
China’s Troubling Robot Revolution - adventured
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/11/opinion/chinas-troubling-robot-revolution.html
======
codeshaman
Here's a nice 2015 documentary about jobs in the high tech society:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtSqlfZgnm4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtSqlfZgnm4)

And this is a qz article dealing with self-driving trucks which are poised to
replace truck drivers:

[http://qz.com/417014/self-driving-trucks-are-going-to-hit-
th...](http://qz.com/417014/self-driving-trucks-are-going-to-hit-the-us-
economy-like-a-human-driven-truck/)

The map in there (also found here
[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-
the-most-common-job-in-every-state)) is interesting. Truck driver is currently
the most common job in the majority of the U.S. states, but interestingly,
'software developer' is on the rise and has taken the top spot in a couple of
states. This happened last year.

So the software developer seems to be the truck driver of the 21st century,
which kind of makes sense , since we're not just driving trucks, we're
'driving' all the machines out there.

So it begs the question - if this is the fate of truck drivers, isn't the same
going to happen to the software developers in a couple of years ?

~~~
tluyben2
I think the difference between software dev and truck driving is that it
doesn't actually require and extraordinary skill to drive a truck. You get
your truck driving license, which is not hard (easy in some countries even)
and that's it. For software dev you need a lot more ; most people simply
cannot do it. The type of software dev that doesn't need those skills will be
(and already are) obsolete; it just takes some time to mature and get to that
point. But for truck drivers; with self driving trucks we need 0 truck
drivers, with better processes, libraries and tools we need less programmers,
but far from 0.

~~~
dsfsdfd
It requires extraordinary skill for a human - but for a computer? Computers
will learn to think, imo you would be a fool to believe otherwise. At that
point creating more software will simply be a matter of burning more
coal/collecting more photons/harnessing more wind/fusing atoms/splitting
atoms/exploiting temperature gradients/etc.

So what we are arguing over is when this will happen. I think we are getting
quite close - decades away. Maybe less for simpler software development
processes.

Most of us are going to live through interesting times, our children are going
to live through very interesting times indeed - as the old Chinese curse
goes...

source: Msc mathematics and have been following the bleeding edge of ML like a
hawk, looking for a problem for the solutions

~~~
tluyben2
Yes, it will happen. I just don't think it's decades away. At least not in the
sense of truck drivers; most programmers will go (like most lawyers, doctors,
etc will) but there will be some skills required the coming decades which are
still too hard (IMHO ofcourse). But yes, it will eventually happen for sure.

And for simpler processes it is already there but people would not call that
programming here on HN and companies are not taking advantage of it. You
really do not need custom software to run most companies (even a lot of
software companies; just repackaging), but (luckily for me) they still order
custom software and yes, it is more efficient and nicer; that is because they
want software to match their process while it should be the other way around
usually.

~~~
minthd
>> You really do not need custom software to run most companies

So why do they still use custom software ??

------
api
Guaranteed basic income. It's the only way... at least if we want a future
that is actually good for more than ~10% of the human race.

The only alternatives are bloody destructive revolutions or totalitarian
panopticon police states to forcibly hold the other 90% in crushing poverty.
That future would look an awful lot like The Hunger Games -- small high-tech
enclaves enslaving and suppressing the rest of humanity -- and even within
these enclaves, you do not step out of line.

I know people said this in the past and "jobs always came back," but I am
increasingly believing that there is a _qualitative_ difference between
Turing-complete automation and non-Turing-complete automation. It's different
this time. Software defined systems are not like the cotton gin or even first
generation industrial robotics.

In other words I agree with Marc Andressen: "software is eating the world."
_Absolutely everything_ will become software defined -- rapidly and easily
reconfigurable and thus exponentially rather than linearly destructive to
employment.

~~~
itistoday2
> _Guaranteed basic income. It 's the only way... at least if we want a future
> that is actually good for more than ~10% of the human race._

Basic income is one of two ways of realizing a future that is good for
_everyone_ (and those ~10% won't be happy without it because the zombies will
be at their door). The other way is to make everything free (either
forcefully, or through price reductions via technology and automation).

Basic income is known to work [1]. "Making everything free" forcefully is a
no-go because it disrespects the realities of market dynamics (as we've
learned from Communism).

It is important also to realize that there are _many_ ways of implementing BI,
and some of them are better than others. This is a debate and discussion we
should be all having.

The primary ethical decision I see is whether BI is implemented in a coercive
manner (i.e. taxation) or a voluntary manner. Both approaches are possible and
each can be done in various different ways. I worked on something called
[http://groupcurrency.org](http://groupcurrency.org) [2], a voluntary
cryptocurrency approach to basic income, and there are many other approaches
as well, the simplest of which is simply for a "company-tribe" to guarantee
its members a minimum income (backed by the fruits of their collective labor).

For those interested in Basic Income, I strongly recommend perusing the
subreddit r/basicincome and related subreddits (r/CryptoUBI, etc.).

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/basicincome/wiki/index#wiki_that.27...](https://www.reddit.com/r/basicincome/wiki/index#wiki_that.27s_all_very_well.2C_but_where.27s_the_evidence.3F)

[2] HN thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501059](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501059)

