Hacker News Reader

Comment by petra | Hacker News Reader

>> RFS: Robot Factories.

From all the places where AI could help, why focus on that field, the place where the most vulnerable employees are found, the hundreds of millions from china, Bangladesh, etc - who have little chance of having a meaningful Social safety net ?

>> job re-training, which will be a big part of the shift.

I don't believe that this is realistic, even in the west. Why ? because the internet, who is obsessed about this subject, and doesn't lack imagination, can't even supply a decent list of what jobs will the future offer that could employ the masses who's jobs will be automated.

View on HN

>> job re-training, which will be a big part of the shift.

To me there's no other way to look at this other than having faith in our ability to find work to do. Wherever there is deficiency in technology, humans will find a way to fill in. Now the question is whether this will be at the same scale, and will there always be gaps to fill in. No one knows. We never have known. We've just blindly innovated and had faith. It's worked so far. Until it doesn't we will probably just continue doing it.

In other words, this is and has always been unplannable. An example. When DARPA invented the internet, no one explicitly said "We're going to put a bunch of mail staff, brick and mortar commerce employees, etc, out of work so we better ensure we train programmers to help fill the void."

I'm with you though; it concerns me.

>> When DARPA invented the internet..b&m employees.. programmers

As for being less brick-and-mortar employees ? i think that was an historical trend, so it makes sense it will continue, supported by tech.

Also It's somewhere between 1960 and 1970(darpa and the internet), i think. But Moore made his law in 1965. So we guess that in 2017 computers are extremely abundant and fast, connected at high speeds(moore + internet), and we know they are versatile.

So we can guess they'll have many uses(and a lot of room for imagining), and maybe we'll need many programmers for that.

furthermore , see my comment on predicting jobs, i don't think it's that hard(in general) :https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=13910181&goto=threads%...

It concerns me as well.

But jobless people are a resource that entrepreneurs will find a way to utilize for profit. It's not that the technology will require new kinds of work, but that idle people will enable new kinds of companies.

I think that Uber/Lyft/Prime Now/etc were enable because of high unemployment / low participation rates.

Factory floor robots will be of use for economies where their populations are in decline, Japan, and soon China, much of Europe. The pace of adoption; as you imply, will negatively impact the workforce --China being China, though, I can see them doing this in a more methodical way, they do not wish to upset their population lest they unwittingly foment unrest.

That said, despite whatever you think, VCs want return on investment and they do not really care about who and what they replace --for example, environmental concerns, they do their PR thing but they will still build/invest in projects which will develop in places with less stringent regulation effectively undermining their domestic posture on environmental issues as well as their posture vis a vis respect for the working person. They just want money and influence --but to feel conscientiously at ease they may engage in political issues that locally will appear to be progressive.

The number of industrial robots in Japan is actually dropping, whereas China is hockey-stick. (Source: UN report[0] released October 2016)[1]

I visited two Chinese factories this week, one for injection-molded plastics and one for metal. Both were essentially collections of very expensive automated machinery such as 5-axis steel boring CNC controllers and high powered laser cutters, with a few gantries, finishing/packaging and storage areas. There were as many people on computers working with 3D models as there were standing on the factory floor. In the latter case, the primary interface was usually a keyboard and mouse or touchscreen.

[0] http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/presspb2016d6_en.pd... (page 3, citing UNCTAD secretariat calculations, based on International Federation of Robotics, 2015, World Robotics 2015: Industrial Robots, available at http://www.ifr.org/industrial-robots/statistics/ (accessed 19 October 2016))

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12991293

The bit about Japanese robot numbers going down is interesting, are factories producing less or are they replacing prev gen robots with newer ones capable of more output (more efficient)?

Japanese GDP is declining and hasn't grown much at all in real terms since the 1990's[1], so... maybe producing less and not replacing with more capable robots?

[1] http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp

While it's true that there have been, are, and will continue to be a loss of manufacturing jobs as a result of automation, robotics, and AI, we also need to consider the other side of the economic spectrum, and look historically to see what has happened when these kinds of shifts come.

