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Comment by popup21 | Hacker News Reader

Robots in Government could wipe out just as many high paying jobs including large swaths of redundant personnel.

As someone traveling through jfk fairly often: there are jobs in government that can be replaced by using proper signage

I think you need to take an even bigger step back. I mean:

>Robots in Government could wipe out just as many high paying jobs

I didn't know there were all that many high paying jobs in government. I can't think of many jobs in government where people make as much as investment bankers for instance?

Maybe he was talking about AI taking out consultants that contract with the government? (I know some of them make in the high 6 figures, and many can make 7 to 8 figures depending on what that consulting firm is doing.) Or maybe he has a different idea of what "high-paying" means? High 5 figures may be high-paying to a lot of people.

Robots in Military could wipe out huge swathes of the population

Robots in space could wipe out...

Robots in reality, we get an expensive dog from Sony called Aibo.

The whole, robots of tomorrow will be doing..... is like the flying car, everybody expects it soon and been that way for generations. People from the 1950's and 60's are still waiting for a robot to do all the housework.

Still you have to wonder how peoples trust in AI/Robots will play out, would an AI think that as humans don't trust me that I should not trust humans! Or would it go, the human reason for distrust is flawed, ego the human is wrong about not trusting me, however if the human has made that mistake, then I can not trust what the human says. It then applies the rules of Asimov and runs away never to be seen again.

It could happen, unlikely, but more likely to happen before all of the above.

And yet.. How many people do you know with a Roomba? Driver assistance in their vehicles (lane keep and adaptive cruise), the list goes on. It's incremental.

"How many people do you know with a Roomba?" None, not even another branded robot hoover. Though I know people who have a cleaner once or twice a week.

In 2018 iRobot sold 1.08 billion dollars worth of Roombas with a 50% gross margin.

My Roomba kept getting wedged under furniture and tangled up on rug fringes. In the end I threw it away and went back to vacuuming myself.

Boston Dynamics would like a word.

But seriously - they are laying the foundations of the platform of mobility that will be built upon to do many things - yet like most things, military comes first.

You don't need robots for that. Nukes are sufficient.

But nukes have been delivered by robots (ballistic missiles) since the 50s

Automated bureaucracy would as all bureaucracy does, tier down and whilst we may see the 3 day working week, we would also see the 3 day bureaucratic hoops we would have to endure above and beyond the 3 day work.

I imagine many of those personnel won't be redundant until the available technology meets or exceeds their level of output. We used to have people welding cars together by hand; now we have fewer technicians that manage many welding robots.

We can only dream.

Depending on how you count, between 10% and 40% of the US is employed by the govt either directly or by proxy.

I understand your sentiment, but the reality of just shedding a large fraction of those jobs is hard to even imagine. Unemployment in 2008-2009 peaked at around 10%.

Between income taxes, corporate taxes, sales tax etc. most people with jobs give up half the money they make to the government anyway, so that makes sense.

Why not just employ 100% since a high government employment number seems like a virtue?

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