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Bill Gates: People Don't Realize How Many Jobs Will Soon Be Replaced by Software

79 points by rblion 12y ago

DenisM 12y ago
I've been toying with the idea of creating a non-profit "social-responsibility" fund. A startup at inception would donate some fixed percentage of their stock to the fund, and the fund will later use dividends or sales proceeds to pay for retraining or retirement of those displaced by the startup. The trouble is, the idea being so novel, I don't think I could convince any investors to get on board with it. It requires broad awareness and years of propaganda to make it a commonly accepted practice. Alternatively, I imagine the disrupted themselves should have a pension fund or a trade union seeking out disruptive innovations and investing in them ahead of time. But in practice they don't, so that where it ends.
- k_kelly 12y ago
  Disruption typically happens where it's not only more efficient but cheaper too. The number of people you displace is going to be a fraction of what you make. If you do end up making as much as the original industry it's because you are doing MORE than the original industry in which case you now have to question if the original industry didn't deserve to be destroyed. Everything that can be software, will be software, what needs to happen is that the number of things that are software needs to outnumber the things that exist now. Software will create work for people to do as long as it keeps pushing what we can do as people. People need to adapt to a world with software at the heart, everything else is very dangerous.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    It would have to work like insurance. Lots of companies with a chance of large scale disruption pitch in funds, applied in the rare cases where large scale disruption happens.
  - DenisM 12y ago
    Retraining is one-time event, it doesn't require equal cash flow, just that there is some cash set aside for it. I don't advocate permanent welfare, except maybe for those who are past retirement age.
- prostoalex 12y ago
  How would you certify the eligibility of someone being displaced? Having no direct application of my superb oats carrying and stable attendance skills, can I be compensated by the horseless carriage companies that put horse stations out of business? A bunch of the skills displaced are so trivial (sales clerk? taxi dispatcher? a person to look up airline tickets and report back what the prices are?) that anybody can (and will) claim complete mastery of those skills and excruciating unemployment caused by your startup.
  - DenisM 12y ago
    I don't have a good answer. there are many problems with this idea, this being one of the. Conceivably, someone who held employment in a disrupted profession for 10 years could qualify. Alternately, retraining could be open to anyone who comes in, if not too many people come in practice there is no need to keep the doors closed. Like I said, I don't have a good answer.
    - prostoalex 12y ago
      Seems like the focus should be on lowering the cost and increasing accessibility of retraining programs. When it's nearly free and available to anybody in need, motivated individuals will take care of themselves, and you just need to take care of smaller remnant group and address their specific issues.
- rndn 12y ago
  Why do you think the revolution will come from startups rather than from tech giants such as Google and Amazon?
  - DenisM 12y ago
    Well, I'm running a startup, so im thinking what I can do. I can't change what Google does.
xux 12y ago
There's a popular notion that we will experience mass unemployment resulting from people whose jobs are replaced with software. This is false. With any revolutionary change in technology, jobs lost in one field will be jobs gained in another. The agricultural revolution didn't drive mass unemployment when farmers were replaced. The industrial revolution didn't drive mass unemployment when small merchants were replaced. The software revolution won't either.
- Retric 12y ago
  There has been a steady decline in the % of 30-40 year old males working in the US which suggests your probably wrong. It's not that there is to little work out there, the issue is are economy keeps changing so rapidly that people are unprepared for new occupations. Worse while low skilled jobs that are often easiest to automate, productivity increases also kill off some high skilled jobs. And people are both reluctant to higher workers for less than they where making especially if they have been out of work for a while.
  - nashashmi 12y ago
    That is a friction that needs to be solved. For as long as that friction exists, Disruptions will be called disruptions instead of innovations.
  - jkmcf 12y ago
    What time frame does this decline occur over? The number of women in the workplace has significantly increased over the last 40 years.
- DenisM 12y ago
  >The agricultural revolution didn't drive mass unemployment when farmers were replaced. Actually, it did. The labor oversupply crisis fueled the World War 1, which killed the bulk of the displaced agriculture workers. Had everyone been productively employed, there would be no one left to fight the war.
- Implicated 12y ago
  Except those revolutionary changes were quite small in scope compared to what's coming. And there's A LOT more people now...
bambax 12y ago
