
People Who Train Robots to Do Their Own Jobs - daschaefer
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/technology/meet-the-people-who-train-the-robots-to-do-their-own-jobs.html
======
zw123456
Some years back I worked for a large corporation on a team that had a large
number of "engineers" doing what seemed like pretty rudimentary work so I
wrote a program to automate about 90% of the job functions. I thought I would
be a hero and showed it to my boss. He asked me if it could be our "little
secret" because he was afraid the whole team would be replaced including him.

~~~
leggomylibro
See, the company should really be incentivizing this sort of thing. If you
automate your team out of a job, great - you all get a pension at 33% wages as
long as the company is in business and 6 months to find a new job.

Company saves a lot of money, workers are incentivized to this sort of
behavior, and you could probably handle the upkeep by offering to keep one or
two employees on at full pay if they'd prefer, or stipulating a day or two a
month to perform any necessary maintenance on your automation.

But that's probably a pipe dream; it would essentially mean funneling capital
to those who produce value, which is apparently a ridiculous concept in this
modern economy.

~~~
ohazi
> you all get a pension at 33% wages as long as the company is in business and
> 6 months to find a new job

Boss: "Or, and take a minute to appreciate my cleverness before you respond,
how about zero, and don't let the door hit you on the way out!"

These improvements eventually materialize regardless of any incentives for
this behavior. Perhaps it would come marginally sooner with an incentive.

But since non-owner workers will no longer have a relationship where they
provide continued value to their employer, the company is (correctly?)
motivated to screw them over (think single vs. repeated prisoner's dilemma).
The company could even pretend to offer the incentive to get these
improvements sooner, and then fire them anyway.

The game theoretic optimum for capital owners is to screw over their (soon-to-
be former) employees. This is why some suggest a tax on automation -- there's
a market externality here that isn't going to magically go away.

------
sitkack
If the apps you are using for your job, store or communicate data in the
cloud, you are unwittingly training your replacement. These massive troves of
data that map problems to solutions are being used to train ML models that
will replace or augment those tasks. On its own, I don't have a problem with
the auto-macroisation of tasks. But those teachers will be invariably thrown
to the wolves. I wouldn't be surprised to see startup pitch decks outlining
domain specific tooling explicitly designed to capture expert-level worker
knowledge.

~~~
olewhalehunter
btw thinking this threat excludes engineers and programmers is delusional

~~~
jameslk
Most (e.g. [1]) don't think of their job as being automated because most don't
understand how it will happen. The issue is we only have the present way to
think about how the future will work. The future will likely eliminate a lot
of mundane engineering jobs (e.g. CRUD apps) with tools that provide
automation (learned or programmed) and more intuitive interfaces for the
layman. Not all work can be automated, but those are the edge cases. The focus
is to eliminate _most_ work, by building smarter and more niche services.

For example, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, et al have reduced the number of jobs
for CMS and ecommerce developers. Zapier and IFTTT have reduced the number of
integration jobs. The Grid was an experiment in creating whole websites
automatically (most regard it as a failure, but the tech will likely catch
up). There's research into using ML to identify and correct bugs in code.
These are the low hanging fruit that will erode away at the jobs easiest to
automate, leaving behind more niche work.

It's hard to imagine less work for engineers in the future because there's so
much work to go around right now. That's likely the case presently because
there's so many industries where manual labor can be eliminated, creating lots
of new labor for engineers. Whole industries may be disrupted until
corporations with automation emerge and take over. We'll likely see
engineering work keep rising until there isn't as much left to automate and
engineering supply catches up, at which point we'll hit "peak software
engineering."

There will be engineers in the future just like there will be medical
professionals in the future, but they'll probably be doing a different job and
there will be a lot less work to go around. I like to think of that line of
work as "escalation jobs," where when the machine fails, it goes to the human.
Other work will likely get more and more scientific, theoretical and research-
oriented.

