Jobs that are disappearing thanks to robots
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
We change. Jobs change. The planet changes. The only thing which will never change is that we will never be able to see into the future. Low quality articles predicting something which triggers gut reaction doom are auto trash. I don't even need AI for that filter.
Pharmacists, lawyers, and journalists.
It isn't just dangerous jobs - it's repetitive or easily automated ones across the board. In very few cases does it completely eliminate a role - more often it is a force multiplier, letting fewer do more.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/3-white-collar-jobs-robo...
Being a real journalist is a far more creative work then being a programmer. Especially in fields like investigative journalism - you must be a 100,000X programmer if you think you can replace Glenn Greenwald with a bot.
At this point, there should be a name for "No True Scotsman" applied to creativity. I have a tough time seeing the comparison between someone reporting what actually went on to someone creating wholly new things. I actually don't want creativity in my journalists or historians. I want ethics and fact checking.
On the other hand, I am very little impressed by the quality of what passes for journalism and am pretty confident that a computer could write much of what I see with better fact checking. Very much like CASE tools of old were used to write programs. At least a robot might be programmed with the courtesy to quote the whole thought and not make cuts that can be attacked or change the meaning.
As to the narrative, too many journalists write their articles as if they were pundits defending their beliefs and "trying to change the world". It is great to be engaging and write something that interests people, but leave the punditry for the political campaigns.
When customers stop paying, fewer journalists have jobs.
The greedy non-news model predates the internet for a long while. The internet just brought some competition.
Well, the robots don't buy newspapers.
I grew up in such a town, and as a kid, I knew the pharmacist a lot better than the family doctor: "my ma told me to ask you about this wart on my hand", that kind of thing. Heck, our pharmacists even did home deliveries to old people (on her bike, no joke). I'm in a my mid-thirties, so this is not entirely ancient history.
So I can see why that social aspect of the work - which is incredible valuable - cannot be automated.
Now, there's WebMD, pharmacists are doing a shift in CVS, "small town life" is pretty much dead, these soft relationships between shopkeepers and customers no longer exist, people no longer defer to authority as easily as they used to, ...
Also, pharmacists have the law on their side. Drugs are a political issue, so they nurture their role as gate-keeper. For that reason alone, the credentialing will persist. The only difference is that perhaps a pharmacist will just be the lady pushing the on/off button on the vending machine, but still, somebody will need to push that button. The jobs that will be automated won't be the pharmacist's job, it will be the assistant's jobs.
She tried to call the pharmacy to see if there was any other alternative, or chance to get on her old pill due to the nasty side-effects. All she got in response was heartless no's and not our problem.
So I totally agree with the idea that these soft-relationships are a thing of the past.
Why would using a bike to make deliveries be a joke?
Lots of things are delivered by bike.
(Even really simple things like computerizing prescriptions and flagging known bad combinations make them more effective, roughly for free)
The pharmacists at my local pharmacy seem to spend most of their time advising patients and dealing with their problems, verifying the pill dispensers actually dispensed the right medication and it is all intact, handling physical scripts for things like controlled substances, calling doctors when a prescription doesn't make sense or wasn't clear, flagging possible drug abuse, managing inventory, handling drugs that can't easily be dispensed by the machines like insulin and checking how much a person's insurance will cover and if it is still valid.
But with online ordering(PillPack ,etc) ,the laws are different, so there's more automation.
We really have to get past the "people would totally get a job if they weren't so damn lazy" mentality.
Obviously this depends on a post-scarcity economy, but it sounds like a better world than one full of assistant HR support analysts.
Take software outsourcing: what was the going rate for an Ukrainian developer 10 years ago and what it is now? The is no longer much of an arbitrage, American developer can compete easily just because of better English and working in the same time zone.
And that is NOT because Ukraine became richer. It didn't. Nominal current-dollar GDP growth since 2003 in USA and Ukraine was about the same (about 1.60x). But the developer salaries which were 5% of American in 2003, at best, are now at least 25%. Which leaves very little sense in outsourcing (and yes Ukrainian developers live the same if not better than American ones these days, at least in a purely material sense - of course crime, environment etc. are much worse there)
I think same is the case with most outsourced industries, except for the few where outsourcing has been so complete in past years that the American skills in these areas are no longer available.
Picking from the top of BI list, do these jobs even exist today?:
3. Switchboard operators, including answering service
1. Telephone operators
The article portraits these jobs are in process of disappearing, looking at the numbers above, looks like BI is rather late with their "news".
[1] http://www.deptofnumbers.com/employment/us/ (assuming data is correct)
2. It's bad that we're still in the middle ages when it comes to this thing where if you don't slave yourself enough to something, you starve because no money.
If robots took over all the jobs that nobody wants to do and people only did the things they loved whether its sitting on their arse or becoming doctors we might just evolve as a civilization to the next level. I think this is also key to becoming a monetary-less society.
Obviously the trick and hard part will be to still get people interested and motivated to become doctors and engineers,etc ..
I personally love what I do as an engineer and could see myself doing even more engineering tasks if resources wasn't a constraint.
Personally I love problem solving and could not handle sitting on my arse all day long, and I don't think I'm one bit unique in this mentality.
Will it happen ? I doubt any time within the next century if ever.
However, I think to evolve as humanity we need to change the system we have today. Currently its more beneficial to hide information than to share it because of monetary gains.
No one really wants to sit on their ass all day, that's just something that's made up by rich people to stress us out so we continue working like dogs for them instead of on our real projects.
If you sat me down in front of the TV with no responsibilities forever everything provided I probably wouldn't last three days.
Somehow I don't think that m-f 40+ hour work week is the most relevant thing about our live once we die.Yet its the most time consuming part of it.
Wouldn't you prefer to be free to work for things that you think are valuable... not in your free time, y'know, the time that should be for yourself and the things you love?
What's up with all these weird open source folk, working hard to create value and giving it away for free, uplifting for all? I hear this linux thing is pretty cool. It's almost like we can capture productivity in code and then copy it endlessly for practically free and everyone benefits. How are these people motivated?!
Maybe we should pursue this cooperation thing... who am I kidding. It fails every. single. time.! Right?
You seem to be justifing the concentration of capital and power in a few hands in order to 'motivate' the rest of the population.
Granted, no one really does anything without considering the possibility of that thing causing them to go six feet under, but you've stated that the only motivation to do anything ever, to decrease the local entropy around yourself even one bit, is under the threat of death.
Are you not aware how unhealthy, conformist, tool-like of a life-philosophy this is?
(Also, you don't need to exactly buy into all this startup cult shit and work your ass off from the beginning, just do anything that makes you more money than you put in. I know this is obvious but judging from most people like you, you need that dose of reality)
Sweden is doing fine. Australia is doing fine. Those two countries are generally in the top 5 of any quality-of-life measure you care to name. The UK is mostly doing fine.
Socialism is not communism.
You probably have a different definition of need than I do. Want != need.
http://www.wltx.com/story/money/2015/05/12/technical-college...
AFAIK, there is no changes in accounting process since, I don't know, 50 years ago? Accounting should have been replaced by software and people start teaching/learning how to use the software instead of teaching at university.