
Ask HN: If the bots take your job, what would you do? - holaboyperu
I personally would take up golfing or play chess by the park. What about you guys?
======
knieveltech
Struggle to re-establish my economic viability before my marriage collapsed
under a pile of unpaid bills. Worst case scenario I'd slam my car into a
bridge piling at a hundred and twenty miles an hour knowing my life insurance
policy would cover the mortgage and my son's college education. Edit: oh
wait...is this a thought experiment where capitalism isn't a thing anymore?

~~~
jcadam
I was thinking more along the lines of "Turn to a life of crime." But your
solution also has merit.

~~~
shshhdhs
Suicide and crime have merit? I fail to see the ethical upside of any of those
besides short-term gains.

~~~
knieveltech
On Maslow's hierarchy of needs ethics are most likely a tier 3 or tier 4
concern. We're discussing a scenario that directly threatens tier 1 concerns.
So on what grounds is it shocking that ethics are the first thing to go?

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NikolaNovak
Other than, attempt to retrain and look for another job?

Without quite knowing the scope or seriousness of question, it's tricky.

I'm in IT, started as a sysadmin in PeopleSoft/ERP world, currently a hands-on
team-lead. A lot of stuff we do can, should, and will be automated. Which will
remove my hands-on portion and reduce my team-lead portion.

I've been lucky/careful to retrain both up (relative direction) and laterally
over the last decade, partially to avoid being off-shored (pretty much every
time I moved a position, shortly thereafter previous one was no longer done
in-house), partially to remain relevant to management and clients.

I enjoy learning, but one day I may burn-out, and/or no longer be capable of
learning fast enough, and/or all the things I'd like to / can easily learn
will be automated. At that point, I haven't a clue, we'll see in which way we
get there...

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> _attempt to retrain and look for another job?_

The question is whether there will be a Big Rip type of event, where jobs are
being automated faster than most people can retrain.

~~~
jacquesm
In that case it is pointless to speculate, a future like that will be so
unlike our present that speculation is roughly where science fiction is.

~~~
ep103
Not really, this is the position middle america finds itself in. Different
population groups retrain at different speeds.

~~~
jacquesm
We must have different ideas about what 'the Big Rip' is.

The one I'm familiar with is a cosmology one, where because of the speed of
the increase of expansion of the universe everything literally gets torn
apart.

Applied to the work situation it means a future roughly related to the plot of
'Accelerando', and once we hit that kind of rate-of-change all bets are off in
the most literal sense.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando)

~~~
ep103
oh, I was going by the definition you left in your previous post. Ie)
technology changes faster than people can retrain.

------
zerebubuth
Change my business cards to say "artisanal codesmith" and go looking for
employers who value the wabi-sabi of code with genuine organic bugs. [edit -
spelling, or were they genuine organic errors?]

------
Akito
Why do only few people realize that bots ARE NOT(!) the problem! Our f*cked up
economic system is! If we would live in. better society in which capitalism is
finally known to be horrible by a majority of people, everyone would profit
from robots and almost everyone (except those mind-sick workaholics) would be
happy. We just need to finally acknowledge, that capitalism is bullshit,
period.

P.S.: I hate communism more than capitalism, so don't dare to accuse me of
being one of those who my family fled from...

~~~
antisthenes
Why do you hate communism? Is there a legitimate reason?

~~~
knieveltech
Given his statement I'm assuming his family fled a particular implementation
of communism at some point in the past. I struggle with responses to
statements like OP has made for a number of reasons. I find it questionable
that authoritarianism is a required component of a communist society. That
said it has clearly been a component of all implementations of "communism" at
the national level. I'm air quoting that because again it's questionable that
authoritarian regimes bear any resemblance to actual ML political theory, and
most real world implementations were merely authoritarian regimes that
borrowed the stalinist playbook and enough ML buzzwords to offer a fig leaf
during their rise to power.

~~~
dogma1138
Communism requires a planned economy which requires authoritarianism.

Post scarcity != communism, if we go by the motief of this thread then the
federation is not communist it also doesn't have a planned economy.

~~~
knieveltech
I hear what you're saying. I question the assertion that economic planning
requires authoritarianism, unless you're being really loose with the term.

~~~
dogma1138
planned economy isn't the same thing as economic planning.

