13 ms·

The future of jobs: The onrushing wave

164 points by bootload 12y ago

SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
They estimate in their chart that Athletic trainers have a 0.007 chance of being automated, the third lowest chance after therapists and dentists. it's hard to know exactly what they class as "Athletic trainers". For Olympic athletes, there will always be staff. For the rest of us, what would that "unlikely" automation of the coach look like? Perhaps it would start with a movement sensor on the wrist? A smartphone app to track and recommend exercise? That's not looking unlikely to me, it's looking like it's already here in plain sight: http://www.fitbit.com/ http://www.fitbit.com/ http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-band/en-us http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-band/en-us https://play.google.com/store/apps/category/HEALTH_AND_FITNESS https://play.google.com/store/apps/category/HEALTH_AND_FITNE...
- anon4 12y ago
  So you're saying the future is in robotics.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
    The future is monitoring and surveillance. That's what these systems do. That and a few data-driven suggestions here and there.
    - midnightreactor 12y ago
      Here's a novel perspective for you: This class of devices are subsidized pieces of technology for use by a group of people, a portion of which for whom it could argued would not have access to the resources this technology provides, and they have access to a greater wealth of data because they are not entitled to rights management for the data they produce, for better or worse. The challenge of these systems is gaining value and insight of understanding different aspects of human behavior while considering the risk/reward calculation each actor engaged in the system. Your use of the words monitoring and surveillance betrays an implied connotation which could be described in the vein of paranoid or Orwellian. It's disingenuous to distill the entirety of what these systems do as "monitoring and surveillance [...] and a few data-driven suggestions here and there". It's more like "monitoring and surveillance" are what these systems are, implied context or not, and what you and I get out of it are suggestions informed by the data of what you and I and everyone else participating actually does within a system.
    - angersock 12y ago
      To midnightreactor: You've been shadowbanned by the HN hivemind. Better luck next account. :(
- raverbashing 12y ago
  But then again, the intersection of people who would pay for a trainer and had it switched to a fitbit is not so huge (Kind of similar to "lost sales due to piracy" given some limits)
- _lex 12y ago
  This shows me how myopic and out of touch these guys are - I already use the biggest loser on xbox kinect, and it's replaced both a gym and a trainer for me.
  - raverbashing 12y ago
    "and it's replaced both a gym and a trainer for me" Exactly The game is enough for you (and for a lot of people) And that's in the universe of people that do exercise currently. But the game doesn't replace weights/equipment (as much as the bodyweight people want to convince it's not needed) or more advanced training techniques (and frankly, several "fitness trainers" are misguided) But trainers and gyms etc are going to keep existing for people who want to go further, or want to socialize, do something different, have specific training requirements, etc
    - SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
      Weights and equipment can't be emulated in software. And you need a gym to keep them in and provide hot showers after. But I'd say that there's less need for a personal trainer than ever before. You can find the how-to use video on youtube, the community on reddit/r/fitness, the training calculator on your phone, etc. I don't see that trend reversing.
      - toomuchtodo 12y ago
        There is a chemical compound going through investigation currently that emulates exercise in your muscle tissue: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/exercise-in-a-pill-the-search-continues/ http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/exercise-in-a-pill-... What we can't emulate in software or robotics, shall be done in biology.
      - maerF0x0 12y ago
        > "Weights and equipment can't be emulated in software. " But if you have a friggin strong robo butler, it can provide all the resistance you need.
  - 12y ago
- JshWright 12y ago
  Yeah, the same chart lists a 17% chance that "firefighters" will be automated... I'm equally curious what then definition of "firefighter" is. If they are talking about woodland (or "forest") firefighting, then _maybe_ (I could see drones accomplish at least some of the tasks involved). But for structural firefighting? No way... Not in 20 years.
  - vosper 12y ago
    But this is exactly the right reading of the chart - the description says "chances that automation will lead to job losses", not "chance that all jobs will be replaced by automation". So, perhaps it will be drones assisting in wildfires that reduce the need to pay as many people to fight that type of fire, whilst structural firefighting remains the domain of humans - for now.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Why not? Is it the chaotic environment? The temperature extremes? The unpredictability of each situation? All those are strong reasons TO automate firefighting. Machines can function better in heat/smoke/violent structural collapse situations. They can make objective analysis when their own mortality is not an issue. Nobody made money betting against advances in computing.
    - JshWright 12y ago
      I'm all for advances in technology making things safer and putting fewer people in harms way. I just don't think there is anything close to a 17% chance that it will happen in the next two decades. I say this as someone who has a foot in both worlds, so to speak... I work in technology, build UAV quadcopters (including playing with various sensors) as a hobbyist, and work at least one shift a week as a firefighter/paramedic. Technological advances in recent years have made life much better in the fire service. Thermal imaging cameras have gotten lighter, with much larger thermal ranges. Gas detection has similarly lighter and more accurate. Breathing apparatus have gotten 'smarter' and lighter, allowing longer working times, less fatigue, and better insights for incident commanders on the status of their crews. Research in fire development and behavior has led to significants advances in strategy and tactics. However, those tactical decisions are still well beyond the scope of what computers (and computer vision) are capable of. There is just too much variation in how homes are build and occupied (and modified). Here are just a few of the issues I see: -Moving an unconscious victim requires a fair amount of care, and I don't think robotics are there yet... -'Reading' smoke coming from a structure gives a lot of insight into the design and occupancy of the structure. I think that's well beyond the current limits of computer vision and decision making. -There are many activities performed by firefighters outside the scope of 'putting water on fire'. Responding to medical emergencies, technical rescue scenarios, etc... Extricating a victim of a car crash is a very delicate operation that employs equipment capable of exerting many thousands of pounds of force, and a few inches is the difference between freeing someone from a deformed care and crushing them to death... Really the biggest issues I see have to do with tactical decision making based on a huge number of subtle variables (which would involve very sophisticated computer vision), and simply navigating in and around a structure. Designing a robot that can move autonomously through all areas of a house, into closets, under beds, etc, while still being