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"being a temp for future robots"

While everyone was predicting that the dirty jobs would get automated, instead its a lot of midlevel jobs are getting automated, but we still don't have a robot that can take out the trash.

I am willing to bet my house thay we can automate away the CEO but not the janitor, and it will be hilarious.

Management is just analysis of data, we can do that. But the physical works requires dexterity and robotics that still escapes us.

> we still don't have a robot that can take out the trash

Because it's hard to justify the $$$ on a robot to automate a job that takes 30 seconds once a week.

Modern people don't realize it, but an awful lot of household drudgery has been automated. I'm old enough to remember life before the microwave. What a marvelous time saver that is! You can even buy one from the thrift store for $10. I remember them being $1000, and that was back when a dollar was worth something.

Yeah, I'm old enough to remember that era, too.

My first encounter with a microwave was at far Bob's in Pasadena. Finals had just ended at Cal Tech and I walked to far Bob's to decompress. I had no knowledge of microwave ovens.

I ordered a piece of cherry pie. Waitress decided to warm it without telling me, using their then-new microwave oven.

The plate was ice cold when she passed it to me. When I bit into a piece of the pie, I burned the bejesus out of my mouth. I yelped and the waitress came running.

She showed me this magic box, which made sense as I'd just finished E&M. She comped me the pie and since it was a slow night (around 2am), we spent an hour testing different foods in the microwave. Bacon layered in paper towels was the clear winner.

Nice to see a fellow techer here!

The fastest tech revolution I ever saw was in the fall of '75, when I was a frosh. At the beginning of the semester, the Caltech bookstore had slide rules for $125. By December, they were on closeout for $5. Never saw them again. The calculators had arrived!

What was that like, going from log tables to instant calculations?

Like riding your bike to school instead of walking.

(Showing my age again. Kids today don't ride bikes to school. All you gotta do is look at the lonely single bike rack at elementary schools. In my day there were lots of racks festooned with bikes. These days when I pass a school, there's a long line of moms in SUVs with the motor running talking on their phones.)

> Kids today don't ride bikes to school.

In the USA. But in plenty of other places they do. In fact, at the bike rack of my sons school there is too little place, so some of them overflow onto the school yard.

Add to that the cheap-as-dirt popcorn maker. My mom would make popcorn in a frying pan. The machine is sooo much easier.

There are the mothers of kitchen automation:

1. refrigerator

2. garbage disposal

3. dishwasher

4. electric / gas stove and oven

These are really marvelous inventions. It seems I spent half my childhood washing dishes by hand. Ugh.

Out of interest, what do you mean by automated garbage disposal? The urban infrastructure of someone taking away your garbage, or the mostly-US device installed in your sinks?

The latter does not exist in Europe so I haven't ever thought it would be an important step in reducing chores. We have bio waste bins for food leftovers which seems pretty efficient already.

It's a grinder machine that people install just below their drain. Ostensibly so that you don't have to put a strainer in there.

In my opinion they provide basically zero value but lots of trouble. They encourage putting all kinds of nastiness down your pipes and in my experience tend to break and leak. But they are virtually ubiquitous here.

Lots of local and regional governments in Europe encourage people to not use the toilet or the sink as a trash can. The wastewater is usually treated before arriving to rivers and other places, so the cleanest is the water, the easiest is to treat it.

Absolutely, only toilet paper can be thrown to toilets. Everything else must go to garbage bins, especially all kinds of wet wipes. Same is surely true for US too.

> My mom would make popcorn in a frying pan. The machine is sooo much easier.

But perhaps not as much fun, particularly if you forget to put the lid on?

> It seems I spent half my childhood washing dishes by hand. Ugh.

Yes, I remember that when I left home to go to university, the very first thing my parents did was to buy a dishwasher.

Mind you, I don't have one today - kitchen too small, and I don't like bending down to fill/empty it.

I'll be honest: I do think frying pan popcorn legitimately tastes better. That said, it can't be argued it's far easier to use the machine.

pretty easy if you use a steel mixing bowl covered in foil with some holes poked (unpopped kernels pool towards the Center)

I still don't have a dishwasher or a garbage disposal (and I've never even used / seen any), diswasher seems really marginal upgrade as a childless couple - I guess it is a timesaver for a family of 4+?

I'm really wondering about the garbage disposal thing and I'll go Google about them.

Microwaves are great but they save waiting time more than drudgery. A toaster oven will heat/cook something with just as little input.

> but we still don't have a robot that can take out the trash.

