Comment by bloopernova | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bloopernova | Hacker News Reader

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My anecdotal experience is that people can't wrap their heads around such an enormous, complete, shift in the way labour and capital will work.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair.

The few truck drivers I've spoken with all seem to think that autonomous trucks are going to arrive just after they retire. Similar stories come from nurses, fast food workers, and construction folks like drywallers. They all say "oh, that won't arrive for at least another 30 to 40 years!" I don't belabour the point because that just makes people fearful and angry.

In the USA there's a huge amount of people in depressed rural areas already. Their fear at being left behind by society has been manipulated into keeping the Republican party in power by various hatemongers. Now imagine the fear and anger they and many more will feel when 95% of the jobs disappear. What sort of person will rise up and lead this vast angry mob? How many of them will claim disability? Imagine 200 million people potentially starving and angry, many of them with firearms? (NB: I make no statement on the ethics of firearms!)

I am deeply worried about the era my teenage stepdaughter will live through.

The only thing I cannot wrap my head around is why we won't create new jobs. Are we truly months away from reaching the pinnacle of human achievement?

We've quite literally lost 95% of all jobs before. That part is nothing new. However, what we found was that when people were jobless and bored, they found new things to do. Things that nobody ever imagined people doing when they were busying doing other jobs.

It is not like human-level robots are anywhere on the horizon. At best we have simple pattern matching machines that can be trained to do certain tasks. But they cannot cross tasks. A self-driving car robot cannot start becoming a self-practicing doctor robot on a whim. A self-practicing doctor requires building an entirely new robot specialized to do medicine.

Up to this point, each time we lose jobs, the new jobs people invent have become more and more diverse. At one time, 95% of the workforce all did the same job. Now the largest industry employs something like 5% of the workforce. The numbers are getting smaller. And are trending to be even smaller still. It is not difficult to imagine a time when people will all have distinct jobs, that no other human does. The economies of building a robot to replace a single person starts to diminish quickly.

The industrial revolution replaced physical laborers, the information revolution will replace mental labor. If both physical and mental labor is replaced by machines, and you're an average or below average individual, what decent career prospects will you have?

Every job has a physical and mental component, so it is difficult to determine exactly where you are drawing the line. But if we say that a mental job is one that is done primarily sitting at a desk, I would suggest that the majority of jobs still fall under the physical labor classification. In fact, the agriculture sector alone, which the industrial revolution changed more than any other, is still about the same size as the entire information sector.

To dig deeper: If we look at the fastest growing jobs, according to the BLS, there are very few on the list that are not primarily physical jobs. Of the top 10, there are only three that I would consider as being more mental than physical.

If this is what a post-industrial revolution that replaced physical laborers looks like, I'm not sure why we're worried about some future information revolution. And that's without even accounting for the fact that the information industry itself is tiny.

i don't think job growth really matters so much as wages. Automation has had a pretty clear impact on middle class wages, while high-level and low-level wage jobs have continued to grow

The problem is how easily the workforce will be able to adapt to these new jobs. It's one thing to have new repetitive manufacturing jobs invented (as with the industrial revolution), and quite another for a growing market of engineers (electrical, mechanical, software, etc).

We don't need any more engineers.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/education/edlife/stem-...

Just because it worked once or twice doesn't mean it's going to work forever.

Worse, "worked" involved communist revolutions and guillotines.

I was thinking of socialist marches, and Homestead. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike

I second that. A year ago I had a discussion with a guy who works as a driver in mid-sized trucks that deliver supplies to ships. So at some point the discussion went to autonomous cars. He had just the reaction you mention so I opened YouTube and showed him a video from a Mercedes S-Class that drives itself around a town. He was literally shocked to the bone. He looked at it and was speechless for about ten minutes. It was like reality smacked him on the head. Right there he realized that the future he saw coming in 20 to 30 years was just less than a decade ahead. For someone in his early forties this is terrifying.

If we combine automation with climate change effects it seems that in the next 20 to 30 years humanity will have to face some very serious problems.

> Similar stories come from nurses

Automating nurses seem very very far in the future though.

Not really.

Automation isn't about saying one day "Whoop, youre through. This robotic maid will do everything you can do and more."

That doesn't happen. Instead, its computerized tools that "allow" you to do 1.2x more work. And 5 nurses means the owners get rid of the 6th nurse.

Then a new comprehensive patient device comes out, and can act like a .5 nurse. The owners buy 2 of them. And then they get rid of another human, or fail to hire when one leaves.

By the end, you have only a small handful of people, with technology as multipliers. And if that single person doesn't show up, then "bad happens".

That bad, with many instances, is the justification to finally depend on full automation.

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