strong enough to lift and move a disabled victim, or employee various tools seems like a pretty difficult problem to solve. How would you power it? Batteries aren't anywhere close to that point, and tethers would limit mobility too much. Personally I think the next 20 years will see continued augmentation, rather than replacement of the men and women in the fire service. For instance, I would love to see an SCBA facepiece with an integrated heads up display providing an infrared image and levels of various gasses that are good indicators of air quality. Once we have that, I'd love the ability to switch between 'tank' air (which I carry a very limited amount of on my back) and 'filtered' air (which would just come from the environment, filtered for particulates, allowing me to save my bottle for when I need it). I think there is also an opportunity for improved 'mapping' of structures as a firefighter moves through them (again, integrated on a HUD inside the facepiece). That would significantly reduce the number of deaths and injuries that occur when firefighters become disoriented and lost in zero-visibility situations. This ended up being much longer than I expected it to be... TL;DR; The next 20 years will see augmentation, not replacement. Who knows what the 20 years after that will bring...
- digi_owl 12y ago
  I recall seeing articles on what may be described as high tech long johns. They were covered in sensors that would give you a readout about every major muscle on your body. Hook that up to a stripped down Watson that can tell you exactly when and how you are doing wrong.
danmaz74 12y ago
Very interesting analysis. But they don't consider at all one very relevant change that happened during the last 30 years in most wealthy economies, especially the USA: That the taxation of the rich and the highest-earners in general was massively lowered. This contributed a lot to the concentration of wealth and capital in fewer hands.
- vixen99 12y ago
  The UK in the 70s had a tax rate of 95% thus encouraging payment of much higher salaries to make it worthwhile for talented staff. If the tax rate is thereafter lowered to something sensible then the differentials are going to be significant. Quite a number of higher earners now have an effective tax rate of 60% which is not exactly low - but that's in the UK.
  - danmaz74 12y ago
    95% is crazy, but today there are lots of multi-millionaire CEOs who as a percentage of their income pay less taxes than their secretaries...
    - zo1 12y ago
      I see no problem with that, that looks perfectly legal. Democracy and legislation has decided that certain forms of income are to be taxed at a lower rate than others. And the CEO does lots of that "other" form of income, hence the lower rate. Why, what problem do you have with Democracy, err, I mean this tax-rate?
      - warfangle 12y ago
        s/Democracy and legislation/vested interests and cronyism/
        zo1 12y ago
        I beg to differ, democracy and legislation allowed vested interests and cronyism to occur/take place/take hold. So it is also to blame for what most, including you, blame on "vested interests and cronyism". Of course, this sort of thing would never happen in a "True Democracy". Maybe they have it in Scotland, run by the Scots, perhaps?
josephg 12y ago
There's a great 15 minute video by CGP Grey introducing the same set of concepts that technology will contribute to unemployment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU Its a bit pop-sciency, but its very approachable and well explained.
- jholman 12y ago
  That was good, yes. And link-browsing from there led me to this feller's site, which so far is also relevant and interesting. http://federicopistono.org/ http://federicopistono.org/
- ExpiredLink 12y ago
  It sounds like the technology forecasts in the 50ies and 60ies but with a pessimistic instead of an optimistic undertone.
  - josephschmoe 12y ago
    In all fairness, most desk jobs that existed in the 50's and 60's are now heavily consolidated (it now takes one journalist and Google what it used to take 10 to do). And most factory work is either also heavily consolidated or moved overseas. Would the words "service economy" even make sense back then?
    - digi_owl 12y ago
      And now there are headlines about automating low tier jobs in the legal and medical professions. The old refrain about getting a degree being a ticket to a steady income is long gone. Never mind that the latest in assembly line robotics are as flexible as humans in their movement, and can be programmed by demonstrating the basic movements a few times. You can pretty much tell Joe to walk away from his station, and roll this robot into the same place.
    - nradov 12y ago
      Some simpler financial news articles are now written by zero journalists. A program just extracts numbers from data feeds and plugs them into a template.
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j1o1h1n 12y ago
Decent sci-fi reading list in the sub-headings.
- devingoldfish 12y ago
  Good catch, thanks for pointing it out.
jfoster 12y ago
The interesting thing is that a wave of redundancy due to automation or unprecedented efficiency contains problems that those made redundant might be able to work on. Eg. Joe can't afford X due to lack of employment, and Bob can't afford Y for the same reason. Assuming Bob can supply X and Joe can supply Y (or some more complicated network of bartering), it seems like should be possible for an economy to arise.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  That's a big assumption. In fact, that's the only thing that may be different this time. If machines are more productive than humans at everything, it break down. If the most productive infrastructure relies on big capital, it breaks down. If Bob and Joe become too poor, it breaks down.
- d4nt 12y ago
  This relies on the assumption that there are things Joe wants that Bob can supply and vice versa. But as we climb higher and higher up the hierarchy of needs that may not be the case. We are already very effective at keeping people alive and mildly entertained indefinitely. (Although we currently look down on these people as trash for not contributing to society). But I can envisage a time when meeting all my material needs requires almost no human input and meeting my emotional needs cannot be monetised.
- pacala 12y ago
  While commerce and trade are important, the basis of our existence is physical. We are physical beings with physical needs. Physical resources (energy, land, lumber, food, water, etc.) all have owners in the real economy. Joe and Bob are unemployed, thus have no resources, thus have nothing to trade. The best they can do in your scenario is called dumpster diving, assuming recycling tech is not making garbage valuable to the real economy as well. Mass dumpster diving, that's your dystopia right there.
  - guard-of-terra 12y ago
    Specifically, Bob and Joe need oil (energy) to produce anything and it's expensive. If they create less value than oil they spent, they're a net loss for society.
desdiv 12y ago
The chart claims that economists have a 43% chance of being replaced by automation. If they're wrong, then they'll be replaced by algorithms that are better at predicting economic trends than they are. If they're right, then...
- vosper 12y ago
  I've pointed this out elsewhere in this thread: That's not what the chart is saying. The description reads "Probability that computerisation will lead to job losses in the next two decades", not "probability that computerisation will completely replace this job". For example, in economics, there might be a need for fewer economists because computers are able to do some of the work that previously had to be done by humans. But they're not suggesting that there's a 43% chance that there will be no human economists in 20 years, or that there will be such a thing as a computerised economist - it'll be aspects of the work that are automated (at least initially), not the whole job.
