There's a lot believers in technological unemployment here on HN and one thing I think that viewpoint misses is just how darn resilient humans are to changes in the economy. In the past 150 years, we've seen human manual labor replaced by mechanical labor. Think about that -- a lot of early California settlers walked here, and now you're commanding power roughly equivalent to 100 horses when you hop into your car. Agricultural employment went from 90%+ of the population to ~1% over a few generations. People using computers at work went from less than 1% to complete ubiquity in 30 years. And against all of this, unemployment is still near its target rate. Is the large scale rollout of predictive algorithms really a bigger wave than those that have come previously?
I like the comparison to horses. Steam engines and trains threatened to replace horses in the mid 1800s. A lot of things that were previously done by horses were replaced with trains and steam engines.
Yet the horse population grew, and cities remained full of horses. There were countless transportation innovations in the 1800s, from canals to streetcars and omnibuses to bicycles. But the horse population kept growing and showed no signs of being threatened by this "automation". Whenever something took a horses job, there will always be other jobs that technology can't do yet, right?
Then the car was invented, and within 2 decades the horse population crashed. Suddenly the price of feeding and maintaining a horse was much higher than the alternative. There is no law of economics that says the supply and demand of a good can't fall below the cost of maintaining it. Or that wages can't fall below minimum, in our case.
Robotics has made incredible advancements over the past 50 years or more. They have taken over entire factories, doing countless routine tasks previously done by humans. But they are still very limited. They have 0 intelligence - they can't see, they can't learn. They can only perform a rote series of movements. So there is still tons of work available for humans.
But with recent advancements in machine learning, this is about to change. A robot will soon be able to be trained to flip burgers, or drive a car, or take a customer's order, etc, etc. I can not imagine any jobs that an average, unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do. Maybe skilled professions will be protected - I can't imagine robots being able to program computers for awhile. But the vast majority of humans can not be trained to be computer programmers.
> I can not imagine any jobs that an average, unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do.
Whenever I hear statements like this, I cannot help but think that the person making the statement has never done a week of work as "unskilled labour" themselves. (No offense intended.) Be it flipping burgers or building houses, there is improvisation both when it comes to high-level intelligence and in the ranges of motion the human limbs go through that make robots a complete non-starter.
Adding to that, a cheap robot arm that can lift as much as a four-year-old is $20k purchase price, plus another $20k for the controller/AI system, and probably $2k-$3k a year in maintenance. Figure four year depreciation when run 8 hours each day, you're looking at a yearly cost of $12k. That's compared to ~$15k for someone working full time on minimum wage. Take into account the huge process of switching your business over to robots, and it just doesn't look good.
Also, we don't need AI to take a customers order, you just need a touchscreen, or even just an app. The tech has been here for more than a decade. Why don't restaurants do this?
I think your analysis is based on shallower automation than we'll actually see.
Let's assume your robot arm example is about a frycook at a burger joint. I agree a robot arm isn't an effective way to replace the frycook, but a specialized system like Momentum Machines is developing[1] will be.
The automated fast food joint isn't a regular one with robot arms instead of people, it's a box the size of a small office that takes raw ingredients from a stockpile inside of it and creates fully assembled burgers, fries, chicken strips, and onion rings without any human interaction.
Automation hardware will strike a middle ground between specialization and reuse. Eg the deep fryer will be able to cook several different meals, but it will still only have 1-2 degrees of freedom for putting stuff in and taking it out. Similar story for the grilling surface, veggie chopping system, and the plating / packaging mechanism.
This is much cheaper, faster, and more reliable than truly general purpose robot arms. More importantly though, it takes dramatically less space than a conventional restaurant, so you can plop your company's food-making-box down in Times Square and actually make a profit, while everyone else is stuck four blocks away to break even on the real estate.
The stories will be different in different sectors, but in general I think the coming automation wave is a bunch of quantitative changes coming together to form qualitative ones like this. You could probably build a burger-maker a decade ago too, but the hardware and design know-how necessary have gotten orders of magnitude cheaper and more abundant, and so now it's actually happening.
I keep telling people the Mcdonalds of the future isn't going to be the same large box with robots running around - it will be much smaller, because robots can use every inch of the kitchen area unlike humans.
I think this also has some interesting implications for real estate long term - if every mcdonalds needs 50% of the space they currently occupy over time that real estate will be put back in the market, multiply that by every organization doing that and it has some follow in implications that I can't forsee but find very interesting.
Very true, never thought of it this way. Add to that the fact that robots don't have the same needs (can operate with little air/heat/light, don't even need to get out of the room, much less safety concerns in general and practically 0% comfort). You could build kitchens in basements or beneath roofs and save 100% of the floor surface for customers.
You could also have much better safety systems - I.e. total oxygen evacuation for grease fires. No need to worry about people getting hurt. In fact, you might be able to make food in a 100% neutral environment (N2?) and have no fire risk at all. Then, you can use closed-loop air filtration and not exhaust grease and combustion byproducts into the atmosphere.
OTOH, the nice dining experiences will be done by people who can improvise and improve day-to-day based on their own tastes. eventually, the stuff people do will be the "good" stuff, and the stuff robots do will be the "bad" stuff. Hopefully. A more negative viewpoint says that robots will do the "high value" stuff and the people will only do the "low value" bad stuff.
No need for total oxygen evacuation. You actually just have to drop oxygen content in the air down from 21% to 15% to make most substances (including oil and grease) inflammable, and this air is perfectly safe to breathe for humans.
In fact, if you consider the partial oxygen pressure (which is what matters for your lungs), this air is no worse than the air you find inside an airplane, or at a 2500m (8200 ft) mountain peak; Wikipedia says 140 million people live permanently at above 2500 m.
Now, this already exists and is called a hypoxic air fire prevention system, and is used e.g. in some data centers and in archives of valuable documents. It's not used in fast food restaurants though, because they have better ways of preventing and extinguishing fires at lower cost.
There are some issues with human consumption of anerobic bacteria and their byproducts. If you thought the food poisoning from aerobic bacteria was rough, try some of the more exciting anaerobes.
>"I keep telling people the McDonalds of the future isn't going to be the same large box with robots running around - it will be much smaller, because robots can use every inch of the kitchen area unlike humans."
The majority of space in a McDonalds is the dining area and ordering counter area These areas are occupied by customers. The kitchens in a McDonalds is already pretty compact and dense.
The same can be said for the real estate used by banks. I guess they are used for meeting to sign paperwork and as support centers for people not comfortable banking online. In the future I don't see that need requiring a large building.
I think the biggest change, functionally, between past automation and today's going forward is the actual ability of the system to "know" what it is doing and correct/adjust accordingly. We're moving past "dumb" automation essentially, and from a historical (technology) perspective it's every bit as fascinating as we'd hoped it to be, and then some.
I mean, real-time voiced-over translation on Skype? Eventually even mimicing the other person's voice? Yes please!
All thanks to this shallow form of AI that Nick Bostrom coined as "artificial narrow intelligence" (as opposed to "general" intelligence, i.e. human-like; and "superior" beyond ours). It's becoming possible for businesses of all kinds and all trades, thanks to the drastic cost reduction of deep learning since we moved these tasks to GPUs (and these bad boys keep improving at +25% performance per generation roughly every 18 month). And what AI does, sometimes is order of magnitude better than what any human individual/team could do (think Spotify's recommendations, anything with "big data" and "subjectivity" in it).
Which leads to the same conclusion as your last sentence.
So I looked at Momentum Machines. First of all, as you say it's completely unrelated to AI, all the technology is decades old. I'm not sure I'm buying that the hardware and design knowhow is so much cheaper today; people started seriously automating car production lines back in the 1960's, so I can't see how this would've been orders of magnitude more expensive in the 1990's when the tech had matured for 30 years.
Second of all, following their links we find that in 2012 they had a full scale machine built that had a 95% success rate, and they projected 11 months until they could launch the concept in a restaurant. What has happened since? No word, AFAICT. Happy to be corrected if I missed it somewhere and they have actually launched.
But otherwise, it doesn't exactly convince me this is "the next industrial revolution" if they can't polish out that last 5% of a single-purpose burger-making machine in almost half a decade.
Yeah I don't know what they're up to. I've used them as a useful shorthand example for automation for awhile, but you're right I should perhaps find a new one because they seem to be in some sort of limbo, crunchbase has nothing after their seed funding.
A more concrete if less evocative example is Amazon's warehouse automation. Relatively simple robots with 3 DOF (2D planar movement + a container jack) are wiping out enormous numbers of jobs, both in obvious immediate effects (less fulfillment center jobs) and by decimating conventional retail.
edit: Momentum still has 19 employees on LinkedIn, so they're not completely dead it seems.
"The tech has been here for more than a decade. Why don't restaurants do this?"
I'm in automation, so maybe I can answer this.
Small businesses don't have necessary capital to implement automation solutions. While they know that in a long term this would be good idea, they have a hard time doing it. Large corporations are slower to implement any major change, and sometimes they are limited by contracts they have with their clients. Few times when I proposed automation solution to business doing with the gov, the response was "We have contract that requires us to employ these people. We want to automate but we can't".
