18 ms·

The More Fungible Worker

92 points by dlss 12y ago

JacobAldridge 12y ago
When I discuss 'Policies and Procedures' (including but not limited to tech like the OP's Amazon example) I often refer to "Plug and Play" staff [1]. If, for any reason, an employee leaves a position then the business is able to replace them with minimum fuss. The more the role can depend on technology, the more 'true' this is, but it needn't be seen as tech-specific. Staff of course have a different view as to their "fungibility". I tend to overcome this in two ways: First, "If you can't be replaced then you can't be promoted." That resonates a lot. Second, I replace the 'Bus Factor'[2] context with the 'Lottery Factor'. More directly, "How many of you, if you won $35M in Powerball, would still be working here next year? So let's plan for at least one of you to win the lottery." (They're not bad at maths, they get that it's the same conversation as being hit by a bus, but the energetic flip leads to faster engagement in the process.) [1] Maybe I need a new Cloud metaphor? [2] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
- chii 12y ago
  > First, "If you can't be replaced then you can't be promoted." That resonates a lot. that is a very sneaky way of saying that their wage/salary cannot increase.
  - JacobAldridge 12y ago
    How so? Most of my clients give 5%+ payrises each year.
Animats 12y ago
Yes. I refer to the Amazon warehouse operation as "Machines should think. People should work". All the thinking is done by computers and robots. Watch one of the Kiva robot videos that shows the human picker reaching where the laser pointer tells them to reach, waving the item under the scanner, and putting the object in the bin where the light is on. Those people will be unemployed as soon as the Amazon Robot Picking Challenge (http://amazonpickingchallenge.org/ http://amazonpickingchallenge.org/) succeeds. This is the future.
- AndrewKemendo 12y ago
  Wow, you weren't joking. http://youtu.be/Fr6Rco5A9SM?t=2m33s http://youtu.be/Fr6Rco5A9SM?t=2m33s I knew about Kiva and the widescale automation in warehousing but I had no idea the UI was so...simple. I see no reason the person couldn't be taken out of the loop completely here with a robotic arm.
  - Animats 12y ago
    The Amazon Picking Challenge, to do that job with a robotic arm, is underway. Finals, with live robot demos, are on May 26-28, 2015, in Seattle. That's the next step, and it's not far away. In a year or two, robots will probably be handling everything rectangular, like boxes and books. There may still be a few people around for odd sizes and shapes. Not many. As for "there will be jobs building and repairing the robots", Amazon has about 30,000 pickers during peak season. Kiva Systems has about 600 employees. Because all those little mobile robots are interchangeable, there's not much need for on-site maintenance. There's someone on site to replace wheels and batteries and do basic diagnostics, but seriously broken ones are just shipped back to the factory. The Kiva system requires little installation, which is why it's being deployed so fast. Previous systems required conveyors, stacker cranes running on tracks, and lots of specialized, custom machinery. Kiva just needs a flat floor, markers on the floor, and WiFi. Here's what US employment looks like, by sector: http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm Manufacturing is only 8% of the labor force, yet the US makes more stuff than ever. US manufacturing is doing great. The drop in output after 2008 has been completely recovered. Manufacturing just doesn't need many people. The jobs lost never came back. In 2012, retail employed 10% of the US labor force. Remember malls? (See deadmalls.com) No new indoor mall has been built in the US in 10 years. (OK, American Dream Meadowlands in New Jersey is still under construction, after 12 years, three bankruptcies, and a roof collapse, but that's a political boondoggle, part of a stadium complex.) Online ordering doesn't need many people. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates show a small decline over the next 10 years, but those numbers predate Amazon's recent growth and are probably optimistic. The BLS shows employment growth in transportation and warehousing. Probably not going to happen. This is the future, and the future is now.
walterbell 12y ago
Spreadsheets made it easier/possible for "users" (accountants) to write financial "programs", reducing the need for custom development of financial software. If there are more innovations like spreadsheets, there will be less or different needs for programmers as the labor category exists today. Fungibility cuts both ways.
- bobbles 12y ago
  The circle of life: Finance task : > finance system to address task > excel spreadsheet to address finance system shortcomings > finance system to 'formalise' the spreadsheet > excel spreadsheet to address finance system shortcomings > finance system to 'formalise' the spreadsheet etc...
  - walterbell 12y ago
    This circle could also apply to enterprises and startups.
- VLM 12y ago