1\. [http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/24/americans-think-robots-
will-t...](http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/24/americans-think-robots-will-take-
everyone-elses-jobs-but-not-theirs.html)

~~~
LrnByTeach
I agree with you, with time old IT jobs are dying and new ones are created.

I like the concepts "peak software engineering" and "escalation jobs," where
when the machine fails, the job goes to the human

In Year 2000 , I worked at a startup , we are 70 employees total out of which
50 are Engineers. We have

\- one dedicated MS Exchange Mail sever admin

\- 5 employee team, for running production servers and helping employee PC
boxes etc.

\- one Release engineer, whose job is to make Builds and ready for 15 day
production release cycle of the code base

That is 7 employees which is 10% of 70. All of it today Replaced by the Self-
service Cloud Infrastructure software

a) Github

b) AWS

c) Gmail Enterprise mail hosting/others

1/ Cloud Infrastructure software

2/ Saas Applications

These are two areas where most of the Job elimination happened in the last
decade.

Then we got disruption ( more automation ) started at every Industry level,
that created more jobs than lost

software engineer productivity doubled/tripled in the last decade as we
developed more higher level Abstractions.

More than 1000 people are working on Amazon Alexa, so do at many other
companies in the areas of ML and Deep learning AI . These are brand new jobs
never heard of 10 years ago.

\------ > For example, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, et al have reduced the
number of jobs for CMS and ecommerce developers.

> Zapier and IFTTT have reduced the number of integration jobs

------
Theodores
For a year I did not automate my colleagues in Customer Service because I
liked them and knew they needed income. When they outsourced everyone but the
team lead I had a chat with the team lead and we decided that automation was
the way to deliver timely customer service and set to work.

The hardest part was the spec. Simple and obvious changes to forms, message
strings and processes were arrived at by my colleague teaching me her job. We
worked collaboratively and now have happy customers.

Had I started this task earlier with the old team present then I doubt I would
have done such a good job. The collaboration would not have been there, it
could even have been hostile. Due to the outsourcing we got a break to work on
the same side.

For our team lead we have better job satisfaction as everything is excellent
with no backlog.

Now we do not need people to fill out forms and do other brainless stuff we
find that we need to get more skilled and differently motivated staff for the
job.

The old team are not suited to the new work that is there so I guess that is a
problem for them but the new hires will be paid a lot better. I think 4 proper
jobs is better than a dozen pointless jobs. We can also scale the business now
without fear of recall or late shipping nightmares sinking the company.

If we scale the business 3x we will be having the larger team again, all paid
better.

I don't see a magic AI system doing the real change, putting people like me
out of a job even though I am the first to admit that most of my work is
simple stuff.

------
jorblumesea
As a junior developer, is it even worth pursuing an "standard" career in
technology if line engineers will be replaced by some kind of deep learning
algo in 10-15 years? What career is even safe if we get to that level? When I
see events and the pace of progress, it's hard to even justify any long term
planning and I feel that (American) society is completely unprepared for the
impact automation will bring.

Might as well go for my masters now, given that no one with a BS degree will
be needed long term? Given a long enough timescale, even that won't matter I
guess...

~~~
grandDesigns
When they invented the COBOL compilers, the assembly language programmers were
scared. "Now every business man can write their own code!".

Same when they invented the spreadsheet.

Same when they invented garbage collection.

Same with every new library, framework, "its just like legos"-invention.

Yes, they make it easier. But, the world then demands more software.

Sofware begets software.

Without compilers, there would be many many fewer programmers in the world.

Someday we might have the computer from the Enterprise. Then we can ask it
"Give us the answer to the ultimate question about Life, the Universe, and
Everything".

~~~
toexitthedonut
That's the way I see it. Programmers have been automating themselves out of
menial tasks since the first compiler, or possibly even before.

What is considered "menial" depends on the context of the problem needing to
be solved and a mix of your personal experience.

The increase of hardware performance also helped allow software abstractions
to the ridiculous levels you see. That's what also makes it possible for
computers to solve a greater array of business problems.

Engineers making tools that are used for making other tools, that are tools
for other tools for other tools that eventually helped make someone's wedding
photography site on Wix.

------
jtraffic
Interesting that the possibility of training a computer to replace parts of
your job has existed for a while. There is an excellent, thought-provoking
paper by Robin Dawes that shows that a linear regression trained on human
decisions will soon beat the decisions of the human, because it will pick up
the trend and follow it with less variance in the future. He refers to this
idea as "bootstrapping."[0] (obviously not the same bootstrapping
statisticians are used to).

The takeaway was that experts should make decisions about which variables
should go in the regression and the signs they should have. The model should
produce the forecasts.

Real world application: doctors should figure out which tests to run, models
should say whether the patient has the disease conditional on the test
results.

[0]
[http://www.niaoren.info/pdf/Beauty/9.pdf](http://www.niaoren.info/pdf/Beauty/9.pdf)

------
amelius
> Waymo’s cars have driven two million miles in the real world and billions
> more in computer simulations. But it’s impossible to program for every
> event.

I wonder what will happen if two people cross the street with a big painting
of ... a road :)

~~~
noonespecial
I have it on excellent authority that if the paint happens of be of the ACME
brand, its very hard to tell what might happen.

------
sharkweek
I imagine this feels slightly worse than training your replacement in a
different country, where the labor is cheaper, which is something I have done
before. At least in that case, another human is making a living.

~~~
wu-ikkyu
I don't mean to bash you because it is a valid point considering the current
state of affairs, but this comment really highlights how we as a society don't
understand that the purpose of automation is humanitarian.

~~~
sharkweek
If I truly believed that automation, especially in the short term, would
include UBI or some other social safety nets, I'd be far more optimistic about
this.

