Look at the post participation statistics. As of this moment, the top standings are:
SlackerInc 65
Evil Captor 49
Mijin 15
Lemur866 12
Quite a gap between the number two and number three positions, yes?
There’s nothing inherently wrong about having a place to keep noting the progression of technology. Bump when you see something interesting. But not everybody is interested in reading a blog. The only reason I even opened this thread was that I saw the most recent post was from someone I knew for a fact joined up more recently, on double-checking I see this poster arrived two years after the thread was started. If the name had been another one of the top-two regulars, I wouldn’t have bothered.
Endless bumping doesn’t make a coherent discussion. It’s interesting for some but not for everybody. This is the basis of the opinion I offered on thread quality. You are free to believe that offering opinions in GD is “rude” but you can’t deny that there is an objective difference in the nature of the two threads, and that some people will prefer one style of participation to the other.
Lemur was participating in this thread in April of 2012. Three years ago, in other words. Then a gap of more than two years with no participation. There was another brief spurt of participation in August of last year. If Lemur were the second name on that participation list, I have no doubt that this thread would be excellent. But the reality is that the top two posters have almost half of total posts. Number two on the list has more than triple the posts of number three.
That’s absolutely fine, for people who like that sort of thing. If it were my thread, I’m sure I wouldn’t mind at all. But not everybody else will feel the same way.
Jesus, if only there were some way to automate my participation in this thread, to keep the complaints about my absence down to a dull roar…
It seems to me we’ve had several interlocking threads on this topic, and I pretty much keep saying the same sorts of things.
One thing I would emphasize is that automation is going to be destroying lots and lots and lots of white collar professional jobs. We keep talking about automation destroying blue collar jobs, and it has done that and will continue to do that. But simply because the past elimination of blue collar jobs has been so thorough and so relentless the existing jobs tend to be ones that have been, so far, resistant to that sort of loss.
So we can build an automated assembly line where the welders and bolt-turners are replaced by machines. But a home health care worker is a lot harder. A robot that can change a bedpan isn’t in the cards any time soon. You need a radically different sort of technology that doesn’t replace human health aides with robot health aides, but fills the same need in a different way.
And that’s what is happening with white collar jobs. Lots of the work that used to be done by law clerks flipping through books and copying down citations is now done by a 10 second database query. But that doesn’t eliminate jobs for lawyers or paralegals if the demand for legal services grows along with productivity. That’s the key part–tools that greatly increase the productivity of white collar workers dramatically increase the potential upside for the industry, but are eventually going to mean fewer and fewer workers in that industry without phenomenal growth in that industry.
It seems to me that here in 2015 we have a huge store of underutilized capital, but not much demand for new production. Companies are sitting on huge piles of cash, but don’t have many good ideas on how to put that money to work.
A future of billions of gleaming automated vending machines that can produce any good or service imaginable if you only put in a quarter, with the starving unwashed masses walking by wishing they had a quarter to put in, doesn’t make any sense.
There won’t be any such machines in that economic system, because why would the capitalist overlords build them, knowing the masses don’t even have a quarter to put into them? Capitalists own businesses to make money. One way to do that is to have the business produce goods and services that people purchase in exchange for money. If no one exchanges money for those goods and services, then there’s no way to make money by producing them, and therefore no capitalist would ever do such a thing.
OK, so there are no robot factories tirelessly making the goods and services the masses need for survival, because the masses can’t afford to pay for those goods and services. So now the masses can have jobs after all, because those factories that would put them out of work don’t exist! Of course there’s an equilibrium here, but the point is that you can’t get rich being a capitalist unless you produce goods and services people are willing and able to pay for. But some goods and services might be so cheap to provide that you can do that for free, just with the understanding that you’re not making much money doing it. And so we have Craigslist that makes a very modest profit by automated distribution of classified ads, destroying thousands of jobs. But if Craigslist tried to capture the revenue that all the paper newspapers used to get for serving classified ads, they’d fail spectacularly. In 1970 if you could somehow siphon off all the revenue that all the newspapers in America used to generate through classified ads, you’d be filthy rich. In 2015 that isn’t possible. It’s possible to provide those services for free and make a tiny profit, it’s impossible to get filthy rich doing it.
