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If a job is so simple, repetitive and brainless that it can be automated, it's in humanity's best interest that it gets automated, and people are freed to do so

If a job is so simple, repetitive and brainless that it can be automated, it's in humanity's best interest that it gets automated, and people are freed to do something more useful. Yes, this will suck if you're 50 years old and get laid off the assembly line, but we've been automating jobs out of existence for a few centuries now and the overall consequences have not been particularly terrifying.

riggins 13y ago
have not been particularly terrifying. well that's not quite true. For mankind as a whole, no. For people who's livelihood has been automated ... its been pretty terrifying.
- brc 13y ago
  That is a disengenious quote...the line partially quoted is 'the overall consequences have not been particularly terrifying'. The OP specifically points out that individually, changes are bad, but as an aggregate, things generally get better.
  - riggins 13y ago
    nitpick. here's the spirit. Often people will dismiss the human consequences of innovation with the logic that it hasn't been all that bad in the past. But the reality is that for effected people it really has been all that bad. Take the Luddites. They seem kinda silly ... going around breaking mechanical looms ... until you put yourself in their shoes. These weren't the poorest of the poor, unskilled laborers. They were skilled laborers who put effort into learning a craft whose skills were suddenly devalued by automation. And that was bad enough for them that they were willing to risk death to destroy mechanical looms. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRluddites.htm http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRluddites.htm
    - rfrey 13y ago
      > nitpick What? No - not nitpick. You cherrypicked words to exclude the writer's caveat, changing the meaning, then criticised the changed meaning. Classic out-of-context quoting, especially since the writer addressed your criticism in the very same sentence you quoted.
      - riggins 13y ago
        you do realize its absurd to talk about 'out-of-context' quoting when the full comment is sitting right there for everyone to read? I was responding to a particular part of the comment, hence why I highlighted that, but obviously the whole comment is right there! My opinion, and what I was articulating is that saying this will suck if you're 50 years old and get laid off the assembly line is a flippant dismissal of a serious issue. Its like saying 'it will suck if you're a Syrian whose family gets wiped out in the civil war ... but hey we've been having wars in the Middle East for 100 years and its not particularly terrifying.'
mchusma 13y ago
Nicely said. I'd just add that if people are still doing simple, easily automated jobs in a few years, that is terrifying. We can do much better as a society than that. All that said, there may be a new class of unemployable people that will need to be accounted for in some way. Not sure what that is yet. I can say that I find it unfathomable that government will work on the problem prior to it becoming an issue.
te_chris 13y ago
You're so noble in your quest to turn skilled factory workers into minimum wage service employees. Problem is, what happens when the purchasing power of all these people is destroyed and the demand they were responsible for creating disappears?
- PeterisP 13y ago
  Umm, actually the skilled factory workers (who aren't yet automated) aren't in danger - but these millions of those minimum wage service jobs are next in line to be automated; and they aren't going to be "turned into" any other jobs at all, they will be permanently unemployed. That's the whole reason for needing drastic social changes, to figure out how to distribute resources when the raw labor of many or most of population isn't useful anymore, when paying a bare sustenance wage is more expensive than simply getting a machine to do the same thing better and faster.
  - programmarchy 13y ago
    Do you really think service workers can't learn new skills? We're talking about human beings here, not ants.
    - Ygg2 13y ago
      I think the question you need to ask - can service workers learn new skills that robots won't automate by the time they are done learning. Robots already can partially or fully replace diagnosticians and surgeons. Those are jobs that takes one or two decade to specialize in.
JeremyNT 13y ago
There is not enough history to give us the context for what this means. People like to bring out truisms of horse and buggy drivers, but we're getting to the point where we're thinking of automating entire classes of jobs out of existence rapidly, not just specific tradesmen one at a time. Where in the past manual labor has been automated, it has tended to happen slowly, increasing efficiencies in niches and eliminating some tasks completely. This has freed people to engage in - by and large - other sorts of manual labor, those which were not so trivially automated. What happens when the very notion of "manual labor" is itself abolished? There's no historical precedent for that. Automation will likely not eliminate all manual labor in our lifetimes, but I imagine it will eliminate enough of it to break capitalism for large portions of the population. We need to start considering what that means sooner, rather than later.
- droopyEyelids 13y ago
  Well stated. A phrase that comes to mind is that "Over time, a quantitate change becomes a qualitative change." Take Moore's law for example. The doubling of transistors/halving of their expense first allowed more efficient computation in the original manner, but now that qualitative change has started to alter the very nature of computation- omnipresent computation in all man made devices doesn't mean our spreadsheets run faster, but rather humanity exchanges information and communicates in an entirely different manner than it did a generation ago. Likewise, I believe we'll see the gradual automation of 'useless' jobs change from an event we can work around by retraining or switching careers to an obsolescence of the vast majority of human labor. There are some nagging statistics about unemployed engineers that I believe back my assumption, especially considering that engineering positions should be the new careers people retrain to.
sfbsfbsfb 13y ago
If a persons fully realized talents, skills, creativity and intelligence are such that the most useful work they can do generates productivity levels below those of generally available robots then they will be displaced. If the maximum work complexity a person can handle is assembling hamburgers, washing dishes, moping floors, sticking one part onto another part then they are in danger of being permanently displaced by robots from ALL job categories. I don't know how many people this is but as robots improve this number grows. How large would this number have to be, when added to current chronic levels of high unemployment, disability, nonproductive elderly/young, before society breaks down. And if by some chance society did not collapse what would all these people be doing? The mind rapidly slides into what we have previously considered dystopian science fiction.
- psbp 13y ago
  "And if by some chance society did not collapse what would all these people be doing?" Starving?
Houshalter 13y ago
>Yes, this will suck if you're 50 years old and get laid off the assembly line, but we've been automating jobs out of existence for a few centuries now and the overall consequences have not been particularly terrifying. In the past we've mostly been replacing a few skilled workers with lots of unskilled ones. Automation does the opposite.
- mbell 13y ago
  I don't think this is true at all. How many unskilled laborers does a single corn combine harvester + skilled operator replace? How many unskilled laborers does a single skidder/tree harvester with a skilled operator replace?
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    Sure there are exceptions, but the people displaced by that found more newly created unskilled jobs in factories. Mass production and manufacturing had previously only been done by skilled craftsman and now was employing most of the population. And today that is finally going away completely.
throwwit 13y ago
jpatokal is right!... more than 7% are 'free' and it can only get better... great times. /s
Johnie 13y ago
Thought experiment. Is it possible that there are no other jobs or not enough jobs than people? And if this is possible, can people be freed to do something more useful if there is nothing more useful?
Ygg2 13y ago
You mean, like when we automated all the boring tedium out of most of our jobs and are now working 30hr week with high minimum wages? Yeah, that was good. Oh, wait.