> "When people say we should raise the minimum wage. I worry about what that does to job creation ... potentially damping demand in the part of the labor spectrum that I’m most worried about." Bill Gates has been saying this many times and I really, really don't get it. Of course when the price of a commodity goes up, demand goes down; but if there's a perfect substitute that's free, demand for the non-free alternative should be zero anyway, so its "price" is irrelevant (as long as it's non-free). Why would anyone hire a human at any cost to do a repetitive and low-added-value job that a robot can do perfectly, without error, without ever arguing or getting tired, etc. AND AT NO MARGINAL COST?? How does "minimum wage" matter in this scenario? - - - Humanity has been wanting to not work since the dawn agriculture, 10 000 years ago at the latest. It's finally happening and we're freaking out about it. What we need to think about is not how to get people employed, it's how to redistribute wealth so that what you earn is not somehow morally related to the job you're holding. The solution is universal basic income, not "minimum wage".
- dllthomas 12y ago
  "Why would anyone hire a human at any cost to do a repetitive and low-added-value job that a robot can do perfectly, without error, without ever arguing or getting tired, etc. AND AT NO MARGINAL COST??" Because the robot costs money up front. If energy, maintenance, depreciation, and amortization of the robot exceeds the marginal cost, errors and oversight of the human, then it's rational to keep paying the human. Raising the cost of the human makes the robot more attractive sooner.
  - nashashmi 12y ago
    > Raising the cost of the human makes the robot more attractive sooner. Which is exactly why the minimum wage should rise. Just like the price of coal energy should rise or the cost of unsustainable goods should rise. People are a limited resource and you can get only so many people over time. It is important that people, who are entities of incredible intelligence should be repurposed to harder and mentally more involved processes.
    - 12y ago
tambourine_man 12y ago
Humans need not apply https://youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
- rndn 12y ago
  The wonderful and terrifying implications of computers that can learn https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_terrifying_implications_of_computers_that_can_learn https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_te...
alexqgb 12y ago
Most people may not realize what's coming now but they will soon enough. When they do, expect Universal Basic Income (UBI) to become a very popular topic. Here's a quick take: http://io9.com/how-universal-basic-income-will-save-us-from-the-robot-1653303459 http://io9.com/how-universal-basic-income-will-save-us-from-... The Wikipedia article goes much further in-depth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income And of course, there's an ongoing conversation on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/ http://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/
- nashashmi 12y ago
  That is to assume there will never be another problem to solve. There will always be problems to solve for as long we are people of needs: shelter, clothing, food, social life.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
olalonde 12y ago
> Gates believes that the tax codes are going to need to change to encourage companies to hire employees, including, perhaps, eliminating income and payroll taxes altogether. If we want to go down that road, basic income is the future in my opinion.
- zackmorris 12y ago
  Ya it's weird to me how Bill Gates nailed the problem so soundly but came to the typical uninsightful solutions that we've had in the US since 1980. Trickle down economics (where benefits are distributed by the private sector rather than government via taxes) is just not going to work in a world where income is decoupled from labor. In other words, as the value of human capital decreases, people without resources will have fewer means to raise themselves out of poverty. Paying no taxes won’t matter in a world where the unemployment rate is 10, 20, 50%. It will just exacerbate the concentration of wealth. An alternative to all of this is to tax all financial transactions: whether to family members, religious organizations, political campaigns or between large institutions or countries. The idea being that in the end there is no real way to distinguish donation from income. Everyone would pay a tax on the difference in their net worth between the beginning and end of the year. The end result would be that people who accumulate large amounts of wealth would pay higher taxes than the majority of the country which is basically living a steady state existence. This also takes care of inheritance tax because children born to wealthy families would pay their income tax the year of their inheritance. We’ve made a mistake in this country thinking that “the government” is small group of powerful individuals. That’s not how things started. Originally the government was the people, so things like tariffs were paid mostly by businesses as a way to fund public schools and infrastructure for everyone. People voted for tariffs so that they didn’t have to pay for government expenses out of pocket. Starting with the Civil War and then at the turn of the 20th century, that system got replaced by the income tax system we have