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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

Things don't have to be fully automated to mean big changes. The factory that makes Ikea bookcases employs twice the number of people it did in the 1980s but they make 37x as many bookcases [1]

We're looking at a similar situation in the programming, ops, and IT support areas.

A friend of mine Tweeted this the other night: "I'm sleepless so I just created a voice-based health tracker using Google Assistant in about 20 minutes that took me wks to write 3 yrs ago." [2]

I've heard numerous anecdotes of "A Zapier account and 20 minutes of fiddling with things just replaced a SAAS app/consultant, etc. we were paying for."

This is what automation looks like: the top 10% in a profession doing 100x the work previously done. To date the appetite for more and more software development (eating the world) has sufficed, but there is no guarantee that will always be the case.

1 - http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38747485

2 - https://twitter.com/Raelshark/status/843776684407111680

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> A friend of mine Tweeted this the other night: "I'm sleepless so I just created a voice-based health tracker using Google Assistant in about 20 minutes that took me wks to write 3 yrs ago."

Sounds like someone scripted an Ajax-Json-API-Call to Google Servers.. today's equivalent of writing a small shell script.. "wow, I piped grep, had I done this by hand in C this would have taken me days" would have been the tweet in the 80s.. what did they call it back then, Gopher?

I am not sure what your point is? Reusable tools ARE what make things easier to do today than they were yesterday.

The fact that there are a lot more easy to use tools today means things are easier to do today, and are going to keep getting easier.

It's not that the tools are easier to use (I'd argue they aren't). It's that the function call you make are much richer, and you can deploy at global web scale just as easily as running that function in a local script.

Sorry, you are right. I said 'easier to use' when I should have said 'can accomplish more with the same effort.'

External servers and API offered by some other company cannot be considered the same as actual tools. They are not guaranteed to exist tomorrow. A hammer that you own, or a compiler in your computer are real tools.

I agree that owning your own hammer, if it is a good one, is preferable to borrowing your neighbor's; but when everything looks like a nail wherever you get your hammer does not keep it from working as such.

I suppose you also only drink "real" water, sourced from your own well, and use "real" electricity, produced by you?

There's no such thing as "real" tools; there are only different models of risk. If you're building a system that needs speech recognition, what you should care about is the risk that the next recognition won't be correctly interpreted, and the odds of that are probably greater for a local installation of PocketSphinx than for a Google service, even including the possibility of it "going away".

> "wow, I piped grep, had I done this by hand in C this would have taken me days"

Exacly. Pipes and grep functionality are great abstractions that have saved people countless hours.

RIP yahoo pipes. imagine what we could do on the web if everyone was about interoperation instead of walled gardens :(

Create a walled garden faster!? Sorry...

So I'm the friend who tweeted that.

And actually it was even simpler than that. No coding involved - I did this with nothing more than a handful of IFTTT recipes. Hook it up to Google, listen for "Home" commands, and send them to a Google Spreadsheet. I have one for each type of entry I wanted to log - meals, symptoms, medications. Planning to add activities and some general exercise capturing when I have another 20 minutes (ha).

And I'll add some biometric logging, although my ultimate goal would be to actually script that to get data directly in from my BP monitor and a scale automatically. Same with sleep data from the app I use to track that. Both would be easier if I were using one of the devices or apps for tracking those that IFTTT supports.

The idea is to set up and collect as much as I can with as little manual entry (i.e., typing) as possible, with as little coding as possible.

The demand for new programs will not abate unless people stop thinking of new things to do with computers. The number of useful things that a computer could do might be infinite -- or it might not. We're unlikely to ever hit that point, because will probably be a long tail that never quite reaches zero.

I don't think that programming is a good opportunity for automation, because I think programming is something that humans are actually very good at. In order to write a program, you have to figure out what functionality would be useful to a person, both to elicit latent specifications and to intuit what would be acceptable for things that are not precisely specified. Anticipating what a person would want requires having a theory of mind and understanding the experience of being human. That's about the hardest task in all of computer science. It's also the thing that people are probably best at. On top of just making it work, it has to work well enough be cost-competitive with employing a person.

If we ever get to that point, there will be so few jobs left for humans that almost everyone on earth will be a programmer. So it won't cost very much to employ one.

Very much agree. And I think the corollary, which you describe more than state outright, is that as the tooling and technology gets better, the human value-add would likely demand the talents of the more imaginative, "right-brained", and creatively extroverted - not the stereotypical techie profile. Knuth thought he could do it with literate programming, which didn't take off, to say the least. Maybe it won't ever be that way. Interesting times ahead!