  My experience is the need for programmers rapidly increases under those conditions because 1) New capabilities and demonstrations of capabilities mean its easier to make the new thing a business requirement, now implemented and supported by IT. 2) Labor required to do something vs skill level in programming scales way beyond linear, maybe exponential. So pay a genius 10 hours of labor at 3x pay, your average grunt "real programmer" 50 hours at 2x pay, or front line sorcerers apprentice doesn't even have programmer in his job title 250 hours at 1x pay to do it in a spreadsheet. 3) Sorcerers apprentices have no idea how to use tools making them incredibly inefficient both in calculating results and the immense labor they expend for their result. The most expensive way to get a result is to pay people who have no idea what they're doing.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    How do you see this dynamic playing out with SaaS services vs. IT? In theory, an external SaaS provider could create economies of scale in usable software for apprentices. Would custom enteprise apps reincorporate those learnings? Or would the enterprise pay a cost to integrate the output of SaaS services (possibly with apprentice errors) into corporate systems?
crdoconnor 12y ago
>The Luddites tried futilely to stop progress that benefited society Luddites were not anti-technology nor were they anti progress. They destroyed technology as a tactic to raise the price of the more automated competition. Their competition made cheaper, crappier equivalents of their artisanal work made with de-skilled McJob equivalent workers whose wages were pressured to abhorrent levels (via other means like the enclosure movement/Napoleonic wars). Similarly, people who strike are not "futilely trying to stop the existence of work". It's another tactic. In a way, the Luddites are pretty similar to the anti-H1B crowd of hacker news. >Before these technological advancements, workers enjoyed mini-monopolies. This is a hacky way of looking at it but the conclusion sort of works. It makes much more sense to look at relative market power of employees vs. employers rather than use the all-or-nothing terminology of monopoly vs. perfect competition. If Amazon workers attempt to sabotage Amazon's stock picking machinery, I expect it will result in an increase in wages, much like it did for the Luddites. They will be called Luddites, but similar to the original Luddites, they kind of only really have a problem with technology that is used to control them.
- dominotw 12y ago
  >In a way, the Luddites are pretty similar to the anti-H1B crowd of hacker news. H1B crowd == de-skilled McJob equivalent workers ?
  - crdoconnor 12y ago
    de-skilled McJob equivalent workers = Outsourced (often Indian) workers that are paid peanuts and who consequently don't give much of a shit about the quality of their work. Elance with its screen recording feature = the equivalent of stocking frames
    - IndianAstronaut 12y ago
      What is wrong with mcdonalds level jobs? A mcdonalds doesn't mean that a high end restaurant cannot exist. They both fill two very different roles.
stretchwithme 12y ago
People who kept doing things the old inefficient way will see their wages go down. If a worker can make ten times the widgets with newer technology, the amount that can be charged per widget, and thus the amount a worker can be paid to produce each one, has to drop eventually.
- stretchwithme 12y ago
  Of course, the upside is that the worker thatchers up with technology eventually gets their widgets for 1/10 of the cost. And this is literally true. Cars, for example, used to cost ten times as much. You can buy a car as reliable as any 1914 model for a few hundred bucks that is more efficient and cheaper to maintain. You can also start it without getting out of the car.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  And as the inefficient workers get outcompeted and more skilled competition shows up, the end result is always the same: new widget costs 1/10 of the original costs, those who make them earn the same amount of money as they did before, but now 9/10 of workers are without a job. It has always been like that and it's responsible for the age of plenty we live in - but the problem of today is that those 9/10 of workers without a job are increasingly unable to find another one, as everything gets slowly automated away.
  - stretchwithme 12y ago
    9/10 of workers are not out of a job. Unemployment is not 90%.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      They didn't use to be, but - looking at the rate of automation - they're about to.
politician 12y ago
A timely article considering the deformation of traditional IT departments threatened by Docker.
- k__ 12y ago
  I remember talking to a few people in high school about me studying CS because I wanted to become a developer. They all my IT-friends were like, "Don't do it man. No one needs new software! Better be an administrator, in the future they will be needed to manage all the IT stuff that already exists, but there will hardly be anything new on the marked!" That was 2003, right before the social and mobile boom.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    Docker isn't anything new (perhaps nicer toolset on an old idea), and admins aren't getting replaced by devs any faster than devs getting replaced by admins. If anything, the amount of work continues to get abstracted away for both camps. Maybe you won't need sysadmins in ~10 years. Maybe. Those of us still doing IT will just pivot into another niche.
    - venomsnake 12y ago
      With more and more abstraction layers the things that could fuck up rise exponentially and are harder to track. So while you won't need 10 ops to be able to keep your servers up, you will need 10 trained IT investigators to find why java 12 inside docker 8.14 connecting to whatever nosql crashes when there is full moon.
      - marcosdumay 12y ago
        Things don't really work that way. Yes, the possiblities for bugs increase exponentialy. But no, that does not mean you'll need exponentialy more time tracking them. And that's not even the most important scaling factor: the point is that good abstractions are simple, and get reused enough so that they create very few interface bugs, and those bugs get resolved.
