Ask HN: If the bots take your job, what would you do? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: If the bots take your job, what would you do?

40 pointsholaboyperu89 comments

I personally would take up golfing or play chess by the park. What about you guys?

Struggle to re-establish my economic viability before my marriage collapsed under a pile of unpaid bills. Worst case scenario I'd slam my car into a bridge piling at a hundred and twenty miles an hour knowing my life insurance policy would cover the mortgage and my son's college education. Edit: oh wait...is this a thought experiment where capitalism isn't a thing anymore?

I was thinking more along the lines of "Turn to a life of crime." But your solution also has merit.

Suicide and crime have merit? I fail to see the ethical upside of any of those besides short-term gains.

They can effect change in an overall uncaring system.

Edit: From an ethical perspective it can be argued that a person who is "good" but does not help less fortunate "bad" people is not in a morally superior position (however you want to interpret that to make the sentence work).

Assuming that society's ability to absorb all the new unemployable citizens is maxed out I would say that in dire times ethics and morality are a luxury.

I wouldn't think in term of gains, if someone doesn't want to live, it's because he/she has no other goal left. Despite the moral/ethical issues this may be a more realistic scenario that what it initially looks. This is what's happening in Italy for the economic crisis

http://www.beppegrillo.it/2011/12/il_veneto_degli.html

http://www.trevisotoday.it/economia/numero-verde-anti-suicid...

http://www.iltempo.it/cronache/2016/09/25/news/2016-il-tragi...

http://www.ilgazzettino.it/nordest/primopiano/presentato_in_... http://mattinopadova.gelocal.it/regione/2015/09/08/news/suic...

http://www.vvox.it/2016/09/11/crisi-veneto-prima-regione-per...

You've seen their merits, then - now think about when they would be worth taking...

Well, I meant that in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way. But then again, when one is watching their children go hungry, the list of things one is willing to do for money/food expands a bit.

On Maslow's hierarchy of needs ethics are most likely a tier 3 or tier 4 concern. We're discussing a scenario that directly threatens tier 1 concerns. So on what grounds is it shocking that ethics are the first thing to go?

(I do not necessarily agree with the following, but I think it might be a defensible position)

The hallmark of civilization is specialization. Instead of everyone having to hunt and farm their own food, build their own shelter from resources they mined/harvested/gathered themselves, only own whatever property they can by force stop other people from taking, and so on, we specialize.

The price for specialization is the loss of self-reliance. To get people to give up that self-reliance and specialize, it has to be implicit in the social contract that if they pick a useful specialty that society needs, they will be able to make a living for essentially the rest of their life. That's important because it can be very hard to change specialties, especially for someone who is older and has a family to support.

In the past when automation took jobs it usually took long enough and there was enough warning that specialists faced a slow decline in their specialty. New people could stop entering that specialty, but there would still be enough work to keep the existing practitioners going for the most part.

For instance, it took a long time for passenger aircraft to seriously take a bite out of demand for passenger rail service. That at least gave people considering careers related to passenger rail a good shot at recognizing when that would no longer be a safe lifetime career and choose something else.

Now we seem to be automating things faster. We can go from "automation is something your grandkids might have to worry about" in a given job to "there is a decade left on this job" in just a few years. People who played by the implicit social contract's rules, and picked specialties that were in demand and that no one seriously thought would be automated for several decades at the earliest are going to get screwed.

I think one could make a plausible argument that society has breached the social contract in such cases, and owes those people compensation in the form of one or more of (1) training them for some other comparable (by income and difficulty) work, (2) early retirement with some kind of pension to let them keep their standard of living until they reach normal retirement age, (3) throttling the rate that these jobs can be replaced by automation so instead of people being fired to make room for the bots the bots only replace workers who are retiring or leaving normally.

If society is not going to uphold the social contract, or compensate for its breach, then perhaps one can make the case that it is not unethical for the aggrieved former worker to also breach the social contract and turn to crime to support himself and his family, depending on the type of crime.

Other than, attempt to retrain and look for another job?

Without quite knowing the scope or seriousness of question, it's tricky.

