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Comment by LethargicStud | Hacker News Reader

Generally, the idea of stifling innovation to "preserve jobs" is harmful to society. Upon choosing a career, you should consider the longevity of that career. Some people will still pick wrong for a multitude of reasons. Hopefully, those people can pivot. It is unreasonable to hold the entire population back to continue employing those in a specific field. If we consistently did that, we'd be in the stone age and our quality of life would be far poorer. This will help future generations drastically even if it hurts us a bit.

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> Upon choosing a career, you should consider the longevity of that career.

Isn't it lucky we humans are so very good at predicting the future!?

When I was taking computer vision courses little more than a decade ago, self driving cars were pure science fiction. Part of me hopes software development is the next job we automate away, just so everyone in forums like this who are so impressed with their own excellent life choices can see what it's like to be on the other end of this.

>Part of me hopes software development is the next job we automate away

We are hard at work automating software development. Thanks to massive advances in programming language design, IDEs, the invention of module systems in combination with the massive success of OSS in that space and the proliferation of massive frameworks, something that took a year of work two decades ago is now at best a weekend project of a much less skilled person.

The thing that keeps us all employed is the incredibly elastic demand. And of course that the work to find and describe requirements is unlikely to be automated away anytime soon (and already often takes more time than actual implementation)

> Thanks to massive advances in programming language design

What massive advances in programming language design have we had since 1998!?

While a lot of the real advances in language design are not new, popular adoption of stuff like functional programming has happened in large part in the last twenty years. E.g. list comprehensions in Python were not introduced until Python 2.0 (2000, which just squeezes into your range). And Java is starting to get similar features, which is great for companies who have invested in the language.

It's not far from it. Software development is in small company with respect to the need for constant re-education and skill maintenance. The vast majority of developers with skills from just 10 years ago are wholly unemployable right now.

You mean somebody who knows how to develop in Java, PHP, Python, Perl, C, C++, Javascript, Ruby, LISP - all languages developed more than 10 years ago - is "wholly unemployable right now"? Doesn't seem to match my experience even a little bit. Programming practices also hasn't changed that much. In fact, there are still jobs for COBOL and Fortran programmers - not that many, but there aren't that many COBOL and Fortran programmers either nowdays.

Um, no.

There's a shortage of COBOL developers that are needed to maintain and update legacy financial mainframes that still don't make economic sense to replace since they operate at critical infrastructure points 24/7 and over the years have become pretty bulletproof.

Replacing these systems is extremely difficult since they're so relied on a replacement needs to be nearly flawless form the start. If you stumble upon on a bug in your international wire transfer code you could be messing up a $10 billion international aid wire that was meant for hundreds of factories.

> Some people will still pick wrong for a multitude of reasons. Hopefully, those people can pivot.

We are lucky as software engineers, but I was also making the point that if your line of work gets automated, hopefully you can pivot. This applies to everyone, and is similar to when you are no longer enjoying your field of work. Changing careers is not always an option, but let's not forget that it usually is when we talk about automating an entire industry and putting them out of work.

So give them the support they need to retrain. We're creating so much value with these automated systems - who is the beneficiary? Surely the compassionate thing would be to use some of this resource to help those that have been trodden on by progress/

I'm hoping for a future where the machines do all the work required to provide everything human beings need to survive, AND where we've figured out a reasonable way to distribute resources in a world where not everyone will be able to "contribute to society" by spending huge amounts of their waking time doing something they'd not otherwise do, in exchange for tokens that can be redeemed for food and shelter.

Yes, but that would be communism, so let's just let people who were born into or stumbled into their wealth amass more of it. I think in general we need to start being more thoughtful about how the things we do can sometimes be hurtful to billionaires.

Well, while you’re joking the original idea of communism and what I’ve been taught about Lenin was about excatly this - communism is inevitable because of technical progress. Call it what you want - universal income, handouts, we will end up in communism.

And yet all implementations of communism has failed so does this mean technical progress eventually leads to societal failure? Also I believe we will end up with socialism, not communism.

> And yet all implementations of communism has failed so does this mean technical progress eventually leads to societal failure?

Only if you believe that once an attempt at something has failed, all future attempts will also fail.

> Also I believe we will end up with socialism, not communism.

Socialism is worker control of the means of production, and is an intermediate step along the route to communism, a fully classless and stateless society.