I'm nervous that in the short term, fewer people will continue to get very
rich, and more people will fall out of the middle class.

~~~
alexbecker
Very much this. HN seems not to appreciate that jobs are our only currently
accepted mechanism for distributing wealth on the scale necessary for our
current society. If automation removes them, sure, it will increase net
productivity (at least until the poor masses destroy the machines). But if we
lose distribution in the process, it's an enormous loss.

------
csours
The Toyota Way includes the idea that continuous improvement should increase
quality and efficiency, and that the efficiency should be re-invested.

If the smartest thing your company can imagine doing with a person who is able
to automate their job is fire them, your company is wasting valuable
resources.

~~~
stinkytaco
This assumes that a company's ultimate goal is growth. For a large, publicly
traded company like the article is talking about, this is probably true. But
many companies I do business with on a day to day basis (local stores,
contractors, etc.) have not interest in growth. Automation is a way of
reducing workforce and costs.

------
dahart
> Can human agents find new ways to be valuable as quickly as the A.I.
> improves at handling parts of their job?

The classifiers we call AI right now can take over a lot of tasks if not whole
jobs -- which points at how remedial many tasks & jobs are, for better or
worse.

What ML can't do yet is tell you that you asked the wrong question. Some jobs
will go away, but not all of them, for now. And some jobs have gone away with
every technical development so far.

The interesting and open question is whether it's turtles all the way down -
is it possible that a large enough classifier that's seen enough examples of
everything will be sentient? Is it possible that we are just walking fleshy
classifiers, and there's no actual line between consciousness and a large
enough neural network?

------
skydoctor
Nitpicking but the article has 5 examples, only 2 of which are true to the
title. The travel agent and the customer representative actually train the
"robots" to do their own job. However the software engineer, for example,
doesn't train A.I. to write software - she writes code which helps A.I. to get
trained in driving better. At present, I think very little of a software
engineer's task can be replaced by an A.I - understanding requirements,
debugging, deployment, and the likes. Mind you programmatic automation has to
be distinguished from A.I.

~~~
dorgo
>for example, doesn't train A.I. to write software

Actually there is reasearch in that direction. Genetic programming comes to
mind
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming))
It would be something which takes a specification and retuns a computer
program. Somebody still needs to write the specification though.

------
joeybaker
As an engineer, I consider it my job to automate myself out of a job. It's a
sisyphusian goal, but a healthy way to think about your duty to the company
and leads to a good kind of laziness.

~~~
rz2k
Sisyphus’ fate could be a punishment because of the effort, or because
everything he does is undone each day. Bad jobs when people are young or have
poor bargaining power often seem to involve a manager who is disconnected from
profitability of the business telling their inferiors to continue doing
something in an inefficient way.

I understand wanting to continue taking home a paycheck to support your
family, but I don’t understand wanting to continue doing a job if there is a
vastly less labor-intensive way to get the same output.

What you describe sounds like Sisyphus always finding out at the end of the
day that he only reached a ridge partway to the top of the mountain. A typical
menial job, where you do the same work every day without improving the process
is more like the classic tale of the boulder rolling back down to the base of
the mountain at the end of each day.

~~~
joeybaker
Fair point. Perhaps "perpetual" is a better word.

------
rm_-rf_slash
When I first read "The unreasonable effectiveness of neural networks" I
realized that the writing is on the wall for the software development
profession as we know it.

I'm glad my employer is sponsoring my part-time M.Eng in AI. Otherwise I fear
my job will eventually go the way of the telephone switchboard operator.

~~~
bjornlouser
yes, they will automate away your programming job, but they will still need
you to run xgboost ;)

------
Markoff
this is pretty much what microsoft has done with reviewers of their app store,
they fired ("downsized" in newspeak) pretty much 80-90% of staff after
automating their jobs with help of few young and eager people not thinking
about consequences. at same time they lowered requirements for submitting apps
due to falling amounts of developers willing to code for their platform. did
it help microsoft? i don't think so, good riddance...

------
sebringj
As AI attains emotion...the boss is like, "Why is this AI telling me to fuck
off?", "Why does this AI hate me?", "Why does this AI always have a bad
attitude toward work?". It was trained to at a very specific time. Hmmm. This
could be termed "Human Cruft" at some point.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
Well, we are all trained (as children) to hate people who mistreat us,
perceived unfairness, etc. The question would be if the AI was capable of
learning to like a good boss if it was trained to hate a bad one first. This
is a common problem for humans and their relationships, for the same
reasons...

~~~
sebringj
Right, but not started on a good footing for sure, kind of like if you are
born into abuse and your epigenetics are all peaked on stress expression,
harder to integrate harmoniously into positive environments. Speculation
vacation... ok I'm back.

------
id122015
but dont you hate it when you call customer service and want to talk with a
human but the robot asks you what you want ?

now I remember, I think it was PayPal that I called.

Last time I had to repeat twice that I want to talk to customer service.
However nobody told me that repeating two times the same thing would do the
trick. A novice would be lost at that.

------
downrightmike
Its not the stupidity of the companies, its that you have a hammer and not
everything is a nail.

------
hindsightbias
What if we train them with bad traits?