today, and people have been swindled into paying for government excess (mostly in the form of military spending and tax breaks for industry) out of pocket again. The gist of this is that framing “taxes” as an expense rather than an income is an effective way to get people to vote against their own self interest. People earning less than roughly $100,000 per year ($16 trillion GDP minus $2 trillion for government, divided by 140 million working Americans) don’t realize that they are short the thousands of dollars that they would receive if people making more than the average paid their fair share. Consider if the tax rate was a flat 50%, with the excess above $2 trillion for government going to everyone as a basic income. Someone earning $30,000 pays about $5,000 today. But under the new system, there would be $7 trillion going to 300 million people, or about $23,000 per capita. So that person would pay $15,000, receive $23,000, so they would actually receive a credit of $8,000, for a total annual income of $38,000. That $13,000 difference between what we’re paying now and what we could be receiving is a major motivator for the Occupy movement, the Other 98% and similar groups. I find this way of looking at things to be much more inspiring than the usual “you pay us” knee jerk stuff coming from people who have profited from the current income tax system.
ratsimihah 12y ago
What I do not get is how many jobs have yet to be replaced by computers that'd do the job better.
barefoot 12y ago
It's an interesting discussion and I find many non-developers unaware of the potential for technology to displace jobs over the next 20 years. If you're interested in related material I recommend a book by Martin Ford that's freely available online, The Lights In The Tunnel: http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
I think the big one that no one mentions is management. A company with 100,000 employees, and a reporting span of 10 people then you have 11,111 managers - and as they tend to get paid more upwards of 25-30% of the salary. And what do they do? Administration and process? Easily automatable. Hiring and firing (teams do this better), "magically know what to do in uncertain times" (guess my views). A lot of this can be replaced with high trust, open environments and "team empowerment" But when do turkeys vote for Xmas? This comes from (iirr) Gary Hamel (https://hbr.org/2011/11/fire-all-the-managers https://hbr.org/2011/11/fire-all-the-managers)
paulmd 12y ago
He's absolutely right, and people don't understand the level of "skilled work" that will be replaced by computers. I write clinical decision support tools, and I interview users (doctors). Nowdays, doctors really just want algorithms to follow. They want to know what the fastest/cheapest way to diagnose problems is. Frankly, they aren't particularly GOOD at diagnosing problems outside of these kinds of algorithms - for example, a likely cause of many Morgellons' disease cases is actually tropical rat mite (see Nick Mann http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/8626767/Morgellons-Disease-continues-to-defeat-scientists.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/8626767/Morgellons-Disease...). Doctors tend to diagnose delusional parasitosis just because it doesn't fit the algorithms. If doctors are just going to follow a basic set of diagnostic procedures, we can easily automate that using the data that are put into modern electronic health record (EHR) systems. We have your vitals, we know the tests that have been done and the outcomes, and so on. As one (very blunt) doctor expressed to me, doctors just want to follow the diagnosis algorithm, he paid $100k to be a data entry technician, and I think that was pretty much on the money. That's not the only time I've heard that, either. If doctors are going to be replaced, there's not much that CAN'T. It's just a question of designing a program/robot for the particular task, which is becoming increasingly cheap.
- DenisM 12y ago
  >a likely cause of many Morgellons' disease cases is actually tropical rat mite Many? You made that conclusion from a single self-reported case of finding that bug? Seems rather far-fetched to me.
  - paulmd 12y ago
    Do I think that 100% of Morgellons' sufferers have a medically explainable cause? Nope, there's hypochondriacs everywhere. Do I think that doctors are way too eager to dismiss diagnoses that don't fit their criteria? Yup. I have a sister who has an absolutely zebra diagnosis (astroblastoma tumor, <0.5% of cases, with typical characteristics), given by top doctors. It was a case punctuated with all kinds of medical accusations regarding the diagnosis. I write Clinical Decision Support tools for a living, for a high-level nonprofit. Our content providers suck ASS. Do I worry that I might be contributing to inappropriate diagnoses/non-diagnoses? Yes, it's a thing I bear in mind every day, every meeting, and I have gone to bat to improve.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
davidgerard 12y ago
I wonder when being a sysadmin will be automated away. My job is, pretty much, to replace every single thing I do with a script. For some reason there continues to be work to do. I strongly suspect I could work until I'm 100 if I want to. Because EVEN IN THE FUTURE, NOTHING WORKS.
misev 12y ago
A recent book looking in depth at what this actually means for us: " The Glass Cage: Automation and Us"