So if your line of work gets automated, you retroactively "picked wrong"?

Despite being a coder, I almost desire tech work to become replaced by machines at some point, with the only options of retraining to be prohibitively hard and leaving us in the dreadful position of these workers, just so I can watch people with attitudes like this get it handed to them.

The attitudes we have towards the unskilled, low-skilled, or those who are being replaced and made redundant by the systems we develop is sickening.

Describing someone spending extensive amounts of time and money retraining and having to abandon a career they've done for decades as "pivoting". Will you provide for their family in the years it takes them to be proficient at a skill that they can use to replace their income and support themselves? Or are we just all snidely sitting here with our tech know-how preaching to those who grew up in a different time, or with different opportunities, or who couldn't have ever predicted the scale to which their livelihoods would become obsolete?

"Hurts us a bit". Don't even speak like you're in the same boat as these people.

Don't get me wrong, progress will happen, but we need to make it socially aware and compassionate progress, not tough luck you didn't pick a the right career and now your life is fucked progress.

I don’t really understand you mate, what are you suggesting, stop technical progress? Sure it harsh and one day we will be next but so be it, it’s life.

I'm not sure where your confusion is arising from. antihero included a preferred alternative:

> Don't get me wrong, progress will happen, but we need to make it socially aware and compassionate progress, not tough luck you didn't pick a the right career and now your life is fucked progress.

That alternative is not stopping technical progress. It's providing for those whose jobs have been made obsolete by that progress, so that they can rebuild themselves. And keep in mind that not doing so carries the cost of having members of society who are unable to provide value beyond their physical existence.

Did you read my comment? Progress is awesome and inevitable, but how we deal with it and how we deal with the people who's careers are made redundant by it is what we need to discuss. We need to give people options, whether that's retraining and financial support, universal basic income, or whatever. Currently the money just goes upwards - the progress, innovation are owned by the elite as intellectual property. We need to find a different way where the fruits of this progress are distributed to benefit humanity as a whole, not used to further exploit the masses.

Although I agree with you, the problem (in the US at least) is that pivoting is nearly impossible for a large group of people. Our educational system is expensive and generally has terrible quality, and we don't have very good social programs to help float people while they are getting re-educated.

If we push innovation without changing these problems, it's not gonna be pretty.

If you don't need shiny credentials, educational system is much less expensive - there are community colleges, courses, free or low-cost online education, etc. Most costly educational requirements arise when coupled with licensing requirements - if you need an official paper, you're gonna pay.

When I graduted high school during the .com bust my father told me not to major in CS in college because there wouldn’t be any jobs for me when I graduated.

Absolutely. Automated trucks will allow shipping costs to be much cheaper which will stimulate the economy in 1000 different ways

"Stimulate the economy" and "provide prosperity" correlate only very weakly, if at all.

"Stimulate the economy" and "provide prosperity to some billionaires" correlates very well. :-/

Shipping is already cheap. Especially bulk shipping.

transportation costs add to the cost of literally everything

Of course, but the point is that they don't actually add all that much cost. It's a few percent. A nice gain if it goes away, but not something that is going to fundamentally change the economy.

A few percentage points on the entire economy? Not good enough?

What percentage of a trucking company’s costs do you think are paid to the driver?

It won’t lower shipping costs that much.

There's plenty of surveys on this[1]. In this one driver wages and benefits make up around 40% of total cost per mile. That's why self-driving trucks are so lucrative.

[1] PDF warning, see page 23 http://atri-online.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/ATRI-Opera...

This is a great resource, but there are a few things wrong:

1. Fuel prices were low in 2015 and have been rising since then, so 39% of marginal costs is likely a peak.

2. The chart you referenced is only for marginal costs, and doesn't include fixed costs associated with a trucking company. The actual percentage of driver pay to the overall operating cost of a trucking company will be lower once fixed costs are factored in.

3. Automated truck companies will also want to capture a fraction of that 30-40% that is paid to drivers.

So in the end, shipping costs will likely drop in the 10-20% range, which is substantial, but it isn't enough to be revolutionary.

My point wasn't to the value created by having automated trucks, but to counter the point that shipping costs would drop significantly.

Also, since shipping costs are a small percentage of the price of most consumer goods, everyday purchases will not be affected much either.

If you could actually predict and pick with more than random success, you'd make more money predicting and picking then you would working in whatever you predicted.

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