And this is the future of whole categories of services that are currently generating hundreds of billions of dollars for the owners of various companies. Job categories that are likely to be eliminated by automation aren’t just “burger flipper” and “truck driver”, they’re also “CEO of FaceGoogle Sony-Warner”.
Meanwhile, in Germany, things are looking catastrophic according to a recent study. Interestingly, and in direct contradiction to the post above, the study above, the prediction is that it’s the low-wage, lower-skilled workers who will lose out first and foremost. Its predictions are catastrophic:
One bright spot: the report does not set forth any kind of time frame for the job losses. (The article only mentions “coming decades.”) To my mind the report is kind of meaningless without a time frame: they’re just saying that at some point in the future 18 million jobs will be lost. The severity of the robot job holocaust is going to be a matter of time as well as numbers. And of course, inability to generate new jobs that won’t also be more suitable for robots. This is the thing the optimists keep missing. Robots and computers aren’t the inflexible, purpose-built machines of the past. They can be programmed to perform new tasks. Their skills at performing those tasks can be upgraded quickly and easily via software.
This new Industrial Revolution is a whole different animal than its predecessors.
You are assuming intelligence not in evidence. Do you remember the Crash of 2007? That was capitalist bankers driving the economy into a ditch, laughing all the way. I am not optimistic that capitalists in any other sector of the economy are any smarter or more moral.
Disposable Hero, that book sounds cool. I would note that DARPA has done a lot of research on autonomous military robots, and I certainly hope that for some time to come they are going to keep double-checking with human overseers before going into “KILL! DESTROY!” mode. But a point that was made on a podcast I listened to about it was that this may not be possible if the speed of combat gets to a point that human operators/overseers are just too slow to keep up. I guess we can hope at least that they can press a button to stop further carnage if something is going terribly awry.
The storyline you describe also reminds me of one in the (IMO very underrated) show Stargate Universe:
They encounter swarms of AI drones who have been programmed to attack and destroy any species other than the one that created them. Said species went extinct long before, however, so the drones are essentially bent on annihilating all life, everywhere.
If you listen to the segment of the Planet Money podcast I linked to, they point out that it’s not so simple. A couple hundred years later, we can say “oh, those silly Luddites–we all ended up better off due to the automation they opposed”. But the experts they talked to noted that it was actually rational self-interest for the Luddites to attempt to do what they did, because the automation did actually kill jobs and depress wages for a half century at least. That was the entire rest of their working lifetimes.
To us now, a fifty year rough patch in the 19th century is some historical bump in the road. But if we hit another such patch in the 21st century, it will be cold comfort to think “well, things will sort out by the time my great-grandkids hit the workforce”. I mean, as Keynes wryly observed, “in the long run, we’re all dead”.
I hadn’t noticed when I linked that podcast upthread that it had a transcript. Here are the relevant portions:
I would argue that the steady drop in the workforce participation rate is a key indicator to watch. I think the unemployment rate is likely to bounce around a reasonable number, but I would not expect that participation rate to go back up any time soon, if ever.
Heh, well played.
I agree with you that certain white collar fields are likely to be particularly impacted in the short and medium term. While I take the general optimistic view, I don’t think it’s wise to spend time and money focusing on learning certain skills and trades that don’t seem to have a lot of staying power. I’m thinking of things like X-ray tech and, as you say, paralegal (I am encouraging my son to be a trial lawyer and maybe a judge, as I think it will be a long time if ever before society allows either of these jobs to be automated completely). I also wonder about a lot of the jobs in engineering and coding that kids are being pushed toward.
Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future came out this month. It is reviewed in the WSJ: Soon They’ll Be Driving It, Too - WSJ
I really do highly recommend it, from the cover and synopsis it seems like its just another ‘alien invasion/fast-jets and explosions everywhere’ piece of fluff (though I’d be perfectly OK with that) but its actually quite thought-provoking on several different levels.
