
Ask HN: Are there any on HN skeptical of the predictions regarding automation? - thewarrior
It&#x27;s now almost accepted wisdom on sites like HN that the coming wave of automation will have drastic effects on society ,employment statistics in particular.<p>This feeds into the wider theme of AI , the singularity and people like Elon Musk donating money to prevent an AI apocalypse.<p>The past shows that it is dangerous to bet against technological progress , so here I would like to say that I am only expressing skepticism on how long it would take for these things to play out.<p>Reading HN or &#x2F;r&#x2F;futurology would have you think that we&#x27;re just 2 or 5 years away from significant adoption of self driving cars and just 20 years or so before we start feeling severe dislocations in the labour markets.<p>I don&#x27;t see how the regulatory and technological hurdles can be overcome in such a short period of time.<p>Considering the state of tech , it could be 5 - 8 years before we have truly self driving cars , and years more before governments and the public start accepting being around them.<p>Another thing is that in Africa,India etc humans will continue to be cheaper for a long time. There will also be significant opposition in these countries if it gets good enough.<p>But I still don&#x27;t get how we could have fully autonomous trucks barelling down our free ways , carrying produce farmed by autonomous tractors , to retail stores with automated check out and shelf stacking robots.<p>This is a degree of AI that simply doesn&#x27;t exist today. There&#x27;s a long gulf between identifying objects in a picture (the state of the art today) and actually doing stuff like farming or cooking.<p>On the other hand , if we are actually on the cusp of something like this its truly mind boggling. We could have products made from metals mined autonomously , shipped to autonomous factories , assembled by robots and shipped via self driving trucks and delivery drones to our door steps.
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jupiter90000
I'm not sure what will happen or when, but what I become most concerned about
is over-reliance on things just working. What I mean is, humans not doing
something for themselves to the point of helplessness when things go wrong.
Whole generations expecting a car to drive them around and AI assistants on
smartphones answering every question and whim.

Then the self driving car malfunctions when driving through a remote area with
no data network on the smartphone device. I picture the person curling up and
crying. Seriously though, I hope us humans stay in touch with how to operate
in the world outside of tech.

It could make for an interesting scenario if the most 'advanced' humans
extinct themselves through having fewer and fewer kids then having a collapse
of the tech that is relied so heavily on. The humans who still know how to
have kids and operate in nature would win out. Seems unlikely now, but we've
only been doing this modern tech life for a blip in history. I won't be
surprised if it falls apart at some point.

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alfapla
The job most likely to suffer massive layoffs in the future because of
progress in AI is the job of the software developer.