~~~
api
While I'm not a fan of coercive taxation, it's better than The Hunger Games.
It's also important to note that populist revolutions also often result in
totalitarianism. So without basic income I think we have a choice between a
totalitarian state of the 1% and a totalitarian state of the 99% (or at least
one that claims to be -- we saw what the USSR turned into).

It's likely the best way to preserve the most freedom and openness, at least
given the political tools at our disposal. I'm a fan of the _idea_ of
eliminating coercive taxation but I do not see it as something politically
achievable in the foreseeable future.

... and yes, there will be some percentage of people who get basic income and
just sit around and get high and eat chips. I do not believe that is
avoidable. I suppose today a lot of those people are working in bullshit jobs
that are on their way out, or are on an existing welfare system.

It's dumb to sacrifice _our_ freedom or quality of life just because it
offends us to see a few people dicking around. Ultimately it's their loss --
they are the ones wasting their lives on unfulfilling time-wasting
"entertainment," and they'll probably regret it later. We need not subject
ourselves to totalitarianism or poverty in order to "punish" people for
laziness -- a life wasted is punishment enough.

~~~
itistoday2
> _I 'm a fan of the idea of eliminating coercive taxation but I do not see it
> as something politically achievable in the foreseeable future._

It is also questionable whether basic income itself is politically achievable.

The beauty of the non-coercive voluntary approaches to basic income is that it
can be implemented _right now_ by any group without requiring or waiting on
any political gesticulation.

~~~
api
I'm curious about this. Any references?

The problem I see is that you already have this huge taxation burden which
soaks up surplus wealth that might power such things. Implementing basic
income at the government level would redirect this firehose, but I don't see
how decentralized voluntarist approaches would achieve that.

~~~
itistoday2
> _I 'm curious about this. Any references?_

Yes, see my post above for links about one possible cryptocurrency approach
called Group Currency (disclaimer: I am one of the contributors to that idea).

Group currencies can be thought of as "company-tribes" where relationships are
familial instead of exchange-based. We'll post a simplified version of this
scheme to [https://blog.okturtles.com](https://blog.okturtles.com) soon.

The TLDR of the simple method is: (1) members of the company-tribe all accept
payment for their products and services to the group's account. (2) Funds are
divided evenly until a basic income has been reached for each member (say, for
the month), after which all additional funds go to the member who is
generating them.

> _The problem I see is that you already have this huge taxation burden which
> soaks up surplus wealth that might power such things. Implementing basic
> income at the government level would redirect this firehose, but I don 't
> see how decentralized voluntarist approaches would achieve that._

This is a great point, and one that needs to be considered and discussed.

It is possible for a group to _both_ pay taxes and provide its members with a
basic income ( _and_ campaign for an end to mandatory income taxes ;).

------
option_greek
Whenever I read an article about robots replacing human workers, I can't help
but remember this excellent short story by Marshall Brain:

[http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

Some how I felt even the worst scenario in the story (where robots confine the
jobless to reservations) seem to be lot better than the current conditions in
many poor countries.

------
mc32
On the bright side, if they can figure this out (the solution to automation
eating the world), we (advanced post-industrial economies) can benefit from
their leadership in this area.

On the other hand, this means that China does not get to transition to higher
value added jobs thereby passing the manual low skill labor to the next
country down on the economic transition pole, i.e. India and greater
Africa.... on the third hand, China approaches an aging population problem,
so...

So what happens to those economies?

We'll need to figure these things out, if this speculation is borne out.

~~~
Animats
_" On the bright side, if they can figure this out (the solution to automation
eating the world), we (advanced post-industrial economies) can benefit from
their leadership in this area."_

That's a useful remark. I'd previously thought that Japan would come up with a
new solution. Their housing bubble popped in 1989 and put Japan into
recession. The US hit that problem in 2008. But Japan never came up with a
good solution - they had a 20 year recession. What they did do is put money
into infrastructure projects, and improve their safety net. So, while there's
less forward progress, life for the average Japanese has not become worse.

From the article: _" 43 percent of Chinese workers already consider themselves
to be overeducated for their current positions."_ Only about half of new
Chinese college graduates find jobs that require a college education. As in
the US, the education industry has saturated the market for educated people.

