
You Will Lose Your Job to a Robot and Sooner Than You Think - _1
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/you-will-lose-your-job-to-a-robot-and-sooner-than-you-think/
======
iamben
"While we’re on the road to our Star Trek future, but before we finally get
there, the rich are going to get richer—because they own the robots—and the
rest of us are going to get poorer because we’ll be out of jobs. Unless we
figure out what we’re going to do about that, the misery of workers over the
next few decades will be far worse than anything the Industrial Revolution
produced."

It was interesting reading some of the comments on the Paradise Papers
yesterday. Lots of people commenting they feel helpless and frustrated in this
and situations like this. The rich have the ability to break the law seemingly
at will and never get punished. The rest can spend 18 months in prison for
smoking pot, or being black and in the wrong place. I don't pay taxes, I'm in
trouble. The rich can afford to just not pay them. etc. etc.

But it was also pointed out that no one is likely to do anything about it,
because any outrage will blow over as soon as the press start on the next set
of scandalous headlines, and unless your life is (/all our lives are)
disrupted in a big enough way that you feel the need to rock the boat - you
won't rock the boat.

Which makes me ask, will the robot revolution be the thing that rocks the
boat? Distrust of government (corporations / power) and quiet dissatisfaction
seems to grow by the day. And yet - no one reacts, because the status quo is
just enough. But if you start to remove jobs without having a social state in
place to cope with it, and every day you're looking at the perfectly curated
Instagram lives of those who have everything - what's going to happen? Do we
hit breaking point?

I don't really know. Interesting and somewhat scary times, though.

~~~
GVIrish
I fear that what will happen is that the unemployed/underemployed masses will
be manipulated into focusing their frustrations on culture wars, kinda like
what is happening now and has happened in the past. 'Those people are taking
your jobs!' 'Those people are amoral and lazy!' 'Those people are terrorists!'
'Those people are taking benefits that were meant for you!'

I mean we're at a point in history where there are many people who are voting
for politicians who are brazenly seeking to destroy healthcare, give even
bigger tax cuts to rich people, tear down regulatory agencies that protect
people from pollution, fraud, and unsafe food. To some degree some people
believe that 'regulation kills jobs' but I'm pretty sure most people want
clean air, safe food, fair education policy, affordable healthcare, etc. But
because of all of the political tribalism and the painting of the other side
as outright villains, people are supporting politicians who are pushing
policies that hurt them directly.

As long as there are convenient scapegoats and wedge issues that can be
exploited it's going to be hard to turn public opinion towards reining in the
oligarchy. Especially since the super rich have much more sophisticated tools
for regulatory capture and manipulation of sentiment now.

~~~
iamben
Anecdotally, I think people are voting for people who don't 'feel' like a
politician. It doesn't so much matter what they're saying, more than they're
addressing the specific issue that upsets you, and distancing themselves from
"those in power". Politicians (in general) seem so far removed from everyday
life, anyone promising to act for the everyman, and distancing themselves from
'establishment' is going to get some kind of traction. Add clever uses of
technology into the mix and it gets pretty potent.

~~~
Piskvorrr
In other words, marketing is king, content is irrelevant.

------
Piskvorrr
One would have thought that November is not cherry-picking season. Apparently
not.

"Almost overnight, the quality of [Google's] translations skyrocketed." In
certain languages, and still dependent on the human brain to reparse the not-
quite-gibberish into something that makes sense.

"Driverless cars soon" \- and flying ones, too, "in production in a few years"
for a _century_ now.

"the progress of the past couple of decades has been stunning. After many
years of nothing much happening [in AI]" \- is that lack of research, or just
that alt-facts make for a nicer story?

"However, if you keep up the doubling for a while, [therefore strong AI],
[Moore's not dead, proof by handwaving, technoesoteric New Age babble]". From
this point on, the story dissolves into "let us assume the Moon is made of
cheese. Why didn't anyone start mining it yet?!?"

~~~
DiThi
> "Almost overnight, the quality of [Google's] translations skyrocketed." In
> certain languages, and still dependent on the human brain to reparse the
> not-quite-gibberish into something that makes sense.

But it happened replacing a system carefully crafted for 10 years, for another
one that barely needed a couple of months to get better than the old one. And
it can be made better than google's, today:
[https://www.deepl.com/translator](https://www.deepl.com/translator)

> "Driverless cars soon" \- and flying ones, too, "in production in a few
> years" for a century now.

We had driverless car prototypes for a century? Wow. /s

~~~
Piskvorrr
\- Fair point. Conflating machine learning with strong AI (as evidenced on the
machine translation example) still dubious.

\- We had flying cars _promised_ for a century, "any year now." Very similar
status to "level 5 autonomous driving any moment now, don't look at the edge
cases."