79 points by rblion 12y ago

I've been toying with the idea of creating a non-profit "social-responsibility" fund. A startup at inception would donate some fixed percentage of their stock to the fund, and the fund will later use dividends or sales proceeds to pay for retraining or retirement of those displaced by the startup. The trouble is, the idea being so novel, I don't think I could convince any investors to get on board with it. It requires broad awareness and years of propaganda to make it a commonly accepted practice. Alternatively, I imagine the disrupted themselves should have a pension fund or a trade union seeking out disruptive innovations and investing in them ahead of time. But in practice they don't, so that where it ends.

k_kelly 12y ago
Disruption typically happens where it's not only more efficient but cheaper too. The number of people you displace is going to be a fraction of what you make. If you do end up making as much as the original industry it's because you are doing MORE than the original industry in which case you now have to question if the original industry didn't deserve to be destroyed. Everything that can be software, will be software, what needs to happen is that the number of things that are software needs to outnumber the things that exist now. Software will create work for people to do as long as it keeps pushing what we can do as people. People need to adapt to a world with software at the heart, everything else is very dangerous.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  It would have to work like insurance. Lots of companies with a chance of large scale disruption pitch in funds, applied in the rare cases where large scale disruption happens.
- DenisM 12y ago
  Retraining is one-time event, it doesn't require equal cash flow, just that there is some cash set aside for it. I don't advocate permanent welfare, except maybe for those who are past retirement age.
prostoalex 12y ago
How would you certify the eligibility of someone being displaced? Having no direct application of my superb oats carrying and stable attendance skills, can I be compensated by the horseless carriage companies that put horse stations out of business? A bunch of the skills displaced are so trivial (sales clerk? taxi dispatcher? a person to look up airline tickets and report back what the prices are?) that anybody can (and will) claim complete mastery of those skills and excruciating unemployment caused by your startup.
- DenisM 12y ago
  I don't have a good answer. there are many problems with this idea, this being one of the. Conceivably, someone who held employment in a disrupted profession for 10 years could qualify. Alternately, retraining could be open to anyone who comes in, if not too many people come in practice there is no need to keep the doors closed. Like I said, I don't have a good answer.
  - prostoalex 12y ago
    Seems like the focus should be on lowering the cost and increasing accessibility of retraining programs. When it's nearly free and available to anybody in need, motivated individuals will take care of themselves, and you just need to take care of smaller remnant group and address their specific issues.
rndn 12y ago
Why do you think the revolution will come from startups rather than from tech giants such as Google and Amazon?
- DenisM 12y ago
  Well, I'm running a startup, so im thinking what I can do. I can't change what Google does.

xux 12y ago

There's a popular notion that we will experience mass unemployment resulting from people whose jobs are replaced with software. This is false. With any revolutionary change in technology, jobs lost in one field will be jobs gained in another. The agricultural revolution didn't drive mass unemployment when farmers were replaced. The industrial revolution didn't drive mass unemployment when small merchants were replaced. The software revolution won't either.

Retric 12y ago
There has been a steady decline in the % of 30-40 year old males working in the US which suggests your probably wrong. It's not that there is to little work out there, the issue is are economy keeps changing so rapidly that people are unprepared for new occupations. Worse while low skilled jobs that are often easiest to automate, productivity increases also kill off some high skilled jobs. And people are both reluctant to higher workers for less than they where making especially if they have been out of work for a while.
- nashashmi 12y ago
  That is a friction that needs to be solved. For as long as that friction exists, Disruptions will be called disruptions instead of innovations.
- jkmcf 12y ago
  What time frame does this decline occur over? The number of women in the workplace has significantly increased over the last 40 years.
DenisM 12y ago
>The agricultural revolution didn't drive mass unemployment when farmers were replaced. Actually, it did. The labor oversupply crisis fueled the World War 1, which killed the bulk of the displaced agriculture workers. Had everyone been productively employed, there would be no one left to fight the war.
Implicated 12y ago
Except those revolutionary changes were quite small in scope compared to what's coming. And there's A LOT more people now...