"an economy in which production, investment, prices, and incomes are
determined centrally by the government."

[https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/planned_economy](https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/planned_economy)

~~~
knieveltech
And government oversight isn't the same thing as authoritarianism. As with
most things the devil is usually in the details. I recommend looking into the
anarcho-syndicalist strategy for structuring economic activity for a snapshot
of one possible approach to the problem of establishing planned economic
activity without devolving into a gulag-riddled dystopia.

~~~
dogma1138
This isn't oversight, this is the government controlling all capital, the
market, and every other part of the economy.

Anarcho-syndicalism isn't an economic model, it's a revolutionary model which
is the most common problem with the vast majority of so called alternative
models to planned economy or the free market.

The models are more about how to get control over the power and influence but
are very light on what to do next.

~~~
knieveltech
_facepalm_ Anarcho-syndicalism is absolutely an economic as well as a
political model. Cheers.

~~~
dogma1138
Once you get the power whilst operating within a free market what then?

How is this a sustainable model?

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remyp
I definitely wouldn't put all my fears, hopes, and dreams in to a vote for a
politician who promises to bring my job back.

What I WOULD do is move to a place with the lowest possible cost of living and
become a bartender or something equally undemanding.

~~~
IanDrake
Just having fun here, but:

In a world where a skilled worker (such as yourself) resorts to that, who are
your customers at the bar and how do they make money to pay their tab?

And where is the robot bartender in this scenario?

~~~
remyp
It depends. If we're post-scarcity then my customers would be like the Ten
Forward customers on the Enterprise and I'd get to wear a sweet hat like
Whoopi.

If not, then I assume they'd be like I am now: someone lucky enough to be able
to take advantage of the current status of the labor marketplace.

As for the robot bartender, I'd imagine myself working in a hipster bar that
still uses human bartenders because it's simple, authentic, and people like
that it's old-fashioned. We'll even have Edison bulbs.

~~~
IanDrake
I literally made a scene laughing at this while sitting in a hipster cafe
complete with Edison light bulbs.

~~~
RileyKyeden
How many lights are there?

~~~
IanDrake
Just six. Is that enough for what you had in mind?

~~~
RileyKyeden
I was springing off remyp's Star Trek reference:
[http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/12050/why-four-
ligh...](http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/12050/why-four-lights)

------
magic_beans
Are we assuming a magic source of income?

If yes: I'd take up writing, teaching and practicing yoga, and charcoal
drawing.

If no: I'd probably have to be some kind of nanny or domestic help. :/

~~~
andriesm
I think everyone "assumes" basic income grants, when the robots make say
upwards of 50 percent of people redundant.

I myself remain sceptical. If you low-medium skilled you should be able to
find work from the people made richer by the robots, as butlers, assistants,
etc... Yes even with the best robot, some people will prefer human contact.
Some people may even pay a premium for companionship.

~~~
majewsky
A "modern servant" scenario (if you will let me summarize it as such) might
work when robots make, say, 50% of people redundant. But what about 90%? 99%?
100%?

Another thing: In a fully automated, yet capitalist society, wealth will be
concentrated in the hands of even fewer people than right now, because we will
come to a point where no one will offer robots for sale anymore, so no one can
become rich except by heritage, and rich people will fail and become poor at a
certain rate (because that's how capitalism works).

This process leads to a financial singularity in which 10 people own all the
money in the world (and all the robots). I see two likely scenarios then:

1\. Since one rich person (and their family) cannot possibly use a billion
servants, a lot of the poor people will not be able to make a living and die.

2\. The poor people agree to not care about the meaning of these green slips
of paper anymore and seize the robots.

Come to think of it, #1 is actually more likely if the robots are intelligent
enough to protect themselves against being seized.

------
codegeek
If the bots can pick up the phone, make a sale and get a client to pay me on a
subscription basis, I won't need to do anything. I will sit on my couch, sip
some wine and watch TV. Until then, I have a job.

~~~
majewsky
Why should the bots pay you, then?

~~~
codegeek
Good point. Damn back to square one.

------
steven777400
As some others have mentioned, the title vs the text confuse a little.