For example, I'm sitting next to someone who is working on robotic apple-pickers. The amount of cost from buying apples is about 75% represented by labor. So yes, there would be job loss, but what if apples start to cost 25% of what they currently do? What if we extrapolate that across all fields?

What if we could do this with everything we need - food, consumer goods, housing, etc? It's a shift as big as the industrial revolution and moving away from an agricultural society from a consumer perspective. In short: Life would get much better and cheaper for all of us and fast.

But then there's unemployment. What will the masses do? Well, what did the masses that used to be farmers do when we moved from 50% of the United States being farmers to the current levels of ~2%?

The answer historically has been that entirely new types of employment are created, and the pain is remarkably short-lived considering the size of the shift and the decrease in costs, and the Luddites look silly in retrospect. It's usually hard to see looking forward, but somehow it's always worked out.

I'm not sure what the entire picture looks like; I do think that we will need massive re-education as a society, and we're completely unprepared for that. In the past we've replaced unskilled labor with new unskilled roles, and I don't see those roles hanging around anymore. (I moved to San Francisco from a very rural town, and I get stressed whenever I think of the economic future of that small town. Until there's risk-free education available at will that area is economically doomed.

But I don't think the proper response is to slow innovation because of pending job loss. If the AI shift will be as big of a deal as the Knternet, imagine how much better it makes the lives of everyone - is that really something we should actively fight against? I'd argue history suggests we shouldn't.

> In the past we've replaced unskilled labor with new unskilled roles, and I don't see those roles hanging around anymore.

The sad reality is that there's a nontrivial chunk of the populace that isn't able to pick up highly skilled roles. It also ignores the role of unskilled jobs in providing space for people whose job class has been destroyed and need to retrain (or mark time until retirement).

I'm not advocating slowing innovation to prevent job loss. I am advocating avoiding magic thinking ('there's always new jobs to go to'): we need to start a serious conversation about what we do with our society when we have the levels of unemployment we can expect in an AI-shifted world. Right now we're trending much more towards dystopia than utopia.

ahem basic income

Rich economies could (barely?) afford that, how could mismanaged economies afford a basic income given they don't have much in the way of economic might to afford a basic income. Think Indonesia, Bangladesh.

I keep pointing out that Bucky Fuller calculated that we could pretty much take care of everyone on Earth while working ten hours a week if we just applied the technology we have in an efficient manner. (By the mid-1970's he claimed.)

>> but what if apples start to cost 25% of what they currently do? What if we extrapolate that across all fields? ... do this with everything we need...

That's great, as long as there are new jobs, or a decent safety net(which i doubt).

>> The answer historically has been that entirely new types of employment are created, ... It's usually hard to see looking forward, but somehow it's always worked out.

It's not always worked out - remember horses ? and what about the terrible transition period ? but let's leave that.Is it really that hard to see looking forward ? That's a more interesting question:

So before the industrial revolution, rich people bought a lot and a variety of clothes/foods/things/services(doctor/lawyer/cook/traveling/transportation), large houses, etc . So assuming things would get cheaper, they'll be more available , you could imagine that regular people will want those things,a lot of them, but maybe with even more variety(more people). So you could imagine a consumer culture.

And the same for the business side: businesses wanted advertising, transportation, financial services, manufacturing, knowledge, etc.. So if all those things will become cheaper - and better, you could assume they would want more and more of them.

And furthermore - before the industrial revolution there we're many problems - the world wasn't ideal(you got sick, life we're boring). In general , we can assume many of those problems will get solved, so they'll create new demand.

So so many new jobs! And we know all that - we've seen it happen!

So why the hell we cannot think of new jobs ?

> Why can't we think of new jobs?

My job didn't exist 50 years ago. Did yours?

Which job, existing or new, cannot be automated?

Cross-cultural educationalist philosopher.

Well, what did the masses that used to be farmers do when we moved from 50% of the United States being farmers to the current levels of ~2%?

Didn't that work in the opposite way, though? New opportunities appeared that pulled (sometimes forced) people away from farming; it wasn't like there was a bunch of unemployed ex-farmers who suddenly started finding new jobs.

