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Robots Are Coming For Our Jobs, Just Not All of Them
szczys writes: There was a video published on YouTube about a year ago called Humans Need Not Apply which compared human labor now to horse labor just before industrialization. It's a great thought-exercise, but there are a ton of tasks where it's still science-fiction to think robots are taking over anytime soon. Kristina Panos makes a great argument for which jobs we all want to see taken by robots, others that would be very difficult to make happen, and some that would just creep everyone out.
there are still some out there?
...then it will be automated somehow, eventually.
No, not the summary, lately, digress... Waste Disposal. Fine for Robots. Let me be the first * to welcome our new Robot Waste Collector Overlords. Drive buses too. Basically, the Ralph Cramden and Ed Norton of the robot world is a-okay.
never!
This is why you go to school and get a good education, so you can get a job that can't be replaced by a robot. Personally if a robot can do a job quicker, cleaner and more efficiently, fire the humans and roll in the robots :D
Yet, horses didn't become extinct. Not in the slightest. We still have _LOTS_ of horses around here. Some farms still use them for horsepower - it's a personal preference. Many people use them for pleasure. They're better off than they were before - more pampered. Soon you like the horse will be just a pleasure item for your robot overlords and happier for that.
There's jobs? Great! I was worried that the 5,000,000,000 work-aged people in the 99% would struggle to find things the 1%'ers want done. Apparently each rich guy needs a city-sized army of artists and musicians for each of their mansions.
It's hilarious to see people in denial about this coming to a head, when it's long since started.
Bobby McGuy is 18 and trying to pay for school instead of suckering into the predatory scam of student loans, because he knows he's fucked if he doesn't get exclusive education (which, by definition, not everyone can have). He's healthy, ready to work, an optimized subject on a silver platter, and there's nothing for him to do unless he undercuts the robot's $2/hr. He's worthless. If, IF there's anything for him to do, 4,999,999,999 others want to do it too.
Until a true AI can be developed automation could only replace manual labor jobs, any job that needs thought involved is going to be out. There is also the problem of troubleshooting and fixing the robots, something I doubt could be automated except for the most routine breakage. For every advance in robots we've seen a loss of some pretty crappy jobs and the addition of some very high paid technical jobs. The welders in the auto plants were replaced with robots and then the auto companies had to hire engineers to maintain and program the robots.
This has been a pretty consistent trend, manual labor replaced with white collar high wage jobs (in lower numbers), often the cost savings aren't very high in labor rates, but the savings come from more precise work by the robots. For example, automotive welding now is perfect almost every time. In the end between the robot companies, the programers and the robot maintainers you end up with more or less the same number of jobs than those that were lost just with higher productivity and better results.
According to those who have insights into the leading companies, AI is already growing exponentially in capabilities. Exponentially!
Don't pretend that its only jobs with straightforward algorithms that will be replaced. Creativity is learnable by a computer. So is critical thinking. Pretty much anything we do will be possible by a computer in 15 years time. Question is, will it be cheaper. That's truly what matters. Is it cheaper to spend the electricity and pay for the cloud compute time to automate your job, or does it cost less to pay you.
As a unspoken rule we keep creating larger bureaucracy so more people get jobs even though these are mining-less and easily replaceable. We will end up in a system where people will go to a job just to be preoccupied with something for a wage that allows them to live till next month (some people are already on this train).
It has been said before.
As the cost of production decreases so will the prices. When that happens more money is left to buy other products hence the job growth. However, short term yes it will sting.
Cars created jobs long term. Many buggy repair places and horse growers were very upset and predicted gloom too! But can we exist today without cars and trucks? No.
If you are non skilled then yes it sucks and you should have listened to your teachers and got an education in something. Last I looked plumbers still make more than doctors. $120/hr is what a doctor charges and he has a $300,000 student loan to pay off too!
Eventually all of us will have more free time as we can create businesses with a fraction of the capital and sell them to other people in poorer countries who will ahve an expanding middle class like China and soon Africa hopefully
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Robots Are Coming For Our Jobs, Just Not All of Them
So, what are the other ones doing? Sneaky bastards.
-Dave
It's interesting that most horses and pet animals don't have to work all day every day, but we humans are seen merely as a 'workforce'.
Consider that if everyone has a robot, that you could get your robot to make things for you rather than buy them.
Here you say "but what about chemicals and compounds"... all of that can be automated.
