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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Debating whether the number of jobs will actually go down or not is irrelevant.

The fact is on the human lifetime timescale, jobs go away (farming from 1900-1940; various factory jobs in the late 1980s, coal mining 1970s-2000s etc). People with decades in these jobs may not be able to move into equivalent (in renumeration & status) replacement jobs as their skills are likely not transferable.

Thus to the tractor manufacturer in her 50s it is irrelevant whether there is high demand for experienced web designers or not. Perhaps her kid can go into the job, but she very likely can't. This is part of the reason for the demand for low-skill (and low paying) jobs.

So either way we have to plan for rolling mass unemployment. The only question is the shape of the derivative.

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> So either way we have to plan for rolling mass unemployment.

Interestingly, each time we have lost jobs, we have diversified into many more types of jobs that cannot be swept away with a single automation breakthrough. ~90% of workforce were once farmers and almost every single one of them lost their job when mechanization came. Now, with self-driving cars, we are worried about the ~2% of the workforce who drive for a living. That is already a big change from the past, and each iteration how shown that a smaller and smaller portion of the workforce will be affected by automation at any given point in time. That is not to say that everyone will go unscathed, but mass unemployment becomes less and less likely.

> ~90% of workforce were once farmers and almost every single one of them lost their job when mechanization came

It was very easy to go from one job to the other. weather it needs to be required or not, many jobs today effectively require 20 years of education (12+ school, 4 undergrad, 2 masters, 2 years experience).

we talk about coal mining jobs going away as if they should have seen it coming, but tech can also be vulnerable. people forget what it was like to search for a tech job even years after the 2001 bubble burst.

also, the reason why people are worried about automation isn't the number of people effected by each iteration. it was widely accepted automation would destroy jobs and more than what was destroyed would come.

the 2001 and 2008 recession seems to indicate that is becoming less true. i would categorize those recessions as mass unemployment, thus mass unemployment is not becoming less and less likely.

Virtually zero jobs require 20 years of education or degrees, 99% of jobs can be learned with a boot camp.

I sure don't want any of that 99% being a doctor or lawyer just finishing a boot camp.

I do. There are all kinds of things wrong with requiring 20 years of study just to be able to have a chance to do a job properly. If done properly, we can reduce that time significantly.

I'm inclined to agree about lawyers, but for medicine I'm pretty sure there just is that much to learn.

I imagine most doctors would be just fine as doctors if they graduated from high school at age 16 and also skipped 1 year (maybe 2) of undergrad.

A great way to spend more money on education would be to target lowering high school graduation age to 17, with at least a year of training oriented education for students that weren't interested in an academic track and a faster academic track for students that did want it. The idea that everybody gets value out of Algebra II is pretty confused and at my Big 10 university, I often knew more history on days I hadn't done the reading than most of the people in my discussion class (that is, our "well prepared" high school students aren't coming out of high school well rounded anyway, lets drop the pretense).

Boot camp is hyperbole for medicine, but the medical field itself is beginning to recognize (at least in the US) that the path to becoming a physician is much longer than need be, especially given the shortage we have especially for GPs.

My impression is that the medical field is mostly increasing the number of new MDs but not the number of residency slots. This means that soon medical school will end up like law school where you can get a law degree but not a job. You need at least a year of residency to be able to practice medicine in any state, to get a real job you need to finish.

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/266610-sho...

It would be easy to fix. Current spending on residency programs is something like 10 or 15 billion dollars. With more than 3 trillion dollars in healthcare spending, a 10 billion dollar experiment aimed at lowering costs is cheap.

(and of course it isn't necessary to immediately double the number of slots in order to soak up the extra MDs)

Maybe we have a shortage of GPs because specialists, such as plastic surgeons, earn lots more money.

If all I need is an ingrown toenail removed, or a prescription for an anti-fungal cream or something, I'd be totally fine with a doctor who went to a boot camp. Why would I want to pay for somebody who is dramatically overqualified - and correspondingly more expensive - to take care of a minor problem?

You want someone "overqualified" who can tell the difference between a fungal infection that just needs a prescription anti-fungal cream, and one that is affecting more than just your foot and/or requires something beyond a cream.

So, what, you think every medical issue demands the same level of expertise? Do we really need somebody with 8 years of schooling, residencies, etc. to deal with every little issue? Personally, I think the answer is "no".

That in no way suggests that there isn't a role for the hyper-educated / trained doctor, or for even more highly trained specialists. The point is just that not every situation requires them.