bambax 12y ago

> "When people say we should raise the minimum wage. I worry about what that does to job creation ... potentially damping demand in the part of the labor spectrum that I’m most worried about." Bill Gates has been saying this many times and I really, really don't get it. Of course when the price of a commodity goes up, demand goes down; but if there's a perfect substitute that's free, demand for the non-free alternative should be zero anyway, so its "price" is irrelevant (as long as it's non-free). Why would anyone hire a human at any cost to do a repetitive and low-added-value job that a robot can do perfectly, without error, without ever arguing or getting tired, etc. AND AT NO MARGINAL COST?? How does "minimum wage" matter in this scenario? - - - Humanity has been wanting to not work since the dawn agriculture, 10 000 years ago at the latest. It's finally happening and we're freaking out about it. What we need to think about is not how to get people employed, it's how to redistribute wealth so that what you earn is not somehow morally related to the job you're holding. The solution is universal basic income, not "minimum wage".

dllthomas 12y ago
"Why would anyone hire a human at any cost to do a repetitive and low-added-value job that a robot can do perfectly, without error, without ever arguing or getting tired, etc. AND AT NO MARGINAL COST??" Because the robot costs money up front. If energy, maintenance, depreciation, and amortization of the robot exceeds the marginal cost, errors and oversight of the human, then it's rational to keep paying the human. Raising the cost of the human makes the robot more attractive sooner.
- nashashmi 12y ago
  > Raising the cost of the human makes the robot more attractive sooner. Which is exactly why the minimum wage should rise. Just like the price of coal energy should rise or the cost of unsustainable goods should rise. People are a limited resource and you can get only so many people over time. It is important that people, who are entities of incredible intelligence should be repurposed to harder and mentally more involved processes.
  - 12y ago

tambourine_man 12y ago

Humans need not apply https://youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

rndn 12y ago
The wonderful and terrifying implications of computers that can learn https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_terrifying_implications_of_computers_that_can_learn https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_te...

alexqgb 12y ago

Most people may not realize what's coming now but they will soon enough. When they do, expect Universal Basic Income (UBI) to become a very popular topic. Here's a quick take: http://io9.com/how-universal-basic-income-will-save-us-from-the-robot-1653303459 http://io9.com/how-universal-basic-income-will-save-us-from-... The Wikipedia article goes much further in-depth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income And of course, there's an ongoing conversation on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/ http://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/

nashashmi 12y ago
That is to assume there will never be another problem to solve. There will always be problems to solve for as long we are people of needs: shelter, clothing, food, social life.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

olalonde 12y ago

> Gates believes that the tax codes are going to need to change to encourage companies to hire employees, including, perhaps, eliminating income and payroll taxes altogether. If we want to go down that road, basic income is the future in my opinion.

zackmorris 12y ago
Ya it's weird to me how Bill Gates nailed the problem so soundly but came to the typical uninsightful solutions that we've had in the US since 1980. Trickle down economics (where benefits are distributed by the private sector rather than government via taxes) is just not going to work in a world where income is decoupled from labor. In other words, as the value of human capital decreases, people without resources will have fewer means to raise themselves out of poverty. Paying no taxes won’t matter in a world where the unemployment rate is 10, 20, 50%. It will just exacerbate the concentration of wealth. An alternative to all of this is to tax all financial transactions: whether to family members, religious organizations, political campaigns or between large institutions or countries. The idea being that in the end there is no real way to distinguish donation from income. Everyone would pay a tax on the difference in their net worth between the beginning and end of the year. The end result would be that people who accumulate large amounts of wealth would pay higher taxes than the majority of the country which is basically living a steady state existence. This also takes care of inheritance tax because children born to wealthy families would pay their income tax the year of their inheritance. We’ve made a mistake in this country thinking that “the government” is small group of powerful individuals. That’s not how things started. Originally the government was the people, so things like tariffs were paid mostly by businesses as a way to fund public schools and infrastructure for everyone. People voted for tariffs so that they didn’t have to pay for government expenses out of pocket. Starting with the Civil War and then at the turn of the 20th century, that system got replaced by the income tax system we have today, and people have been swindled into paying for government excess (mostly in the form of military spending and tax breaks for industry) out of pocket again. The gist of this is that framing “taxes” as an expense rather than an income is an effective way to get people to vote against their own self interest. People earning less than roughly $100,000 per year ($16 trillion GDP minus $2 trillion for government, divided by 140 million working Americans) don’t realize that they are short the thousands of dollars that they would receive if people making more than the average paid their fair share. Consider if the tax rate was a flat 50%, with the excess above $2 trillion for government going to everyone as a basic income. Someone earning $30,000 pays about $5,000 today. But under the new system, there would be $7 trillion going to 300 million people, or about $23,000 per capita. So that person would pay $15,000, receive $23,000, so they would actually receive a credit of $8,000, for a total annual income of $38,000. That $13,000 difference between what we’re paying now and what we could be receiving is a major motivator for the Occupy movement, the Other 98% and similar groups. I find this way of looking at things to be much more inspiring than the usual “you pay us” knee jerk stuff coming from people who have profited from the current income tax system.