I agree, and will add that I believe this is the secret sauce in the truly exceptional data scientists, engineers, and developers: people who take the tech skill set and remix with heavy doses of creativity and interpersonal skills.

Actually, if you consider programs that can be considered art, like video games, that may create an infinite demand for programmers, because the demand for art is infinite. In art, the fact that something has never been done before can be the sole justification for doing it.

With respect to creativity becoming more important relative to technical ability-- I think that both will be important.

If the demand for art were infinite, it's a mathematical fact that the price would also be infinite, regardless of the quantity supplied.

In fact the price for most art is very low, below the cost of materials, or free. This implies that demand for art is very, very finite.

Andy Warhol's whole point was that the art that sells for real money has nothing to do with art. It's a sale of association with social status, and the physical art itself is superfluous.

That's incorrect. Price is limited by capacity to pay. If art production gets more efficient, more people can afford to buy it.

Demand has multiple dimensions. There is only demand for so much quantity of art, but competition can drive the quality up indefinitely.

I meant infinite in the sense that there will never come a time when the human race stops making art because there's none left to make.

The relationship between demand, supply and price that you assume to make that conclusion is not a mathematical fact.

It would be more correct to say that demand for art is non-zero at every point in time when a person exists. This only becomes infinite if humanity exists for an infinite amount of time.

Agree 100%. The fact is (well, in my experience anyway) that the people who want programs written don't really know what they want (they only think they do). The art of requirements analysis is very difficult to do well, partly because of this, and like you say, when (if) any machine becomes intelligent enough to equal a human in eliciting good requirements, we will all be in a lot of trouble.

Right now, is there any natural language system that can appropriately correct the punctuation on these sentences (not meant rhetorically)?

SPLINTERS WEAR SHOES

PANDA EATS, SHOOTS AND LEAVES

It's not only cases where the requirements are especially hard to elicit. Computers don't have common sense, so even "obvious" things would be hard.

One reason computers don't have common sense because [insert large but hard to calculate percentage] of human interaction is context, learned and scripted social setting/interaction, and tradition, not semantics. And certainly not statistics.

You can't parse conversations effectively without a social context, because a lot of the meaning is implied by the context. The words themselves are more like pointers into the context, and are never a full description of the meaning. (See also: "Make me a sandwich".)

So when someone on HN says "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana" the context tells a human reader that the real meaning is "This is a meta-sentence illustrating a point about grammar, context, ambiguity, and NLP. It does not mean I am saying anything specific about flies, time, arrows, fruit, or bananas."

The contextually correct response would be to continue with a different comment about AI. Or maybe to make a context-bending joke. (But not on HN, where the context doesn't allow that.)

Every so often someone in AI rediscovers this idea and tries to model it, but for some reason it keeps being forgotten. It's been around since at least the 1970s, but so far as I can tell modern statistical ML largely fails to be interested in it.

There are many tasks related to programming that would be maximally hard for computers. It would be kind of like a gordian knot of all the intractable problems in AI all woven together.

It's impossible, as a human, to know what you actually wanted to say with those sentences in isolation.

Are you setting up for a joke about a gun-toting panda at diner, who left the scene of a crime? Are you paraphrasing an informational sign at a zoo about a black and white animal?

Assuming you're not trying to go for a bit of clever wordplay, however, plug the panda sentence in Google Translate and it'll correctly translate "leaves" to be the plant, and not the verb tense of "to leave", in the chosen destination language.

TechCrunch discussed Google's internal representation of language[1] which implies that while the computer doesn't have a concept of the animal and its food sources, it recognizes that "panda" has something to do with "leaves" as being related to plants rather than "to leave".

Google Translate's far from perfect, but as poor as it is, it was once considered impossible to advance to where it is now.

[1]https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/22/googles-ai-translation-too...

The demand for new software may never go away entirely, but the scope of what can be accomplished while writing little or no code is ever-increasing. I expect it's going to get harder and harder for businesses to justify spending money on software development when there's already a good-enough program that already exists.

This has been happening for a long time. Back in the 80's and 90's, most of the major tech companies had their own derivative of UNIX because it made sense (sort of) to have their own in-house OS. Now almost everything is Windows, Linux, or MacOS. It would seem very strange for any company to go off and do their own thing rather than use one of those three.

In the 90s, I thought that there wasn't much software left to write. It turned out that there was. I don't want to be glib, but I think it's always hard to imagine the things that haven't been created yet.

I think Moore, after his famous prediction , had some crazy predictions about the stuff computer will do. I would guess Steve jobs had some idea too. So maybe in general , some rare visionaires do know, but most people don't.

