BLS 10-year forecast: robot cashiers, math nerds, and many healthcare workers | Hacker News Reader

BLS 10-year forecast: robot cashiers, math nerds, and many healthcare workers

theatlantic.com

75 pointsrafaelc15 comments

Actual report, much easier to ingest data (1)

That said, what I'd be far more interested in is where the labor shortfalls are expected to be. Also, we can predict that the health aide labor market will eventually fall off. High school class size maxed out around 2009 (2)

1) https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecopro.pdf

2) https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/mobile/Enrollment_ES_Pub...

For comparison, the report from 2006 on projections for 2016:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/ecopro_12042007.pd...

I definitely prefer the tables of the 2006 report.

It is quite dystopian how much of our productive capacity is geared towards making people less sick.

Interesting, I have the opposite reaction; it seems virtually utopian to me (especially if you define "sick" broadly).

Why? Healthcare is a luxury good. As you have more income, you spend more on health.

It is one of the steps towards singularity, which have immediate positive effects on the people currently alive.

See, the problem with healthcare is not that it is expensive. I think it's completely reasonable to spend a very large portion of our GDP on healthcare. Why not call it a defense program? hell, disease has always killed more people than war. (was world war two the only time period where that wasn't true?)

The problem is that healthcare is unaffordable to people who aren't in the top 10%. We can solve this through redistribution. It seems that for research, this should be obvious. Most of the cost of research is pretty similar if you sell 100 or one billion units. In those cases especially, there's no reason not to collect the money that people are willing or able to pay and then give the advance to everyone, if you have a mechanism for doing that without reducing the money you collect.

But, the point here is that if we curtail basic research because we amortize the cost evenly over the consumers of healthcare, that hurts the rich, too... because that means we don't get as many medical advances.

(of course, doctor patient interactions don't scale so well; that will require redistribution, and perhaps even a lower tier of care.)

Really, I think this is similar to the education problem. Spending less on education seems... like a poor long term decision. But it is unaffordable to the poor, so subsidies may be in order.

900 mathematicians is a ~30% increase?

And what do they call mathematics. Is it about machine learning/big data specialists?

I hope not!

Everywhere I hear people talking about healthcare. Mostly it seems we need more providers for the elderly, because of our demographics and population growth slowdown. But if that's the case, won't this be the "peak elderly" in that there will be less elderly (because there are already less young people now to become elderly). After the first generation, will there be an excess of healthcare workers? Or perhaps, there will be more dedicated care and better quality of care?

When it comes to acquiring a conceptual framework for understanding the future, Alvin Toffler is your man. His books will never let you down.

They need to go review the results of AlphaGo again

> An AI wins at something that is specifically designed to be the type of thing that's easy for AI.

Most games like Go and Chess are made to be hard for the human mind to win, since that's challenging. As someone who works in AI, all of this is hype, we aren't even close to understanding how to make a real AI

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