Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

I can't be alone in thinking this recent "robots are talking all the unskilled jobs" meme is a bit overblown. It feels premature, at best.

I'm skeptical about the robotic lawyer and pharmacist use cases the article calls out. These seem like really distant applications--nothing I gather we'll see in the next decade, anyway. I have a friend going to pharmacy school, and I wouldn't think to warn her about her career choice just yet. Mistakes in these fields simply cost too much.

What other careers are at immediate risk? How big of a working population will be put out of work?

I imagine trucking and freight is the industry most immediately at risk.

Autonomous vehicles are impressive, but there are so many social problems arising from failure modes we've yet to answer. I'm imagining the first fatal accident arising from an autonomous truck--the press will jump on automation like vultures. The lawsuits will be huge. I can't imagine the court of public opinion being kind to the shipping company whose machine kills an unsuspecting family on vacation.

I realize that doesn't prevent automation from happening, but I think it could bring any rollout to an immediate halt.

And though it's getting a bit off topic, I feel like the "no more car ownership" meme is utter hyperbole. I would be willing to bet money that private car ownership will continue to be a thing for a long time. How much would an hour and a half long Uber commute cost to make every day for workers living in a city without sufficient public transit, such as Atlanta? Are people that live or travel to rural areas going to participate in ride sharing? Increasing remote work and better housing options seem like they will be more pragmatic solutions to the plague of the commute.

As much as I'd like to see increased efficiency through AI and automation, it still seems much too early to count humans out. I guess I'll eat my words when I see it.

I imagine trucking and freight is the industry most immediately at risk.

I think it's jobs that are essentially a manual version of a computer program that will disappear first - the day-to-day work of lawyers and accountants is already being eaten by code, and that trend will continue until there are very few people in those industries. I'd go so far as to suggest there won't be any accountants in 20 years time, just accounting software and the people who run it.

Automating something mechanical is far harder than automating data processing.

On the media jumping on it like vultures, I think plane accidents can give us hope.

When there is a plane crash, medias will be all over it for weeks. But at the same time they will repeat again and again that aircrafts are incredibly safe, and that you are more likely to have a crash on your way to the airport, etc.

The opposite is done for terrorism. Every time someone is killed in a terror attack, the message is "it could happen to you".

So not sure what makes them behave either way but it could still turn out to be OK.

On car ownership I agree. I don't really buy that all cars will be shared when fully automated.

For sentimental reasons, people like to own their car, they like to invest in it, they don't like to find a car that looks more like a mix of dumpster and toilet after 20 party-goers used it before you.

For a very practical reason, the same reason farmers own there heavy equipment when they could just rent it: because they all need it at the same time. The primary purpose for cars is commuting from home to work and everyone needs to do that at about the same time. So the only guarantee you will have to have a car available when you need it at peak period will be to own it.

What I think could happen is that when self driving cars have become mandatory in large cities, you won't really need to park the car near where you live or work. It could go park itself in some large underground car park 5-10 min away. Without parked cars on both sides of the street you increase the capacity of most cities (at least in Europe) massively.

That plus smoother driving could go a long way eliminating traffic jams.

The primary purpose for cars is commuting from home to work and everyone needs to do that at about the same time. So the only guarantee you will have to have a car available when you need it at peak period will be to own it.

I think a more likely outcome would be that employers have to become more flexible. If you have to be at work by 9am but you can't get there at that time then you can't do the job. If everyone is in that situation the employer won't be able to fill the position. Ergo, change will happen.

There are reasons why companies have sort of standardised business hours. School schedules. Being able to interact with other companies. And within a company you sort of want people to be around at the same time otherwise you lose efficiency.

There are reasons why companies have sort of standardised business hours.

It's because 50 years ago scheduling was hard. You had to notify people of things sending them a letter via a post system. Large companies had their own internal mail systems. After that there was email that sped things up a lot, and now we have video conferencing so you can have a meeting whenever you want without even really needing to schedule it if all the parties are available. So long as there are a few core hours when everyone who'd need to meet all work then hours wouldn't be an issue.

A robot pharmacist is a trivial application -- it's just a secure vending machine, essentially a fancy coffee machine.

In principle, pharmacists exercise a lot of professional judgement -- everything from preventing/reporting drug abuse to noticing when a set of prescribed medications shouldn't be taken together. They act as the safe join operation of the medical system, which forks between specialists, various offices, etc., who usually don't communicate well with one another.

In practice, you may be right -- I don't know enough about pharmacies to know.

> I'm skeptical about the robotic lawyer and pharmacist use cases the article calls out. These seem like really distant applications

Machine learning is being applied in DNA research and chemistry right now, not over decades.

You may well be right, but it's pretty common to initially overestimate the pace of progress ("it'll be ready in 15 years" for 100 years running) only to severely underestimate it later on ("it feels premature"). Given the recent evidence of unexpectedly early breakthroughs in AI ("it'll take another 10 years to beat humans at Go") I think it's not crazy to ask whether the inflection point has been reached.

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