hacknat 12y ago
I don't understand the argument that just because technological progress in the past has led to higher wages and employment (indeed, it actually hasn't always) that it's a given that this will always happen. It seems to me that it is self-evident that most low-skill labor, at the very least, is in the process of being automated and is therefore going to be unnecessary. There has been no other time in human history when ALL low-skill labor was in the process of being automated in such a generalized way. While it is certainly true that there is and always has been huge economic pressure on low-skill labor to be destroyed, it is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate and the economic forces that are destroying it don't seem to be creating any residual low-skill labor (like the assembly line, etc did). Making sure that the labor force is educated enough to not need the low-skill labor is good, and it is undeniable that everybody is getting more educated. Still, I worry a great many people are going to get left out in the dark.
- SomeCallMeTim 12y ago
  This is why we should support basic-income or minimum-income. Then NO ONE is left out to starve, ever. People would still get jobs to get MORE money, because people always want more, but you could eliminate minimum/living wage laws, so the marginal cost of production at jobs that people enjoyed could actually go down, while at the same time more people would have money to spend. The transition is the hard part.
  - _yosefk 12y ago
    People always want more money, but they won't necessarily want to work for it. Is there any evidence for a sufficient willingness to work under a basic income arrangement to keep the economy going?
    - reverius42 12y ago
      I don't see why everyone needs to work in order to keep the economy going. Suppose in the future we've managed to completely and fully automate all the work that was done by humans in 2014. Shouldn't we be able to maintain the standard of living of 2014 indefinitely, with no human "work" to speak of? (Assuming, of course, that our standard of living in 2014 is sustainable to begin with.)
SatvikBeri 12y ago
Workers becoming more fungible happens even in creative domains. For example, I've heard several companies cite how advances in sales software have dramatically reduced the training time for new sales people as well as reducing the gap between top performers and everyone else.
Futurebot 12y ago
Those that can 'defer to the machine' are going to do better in many jobs (that will remain) in the future. This is a big part of Cowen's "Average is Over." Here's a good review of it which goes into that aspect of it: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/searle20150109 http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/searle20150109 Excerpt: 'The moral Cowen draws from freestyle chess is that the winners of these games, and he extrapolates, the economic “games” of the future, are those human beings who are most willing to defer to the decisions of the machine. I find this conclusion more than a little chilling given we’re talk about real people here rather than Knight or Pawns, but Cowen seems to think it’s just common sense. In its simplest form Cowen’s argument boils down to the prediction that an increasing amount of human work in the future will come in the form of these AI-human teams. Some of this, he admits, will amount to no workers at all with the human part of the “team” reduced to an unpaid customer. I now almost always scan and bag my own goods at the grocery store, just as I can’t remember the last time I actually spoke to a bank teller who wasn’t my mom. Cowen also admits that the rise of AI might mean the world actually gets “dumber” our interactions with our environment simplified to foster smooth integration with machines and compressed to meet their limits. In his vision intelligent machines will revolutionize everything from medicine to education to business management and negotiation to love. The human beings who will best thrive in this new environment will be those whose work best complements that of intelligent machines, and this will be the case all the way from the factory floor to the classroom. Intelligent machines should improve human judgement in areas such as medical diagnostics and would even replace judges in the courtroom if we are ever willing to take the constitutional plunge. Teachers will go from educators to “coaches” as intelligent machines allow individualized instruction , but education will still require a human touch when it comes to motivating students.'
KedarMhaswade 12y ago
The essence of the article is about effectiveness of technology/trade in reducing the 'gaps' between the capabilities of workers/artisans results in lowering their average compensation. But I think there's something missing. Professor Katz famously suggested not to become scientists [1] because getting your research funded becomes top priority than the assurance that 'all you'll do is research'. In a way, since we live in a society, workers need to feel personally responsible for /constantly/ finding the appropriateness (value) of their skills and elevate them as necessary to make sure they have a steady income and their craft is still valued by 'customers'. If you stagnate there, then you will gradually (or rapidly) become replaceable. And as you age, being indispensable becomes harder. So, perhaps, it makes sense to learn things that ensure stability of demand for your skills. 1- http://physics.wustl.edu/katz/scientist.html http://physics.wustl.edu/katz/scientist.html

