Large-Scale Loss Of Jobs To Robots In The Next Few Years. How serious to take this?

In My Humble Opinion
81

My point was that robotic technologies - dexterity, tactile feedback, machine vision, problem-solving capacity, and agility - are all advancing. The particular robots shown in that video, and the present state of robotic technologies in general, aren’t suited to a lot of tasks. But they’re only going to get better.

A human nurse earns $65,000 per year, plus benefits like health insurance, pension, vacation time, and sick leave (assume for argument’s sake that those have a total value of $10,000). If a robo-nurse costs $1M, requires no salary/benefits and can work 3 shifts per day without any bathroom or meal breaks, the payback period is less than five years. True, maintenance/repair costs eat into that. OTOH, if there is reduced civil liability because robo-nurse screws up less often than a human nurse, then the argument for robo-nurses gets better. And if the quality of care goes up, that’s another argument in favor of robo-nurses.

It may seem like folly to believe that robo-nurses could conceivably provide better care than human nurses. But the same discussion is being had, right now, about driverless cars. People are reluctant to trust driverless cars, but the reality is that they’re pretty damn good - better than a lot of human drivers, in fact. My brother and I have a bet regarding the timeline of driverless car technologies; he thinks that within five years a mass-produced driverless car will be available for purchase by the general public. I think it will take more than five years, but I have no doubt that it will happen.

:confused: Why would a company continue to hire employees to fill positions that serve no purpose? Why would purposeless employees be relegated to middle management instead of to the soup line?

82

Eloquent in it’s brevity.

No one says “I’m going to create a stupid, dysfunctional organization”. Putt’s Law, the Dilbert Principle and the Peter Principle are often lumped together to describe how “merit based” hierarchical organization often results in the unintended consequence of creating an “inverse competency” pyramid.

What Putt’s Law/Dilbert describe is a phenomenon where there are two types of people - those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand. Because the smartest and most technically competent individuals need to be close to the technology they operate. The flip side of that is the less competent and knowledgeable can be relegated to simpler tasks like managing schedules, chasing down developers to complete deadlines and bringing donuts to the office.
The Peter Principle describes a phenomenon where technical people are “rewarded” by promotions into management or sales positions where they may not have any aptitude.

All these phenomenon can be observed whenever you say “my boss is an idiot who has no idea how I do my job and I don’t understand why he gets paid so much.”

83

I’ve worked on a lot of projects for a lot of organizations and I wouldn’t describe project managers as “less competent and knowledgeable”. Well some of them are. I’ve had some complete morons running projects I was working on. But a good project manager is worth his or her weight in gold. It requires, in Liam Neeson’s words, a particular set of skills. (It’s not something I think I would be suited for, so I haven’t pursued it.)

84

Do you remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? It ends with the wolf showing up.

Just because the predictions never turned out correct in the past doesn’t mean they won’t be in the future.

When agriculture went away we got manufacturing. When manufacturing went away as a big employer, we got services. Now services are declining. What sector is going to employ people who used to have service jobs? Arts/crafts could be one, but the trouble there is that it requires some level of skill and is prone to the wannabe/star dichotomy: most people make very little money, if any, and the superstars get rich. You can’t build an economy on that.

85

Moreover, a glut of artist labor will create a glut of art. The price of good quality art will plummet, as will income levels for artists. Many (most, I would guess) will not be good enough to earn a living wage from selling their art.

86

If packaging things in a metal box is enough to make your job obsolete, you have bigger problems going on.

87

Do you remember the story of Chicken Little? It ends with the sky not falling. I can cite fairy tales and parables, too.

But they’re not. The unemployment rate is not increasing. You’re not even putting this in the right order. Service jobs have been lost to machines over the last century by the millions.

I can cite a dozen or more examples of massive loss of jobs or increases in the number of people seeking work that, over and over and over, did not result in intractable, permanent unemployment. We have had robots (or people overseas, or women entering the workforce, or new technology, etc etc) replace existing humans for a long, long time, and unemployment remains low.

Give people a functioning, benevolent state and some freedom and they find things to do.

[QUOTE=msmith57]
What Putt’s Law/Dilbert describe is a phenomenon where there are two types of people - those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand. Because the smartest and most technically competent individuals need to be close to the technology they operate.
[/QUOTE]

Can you provide evidence that Dilbert’s Law is, in fact, a thing that happens, and is not just a joke that a guy came up with to sell books?