I thought that's exactly what it was. Dustbowl -> Great Depression -> New Deal -> WWII -> Industrial Revolution takes off

Which time period in history? In the 1830s, you'd get younger sons or daughters of a farming family who would move away to the city to earn extra spending money for their family and find a measure of independence; oftentimes the eldest son would inherit the farm, so there was no place there for the other children.

In the 1930s, the farms were themselves collapsing. Mechanized agriculture created both a huge oversupply of produce (which drove down prices) and also ruined the ecology of the plains, which eventually led to the dust bowl. Farmers absolutely were forced off their land: that's where we got Okies, Hobos, the Great Migration, Grapes of Wrath, and all those other subcultures of migrant workers from.

What do you suggest they focus on then? I think it's a good thing. That change is coming one way or another, so why not own it?

Considering that UC is also funding Basic Income research, I think they'd be one of the better people to be automating stuff.

The legal and healthcare industries being disrupted by AI would be preferable. That's where a lot of inefficiency exists. Both of those are making it very hard for "normal people" to afford legal help or good medical care, due to how expensive they can get. If a single lawyer could use an AI to do 95% of his or her work, I imagine that would drastically cut his or her total fees.

Doctors are overworked as is and won't have their jobs replaced, they will only benefit. And doctors don't deserve to lose their jobs anyways. Lawyers on the other hand...

I've also become cynical in this regard - "better in the long run" often means that entire generations of people will suffer, which is a huge societal impact in the end. It's even scarier when you consider this new industrial revolution will need even fewer people, which means wealth will be redistributed even less, and will probably bias those who already have access to capital to fund such ventures. More and more I'm convinced that we owe it to ourselves to provide a safety net for every person that allows them to live a decent life without worry for basic needs - UBI or otherwise.

Here's an article about that idea from the POV of startups, though I think it's more generally just a moral thing we should do: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/the-ent...

Reducing the cost of manufactured goods helps the poor as much as the rich.

For instance: Reducing the cost of farm equipment could enable poor rural farmers to rise above subsistence farming. I could think of countless examples.

In fact, reducing the cost of manufactured goods helps the poor more than the rich in some sense, since a marginal reduction in cost of living for them is much more impactful than for a rich person.

Think about it from a revenue standpoint. It doesn't matter if your cost of living becomes 50% cheaper if you lose 100% of your income.

If 10 people's cost of living drop 50%, then one drop of 100% of income would be acceptable.

I guess YC is looking at this from the perspective that it would prefer if its startups wouldn't have to deal with manufacturing issues in China, when the entrepreneurs could build everything they need in robot-powered factories in the United States.

I'm not agreeing with them, just saying that I think this is where they are coming from.

Surely YC isn't to blame for the 'vulnerable employees' you speak of?

Why attack YC instead of the ones exploiting those employees, or even the systems that allow exploitation to occur in the first place?

But no, by all means, lock those 'vulnerable employees' into a job that they will be treated as sub-human for the rest of their lives, all in the name of 'job security' (or whatever you think you're preserving).

Because YC is both the one advancing AI work and proposing this "solution".

If the problem is truly exploitation, then let's attack exploitation.

Because aside from exploitation, there is another very real problem of replacement. Who said there's only one problem to be attacked at a time?

The point wasn't that this employees have terrible jobs. Some sure do, some doesn't.

The point is that if factory work is automated - they'll have no other possible job, and no safety net, unlike the west. Thus they are vulnerable.

>if factory work is automated - they'll have no other possible job, and no safety net

I know, and it's morally disgusting and I wish systems like this didn't exist in the first place.

What I'm saying is that there is no future in which automation does not replace (most) human labor, so if the goal is ROI, then why would YC ever invest in something other than that? It would be delaying the inevitable, would it not?

Let's say YC provides a UBI to all of those displaced workers; now what? A bunch of unemployed are (still) surviving in the same fucked up system as before and the problem still exists.

To somehow pin the problems of the system on YC's investments is ignoring the larger, more pressing problems of socioeconomic inequality and exploitation as a whole.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com