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- moonchrome 12y ago
  >eventually full AIs At that point there will be no corporations or anything else related to our society because it will break the premise society is built on - that we are better off working with each other - someone in control of such AI doesn't need anyone else - it's impossible to guess what they would do with it but a logical choice would be to eliminate potential threats (ie. anyone who can develop similar technology or compromise it) Once someone kicks off a "seed AI" that can develop/replicate fast enough it's game over for the rest, they win. And note that by AI I'm not talking about Terminator style self-aware machines - I'm talking about a problem solving device capable of performing given tasks.
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    People tend to bloviate a bit about how the first person or group to build and train a "seed AGI" would have "godlike" power, but what they forget is that given godlike power, there is no reason to be selfish or psychopathic. Most human selfishness and greed comes from incentive gradients and competition traps resulting from the systems we have to survive in. Once you have nonhuman but human-equivalent-or-greater intelligence directed towards human goals, you're beyond competing for survival, and have no incentive not to direct the AGI cooperatively and altruistically. This is a choice we can make, as a profession, as a community, and as a species. There is no point in letting short-sighted competitive anxieties destroy such a potential for good.
    - pacala 12y ago
      I wish I could be as optimistic. But AGIs are physical beings with computational limitations that run on energy. The Sun can produce so much over a given period of time. It's not hard to imagine a competition trap involving AGIs, each trying to get as much resources as possible to increase its capacity and crush the competition.
      - 12y ago
doctorstupid 12y ago
Of course, the other side of the coin says that there are too many people.
- tomwalker 12y ago
  I think that this is a very important piece of the discussion. Improving the efficiency of a lot of workers and increasing automation does not marry up well with a constantly increasing world population.
  - sumedh 12y ago
    The growth rate is falling though.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  For the planet, sure. But for economic analysis its irrelevant. All metrics are per-capita.
  - selmnoo 12y ago
    > For the planet, sure. But for economic analysis its irrelevant. No, for economic analysis overpopulation is very relevant. Maybe not in the extremely short term, but in the long term when overpopulation strains the finite supply of goods like energy and raw material, this becomes very relevant. In addition to the fact the reversing man-made climate change would also take incredible capital and resources to pull off, it's actually probably one of the biggest things to be seen in economic analysis.
aaronhoffman 12y ago
I'd recommend reading Economics in One Lesson http://mises.org/library/economics-one-lesson http://mises.org/library/economics-one-lesson
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
Science is by definition the creation of causal chains. If I do X in this system, Y will result. Hence the importance of falsifiability and reproducibility. This is yet another in a series of economic articles that sound much more like a typical op-ed column than an observation, hypothesis, or proof.
SixSigma 12y ago
Ftee trade destroys wages, of this there is no secret. De-regulation subverts democracy. Time to revisit the relationship between capital and well-being. Ricardian theories of comparative advantage drive wealth into the hands of those who control capital, not into the calloused hands of the poor suckers who sweat.
- Houshalter 12y ago
  Automation destroys far more jobs than free trade. If anything we should ban automation.
  - SixSigma 12y ago
    It wasn't automation that destroyed US manufacturing
    - Houshalter 12y ago
      Manufacturing only became the major source of employment after all the farm laborers had become unemployed due to automation. As another comment mentioned, just banning wheat harvesters alone would create thousands of jobs. If creating jobs was our only goal.
      - SixSigma 12y ago
        Farm labourers became unemployed as a result of govt. policy to undermine farm worker political power. More labour intensive farming would be a good thing. At the moment the US uses 10cals of energy to produce 1cal of food. Pre "get big or get out" it was 1 in 2 out. Back to manufacturing, it is free trade that has gutted US manufacturing capability. Just look at the trade deficit, the rest of the world benefits greatly, capitalists get great returns on their free movement of money. The US loses taxes, jobs, and wealth and is eroding its long term economy while the short term policy makers make hay.
        Houshalter 12y ago
grandalf 12y ago
If unemployment ever becomes a problem we can simply outlaw the wheat combine, which will open up hundreds of thousands of jobs harvesting grain manually.
- glesica 12y ago
  I hope you were being sarcastic... but in case you weren't, why would we ever create meaningless work instead of just giving people money for pursuing whatever makes them happy? A basic income guarantee seems like a much more reasonable solution than "put everyone to work digging holes and filling them in again".
  - cle 12y ago
    No doubt GP is being sarcastically cynical. But the cynicism is well-founded. We might create meaningless work because it would protect the income of the richest (the most politically influential). There is a strong historical precedence for this. It's socially accepted to some degree, due to our widespread belief in the cargo cult of "jobs".
    - thirdtruck 12y ago
      I think the "bread and circuses" maxim could be expanded to "bread and circuses and hammers" (i.e. work).
  - thirdtruck 12y ago
    OP likely was sarcastic, and I agree with you that basic income appears to provide a better solution. That said, they're also extrapolating from existing trends. An inordinate amount of office work today (including a lot of software development) exists solely to keep people busy. While that might sound absurd, consider the following: * Companies, particularly large ones, need to have staff on hand for when heavy work hits, but can't just fire them in their off season, not without destroying morale. * Classic hiring practices are terrible at selecting for actual technical ability, and no one wants to trust the demonstrably valuable work to "the new person." Busy-work provides a way to test their proficiency without ruining the business in the process. * Management prestige (and pay) is often tied to one's direct report head-count. Worse, stack rankings and similar systems tie career survival to extraneous, buffer head-count. * Firing someone is surprisingly hard in most companies. A single lawsuit or a few days of outage from a legacy system maintained by only one curmudgeon can wipe out all the (on-paper) savings from firing an ineffective or even counter-productive person. * Some managers genuinely care about their employees, and want to shield them from the existential and health threats of losing their job and insurance.
jokoon 12y ago
the domain of computer science that seems to have a bright future is machine learning.
tokenadult 12y ago