China's government has more options than the US does. The government has built
over 100 new large cities, for example. Some of them were empty at first, but
they're getting better at starting them up. Now they do the construction,
finish that, stock and staff the retail stores, start up the transportation
system and services, and then, with all the services available and
underutilized, get people and businesses to move in. This seems inefficient
but turns out to work better than trying to do it in profitable stages. It's a
communist system, remember; it doesn't have to make money immediately.

China's government will probably not ignore the problem. The US has a sizable
lobby that takes the position that the free market somehow makes the decisions
about how things work, how much things cost, and who gets paid how much. China
does not have that. It's a directed economy.

There are probably papers being published about what to do about this in
China. Anyone know of any good ones?

------
ChuckMcM
The economic challenges are pretty real, given that consumers, wages, and GDP
are all entangled in an interdependent way, when things are out of balance for
a long time it leads to sometimes rather abrupt corrections.

~~~
tangled
I find it hard to imagine abrupt corrections happening in the western world.
Everyone is just so very controlled. But then maybe people thought the same
thing leading up to the French revolution 'only' 200 years ago? From my
limited knowledge, the French had a stable aristocracy with a controlled
populace. And then just a few years later the new powers were executing tens
of thousands of citizens. That's crazy.

~~~
Sideloader
I think the western world suffers from a collective mass delusion. We think
that liberal democracy and a (no longer) stable middle-class are "how things
are" and it is still easy (but becoming increasingly difficult)to believe
"this" was how it always was and how it will always be. The rise of the
middle-class began in the early 20th century and peaked in the 1970s and since
then we have been sliding back into a feudal order where the 5%, 1%, 0.1% or
whatever effectively control all of the wealth and power and the remaining
90%+ owe fealty to their regional feudal overlord.

This is not to say a return to a feudal order is inevitable but various
flavors of feudalism served as the west's default social and political
structure for thousands of years before democracy made its appearance.

I suspect reality will sink in if or, rather, when, an economic catastrophe
precipitates a breakdown in the social and/or political order and the standard
of living falls out from underneath the citizens of today's prosperous nations
and mass unemployment, hunger, deprivation and violence become tangible and
inescapable. If present trends continue we are fucked but, as you mentioned,
change for the better (or worse ;p) can manifest itself quickly and
unexpectedly.

As for China...it's home to a civilization that's remained more or less intact
for over 5,000 years. Something tells me that despite western pundits
disingenuously prophesying its imminent collapse China will be around for a
while yet. But there like here change can come fast and hard when it's least
expected.

The digital revolution (and it is a revolution) has already changed the world
in ways that were unimaginable even 15-20 years ago. And this is only the
beginning!

~~~
crdoconnor
Many of our ancestors fought the forces of feudalism in order to _create_
broken democracies out of feudalism and their descendants fought to turn turn
broken democracies into less broken democracies. And _their_ descendants
fought to turn less broken democracies into liberal democracies.

Fatalism _not only_ shows immense disrespect to the achievements of every
generation before us that fought to create a humane and just society, it is a
gift to the forces of feudalism that attempt to corrupt our democratic
processes and sequester our wealth.

~~~
tangled
I'm not sure it is fatalism. Could the past fifty years or so just be an
anomaly? Is it that liberal democracies are inherently unstable as they scale
up? Already, it's basically impossible to have a single-earner family, whereas
I think that was pretty common in the post WWII years. And education costs
continue to rise (my parents were _paid_ a stipend to become doctors in the
UK... those times are long gone now).

~~~
locopati
This may have something to do with deliberate decisions made around how much
those who have plenty contribute to the society around them so that others may
have enough.

------
chaostheory
This article is similar to what you would have read in the late 19th century
when looms were being mechanized. Hopefully the future will continue to match
the historical precedents of mass mechanization (i.e. Industrial Revolution,
20th century manufacturing, ...). Yes there will be disruption, workers will
lose their jobs, and there may even be riots. However in the end we still had
progress and we still created jobs; the old jobs were gone but there's always
a new need.