92 points by dlss 12y ago

When I discuss 'Policies and Procedures' (including but not limited to tech like the OP's Amazon example) I often refer to "Plug and Play" staff [1]. If, for any reason, an employee leaves a position then the business is able to replace them with minimum fuss. The more the role can depend on technology, the more 'true' this is, but it needn't be seen as tech-specific. Staff of course have a different view as to their "fungibility". I tend to overcome this in two ways: First, "If you can't be replaced then you can't be promoted." That resonates a lot. Second, I replace the 'Bus Factor'[2] context with the 'Lottery Factor'. More directly, "How many of you, if you won $35M in Powerball, would still be working here next year? So let's plan for at least one of you to win the lottery." (They're not bad at maths, they get that it's the same conversation as being hit by a bus, but the energetic flip leads to faster engagement in the process.) [1] Maybe I need a new Cloud metaphor? [2] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

chii 12y ago
> First, "If you can't be replaced then you can't be promoted." That resonates a lot. that is a very sneaky way of saying that their wage/salary cannot increase.
- JacobAldridge 12y ago
  How so? Most of my clients give 5%+ payrises each year.

Animats 12y ago

Yes. I refer to the Amazon warehouse operation as "Machines should think. People should work". All the thinking is done by computers and robots. Watch one of the Kiva robot videos that shows the human picker reaching where the laser pointer tells them to reach, waving the item under the scanner, and putting the object in the bin where the light is on. Those people will be unemployed as soon as the Amazon Robot Picking Challenge (http://amazonpickingchallenge.org/ http://amazonpickingchallenge.org/) succeeds. This is the future.

