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Comment by vivekd | Hacker News Reader

Silicon valley is full of crap is what happened. Some jobs have been reduced - bank teller, cashier etc. There are also lots of jobs that could be replaced but aren't beause of weird regulations and such - lawyer etc.

But most jobs - making hamburgers, cooking, laying brick, pouring cement, packing stuff in warehouses or assembly lines - stuff that matters, automation looks as far off as ever. Sure machines do a lot to help in these fields but it's going to be a very long time if ever when machines can replace people completely. Even self driving cars appear to be much further away than people think.

We cannot and should not plan the economy around Silicon valley hype

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> lawyer etc

funny you mention that, because discovery automation (the job that a lot of starting lawyers do) is huge. It used to take weeks or even months, to just sort through the mountains of papers and emails. Now it's indexable and searchable, and probably even have machine classifications to identify the valuable pieces of info.

The reason lawyers haven't been fired (and that you think lawyers aren't automate-able) is that they move up the value chain - provide client focused advice, etc, where the client prefer not to see a robot.

In terms of warehouses there's a fair bit of automation which replaces quite a few jobs - at my former employer's warehouses the pickers had robots drive all the stuff to them, and they were trying out robot pickers (they were able to handle ~30% of orders due to limitations in agility, SKUs had to be specifically whitelisted). You still need people to handle e.g. dangerous goods and handle the various fuckups in the system (e.g. due to poor master data), but when I was leaving they were not planning on any new "classic" warehouses.

I don't want to disclose where I worked, but you can take a look at Ocado, they are in a similar space (although focused on a different target market) and expanding from being online grocer to making those FCs for other companies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E

You think lawyers haven't been replaced solely because of regulation?

Largely yes. In any field there are a few top performers or people with special connections that cant be replaced. But legal forms can be automated and AI today, even relatively unsophisticated AI seems to me to be capable of finding the correct legal argument better than many lawyers

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