~~~
tluyben2
I read a lot about that but I don't see how that will work this time. In the
previous revolutions very specific jobs were replaced and you could kind of
see there were still jobs to be done outside it. I come from a loom family; my
grandfather was replaced by machines and he became a department head; the rest
(family, friends, ...) got forced out and most never got jobs again. But of
course next generations managed to do other things unrelated to this line of
work my family did for generations. This time I simply don't see what will be
'in the end' as we are replacing all but highly skilled (mostly thinker) jobs
and by far most people, no matter how you train them (and most don't want to),
are simply not that skilled. The jobs we train people for who cannot get jobs
are college graduates, but in something non-tech; we train them for coding &
digital marketing. Most (90%) don't get beyond basic coding skills (html/css +
copy/paste of js from stackoverflow) and both that and digital marketing
skills (keyword search for seo/ads etc) can already be mostly replaced, but
it's too expensive to build the software to do it. Someone will do and then
these people have nothing; they simply cannot do much of which is in demand. I
don't want to say software is the only place ofcourse, but they come to us via
the state unemployment bureau after have been there for as much as 7 years for
some after graduating; they tried other things. And this is the top % of
society that actually went to uni. I really don't see how this will work for
anyone with only a high school degree.

~~~
chaostheory
> I read a lot about that but I don't see how that will work this time. In the
> previous revolutions very specific jobs were replaced and you could kind of
> see there were still jobs to be done outside it.

This pattern of thought just keeps repeating itself whenever something
disruptive comes about. The generations before us also couldn't see what new
jobs would replace all of the displaced ones

> I really don't see how this will work for anyone with only a high school
> degree.

I think you just answered your own question below:

> But of course next generations managed to do other things unrelated to this
> line of work my family did for generations.

People in general are resilient when there's no choice. For example, before
the advent of microcomputers and spreadsheets, most businesses had whole
departments of people who spent all day just creating one or two spreadsheets.
Before mechanical alarm and electronic clocks were widespread, they had people
tap on windows to wake people up on time. Before the manufacturing process for
computers became mechanized, most of the work was done by female workers
'stitching' wires for machine logic. People adapt. Humanity as a whole
advances.

Well the good part is that most places have some form of social net that buys
us time to figure it out. Maybe someone in HN or one of the major tech hubs
can actively try to solve it?

------
jqm
Wasn't there an article a week or so ago about China's one child policy, and
how there wouldn't be enough workers to take care of the older generation?

Well... which is is? Too many workers or not enough workers?

~~~
adventured
China has a billion too many workers presently.

They have ~500 million farmers, with nothing else to do than pretend to be
farmers, held in a form of land slavery because there's nothing else for them
to do and nowhere else for them to go (and they're not allowed to own the
farming land). So China intentionally retards the progress in farming, keeping
their productivity extraordinarily low. If they changed course on farming
productivity, China would rapidly find itself with hundreds of millions of
unemployed farmers (the US needs 3 million farmers / farm workers to feed 400
to 500 million people; China is using ~500 million farmers to feed 1 billion
people). This issue likely terrifies the central government.

------
timtas
"Strengthening the health care, retirement and unemployment insurance systems,
so that workers feel more secure, might help lower the savings rate somewhat."

Translation:

We need to get 'em all on the dole but quick, because as innovation increases
output per worker how can they possibly make the transition to higher paying
jobs, what with all that dang savings to worry about. Wait...what?

~~~
crdoconnor
China's high household savings rate is largely due to the smashing of the iron
rice bowl and the increase in income uncertainty. It's a vastly inefficient
form of self-insurance driven by the lack of welfare.

Worse, this enormous savings surplus is largely being recycled into enormous
infrastructure construction projects which will never show any ROI and
apartments which nobody will ever live in.

All that construction does provide a lot of opportunity for graft, though.

~~~
LoSboccacc
honestly better to have apartment available to sustain the growth that a
speculative market that makes having a roof a privilege like in the western
countries, where most houses are actually owned by banks.

------
crdoconnor
"OVER the last decade, China has become, in the eyes of much of the world, a
job-eating monster, consuming entire industries with its seemingly limitless
supply of low-wage workers. But the reality is that China is now shifting its
appetite to robots."

Translation:

We _know_ that you know that the Chinese are really doing most of the
manufacturing jobs that not-so-mysteriously disappeared the United States over
the last 30 years.

We also know that you know that we did this on purpose, because taking
advantage of Chinese currency repression, wage repression and loose
environment controls meant higher profits for us.

This is the part where we're going to be completely honest with you, because
we have no vested interests here _whatsoever_ :

Those jobs aren't ever coming home because androids that will replace all of
those Chinese workers - you know, like you've seen in all those movies.

Any.

Day.

Now.

And, as soon as we're done with that, we're sure somebody will invent a robot
to _build_ those robots so we don't need to pay your wages either.

We will continue to deluge you with anecdotes of individual factories doing
banal automation like they have done for the last two hundred years until you
'get the feeling' that this 'trend' is unstoppable.

Meanwhile, pay no attention to NAFTA, CAFTA, TTIP, TPP or the US goverment's
unwillingness to designate China as a currency manipulator. Also, we need you
to keep up the pretense that austerity is about saving taxpayer money, rather
than repressing your wages.

~~~
Sven7
But my Apple iPhone is beautiful and magical.

~~~
anon4
Artisanally crafted by delicate robot hands, the highest in precision
standards, untouched by human skin until you open the packaging.