AndrewKemendo 12y ago
Wow, you weren't joking. http://youtu.be/Fr6Rco5A9SM?t=2m33s http://youtu.be/Fr6Rco5A9SM?t=2m33s I knew about Kiva and the widescale automation in warehousing but I had no idea the UI was so...simple. I see no reason the person couldn't be taken out of the loop completely here with a robotic arm.
- Animats 12y ago
  The Amazon Picking Challenge, to do that job with a robotic arm, is underway. Finals, with live robot demos, are on May 26-28, 2015, in Seattle. That's the next step, and it's not far away. In a year or two, robots will probably be handling everything rectangular, like boxes and books. There may still be a few people around for odd sizes and shapes. Not many. As for "there will be jobs building and repairing the robots", Amazon has about 30,000 pickers during peak season. Kiva Systems has about 600 employees. Because all those little mobile robots are interchangeable, there's not much need for on-site maintenance. There's someone on site to replace wheels and batteries and do basic diagnostics, but seriously broken ones are just shipped back to the factory. The Kiva system requires little installation, which is why it's being deployed so fast. Previous systems required conveyors, stacker cranes running on tracks, and lots of specialized, custom machinery. Kiva just needs a flat floor, markers on the floor, and WiFi. Here's what US employment looks like, by sector: http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm Manufacturing is only 8% of the labor force, yet the US makes more stuff than ever. US manufacturing is doing great. The drop in output after 2008 has been completely recovered. Manufacturing just doesn't need many people. The jobs lost never came back. In 2012, retail employed 10% of the US labor force. Remember malls? (See deadmalls.com) No new indoor mall has been built in the US in 10 years. (OK, American Dream Meadowlands in New Jersey is still under construction, after 12 years, three bankruptcies, and a roof collapse, but that's a political boondoggle, part of a stadium complex.) Online ordering doesn't need many people. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates show a small decline over the next 10 years, but those numbers predate Amazon's recent growth and are probably optimistic. The BLS shows employment growth in transportation and warehousing. Probably not going to happen. This is the future, and the future is now.

walterbell 12y ago

Spreadsheets made it easier/possible for "users" (accountants) to write financial "programs", reducing the need for custom development of financial software. If there are more innovations like spreadsheets, there will be less or different needs for programmers as the labor category exists today. Fungibility cuts both ways.

bobbles 12y ago
The circle of life: Finance task : > finance system to address task > excel spreadsheet to address finance system shortcomings > finance system to 'formalise' the spreadsheet > excel spreadsheet to address finance system shortcomings > finance system to 'formalise' the spreadsheet etc...
- walterbell 12y ago
  This circle could also apply to enterprises and startups.
VLM 12y ago
My experience is the need for programmers rapidly increases under those conditions because 1) New capabilities and demonstrations of capabilities mean its easier to make the new thing a business requirement, now implemented and supported by IT. 2) Labor required to do something vs skill level in programming scales way beyond linear, maybe exponential. So pay a genius 10 hours of labor at 3x pay, your average grunt "real programmer" 50 hours at 2x pay, or front line sorcerers apprentice doesn't even have programmer in his job title 250 hours at 1x pay to do it in a spreadsheet. 3) Sorcerers apprentices have no idea how to use tools making them incredibly inefficient both in calculating results and the immense labor they expend for their result. The most expensive way to get a result is to pay people who have no idea what they're doing.
- walterbell 12y ago
  How do you see this dynamic playing out with SaaS services vs. IT? In theory, an external SaaS provider could create economies of scale in usable software for apprentices. Would custom enteprise apps reincorporate those learnings? Or would the enterprise pay a cost to integrate the output of SaaS services (possibly with apprentice errors) into corporate systems?