But once competition automates, all bets are off everyone must automate or perish.
There's a big difference between McDonald's and a high end restaurant, even if you just order a hamburger. McDonald's has already been working on automation. Have you noticed that humans no longer dispense drinks there? They are also working on getting rid of the human order takers.
Agreed. There will probably always be specialty and high end restaurants, where it's more about the experience (in some way). If you want mass produced, a robot is great for that. But they're not so great for limited runs. Which is to say that general purpose robots (for any application) are a long way off.
I think we'll adapt as a race, but it'll be mighty uncomfortable for some (say those reliant on low skilled jobs, truck drivers, fast food workers, etc.). It's not to say that the way things will get done will even look the same as the transition occurs. I suspect many things will look different. For instance, rather than speaking your order to a person at McDonald's, you make your selections from a menu and a machine creates it, and then you pick it up and take it back to your table. Redbox already does this for movie rental. Think about how they've changed what we expect of renting movies... Same for home construction, particularly of the cookie cutter variety. Rather than a crew of people going through the motions to excavate a hole, lay a foundation, frame the house, put up drywall, paint, etc., Maybe it'll just be 3D printed with a huge machine (this tech actually exists, if in its infancy). Or maybe we'll switch to brick houses because they make brick laying robots (not humanoid, more like boxes which can move around). The next decade or two will be interesting!
These menu displays are wonderful toys when you get to use them (they're in every McDonald's in my city). Looking through all the menus makes you realize how many things you could do before to customize your order. I usually add extra patties to my burgers, add extra onions/lettuce, and then go to the "free condiments" section and order 5-10 peanut packages. All of which are happily placed on my tray without question, which is the only time I should interact with their employees: when I'm receiving my food.
I think you're absolutely correct. A good example in the context of this discussion is pizza places with conveyor belt ovens: they take the timing and risk issues out of the hands of their minimum wage workforce.
But high end pizza places still don't use them and instead rely on stone / brick / coal pizza ovens instead.
Why would you run your robot arm for only 8 hours a day? Does it also ask for sick days, weekends, holidays, and maternity leave? Why does it irreparably break after 4 years?
Even if all of those assumptions hold today, what makes you think the the robot arm of a decade from now won't cost $20,000, but, with minor maintenance, operate for a decade?
the price of robots keeps going down and price of humans keeps going up, somewhere in near future it doesn't make sense to hire a human for a min wage job. we are not there but we will be.
Restaurants are doing that, go download Starbucks or Yelp app and you see.
They are rolling out touch screen ordering for our local macdonalds. I don't think they fire anyone, but throughput is higher (so I guess that is one or two less jobs per customer served)
They've rolled out touch screen grocery checkout... Pretty much everywhere over the last decade. My local QFC used to employ a dozen cashiers - now, they employ 4.
What jobs have been created by this automation? This certainly didn't create 8 (times the # of stores) jobs for software engineers - otherwise, this wouldn't have been profitable for QFC.
Does anyone seriously think that those 8 people went on to do work that paid better, or was more valuable then putting groceries into plastic bags? If so, why haven't they done that before they were put out of work by a machine? Do engineers not see a connection between this, and the fact that they get to step over human excrement on their way to work?
HackerNews is read by a very weird set of people. All highly motivated and smart. Now, I've worked in a lot of small companies with people who are fairly smart but have no realy desire to win at work (or get promoted) they just want to turn up, do the work and go home. Home is time for family, hobbies, pub, etc.
I've noticed that simple web apps replace people. Excel or an access database, some scripts and someones job is suddenly much easier. People move on, or get demoted to part time, or some small pay cut (or years without a pay rise) and eventually leave.
These are usually the 18 - 25 year olds, employed to help out accounts or a manager or as a secretary while the PA is busy. These are the people that I don't see around so much these days. The gossips, the ones who remember your kids names, who have time for a chat. Who organise a night down the pub where the whole team bonds. They are the glue and the social oil that makes the machine move smoothly.
But they don't seem to get hired these days. Who needs them to print out a thousand letters and put them in envelopes? gmail will do that. Who needs them to find that document filed away in the back office? Or to go to the other office on the other side of town to find that blueprint?
Automation does kill jobs. For good and for bad. Life goes on.
I hate those self checkout machines. They are slow and constantly try to error out and alert a human to help me. I'm capable of bagging groceries, just let me do it.
They are incredibly simple to use if you follow the 3 instructions. But hey, people can't even signal when turning reliable, of course a lot of people are going to have problems with these machines.
As a former cashier I can certainly bag and scan efficiently. I actually like the machines because it reminds me - but they do get in the way. I'm maybe a quarter as efficient on them as I was on a proper register.
I assure you, I can reliably signal turn. I also assure you that any time an item fails to scan on the first swipe, it accuses me of being either an idiot, or a thief.
I have a special hatred for self-checkout machines that attempt to monitor your bagging without an escape mechanism. Let loss prevention do their damn job and let me give you my money already. At least I can still vote with my feet and always go to a cashier in these places. Someday I probably won't be able to.
There was a Planet Money segment about these. (I think it was Planet Money.) Apparently, there's a setting on these machines for the balance between convenience and loss prevention. It's up to the stores to set it where they want.
That sounds like hell. A buggy machine talking down to me hits quite a few of my buttons, but at least it doesn't interrupt my checkout process when it thinks I'm stealing groceries. (And given how often the alarm goes off, the loss prevention guys just ignore it.)
Horses are tools that people used. When there's no more use for the tool, it's usage may be reduces. People are not just tools, they are the reason we have an economy in the first place. A solution in some form will have to be put forth if one doesn't emerge.
Another way of looking at this is that we weren't ever under threat of millions of displaced horses rising up and overthrowing the system. Since that is a possible outcome of too many unhappy people, changes will be made to ensure people have some base level of happiness on average to prevent that. It's one of the things that makes our current government as stable as it is - the need to respond to the people.
People absolutely are tools in the eyes of their employers. I've never been at a company and not heard them refer to employees as "resources" when talking about scheduling and allocation of people. There's nothing special about humans in a factory compared to robots other than our ability to adapt and learn. But as robotics and AI/ML get better that gap narrows until you reach a point that the robot is "good enough". That same robot might be a little slower than a person at first but it's operating for a fraction of the hourly rate and it's doing so 24/7 with no breaks and no slow downs.
Your point about millions of displaced people rising up and being unhappy is 100% valid. But you'll be hard pressed to find any company willing to sacrifice a slice of their earnings to employe people just because it's the right thing to do. Especially in the US where the entire culture is based around corporate profits only ever increasing at a rate greater than inflation. The US is in one big race to the bottom to see who can shave $0.01 off the sale price of their product. That naturally leads to two things. Monopolies and hyper efficiency. Because when your profit margin is pennies per unit you have to move one hell of a lot units to make hundreds of millions a year in revenue.
> you'll be hard pressed to find any company willing to sacrifice a slice of their earnings to employee people just because it's the right thing to do.
Sure, but that's what legislation is for. We have a minimum wage and laws protecting workers for a reason. Companies do have a disproportionate influence on politics, but only to a point. When it comes to a truly unhappy populace, politicians know what's more important to continuing to perpetuate the system.
You write that as if the US is the only economy that tries to shave prices to the lowest possible. Look where most of the electronics in the world are produced, or where most of the textiles are processed. Same with shoes. Pressure to reduce production costs is a continual factor in worldwide capitalism.
>Horses are tools that people used. When there's no more use for the tool, it's usage may be reduces. People are not just tools, they are the reason we have an economy in the first place. A solution in some form will have to be put forth if one doesn't emerge.<
I'm unsatisfied with the ubiquitous horse analogy as well. The economy exists to solve human problems, not horse problems. We are constantly generating new problems and new social performances. It would not surprise me if the economy of the future was based around elaborate, manpower-intensive tea-ceremony-like rituals or something equally preposterous. Human obsolescence is not inevitable, but might be engineered.
Both employment and returns on capital are a happy side effects of solving human problems and directing scarce resources to their highest and best use, the only human-aligned goals of an economy. Hunter-gatherers operated various economies for millennia with very little capital and almost no capital returns. But the definition that you supply is the one that is in operation, and will be almost impossible to dislodge. I'm not arguing that immiseration brought on by automation is unlikely, merely that it is not inevitable.
>"Horses are tools that people used. When there's no more use for the tool, it's usage may be reduces. People are not just tools, they are the reason we have an economy in the first place. A solution in some form will have to be put forth if one doesn't emerge."
Putting aside my dislike for considering horses as tools, you're missing an important point. Economies only have to function for those at the top in order to be promoted. You could say that the majority of humans are just seen as 'tools' to the people in power that are driven by profit. To them, as long as they get to maintain their quality of life, what do they care about the masses?
If you think this is far fetched, look at what's happening in places like Flint, Michigan. People were drinking poisoned water for decades, and those in charge knew about it. There's even a story that GM had to get a factory in Flint connected to the Detroit water supply because the Flint water was damaging their parts. Plus Flint is not an isolated case. Some people put profit ahead of people, and sadly a high number of those people are in positions of power.