I'm in IT, started as a sysadmin in PeopleSoft/ERP world, currently a hands-on team-lead. A lot of stuff we do can, should, and will be automated. Which will remove my hands-on portion and reduce my team-lead portion.

I've been lucky/careful to retrain both up (relative direction) and laterally over the last decade, partially to avoid being off-shored (pretty much every time I moved a position, shortly thereafter previous one was no longer done in-house), partially to remain relevant to management and clients.

I enjoy learning, but one day I may burn-out, and/or no longer be capable of learning fast enough, and/or all the things I'd like to / can easily learn will be automated. At that point, I haven't a clue, we'll see in which way we get there...

> attempt to retrain and look for another job?

The question is whether there will be a Big Rip type of event, where jobs are being automated faster than most people can retrain.

In that case it is pointless to speculate, a future like that will be so unlike our present that speculation is roughly where science fiction is.

Not really, this is the position middle america finds itself in. Different population groups retrain at different speeds.

We must have different ideas about what 'the Big Rip' is.

The one I'm familiar with is a cosmology one, where because of the speed of the increase of expansion of the universe everything literally gets torn apart.

Applied to the work situation it means a future roughly related to the plot of 'Accelerando', and once we hit that kind of rate-of-change all bets are off in the most literal sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando

oh, I was going by the definition you left in your previous post. Ie) technology changes faster than people can retrain.

> jobs are being automated faster than most people can retrain

For the section of the US between the Hudson river and the SF bay this has been the case for ~20 years. What most 30 year old laid off workers MAY do is very different from what they CAN do. Saying "ohh, just learn to code" isn't helpful to someone worried about making rent this month let alone paying their internet bill.

Change my business cards to say "artisanal codesmith" and go looking for employers who value the wabi-sabi of code with genuine organic bugs. [edit - spelling, or were they genuine organic errors?]

Why do only few people realize that bots ARE NOT(!) the problem! Our f*cked up economic system is! If we would live in. better society in which capitalism is finally known to be horrible by a majority of people, everyone would profit from robots and almost everyone (except those mind-sick workaholics) would be happy. We just need to finally acknowledge, that capitalism is bullshit, period.

P.S.: I hate communism more than capitalism, so don't dare to accuse me of being one of those who my family fled from...

Why do you hate communism? Is there a legitimate reason?

Given his statement I'm assuming his family fled a particular implementation of communism at some point in the past. I struggle with responses to statements like OP has made for a number of reasons. I find it questionable that authoritarianism is a required component of a communist society. That said it has clearly been a component of all implementations of "communism" at the national level. I'm air quoting that because again it's questionable that authoritarian regimes bear any resemblance to actual ML political theory, and most real world implementations were merely authoritarian regimes that borrowed the stalinist playbook and enough ML buzzwords to offer a fig leaf during their rise to power.

Communism requires a planned economy which requires authoritarianism.

Post scarcity != communism, if we go by the motief of this thread then the federation is not communist it also doesn't have a planned economy.

I hear what you're saying. I question the assertion that economic planning requires authoritarianism, unless you're being really loose with the term.

planned economy isn't the same thing as economic planning.

"an economy in which production, investment, prices, and incomes are determined centrally by the government."

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/planned_economy

And government oversight isn't the same thing as authoritarianism. As with most things the devil is usually in the details. I recommend looking into the anarcho-syndicalist strategy for structuring economic activity for a snapshot of one possible approach to the problem of establishing planned economic activity without devolving into a gulag-riddled dystopia.

This isn't oversight, this is the government controlling all capital, the market, and every other part of the economy.

Anarcho-syndicalism isn't an economic model, it's a revolutionary model which is the most common problem with the vast majority of so called alternative models to planned economy or the free market.

The models are more about how to get control over the power and influence but are very light on what to do next.

facepalm Anarcho-syndicalism is absolutely an economic as well as a political model. Cheers.

Once you get the power whilst operating within a free market what then?

How is this a sustainable model?