People in cities might be fucked. I don't know... they can live it up with Judge Dredd in Mega City 1. But people with some land might be able to enjoy a modern high tech life style and produce most of what they want and need independently.
3d printers... CNC machines... that magnetic auto refinery/chemical plant/bio sample handler... there are a lot of things you could make with that. And those things you made could make pretty much anything else and so on.
Keep in mind, everything we have today from satellites to submarines was built with human hands... or built with things built by human hands.
We could see a democratization of industry in the same way that computers have democratized a lot of things.
Rather than wondering if you'll have a job... consider if you'll even need one. Why do you have the job? To make the money to get the things you buy with the money. What if you could just skip that middle step and go right to the end?
You might say "this thing I want isn't practical to build that way"... maybe... but also consider that you might build things differently if your industrial model were different.
Consider how things were made 30 thousand years ago. Pretty much all we have from that period are "hand axes"... bits of stone chipped into sharp shapes... or smooth rocks used as hammers.
Look at how things were made in every era from then to now. The way they're made and the way people thought about the things they made changed from one era to the next. That relationship between the thing, what it is meant to do, who made it, and how society sees the person that made it influences the thing that is made.
A skilled craftsman in the 1700s is not going to make something the same way that an assembly line worker will in 1938. And just the same, a person that instructs his machinery to build him a whatever that he wants is not going to build it the same way that assembly line worker would either.
the great take away many people have with this is that we should just get welfare and have the big government or corporations pay us for breathing. The reality is that if the industrial complex doesn't need us then it doesn't need us. You might think you can vote yourself some political power but if you provide nothing the society actually needs... then why does the society need to care what you want? Your vote won't matter.
So you had better hope you're better than just a welfare sink. Because if that's all 80 percent of humanity becomes... then 80 percent of humanity is expendable. I'm not saying I'd kill them off... I'm saying someone will do it though. And when it happens... those that do it will lose nothing when they do it because the people they're killing are of no value at all to the society.
So pray you're not as useless as some would suggest. Because if you are... you might just be the walking dead.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Why do people insist on having jobs when what they really want are goods and services? Robots will exponentially decrease the costs of goods and services until they they cost nothing, just as has happened on the internet (do you pay money to a website to post comments? Probably not).
We will likely wind up in a situation where basic commodities are provided free of charge, or for a very small fee, and your home robot will use them to make whatever you want, whether it's a new t-shirt, a drone, or even a medical device. By the time this happens, the robot will be far more intelligent and skilled than any human, possibly ALL humans combined. It will be able to perform surgery on you, and synthesize custom medicine in house to keep you healthy. It will mow your lawn, and repave your driveway. It will build you a new house if you want. Perhaps it will even build a specialized workshop for the production of some commodity that it can sell to bring in some cash to use towards the purchase of similar commodities.
Imagine, each home a corporation, with the humans as executives. They just tell the robot(s) what they want, and they get it done.
As in the comment on TFA:
In that way, instead of trading one’s menial labor for money you simply trade your robot’s menial labor for money (which, I think, is not a bad trade). So I think the solution is to figure out ways to make owning a robot akin to owning a car (i.e. something that basically every worker is already doing). This seems a lot more doable than demanding certain menial tasks be reserved for human labor or, even more futile, demanding higher wages for the human performance of menial tasks such a latte preparation and burger flipping.
That's an awesome idea. Solves [or delays] many problems.
I love when uninformed people try to guess what ai can and can't do. Can you plot accurate orbital intercepts for space probes? Or design new networking algorithms? How about debug a program without the source code? Cause ai can already do all that and more.
This is why you go to school and get a good education, so you can get a job that can't be replaced by a robot.
To paraphrase a line from The Incredibles, "When everyone is college educated - no one will be."
I'm not exactly thrilled at the prospect of living in a world where you'll need a 4 year college degree to bag groceries, because everyone in the transportation industry was put out of work by self-driving vehicles and drones. From the looks of things, we're not even that far off.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
good education with a 100K loan that is very hard to get rid of.
with modern militaries and information control? Also, if you look at history it's really only happened once when FDR and a few others broke ranks among the 1%, and even then it took the loss of life after WWII trimming excess population plus an irrational fear of communism to get the 1% of open up their coffers. They're over that fear and they're not bothering with large scale wars anymore. Hell, back around 2000 a bunch of Pakistani terrorists attacked India's capital, there was strong evidence the Pakastani gov't knew about it (maybe bullshit, but still) and there was _still_ no war.