I see the dateline of this interesting submission (which looked familiar) is "Jan 18th 2014 | From the print edition." There seems to be a whole spate of year-old submissions to Hacker News this weekend. Are we trying to do a year in review, to see which predictions of 2014 turned out in reality? As for the substance of this interesting submitted article, the historical facts are reviewed in a key paragraph before the article goes off into speculation about the future: "For much of the 20th century, those arguing that technology brought ever more jobs and prosperity looked to have the better of the debate. Real incomes in Britain scarcely doubled between the beginning of the common era and 1570. They then tripled from 1570 to 1875. And they more than tripled from 1875 to 1975. Industrialisation did not end up eliminating the need for human workers. On the contrary, it created employment opportunities sufficient to soak up the 20th century’s exploding population. Keynes’s vision of everyone in the 2030s being a lot richer is largely achieved. His belief they would work just 15 hours or so a week has not come to pass." The nub of the article's argument is that new forms of technological change might not leave us with any new forms of gainful employment. After its interesting text discussion and chart predicting what kinds of employment are least likely to be automated out of existence, the article points out one difference between the world of the past and the world of today: "Another way in which previous adaptation is not necessarily a good guide to future employment is the existence of welfare. The alternative to joining the 19th-century industrial proletariat was malnourished deprivation. Today, because of measures introduced in response to, and to some extent on the proceeds of, industrialisation, people in the developed world are provided with unemployment benefits, disability allowances and other forms of welfare. They are also much more likely than a bygone peasant to have savings. This means that the 'reservation wage'—the wage below which a worker will not accept a job—is now high in historical terms. If governments refuse to allow jobless workers to fall too far below the average standard of living, then this reservation wage will rise steadily, and ever more workers may find work unattractive. And the higher it rises, the greater the incentive to invest in capital that replaces labour." Indeed, it may be that the funding of governmental benefits will become secure enough through rising productivity that many current workers will have children who do not need a job at all.
michaelochurch 12y ago
I don't blame technology for the stagnation of the American middle class. I blame poor leadership, but I think there's something else going on that isn't getting a lot of press: latency skew. Instead of waiting two to three days for a piece of postal mail, we're annoyed if that email takes two minutes. I'm not going to moralize about "instant gratification" as if it were wrong, because it's mostly not conscious and it's not a moral issue; we're just being neurologically retrained to resist delays. From a website, 10 seconds means "never": it's down, or in an unusable state. We're also (some of us, at least) at a ridiculous level of comfort; we have people who program their garages to heat up 30 minutes before they leave for work, because they can't stand the thought of 45 seconds' exposure to winter cold. What's not becoming instant is human learning. If something can be learned quickly and will become rote, we can now program a computer to do it. So the things that we need humans for tend to be those that require subtlety or experience. That hasn't gotten faster. It still takes 6+ months before someone is good at his job. That's not a new problem. It's just less tolerated because people are more primed to expect instant results. So we're seeing an aversion to training people up into the better, more complex jobs that technology creates.
gregpilling 12y ago
I am always stunned with statements like this: "For those not in the elite, argues David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, much of modern labour consists of stultifying “bullshit jobs”—low- and mid-level screen-sitting that serves simply to occupy workers for whom the economy no longer has much use. Keeping them employed, Mr Graeber argues, is not an economic choice; it is something the ruling class does to keep control over the lives of others." Yes, I, as an employer, keep my staff doing "bullshit jobs" because I want to "keep control over the lives of others." WTF?!?! Why would I do that? Why not fire the bullshit job person and use that money to take my family on vacation 4x a year? It amazes me that some people think there is some ruling cabal in a dark castle somewhere, deciding how to keep the masses in line. Maybe the answer is less evil - I have the person doing the work because I can't afford to automate it yet, or it is not currently possible. What does the author think of the maker movement? This "Capital Equipment" is now priced at a weeks wage for many US workers. Marx would love it - it puts the means of production in the hands of the common man. I sold capital equipment for years, and what I used to sell for $50,000 you can now do with a $5000 machine. Prices keep coming down, and the machines I sold are no longer made. My job was eaten by progress :) People will keep re-inventing themselves. It's what humans do.
- api 12y ago
  Bullshit jobs arise in two ways. One is through the crazy inefficiencies of huge companies and governments. This is likely not you. Second is as an emergent property of red queens races in the economy, escalating complexity or overhead that does not actually increase overall macro productivity. The latter requires at least a casual familiarity with evolutionary game theory, but once comprehend cannot be un-comprehended. Most global military competition also falls into this category, and that's double digits of the economy in some countries. I feel like these kinds of emergent pathologies are a species scale IQ test that so far we have utterly failed.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    Great comments from both you and OP. Thanks for this.
  - 12y ago
api 12y ago
If it does turn out to be different this time, it will be because Turing complete automation is qualitatively different from single purpose machine automation.
wittedhaddock 12y ago
The article refers to a 2013 paper by David Autor of MIT... http://economics.mit.edu/files/9014 http://economics.mit.edu/files/9014 The Nissan anecdote starts on page 3.
13hours 12y ago
This makes me think : what are good ways to try and protect myself against this? How can I, as a software developer and entrepreneur leverage this to my advantage? What does this tell me about where the big opportunities will be in 3,5 and 10 years so I can begin positioning myself there?
prodigyboi 12y ago
"However, society may find itself sorely tested if, as seems possible, growth and innovation deliver handsome gains to the skilled, while the rest cling to dwindling employment opportunities at stagnant wages." As insurmountable as it may seem, people living in and affected by these innovative societies just need to adapt accordingly. It is in our innate nature to do so rather than remain stagnant and perpetuate mediocre jobs that were created as a result of the industrial revolution. People can acquire new skills and leverage themselves to appropriate some of the "handsome gains". Also, globalization would only exacerbate the issue of "dwindling employment opportunities". Nowadays, more and more corporations seek to outsource jobs to other countries due to cheap labor costs. For most people, it'll be a paradigmatic shift in thinking and seeking ways to contribute to society. Machine learning and artificial intelligence will only serve those who can transcend the repressive jobs which are inherently repetitive and meant for a machine to accomplish as they are the jobs most susceptible to computerization.
yellow_and_gray 12y ago
A table in the article says Technical Writers have an 89% chance of losing their jobs. But it's only 6% for editors. Why? Will technical instructions be automatically generated? How?