The main reason why I stated this about communism is the constant buzzword-like usage of "communist" by too many right-wingers, when they read anything related to critisizing their oh so beloved capitalistic society. I don't follow communists and want to kill them. So I don't despise it like my worst enemy. But, especially regarding communism that actually happened, like Russia, East-Germany, Cuba, North Korea, etc, I stand against those types with everything I am. And honestly communism wouldn't be ao shitty if people had more self-discpline and could sacrifice freedom for the sake of a better environment for the majority of people. But humans don't work like this which is why communism never worked without making it unfair and totalitarian.

Offer solutions, not problems.

I definitely wouldn't put all my fears, hopes, and dreams in to a vote for a politician who promises to bring my job back.

What I WOULD do is move to a place with the lowest possible cost of living and become a bartender or something equally undemanding.

Cheers 2: Topeka

Bartending is more demanding than you would think.

Almost certainly, but usually the schedule is flexible enough that I could just work fewer shifts if it gets to be too much.

Heh, too late: http://vegas.eater.com/2017/3/6/14824690/first-robotic-bar-e...

Just having fun here, but:

In a world where a skilled worker (such as yourself) resorts to that, who are your customers at the bar and how do they make money to pay their tab?

And where is the robot bartender in this scenario?

It depends. If we're post-scarcity then my customers would be like the Ten Forward customers on the Enterprise and I'd get to wear a sweet hat like Whoopi.

If not, then I assume they'd be like I am now: someone lucky enough to be able to take advantage of the current status of the labor marketplace.

As for the robot bartender, I'd imagine myself working in a hipster bar that still uses human bartenders because it's simple, authentic, and people like that it's old-fashioned. We'll even have Edison bulbs.

I literally made a scene laughing at this while sitting in a hipster cafe complete with Edison light bulbs.

How many lights are there?

Just six. Is that enough for what you had in mind?

I was springing off remyp's Star Trek reference: http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/12050/why-four-ligh...

Are we assuming a magic source of income?

If yes: I'd take up writing, teaching and practicing yoga, and charcoal drawing.

If no: I'd probably have to be some kind of nanny or domestic help. :/

I think everyone "assumes" basic income grants, when the robots make say upwards of 50 percent of people redundant.

I myself remain sceptical. If you low-medium skilled you should be able to find work from the people made richer by the robots, as butlers, assistants, etc... Yes even with the best robot, some people will prefer human contact. Some people may even pay a premium for companionship.

A "modern servant" scenario (if you will let me summarize it as such) might work when robots make, say, 50% of people redundant. But what about 90%? 99%? 100%?

Another thing: In a fully automated, yet capitalist society, wealth will be concentrated in the hands of even fewer people than right now, because we will come to a point where no one will offer robots for sale anymore, so no one can become rich except by heritage, and rich people will fail and become poor at a certain rate (because that's how capitalism works).

This process leads to a financial singularity in which 10 people own all the money in the world (and all the robots). I see two likely scenarios then:

1. Since one rich person (and their family) cannot possibly use a billion servants, a lot of the poor people will not be able to make a living and die.

2. The poor people agree to not care about the meaning of these green slips of paper anymore and seize the robots.

Come to think of it, #1 is actually more likely if the robots are intelligent enough to protect themselves against being seized.

If the bots can pick up the phone, make a sale and get a client to pay me on a subscription basis, I won't need to do anything. I will sit on my couch, sip some wine and watch TV. Until then, I have a job.

Why should the bots pay you, then?

Good point. Damn back to square one.

As some others have mentioned, the title vs the text confuse a little.

The main difficulty in the thought process is what is meant by "my job". Of course, it can't literally be just my job. It would have to be a class of jobs. What class? I do a little supervision, a little data analysis, a little CRUD app maintenance/development. The hardest part of my job is translating customer requests/requirements into action without adverse side effects. So we can imagine a NLP+AI type bot could potentially solve that problem.

So in that case, there's now globally little-to-no demand for intermediate level programming and analysis. So I can't just switch to another, similar job.

At that point, what happens depends strongly on the environment. My wife is now in training to be a nurse. Has she completed that training and is so working when the automation event occurs? If so and if her job is unimpacted, then we simply downsize our lifestyle to accommodate the reduced income.

