

The 7 Stages of Robot Replacement - bennesvig
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/09/the_7_stages_of.php

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Kliment
This is a question that has been bothering me for a while now. I think we have
a cultural problem, as a society, with automation. In the industrial world,
wealth creation is being decoupled from (human) work through automation. In
the social world, trading work for money is still the primary way of obtaining
wealth. At some point, this is going to be unsustainable (many argue it
already is). Personally, I thrive on automation. I love building machines and
writing programs that do work I believe too humiliating, boring, dangerous or
difficult for humans. But I keep encountering people who seem to spend most of
their life looking for their next temp job. I can figure out a number of
alternative income sources for myself, but I try to think of some for them and
it's not easy. I'm not sure what can be done here.

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InclinedPlane
Your comments would be even more germane 100 years ago. Why didn't that lead
to a crisis?

Either the economy is fundamentally broken (and must have been for over a
century) or perhaps it's simply a failure to grasp the subtleties and richness
of the way the economy works.

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loup-vaillant
> _Why didn't that lead to a crisis?_

I beg your pardon? 1929? World War II? Permanent cycling between "growth" and
recession? Our world practically _runs_ on crises! Now, the planet is still
spinning, but I very much doubt the way economy runs now is anywhere close to
optimal. ("Far away from optimum" counts as "fundamentally broken" in my book,
because both call for a fix.)

Regarding automation, imagine for a second that we automate a large part of
our industry. Say, driving. That would potentially be awesome: it would
significantly reduce the amount of mandatory work. But what _will_ probably
happen ? Big economic problems triggered by trucker's unemployment.

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saulrh
Roboticist here. Thankfully, if the robots learn how to do my job, I have
much, much bigger things to worry about.

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suivix
Since your job is to make non-sentient robots, I don't think there'd be big
problems.

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invalidOrTaken
Are you sure about that?

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suivix
I apologize, I should have said something like "presumably to make".

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po
Every now and then managers get the idea that they can outsource a
programmer's job: be it to untrained workers who churn out code or by buying
into the latest code generation techniques being sold by big vendors. They
think "ok we've solved the problem once, lets just describe it so that we can
hire 500 programmers to do it 500 more times!"

The thing is that the very definition of 'computer programmer' is to do the
part that cannot yet be simplified or automated. Every good programmer has an
automation toolbox full of languages and data structures and will replace
anything that can be simplified to a set of rules with running code.

There is a certain job security in programming but it means a life of
continual hill climbing.