I recently composed an email for someone with a degree in mathematics but little experience with computers, outlining what they'd need to do to bridge the gab between their current position and someone with a degree or strong self-taught skills in CS.

When I started I thought it'd be fairly short. It wasn't, and much of the difference wasn't theoretical CS stuff—it was "stupid computer shit". Tools, the command line, daemons, implementation details for a dozen key technologies, debuggers, and on and on and on.

I think I'd underestimated how much all that time I'd spent futzing with DOS to make my games work, or playing with operating systems, or running a message board for my friends, and so on, had provided the foundation for my success as a developer. The hours weren't spent optimally, but they were spent in great quantity, and most people didn't grow up with that kind of running head-start into the industry. It's a giant hurdle to overcome.

that's exactly what i meant =)

We're also pushing the pension date by 5 year every 5, so there's that. Zero mobility upward, load pressure from newcomers and if you happen to leave the job after your peak at 50 - real or percieved peak - you've mostly unemployment left as a life prospect

Did you read the article? The argument is not "some jobs are disappearing but other jobs are being created," the argument is "stop arguing from anecdote, productivity growth is practically non-existent, the fact that you saw a restaurant with no waiters does not dent the fact that we have below-full-employment levels of unemployment."

Sure unemployment is low now. The automation wave hasn't come yet. It takes years for new technologies to get out of labs and into the real world. But self driving cars and learning robots are definitely coming soon. AI has made tremendous progress in just the last few years. There are very few jobs that can't be automated with technology that already exists.

> AI has made tremendous progress in just the last few years. There are very few jobs that can't be automated with technology that already exists.

I'm tired of hearing this argument again and again. It amounts to saying this...

> I did a thought experiment and in that experiment is was theoretically possible to replace humans with AI in any job. Therefore we're all fired!

This is not far from saying in a Universe containing 100 billion galaxies there are probably aliens out there willing to work for less than the minimum wage, just dying to make us all redundant! It's also theoretically possible.

But just because something is theoretically possible, doesn't mean it will actually happen. Most jobs won't get replaced with AI because humans will remain the better economic option.

The automotive industry is an exception for economic not technology reasons. There are a small number of car makers making enormous revenue selling cars that are vastly under utilised. Grabbing a share of the revenue by disrupting that industry with self-driving cars makes economic sense; the massive investment required to develop (and maintain!) self driving cars.

I'm not saying it's theoretically possible. I'm saying it's absolutely possible. I'd bet money on it. The technology exists right now. It just takes time to deploy it.

Right now researchers are demonstrating AIs that can learn to play video games vastly better than humans. There's not a huge leap between that and learning to control a robot. Hell I'm watching a video series right now where a random programmer builds a self driving car in GTA.

I get your point but I still disagree. Take a job like a plumber for example. Could you replace it with AI and robots? In theory yes. Will it ever happen? No. Why not? Because it makes no economic sense to do so. Developing, testing and maintaining robots and AI capable of handling every kitchen and bathroom alone would be massively expensive and for what return? There isn't enough money in the plumbing market to justify disrupting it.

The plumber example is a good one. All the AI breakthroughs you read about seem to have simple "IO" so to speak. Even a self driving car while a challenging task, is reasonably well constrained, an effective solution might be possible with just cameras, throttle, brake and steer angle.

A robot I can call about a plumbing problem, that can realize it needs to dig up a pipe in the front lawn, successfully dig up the pipe in the front lawn and fix a leak. Not to mention the rest of the things a plumber does. Now that is hard task and I can't see it being solved any time soon.

Any job that has difficult "IO" is a long way from automation in my mind.

Grabbing a share of the revenue by disrupting that industry with self-driving cars makes economic sense; the massive investment required to develop (and maintain!) self driving cars.

Even more, there's no definite proof (yet) that self-driving cars will even "catch on" and replace traditional human driven cars at all. OK, for shipping / transport and what-not, the economic drivers are pretty clear. But considering that at least some personal driving is actually recreational and that there's no super-strong economic incentive to favor self-driving cars, it's hardly out of the realm of possibility that the self-driving cars will just be a passing fad, or will never amount to anything but a niche market.

Note that I'm not saying that things will necessarily play out this way. Just pointing out that it is a realistic alternative to the prevailing "self driving cars are the future" narrative.

Massive coal mining employment was gone by 1962. Read "Night Comes to the Cumberlands". Most US coal comes from strip mining in Wyoming.

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