> Putting aside my dislike for considering horses as tools
Well, I labeled humans as tools as well, so I'm not treating horses any differently in that respect than I am people, so I think you inferred a slightly different connotation for tool than I meant. Interestingly, the ability to see horses as non-tools is possible largely because their usefulness as a tool was surpassed by other technology. The same with cats and dogs.
> You could say that the majority of humans are just seen as 'tools' to the people in power that are driven by profit.
Yes, that is one aspect of the current system. The main difference is that it's not the only aspect, as it was for significant periods of history for significant portions of the world.
> If you think this is far fetched, look at what's happening in places like Flint, Michigan. People were drinking poisoned water for decades, and those in charge knew about it.
This is only a counter-example if the problem comes out, everyone wants a change, and nothing happens, and then only somewhat, depending on how much people actually care. I'm not arguing that the world has magically eradicated corruption, negligence and shortsightedness, but I do believe that once exposed the public then gets to steer the response if they care enough. Special interests will still have a disproportionate amount of influence, but when the populace cares enough, that disproportionate influence is a drop in the bucket compared to the influence of an incited populace.
If injustices were few and far between, I'd have more hope your approach could work, but considering the scale of the issues we face I don't think we can rely on mobilising the population into action over every injustice. Furthermore, the mass media still plays a large role in spreading misinformation, and smaller news outlets often lack the resources to carry out in-depth investigative journalism. I'd suggest any widespread political movement that doesn't tackle these issues head on is fighting an uphill battle from the start.
> For you maybe, I'd say it's largely because they're sentient beings we share this planet with.
And my point is that a view such as this is a luxury people can now have because they are no longer required for survival. There have of course been people in the past that did not view these animals as tools, but for the vast majority of our history the vast majority saw them at least partially as a tool. The vast majority of people were seen as tools as well. Again, what I mean when I say tool and what you interpret when you read tool are very likely subtly different, otherwise I don't think you would have much objection. As I stated, I'm not treating them any different than people in this specific respect.
> It's a nice idea, but compassion fatigue is a real phenomenon.
Which doesn't really matter all that much when the whole point is that it may affect massive amounts of people. If it's affecting that many people, it's not compassion that's being tapped, but the changing circumstances of yourself and your immediate loved ones. Compassion isn't called for when it's happening to you; you don't become inured to pain like that when it's your own pain.
> I don't think we can rely on mobilising the population into action over every injustice.
I'm not proposing we do or can, for every injustice. I'm just noting that the people still have a massive amount of power, and when things affect them enough, they create change. The recent election is proof of this. People felt a change was needed, and felt they weren't being represented (whether true or not), and now we're in for something different. I don't think that necessarily means better, but I doubt it will be the status quo.
> Horses are tools that people used. When there's no more use for the tool, it's usage may be reduces. People are not just tools, they are the reason we have an economy in the first place. A solution in some form will have to be put forth if one doesn't emerge.
Unfortunately, there's a long history of people thinking of and using other people as tools.
Technology is also a force multiplier, removing the need to keep soldiers happy. The future is a couple billionaires with a drone army to keep the rest of us at bay while we thankfully starve.
Ah but technology, specifically the technological process may make tools of us yet.
Heidegger's question concerning technology is essential reading, but his basic argument is the technological process subordinates all others to be ends to itself. Notice how people don't so much adapt technology to their needs as adjust their needs to the available technology.
> The vast majority of humans can not be trained to be computer programmers.
I disagree with the general sentiment. What makes humans different is that we can become skilled.
Imagine the big slave population that was used to build the pyramids in ancient Egypt. Suddenly, modern construction machinery appears over there, making them "unemployed" (slaves had a cost too). I would bet only a very very small part of those slaves couldn't be trained to do something more skilled than pushing rocks around.
Unskilled labor, as in repetitive, boring work where little creativity, reasoning, or dexterity is involved, is an infliction humans have to endure, for the moment. It's a waste of our real ability.
Nitpick: Contrary to popular belief, the pyramids were actually built by well paid, reasonably skilled workers that were treated decently, and not by slaves:
> A robot will soon be able to be trained to flip burgers, or drive a car, or take a customer's order, etc, etc.
From what I've read, we're not going to have completely driverless cars anytime soon (too much difficulty with all the potential edge cases). If we look at productivity growth, it's actually somewhat slow at the moment. People are claiming that soon it will be rapidly increasing, but they've been claiming that for several years now and it's yet to materialize. The evidence of a "robot revolution" is pretty weak at the moment.
And that's not even getting into the question of what effect this would have on the job market. The horse population might have crashed, but that's because you can't retool horse to weld skyscrapers or make advertisements. You can use humans for a variety of tasks, and until we have a post-scarcity society there's always going to be a desire for more production. And even in a post-scarcity society there will probably be a demand for more researchers or artists.
Sure, you might not be able to imagine what people of the future will do, but that's not surprising. If you told someone 150 years ago that less than 2% of the population would be involved with agriculture, they probably would imagine a mass employment catastrophe. They wouldn't imagine jobs like social media manager or video game developer, nor would they probably imagine that there would be enough offices to provide employment to so many administrative assistants. If you go back far enough, people would probably have a hard time believing that so many people could be employed in work that required reading and writing - surely the vast majority of humans can not be trained to read and write!
> I can't imagine robots being able to program computers for awhile.
This actually puzzles me (especially since writing code requires no physical robot, just "an intelligence").
Just recently, we had some AI beat the world's Go champion?
Poker, chess and countless other games are long done.
Programming, in many languages for many tasks, isn't that much of a stretch. In all these games you have a number of primitive operations, sets/rules of valid and invalid state, a goal to work toward.. "same as much of programming, in principle" ;)
I guess at this point the only things holding AI back are (A) the impossibility of parsing human-formulated requirements and specs accurately (we suck at this to, but we're also for now "the only alternative" and can be talked to by same-species inconcise/inconsistent spec-writers painstakingly), and (B) how to deal successfully with all the glitches bugs inconsistencies incompatibilities and special-cases in the various unavoidable-for-interop-required-by-specs human-made APIs, libraries, tools, stale repos, protocols, frameworks..
I think you're comparing apples to oranges. Writing code is nothing like playing a board game.
A more apt comparison would be having an AI create board games that have logical rules, are enjoyable, and are extremely deep.
In this case, specifying a fitness function becomes non-trivial.
Like with designing a board game, how do you know if the program you are writing is getting closer to the goal? Let's say you use the number of unit tests passed as a metric. Ok, but who wrote those unit tests? And more importantly, how do you know you're getting closer to passing some unit test?
In summary, we are still far away from an AI that can fully replace software developers, unless we get a general AI out of nowhere, of course.
> Maybe skilled professions will be protected - I can't imagine robots being able to program computers for awhile.
In the popular "Humans Need Not Apply" video about this subject. It was suggested that there are signs that "creative" jobs are already being replaced by automation and that professionals are the ones creating tools that replace themselves.
> Plumbers, electricians - just don't see it happening.
There may not be robot plumbers, but that's not the only possible outcome.
I've seen tradespeople complaining about others who don't really know what they're doing and just look things up on YouTube in the van outside.
If we had an AI system that could look at images/lidar of plumbing and interact with you to diagnose issues and fast self-driving part delivery, that could result in a system where routine plumbing work gets done by people who would otherwise call a plumber.
I'm not saying this will likely happen soon, but there are other ways this could have an impact besides full-on robotic automation.
> Plumbers, electricians - just don't see it happening.
Like many other "optimistics" about AI I think reality will be much more of a hybrid one, i.e. plumbers or electricians will be aided, not replaced, by AI and robots. It's like the 100 horses in your car, it didn't kill the transportation industry but took it to a whole other level. Imagine as a plumber having an army of tiny drones to fix things you can't even see, let alone reach, as a human; from diagnosis to actual repair. You would wield such power that eventually one man could fix/maintain a whole skyscraper alone and still be home for dinner with the kids.
It's the difference between what an office worker could do with pen and paper and the post office, and what they could do once came the telephone: suddenly you could talk to hundreds of people every day without moving. Then came computers, internet, now AI and robots... A century ago, thousands of men couldn't do some of what you alone accomplish in your office today.
The most menial tasks will be automated for sure, however whether or not a given job is entirely made of such tasks is another matter entirely.
I, for one, don't think it a bad thing that we eliminate brainless or skill-less jobs, I'd much rather pay for UBI for these people until they learn new skills more likely to be rewarding on a self-growth level. I also think it a good thing that we supplement most professions with ever better tools -- think what a doctor or lawyer can do with a computer and a few ad hoc databases that they couldn't do without. Even as an assistant, if you are freed from most menial tasks (e.g. "computer, send a thank you email to these customers with our classic style") then you can focus on creating more value for the person you assist. You can reclaim your worth as a highly-functioning human being, add much more value to the table, while robots and AI takes care of things your kid could do (but never will, and that is a good thing).