Does basic income exist at the point when the automation event occurs? If so, that's a fallback.

Have any new industries appeared as a result of new technology that don't exist today? If so, what kind of entry requirements are observed? What timeline would I estimate to attempt to retrain? Could it be done before the target industry itself is automated away?

As a final fallback, I'm lucky to have a supportive family in the area. I would describe my situation and offer to do their household chores in exchange for room and board.

If we are at the point where the job of "translating customer requests/requirements into action without adverse side effects" can be performed by an "NLP+AI type bot", I can literally not imagine any type of job that could not be automated. Politics is supposed to be the hardest kind of job, and what you do is basically politics if you s/customer/voter/.

With condition of being suppled by resources for living I think it's a good idea to go into research.

It's a bit unrelated, but I think that maybe instead of just introducing basic income to suppress social tensions caused by bots taking jobs it would be better to spend the money to create new research jobs at large scale. There are plenty underexplored directions in science and research in lots of them can't be automated anytime soon.

If there were much more PhD positions that paid solid stipend (and colleges were accessible to everyone and paid solid stipends too) and there were a lot of open research positions, people losing their jobs because of automation would go to these programs and then do research which eventually might make the world a better place to live.

Just replying to someone who is going to say that not everyone is able to meaningfully participate in research, I think it is not true. Yes, different people might have different productivity and abilities, but science needs not only researchers generating new ideas, but also laboratory assistants and experimental scientists mostly just doing meticulous measurements.

However it's simpler to just throw money at people and tell them that they don't need to work rather than scale the educational and research systems to the extent that would allow them to engage a large part of the population into them.

THIS. I think basic income makes everyone becomes the same ... but people inherently need structures to climb up -- "power processes". Ted Kaczynski describes this very well in his essay "Industrial Society and it's Future" (crazy guy but actually saw the problem clearly) http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf I still think there are infinitely many amazing things to unlock and discover and everyone can be involved at various levels (whether it be experimenting and trying new things or being "subjects" in experiments) or coming up with experiments or areas of study.

The people at the top of the hierarchy would figure out the experiments with different levels / skill sets people could do. In this sense we would transition to an economy where we try to build the "System" to fit the "needs" in terms of power processes of humanity -- not just sustenance. In other words the economy becomes one where the people who are rewarded and get to the top are those that are able to create structures that enable people fulfill higher elements of maslows hierarchy than pure food and entertainment.

I don't think infinite resources equals the death of capitalism -- but rather, in a world where the bottom rungs of Maslows pyramid are fulfilled the only things of value become "systems" that enable people to exert power processes.

AFAIK most UBI advocates aren't looking to just throw money at people and tell them they don't need to work. It's not called a Universal Comfortable Income, or a Universal Middle Class Income.

Unless you're a devout ascetic or minimalist, you'll probably still want other sources of income. The UBI provides you a baseline that can make it easier for people to spend a while retraining, or resist being underpaid for miserable/dangerous work. One of the big potential boons of a UBI is that it could be paired with a rollback of minimum wage/benefit requirements, shifting the point at which automation is strongly incentivized.

In such an environment, meaningful research projects with significant low-skill components should have an easy time (at least relative to today) staffing up.

To add to this, UBI would also allow people to provide value in areas other than research. A few examples would be arts, sports, charity and community work.

Become a Robot service engineer...oh wait that's what I already am! Sorted.

Edit: I am not an actual robot service engineer except in so far as all devs service automated systems.

collaborator!

> Become a Robot service engineer

That'll be the second job to be taken over by robots.

That depends a lot on the type of the world we live in at the time the robots take my job. Are their jobs available still that I can retrain for, or are we living in a post-work world where the Robots have taken all the jobs? If it’s the former I will hopefully be able to retrain for a new job or have accomplished plan A. If it’s the latter I’m not really sure. That world would look so much different than today’s world that I’m not sure I can predict what I would be doing. Hopefully, I would be doing some kind of creative work like playing music. I suspect that even when AI is capable of producing art and entertainment there will still be a desire to go watch other humans create. Plan A is to save enough money that by the time my job is automated away I will be able to live off of my savings. That way I will have the freedom to retrain for a job that hasn't been automated away or to be able to work in a volunteer capacity or on some creative endeavor without expectation of financial return. I will probably always want to work in some capacity, so I don't see myself just retiring into leisure.