164 points by bootload 12y ago

They estimate in their chart that Athletic trainers have a 0.007 chance of being automated, the third lowest chance after therapists and dentists. it's hard to know exactly what they class as "Athletic trainers". For Olympic athletes, there will always be staff. For the rest of us, what would that "unlikely" automation of the coach look like? Perhaps it would start with a movement sensor on the wrist? A smartphone app to track and recommend exercise? That's not looking unlikely to me, it's looking like it's already here in plain sight: http://www.fitbit.com/ http://www.fitbit.com/ http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-band/en-us http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-band/en-us https://play.google.com/store/apps/category/HEALTH_AND_FITNESS https://play.google.com/store/apps/category/HEALTH_AND_FITNE...

anon4 12y ago
So you're saying the future is in robotics.
- SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
  The future is monitoring and surveillance. That's what these systems do. That and a few data-driven suggestions here and there.
  - midnightreactor 12y ago
    Here's a novel perspective for you: This class of devices are subsidized pieces of technology for use by a group of people, a portion of which for whom it could argued would not have access to the resources this technology provides, and they have access to a greater wealth of data because they are not entitled to rights management for the data they produce, for better or worse. The challenge of these systems is gaining value and insight of understanding different aspects of human behavior while considering the risk/reward calculation each actor engaged in the system. Your use of the words monitoring and surveillance betrays an implied connotation which could be described in the vein of paranoid or Orwellian. It's disingenuous to distill the entirety of what these systems do as "monitoring and surveillance [...] and a few data-driven suggestions here and there". It's more like "monitoring and surveillance" are what these systems are, implied context or not, and what you and I get out of it are suggestions informed by the data of what you and I and everyone else participating actually does within a system.
  - angersock 12y ago
    To midnightreactor: You've been shadowbanned by the HN hivemind. Better luck next account. :(
raverbashing 12y ago
But then again, the intersection of people who would pay for a trainer and had it switched to a fitbit is not so huge (Kind of similar to "lost sales due to piracy" given some limits)
_lex 12y ago
This shows me how myopic and out of touch these guys are - I already use the biggest loser on xbox kinect, and it's replaced both a gym and a trainer for me.
- raverbashing 12y ago
  "and it's replaced both a gym and a trainer for me" Exactly The game is enough for you (and for a lot of people) And that's in the universe of people that do exercise currently. But the game doesn't replace weights/equipment (as much as the bodyweight people want to convince it's not needed) or more advanced training techniques (and frankly, several "fitness trainers" are misguided) But trainers and gyms etc are going to keep existing for people who want to go further, or want to socialize, do something different, have specific training requirements, etc
  - SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
    Weights and equipment can't be emulated in software. And you need a gym to keep them in and provide hot showers after. But I'd say that there's less need for a personal trainer than ever before. You can find the how-to use video on youtube, the community on reddit/r/fitness, the training calculator on your phone, etc. I don't see that trend reversing.
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      There is a chemical compound going through investigation currently that emulates exercise in your muscle tissue: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/exercise-in-a-pill-the-search-continues/ http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/exercise-in-a-pill-... What we can't emulate in software or robotics, shall be done in biology.
    - maerF0x0 12y ago
      > "Weights and equipment can't be emulated in software. " But if you have a friggin strong robo butler, it can provide all the resistance you need.
- 12y ago
JshWright 12y ago
Yeah, the same chart lists a 17% chance that "firefighters" will be automated... I'm equally curious what then definition of "firefighter" is. If they are talking about woodland (or "forest") firefighting, then _maybe_ (I could see drones accomplish at least some of the tasks involved). But for structural firefighting? No way... Not in 20 years.
- vosper 12y ago
  But this is exactly the right reading of the chart - the description says "chances that automation will lead to job losses", not "chance that all jobs will be replaced by automation". So, perhaps it will be drones assisting in wildfires that reduce the need to pay as many people to fight that type of fire, whilst structural firefighting remains the domain of humans - for now.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Why not? Is it the chaotic environment? The temperature extremes? The unpredictability of each situation? All those are strong reasons TO automate firefighting. Machines can function better in heat/smoke/violent structural collapse situations. They can make objective analysis when their own mortality is not an issue. Nobody made money betting against advances in computing.
  - JshWright 12y ago
    I'm all for advances in technology making things safer and putting fewer people in harms way. I just don't think there is anything close to a 17% chance that it will happen in the next two decades. I say this as someone who has a foot in both worlds, so to speak... I work in technology, build UAV quadcopters (including playing with various sensors) as a hobbyist, and work at least one shift a week as a firefighter/paramedic. Technological advances in recent years have made life much better in the fire service. Thermal imaging cameras have gotten lighter, with much larger thermal ranges. Gas detection has similarly lighter and more accurate. Breathing apparatus have gotten 'smarter' and lighter, allowing longer working times, less fatigue, and better insights for incident commanders on the status of their crews. Research in fire development and behavior has led to significants advances in strategy and tactics. However, those tactical decisions are still well beyond the scope of what computers (and computer vision) are capable of. There is just too much variation in how homes are build and occupied (and modified). Here are just a few of the issues I see: -Moving an unconscious victim requires a fair amount of care, and I don't think robotics are there yet... -'Reading' smoke coming from a structure gives a lot of insight into the design and occupancy of the structure. I think that's well beyond the current limits of computer vision and decision making. -There are many activities performed by firefighters outside the scope of 'putting water on fire'. Responding to medical emergencies, technical rescue scenarios, etc... Extricating a victim of a car crash is a very delicate operation that employs equipment capable of exerting many thousands of pounds of force, and a few inches is the difference between freeing someone from a deformed care and crushing them to death... Really the biggest issues I see have to do with tactical decision making based on a huge number of subtle variables (which would involve very sophisticated computer vision), and simply navigating in and around a structure. Designing a robot that can move autonomously through all areas of a house, into closets, under beds, etc, while still being strong enough to lift and move a disabled victim, or employee various tools seems like a pretty difficult problem to solve. How would you power it? Batteries aren't anywhere close to that point, and tethers would limit mobility too much. Personally I think the next 20 years will see continued augmentation, rather than replacement of the men and women in the fire service. For instance, I would love to see an SCBA facepiece with an integrated heads up display providing an infrared image and levels of various gasses that are good indicators of air quality. Once we have that, I'd love the ability to switch between 'tank' air (which I carry a very limited amount of on my back) and 'filtered' air (which would just come from the environment, filtered for particulates, allowing me to save my bottle for when I need it). I think there is also an opportunity for improved 'mapping' of structures as a firefighter moves through them (again, integrated on a HUD inside the facepiece). That would significantly reduce the number of deaths and injuries that occur when firefighters become disoriented and lost in zero-visibility situations. This ended up being much longer than I expected it to be... TL;DR; The next 20 years will see augmentation, not replacement. Who knows what the 20 years after that will bring...
digi_owl 12y ago
I recall seeing articles on what may be described as high tech long johns. They were covered in sensors that would give you a readout about every major muscle on your body. Hook that up to a stripped down Watson that can tell you exactly when and how you are doing wrong.