riggins 13y ago

have not been particularly terrifying. well that's not quite true. For mankind as a whole, no. For people who's livelihood has been automated ... its been pretty terrifying.

brc 13y ago
That is a disengenious quote...the line partially quoted is 'the overall consequences have not been particularly terrifying'. The OP specifically points out that individually, changes are bad, but as an aggregate, things generally get better.
- riggins 13y ago
  nitpick. here's the spirit. Often people will dismiss the human consequences of innovation with the logic that it hasn't been all that bad in the past. But the reality is that for effected people it really has been all that bad. Take the Luddites. They seem kinda silly ... going around breaking mechanical looms ... until you put yourself in their shoes. These weren't the poorest of the poor, unskilled laborers. They were skilled laborers who put effort into learning a craft whose skills were suddenly devalued by automation. And that was bad enough for them that they were willing to risk death to destroy mechanical looms. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRluddites.htm http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRluddites.htm
  - rfrey 13y ago
    > nitpick What? No - not nitpick. You cherrypicked words to exclude the writer's caveat, changing the meaning, then criticised the changed meaning. Classic out-of-context quoting, especially since the writer addressed your criticism in the very same sentence you quoted.
    - riggins 13y ago
      you do realize its absurd to talk about 'out-of-context' quoting when the full comment is sitting right there for everyone to read? I was responding to a particular part of the comment, hence why I highlighted that, but obviously the whole comment is right there! My opinion, and what I was articulating is that saying this will suck if you're 50 years old and get laid off the assembly line is a flippant dismissal of a serious issue. Its like saying 'it will suck if you're a Syrian whose family gets wiped out in the civil war ... but hey we've been having wars in the Middle East for 100 years and its not particularly terrifying.'

mchusma 13y ago

Nicely said. I'd just add that if people are still doing simple, easily automated jobs in a few years, that is terrifying. We can do much better as a society than that. All that said, there may be a new class of unemployable people that will need to be accounted for in some way. Not sure what that is yet. I can say that I find it unfathomable that government will work on the problem prior to it becoming an issue.

te_chris 13y ago

You're so noble in your quest to turn skilled factory workers into minimum wage service employees. Problem is, what happens when the purchasing power of all these people is destroyed and the demand they were responsible for creating disappears?

