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Comment by PopsiclePete | Hacker News Reader

Automation is coming. We can't stop it. Together with Globalization and various "free" trade agreements, the US worker is ..effed. We are going to have the well-paying STEM jobs, the lawyers, bankers, doctors, therapists, the super low wage unskilled laborers in a race to the bottom, trying to compete with machines, and a huge, empty nothing in the middle between those groups.

And that's going to happen sadly before we reach Star Trek utopia, and there will be large-scale civil unrest, even in the US, within the next 30 years, I'm betting on it.

And let's not even talk about impoverished countries with exploding populations that are already struggling to provide jobs - an endless cycle of regional warfare, an endless Arab Spring.

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> the US worker is ..effed

Work is almost over. Good riddance to it. Why shouldn't everyone benefit from the fruits of full automation?

> We are going to have ... the super low wage unskilled laborers in a race to the bottom, trying to compete with machines, and a huge, empty nothing in the middle between those groups... and there will be large-scale civil unrest, even in the US, within the next 30 years, I'm betting on it.

That is largely up to the people who now have all the money and power. If they are shortsighted enough to take entirely for themselves the wealth the machines create - rather than using it to guarantee basic security for everyone - then we're in for rough times. I'm betting with you on that one.

> Why shouldn't everyone benefit from the fruits of full automation?

They should, but:

>That is largely up to the people who now have all the money and power.

And that's why they won't. At least not until their poverty destabilizes the economy. It's expensive and reduces profits for the people making the decisions, at least in the short run.

Now is the time to make the concept of a basic minimum income mainstream.

Doctors, bankers and lawyers are screwed as well. ML will make sure of that. We will still need some people to perform those functions, but not nearly as many as we have now.

Yup, virtually everyone is screwed, eventually (with eventually being not that far away, IMO).

Something that seems to get missed a bunch when talking about the upcoming lack of work for humans is that a job category doesn't need to be fully automated to cause widespread lack of employment.

Simply automating a job enough to allow 2 people to do the work 3 used to do puts 33% of those doing that job out of work. 33% unemployment is already an economic nightmare and the actual ratios of "X people to do the work Y used to do" will quickly become much more severe than 2 to 3.

Some people will inevitably say "this has happened before", but this time a lot of the automation is going to be purely software. You are not going to have enough new jobs for people "maintaining the robots" at anywhere near the scale required to make up for the lost jobs like you did with the previous more mechanical style of automation.

Show me an AI that can do these jobs, and I'll show you one that can do any job.

Show me an AI that can beat the best human at Chess, and I'll show you one that can beat the best human at any game?

Your mistake is assuming that a sizable portion of the work these jobs involve can't be replaced by "dumb AI", which is what ML is all about, and that they require a fully general AGI.

I should have said, do these jobs more efficiently. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see how a machine that does a "sizable portion" of the work would ever be good enough to be worth using. A human expert would always be needed to check the work.

If the proposition is that this would lead to fewer humans being needed for these jobs, I suppose that could be the case. In my own field, my criticism of automating, say, legal research and writing, is that the time it would take for me to check the work would be nearly the same as doing it myself. I don't see much efficiency gain, which is why I think the only thing that would truly be better than a human would be an AGI.

That's very true.

Also, if you look at most of what's been automated away, there's very little what we would consider (and even what people 40 years ago would have considered) artificial intelligence involved.

If you look at the legal field, what's changed is the means of gathering and disseminating information. Legal researchers can be much more productive with computer searches, and consumers can get access to advice and forms in some cases without the need of direct face time with a lawyer.

Some of the changes weren't even primarily driven by technology at all, but by new ideas for business models. I think that something like legalzoom could have been done with the technology available decades ago (phones, mail, and catalogs).

Manny attorney jobs, especially entry level discovery and research, are being automated out of existence through increased productivity. You may be able to keep your job, but a lot of graduating attorneys in the next few years will not be able to find one.

There won't be a sudden replacement that can do everything. It will be like gathering food. The majority of the population used to be involved with gathering food. Then people started to farm. Then instead of human powered ploughs they started to use horse powered ploughs. Then came the engine powered ploughs. Then came automatic seeding machines. Machines that can separate corn from the plants. Etc. Nowadays only a tiny fraction of the population is involved with food production. There are still farmers, but just a couple. We are now in the horse powered plough stage. We have full text search that can go through tons of documents that doctors and lawyers would previously have to search by hand. An assistant to do legal research is essentially just a really good full text search engine, it's a continuum from dumb search engine to smart search engine. We have email. We have electronic systems to keep track of patients and clients. Soon we will have systems that can suggest a diagnosis based on symptoms, and systems that can suggest medical tests to narrow down a list of diagnoses. Systems that can assist clients to write their own standard legal documents. It won't be that suddenly all doctors and lawyers are out of a job, it will be like farming. We still have farmers, but only a couple because they are so efficient.

Watson can do diagnosis (a lot) better than the average Doctor. IBM is working on the law now.

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