Never watched Stargate Universe but that does sound plausible!
On a different note although I’ve heard about humans being removed from future combat aircraft for some time I never really understood it on a visceral level until I watched some youtube videos of model helicopters and drones being flown in a way that would turn a human into pulp and would be extremely difficult to combat as an opponent.
I’ve read several sci-fi stories where humans are indeed removed from the legal process on the premise that a sufficiently advanced AI would be a truly neutral and impartial upholder of the law, making decisions based on the facts of the case alone without those awkward human prejudices and emotions getting in the way.
I’m studying accounting now. I’m taking the upper level classes and I’ll be ready to sit for the CPA exam (the gold standard in accounting) soon. People keep telling me that they can’t automate what a CPA does - I’m seriously finding it hard to believe. I think I’ve got 10, maybe 15 years to make some money at it before the wages start getting severely depressed by automation.
Heh, I went just now to add that to my Amazon Wishlist, and the “AI” at the website informed me I had apparently already done so. :o
Yeah, that seems perilous. Did this insight come too late to switch majors? And what do you intend to be doing in 2030?
Now, there was an interesting Planet Money podcast about automation of accounting that essentially contains the counterargument. They showed how the invention of computerized spreadsheets allowed accountants to do something that had formerly taken hundreds of “man-hours” in just minutes, and then nearly instantly create a new one that takes into account a changed piece of data or assumption (whereas in the past, changing it would take almost as long as creating it to begin with).
But up to now at least, this didn’t seem to make accountants go the way of travel agents. Instead, it made any individual accounting task much faster for accountants to do, and thus a much cheaper service for accountants to offer, which created a much higher demand for much more detailed accounting, and thus accountants continued to have a job market.
The travel agent example is telling, though, because at a certain point people will be able to ask “Siri” or “Hey Google” to do their books for them, and it will be just as user friendly (and, frankly, less of a hassle, not to mention essentially free) as asking a CPA to do them.
Agreed, and this sounds to me like one of those notions that a sci-fi author thinks sounds intriguing and which makes an interesting twist to a futuristic story, but which is unlikely to happen for a long time if ever. I think using actual human lawyers to prepare contracts will soon go the way of the dodo, but litigating in court will remain a human pastime for the foreseeable future. Not because humans are necessarily the best at this, but because society is likely to be profoundly uncomfortable with handing this over to AIs (particularly since, unlike with AI physicians, there won’t be a clear way to show that it makes outcomes better). There will be strict legal regulations that require judges and those arguing before the court to be human, as well as juries, and for that matter legislators. Nearly everything else in the world may become automated, but elected officials and officers of the court will be human.
Now, there may be a back door way in for AIs in the form of a slippery slope toward becoming cyborgs. From Apple Watches and Google Glass to brain implants, the “flesh and blood humans” in these roles may be more and more augmented by AIs to the point that they find themselves more or less in the passenger seat while the AI does all the work, and the piece of sentient meat going along for the ride is a quaint holdover, sort of like the powdered wigs they still(?) use in British courtrooms. But even that will provide a good paycheck, and seems unlikely to get to that extreme for a quite some time.
It’s not really perilous for me personally - whether I get a job in accounting or not; or any job for that matter - will not be hugely impactful on my lifestyle or standard of living - I’ve been very fortunate in that sense. I really got into accounting a little later in life(I’m 38) and only took it up because it was something I became interested in after owning a small business.
I think accounting will become much more automated after convergence - when most of the countries in the world go on the same system for financial reporting. They have not decided on the details yet what accounting treatment to give to various things; but once they do, everything will be less vague and more structured.
Once things become more structured, automation becomes much easier. Couple that with the money that can be made by whoever automates the system, and a tremendous incentive is there for the tech world to start focusing more attention on the “problem” of well paid accountants costing businesses too much money.