Funny this should come up though. I just was talking to my best friend last night. He’s a director as Cisco Networks. He and literally every other manager and director he works with is an incredibly brilliant software and/or hardware engineer. I lost track of the number of patents he has. Hell, now that I think about it, every manager at MY company has direct, extensive and very impressive technical expertise. Or any company I work with. It’s funny, you’d almost think Scott Adams was just a cartoonist.

88

Sure, but we are a long long away from robo nurses. We probably aren’t going to see them. We are going to see specialize machines replace them.

First, let’s back up a second. I went to the doctor last week and this is based on that visit. I saw/interacted with six people on that visit. Two receptionists, a scheduler, two nurses, and a doctor. The receptionists and scheduler can be eliminated relatively easily.

Of the nurses, one weighed me, took my blood pressure, and measured my pulse/o2 levels. Honestly, she was totally unnecessary. I can step on a scale, put my arm in a sleeve, and clip the thingee on my finger. A smart office where all of those are hooked up into a computerized record keeping system eliminates her. The second nurse took blood. That’s more difficult to replace, but certainly a Vamp-o-Matic is possible (and brief googling suggests it exists in an experimental state).

Then the doctor. I told her my symptoms, she asked some questions, ordered a bunch of blood tests, and then eventually reviewed them. All while she was typing into a computer to enter stuff into my digital chart. There’s nothing here that can’t be replaced by a computer. The difficulty is the sheer scale of symptoms and possible courses of action.

That’s just the doctors office, mind you. If we get robot doctors, that’s going to gut the insurance companies work force. A robot doctor isn’t going to scam anyone and there’s no more need for any of the billing folks on the insurance company’s or doctor’s side anymore.

So even if we can’t replace the doctor, we certainly can replace/reduce the support staff around them.

89

Are you sure those were nurses? At my doctor’s office, the vital signs are collected by a medical assistant and a phlebotomist does the blood draw.

90

Putt’s Law is the more “serious” version of the theory. At least as “serious” as a book written in the 80s under some pseudonym can be.

But the Peter Principle is considered a “thing”, in that it seems to get serious study.
Although, the cynic in me thinks all these theories, indeed all management theories (for example, Zappo’s Holacracy) in general are “bullshit”. You have people who own “means of production” and you have people who do actual work. Everyone in between is just trying to justify their existence of making as much money as possible for doing as little “real work” as possible. That’s because most “real work” is either tedious and dangerous (making stuff in a factory, construction, etc) or requires rare talent and skills (being a surgeon, art designer, architect).

Anyhow, my bullshit theory is that automation will eliminate the tedious and dangerous stuff, simplify stuff that requires talent and skill such that a moron can do it and ultimately turn us into a socialist democracy of mostly morons doing bullshit middle management jobs to justify collecting a paycheck.

IOW, meetings, email and Powerpoint don’t “waste time” keeping you from “important work”. That’s basically the work.

91

I used nurse in the more colloquial sense.

92

My point was that MA or a phelbotomist is a lower skill level and lower pay level than a registered nurse.

93

Unemployment may be low, but underemployment isn’t. Pay isn’t keeping up with productivity; the gains are all going to the top 1%, and minimum wage is not keeping up with the cost of living. This, i.e. underemployment, is the first stage. California just raised their minimum wage from $10 to $15 per hour; for the people who manage to keep their jobs, this will help, but for a lot of folks this will result in getting laid off because they’re just too expensive now. What jobs are those people going to get?

94

I know… I do/have done database and BA work in healthcare IT. Actually allergies and hypertension are the biggest two we see on our urgent/primary care side of things.

And I know that a halfway competent doctor doesn’t have to go consult his references to diagnose someone with most things, but I suspect something like an AI expert system could pull the pieces together that maybe an individual doctor might not, or do it in a faster/more accurate way than a doctor would. And the AI wouldn’t be a rules-based system like we’d scheme up today; it would literally be something that could weigh the implication of that one 1971 journal article against all the others and come to a reasonable conclusion. It would have to learn how to do it, and that would be the tricky part.

But ultimately it would have FAR more data at its disposal, and far faster than any human would, and draw conclusions/inferences/etc… that a person couldn’t. For 99.9% of cases, it would be a slam-dunk matter of pointing out that your BP is over some threshold, you’re fat, and your BP is over 100, therefore you probably have metabolic syndrome. But in that other 0.1% of cases, it might notice that you have some other symptom that isn’t obvious, or that only is an issue in certain unlikely situations, etc… and could act like a backstop to the doctor’s memory in those cases.

