The rise of robots and the future of jobs | Hacker News Reader

The rise of robots and the future of jobs

timharford.com

38 pointsjuanre48 comments

Two quotes come to mind:

"Never send a human to do a machine's job." -- Agent Smith

"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." -- Buckminster Fuller

It's been my worry for a while that we will achieve the marxist workers utopia technically, where the vast majority of work is done by robot, but culturally we will be stuck with a small group of people enjoying the rewards of capital and technology and an enormous group of miserable poor fighting each other to get the rare chance to work.

Even if you think that such an outcome is 'deserved' for the capitalist and technologist in the short term, in the long term, as the divide grows sharper, I believe most people will come to see that there's something appalling about giving all of the wealth of the world to the descendants of the few and nothing to the rest. Already one family in the USA control more wealth than approximately half the population. And this will get starker.

Technology enhances power, and we are currently stuck with a system where much more worrying than the 'rich getting richer', the 'powerful get more powerful'. And the technological concentration of power in the hands of capital goes alongside the concentration of military and political power too. In the past, when capital got too far ahead of labour, there was always the spectacle of revolution to act as a last ditch moderator and equaliser, but the future will give those in power unprecedented access to surveillance, intelligence and military ability to allow the divide to grow bigger than ever before.

We need to find a way to share the amazing gains that technology brings with labour as well as with capital, and do so in a way that doesn't disincentivise the creation of new technology, and we need to start coming up with this really soon to have any chance of heading off a disaster. I think this is one of the most serious issues facing us as people who care about technology and the world.

That's why I think Guaranteed Income schemes are inevitable politically, in the developed countries. Sooner or later, one is going to do it (Switzerland?), and within a couple of decades, all the rest will follow.

Hopefully, this will lead to a realignment of society's sense of "value" away from currency and things exchangeable for currency. Money-driven thinking is the curse of Marxists as much as capitalists.

The problem is that capitalism, as any other paperclip maximizer, will not stop working just because of one country decision. Minimal income will increase cost of labour because nobody would want to do shitty job. This will make local products more costly and less competitive, and most of the labour will be outsourced. Most of the export will be natural resources.

Switzerland owns huge chunk of world's banking system and due to direct democracy has minimal corruption, so it could afford minimal income by exploitation of other countries. How to make it work for Ethiopia without Earth's unite government and worldwide wealth redistribution system?

A few problems with this. First, most of the modern crap jobs are service-oriented jobs that are done locally because they can't be outsourced. You're talking about "products", which often can be outsourced, and thus have already been outsourced. Not every job is manufacturing. You can't outsource your janitor or dishwasher.

Second, Ethiopia doesn't have a functioning modern economy. So no, they can't do Guaranteed Income. If they want it, they need to modernize to the point where they can provide a stable economy first. Exploited? No one bothers to exploit them. Given the political and economic instability, it's not worth exploiting. Much better to exploit countries like Indonesia that can provide basic stability.

But you're also stuck on the whole exploitation thing. That's a very 20th century attitude. Exploitation for natural resources is no longer the driver of economics. The primary resource now is labor, particularly skilled labor, and that becomes increasingly expensive as it becomes successful - in other words, being "exploited" is the best and fastest way for countries to become wealthier and more independent.

Just imagine autonomous cars/drones/delivery-bots etc. millions of jobs lost overnight. Society will change for good in the coming decade and if thinks go wrong we will have a dystopia coming for us.

And people with power/money usually aren`t interested in the greater good. Our current financial system is doomed to fail and the reset button will not come this time.

>It's been my worry for a while that we will achieve the marxist workers utopia technically

This is actually my mid-term goal with the food service industry, driving labor costs to insignificant (not that it would realistically get to zero). How I anticipate addressing the problems you describe are several fold:

1) Job training and direct hiring for technologically displaced workers in the industry 2) Free food for low/no income people 3) Political advocacy for the basic income

These aren't magic bullets but I think they would go the furthest to bring everyone up while moving technology forward.

It's called the "service economy". 99% of us will be fighting to capture some income from the 1% either in zero-sum services (such as advertising), or better and more exotic leisure (travel, cooking, experiences) and healthcare and other services for the 1%, with some spillover effect.

I imagine something like the Apple store extended to the whole economy, with thousands competing for one sale, a few big winners (the chosen restaurants, the chosen services) and thousands or millions of losers for each winner, surviving on the long tail.