/. jokes). Seriously, about the only thing that makes the bastards in our ruling class treat us well is if there isn't enough of us. That's why the chruches say no to birth control. They've long since noticed the drop in happiness that happens after childbirth for all but the richest and they'll be damned if we're gonna stop giving them fodder for their factories...
I don't see us throwing off the yolk of oppression with violent revolution ever again. If there's any hope it's male birth control and a general lack of interest in having children that'll do it (queue
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San Francisco? I can go on Craigslist in Phoenix right now and get a plumber for about $30/hr. That $150/hr might be if you're completely renovating your kitchen, but they're over charging because board rich housewives like spending a lot on that sort of thing. That kind of work is also hard to come by. For every 'owner' there's a ton of juniors. But it's hard to be an owner because without a few juicy contracts you'll never make enough money to keep a business going. Didn't you ever work in a computer shop? It's the same damn thing. You need a few nice big commercial contracts to keep you going through the lean times or you have to go out and get hourly work. You get those kinda jobs from friends, family and dumb luck.
:(...
As for General Practitioners, we treat 'em like shit in America because our health care system if literally FUBAR'd (yes, I know what literally means). They'd do a lot better if we were single payer, but we can't stop being scared 'o the big bad communist long enough to do that
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That's one of the big problems with college loans: they'll give you 100k for a career path with no clear ability to pay back that cost in a reasonable timeframe (say, 5 years). If you took out a $100k to get a music degree, an education degree, a social sciences or philosophy or religion degree there's no way that's going to pay off in a reasonable period. Chemical engineering? Yeah. MD or JD? Yup. Accounting - maybe.
If, all of a sudden there were no loan guarantees and banks based loans on actual salaries and job prospects, you'd find that your max loan amounts would be in the 0.8-1.2x starting annual salary range, and there would be whole degree types that would be simply ineligible.
And when nobody had (seemingly) free money to go to school, those colleges would find a way to reduce costs and tuition for the non-money jobs. Or they'd drop the programs entirely and the supply would be reduced until there were a decent salary for those left.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Business men who run plumbing companies make more than doctors who are merely employees.
Just because you're a plumber doesn't mean you can't have business acumen. Just as being a doctor doesn't mean you do have it. I know plenty of both, and the rich ones are the ones that run a business, either instead of or in addition to their hands-on work. And the doctors running the business end of things are still making a shitload more than the plumbers who are running the business end of things, by a factor of 3 or more (similar to the plain-old-employee ratio).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
With a (redacted) marketshare we need to (redacted). Putting up more barriers will just have them ignore the US entirely.
It wouldn't be that bad of a disaster, as not all companies could afford to leave. Others would find themselves on the painfully wrong end of some products delivered by more US-friendly peers.
By leaving the US, they would be signing their own death warrants. Embracing the US and her citizens would preserve their existence and remove any reason for hostility.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
For those eager to remove jobs with AI/tech, consider that all the bread, circuses, and such will not stop a critical mass of displaced individuals.
The result will be a large reversal of technological progress, most of which would have been avoided by reintegrating displaced individuals.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The video says that automation is good because it produces abundance if there is abundance what is the point on needing to work? Why we don't just organize the production so every human person can benefit from the work of the machines, and pursue their own interests. Most of our governments and corporations say they just want the best for the people, why they don't start using automation to improve the life of millions of people for free?
It's what auto-mechanics do more and more of. Read a trouble code, the screen brings up the part info, punch the order button connected to the local warehouse, a paid driver delivers it, mechanic snaps it in plus a couple of screws.
Even plumbing is becoming like that: the plumber swapped a hot/cold regulator module out for a new module in our house. It was a little tricky to snap in place, though, and that's where skill comes in. (My state regulates the hot/cold regulator design per "anti-scalding", for good or bad.)
Either bots will get better at snapping in the replacement modules, or the designs will be simplified enough for bot-enabled snapping in, at least for industrial machinery or heavily watched industries like cars.
Table-ized A.I.
Robots are coming for all jobs eventually. Not saying "soon", but it's a matter of time, the inevitable endgame of labor-saving technology, which is the whole point of technology: to enable us humans to get more done with less effort. People will never stop trying to get machines to do work for us until we never have to do work -- or pay someone else to do work in our stead -- again.
