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Comment by joesmo | Hacker News Reader

"Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea."

It's terrible sure, but it's popular only because our economy requires it. That is the basis for the whole economy. It's not like people are clamoring to serve McDonalds for minimum wage or clean shit out bathrooms. They have no other choices in this economy. The economy demands it. While those jobs might be necessary, most middle management and office type jobs are incredibly redundant and frankly, pointless. They are there because people need to eat and we haven't figured out a better, more appropriate way of wealth transfer.

"The fact that we don’t have serious efforts underway to combat threats from synthetic biology and AI development is astonishing."

It's not astonishing considering that these things don't exist, pose no threat, and the people in power wouldn't understand them even if they did exist. There are many more pressing issues that hypotheticals.

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I would assume SamA knows this. "Worthless" jobs are typically jobs that are actually valueless, but we continue to irresponsibly support their existence. My favorite example is break bulk shippers before the widespread adoption of containerization. Unions negotiated deals where workers would basically just stand around and get paid regardless of the complete lack of need.

The jobs you mention could eventually get to the point where they are actually worthless, ie: robot fast food workers, but I don't think anyone is arguing we're there yet.

> While those jobs might be necessary, most middle management and office type jobs are incredibly redundant and frankly, pointless.

This is a conceit of software folks that's not borne out by reality. Those "worthless" jobs continue to exist because software can do 90% of what those folks do, but shit the bed when faced with the other 10%. Software generally isn't reliable, predictable, or robust in the face of unusual circumstances, which is why humans continue to do these jobs.

Large corporations "restructure" all the time. Most often this consists of a periodic pruning of exactly these jobs, which really are worthless. The company continues on, wholly unharmed by the cuts.

> software can do 90% of what those folks do, but shit the bed when faced with the other 10%

So let software handle the 90% and refactor the current jobs to handle the other 10%.

> Software generally isn't reliable, predictable, or robust in the face of unusual circumstances

Not yet, at least.

I agree with you, though, and they're the same reasons why I'm personally paranoid about self-driving cars. Yeah, the occasional autopilot is nice, but if a deer jumps in front of my truck, or the self-driving software runs into some kind of bug (and remember: there's no such thing as perfect software), I'm nowhere near ready to trust the car's computer over the already-pretty-sophisticated computer in my skull.

> So let software handle the 90% and refactor the current jobs to handle the other 10%.

If the jobs could be so refactored in a cost-efficient way, they would be.

They are being so. It's an ongoing process.

Two economists are walking down the street. One spots a $100 bill on the ground.

"Hey," he says to his friend, "There's a hundred bucks lying on the ground!"

"Don't be silly," the other replies, "If there were a hundred dollars on the ground, someone would have picked it up already!"

The two economists keep walking down the street.

The worthlessness of most middle management jobs has nothing to do with software. If they were flat out eliminated, in most cases, nothing would change. There's no software needed to replace them.

The great irony is that it's exactly that arrogant ignorance and inability to understand what happens when large numbers of wildly different human beings try work together why middle management continues to be necessary.

It's like saying we don't need janitors because we can self-organize and all clean the company toilets ourselves.

It's a claim that is as true as it is ignorant and naive.

Just because we (usually) need managers doesn't mean we need managers of managers of managers of managers of managers of managers of managers of managers of managers of managers of managers of managers of managers of managers. That's the primary observation, here: that the quantity of management staff is needlessly bloated, and the levels of indirection between the highest-level executive and the lowest-level subordinate are excessive.

You're trying to paint a picture where the only options are either having five janitors per room or having no janitors at all. The point a lot of others are trying to make is that we just don't need as many janitors.

> They are there because people need to eat and we haven't figured out a better, more appropriate way of wealth transfer.

Also because some people benefit from the current arrangement, no?

synthetic biology does exist, just look at this: http://www.genomecompiler.com/

Also look at this: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-...

It's only been since 2010 that we've known how to actually do it, but the technology exists. Pandora's box has been opened.

AI development isn't science fiction either. GPU's + convolutional neural networks have been enabling radical developments in the area.

I think both of these developments have a whole bunch of potential to make our society drastically better. However there's a bunch of potential threats they represent, and it makes sense to be thinking about counter measures for those threats at the same time we develop the tech.

Don't forget about http://cambriangenomics.com/ a YC company.

Yes, but at least in the case of AI, it's so primitive and so far away from being any type of intelligence that the only intelligence is in the name. Sorry, that doesn't count, especially when you're talking about putting valuable resources into something that may never materialize: real AI. I suspect that the same applies to synthetic biology at this point, though I'm no expert on that.

>It's terrible sure, but it's popular only because our economy requires it. That is the basis for the whole economy. It's not like people are clamoring to serve McDonalds for minimum wage or clean shit out bathrooms. They have no other choices in this economy. The economy demands it. While those jobs might be necessary, most middle management and office type jobs are incredibly redundant and frankly, pointless. They are there because people need to eat and we haven't figured out a better, more appropriate way of wealth transfer.

Then we should probably change the economy so that the people don't have to suffer so much.

>It's not astonishing considering that these things don't exist, pose no threat, and the people in power wouldn't understand them even if they did exist. There are many more pressing issues that hypotheticals.

I'll go tell friends, colleagues, and my professional idols that their work does not exist and is purely hypothetical, then.

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