As the article says, more lawyers and burger flippers. No more middle class clerks or bank tellers and especially no more blue collar workers or farmers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_economy

Edit: what Joe_Altmaier said

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6990430

Edit2: World Bank paper detailing the growth of services in a postindustrial economy:

http://www.worldbank.org/depweb/beyond/beyondco/beg_09.pdf

"As incomes continue to rise, people’s needs become less “material” and they begin to demand more services—in health, education, entertainment, and many other areas"

"Meanwhile, labor productivity in services does not grow as fast as it does in agriculture and industry because most service jobs cannot be filled by machines. This makes services more expensive relative to agricultural and industrial goods, further increasing the share of services in GDP. The lower mechanization of services also explains why employment in the service sector continues to grow while employment in agriculture and industry declines because of technological progress that increases labor productivity and eliminates jobs. (Figure 9.2). Eventually the service sector replaces the industrial sector "

Robots have been taking over jobs for a long time. The problem is that people have too narrow a definition of "robot". Is a Bobcat a robot? A job that 30 years ago might have been done by a row of men with shovels can now be done faster and far more cheaply by one guy with a Bobcat. How about a forklift? Hauling 100 pound bags of stuff around used to be a major source of human employment. Now, we put those bags on a pallet and carry them with a forklift.

Is a food processor a robot? A century ago, fine French cooking was defined by its labor-intensive sauces, manually grinding and sieving vegetables down to liquids. Now, it can be done in seconds by a cheap little machine. Meanwhile, two people and a Hobart can wash all the dishes generated by a large restaurant. Is that Hobart a robot?

Automation doesn't just replace labor. It allows new forms of labor. Most of us here work on computers. What would we have been doing 100 years ago, before there were computers? Would we have been clerks? Adding numbers manually? Artists drawing things by hand for print?

So I was having a debate with a colleague a few weeks ago: the suggestion was that in 20 years time the a large percentage of surgeries done in hospitals will be done by robots .

Importantly, we didn't specify which surgeries, but through the conversation the implication was not that robots would be removing millions of weird moles and skin marks - we're talking serious, long surgeries.

I'd be really interested to hear the HN community's view on this. I have my own (strong) opinions based on my knowledge of AI and ML as a field, but perhaps other people have their own strong opinions (and perhaps people can change my mind!)

You have to specify what you mean by "done by robots". Will a qualified surgeon still need to be present for the operation to take place?

Probably, but they may be alone supervising 3 operations in parallel rather than having a team of junior surgeons and nurses to help them on one operation.

  > we're talking serious, long surgeries

well, 20 years is a long time, so it is hard so speculate. But I'll say, probably not.

If you think that liability issues pose a significant barrier to entry for self-driving cars getting to market, just wait until you consider robotically automated surgeries.

Just wait until the probability of error with a robot surgeon is lower than that of a human surgeon.

Even if it's lower, a single mistake from a robot surgeon will not be forgiven. That's the same problem with self-driving cars. I'm pretty sure that they're already safer than a human driver, but a single mortal accident for a technical problem will be all over the news and block any progress in legislation.

Driving is different. Thought `robot is better driver than me` is much harder to accept than `robot is a better surgeon than someone i don't know`.

An intermediate step would be robotic tools that could be controlled by a surgeon as effectively as their own hands.

As such, I do not believe we will see majority-robotic surgery within 20 years.

"An intermediate step would be robotic tools that could be controlled by a surgeon as effectively as their own hands."

But that is basically already were we are today right? And it's way more efficient than "as their own hands": a friend surgeon was explaining me that robotic tools were used not only because they were way more precise than human hands but also because they allowed for far greater freedom of movements, being able to rotate on way more axis than our human hands.

This is one of the main "problem" with robots: it's not just that they're "as good" as we are. It's that they're way more precise and can do things we can't.

There are also, if I'm not mistaken, surgeries that have been performed across countries, with the surgeon in one country controlling the robotic arms in another country.

I agree with your assessment of the situation, but not with the conclusion that robotic tools are as effective as hands:

Robotic tools have been optimised for specific, planned and clearly-defined surgeries, and I know they can offer less invasive keyhole surgeries.

But, they do not nearly emulate hands in a general way - much bigger breakthroughs are required for robotic tools to be useful in emergency surgery.

I'm a beginner at the math of AI/ML, but I can say this: almost every task we've ever assumed requires human general intelligence - short of the old "world domination" standby - has turned out to be entirely doable by a sufficiently specialized AI/ML algorithm. Even spoken conversation is turning out more amenable than originally proposed, once you confine the software to one kind of conversation.

I'm founder and lead developer of a ML startup where we trained our system to do realistic 3D modeling for human 3D animation. From my perspective, I think it will be less than 20 years before the vast majority of longer surgeries will be automated. We already have robotic assistance, and remote robotic surgical hands for when the doctor and patient are in separate locations. There is too much money to be made for this to remain non-main stream.

I'm having my kidney removed for transplant in February. The hospital offered to have the surgery performed with robotic tools where I'm never actually touched by surgeons -- they are controlling the tools from a workstation.

These tools have come under fire because a certain number of surgeries have gone wrong using them, but it seems like when you compare the number of incidents vs the number of surgeries performed the percentage of error is significantly smaller than those performed by human hands.

That said, I definitely agree that it is only a matter of time before a robot will be handling the surgery from start to finish, having learned how to perform the task by trained surgeons. The complications arise when the robot runs into difficult situations and things that happen outside of their defined work patterns.