It's basically what allowed civilizations to work twice less (in time, work hours) and actually keep growing that GDP. I don't know where AI takes us in this regard, but I wouldn't be surprised if on average we could eventually maintain the same level of growth working orders of magnitude less. But since humans love doing stuff, I'm sure most won't work less, they'll just do so much more --and we might yet reconnect with double-digit growth in western countries.
I haven't seen any data, but my guess is that the average person's commute is roughly the same as it was 150 years ago. And if at some point we have self-driving cars or flying cars, we'll still spend roughly the same time commuting as we do today.
> I haven't seen any data, but my guess is that the average person's commute is roughly the same as it was 150 years ago.
I think you'd probably be wrong (though it may depend strongly on which average you take); even with the industrial revolution, working at home, or essentially so (whether yeoman farming or living upstairs from the shop) was a lot more common 150 years ago than it is now, though it may be more common now than it was just before telecommuting.
It should be easier to automate a web developer's job than a handyman's. A lot of less skilled jobs call on people to understand instruction, look at what's in front of them, and use common sense. Skilled work often just involves having people do something repetitive using obscure knowledge.
The Industrial Revolution caused a lot of suffering for a lot of people. I don't think "eventually society adapted" is good enough. The point is that we need to learn from history and develop responsible policies so that we don't screw over most of the planet with massive inequality.
That doesn't mean technology and AI are bad, just that we have the benefit of hindsight and we don't have to just blindly plunge ahead and hope it all works out eventually.
> In 1760, the lowest 65 percent received about 29 percent of total income in Britain; in 1860, their share was down only four percentage points to 25 percent. So the lowest 65 percent were substantially better off, with an increase in average real income of more than 70 percent. [1]
Despite what Dickens may have written, the period was marked by faster gains for the lower classes than the previous century. And perhaps in part due to what he's written, we now have a social safety net -- I'll admit the quality of this system could be improved. What concerns me is making broad, major social changes in anticipation of a completely speculative (and very specific) view of the future.
I'd be curious about your answer to this: If conditions for the bottom third improve -- instead of falter -- as this trend develops, does that change your policy recommendations (about presumably, UBI)?
1. 100 years is way too long. If it took a century for society to sort itself out, that's a good demonstration of my point.
2. "the lowest 65 percent" is a pretty big segment. How were the lowest 40% doing, or 20%? I don't know the answer, I just think it's a useful question.
3. Much of this article talks about how rising income is not the same as a rising standard of living, and how it is "plausible" that standards of living decreased for the first 70 or so years of the industrial revolution.
4. Even if wages and standards of living both went up, inequality on its own is a concern. Your quote shows that inequality was worse a century later.
5. I'm not calling for anything specific. My only point is that it's not acceptable to say "we don't need to worry at all, everything will work out". We do need to worry, but it's totally possible that after worrying we'll come to the conclusion that no major changes make sense at this time.
I've just seen a lot of people say "look at the Industrial Revolution, we'll be fine" and I think that's exactly the opposite lesson we should have learned. And I honestly didn't have UBI in mind when I wrote that comment, I was thinking about maybe some kind of subsidized education program for people who need to switch careers because their old career no longer exists. Or anything, I don't know. This isn't my field. I'm just saying this is worth a lot of thought and study, preferably by people who know what they're doing.
Then it would appear we mostly agree. There will be winners and losers.
>"we don't need to worry at all, everything will work out"
Strawman of course. A nuanced understanding of the historical context of other technological booms is the point of my original post and it's specifically the 'omg AI gonna take our jerbs' kneejerk reaction that I wanted to preempt. I would add that statisticians seem to be less worried about AI threats than your average HNer [1]. And although I don't have a handy source, I know that economists are also likely to brush aside predictions of major impacts.
Ok, I guess I misread your comment. I still think it reads like "the last labor transformation went pretty smoothly, and this one will be less significant, so chill". On a human level it did not go smoothly, and most individuals are not very resilient to changes in the economy.
The problem with these sort of blanket policies is that they often have unexpected consequences- For instance, if we hand out lots of checks to the underemployed it MIGHT make their lives better or it MIGHT cause macroeconomic disruptions tied to the labor market that triggers inflation on basic staples, making the underemployed worse off than they were before the new policies.
I'm sympathetic do the idea of saying "we've go to do something" but history unfortunately shows instances where "doing something" is often worse than "doing nothing" so you have to be very very careful.
This is sufficiently simplistic to be tone deaf to what's going on. The rhetoric has been "jobs!" but this isn't a complaint that there are no jobs; the complaint is two fold, a.) lack of work that utilize people's interest and/or skills b.) lack of work that pays what people expect or even need to get ahead.
Wage stagnation is a real problem. It's a kind of vectorized unemployment where everyone in the middle class on down is partially unemployed through a combination of more part time work rather than full time, and stagnant wages. The broadness of the problem makes it seem like we have good employment numbers, but wage stagnation is a big problem, especially in contrast to the rise in cost of living, in particular housing.
I don't hear much discussion of real income in this thread. The working class in the UK and USA are being impoverished from 2 directions at once - plummeting real income and escalating property prices/rents. I'd like to see some data which factors in all of these variables.
>And against all of this, unemployment is still near its target rate.
Unemployment is a synthetic measure. A mom working 39 hour shifts at Walmart so she doesn't get benefits isn't the same as a cush office job that's rolling in benefits. When we look at post-industrial societies, we look at late stage job creation being problematic. There's a lot of Mcjobs, temp jobs, and contract jobs. Technically those people are employed, but its not sustainable for them.
Yes, the US has done well but its an exception for the most part due to the massive economy at work here and the relative lack of competition, until recently, from other regions. French youth unemployment hit 26% a few months ago. Spain and Greece are just as bad, if not worse. Jobs in many European economies are lifer jobs because if you leave, your chances of getting a new one is slim.
The real question is, when is the camel's back going to break. Another good career job replaced by a McJob thanks to automation won't change the unemployment stats, but it will make people unhappy. It will drive down the economy with less spending and other issues. In other words, wages matter, not just employment numbers.
I would not assume we are sitting pretty right now. This dam is going to break. Arguably, the surprise win of anti-automation, anti-liberal, anti-globalization, and anti-intellectual candidates in the UK and the USA are the first signs of a major fault.
There is also a large proportion of people whose standard of living is a step back from being self-sufficient modest farmers living with family off their own land.
I'll all for technological advancement. As a society, we've accomplished marvelous things. But it's useful to remember whether individuals are actually improving their standard of living or not.
> now you're commanding power roughly equivalent to 100 horses when you hop into your car
The flipside of this is that (for most US) you must have a car to perform basic necessities such as purchasing food to eat. Food that would have otherwise been in your vegetable garden/chicken coop/pond.
Our society is immensely better for well-off city dwellers, but there are large portions of the population whose level of freedom is only slighly better than servitude.
You're telling me. My partner here in London works full-time as a cleaning supervisor and after she has paid her rent, bills and travel costs she has a paltry £65 with which to shop for food. And that's renting a room in a house. A 1-bed flat for her is out of the question. I think my parents in the early 60s were better off than her in real terms.
> Is the large scale rollout of predictive algorithms really a bigger wave than those that have come previously?
No of course it isn't. But because it's called "artificial intelligence" instead of "conditional probability" or "regression" or something people think otherwise.
The reality is that this kind of technology will make us more productive, bring down the cost of products and services and make them available to a mass market, in exactly the same way literally every tech advance has done.
Of course some jobs and disciplines will be lost, but they will be replaced with different, higher skilled jobs. Just look at the range of disciplines and jobs that the web has created over the last 20 years. I mean just look at Google. The world's largest "AI" platform has spawned entire industries. No evidence this trend won't continue.
It seems like there's significant overlap between people that are afraid of AI and those that think e^x has a "knee in the curve." It's amazing they're not called out considering "the derivative of e^x is e^x" is memorized by HS calculus students daily.
> how darn resilient humans are to changes in the economy
Survivorship Bias; Not everyone is thriving under the current circumstances, not everyone was thriving during the Industrial Revolution or the Digital Revolution.
There's a crucial difference this time around, though. After the industrial revolution, there were still plenty of jobs that people could do that machines were no good at. By definition, human-level AI is as good as or better than a human at some task. Therefore, an AI revolution means, by definition, that there won't be any jobs that can be done by a human that can't be automated. Adaptability won't help, since there will be nothing left to adapt to.
The undeniable math is that machine productivity will grow exponentially faster than human productivity. Organics have had a few billion year head start on machines, so it's of no consequence that we've been able to scramble in front of our metallic friends for their few-hundred-year infancy. The day will come when machine productivity dwarfs that of humans by orders of magnitude. It would be absurd to task humans with new jobs when we have limitless machines that are infinitely smarter, stronger, and more reliable. The concept of a "new job" won't even exist because machines will immediately meet any new demand before humans are even aware it exists.
I don't think several orders of magnitude is really true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P73REgj-3UE is slower than a modern house, but not that slow. Further, with just hand tools the Amish where known for raising a barn in one day.