crdoconnor 12y ago

>The Luddites tried futilely to stop progress that benefited society Luddites were not anti-technology nor were they anti progress. They destroyed technology as a tactic to raise the price of the more automated competition. Their competition made cheaper, crappier equivalents of their artisanal work made with de-skilled McJob equivalent workers whose wages were pressured to abhorrent levels (via other means like the enclosure movement/Napoleonic wars). Similarly, people who strike are not "futilely trying to stop the existence of work". It's another tactic. In a way, the Luddites are pretty similar to the anti-H1B crowd of hacker news. >Before these technological advancements, workers enjoyed mini-monopolies. This is a hacky way of looking at it but the conclusion sort of works. It makes much more sense to look at relative market power of employees vs. employers rather than use the all-or-nothing terminology of monopoly vs. perfect competition. If Amazon workers attempt to sabotage Amazon's stock picking machinery, I expect it will result in an increase in wages, much like it did for the Luddites. They will be called Luddites, but similar to the original Luddites, they kind of only really have a problem with technology that is used to control them.

dominotw 12y ago
>In a way, the Luddites are pretty similar to the anti-H1B crowd of hacker news. H1B crowd == de-skilled McJob equivalent workers ?
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  de-skilled McJob equivalent workers = Outsourced (often Indian) workers that are paid peanuts and who consequently don't give much of a shit about the quality of their work. Elance with its screen recording feature = the equivalent of stocking frames
  - IndianAstronaut 12y ago
    What is wrong with mcdonalds level jobs? A mcdonalds doesn't mean that a high end restaurant cannot exist. They both fill two very different roles.

stretchwithme 12y ago

People who kept doing things the old inefficient way will see their wages go down. If a worker can make ten times the widgets with newer technology, the amount that can be charged per widget, and thus the amount a worker can be paid to produce each one, has to drop eventually.

stretchwithme 12y ago
Of course, the upside is that the worker thatchers up with technology eventually gets their widgets for 1/10 of the cost. And this is literally true. Cars, for example, used to cost ten times as much. You can buy a car as reliable as any 1914 model for a few hundred bucks that is more efficient and cheaper to maintain. You can also start it without getting out of the car.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
TeMPOraL 12y ago
And as the inefficient workers get outcompeted and more skilled competition shows up, the end result is always the same: new widget costs 1/10 of the original costs, those who make them earn the same amount of money as they did before, but now 9/10 of workers are without a job. It has always been like that and it's responsible for the age of plenty we live in - but the problem of today is that those 9/10 of workers without a job are increasingly unable to find another one, as everything gets slowly automated away.
- stretchwithme 12y ago
  9/10 of workers are not out of a job. Unemployment is not 90%.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    They didn't use to be, but - looking at the rate of automation - they're about to.

politician 12y ago

A timely article considering the deformation of traditional IT departments threatened by Docker.

k__ 12y ago
I remember talking to a few people in high school about me studying CS because I wanted to become a developer. They all my IT-friends were like, "Don't do it man. No one needs new software! Better be an administrator, in the future they will be needed to manage all the IT stuff that already exists, but there will hardly be anything new on the marked!" That was 2003, right before the social and mobile boom.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  Docker isn't anything new (perhaps nicer toolset on an old idea), and admins aren't getting replaced by devs any faster than devs getting replaced by admins. If anything, the amount of work continues to get abstracted away for both camps. Maybe you won't need sysadmins in ~10 years. Maybe. Those of us still doing IT will just pivot into another niche.
  - venomsnake 12y ago
    With more and more abstraction layers the things that could fuck up rise exponentially and are harder to track. So while you won't need 10 ops to be able to keep your servers up, you will need 10 trained IT investigators to find why java 12 inside docker 8.14 connecting to whatever nosql crashes when there is full moon.
    - marcosdumay 12y ago
      Things don't really work that way. Yes, the possiblities for bugs increase exponentialy. But no, that does not mean you'll need exponentialy more time tracking them. And that's not even the most important scaling factor: the point is that good abstractions are simple, and get reused enough so that they create very few interface bugs, and those bugs get resolved.

hacknat 12y ago

I don't understand the argument that just because technological progress in the past has led to higher wages and employment (indeed, it actually hasn't always) that it's a given that this will always happen. It seems to me that it is self-evident that most low-skill labor, at the very least, is in the process of being automated and is therefore going to be unnecessary. There has been no other time in human history when ALL low-skill labor was in the process of being automated in such a generalized way. While it is certainly true that there is and always has been huge economic pressure on low-skill labor to be destroyed, it is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate and the economic forces that are destroying it don't seem to be creating any residual low-skill labor (like the assembly line, etc did). Making sure that the labor force is educated enough to not need the low-skill labor is good, and it is undeniable that everybody is getting more educated. Still, I worry a great many people are going to get left out in the dark.