And that is going to be a gigantic problem for everyone whose life depends on other people paying them to do work in their stead, which is to say the lower-class majority of humanity, the ones with so little capital that they're dependent on borrowing the capital of others and have to trade their labor for that "privilege". Forget about income inequality, automation will make income irrelevant eventually. The real problem we need to have fixed by the time that happens is asset inequality, to make sure that everybody's got a little chunk of land to call all their own and enough cash in hand to buy the robots that will do all their labor for them.
Anyone who doesn't fit that description is eventually going to be completely fucked, and seeing as how only a tiny fraction of the populace has ever fit that description, we're all going to be completely fucked... and it's not the robots' fault, and the fuckers whose fault it is are going to pay sorely for it once the only options for the rest of us are either to make them pay, or lie down in the street and die.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
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Every job that a human can do will eventually be replaced with robots.
For everything else, it will be outsourced to India. And that includes the robot repair call center.
I for one welcome our new Hindu overlords.
The rest of us are F**KED
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
But one could see the car industry as a likely source of new jobs to replace the horse jobs. We don't have anything equivalent in proportion.
A robot may replace 10 jobs for every 1 bot repair or design job it creates. (And they may soon be able to fix themselves.) Houston, we have a ratio problem. As somebody pointed out, industrial-age improvements magnified human ability, rather than outright replaced humans.
Perhaps we are just not spotting the new replacement jobs equivalent to horse-to-cars, but after bringing up this issue many times, nobody else has spotted it either.
Let's see if 20 years from now we slap ourselves on the forehead and say, "There it is, the Magic Gap! So obvious in hindsight, how could I be so dense! We are all.....belly dancers!"
Table-ized A.I.
Suckers.
And please, spare me the goddamn horse analogy. Horses have one skill, trotting. If the only thing you can do it trot, then yes, you are in huge trouble. Otherwise the job landscape will change, but it is doing that constantly anyway.
This has been true so far. But it's unlikely to remain true indefinitely. Machines are closing the gap between what humans can do and what machines can't. This has made people more productive, and opened up new kinds of jobs. But that won't be the case when a machine can do anything a human can do, more reliably, 24 hours a day, without sick time or vacation, and without requiring a salary. When this will occur is a good question, 30, 50, 100 years from now maybe, but it's coming.
The trick will be handling the transition. It could be disastrous, or we could usher in a post-scarcity society.
Robots Are Coming For Our Jobs, Just Not All of Them
Right. The rest are coming to kill us!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
from TFA:
We may be a reckless and hedonistic species, but weâ(TM)re not going to replace ourselves into extinction. Thatâ(TM)s just silly. Someone still has to design robots, train them, fix them, and streamline their processes.
Firstly, human being do a lot of silly things. Saying something is silly means absolutely nothing on the axis of "likely to happen".
Secondly, I see nothing that prevents robots in principle from designing, training or fixing other robots. In fact, we already have most of the components for such things in place.
What robots can't do, at this time, is to decide about purpose. They can do things, and even figure out better ways of doing them by themselves, and very soon they will be able to decide independently what to do in order to reach a given goal. But the goal-giving is still human.
But, I don't think that's a god-given. Where do our goals from? They're basically just what's bubbling up from this sea of desires, interests and good old instincts. The ultimate goal is a question as old as mankind, and as silly. We don't have a goal, really. What we consider goals and purposes are just higher-level to-do items, and a sufficiently complex computer program can come up with equivalent things, in principle.
So in summary, we very much may replace ourselves into extinction. And on some level, we even need to do it. Our biological machine is as primitive and flawed as it is beautiful and brilliant. The same will be true for machines we design, but with self-replicating machines, the evolutionary cycles can be much faster in the same way that language and writing have dramatically increased the speed at which we humans develop compared to animals who only have genetics to pass on whatever they learnt.
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Yes, automation will replace all human employment and it is coming at us a rocket like speeds. So naturally society is avoiding even considering changing things to prevent suffering at about the same level as not confronting global warming. The cost of human labor is no longer a factor. Now we can argue over whether Chinese robots out work American robots. The nation with the best automation wins all bets.
Top 10% has no need for 7+ billion people fucking up their planet. So, all this "If large groups of people are unemployed, that means large groups of people are spending as little money as possible to survive, and the economy stagnates." becomes irrelevant.