I don't think the specific example matters. Obviously, you couldn't build a skyscraper without machinery or fly through the air in a metal tube. I'll grant that the US middle class is only 2 orders of magnitude above subsistence (~$2 / day) living.
As in, they won't buy a hammer from the town down the road? Instead they'll cast the metal head, and chop the wood for the handle? Mine their own metal ore? It can't go all the way through.
This is a discussion about closing chapters isn't it? Are we merely disputing the date on which a billion power screwdrivers can direct themselves and then Instagram pics of their accomplishments? I give it 50-150 years.
The 'unemployment rate' is fictional, and it takes a lot of hand waving to get to 5% unemployment rate. Some of which justified, but it's only useful for year to year comparisons not decade to decade as the number keep changing.
Right now there are 121.5 million people working full time in the US. The population is 320 million people and 250 million adults and 200 million adults under 65. So actual employment is around 50% depending on how you slice it.
It does not take any hand waving -- you're trying to redefine a standard variable. U-3 is the 'headline' unemployment number which is near 5% right now. There are plenty of other ways to calculate it, including at least 5 published by the BLS. All of them tell the same story: people who want jobs, historically and barring recession, have been by and large able to get them, even if the job itself is not ideal.
Your 50% number is more commonly called the 'labor force participation rate' and it's near 63% right now [1], but has trended down for the past few decades. I would argue (as Keynes did) that if work force participation falls and standards of living continues to rise (or stay flat) then society is having good results.
U3 has political value, but from say a military standpoint it's not that useful. The reality is the employment rate is not 1 - U3.
Further just looking at the published unemployment rate in the US there has been several changes to the definition over time. On top of that other countries use different metrics. So no you can point to U3 and call it a day.
The extent of adaptability depends on the scale and the pace of the change. Arguably, every generation is experiencing more drastic changes than the previous one. And if the ML/DL/AI combo could deliver on its promises, there aren't many job sectors that can't be improved(!). E.g. taxi drivers' becoming Uber/Lyft drivers is one thing, getting rid of drivers in cars/trucks is another.
True. Humans definitely will find a way to figure out what to do next if AI takes away lot of jobs. But the important thing is that the rate of which these jobs go. With the recent advances in deep learning or AI in general, the rate of loss of jobs across manufacturing, logistics, agriculture or construction is way more and i don't think we are ready to do something about it.
People who recognise the threat from cheap AI and robot.
And people who think there is some hand-wavy magical force that will ensure that people will always be employed.
You can see that doesn't work now, you can see low income jobs are down, and while they are rising in China and India, those people are already being replaced by robots.
As work became less and less physical, people generally retreated into more cognitive-based jobs.
Now it seems that AI might be able to handle any mind-based job just fine, in a not too distant future. If that is indeed the case, what will human workers do?
Examples of changes which may impact "everyone will lose their job" predictions:
* Delocalization of work. The need for physical proximity is still a pervasive bottleneck. As that further relaxes (VR, remote work), what changes? Think "N weeks to get there" Roman empire vs current "call/email/tweet the world". Maybe a world without commutes? Without two-body problems?
* More richly interwoven human/machine-learning hybrid work processes. Say CEO compensation plummets as you get jit virtual "CEO"s. What happens when most businesses can afford competent leadership? Management? Even if the number of businesses increases by an order of magnitude? Or three?
* What does an economy look like if most people are scrambling, looking for opportunities, not working n-hour "jobs"? Where you can again pick up a "help wanted" "paper", and have a work a few hours later?
Yes, it's easy to imagine dystopias. Especially with resurgent aristocracy, regulatory capture, a patent system I expect to remain broken my entire professional career, and so on. But it's also easy to forget just how much potential change is inbound. Modulo the usual dangers of stagnation and wreckage, "you've not seen anything yet". Maybe.
There's some big flaws in the argument that we'll find new jobs to employ many thousands of industrial workers in. First, retraining someone in their 40s or 50s that have been working at Coleman or some other firm isn't going to likely happen. Mostly because the workers themselves either never completed the equivalent of high school or barely got by. Most of that retraining would have to be in complex tasks and not old fashioned data entry (those kinds of jobs are the ones that are being replaced by software automation and auditing). So, that means fewer still can make the leap from working on a manufacturing line to software development or some other skills based position. You just can't drop the equivalent of Homer Simpson into a code camp. It's just not going to happen. Second, there's not enough demand for such people in such a new economy. For example, I've known people who've worked on all kinds of software from games to enterprise development and all instances when a product was finished the amount of staff ever needed to maintain it was many times smaller than what they had during development. It doesn't matter if you employ waterfall or agile development, if your product only needs 20 people versus 200 people to maintain a product after it's release and future releases then you're not going to hire 200 people ever again. Third, many modern jobs are shifting to what seems like contract work via employment agencies like Volt and Man Power which bothers me because the benefits are greatly reduced without the equivalent increase in wages to offset this (especially in healthcare). Unless there's something I'm not aware of that could absorb all those thousands of people, I'm just not buying this theory that we'll just create new jobs out of thin air. Past performance is never an indicator of future returns.
One things that's different is that we've reached consumption limits. I can't eat more or much better. I don't have time to watch more TV and movies. I don't need more stuff or services. If I don't need more then there won't be jobs available to people to create more.
unemployment calculated how? As I understand it, we measure based on how many people are looking for work and have it.
So if our social safety nets (retirement) and cultural expectations have kept pace with people being employed less, (be it in hours/day, hours/week, or just what years you'll be working), I'd expect unemployment numbers to not show the effects of technological unemployment.
Of course, it's too simplistic to just assert what I have and ignore forces on the other side (for example, dual income households are now the norm). That is, however, my point: Looking at the unemployment numbers is a poor measure of any effects upon people's ability to work as it has so much else lumped in there.
People tend to forget about one thing - in previous industrial revolutions jobs changed, but people were added and removed from the pool slowly and predictably. This time automatons not only take jobs from people, they are also in a sense added to the economy as additional workers.
Think about it this way - previously if someone came up with a more efficient way to do a given job, out of 10 people 9 lost employment, but you still needed that one person to do the job. With automation you get rid of 10 people, and add one additional "worker" to the pool of workers. So now 10 people have to compete not only with themselves but also with one robot that can do job of 10 people.
it will be tried, but it's really impossible to implement. first reason - you can't force all countries to do the same. second - how do you define automation? will i need to pay taxes on scripts I use to automate some of my jobs? Will I need to pay automation tax on my roomba? or dishwasher? If the robot does not replace any worker, but makes job or current workers easier and faster will it be taxed?
No different than how H1B's are implemented, you'll see a "no automated cars for hire" law, if necessary it'll happen city by city if the political will isn't there Federally. It will be a very specific proscription, likely very industry specific, because only a large number of impacted workers will have the political clout to establish such laws. And it might even be only city by city, rather than at a Federal level.
There are ways in which H1B is imperfect, doesn't work, and isn't fair. There will be ways in which making automated cars for hire illegal will be imperfect, doesn't work, and isn't fair. But those attributes haven't driven the former into the dustbin yet. If anything it's about to get stronger under the current political climate, so there's no reason to think the later won't be successful, at the least as a delay tactic so that automation isn't as disruptive as hypothesized.
Also, as a country establishes a more isolationist attitude, it matters less what the rest of the world does, and the rhetoric right now is distinctly a more isolationist attitude.
I don't think the change is linear here. Industrial revolution pushed people behind desks because human still had brains while machines were dumb (sic). Then desk jobs were split between computerized backend and social interface done by people; this is what is gonna fall soon. Comptuers can now listen and answer to you; gather real world analog / organic data; rather than only dealing with structured data as since the 60s.
Also, lots societies needs don't even require Alpha Go level of AI; and computer will make these tasks automatic. And these class of worker won't beat machines logic until a deep learning (sic sic) phase.
Yes, one example I like to point out is that there used to be people who's sole job was to tap on your windows in the weekday mornings to wake you up, before alarm clocks were cheap & affordable to everyone.
It's all speculation. Increases in productivity (GDP per hour worked) are typically accompanied by rising wages. So you're likely to see job losses in impacted industries accompanied by rising wages in aggregate. It's not obvious which direction inequality would head.
It's not speculation, stagnant wages is a real problem we've been experiencing for decades. As far as I know, no one disputes this fact, it's just that no one really knows what to do about it.
> Advances in artificial intelligence will lead to job losses, but new forms of employment will take their place...History, though, has demonstrated that technological breakthroughs lead to new employment opportunities
-- IBM CEO Ginni Rometty
But, I think we are approaching (if we haven't already crossed this point) the time where new jobs created by technology advancements will be fewer than old jobs displaced.
My example here is Instagram, a company of a dozen staff or so when acquired, is the digital replacement of photo labs in every city. New technologies are not the job creator that they once were and I haven't read anything to contradict that statement or posit that new tech is going to drive jobs growth.