~~~
DiThi
"Promised" but without any workable and remotely affordable prototype. It may
happen soon, though: [https://lilium.com/](https://lilium.com/)

I see both hand in hand. I don't think it will take off (metaphorically)
without mandatory self driving AI near populations.

~~~
Piskvorrr
"It may happen soon" is the mantra of vaporware, QED ;)

~~~
DiThi
Yes, it is indeed. However I base my conclusions on existing prototypes and
their cost.

------
dragontamer
Does this refrain get repeated every decade?

In the 1980s, "Expert Systems" were shown to outperform human experts (ie:
Doctors) at diagnosing patients in certain situations. (ex:
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/03787206859...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0378720685900667?via%3Dihub),
a 1985 paper on the subject of "Expert Systems"). Or this article, which has
links to proven efficacy of Expert Systems in 1987:
[http://www.openclinical.org/aiinmedicine.html](http://www.openclinical.org/aiinmedicine.html)

30ish years later, we still have doctors primarily delivering our diagnosis.
The march of progress may look exponential, but the hype is often overstated.

The terminology "expert system" has morphed into new terms over the years, but
the problem has remained the same. Creating a system that can diagnose
patients given the data that the patient supplies. Its the diagnosis problem
plain and simple... but what has been called "Expert System" in the past will
now morph into "AI" and "Machine Learning" under today's terms.

As such, I'm wary about graphs like this one: [http://www.motherjones.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/10/201710...](http://www.motherjones.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/10/2017102617_ai_timeline-e1509051923145.png)

The human brain is really, really, really bad at being a computer. It seems
like computers are also really, really, really bad at trying to be a human
brain.

The typical layman / non-computer programmer simply fails to understand the
limitations of a typical computer. They see computers doing human-like tasks
(like winning in Jeopardy), but then don't realize the enormous amount of
programming effort that was required for that task to happen.

~~~
jcadam
At this point I almost think you could automate away my Primary care provider.
All he does is take vitals, perform a cursory examination (may include a CBC,
etc.) and then refer you to a specialist. I wonder why a nurse can't do the
exam and plug all of my data into a system that spits out a diagnosis (You
have strep throat - 98% confidence) and/or a referral to someone with some
real expertise.

~~~
dragontamer
That's actually a big debate right now. But the AI is completely not involved
at all. A Nurse Practitioner is 4-years of undergrad + 2-years of Nurses
school (which is roughly equivalent to a Masters Degree).

So there's a big belief that highly trained Nurses ought to be good enough for
primary care.

\-------------

With that said, I've traveled a bit across America and many rural areas only
have small ~3 or 4 room "hospitals" that cover entire towns, or even entire
counties (~2 hour drive area to the next 5-room "hospital").

In these cases, you definitely want a Doctor who has experience in way more
fields.

Nurse Practitioners are probably good enough for primary care in cities, where
referrals to specialists is possible. In rural areas where specialists may be
a 4+ hour drive away, its simply not feasible to recommend a specialist. The
doctor at the small county hospital is all you've got.

------
container
This might just be a detail, but the author seems to think their phone's CPU
is doing some heavy lifting when they search something on Google (in this
case, why erasers are pink). If I'm not mistaken, even the voice recognition
happens on a server, and the phone just records audio and sends it. And the
interpretation of the query and returning a result have nothing to do with the
device itself either.

"Google has to be smart enough to figure out in context that I said pink and
that I’m asking about the historical reason for the color of erasers, not
their health or the way they’re shaped. And it did. In less than a second.
With nothing more than a cheap little microprocessor and a slow link to the
internet."

~~~
Piskvorrr
Not a detail at all: the author seems to confuse "the whole Google cloud
system works as expected - approximately in line with the 80/20 adage" for
"the phone in my pocket is independently capable of intelligent, contextful,
humanlike reasoning."

Google just needs to see where the previous million people went after asking
this particular question - odds are good that the million-and-first person
will also want that particular answer. It's a clever trick all right, and a
marvel of engineering, but no robots: this is mostly human behavior:
collected, averaged, and parrotted back. (Yes, there is machine search at the
base of it; unlike Altavista before, the _relevance_ of the results is shaped
by its human users though)

------
peterwwillis
In the 50s, everyone knew by the year 2000 everyone would have a rocket car,
because technology was progressing so fast. Turns out the most advanced
aeronautical tech peaked in the 70s, and we just stopped giving a shit about
advancing it past that point. We're only now bringing back supersonic
transatlantic flights, 14 years after we stopped them because it turned out it
was expensive.

When people talk about AI, they don't talk realistically, they talk
theoretically. Just look at trains. New York City subways have been trying to
modernize their switching system for 25 years. Estimates show as long as 50
more years just to finish upgrading existing tracks. Are the people that are
upgrading the track going to get replaced before then? _Not likely._

Even if all practical common sense is thrown aside and you imagine a Jetsons
world where robots have taken over most jobs, _there will be new jobs_ ,
because we will have new industries built on top of the automated ones. We
just invent new jobs, the same way we invented them for a technology industry
that did not even remotely exist 50 years ago.

All of this AI hype also depends on the status quo, and in all likelihood our
society won't even be remotely the same in 40 years. Estimations like these
depend on the US maintaining its hegemonic dominance over global trade. How
the hell is it going to do that if its deficit grows exponentially and it can
barely fund its federal budget every few months? Is Silicon Valley going to
keep pumping out new technology once the unlimited tap of VC money dries up?
Can the industry withstand a collapse of the current regime of super-
consolidated monopolies? Will bare-bones politics end up poisoning and strip-
mining the land we currently overburden for a few genetically modified crops,
reducing economic output to fracking protected wilderness for oil and gas and
white collar work in a paltry few cities on the coasts?

Who knows, but assuming robots will take all our jobs in 40 years sounds like
extremely magical thinking.