SomeCallMeTim 12y ago
This is why we should support basic-income or minimum-income. Then NO ONE is left out to starve, ever. People would still get jobs to get MORE money, because people always want more, but you could eliminate minimum/living wage laws, so the marginal cost of production at jobs that people enjoyed could actually go down, while at the same time more people would have money to spend. The transition is the hard part.
- _yosefk 12y ago
  People always want more money, but they won't necessarily want to work for it. Is there any evidence for a sufficient willingness to work under a basic income arrangement to keep the economy going?
  - reverius42 12y ago
    I don't see why everyone needs to work in order to keep the economy going. Suppose in the future we've managed to completely and fully automate all the work that was done by humans in 2014. Shouldn't we be able to maintain the standard of living of 2014 indefinitely, with no human "work" to speak of? (Assuming, of course, that our standard of living in 2014 is sustainable to begin with.)

SatvikBeri 12y ago

Workers becoming more fungible happens even in creative domains. For example, I've heard several companies cite how advances in sales software have dramatically reduced the training time for new sales people as well as reducing the gap between top performers and everyone else.

Futurebot 12y ago

Those that can 'defer to the machine' are going to do better in many jobs (that will remain) in the future. This is a big part of Cowen's "Average is Over." Here's a good review of it which goes into that aspect of it: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/searle20150109 http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/searle20150109 Excerpt: 'The moral Cowen draws from freestyle chess is that the winners of these games, and he extrapolates, the economic “games” of the future, are those human beings who are most willing to defer to the decisions of the machine. I find this conclusion more than a little chilling given we’re talk about real people here rather than Knight or Pawns, but Cowen seems to think it’s just common sense. In its simplest form Cowen’s argument boils down to the prediction that an increasing amount of human work in the future will come in the form of these AI-human teams. Some of this, he admits, will amount to no workers at all with the human part of the “team” reduced to an unpaid customer. I now almost always scan and bag my own goods at the grocery store, just as I can’t remember the last time I actually spoke to a bank teller who wasn’t my mom. Cowen also admits that the rise of AI might mean the world actually gets “dumber” our interactions with our environment simplified to foster smooth integration with machines and compressed to meet their limits. In his vision intelligent machines will revolutionize everything from medicine to education to business management and negotiation to love. The human beings who will best thrive in this new environment will be those whose work best complements that of intelligent machines, and this will be the case all the way from the factory floor to the classroom. Intelligent machines should improve human judgement in areas such as medical diagnostics and would even replace judges in the courtroom if we are ever willing to take the constitutional plunge. Teachers will go from educators to “coaches” as intelligent machines allow individualized instruction , but education will still require a human touch when it comes to motivating students.'

KedarMhaswade 12y ago

The essence of the article is about effectiveness of technology/trade in reducing the 'gaps' between the capabilities of workers/artisans results in lowering their average compensation. But I think there's something missing. Professor Katz famously suggested not to become scientists [1] because getting your research funded becomes top priority than the assurance that 'all you'll do is research'. In a way, since we live in a society, workers need to feel personally responsible for /constantly/ finding the appropriateness (value) of their skills and elevate them as necessary to make sure they have a steady income and their craft is still valued by 'customers'. If you stagnate there, then you will gradually (or rapidly) become replaceable. And as you age, being indispensable becomes harder. So, perhaps, it makes sense to learn things that ensure stability of demand for your skills. 1- http://physics.wustl.edu/katz/scientist.html http://physics.wustl.edu/katz/scientist.html