danmaz74 12y ago

Very interesting analysis. But they don't consider at all one very relevant change that happened during the last 30 years in most wealthy economies, especially the USA: That the taxation of the rich and the highest-earners in general was massively lowered. This contributed a lot to the concentration of wealth and capital in fewer hands.

vixen99 12y ago
The UK in the 70s had a tax rate of 95% thus encouraging payment of much higher salaries to make it worthwhile for talented staff. If the tax rate is thereafter lowered to something sensible then the differentials are going to be significant. Quite a number of higher earners now have an effective tax rate of 60% which is not exactly low - but that's in the UK.
- danmaz74 12y ago
  95% is crazy, but today there are lots of multi-millionaire CEOs who as a percentage of their income pay less taxes than their secretaries...
  - zo1 12y ago
    I see no problem with that, that looks perfectly legal. Democracy and legislation has decided that certain forms of income are to be taxed at a lower rate than others. And the CEO does lots of that "other" form of income, hence the lower rate. Why, what problem do you have with Democracy, err, I mean this tax-rate?
    - warfangle 12y ago
      s/Democracy and legislation/vested interests and cronyism/
      - zo1 12y ago
        I beg to differ, democracy and legislation allowed vested interests and cronyism to occur/take place/take hold. So it is also to blame for what most, including you, blame on "vested interests and cronyism". Of course, this sort of thing would never happen in a "True Democracy". Maybe they have it in Scotland, run by the Scots, perhaps?

josephg 12y ago

There's a great 15 minute video by CGP Grey introducing the same set of concepts that technology will contribute to unemployment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU Its a bit pop-sciency, but its very approachable and well explained.

jholman 12y ago
That was good, yes. And link-browsing from there led me to this feller's site, which so far is also relevant and interesting. http://federicopistono.org/ http://federicopistono.org/
ExpiredLink 12y ago
It sounds like the technology forecasts in the 50ies and 60ies but with a pessimistic instead of an optimistic undertone.
- josephschmoe 12y ago
  In all fairness, most desk jobs that existed in the 50's and 60's are now heavily consolidated (it now takes one journalist and Google what it used to take 10 to do). And most factory work is either also heavily consolidated or moved overseas. Would the words "service economy" even make sense back then?
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    And now there are headlines about automating low tier jobs in the legal and medical professions. The old refrain about getting a degree being a ticket to a steady income is long gone. Never mind that the latest in assembly line robotics are as flexible as humans in their movement, and can be programmed by demonstrating the basic movements a few times. You can pretty much tell Joe to walk away from his station, and roll this robot into the same place.
  - nradov 12y ago
    Some simpler financial news articles are now written by zero journalists. A program just extracts numbers from data feeds and plugs them into a template.

deleted 12y ago

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j1o1h1n 12y ago

Decent sci-fi reading list in the sub-headings.

devingoldfish 12y ago
Good catch, thanks for pointing it out.

jfoster 12y ago

The interesting thing is that a wave of redundancy due to automation or unprecedented efficiency contains problems that those made redundant might be able to work on. Eg. Joe can't afford X due to lack of employment, and Bob can't afford Y for the same reason. Assuming Bob can supply X and Joe can supply Y (or some more complicated network of bartering), it seems like should be possible for an economy to arise.

marcosdumay 12y ago
That's a big assumption. In fact, that's the only thing that may be different this time. If machines are more productive than humans at everything, it break down. If the most productive infrastructure relies on big capital, it breaks down. If Bob and Joe become too poor, it breaks down.
d4nt 12y ago
This relies on the assumption that there are things Joe wants that Bob can supply and vice versa. But as we climb higher and higher up the hierarchy of needs that may not be the case. We are already very effective at keeping people alive and mildly entertained indefinitely. (Although we currently look down on these people as trash for not contributing to society). But I can envisage a time when meeting all my material needs requires almost no human input and meeting my emotional needs cannot be monetised.
pacala 12y ago
While commerce and trade are important, the basis of our existence is physical. We are physical beings with physical needs. Physical resources (energy, land, lumber, food, water, etc.) all have owners in the real economy. Joe and Bob are unemployed, thus have no resources, thus have nothing to trade. The best they can do in your scenario is called dumpster diving, assuming recycling tech is not making garbage valuable to the real economy as well. Mass dumpster diving, that's your dystopia right there.
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  Specifically, Bob and Joe need oil (energy) to produce anything and it's expensive. If they create less value than oil they spent, they're a net loss for society.

desdiv 12y ago

The chart claims that economists have a 43% chance of being replaced by automation. If they're wrong, then they'll be replaced by algorithms that are better at predicting economic trends than they are. If they're right, then...

vosper 12y ago
I've pointed this out elsewhere in this thread: That's not what the chart is saying. The description reads "Probability that computerisation will lead to job losses in the next two decades", not "probability that computerisation will completely replace this job". For example, in economics, there might be a need for fewer economists because computers are able to do some of the work that previously had to be done by humans. But they're not suggesting that there's a 43% chance that there will be no human economists in 20 years, or that there will be such a thing as a computerised economist - it'll be aspects of the work that are automated (at least initially), not the whole job.

