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Automation bashing had become so boring. ”Us vs them” its a go to media cliche. Machines, automated or otherwise, are made to help us. We want every thing to be

by hooande 13y ago

Automation bashing had become so boring. ”Us vs them” its a go to media cliche. Machines, automated or otherwise, are made to help us. We want every thing to be automated. The purpose of business and technology is to improve lives, not to employ people. No one starts a company with the intention of creating jobs. People want to solve problems, make money or bring useful new ideas to life. Startup founders want to do whatever has to be done in order to execute their vision, with humans, machines, trained animals or whatever. Automation improves our position as species and we need to get behind it instead of viewing it a competitive threat. As they say in pickup basketball, ”Same team!” It's true that automation has a disproportionate effect on different levels of society. But that's more about humans than it its about machines. There are a lot of people working on technical solutions now and sooner or later people will get to work on social solutions that address some of Friedman's concerns. We're a long way from a fully automated society and we have time to prepare for the inevitable changes.

bertil 13y ago
> we have time to prepare for the inevitable changes. I would argue, having lived in countries that lead automation rates, that we already are at a point were large groups of the population cannot find work with their qualification, and never will: farmers, miners and forest workers had to convert to become factory workers, but most of those are now outsourced or automated; at the moment, there isn’t a job in Western countries for someone who has difficulty learning how to read. Some people genuinely can’t grasp any abstract concepts: I taught in jail for a while, to people who couldn’t for the life of them generalise “Two apples plus three apples equals five apples; two sheets of paper plus three…” and remained baffled by ‘addition’ as an abstraction. Keep in mind: some of those guys fashioned working radios and distilleries from scratch. Similarly, I have talked to taxi drivers who couldn’t understand it was in their interest to switch to Uber, how the trust mechanism worked with the app (they thought the dispatcher could better tell on the phone if the client was shifty), to say nothing of choosing a path based on a congestion map. I love my Roomba and my waching-maching, but without the cleaning jobs, what are immigrants to Western country going to do? Take care of elderly people to whom they can’t speak? I fully agree with your point that automation is good for all, but we might have to face before the end of our careers a point where a vast majority of the population has to be considered handicapped, “mentally” for lack of a better word, out of the workforce and entirely subsidised. At the moment, even a coder, hard working and of average skill, cannot find a job where I am: I know a handful of guys who can make functional, useful apps all by themselves (say: scanning barcode, interrogate database to tell if a product is ethical, handle shopcart, and all that with a great design; sports tracking). They make a hundred of euros from those on the first month, but that’s it: I tell them to treat those as portfolios to get interviews, and they do. I have no idea what goes wrong during those, but their repeated failures to sign anything is bigger than one HR being in a bad mood. What I see is a world in 15-20 years where 3% of the population designs things; 12% have menial jobs, mainly manning security and healthcare bot-based systems and 85% cannot work. Spain or even Berlin already have a modern economy with 30% unemployment: subsidies, black-market service jobs, low rents… it looks somewhat stable, if shocking. Clay Shirky had an interesting point about that, in an essay called “Gin, TV series and Wikipedia” or something like that — where he assumed there is a sacrificed generation, and the next learns. I have a hard time seeing millenials be anything but creatives with a YouTube channel. Maybe that’s worth it.
ChristianMarks 13y ago
No one sta[r]ts a company with the intention of creating jobs. Sure they do. Many founders would like their companies to pay them at least a working wage.

by hooande 13y ago

bertil 13y ago

> we have time to prepare for the inevitable changes. I would argue, having lived in countries that lead automation rates, that we already are at a point were large groups of the population cannot find work with their qualification, and never will: farmers, miners and forest workers had to convert to become factory workers, but most of those are now outsourced or automated; at the moment, there isn’t a job in Western countries for someone who has difficulty learning how to read. Some people genuinely can’t grasp any abstract concepts: I taught in jail for a while, to people who couldn’t for the life of them generalise “Two apples plus three apples equals five apples; two sheets of paper plus three…” and remained baffled by ‘addition’ as an abstraction. Keep in mind: some of those guys fashioned working radios and distilleries from scratch. Similarly, I have talked to taxi drivers who couldn’t understand it was in their interest to switch to Uber, how the trust mechanism worked with the app (they thought the dispatcher could better tell on the phone if the client was shifty), to say nothing of choosing a path based on a congestion map. I love my Roomba and my waching-maching, but without the cleaning jobs, what are immigrants to Western country going to do? Take care of elderly people to whom they can’t speak? I fully agree with your point that automation is good for all, but we might have to face before the end of our careers a point where a vast majority of the population has to be considered handicapped, “mentally” for lack of a better word, out of the workforce and entirely subsidised. At the moment, even a coder, hard working and of average skill, cannot find a job where I am: I know a handful of guys who can make functional, useful apps all by themselves (say: scanning barcode, interrogate database to tell if a product is ethical, handle shopcart, and all that with a great design; sports tracking). They make a hundred of euros from those on the first month, but that’s it: I tell them to treat those as portfolios to get interviews, and they do. I have no idea what goes wrong during those, but their repeated failures to sign anything is bigger than one HR being in a bad mood. What I see is a world in 15-20 years where 3% of the population designs things; 12% have menial jobs, mainly manning security and healthcare bot-based systems and 85% cannot work. Spain or even Berlin already have a modern economy with 30% unemployment: subsidies, black-market service jobs, low rents… it looks somewhat stable, if shocking. Clay Shirky had an interesting point about that, in an essay called “Gin, TV series and Wikipedia” or something like that — where he assumed there is a sacrificed generation, and the next learns. I have a hard time seeing millenials be anything but creatives with a YouTube channel. Maybe that’s worth it.

ChristianMarks 13y ago

No one sta[r]ts a company with the intention of creating jobs. Sure they do. Many founders would like their companies to pay them at least a working wage.