Hacker News Reader

Comment by nopriorarrests | Hacker News Reader

>there’s a ton of shitty jobs out there, and those shitty jobs are most vulnerable to outsourcing, automation, made obsolete, etc

Shitty jobs are not must vulnerable, quite opposite in fact. Automating some 400K/year quant job at hedge fund makes morse sense than automatng MCjob that pays 40K/year. More to that, shitty jobs are hardest to automate (we are nowhere close to good janitor robot, for example).

Also, you can not outsource cleaning toilets or hairdessers, but you can software development or building trading models.

View on HN

There are "1000's" more 40k/yr jobs than 400k/yr ones. Automating a 40k/yr job that 1000 people do makes more sense than 10 400k ones. In aggregate, there is more money to be saved automating the 40k jobs.

Also, typically lower paying jobs are physical labor jobs, trading time for money, not "thinking" jobs that deal with exceptions to the rules.

Robotics are suppose to automate lower labor physical positions, AI is suppose to replace our thinking and mental positions.

Are there a significant number of physical labor jobs (in high-income countries at least) that do not require 1) intelligent human interaction or 2) detailed visual inspection and fine motor control?

There appears to be a huge hump in difficulty of robotic “automatability” caused by the fact that humans are just so much better at these two tasks than machines are.

“Thinking” jobs that essentially entail transformation of one type of data into another seem no more difficult to automate (if not perhaps even easier) than most manual labor that has not already been automated.

My uninformed guess is that we will automate low- and mid-level “thinking” jobs and the remainder of physical jobs at around the same time, because both require near-human perceiving, communicating, and manipulating capabilities.

Yes, McDonald's automates tasks across a massive labor force, they aren't trying to automate everything that a given employee might do.

Automating bureaucracy could be something that actually creates more jobs. We had to wait 8 months to get a permit to build a deck!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com