deleted 12y ago

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moonchrome 12y ago
>eventually full AIs At that point there will be no corporations or anything else related to our society because it will break the premise society is built on - that we are better off working with each other - someone in control of such AI doesn't need anyone else - it's impossible to guess what they would do with it but a logical choice would be to eliminate potential threats (ie. anyone who can develop similar technology or compromise it) Once someone kicks off a "seed AI" that can develop/replicate fast enough it's game over for the rest, they win. And note that by AI I'm not talking about Terminator style self-aware machines - I'm talking about a problem solving device capable of performing given tasks.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  People tend to bloviate a bit about how the first person or group to build and train a "seed AGI" would have "godlike" power, but what they forget is that given godlike power, there is no reason to be selfish or psychopathic. Most human selfishness and greed comes from incentive gradients and competition traps resulting from the systems we have to survive in. Once you have nonhuman but human-equivalent-or-greater intelligence directed towards human goals, you're beyond competing for survival, and have no incentive not to direct the AGI cooperatively and altruistically. This is a choice we can make, as a profession, as a community, and as a species. There is no point in letting short-sighted competitive anxieties destroy such a potential for good.
  - pacala 12y ago
    I wish I could be as optimistic. But AGIs are physical beings with computational limitations that run on energy. The Sun can produce so much over a given period of time. It's not hard to imagine a competition trap involving AGIs, each trying to get as much resources as possible to increase its capacity and crush the competition.
    - 12y ago

doctorstupid 12y ago

Of course, the other side of the coin says that there are too many people.

tomwalker 12y ago
I think that this is a very important piece of the discussion. Improving the efficiency of a lot of workers and increasing automation does not marry up well with a constantly increasing world population.
- sumedh 12y ago
  The growth rate is falling though.
JoeAltmaier 12y ago
For the planet, sure. But for economic analysis its irrelevant. All metrics are per-capita.
- selmnoo 12y ago
  > For the planet, sure. But for economic analysis its irrelevant. No, for economic analysis overpopulation is very relevant. Maybe not in the extremely short term, but in the long term when overpopulation strains the finite supply of goods like energy and raw material, this becomes very relevant. In addition to the fact the reversing man-made climate change would also take incredible capital and resources to pull off, it's actually probably one of the biggest things to be seen in economic analysis.

aaronhoffman 12y ago

I'd recommend reading Economics in One Lesson http://mises.org/library/economics-one-lesson http://mises.org/library/economics-one-lesson

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

Science is by definition the creation of causal chains. If I do X in this system, Y will result. Hence the importance of falsifiability and reproducibility. This is yet another in a series of economic articles that sound much more like a typical op-ed column than an observation, hypothesis, or proof.

SixSigma 12y ago

Ftee trade destroys wages, of this there is no secret. De-regulation subverts democracy. Time to revisit the relationship between capital and well-being. Ricardian theories of comparative advantage drive wealth into the hands of those who control capital, not into the calloused hands of the poor suckers who sweat.

Houshalter 12y ago
Automation destroys far more jobs than free trade. If anything we should ban automation.
- SixSigma 12y ago
  It wasn't automation that destroyed US manufacturing
  - Houshalter 12y ago
    Manufacturing only became the major source of employment after all the farm laborers had become unemployed due to automation. As another comment mentioned, just banning wheat harvesters alone would create thousands of jobs. If creating jobs was our only goal.
    - SixSigma 12y ago
      Farm labourers became unemployed as a result of govt. policy to undermine farm worker political power. More labour intensive farming would be a good thing. At the moment the US uses 10cals of energy to produce 1cal of food. Pre "get big or get out" it was 1 in 2 out. Back to manufacturing, it is free trade that has gutted US manufacturing capability. Just look at the trade deficit, the rest of the world benefits greatly, capitalists get great returns on their free movement of money. The US loses taxes, jobs, and wealth and is eroding its long term economy while the short term policy makers make hay.
      - Houshalter 12y ago

grandalf 12y ago

If unemployment ever becomes a problem we can simply outlaw the wheat combine, which will open up hundreds of thousands of jobs harvesting grain manually.

glesica 12y ago
I hope you were being sarcastic... but in case you weren't, why would we ever create meaningless work instead of just giving people money for pursuing whatever makes them happy? A basic income guarantee seems like a much more reasonable solution than "put everyone to work digging holes and filling them in again".
- cle 12y ago
  No doubt GP is being sarcastically cynical. But the cynicism is well-founded. We might create meaningless work because it would protect the income of the richest (the most politically influential). There is a strong historical precedence for this. It's socially accepted to some degree, due to our widespread belief in the cargo cult of "jobs".
  - thirdtruck 12y ago
    I think the "bread and circuses" maxim could be expanded to "bread and circuses and hammers" (i.e. work).
- thirdtruck 12y ago
  OP likely was sarcastic, and I agree with you that basic income appears to provide a better solution. That said, they're also extrapolating from existing trends. An inordinate amount of office work today (including a lot of software development) exists solely to keep people busy. While that might sound absurd, consider the following: * Companies, particularly large ones, need to have staff on hand for when heavy work hits, but can't just fire them in their off season, not without destroying morale. * Classic hiring practices are terrible at selecting for actual technical ability, and no one wants to trust the demonstrably valuable work to "the new person." Busy-work provides a way to test their proficiency without ruining the business in the process. * Management prestige (and pay) is often tied to one's direct report head-count. Worse, stack rankings and similar systems tie career survival to extraneous, buffer head-count. * Firing someone is surprisingly hard in most companies. A single lawsuit or a few days of outage from a legacy system maintained by only one curmudgeon can wipe out all the (on-paper) savings from firing an ineffective or even counter-productive person. * Some managers genuinely care about their employees, and want to shield them from the existential and health threats of losing their job and insurance.

jokoon 12y ago

the domain of computer science that seems to have a bright future is machine learning.

