a robot that stays robust when working with "gooey" stuff like food (it will build up inside the robot, then fail or cause overheating). Then you need to solve all the problems that the "manna" system solves, or there's no point having a robot in the first place. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjgkV77gVcs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjgkV77gVcs (note the obviously reduced dimensionality that wouldn't fly in the real world, and that the robot sees no problem moving through itself. It's stability under disturbances is also not at the point that it would keep operating for long periods. Do that in real life and the thing will topple over) [2] And before you say Bigdog, note that 4 feet locomotion is a much simpler problem. Bigdog is solving for 8 dimensions, and that's state of the art (and it is not sufficiently reliable to operate a single day without assistance). 2 feet locomotion in a human is ~140-dimensional, the minimum you can reduce it to while still having a nice mobile robot is 12-dimensional.