I honestly don’t really know what gives people all this motivation to stake their future on jobs that probably won’t exist or pay well in the future; seems like a waste of the limited time one has in this world. YMMV
The problem will be not that “society” will be uncomfortable with handing lawyering and judging over to AIs, it will the that LAWYERS and JUDGES will be profoundly uncomfortable with handing their jobs over to AIs, and they will write laws for their legislator buddies to pass, forbidding this from happening. LONG after it has become very evident that AIs do a much better, fairer (and most of all, cheaper) job of lawyering and judging than humans, it will be strictly illegal for them to do so. We will have the spectacle of drunken bums staggering around the courtroom while being used as beards for the AI programs that are doing all the work for both the lawyers and judges.
The legal profession will be one of the last to be automated, because they will write laws to make it so.
Agreed that lawyers and politicians and kings will just make it illegal to automate their jobs, while insisting that doctors and plumbers and accountants and truck drivers are out in the cold.
But even if you forbid expert systems from “practicing law”, what will happen is just as you outline, you have lawyers that are nothing more than meat puppets for the expert systems that do the real work. Sure, that’s a job, but it’s unskilled labor and not worth much more compensation that flipping burgers.
We can imagine all sorts of these George Jetson style “jobs”, where a human being comes to work, gets himself a cup of coffee, settles down at his desk and presses the big red button, then kicks back and watches in bored confusion as the robots and computers spring into action to do all the work. Why not throw in a crabby boss who’ll yell at you for coming in late, and a wife who sits at home all day and presses the button that tells the robot maid to clean the house, and another button to tell the robot kitchen to have dinner on the table when her husband gets home from the office?
It really reminds me of the earlier Orwell quotation, that a man with a toothache imagines Utopia as simply not having a toothache. To guys that broke their backs on farms and factories and mines all day, a dream job is one where you sat at a desk at pressed a button a few times a day. And to a hobo, Utopia has jails with tinfoil walls, blind watchmen, and bulldogs with rubber teeth.
I am sure that laws will be passed ensuring lawyers “adequate compensation” for all the nothing they will do. We cannot have meat puppets doing their dance for minimum wage!
There’s already a Basic Income movement underway, though I doubt it will succeed until much human suffering has occurred.
Utopia is good fifty years off, don’t get your hopes up.
Yes, five years is ridiculous. Maybe in twenty or thirty. [Edited to add: they could actually make this transition easier if they banned people and their slow reflexes, poor decisionmaking, and all-around unpredictability from manually driving at all. Then the “cloud” could just move everyone along smoothly, “tailgating” at high speeds with little risk.]
Absolutely.
Planet Money has another interesting tale of automation, this time in the restaurant business (including Pizzeria Uno, Chili’s, Applebee’s, and Olive Garden). Makes total sense that these gizmos would increase dessert sales: having a waiter (especially if significantly thinner than the customer) standing there asking if you “have room” makes a lot of people hesitate.
What surprises me though is that this would actually increase the size of tips. Waiters under this system don’t have to take orders, bring a check, collect the money, or bring you change. Nor do they have to come by and check how you are doing, since there’s a call button (and that’s nice too, as I have found it annoying to have them interrupt conversation when not needed, as well as being frustrating not to be able to get their attention when needed). Why give them more money for doing only (at most) half the job?
My guess is because they default to 20% (at least at the Chili’s near me) when the tip option comes up, and you have to manually move it to give them more or less.
So I bet a lot of people just take the default, or even add to it, but relatively few are quite ruthless enough to run the tip DOWN to 15% or less.
I’m sure that’s true (although I’m one that would certainly be that “ruthless”). Seems strange though on the business’s part: they aren’t getting any of that tip money, but they are discouraging people from coming in as frequently, or ordering as much.
Given the research on defaults, I rather suspect you are right. Lots of people are unsure about tipping - making 20% the default would be a social cue that this was the right amount. What would be really interesting would be to study if people who go to these restaurants start tipping 20% at non-automated places they go to.