The main difficulty in the thought process is what is meant by "my job". Of
course, it can't literally be just my job. It would have to be a class of
jobs. What class? I do a little supervision, a little data analysis, a little
CRUD app maintenance/development. The hardest part of my job is translating
customer requests/requirements into action without adverse side effects. So we
can imagine a NLP+AI type bot could potentially solve that problem.

So in that case, there's now globally little-to-no demand for intermediate
level programming and analysis. So I can't just switch to another, similar
job.

At that point, what happens depends strongly on the environment. My wife is
now in training to be a nurse. Has she completed that training and is so
working when the automation event occurs? If so and if her job is unimpacted,
then we simply downsize our lifestyle to accommodate the reduced income.

Does basic income exist at the point when the automation event occurs? If so,
that's a fallback.

Have any new industries appeared as a result of new technology that don't
exist today? If so, what kind of entry requirements are observed? What
timeline would I estimate to attempt to retrain? Could it be done before the
target industry itself is automated away?

As a final fallback, I'm lucky to have a supportive family in the area. I
would describe my situation and offer to do their household chores in exchange
for room and board.

~~~
majewsky
If we are at the point where the job of "translating customer
requests/requirements into action without adverse side effects" can be
performed by an "NLP+AI type bot", I can literally not imagine _any_ type of
job that could not be automated. Politics is supposed to be the hardest kind
of job, and what you do is basically politics if you s/customer/voter/.

------
inlineint
With condition of being suppled by resources for living I think it's a good
idea to go into research.

It's a bit unrelated, but I think that maybe instead of just introducing basic
income to suppress social tensions caused by bots taking jobs it would be
better to spend the money to create new research jobs at large scale. There
are plenty underexplored directions in science and research in lots of them
can't be automated anytime soon.

If there were much more PhD positions that paid solid stipend (and colleges
were accessible to everyone and paid solid stipends too) and there were a lot
of open research positions, people losing their jobs because of automation
would go to these programs and then do research which eventually might make
the world a better place to live.

Just replying to someone who is going to say that not everyone is able to
meaningfully participate in research, I think it is not true. Yes, different
people might have different productivity and abilities, but science needs not
only researchers generating new ideas, but also laboratory assistants and
experimental scientists mostly just doing meticulous measurements.

However it's simpler to just throw money at people and tell them that they
don't need to work rather than scale the educational and research systems to
the extent that would allow them to engage a large part of the population into
them.

~~~
abathur
AFAIK most UBI advocates aren't looking to just throw money at people and tell
them they don't need to work. It's not called a Universal Comfortable Income,
or a Universal Middle Class Income.

Unless you're a devout ascetic or minimalist, you'll probably still want other
sources of income. The UBI provides you a baseline that can make it easier for
people to spend a while retraining, or resist being underpaid for
miserable/dangerous work. One of the big potential boons of a UBI is that it
could be paired with a rollback of minimum wage/benefit requirements, shifting
the point at which automation is strongly incentivized.

In such an environment, meaningful research projects with significant low-
skill components should have an easy time (at least relative to today)
staffing up.

~~~
galvin
To add to this, UBI would also allow people to provide value in areas other
than research. A few examples would be arts, sports, charity and community
work.

------
scandox
Become a Robot service engineer...oh wait that's what I already am! Sorted.

Edit: I am not an actual robot service engineer except in so far as all devs
service automated systems.

~~~
jacquesm
> Become a Robot service engineer

That'll be the second job to be taken over by robots.

------
importantbrian
That depends a lot on the type of the world we live in at the time the robots
take my job. Are their jobs available still that I can retrain for, or are we
living in a post-work world where the Robots have taken all the jobs? If it’s
the former I will hopefully be able to retrain for a new job or have
accomplished plan A. If it’s the latter I’m not really sure. That world would
look so much different than today’s world that I’m not sure I can predict what
I would be doing. Hopefully, I would be doing some kind of creative work like
playing music. I suspect that even when AI is capable of producing art and
entertainment there will still be a desire to go watch other humans create.
Plan A is to save enough money that by the time my job is automated away I
will be able to live off of my savings. That way I will have the freedom to
retrain for a job that hasn't been automated away or to be able to work in a
volunteer capacity or on some creative endeavor without expectation of
financial return. I will probably always want to work in some capacity, so I
don't see myself just retiring into leisure.