I am actively engaged in building as many robots as I can to do as much of my work for me as is expedient. "Part-time Robot manager" is my dream job. Alas, the requirements seem to change as fast as I can automate them, so I expect to be a full time robot engineer for the foreseeable future.

I'm guessing that when i'm no longer able to find a job (i'm a software engineer) our society found some solution for all of us.

Might be a little bit selfish but i do think that when i as a person with my knowledge and capabilities is no longer needed and we have still a well working economy, i'm not the only one without a job.

If the spread is to big between 'average middle class people living an acceptable life with an acceptable lifestyle' vs. 'not' our society will put that much pressure on everyone above middle class that they have to do something. Who wants to live in a country as a rich person when you have a lot of desperate people who want something from you?

Yes i do know that in usa or in south africa they have big fences but i would act and not accept the new side of the fence.

We'll all be living in a VR utopia while the robots do all the work and feed us intravenously...

I think our ideas of Utopia differ

This story has been playing out for a long time now. The plowshare, the printing press, textile mills, cars, etc...

The plowshare replaced a team of people doing the work by hand. What happened to those people when the plowing "robot" took their job?

I bet it was hard times for them, but you can't avoid the fact that we're all better off for it.

So, since we know what happened in history and can't see into the future, a more interesting way to pose this question with an understood context would be: if you were a field hand that lost your job to a plow, what would you do?

Or maybe something a little more recent in history?

If you're a horse, and the car was just invented, what do you do? That is the question.

If horses could invent cars, things would be very different. We are not horses.

An AI that could replace a software developer can likely replace all forms of white collar work. Not a whole lot left after that. I can't imagine that any new job category that such an AI would enable would need humans either.

I would go in the wild to do math and design algortihms and catch fish.

I think I'd do like Charlie Brown did and set up a "Psychological Help - $5" booth.

Wasn't it Lucy's?

As a chef - learn to code the bots, so I can continue to be creative.

Aside from that, go back to work on my voice recognition software for gaming.

Or become a hobo under a bridge, drinking from a glass jar and reminiscing about the good old days before those damn machines took over.

As a man, learn to accept a life of celibacy. Sadly, women's tendency to evaluate men by their occupation is not going to change as quickly as the jobs market.

(This is admittedly a dystopian view, but I believe it's possible.)

This sort of sentiment is sexist, demeaning, and false.

The thing is, it's already starting to happen in a small way. A quick search will find you several articles like this:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/10/dating-...

Of course, there absolutely are plenty of single men out there, it's just that they are invisible to the women quoted in the article, because they're not in the correct socioeconomic group.

I am simply saying that this trend is likely to continue. It's neither sexist nor demeaning to say that.

Throwing out a string of random adjectives does not give credence to your skepticism of the post above.

There is a huge body of research done on mating preferences for both sexes. Some of them may not confirm with your current world view.

Either celibacy, or "How I learned to stop worrying and love the sex bot".

This study on this very concept was written over 52 years ago:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734633/

I become a carpenter, probably living in a van down by the river.

Buy robots, obviously.

I'd become an electrician. Or if I wanted my own business, a carpenter.

Decent pay, and there's lots of jobs everywhere, so I could have a low cost of living.

Become the messiah to the robots hoping once they realize they don't need humans that they would still need their human messiah.

They already did. I started wrestling, maybe I'll be good enough to teach it one day. That's my plan A. :(

I'm legitimately scared by this question. What bot knows how to take a design and implement it in software?

Choose a new career where the margins are small enough to not justify being replaced by bots before I die.

Find something else to be good at way before this happens, so that I don't have to worry about it.

I'd program a bot better than the one that took my job and take his (and yours)! :)

X evangelist, where X is a job that has yet to be replaced by bots

I would start building bots.

Become a bot and get to keep your job. :)

Build bots.

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