It all seems so obvious to me that I feel like I must be the fool in the room, but that can't be. Technology and progress in science changes the kinds of work we do. The processes are accelerating, and we're reaching a point where work is better done by machines. I can see no viable future for humans other than Universal Basic Income, with options for additional creativity and work unbounded by time spent doing menial tasks to earn wages for shelter and food and clothing. Yes that all sounds utopian, but what other futures are there? The masses won't have jobs - the machines will. What will people do when there are no jobs? We'll have UBI and we'll have the strongest entrepreneurship and artistic discovery we've ever had. It doesn't matter what side of the politics you're on - UBI is going to be the future simply because it has to be.
"Job creator" is the most intense insult I can think of to call a politician but everyone else seems to love it. Aren't we supposed to be destroying jobs as fast as possible so that automation can make our lives easier and provide higher quality of life to all?
Creating jobs sounds like the worst possible path for people to take - and for CEOs like Rometty to encourage the idea that jobs are here to stay seems dangerous. Jobs are not here to stay, even as the work changes and some new jobs are created along the way, the numbers of jobs will decline to 0.
I think part of what drives your view on this is a particular idea of what a "job" is. It's likely that the meaning, in aggregate, will shift somewhat over time.
Another way to look at it is that some people like working, and find having a job fulfilling, regardless of whether it pays the bills or not (many senior people get simple jobs after retiring because they like it).
If we think of a "job" as a means for acquiring the resources for happiness (all too often money for basic needs, but also often a feeling of advancement and status among peers), then it's not something we necessarily want to do away with. It may be that it's less based on money and more on some other capital (social?) instead though.
> so that automation can make our lives easier and provide higher quality of life to all?
No one has explained to me how this is supposed to occur. I agree that if you were building a civilization from scratch and had this sort of automation available, you'd probably come up with a nice idealistic solution.
But as it is, starting from the world we live in today, these sorts of efficiency savings just seem to concentrate wealth in the hands of the robot owners.
I feel like companies would say "Oh, look at this, our production went up 10x at no increased cost. Now, should we use that increase to maximize our profits, or should we just raise wages and cut working hours in order to selflessly do our part towards creating a utopia?"
So the only future you see for humans if something like Ian Banks' Culture universe, where machines completely run the world, but are benevolent enough to harbor, nourish, and otherwise care for humans?
I agree, we have moved from farming (subsistence) to manufacturing (subsistence and consumption) to services (pure consumption). What is there to move to next? Everyone says we will create new jobs but the question is doing what? We all can't either program the robots or serve at Starbucks. (and can't that be automated away too?)
Where will the 3M jobs that automated trucking will remove come from? I don't think it is all doom and gloom but it begs the question of what fuels the consumption. If employment is super low, then we need money from somewhere to continue to live, so is that universal basic income? Or will things be so automated that everything will effectively be free?
Very interesting time to be alive and wonder what might be yet to come.
> My example here is Instagram, a company of a dozen staff or so when acquired, is the digital replacement of photo labs in every city.
While not trying to dispute your main point, I hardly think Instagram replaces all of what photo labs do, such as large size prints, professional correction, and specialty products such as cards and books. There are other companies online that do compete in these spaces though. I think most labs are probably getting by with their services targeted towards professionals, who want a bit more accountability than they are likely to get using a large service. That may just mean a semi-large to large lab though, so small labs likely have a hard time of it.
>History, though, has demonstrated that technological breakthroughs lead to new employment opportunities
Except history has never had to content with automation and AI. Sure, back in the old days you took farmers and showed them how to make steel. Then took the steel workers and showed them how to work in a cubicle in a service economy. Now we're not that far away from the machines doing cubicle work. What's past the service economy? What's past creative and technical work?
I think its a little naive to think we'll always find work for people to do. There has to be an endgame here and this might be it. Just because certain people were wrong in the past doesn't mean the end of labor as we know it won't ever happen.
Considering we live in a political environment paranoid about "job stealing" and a POTUS who reflects those views, well, of course IBM mouthpieces are parroting those views. IBM doesn't want to become the posterboy for job loss via automation. They want you to think its the other guys.
> Except history has never had to content with automation and AI
It's taken me awhile to wrap my head around this. I think I'm starting to understand the fundamental difference.
In the past technology revolutionized processes. E.g. Replace horse with trains and cars. But, the human skills were never touched--they all required a driver.
Whereas today, technology is reaching the point of replacing human skills. E.g. autonomous cars. So, this time as you say it is different because it is the human skills that are being revolutionized by technology.
So smartphones? I thinking looking at this from the point of view of a single product category is too simplistic and likely inaccurate. A better way of looking at this may be "one new ecosystem of jobs is replacing another".
If you look at it this way, it's possible that the new ecosystem is just as big in terms of number of jobs.
I think a bigger problem may be that the pace of change is accelerating and people used to sticking to a job for a decade or longer may find themselves having to do more drastic career changes every few years.
The bottleneck here is education. There will always be demand for employees in the emerging industries, but the required skillset will increasingly be out of reach of the masses, partly due to the time needed to learn these skills (compounded with age and expected time working in that field) and partly due to aptitude. I think UBI is the only ethical long-term solution, but ironically, the people most passionately opposed to such programs are also the people least equipped to be competitive in the emerging economies.
> My example here is Instagram, a company of a dozen staff or so when acquired, is the digital replacement of photo labs in every city. New technologies are not the job creator that they once were and I haven't read anything to contradict that statement or posit that new tech is going to drive jobs growth.
Photo labs (places where physical photos were developed and edited) were replaced by digital post processing. Some of which is done by the photographers themselves, some is done in specialty shops, some is even done overseas. We can imagine that demand for the output (finished commercial photographs for products, offices etc) has likely continued to increase as the number of products, offices etc. have increased globally.
While many physical labs have shut down, many digital post processing shops have started. And where they haven't started, the photogs themselves are either doing the work or hiring people to do the work for them.
The net effect of digital photography is likely more jobs overall (post processing, web design, etc.) and product delivered for a lower price, but people who used to work for physical labs are completely screwed unless they completely learned a new skill.
Then comes along Instagram! Well, all of the sudden, there is a new place to display high & low quality images and some new editing tools. I am sure that some professional editing is now just a simple filter, but most finished commercial photography projects are still highly post processed by paid professionals. So what about all those images? Well, Instagram has actually resulted in multiple new business models, including "Instagram models" etc.
My guess (no data) is that the number of people producing commercial digital images has increased, not decreased and that instagram probably helps create demand for finished images. At the same time, instragram has likely helped launched new businesses without us even realizing it (access to random food blogs etc.)
While this is all great, and increases global net jobs, it doesn't help the poor guy who owns a photo lab in Missouri. That guy/girl is completely screwed and when people talk about technology jobs, he will have his photo on CNN.com, taken by an unpaid photographer who post processes his images himself. He was/is not newsworthy, but CNN now creates clickbait. In other words, there was never going to be a professional paid to shoot that guy in the past, but now there is a new market for previously worthless content. He will be photographed and CNN will make like $3 on the post in ad revenue.
> Photo labs (places where physical photos were developed and edited) were replaced by digital post processing.
Not at all. The mass of work was not done for professionals, but for the mass market. And that one totally disappeared, almost nobody gets photos developed any more compared to hundreds of millions (billions ?) of people before. Of course it was already automated, but now there is isn't anyone left to feed the machine, to check the result, to send the photos or deliver them at the desk, since even the machines are gone...
We can argue this all day long since neither of us has data to back up our assertions. So, I'll reframe this somewhat.
Technology in the past created new more efficient processes, freeing people to create new processes. That describes your example above and technology advancements largely to date. What's different now is not that we are making more efficient processes, rather technology is displacing human skills. Concretely, when the horse was replaced with a car both still required a driver. But, the driver was so much more productive thanks to the advancement in the process. However, today, it is not the process that is advanced it is the human skill that is replaced--ie. there will be no driver. So, it is the human skills that technology is encroaching on. So, anything that I can physically do, we could soon engineer a robot to do as well. Price/performance may not make sense today, but we know tech gets cheaper/better every year, labour doesn't. So, it is not processes that are being replaced but human skill.
So, with this in mind, I don't think you can argue that we'll have full employment in 100 years time.
Things that are based on rules will be and should be automated. You are saying that the person that fixes the technical aspects of a picture is screwed. So fucking what? With tech you will have 1 billion people taking technically perfect pictures, but it's still the photographer, which can also manually do the what the tech does, that will take a picture of the right subject.
Tech never creates as many jobs as it destroys buy it doesn't have to. When there were less farming the economy compensated by creating manufacturing jobs so I don't think that the worst case scenario is a given, at least in the reasonably foreseeable future
Manufacturing jobs did not require enormously sophisticated skills (i.e. the equivalent of a PhD) to be performed.
So "moving up" or "moving to" the new jobs was still possible. If automated trucks replace 1000 truckers, how many of them will be able to transition to "automated truck programmer"? (And note: they cannot move to "automated truck mechanic" because those jobs are already taken by "non-automated truck mechanics")
I know individually people are going to have a hard time, that seems pretty obvious. The comment I was responding to was saying that technology was going to lead to less jobs overall and I was just pointing out that each specific technology has led to less jobs overall (otherwise generally the new tech wouldn't be worth it) but the economy as a whole generally creates jobs elsewhere to compensate. I was mainly wondering why he think the economy can't create the new jobs any more.