Pneumatic waste collection is a thing, and has been for quite some time.

See

- https://www.wired.com/2010/08/trash-sucking-island/

- https://untappedcities.com/2020/04/09/inside-roosevelt-islan...

- https://qz.com/1909600/the-future-of-garbage-collection-is-p...

Management isn't analysis of data, it is making a decision based on that analysis. A completely different and more complex problem. One could argue that the border between the two is unclear but we have for sure been automatizing the analysis and we are nowhere near removing the managers. Maybe we could say we have removed layers of management though

I'm with the bet-the-house guy. I've worked for huge organizations since 1990 and I really think that even a mid-grade student project could make decisions as well as the management I've known, which includes multiple Fortune 50 CEOs. When I say "known" I mean "known" and not "been ten layers under."

What I think will happen is CEOs will be glorified actors that are tasked with delivering the decisions some ML system has made. It'll be like the "white guy in a suit" role that some Chinese companies have.

There are strong reasons to believe that tasks that are new to humans and are considered difficult, will be easy to AI. Like programming, finance, strategy, etc

Whereas things humans have developed over millions of years and think are easy, like vision, dexterity, etc might be quite hard and the last things to be automated.

ML systems don’t make decisions.

I feel like a lot of comments about what ML will do start with a misunderstanding of what ML actually is.

Saying ML will make a CEO’s decisions is like saying Excel will make CEO’s decisions. Neither is anything more than a system for keeping track of correlations.

ML models don't make decisions, but there certainly are ML systems, within which are ML models embedded with data flows, business logic, etc., which make "decisions" or "adjudications" or "classifications" or whatever term you are trying to avoid here.

Neither do most CEOs. What they do is best guess which fully evaluated option for (d)investment they like better based on gut feel. Most business-oriented decisions are basically stack ranking the options presented.

This is basically where we are today, except that instead of AI it's management consultants (and they're expensive).

Because you knew every counter factual, right?

Absolutely. This is why it would be better to chose the best option without the management.

I regularly consult management about technical decisions and the always chose something else than the best option. Based on feelings, opinions and kickback rates.

> I regularly consult management about technical decisions....

Well, right there's your problem.

Don't we have robots that take out the trash? The garbage trucks pickup the garbage and put it in the truck.

Also, the vacuum now empties itself

forget if it empties, the fact 90%+ of my vacuuming is done automatically is incredible! I can live with the 30 seconds to empty the bin every couple weeks

How is your vacuuming done automatically? You mean with a Roomba robot?

Have you found those working? All my friends that have one just end up storing them somewhere never to be used again.

How? I've had a roomba for almost 2 years now, and I use it all the time - it runs and cleans our living room and kitchen at least 2-3 times a week. There has been a noticeable reduction in dust present in the house. And that's not even a fancy self-emptying model, just a normal roomba where I have to empty the bin by hand. Why would you stop using one?

Not the parent comment, but I think it depends on the house you have. I find huge american houses with 3-5 rooms are unsuitable, except when you limit the robot to one or two rooms.

My apartment in Europe is suitable for it, as I do not have many rooms, so that it does a decent job on cleaning. I do not use the regular vacuum very often.

On the other hand my old European apartment isn't very suitable as my robot gets stuck on high door thresholds and under radiators. It's great anyway, just can't be left alone as I need to save it every now and then.

1) I think we can automate the janitor now. We just don't because it's cheaper to pay minimum wage for 25-30 years.

2) The CEO, and CEO pay, is already more of political action.

"I think we can automate the janitor now."

Have you ever seen a robot unclog a toiler? Get into a greasy kitchen vent to clean it? Clean out the molt between the tiles?

Of fuck that, there is no cleaning robot that can even recognise a stain a scrub it off with a brush.

Do you know there are different kinds of cleaning products and brushes for different surfaces?

Cleaning is a very complex process made up of hundreds of little actions, each fairly complex. They require loads of dexterity

> Have you ever seen a robot unclog a toiler? Get into a greasy kitchen vent to clean it? Clean out the molt between the tiles?

I have seen a plunger-bot. I have never seen a commercial plunger-bot. I think I've also seen a mold scrubber bot. I'm not trying to minimize the skill involved. I'm trying to say that the labor it replaces (assuming the time value of money and minimum wage increases cancel out) is worth 362,500 over 25 years. That's a lot of money, but it's also not for a robot that can do all those things assuming it was as efficient as replacing a whole person. And less if the robot has to be replaced more frequently.