In the case of Steve Jobs, his predictions were things that he did himself. I think what youre saying is that he predicted what a good cell phone would look like. I'm not sure that's really salient to my point.

> The number of useful things that a computer could do might be infinite -- or it might not. We're unlikely to ever hit that point, because will probably be a long tail that never quite reaches zero.

As it is now, we - as humans with programming skills, not professional programmers employed by few select corporations and their subsidiaries - might never hit that point because we'll be prevented from doing so. Trusted computing, DRM, SaaS model and various other things together conspire to take away the ability to run Turing-complete programs on our own machines. It's something we need to keep in mind too.

I don't understand the constant focus on the upcoming automation crunch. Efficiency improvements (through automation and otherwise) have been happening over the past several decades - more output with less jobs - where the majority of the benefits go to the owners of the clockwork.

Now we're in a situation where we produce most goods that society needs (and a lot that we don't need) yet there are fewer jobs. This is absolutely going to get worse, but we shouldn't be thinking of robots as any different to the market forces that have been going on for years. Something has to give.

People like Ray Kurzweil prophecy about a time when human "intelligence" is replaced in value. But what about human work? It is something deeper and at least as precious, our freedom to be physically integrated with one another and and with the physical environment we are embedded in.

Karl Marx, etc already wrote about a kind of devastating "singularity" that is here and now at the roots of many social, physical and spiritual ills.

Aristotle would have been OK with that. Work simply is "non-leisure" and therefore shouldn't be aspired to per-se.

As per Josef Pieper – it's all about leisure.

School especially so:

"The Greek word for leisure (σχολή) is the origin of Latin scola, German Schule, English school. The names for the institutions of education and learning mean leisure."

In this potential world of abundant leisure we just need to get back to good old sharing – because sharing means caring!

I doubt the multi billionares are going to be open to the idea of sharing.

Never thought I'd see Pieper referenced on HN. Great point and reference.

For everyone else, Leisure the basis of culture is worth reading and relevant here.

But finding a realistic economic system where the benefits of automation don't just benefit the top x% and lead to a morlocks and Eloi society is HARD!

It's not so hard to find it, it just it sounds too much as socialism.

There are all kind of possible ideas. Just the other day I read about, instead of taxing corporations, make that a minority percentage is owned by the society. Not without its problems, but sounds like it would line up some bad incentives that we see now in action.

At the end of the day, we always go back to who owns the means of production.

As is always the case with humans, change it's not going to happen until we are in real trouble. Maybe not even then.

I'm not sure if we should be taking lessons from people who's leisure time was created from slavery. Arisotle was the ancient equialent of billionaires who's family can live forever off of interest/investments

Aristotle's contemporaries who claimed "nature has made nobody a slave" also held similar, if not the same, views on leisure. Of course, you could argue all Athenians really took others into slavery by virtue of war, or their unquestioned military superiority of the time. The question is, is hypocrisy actually contradictory to Aristotle's views?

I think not.

because sharing means caring!

I thought sharing meant copyright infringement! ;-)

I'd say both, and that's why I think we need to loosen up on the copyrights a bit :). Too much "intellectual property" protection is harmful to society.

> I don't understand the constant focus on the upcoming automation crunch. Efficiency improvements (through automation and otherwise) have been happening over the past several decades - more output with less jobs - where the majority of the benefits go to the owners of the clockwork.

Before, automation only impacted the jobs of blue collar workers so nobody cared. Now it impacts the jobs of white collar workers so everybody is starting to whine.

To be fair, I think a modern day professional carpenter would much rather work with modern power tools than what carpenters had to use at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Modern-day miners much prefer using their heavy machinery than swinging a pickaxe and pushing a trolley. I can't see many modern-day blue-collar workers volunteering to go back to the old ways in order to increase employment counts.

Pretty sure the carpenter will complain when anything made w/ wood can just be put through a 3d 'wood' printer and come out flawless, or a device that basically can take a block of wood, or 4x4s and construct just about anything without any human intervention. Won't be long before mining operations are all manned by drones and not a single human. This isn't sci-fi, it's near-future tech.

Mining is already there, bringing a mine online is human intensive, but when that's done most of the mining is automated.

But when AIs start to program we as programmers have a simple solution : we simply bring them into a meeting with marketing and product management and let the result natural suicidal impulse take care of those suckers.

But programming is blue collar work!

Maybe more accurately, it's blue collar work that is sometimes encouraged to think it's white collar work.

The new focus on the 'automation push' is for political reasons and not for any other real concerns. Ask yourself what changes in society are being agitated for the most? What is being put forward for the solution to the automation push?