I’m not advocating replacing doctors with these systems, but rather using them like a really handy diagnostic/treatment recommendation tool.

And an AI would be a terrifically useful triage-type tool. Not in the battlefield/mass casualty sense (although it might be useful there as well), but in a sense of you get your vitals taken, you get your labs done, and then you talk with the AI, and it refers you to the NP/PA if you have relatively simple stuff like allergies, a cold, etc… and refers you to the actual physician if you have something more interesting, along with a tailored diagnosis and treatment suggestion.

Considering that there’s projected to be a shortage of doctors, something like this would be terrific, and better yet, it would be continuously updated. So if the ADA or AAP changed their guidelines, the AI wouldn’t have to go read up on it, and then potentially try and break decades of habit, or just blowing it off.

95

There is no way to predict the outcome of this technology.

Take “Doctor AI, M.D.”:
In first world, of little use.
In third world: Revolution. With solar electricity and a box, even the local Medicine Man can increase life expectancy within one generation.
Which has the same “Oppps! Missed that!” effect as the “Feed the Starving Children” campaigns:
More mouths to feed with still inadequate food production - which causes wholesale clear-cutting and burning of forests and jungles with all the problems those bring.

Damn the Torpedoes!
Full Speed Ahead!

96

Another aspect of this is the way it can cascade.

For example, GM is building its self-driving cars as part of a partnership with Lyft.
citation

So these self-driving cars aren’t just coming for the jobs of cab drivers. They are making car-sharing more attractive, since the empty car can come to you if it doesn’t happen to be nearby. And since the NHTSA says cars are parked 95% of the time on average, car-sharing can mean a significant reduction in the number of cars in use.

So Lyft switching to Johnny-cabs will mean fewer jobs building cars.

And since there are IIRC 7 or 8 parking spaces for every car in the US, fewer cars means freeing that land up for other uses.
And the snowball keeps on rolling.

Things are going to be changing a lot in the next few decades.

97

But one reason why poorer people in the third world have more kids IS the high mortality rate, just like feeding the starving children can also free their parents to do things other than poach for food, and the kids are more likely to be better educated so the next generation won’t be so fruitful.

98

However, the times when there is the highest usage of personal automobiles are largely coinciendent, e.g. the commuting rush hour. The notion that a reduction in automobiles by 95% is just incorrect. In fact, having widescale access to automated personal vehicles which are cheaper to operate than cabs will probably increase the use of such vehicles, since there is no longer either a need to coordinate or share trips, or a limitation on who could use such vehicles. The notion that technology is going to contract markets like transportation is not borne out by any prior experience, except in the narrow sense that markets based upon obsolete technologies (e.g. building horse-drawn coaches) are replaced by markets catering to emerging technologies.

The biggest industry that automated vehicles threatens is actually long haul trucking. With the ability to transport goods from point to point without stopping (other than refueling or recharging) the technology offers both dramatic improvements in efficiency and safety. It remains to demonstrate that automated vehicles can operate at highway speeds safely including contingency conditions, but the day is coming when “trucking” as an industry employing human drivers will be an anachronism.

Stranger

99

I was just reading an article in Wired from January, and encountered this:
"A 2015 study of Lisbon, Portugal, by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development found that a fleet of just 26,000 TaxiBots—hypothetical on-demand, autonomous carpool vehicles—could replace every one of the city’s 203,000 cars. "

I think their estimate is optimistic. I specifically avoided numbers because I am not willing to bet on how much the market for cars may contract. But most automakers believe that, in the words of another article from Wired, "selling one car to every person with the money to buy one is no longer viable. "

And while I’m discussing cascade: how will a significant reduction in private ownership of vehicle affect the industry that services customizing those vehicles. I don’t mean just the ships that make stretch limos and conversion vans, I mean the factories that make fancy rims. Those jobs depend on people owning their cars.

I don’t think that those jobs are 100% going away, but if just 10% of the population decides they can use Uber instead of having a car, that is going to send ripples throughout the economy.

100

No drivers perhaps, but probably humans riding shotgun. A valuable cargo traveling through remote locations is just asking to be stopped and robbed. Unless you give the truck defense systems. Which is when “Duel” becomes a documentary.