tokenadult 12y ago

I see the dateline of this interesting submission (which looked familiar) is "Jan 18th 2014 | From the print edition." There seems to be a whole spate of year-old submissions to Hacker News this weekend. Are we trying to do a year in review, to see which predictions of 2014 turned out in reality? As for the substance of this interesting submitted article, the historical facts are reviewed in a key paragraph before the article goes off into speculation about the future: "For much of the 20th century, those arguing that technology brought ever more jobs and prosperity looked to have the better of the debate. Real incomes in Britain scarcely doubled between the beginning of the common era and 1570. They then tripled from 1570 to 1875. And they more than tripled from 1875 to 1975. Industrialisation did not end up eliminating the need for human workers. On the contrary, it created employment opportunities sufficient to soak up the 20th century’s exploding population. Keynes’s vision of everyone in the 2030s being a lot richer is largely achieved. His belief they would work just 15 hours or so a week has not come to pass." The nub of the article's argument is that new forms of technological change might not leave us with any new forms of gainful employment. After its interesting text discussion and chart predicting what kinds of employment are least likely to be automated out of existence, the article points out one difference between the world of the past and the world of today: "Another way in which previous adaptation is not necessarily a good guide to future employment is the existence of welfare. The alternative to joining the 19th-century industrial proletariat was malnourished deprivation. Today, because of measures introduced in response to, and to some extent on the proceeds of, industrialisation, people in the developed world are provided with unemployment benefits, disability allowances and other forms of welfare. They are also much more likely than a bygone peasant to have savings. This means that the 'reservation wage'—the wage below which a worker will not accept a job—is now high in historical terms. If governments refuse to allow jobless workers to fall too far below the average standard of living, then this reservation wage will rise steadily, and ever more workers may find work unattractive. And the higher it rises, the greater the incentive to invest in capital that replaces labour." Indeed, it may be that the funding of governmental benefits will become secure enough through rising productivity that many current workers will have children who do not need a job at all.

michaelochurch 12y ago

I don't blame technology for the stagnation of the American middle class. I blame poor leadership, but I think there's something else going on that isn't getting a lot of press: latency skew. Instead of waiting two to three days for a piece of postal mail, we're annoyed if that email takes two minutes. I'm not going to moralize about "instant gratification" as if it were wrong, because it's mostly not conscious and it's not a moral issue; we're just being neurologically retrained to resist delays. From a website, 10 seconds means "never": it's down, or in an unusable state. We're also (some of us, at least) at a ridiculous level of comfort; we have people who program their garages to heat up 30 minutes before they leave for work, because they can't stand the thought of 45 seconds' exposure to winter cold. What's not becoming instant is human learning. If something can be learned quickly and will become rote, we can now program a computer to do it. So the things that we need humans for tend to be those that require subtlety or experience. That hasn't gotten faster. It still takes 6+ months before someone is good at his job. That's not a new problem. It's just less tolerated because people are more primed to expect instant results. So we're seeing an aversion to training people up into the better, more complex jobs that technology creates.

gregpilling 12y ago

I am always stunned with statements like this: "For those not in the elite, argues David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, much of modern labour consists of stultifying “bullshit jobs”—low- and mid-level screen-sitting that serves simply to occupy workers for whom the economy no longer has much use. Keeping them employed, Mr Graeber argues, is not an economic choice; it is something the ruling class does to keep control over the lives of others." Yes, I, as an employer, keep my staff doing "bullshit jobs" because I want to "keep control over the lives of others." WTF?!?! Why would I do that? Why not fire the bullshit job person and use that money to take my family on vacation 4x a year? It amazes me that some people think there is some ruling cabal in a dark castle somewhere, deciding how to keep the masses in line. Maybe the answer is less evil - I have the person doing the work because I can't afford to automate it yet, or it is not currently possible. What does the author think of the maker movement? This "Capital Equipment" is now priced at a weeks wage for many US workers. Marx would love it - it puts the means of production in the hands of the common man. I sold capital equipment for years, and what I used to sell for $50,000 you can now do with a $5000 machine. Prices keep coming down, and the machines I sold are no longer made. My job was eaten by progress :) People will keep re-inventing themselves. It's what humans do.

api 12y ago
Bullshit jobs arise in two ways. One is through the crazy inefficiencies of huge companies and governments. This is likely not you. Second is as an emergent property of red queens races in the economy, escalating complexity or overhead that does not actually increase overall macro productivity. The latter requires at least a casual familiarity with evolutionary game theory, but once comprehend cannot be un-comprehended. Most global military competition also falls into this category, and that's double digits of the economy in some countries. I feel like these kinds of emergent pathologies are a species scale IQ test that so far we have utterly failed.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  Great comments from both you and OP. Thanks for this.
- 12y ago

api 12y ago

If it does turn out to be different this time, it will be because Turing complete automation is qualitatively different from single purpose machine automation.

wittedhaddock 12y ago

The article refers to a 2013 paper by David Autor of MIT... http://economics.mit.edu/files/9014 http://economics.mit.edu/files/9014 The Nissan anecdote starts on page 3.

13hours 12y ago

This makes me think : what are good ways to try and protect myself against this? How can I, as a software developer and entrepreneur leverage this to my advantage? What does this tell me about where the big opportunities will be in 3,5 and 10 years so I can begin positioning myself there?

prodigyboi 12y ago

"However, society may find itself sorely tested if, as seems possible, growth and innovation deliver handsome gains to the skilled, while the rest cling to dwindling employment opportunities at stagnant wages." As insurmountable as it may seem, people living in and affected by these innovative societies just need to adapt accordingly. It is in our innate nature to do so rather than remain stagnant and perpetuate mediocre jobs that were created as a result of the industrial revolution. People can acquire new skills and leverage themselves to appropriate some of the "handsome gains". Also, globalization would only exacerbate the issue of "dwindling employment opportunities". Nowadays, more and more corporations seek to outsource jobs to other countries due to cheap labor costs. For most people, it'll be a paradigmatic shift in thinking and seeking ways to contribute to society. Machine learning and artificial intelligence will only serve those who can transcend the repressive jobs which are inherently repetitive and meant for a machine to accomplish as they are the jobs most susceptible to computerization.

yellow_and_gray 12y ago

A table in the article says Technical Writers have an 89% chance of losing their jobs. But it's only 6% for editors. Why? Will technical instructions be automatically generated? How?