If the market supported a robot that cost a few orders of magnitude more than that, I can see a fleet of robots. Not 100% "let 'er rip" L-5 autonomy, but where one person managed a fleet of specialized robots. Mapping out the surfaces ahead of time, etc.

I will say, I was responding to a "janitor" in the office environment doing routine tasks emptying trash. Not a kitchen vent cleaner. There are a lot of deep cleaning actions that would be harder to automate, and given their rareness and extra difficulty are likely the last to go.

> One solution can be for a union, government, Amazon etc, is to put aside money for a fund that will invest in training these employees so they could one day not depend on these kind of low-leverage jobs.

Unions have negotiated with companies that outsource or automate its members' jobs to secure compensation for the workers who were affected.

However, I think this is a problem that requires a larger solution. There needs to be compensation plans for workers as they're automated away or outsourced. Perhaps it can be a buyout, or a shared ownership scheme where workers get shares in the company or the automation itself that pay dividends. Or a tax on automation or outsourcing that gets returned to workers.

We're heading towards a world where most work is done by machines, and only a handful of people will own, control and profit from them. I think a tax and a shared ownership model would help prevent a world where workers and their progeny are relegated to peasantry.

> We're heading towards a world where most work is done by machines, and only a handful of people will own, control and profit from them

People keep saying that but we are no closer than we were 50 years ago. A lot of jobs have been replaced but new jobs have been created and society has absorbed the increased productivity (cheaper goods, foods, and much more complex high end goods (iPhone, airplanes, etc).

> A lot of jobs have been replaced but new jobs have been created and society has absorbed the increased productivity.

Not in every case. You can look at workers in the Rust Belt. Their well paying jobs with benefits were "replaced" and new jobs never came, unless you think working at Walmart for close to minimum wage is one of those new jobs.

Even when, say, manufacturers come back and produce domestically, they've reduced what used to be a 1,000+ person job to one that requires 40 engineers and a handful of maintenance people. It's not like any of those factory workers who were laid off in the past were later rehired as engineers, either.

It isn't "society" that's absorbed absorbed increased worker productivity, but employers and those who own the automation. Worker productivity in the US increased dramatically over the last 20 years, and even more over the last 40. Despite that, worker compensation hasn't increased, and has roughly remained the same over those same 40 years[1].

[1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

> Not in every case. You can look at workers in the Rust Belt

And the old coal mining towns in Northern England (and South Wales).

I think your source is just bad here. Productivity hasn’t increased, process streamlining has. This is usually thought up, created, and managed by the same higher earners that your “source” is saying is the cause of all of the worlds problems.

With wages the minimum wage in 1980 was $3.10, while the last increase from 2009 rose from $6.55 to $7.25 per hour

> It isn't "society" that's absorbed absorbed increased worker productivity, but employers and those who own the automation.

What society has "absorbed" is an expectation that stock markets will continue rising at a pace that significantly outstrips inflation and (related) wage increases. Pension funds and individual retirement savings (401k, RRSP) heavily rely on employers pocketing the bulk of productivity increases for themselves and continuing to exploit labour. It'd be interesting to see the chaos that would arise if governments decided at some point that workers should get an equal share of that.

> It isn't "society" that's absorbed absorbed increased worker productivity,

Yes it has. Food is way cheaper now. Clothes are way cheaper. Transportation is way cheaper. Housing is way better (and cheaper if you want what passed for housing in the 40s).

Employment rates aren't the issue IMO, wealth concentration is. And that's increasing.

It's important because wealth is essentially power, so concentration of wealth inevitably changes the balance of power in society. And that in turn creates a feedback loop where the wealth and powerful can undermine thelaws and regulations intended to keep the distribution of wealth and power from becoming too lopsided.

This is why I view the current everything-as-a-service model that takes things people used to own and turns them into things people rent pretty skeptically.

Do you think the centralization of power in the federal government is a problem? Do you think famous people are a problem? Or is it only wealth that's a problem?

Power, as in the ability to alter others lives, is the “problem” IMO. Wealth is only a problem in that it’s intrinsically linked to power.

Really I think it’s a balancing act. Since we can’t just get rid of the concept of power, we try to regulate its use. This is pretty difficult.

The government is, to a certain extend, chosen by the people.

But it doesn't represent the people, which is the problem: https://act.represent.us/sign/the-problem/

That wealth is power is a correlation that few realize.

It’s why these wage debates get so heated - they threaten the core social power of people.