~~~
Gustomaximus
> Turns out the most advanced aeronautical tech peaked in the 70s, and we just
> stopped giving a shit about advancing it past that point.

Really? Gains have been massive since the 70's. Today the goalposts are
comfort and cost efficiency. So we're not getting the more sexy speed
advancements the jet engine brought us. But cost, comfort, safety have all
improved massively. And last year we even ha a solar plane fly around the
world. Self landing space rockets. Flying wings. Drones. I feel your ignoring
much beyond going supersonic.

~~~
peterwwillis
Those examples support my point. Not only did we have more advanced technology
then, we were able to achieve superior technology in a decade or less, _when
we felt like it_ , and the rest of the time we didn't focus on advancement at
all. Just because we _can_ achieve it has absolutely nothing to do with
whether we _will_ or not.

I'm still waiting on my flying car.

~~~
Piskvorrr
The Moon Race was a thinly veiled ICBM race - and in military research, cost
is rarely a concern. With this type of warfare no longer a major concern came
SALT, SALT II, bean-counting, and the end of this line of development.

------
quirkot
There is a concept in philosophy called the Is-Ought gap, which is to say that
you can’t tell what ought to be simply by looking at what currently is. This
is something that applies to AI that I think is often overlooked.

A computer can tell me what my bank account IS, and a smart enough program
could use supporting information to tell me what it WILL be or even MIGHT be…
but it can never tell me what it OUGHT to be. Especially in a world without
perfect interoperability (or with some things done offline/cash). Similarly a
can tell me what IS on a monthly performance report, and in a steady and
routine business environment it will tell me what MIGHT be useful on the
report, it can never tell me what OUGHT to be on it

------
coldcode
If a robot can write code in our environment and deal with all the politics
and stupid decisions and wishy washy product direction (we don't know what we
want, just implement everything) and broken technologies, you're welcome Mr
Robot.

~~~
redleggedfrog
I laughed out loud at this.

I do wonder how robots will deal with our fickle human ways. How will they
help a person who can't even express themselves in words or speech because
they're near illiterate? This isn't a facile question - this is a large
percentage of the people I've written software for.

~~~
sametmax
But after laughing I'm crying.

Because what will happend is that the robot won't deal with it. Their creators
will simply assume the use case is only 1% of their input and will just lock
it out. We will live in a more and more standardized and inflexible society.

It's happening already.

This week, I had to bring a car for a second checkup and I was late to my
appointment. The gal told me I had to reschedule because the computer didn't
allow to be late at a second checkup: the date between the first and the
second was fixed.

Because I'm a computer scientist, I knew what to do: let's "forget" about the
whole thing and create a new "first checkup" for which I could come without a
schedule. I told her and she though it was a great idea and we worked around
the system. Luckily they didn't have a check for that and she was able to do
my checkup.

So when the robot will take your job, they will just ignore a whole lot of
cases and make everyone not fitting the exact size of the box living in hell.

~~~
EADGBE
I fear for when the system doesn't allow it.

"Sorry, I can't do that on this computer" shouldn't be a thing. But it already
is.

------
ganonm
The anecdote about the pink eraser isn't as impressive as the author makes
out. A manual google search of 'why are erasers pink' returns the same article
from Design*Sponge (that the author mentioned as the source for the response
to his voice query) as the top Google result. So, the remarks about how the
answer shows evidence of context awareness don't really ring true. The
assistant is just passing his question into Google and reading back the
response. The sum may be greater than the parts, but nothing revolutionary
here.

------
adventured
The US has a vast inbound labor shortage problem. AI + robotics are not going
to solve that problem over the next 20 years.

US population growth has continued to erode toward barely expanding, and
that's with immigration included. That decline is going to get worse by the
decade, while simultaneously boomers continue to plunge out of the labor force
over the next decade.

The US economy added between $4.5 and $5 trillion to its GDP in the last
decade (an economy the size of Japan). That's while only adding ~23 million
people. It's going to become increasingly difficult to replicate that growth
without dramatic productivity gains. AI and robotics, automation broadly, are
likely the only means to accomplish that.

Simply put, we're going to need dramatic productivity gains just to repeat the
growth from the past ten years, and that growth wasn't spectacular. Want
routine 3% to 4% GDP growth against sub 1% population growth? Better bring on
the automation, and as much of it as possible.