------
warcher
I am actively engaged in building as many robots as I can to do as much of my
work for me as is expedient. "Part-time Robot manager" is my dream job. Alas,
the requirements seem to change as fast as I can automate them, so I expect to
be a full time robot engineer for the foreseeable future.

------
sigi45
I'm guessing that when i'm no longer able to find a job (i'm a software
engineer) our society found some solution for all of us.

Might be a little bit selfish but i do think that when i as a person with my
knowledge and capabilities is no longer needed and we have still a well
working economy, i'm not the only one without a job.

If the spread is to big between 'average middle class people living an
acceptable life with an acceptable lifestyle' vs. 'not' our society will put
that much pressure on everyone above middle class that they have to do
something. Who wants to live in a country as a rich person when you have a lot
of desperate people who want something from you?

Yes i do know that in usa or in south africa they have big fences but i would
act and not accept the new side of the fence.

------
andriesm
We'll all be living in a VR utopia while the robots do all the work and feed
us intravenously...

~~~
noja
I think our ideas of Utopia differ

------
IanDrake
This story has been playing out for a long time now. The plowshare, the
printing press, textile mills, cars, etc...

The plowshare replaced a team of people doing the work by hand. What happened
to those people when the plowing "robot" took their job?

I bet it was hard times for them, but you can't avoid the fact that we're all
better off for it.

So, since we know what happened in history and can't see into the future, a
more interesting way to pose this question with an understood context would
be: if you were a field hand that lost your job to a plow, what would you do?

Or maybe something a little more recent in history?

~~~
mooseburger
If you're a horse, and the car was just invented, what do you do? That is the
question.

~~~
cema
If horses could invent cars, things would be very different. We are not
horses.

~~~
mooseburger
An AI that could replace a software developer can likely replace all forms of
white collar work. Not a whole lot left after that. I can't imagine that any
new job category that such an AI would enable would need humans either.

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interdrift
I would go in the wild to do math and design algortihms and catch fish.

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Kluny
I think I'd do like Charlie Brown did and set up a "Psychological Help - $5"
booth.

~~~
Unknown008
Wasn't it Lucy's?

------
marak830
As a chef - learn to code the bots, so I can continue to be creative.

Aside from that, go back to work on my voice recognition software for gaming.

Or become a hobo under a bridge, drinking from a glass jar and reminiscing
about the good old days before those damn machines took over.

------
J-dawg
As a man, learn to accept a life of celibacy. Sadly, women's tendency to
evaluate men by their occupation is not going to change as quickly as the jobs
market.

(This is admittedly a dystopian view, but I believe it's possible.)

~~~
EnFinlay
This sort of sentiment is sexist, demeaning, and false.

~~~
J-dawg
The thing is, it's already starting to happen in a small way. A quick search
will find you several articles like this:

[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/10/dating-...](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/10/dating-
gap-hook-up-culture-female-graduates)

Of course, there absolutely are plenty of single men out there, it's just that
they are invisible to the women quoted in the article, because they're not in
the correct socioeconomic group.

I am simply saying that this trend is likely to continue. It's neither sexist
nor demeaning to say that.

------
DrScump
This study on this very concept was written over 52 years ago:

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734633/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734633/)

------
nether
I become a carpenter, probably living in a van down by the river.

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peterisza
Buy robots, obviously.

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paulddraper
I'd become an electrician. Or if I wanted my own business, a carpenter.

Decent pay, and there's lots of jobs everywhere, so I could have a low cost of
living.

------
gorbachev
Become the messiah to the robots hoping once they realize they don't need
humans that they would still need their human messiah.

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65827
They already did. I started wrestling, maybe I'll be good enough to teach it
one day. That's my plan A. :(

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inostia
I'm legitimately scared by this question. What bot knows how to take a design
and implement it in software?

------
slouch
Choose a new career where the margins are small enough to not justify being
replaced by bots before I die.

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nunez
Find something else to be good at way before this happens, so that I don't
have to worry about it.

------
owebmaster
I'd program a bot better than the one that took my job and take his (and
yours)! :)

------
slouch
X evangelist, where X is a job that has yet to be replaced by bots

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realPubkey
I would start building bots.

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skynode
Become a bot and get to keep your job. :)

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imgabe
Build bots.

------
Akito
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