PeterisP 13y ago
Umm, actually the skilled factory workers (who aren't yet automated) aren't in danger - but these millions of those minimum wage service jobs are next in line to be automated; and they aren't going to be "turned into" any other jobs at all, they will be permanently unemployed. That's the whole reason for needing drastic social changes, to figure out how to distribute resources when the raw labor of many or most of population isn't useful anymore, when paying a bare sustenance wage is more expensive than simply getting a machine to do the same thing better and faster.
- programmarchy 13y ago
  Do you really think service workers can't learn new skills? We're talking about human beings here, not ants.
  - Ygg2 13y ago
    I think the question you need to ask - can service workers learn new skills that robots won't automate by the time they are done learning. Robots already can partially or fully replace diagnosticians and surgeons. Those are jobs that takes one or two decade to specialize in.

JeremyNT 13y ago

There is not enough history to give us the context for what this means. People like to bring out truisms of horse and buggy drivers, but we're getting to the point where we're thinking of automating entire classes of jobs out of existence rapidly, not just specific tradesmen one at a time. Where in the past manual labor has been automated, it has tended to happen slowly, increasing efficiencies in niches and eliminating some tasks completely. This has freed people to engage in - by and large - other sorts of manual labor, those which were not so trivially automated. What happens when the very notion of "manual labor" is itself abolished? There's no historical precedent for that. Automation will likely not eliminate all manual labor in our lifetimes, but I imagine it will eliminate enough of it to break capitalism for large portions of the population. We need to start considering what that means sooner, rather than later.

droopyEyelids 13y ago
Well stated. A phrase that comes to mind is that "Over time, a quantitate change becomes a qualitative change." Take Moore's law for example. The doubling of transistors/halving of their expense first allowed more efficient computation in the original manner, but now that qualitative change has started to alter the very nature of computation- omnipresent computation in all man made devices doesn't mean our spreadsheets run faster, but rather humanity exchanges information and communicates in an entirely different manner than it did a generation ago. Likewise, I believe we'll see the gradual automation of 'useless' jobs change from an event we can work around by retraining or switching careers to an obsolescence of the vast majority of human labor. There are some nagging statistics about unemployed engineers that I believe back my assumption, especially considering that engineering positions should be the new careers people retrain to.

sfbsfbsfb 13y ago

If a persons fully realized talents, skills, creativity and intelligence are such that the most useful work they can do generates productivity levels below those of generally available robots then they will be displaced. If the maximum work complexity a person can handle is assembling hamburgers, washing dishes, moping floors, sticking one part onto another part then they are in danger of being permanently displaced by robots from ALL job categories. I don't know how many people this is but as robots improve this number grows. How large would this number have to be, when added to current chronic levels of high unemployment, disability, nonproductive elderly/young, before society breaks down. And if by some chance society did not collapse what would all these people be doing? The mind rapidly slides into what we have previously considered dystopian science fiction.

psbp 13y ago
"And if by some chance society did not collapse what would all these people be doing?" Starving?

Houshalter 13y ago

>Yes, this will suck if you're 50 years old and get laid off the assembly line, but we've been automating jobs out of existence for a few centuries now and the overall consequences have not been particularly terrifying. In the past we've mostly been replacing a few skilled workers with lots of unskilled ones. Automation does the opposite.

mbell 13y ago
I don't think this is true at all. How many unskilled laborers does a single corn combine harvester + skilled operator replace? How many unskilled laborers does a single skidder/tree harvester with a skilled operator replace?
- Houshalter 13y ago
  Sure there are exceptions, but the people displaced by that found more newly created unskilled jobs in factories. Mass production and manufacturing had previously only been done by skilled craftsman and now was employing most of the population. And today that is finally going away completely.

throwwit 13y ago

jpatokal is right!... more than 7% are 'free' and it can only get better... great times. /s

Johnie 13y ago

Thought experiment. Is it possible that there are no other jobs or not enough jobs than people? And if this is possible, can people be freed to do something more useful if there is nothing more useful?

Ygg2 13y ago

You mean, like when we automated all the boring tedium out of most of our jobs and are now working 30hr week with high minimum wages? Yeah, that was good. Oh, wait.