But anyone could transition from farmer/craftsman to factory worker. It needed less skills to repeat a small set of gestures all day long for months and years on an assembly line (being a cog in a machine) than were needed by the craftsman who excelled in his craft (highly skilled in one domain) and by the farmer who had to know and be able to do a bit of everything (not deep, but wide skills).
Please try to not dismiss my question, but what skills does a truck driver have that can't be learned in a couple of weeks?
On the other side, I agree with the manufacturing comment. There is a British documentary about building steam locomotives on Youtube. Watch what the skilled workers do, they just move things from side to side so a machine can do the hard work. Hell, I can learn to do that in a week.
I am not dismissing it, but I don't see your point.
Yes, to become a truck driver your basic qualification is "driving license" (for trucks, if your country treats it differently from driving cars).
You may have extra skills, e.g. a foreign language would help you qualify for driving across the border, maybe, but it is not required.
So when your main/only skill is "driving a truck" what can you pick up as a new job when "driving a truck" has been automated?
The point is that at the moment we will replace all truck driving jobs in US, we are not going to replace 3.5 million individual workers, with skills that took a life to master, but 3.5 million jobs that a big slice of the 7 billion humans could learn to do in a couple of weeks (let's not start a debate about how far away we are from actually starting to have automatic trucks...). I don't see the point of feeling bad for these people loosing their jobs. As I don't feel bad for all the breakers that were put out of a job by the invention of air brakes (did you know that US railways took forever - and many casualties - to adopt air brakes, because they didn't want to fire breakers?)
Reading and writing where a skill at some point. So was driving. But at this point, they are necessities (maybe not driving, if you live in a civilized country). We shouldn't keep jobs around just because some people really can't do anything else. I'm not saying that we shouldn't find a way for these people to live, but keeping them employed in jobs that hold humanity back, just because, is beyond stupid.
Then we are talking of two different things, I am afraid.
I never said or implied "we must prevent truckers from being replaced by automation". I have my own ideas on this, but it wasn't the point I was answering to.
What I was trying to address was: "Yeah, in the past technology advances always created new jobs, this will happen with AI too, do not worry". And I am arguing that this time we are not sure it will work because the skill gap between - for instance - truck driver and self-driving-sensor-suite repairman is much bigger than the one between farmer and factory worker.
Thanks for posting that quote and saving me the trouble of reading it. I thought he might have actually had some original insight to bring to this issue.
We've seen this before with the transition from a labour force that was 50%+ involved in farming to one that became a manufacturing based society and then again in the move from manufacturing to services.
One of the bigger differences with AI is that it now may take away many of the lower tier "white collar" jobs along with blue collar jobs that were previously displaced by technology shits.
I'm not terribly familiar with my economics history but is it possible that a huge tide of AI backed apps could be the first time that a significant portion of white collar jobs are lost along with the typical blue collar jobs that are more traditionally lost with tech shifts?
Then again, in 2000, alot of first world programmers were worried about offshoring of programming jobs, I haven't seen any real impact of the loss of these jobs on programmers in North America so perhaps IBM is correct that AI will produce as many new jobs as it replaces.
The issue is not that yet another group of cowards is whining. The issue is that once machines can do everything better than humans, we will need a new way to organize society.
Machines have already replaced animals including humans for the application of pure physical force to solving problems.
Now machines are now replacing animals including humans for the application of intellect to solving problems.
It is not clear that there is any next frontier. Would it be "love" or "spiritual practice" or what?
Some people say that AI will not progress as far as industrial-age machines did in obsoleting humans. They sometimes give specific examples, claiming that they find AI-generated art to be dull or that AI-guided robotic surgeons only succeed in narrow tasks, etc. It's OK to argue that this will take a long time but I haven't heard anyone explain why the AIs won't win in the long run. Maybe the run is so long we shouldn't worry about it?
Some other people say "we found new jobs before, we'll do it again." For example, the IBM chief. And that seems like empty wishful thinking.
In each previous upheaval, new industries created large numbers of low-skilled jobs. In contrast, most of the new jobs created by AI will require significant education and creativity.
The problem with AI is that it's dynamite when it comes to capital-labour relations. You can't compete with something with perfect agency that never gets sick. Now, are there going to be new categories of work and new economies? Yes. But in the meanwhile, for a category of work that defines a plurality if not majority of the functioning economy (basically anything that doesn't require creativity across multiple domains or empathy), there are going to be SEVERE income share implications.
Keep in mind that labour share of income has gone down drastically in the last few decades and that as a result, real wages have stagnated -- which has produced significant unrest in developed countries and unseated the established political order. If that trend continues...
> You can't compete with something with perfect agency that never gets sick. Now, are there going to be new categories of work and new economies?
Follow your own logic to its conclusion. If AI does that then what are the new jobs? We are eliminating entire job categories. While the new jobs will be in entirely different categories (e.g. manual labor will be all but eliminated, and the new jobs will be in creative industries). There is very little cross over between those job categories so we are heading to a future with a significant portion of the population jobless.
Machines are bad at transferring domain knowledge and generalizing/making unconventional linkages between topics -- what some would regard as creativity, they're also not going to be very good at empathy without essentially solving for strong AI and regularized data on human emotions -- there also are going to be human jobs because of protectionist instincts. ex: A machine right now would actually probably do a more optimal job of determining interest rates if given more economic data and more data on outputs/outcomes, but replacing the Fed and analysts under it with a machine is a political football and a half to even say.
If we solve for strong AI, we might as well kiss the species goodbye, never mind just jobs -- but the AI we have in between is not going to completely eliminate every category of work in the present, never mind future ones that might arise.
I think we agree on the larger point, just to the degree of the damage. I think I'm on a 7.5, you might be on a 9 in terms of damage AI can do to employment.
When I wrote my comment I was thinking long term (e.g. decades). Regardless, the disruption is going to be sufficient enough to force us to redefine our economy.
Is IBM CEO Ginni Rometty someone who can actually provide insight on the impact of AI on society? I'm sure some of her subordinates could, but the only thing I've ever heard about her personally is that she's driving IBM into the ground by chasing some unrealistic financial metric, and I'm not super inclined to bypass a paywall just to hear an executive say executive things.
Watson does not offer anything more than you can get from popular, free open-source projects, and often it offers much less, because it is complex, costly and closed-source. Nobody looks to Watson for the state of the art in AI.
In discussions of the issue, AI and automation are often used interchangeably and this entirely clouds the issue.
The AI that is so far real is a particular kind of software that has helped large-scale decisions and processes in large enterprises, large websites and etc - places with a lot of data to agregate.
Automation is an ongoing process of replacing people with machines and it is what has eliminated jobs. Advances in software has helped some automation and some of those advances are connected to AI but a lot of the advances involve materials, processes, a willingness-or-not of consumers to use automated processes rather than interacting with a human (whether buying online or from automatic kiosk or whatever).
Indeed, the AI-in-particular and job losses in general narrative is just about a sales-pitch for IBM's Watson etc rather than a serious threat.
This position, "AI as automation", is the important one.
Tasks, whether they are manufacturing or service, have a difficulty level in automation. That difficulty is generally scored as a 'cost' with respect to having a person do the task or service and the cost to have them do that.
There are two costs associated with execution, training and marginal cost of execution. So if you spend 10 hours training a factory worker to use a machine, that is your training cost, if it takes them 1 second to operate the machine to do the task, that is the marginal cost. Consider the printing press.
The printing press replaces a fully manual process. A scribe takes 3 to 5 years to write out a copy of a book. They are trained for many years in calligraphy, and each book takes years to produce. The printing press on the other hand you train a 'scribe' to arrange the letters from a type tray into a plate, to ink it, to press it onto sheets. That training takes less time than calligraphy training. Then for each book the scribe puts together the plates, prints out multiple copies of the page, and then assembles the book from the various pages. One or more copies of a single book can happen in a week. Your marginal cost has gone down as well.
Then plate printers, removed the type trays. Then mechanical paper handling fed paper into these machines. Etc to the point where now you need nothing, the author writes, uploads it to their kindle publishing account and the readers down load and read.
But all through this process "employment" around the notion of books changed. And who was employed and how also changed. The product, written and illustrated communication from one person to many, was fundamentally the same but delivered differently.
What we think of as "AI" today allows automating with less people training tasks which defied automation before. And by doing so it changes the market dynamics around that good or service. The most popular example is livery and delivery services with automated drivers. It only became possible to automate a driver when you had a machine that could recognize and respond to a wide variety of conditions in its environment.
Deep learning-ish advances can theoretically automate a ton of things now, but it will take a few years for those AIs to be engineered/trained/marketed. That is actually a continuation of automation which is as much a social process as it is about technology.