With a female voice, and vibe testing.
It started in the factories where assembly lines where people put parts together were eventually replace by machines that could do it not only longer and faster, but with more accuracy. Now think of any job where long hours of repetitive, manual labor is required and that job can be replaced by a machine. Fast food workers, dock workers, construction workers, even farming can all be replaced by machines. The up front cost is the design of the machine and programming the process of performing the tasks.
From the hackaday piece: "we’re not going to replace ourselves into extinction. That’s just silly. Someone still has to design robots, train them, fix them, and streamline their processes." Yes, because design, training, mechanics and streamlining are uniquely human capabilities! Just because you have a hard time imagining something, does not mean it cannot be. Many people have a hard time imagining evolution working.
Let's put the genes back in Genesis.
You wrote:
"Robots will exponentially decrease the costs of goods and services until they they cost nothing,"
And we've been told this lie before, with other things. Consider nuclear power. Nuclear was sold to the masses as "Electricity so cheap, there will be no need to meter". In other words, the dream of nuclear power was to make it so cheap, it would be free or close to free.
And that was the 1960's. Are we there yet? Because I've only seen my power bill go up. Nuclear was a nice experiment, but it was both more expensive than predicted, and fraught with unforeseen complications.
Trust me when I say that the robot "revolution" will be no different. There will be unexpected costs and complications, making those goods and services cost just as much, while still displacing workers who required income for those goods and services.
And let's not forget the factor of greed. Unless our society sees some kind of critical shift, the "job creators" (i.e; the 1%) will see this as an opportunity for greater profits, and will NOT pass the decreased costs to the consumer.
It's a utopian fantasy to suggest that we will not need incomes when we're all out of work. Hell, we don't even have universal healthcare in the USA, and we're the richest economy on earth, so there's clearly something wrong here. We already have have 20 million below the poverty line, and that number is growing.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Dey tuk or jerbs!
40 years ago everyone was worried that computers would take over all the work. Look how that turned out.
I'm amazed at how many people take such things so seriously.
This myth that unemployed people all have art history degrees is getting boring.
IEEE has reported the very high unemployment rate of EEs. The job market for nurses is the worst ever. The job for STEM people use' tags good as our policy makers say it is and in 5 years, we will see such a glut, kids will wish they got a degree in art.
After the crash of 09, businesses figured out that they can make their left over staff work twice as hard for the same pay - and people will be thankful for the job.
All areas of IT has been effected. Jobs have been sent overseas and quite a few people were canned. If anyone thinks that being a techie is secure, they are delusional.
We stopped using job websites and recruiters because we would get hundreds of applications from qualified people. Now, An email just goes around and in two weeks, we got a new guy. If any company cannot find people, they are doing something wrong - THEY suck.
We are also doing the same amount of work with about half the people. Tools today have boosted productivity tremendously.
Salaries have been affected too. C++ guys with 5 years exp. who made 80k in 00, now make 65k - that's 40k in 2000 dollars.
Tech jobs are not what they used to be. You got maybe ten tears after graduation and then you'll be booted out for younger and cheaper people.
I am glad I went into management.
NLP has come a long way. However, take a look at how far away it actually is and you will not be so worried for quite some time.
Unions organize labor into voting blocks like the AARP. Workers vote tariffs to level the playing field like they do everywhere else this is a problem. This is a problem that was solved hundreds of years ago you know? And for all your bitching tariffs work. At least for protecting workers. Sure, your economy doesn't grow as far, but WTF do I care how big the poor l pie is when my slice can be measured in microns.
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No, seriously. If you haven't been to one lately, a modern factory looks like this: All the actual work is done by machines. Goods are produced, transported, inspected, manipulated and packaged without human intervention. But every so often, one of the machines has a "problem". Could be a software error, and someone just has to shut it down and restart it. Could by a mechanical problem and someone has to replace a wearing part. Or some of the produced goods might have jammed the machine and some opposable thumbs are needed to remove them.
I don't see those tasks done by robots any time soon. They're too diverse and often hard to explain (or program) before you see the problem - when a human just looks at it and says "oh, right, this thing just fell over and is blocking the motor. I should check the circuit breaker after I removed it".
Sure, productivity per worker will continue to increase. But I don't see it going to infinity in the near future.