It is not very different than the political handling of man-made global warming. The solution is for affluent nations like the US to reduce its standard of living and cede more control to international bodies. We can debate the merits of the science all we want, but the solution put forward promotes a pre-determined political agenda.

We're seeing the same type of thing starting now with the talk of the automation crunch. Ideas like UBI are declared the solution and a shift to greater reliance on government because we will all soon be unable to have good enough jobs to look after ourselves.

> The solution is for affluent nations like the US to reduce its standard of living and cede more control to international bodies. We can debate the merits of the science all we want, but the solution put forward promotes a pre-determined political agenda

Where is this solution put forward? By what politicians is this "political handling" being done? What legislation has been proposed, let alone passed?

> we shouldn't be thinking of robots as any different to the market forces that have been going on for years

It's not that they're so different as such; it's the scale and speed of change that's different.

How many programmers did commercial Operating Systems put out of work?

Every new level of abstraction leads to new capabilities and new demands. You may have to learn new technology or move in a different direction, but I'm pretty sure software development as an industry is pretty safe unless we develop strong AI.

Higher levels of abstraction allow people to build virtual goods that are more complex and there is no foreseeable limit to the desire for more complex goods virtual goods, and no real physical limit.

> How many programmers did commercial Operating Systems put out of work?

Programmers ended up getting more work. Whatever the computers displaced is where the jobs diminished.

At some point we'll collapse under our inability to manage complexity, both on the production side and the consumption side.

This is Jevon's paradox, which states that efficiency increases can lead to higher resource usage. Here the resource is human labour

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Not to mention, 20 minutes always means at least a few hours when a developer is telling you how easy something was.

(Friend who tweeted this here)

In this case, I actually did create it that quick while lying in bed, and used nothing more than IFTTT and a Google Spreadsheet. I probably should have mentioned "without coding" in the original tweet to be clear about that, cause I think it's a pretty big factor.

Literally anyone with the least bit of tech savvy and a recent Android phone could do this, and it's actually more effective than the original web app I used.

Edit: clarified the time it took

If you think about it, how many web designers were knocked out by WordPress?

How many programmers were knocked out by C?

It probably affected the DMV and grocery hiring pools more. Not that WP is for dummies, but it absorbed many people who back in the day were underemployed, intellectually and creatively.

But you don't need to be a programmer to install (and keep up to date) WordPress.

In fact, you can be a business owner, set aside a Sunday, and you're done. You don't need to hire anyone

But you don't need to be a programmer to install (and keep up to date) WordPress.

That was essentially my point.

If you think about it, how many web designers were knocked out by WordPress?

Are you assuming it's a small number? It seems reasonable to assume that without WordPress we might have another 10,000 web designers. Or 100,000. Or 0. Or -10,000 if WP theme design increased the size of the web industry. We don't know.

These sorts of notionally statistical questions breakdown when you try to use "common sense" or logic-but-without-data to answer them. We have no way of knowing what might have happened without WordPress.

No I don't. I think it's a huge number. Think about all those diners, souvenir shops, whatever, who need websites no longer go to mom-and-pop website designers but click, click, click and they have a decent WordPress installation.

Remember those "website for $100” ads? All gone.

But my point is that this was going on for a while.

How many code-monkeys (who are real humans with real needs) can't find a job now because modern high level languages take out so much of the monotony of programming in the 50s?

How big would MS have to be if all code was written in Assembly?

For that matter: computer used to be a job description, not a piece of hardware.

I think because its so easy & cheap to create websites using wordpress, we have so many websites. Without that I think a lot of demand will disappear. So while there is some impact on web designers, it will be at the low end and unlikely to be huge.

The C programming language undoubtedly reduced the cost of making software. However, an increase in efficiency (in this by reducing labor costs) can often actually increase overall demand, as new use cases become economically viable. There's a term for this phenomenon, but I can't remember it at the moment.

I think the increase in prevalence of software since C was created provides some empirical evidence that this dynamic was occurring (and perhaps still is).

WordPress is a bit trickier as it allows non-technical people to implement working software. However, isn't there a booming market of WordPress devs who do more complex customizations? Such work is different than being a full stack engineer at Google, but it is still a technical role that produces software.

Programming is two things. Figuring out what to build, and than building it. We've made much more progress on the latter than the former.

I wonder if we could create a limited AI that could prompt users to define requirements better? Something where the output to would be a bunch of user stories.

My two cents about this and back to work: I do code deployments to production with the click of a button and some years ago it required a lot of careful planning and time.

In what scenario will the appetite for software will go down ?

> A Zapier account and 20 minutes of fiddling > with things just replaced a SAAS app/consultant

Just wait until things go wrong (for whatever reason).

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