ratsimihah 12y ago

What I do not get is how many jobs have yet to be replaced by computers that'd do the job better.

barefoot 12y ago

It's an interesting discussion and I find many non-developers unaware of the potential for technology to displace jobs over the next 20 years. If you're interested in related material I recommend a book by Martin Ford that's freely available online, The Lights In The Tunnel: http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

I think the big one that no one mentions is management. A company with 100,000 employees, and a reporting span of 10 people then you have 11,111 managers - and as they tend to get paid more upwards of 25-30% of the salary. And what do they do? Administration and process? Easily automatable. Hiring and firing (teams do this better), "magically know what to do in uncertain times" (guess my views). A lot of this can be replaced with high trust, open environments and "team empowerment" But when do turkeys vote for Xmas? This comes from (iirr) Gary Hamel (https://hbr.org/2011/11/fire-all-the-managers https://hbr.org/2011/11/fire-all-the-managers)

paulmd 12y ago

He's absolutely right, and people don't understand the level of "skilled work" that will be replaced by computers. I write clinical decision support tools, and I interview users (doctors). Nowdays, doctors really just want algorithms to follow. They want to know what the fastest/cheapest way to diagnose problems is. Frankly, they aren't particularly GOOD at diagnosing problems outside of these kinds of algorithms - for example, a likely cause of many Morgellons' disease cases is actually tropical rat mite (see Nick Mann http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/8626767/Morgellons-Disease-continues-to-defeat-scientists.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/8626767/Morgellons-Disease...). Doctors tend to diagnose delusional parasitosis just because it doesn't fit the algorithms. If doctors are just going to follow a basic set of diagnostic procedures, we can easily automate that using the data that are put into modern electronic health record (EHR) systems. We have your vitals, we know the tests that have been done and the outcomes, and so on. As one (very blunt) doctor expressed to me, doctors just want to follow the diagnosis algorithm, he paid $100k to be a data entry technician, and I think that was pretty much on the money. That's not the only time I've heard that, either. If doctors are going to be replaced, there's not much that CAN'T. It's just a question of designing a program/robot for the particular task, which is becoming increasingly cheap.

DenisM 12y ago
>a likely cause of many Morgellons' disease cases is actually tropical rat mite Many? You made that conclusion from a single self-reported case of finding that bug? Seems rather far-fetched to me.
- paulmd 12y ago
  Do I think that 100% of Morgellons' sufferers have a medically explainable cause? Nope, there's hypochondriacs everywhere. Do I think that doctors are way too eager to dismiss diagnoses that don't fit their criteria? Yup. I have a sister who has an absolutely zebra diagnosis (astroblastoma tumor, <0.5% of cases, with typical characteristics), given by top doctors. It was a case punctuated with all kinds of medical accusations regarding the diagnosis. I write Clinical Decision Support tools for a living, for a high-level nonprofit. Our content providers suck ASS. Do I worry that I might be contributing to inappropriate diagnoses/non-diagnoses? Yes, it's a thing I bear in mind every day, every meeting, and I have gone to bat to improve.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

davidgerard 12y ago

I wonder when being a sysadmin will be automated away. My job is, pretty much, to replace every single thing I do with a script. For some reason there continues to be work to do. I strongly suspect I could work until I'm 100 if I want to. Because EVEN IN THE FUTURE, NOTHING WORKS.

misev 12y ago

A recent book looking in depth at what this actually means for us: " The Glass Cage: Automation and Us"