This is a key reason why I feel it's important to be working in technology, especially as a developer. It will take longer before your job is automated away.

My wife works in a position that I feel could be automated, and it's scary when you give it much thought.

When the time comes that there are people who are able to work because their skills keep them valuable and people who can't work because their skills are no longer needed, I know which side I want to be on, regardless of any sort of moral implications.

Things that are formulaic, repetitive and doesn't necessarily need "human" input will inherently be reached barring any catastrophic events that set all of humanity back. Terminator is robots with agency bias added, so that scenario happening is a bit unlikely. Elysium on other hand might be a slightly better portrayal of things to come.

There are some other serious implications of the rise of such technology too, political ones. The "elite" & "powerful" have depended on the masses for labor, economic output etc. When a good chunk of the masses become somewhat "useless", what happens to them? Thanks to drones and "big dogs", it can be somewhat ensured that a massive population of people will have no real recourse to socio-economic or other inequities and injustices.

> Thanks to drones and "big dogs"

What are "big dogs" in this context? (Bit of a challenge for the Goog!)

It says in the article that Big Dog is a robot made by a company Google bought. Here's a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNZPRsrwumQ

Personal service will probably continue. In fact its a large part of the American job scene. Somebody cuts your hair, your lawn. Somebody does your taxes. Some of these can be done by robots, but its hard to replace the human interaction.

Will that mean personal services will become as rare as employing a butler is now? Maybe. Or maybe some of these will never be efficiently replaced by bots. And new ones may come up.

In some countries, the 'haves' employ dozens of 'have-nots' in an effort to allow everybody a position in society. With robots, it may be enough to nanny an industrialist's children to school each morning. Then return to your bot-run apartment to enjoy automatic perfect coffee and read your blogs.

There will not be enough industrialists for there to be many of these jobs. The wages will be driven down, the expected duties will increase, they'll be fought over by the large numbers of unemployed. They'll probably end up being given away as prizes on reality TV shows.

The article's central point at least partially hinges on the continuation of Moore's Law. However, if the exponential rise in computing power at stead cost does not continue, the coming 'rise of robots' might be substantially slower.

There is some evidence that Moore's Law might come to an end: http://www.economist.com/news/21589080-golden-rule-microchip...

Our knowledge of AI suggests that performing basic human tasks like perception and navigation in the physical world is extremely computationally expensive. Even though improvements in algorithms would speed things up somewhat. The required computing resources would still be fairly expensive for complicated tasks many workers routinely perform.

On the bright side, this might give us time to adjust our institutions to the new reality.

Thoughts?

"We tend to miss this because the bloated copies of Microsoft Word we use do not seem faster than 20 years ago." - person obviously not familiar with Office 365.

"Even the Chinese must fear the robots." - especially them IMHO (world's manufacturing outsourcing center).

> person obviously not familiar with Office 365

More like, a person in an office. Adopting new technology has less to do with new technology becoming available, and more to do with retraining, support and backups. I imagine the majority of the workforce is not familiar with Office 365.

Moore's law has not much to do with computational power anymore, it's always been about transistor numbers in cpus. While this has traditionally mapped 1:1 with computing power, it doesn't work like this anymore. It's not an exponential growth in computing because our techniques of parallelism and algorithms haven't been keeping up with all this power.

Very interesting article nonetheless, just felt like clarifying this tiny point.

And this is why I want to find work in automation, robotics, or AI or something.

Labor against capitalist. Sharpen the contradictions! Radicalize the moderates[1]! Bring it all on!

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6GLoKkkCtY

Steady comrade.

Let me have a little fun with it. Glory to Arstotzka!

This other article on the front page of HN today seems to contradict this [1].

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/21589080-golden-rule-microchip...

Automation and the mass annihilation of jobs will be the biggest story of the next five years.

I remember reading a story in Analog science fiction about just this scenario: inexpensive, multi purpose robots (and the riots they caused when people realized they could be replaced).

The solution? Have each robot owned by one, and only one, human being, who could lease out the robot's "labor" as they wished.

I doubt that solution is possible, but I do think the issues the story raised are going to be, as you put it, "the biggest story" of the near future.

(I wish I could remember the name of that story!)

This one is similar:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

I love that story--the contrast between the US and Australia illustrates the fact that it really is a political choice how to spend fantastic wealth that automation gives us. (It's not only a political choice, there are moral components as well.)

Government wouldn't even limit real estate ownership to one per person...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means_of_production#Marxian_eco...

But why only one? It might be optimal to have many more robots than humans.

I think the point was to make sure that capital wasn't going to replace labor via automation.

soon : the Butlerian Jihad

What is different now, compared to five years ago? Did I miss some major break-through?

You didn't. It's just the usual exponential growth finally produced enough computing power that formerly nearly-impossible things have become tantalizingly practical.

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