And it absolutely is a feedback loop. Something about absolute power corrupting absolutely.

People keep saying that but we are no closer than we were 50 years ago.

People have been saying it for far longer than 50 years:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

The trouble is, both sides of the argument are correct. When disruption occurs, many people are badly disadvantaged even if society as a whole moves forward. It would be best to find ways to reduce the impact on the affected people without holding up automation and other improvements which have been shown to be beneficial to productivity in the long term.

And luddites were right because pre-industrial level of worker compensation, in real terms, was only achieved by the early XX century.

Actually compensation for most workers went up dramatically from the outset of the industrial revolution. There just wasn't that much wealth to go around prior to industrialisation.

http://nws-sa.com/rr/Inequality/Lindert.pdf

Counting workers is misleading, you don’t replace a 40$ an hour jobs with a 15$ an hour job without consequences. Beyond that looking at the percentage of Americans employed shows a net drop even accounting for retirement etc.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001

Yep. Back in the hand-written letter days people must have thought “think how much time we would save if all this was automated and letters were delivered instantly!” Nope. We just send 10x more.

Yeah but we read 100% fewer of them.

> If Amazon is close enough to automating these jobs, then it will likely just automate it and fire whoever it can.

They will do this anyway. The reason it mattered for elevator operators is that you had to convince a bunch of end users that it was reasonable to self-operate the elevator after they had been trained for years to have an attendant, and you probably had to modify the deployed elevators all over the city--which weren't owned by and one party but had been installed by various buildings--to have additional safety features. Amazon can replace out how Amazon works internally and I would have no clue.

There's not enough high-value jobs to go around. We can either automate and share the wealth, or automate and have a class of useless poor people and some factory owners. Historically the former tends to end in violent ways. And so far, we haven't experimented enough with sharing the wealth in ways that also didn't turn incredibly authoritarian and also oppressive with violent ends...

> There's not enough high-value jobs to go around

it's hard to make this argument when you apply it to the industrial revolution which has already happened, and people aren't completely destitute because of it. In fact, people, on average, are wealthier because of it!

Automation means wealth, and this new-found wealth means more demand for goods/services - of which may not yet exist today. How many people would have guessed that a youtube content-creator is going to be a thing?

Key comment of the thread

Rest assured if Amazon could automate, Amazon would automate.

> I don't see any way for the employees to win this beyond buying a bit more time.

Why can't the government increase minimum wages? If those jobs are likely to get automated away then that's going to happen either way At least let them make decent wages _while_ they have a job.

And Amazon will over time or they'll get squeezed.

I get my groceries from Ocado in the UK. Their warehouses are almost entirely automated, including increasingly picking and packing groceries that often include soft or easily breakable products into bags.

They're moved from focusing on growing their own direct sales to increasingly licensing that platform globally.

You say that, but you know how many people that "fully automated" warehouse in the UK employs? Around 800 per shift. It was mentioned in the last incident report when one robot caught fire.

Yeah a big part of the work is automated. But these warehouses still need people.

They still need people, but far fewer, and dropping rapidly as a proportion of goods shipped. The number of workers is a distraction - what matters is product shipped per worker.

E.g. a few years ago the packing into bags was still done by people across the board from trays brought by robots. They've systematically automated more and more of it at a pretty astounding pace.

retraining does not work https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/the-fa...

Amazon should be federally fined for every RIF sufficiently to pay for a retraining/education. As should all dominant employers receiving sweetheart deals on local taxes.

It should be done today and held in escrow for when it happens.

Should these menial, easily automated jobs in a low margin business exist in the future?

I think a fully automated amazon without a large local workforce and therefor a large local TAXBASE is going to be a huge target for regulatory enforcement.

How? If the workforce isn't local, then there's no citizens involved which US law applies too.

Reducing jobs reduces overall political support, which makes it more attractive for politicians and regulators to pass new laws or more aggressively pursue existing ones. Amazon could get hit with antitrust or some other new legal theory that develops.

Those warehouses have to go somewhere and politicians are much more likely to initiate a shakedown when non of their constituents benefit.

To be clear, from Amazon's point of view, all of their human employees are tamping for future robots right now.

They're always pushing for automation as fast as they possibly can.

I don’t disagree with you, but robots don’t spend money.

The problem is that all automatic elevators are going to be stamped Amazon and there is hardly any room available for someone else. It’s a bigger and bigger monopoly. I am sure that Amazon is going to automate as much as possible and it will only increase.

Cool story about the elevator. :)