Comment by dave_sullivan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dave_sullivan | Hacker News Reader

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> Doctors will still play an important role in treating their patients and will be more effective because they'll have powerful tools assisting them.

I get into this argument with people a lot.

I say something like, "Self driving cars will replace all the transport jobs" and the pedant says, "Well they won't replace ALL the transport jobs, so argument null and void." But no shit they won't replace ALL the transport jobs, if they replace even 30% of them, that's huge. Highest unemployment during "The Great Depression" was ~25%. I think in the case of transportation it will be more like 80% fewer transportation jobs in 10 years, something like that.

With doctors and hospitals, if there were better incentives in place promoting any level of efficiency, we would have less need for doctors (and hospital staff in general). I agree that we won't see 100% automation. But a hospital finding it can do more and better work with 50% less staff? I could see that being a possibility in our near future, with the caveat that it won't happen in the US due to the regulatory environment and incentives in healthcare.

Countries outside of the US might be more open to the idea of efficiency in healthcare.

It is no different than going to the urgent care clinic for a strep test. Doctors do not perform those either. Most diagnosis will be done via software administered by lower paid and more easily replaceable low skill labor just like urgent care clinics do with lab testing.

There are fewer accountants today because of tax software and Excel spreadsheets. They are still needed for more complex and unique situations, but there will be a lot fewer of them. The local H&R Block uses lower paid "Tax Preparers" instead.

There are a lot of research done about Walmart and about when the store moved into town there were not fewer jobs, but somehow the area got poorer. What they found was that the local community leaders(small business owners, lawyers, accountants) were automated away and/or moved to Walmart headquarters.

http://aese.psu.edu/nercrd/economic-development/for-research...

Is one I could find, but that also references other papers in the field.

This leads to me understand that like Walmart, the simple human physical labor jobs will remain long after the more skilled positions. The main reason, I believe, is that software is simply cheaper than hardware(robots) so highly skilled positions which require software not hardware to remove will be the first to go. This is exacerbated by the fact that the software replaceable jobs are the highest paid and therefore the most profitable to remove.

" The main reason, I believe, is that software is simply cheaper than hardware(robots) so highly skilled positions which require software not hardware to remove will be the first to go."

Very much this. This is how we'll be able to replace general practitioners with, at first, nurses with a bit of extra schooling - and then nurses with a 4 year degree... and then with a 2 year degree. Yet we'll still see surgeons for some time because it takes robotics or some other scientific breakthrough to replace them.

Thought experiment: do you think some part of your job will be automated before or after hospitals automate away 50% of their medical staff?

Depends on which job:

Programming, machine learning: it's constantly being automated, which leads to paradigm shifts. Those new paradigms are then studied, understood, and automated. Automation is about "not doing the same thing over and over again so you can solve new problems."

Programming, games: I'm giving a talk later this month about automating game production with machine learning. You can't really use machine learning to be "creative" yet, but you can use it to generate novel game assets, which is actually where most of the time is spent in game dev. There's also a lot of pipeline improvements that could be made by existing tools companies, most notably Adobe and Autodesk. So the upshot is it will be possible for small teams to create much more expansive game worlds. Make GTA V for $1M instead of $260M kind of thing. But even then, the history of game design has been automating different pieces -- it's basically the reason for the existence of game engines.

Starting businesses: This is controversial, but I think entrepreneurship is the highest intellectual endeavor. It requires you to apply everything you've learned about life, the universe, and everything in ways that most people haven't thought of. I think you'd need a very real AGI to do this; although I suppose I could see an algo running P&G or J&J and making decisions about what brands to invest in and divest from, along with how to market based on what people are saying on social media, stuff like that.

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