But if you look at projects like Deep Mind Lab, Open AI Universe, Good AIs Lab and 5 million usd AGI contest, combine those 3d environments with incremental learning transferred across domains, leveraging deep learning, hybrid and other advancements, as well as (hopefully) the existing body of research from the field of AGI (which has existed for a number of years, despite many pretending it didn't) -- we now have very powerful parallel learning tools and many public projects aimed at general agents. And very convincing demos in more narrow domains. Because of all of this I personally believe the core AGI technology will be demonstrated within the next two years. How long before that makes its way into embodied robots and gets trained up to the point it can be readily adapted to various industries may be another few years.
So my own belief is that we should expect ALL jobs to start to be 'threatened' by AGI systems by around 2022-2023.
I get your point, but in general I don't understand people who look at the things coming out of google et al lately and can still say to themselves "This is just a minor incremental improvement over previous AI research"
I'm sorry, but the stuff coming out in the last couple of years just seems like it's in a totally different league to me...
_I_ am proof? I wonder why you are making it personal. Its not about me though is it?
Look at the Open AI Universe, Deep Mind AI Lab, Good AI Universe, etc. Look them up. They all say that the goal is artificial general intelligence. All of these companies/programs have multiple literal geniuses and tens or even hundreds of millions or more in funding. The AGI environments are public, so who knows how many hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of talented programmers and scientists are working towards the same goal.
Do _you_ think that all of these large programs, companies, investors would be so publicly pursuing this goal if it were not feasible? If not within two years, then how many years do you think it will be before these projects yield results that have human-like generality or abilities?
If you suppose they will never achieve that, then what level of generality do you assume them to be limited to? Certainly those groups expect to achieve some type of general intelligence. So perhaps you assume in the near term it will not be human-level, then at what level do you suppose it will be limited? Dog-like intelligence? Once agents achieve dog-like intelligence, why would you assume there would not be a way to progress beyond that? We have already achieved super-human intelligence in numerous particular domains.
> _I_ am proof? I wonder why you are making it personal. Its not about me though is it?
Fair enough. Your post is proof
> Do _you_ think that all of these large programs, companies, investors would be so publicly pursuing this goal if it were not feasible?
Sure, it happens all the time.
> If not within two years, then how many years do you think it will be before these projects yield results that have human-like generality or abilities?
I'm not sure those projects ever will but in general before we get AGI? It's totally unpredictable. My current best guess is that self-driving car systems won't be as good as promised and because they've pierced the public consciousness, we will get AI backlash setting in another AI winter. This winter will trim the fat of all the crap that gets published now and maybe* a couple new fundamental techniques will be born. Maybe those techniques lead to AGI when we emerge from the winter. We'll get AGI like we'll get cold fusion. When it comes it comes.
> We have already achieved super-human intelligence in numerous particular domains.
Sure but show me a system that can do just two unrelated tasks. Doesn't even have to do them above human intelligence, but something that can say put blocks in holes like a two year old and do some basic language processing. Or play chess and recognize pictures of dogs. What kind of leap is even required to get there?
I think a lot of people here are missing why these labor changes will be so harmful.
Yes, when agriculture, industrialization, etc, emerged, old jobs were replaced with new jobs that people could not have previously predicted.
But these new jobs are terrible. They are degrading, dehumanizing, and absurd. We have 63% labor participation, and about half* the people working do nothing. They make Power Point slides, they send emails, they form working groups, they schedule conference calls to schedule other conference calls. Apple hires a bunch of lawyers to sue Samsung. Samsung hires a bunch of lawyers to defend itself. Nothing is accomplished. They all feel like shit, they're addicted to the internet and they are on prescription anti-depressants.
These jobs are rituals, they are not productive in any sense.
When ancient Egyptians developed agriculture, they did not go on to live lives of luxury. Workers who would previously have spent their days hunting and gathering instead spent their days pushing limestone blocks up to the top of the pyramid.
*bullshit on my part, but look at these statistics (https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm) and come up with an industry-by-industry estimate for yourself, it is depressingly high
The sad thing is she has to say this to appease her public sector clientele that still holds to the believe that life benefits tied to 'jobs' are the only way to keep the unruly masses under control.
Most of these discussions revolve around when and how sufficiently intelligent AI will be available to revolutionize society, but what about the hardware? As in, is there a limit to our ability to design and create (cost-effectively) the mechanical and other physical components that are required for building the precise robots and other machines of this automated future? At what point do we hit a physical limit of cost prohibitive machinery for full automation?
I'm not sure what "full automation" really entails, but those who envision to inevitable automation future don't really explain it either. Everyone focuses on the software without considering if there may be limits to the hardware, and by that I don't just mean the computing machines but everything in meatspace.
The big problem with immigrant-fueled growth in America is that the first derivative of most Latin American demographic trends indicates larger reductions in growth rate than the U.S. or Canada. So North America, in general, could become dependent on higher-risk immigrant populations from Asia to maintain any significant growth.
2. Most boomers will be dead and turned to dust before 2060. And age distribution could become flat as fertility rates go flat. After 2045, the over 65 population rate will probably decrease to under 25% for North America. Some actuaries are thinking that people will not necessarily continue to have increased lifespans.
3. Quality and financial incentives for production and design automation have been driving industry at increasing rate for at least 25 years. My three current employers (one full-time regular, two contract) are all under 200 employees, have all reduced head count by at 15% to 40% over last 5 to 10 years, and have mandated to either not increase bodies or to further decrease bodies.
4. Too much emphasis on self-driving vehicles. Most industrial automation is after the obvious low-hanging fruit - logistics and production, where you do not necessarily see actual robotics, but much process automation and decision-making sustained by ML.
5. Mid-level jobs are being increasingly targeted: parsing of legal documents, accounting, warehouse management and stock control, and some of the more simple product design functions.
6. Anecdotal stuff.
In Early 2016, employer's main site in Southern California terminated OVER half of the engineering group - mostly support and mid-level management. Only one technician, no PCB designers, no mechanical designers, and no engineering managers remain. The remaining engineers do it all - feasible because design automation tools have reached a 'critical' mass.
Spent most of October through December automating the crap out of a factory warehouse and related processes. Last week, 14 people were terminated at the Mexico factory site. The factory warehouse had 14 full-time and 4 part-time employees in warehouse; there are now 3 full and 1 part-timer; and the part-timer will probably go away next quarter. And no robots in sight...
It seems like these articles about AI are just a distraction from the real wage suppression caused by temporary work visas, illegal immigration, and workers being classified as contractors. Perhaps tech companies want to signal they have other options for labor as a sort of threat to combat increased scrutiny of their labor practices. Perhaps the message is: "Don't take away our cheap labor or we will release the AI overlords."
what do you think will happen to the working class when it becomes useless to those in charge ? Don't you think they'd enjoy more living on earth without us, plebeian ?
(eg, like the spacers living in Solaria in Asimov novels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaria )
The AI revolution will wake up the west to the realities of capitalism. Trump's spat with China over trade barriers is just one example of America coming to terms with the fact that capitalism has no sense of patriotism or morality. If the price (of labour) is right capitalists will do business with anyone. The capitalist philosophy, based on Adam Smith's "invisible hand" which mysteriously takes care of the common good, is a fallacy behind which the greed of the 1% masquerades as success. Capitalism's goal is to drive down the price of labour which it can only see as a cost. AI is the capitalist's dream, presenting for the first time the possibility of eliminating human labour altogether. There is only one question we must ask as a society - to whom will the capitalists of the AI age be accountable? Marx wrote about this endgame 150 years ago and of all the economists since then I'd say his analysis has been the most accurate.
I think it is also matter of time scale. There may be new jobs once this all settles down. Today I have real fear of mass job disappearance. If I lose job today due to AI and tumultuous times continue for next 50 years it is of no use to me that 2080 is the start of AI based golden era.
AI is a flaky term changing its meaning every now and then, and indeed, as the backbone of the hype, Deep Learning itself is rapidly evolving unlike any other fields I have witnessed.
Take CV for example. AlexNet is wakeup call for deep learning renaissance, however no one has predicted that we would go beyond human-level performance in just 3 years(ResNet developed in 2015). Same goes for AlphaGo/Machine Translation/Speech Recognition, or the latest photo-realistic stacked GAN.
All in all it is hard to predict what we will end up with by looking at history because we are in such an exciting time of ML/AI development. No matter how prestigious that person might be, his or her words affect very little what the future will actually be, only technology itself could.
If I was Ms. Rometty, I would spend my time playing up the fact that A.I. will lead to a vastly improved quality of life for everyone. Advancements in knowledge always tend to do that and A.I. is a great leap forward in tech knowledge.
In other news, IBM announced today that CEO Ginni Rometti has resigned in order to have more time to spend with her family and the new CEO will be Watson.
Rometty doesn't even know that Watson is a vaporware boondoggle, so how would she know what's going to happen when AI impacts society. She is probably the least qualified person at IBM to talk about AI, and IBM itself is one of the least qualified companies practicing "AI". She too far removed from the trenches. But IBM has excellent PR, and this is the line I would take if I were betting my company on AI services.
> A doctor reads about a half dozen medical research papers in a month, Meyerson says, whereas Watson can read a half million in about 15 seconds. From that, machine learning (one of the key types of artificial intelligence today) can suggest diagnoses and the most promising course of treatment.