~~~
ryandrake
Who's "we" and why should they care about GDP growth? Surely not normal
people. _I_ don't care about GDP growth. "GDP growth" means someone already
rich is getting richer. Why should normal people care about productivity
gains? To most of us, "productivity gains" means my company can lay me off now
because Sally can do the work of both of us. Where is this labor shortage? You
say labor shortage, I say companies refusing to pay enough for labor, then
complaining they can't find workers.

~~~
mac01021
> I say companies refusing to pay enough for labor, then complaining they
> can't find workers.

They'll pay any amount for labor up to the point where the cost of the labor
outweighs the additional profit for the company that the labor will induce.

~~~
ryandrake
In other words, there is exactly enough labor, given labor cost and profit. So
where is the ‘shortage?’

------
JeanMarcS
And on the other side of technology there's 3D printing. It will allow to
reduce transportation of goods (only raw materials), and we already can
"print" houses.

So if unemployment starts striking big time according to this article, in the
same time houses will be cheap, food will be cheap...

The real question is : when nobody will have to work anymore, what people will
do ? There's a big risk of population rise to the rooftop, because, you know,
when you're bore...

------
bolololo1
we're supposed to have Mars colonized by now by the 1960s predictions, weren't
we?

~~~
sgift
The economic incentives for replacing people with machines are far greater
than that for going to Mars. So, if that's all you have that's not really
reassuring.

~~~
bolololo1
Won't millions of people loose employment? I don't know I'm just asking.

~~~
boomboomsubban
Nobody knows. What is known is that every past tremendous increase in the
working ability of mankind has not resulted in catastrophe despite people
predicting that it would.

~~~
ameister14
Well, that's not exactly true. For the main period of transition and skilled
laborers prior to the tremendous increase, it has been a catastrophe.

------
jasonmaydie
I'm still waiting for those flying cars predicted in the 50s.

------
Overtonwindow
A robot will never be a lobbyist. I'm safe. I hope.

------
jeffmcmahan
This is a tech-ignorant political blogger with a serious case of AI weenie-
ism.

~~~
fisherjeff
As a frequent reader of Kevin’s, I can say that he’s certainly not tech-
ignorant. In fact, the article itself suggests a pretty decent grasp on the
issues.

Regarding weenie-ism, he predicts driverless trucks in 2027, which seems
perfectly reasonable to me. Now have a look at this article:

[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)

So if only that one prediction is accurate, the most common job in 30 US
states will be disappearing in 10 years. How is that not worth addressing?

~~~
adventured
There's nothing to deeply worry about for several reasons.

As truckers retire as the automation age sets in, you stop creating new ones
at the same rate (specifically you vastly reduce your rate of creation). Most
likely we end up with a human driver shortage 30 years out due to that alone.

Did you notice we don't have a vast inventory of unemployed radio DJ's
spilling out of universities every year? They've nearly stopped making them;
adaptation has happened. That's not to compare the scales, it's a principle in
action that will apply exactly the same to trucking.

It'll take at least 25-30 years to remove just half of all truck driving jobs,
assuming that market does get heavily automated. Dramatically over-estimating
change in the short-term is by far the single most frequently repeated error
in tech journalism and tech prognostication if you look at the post WW2 era.

Very high sunk costs in the trucking industry guarantee heavily restrained
self-driving progress in the early adoption years. Safe, highly tested,
approved commercial solutions won't be ready for a decade. From there staple
another decade of sunk cost time onto the equation.

In that 20-30 year span when truckers are supposed to be getting fired by the
hundreds of thousands, we have a big labor shortage problem that makes one to
two million truck driving job losses look like a trivial issue by comparison
(while simultaneously the trucking industry stops producing replacement
numbers). To say nothing of the fact that that industry employs 8-10 million
people. With very modest economic growth over 20-30 years, you absorb a
million trucker jobs within that industry alone.

If we cycle 100,000 automated-away truck driving jobs out of the economy per
year on average for 20 years (assume a spike potential of 50-100k above that),
it's meaningless. Half of those truckers will retire before they get fired. We
need millions of workers that we are not going to have in the next few
decades, as we're facing population contraction most likely.

------
koancone
Who will buy the goods and services the robot workers produce?

~~~
TheCoelacanth
People who own other robots.

