
Get Ready To Lose Your Job - ohadfrankfurt
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/16/this-time-is-different/
======
api
A big, unmentioned one: virtually all middlemen who do not add significant
value are obsolete.

This includes salesmen, sales representatives, dealers, warehousers (replaced
by on-demand everything), many types of brokers, etc.

This is a huge chunk of the economy. In the old industrial economy there were
layers and layers of bureaucracy and markups between the producer and the
customer. Now there will be at most one. The customer and the producer will
deal directly. Everyone else is cut out.

That one layer -- an Amazon type thing -- will be heavily monopolized by a few
big players (Amazon, Wal-Mart, etc.) and will be _very_ low margin / high-
volume.

~~~
dclowd9901
> salesmen, sales representatives, dealers

I still see a place for a person who is capable of framing product relevance.
These positions will transition to more resemble marketing and support
positions than the traditional wheeling, dealing salesman.

I know it's not a popular opinion around here, but selling and supporting
products The Right Way(TM) _does_ take a level of creativity that computers
probably will never possess.

Then again, after a technological singularity, anything's possible.

~~~
larrys
"I know it's not a popular opinion around here, but selling and supporting
products The Right Way(TM) "

People who have more time then money are fine (or must) spend their time to
duplicate the knowledge of others.

I would rather use the money that I have to solve problems because I have
limited time.

I recently needed a firewall for a particular application. I would have loved
to have had a 5 minute conversation with a knowledgeable salesperson who would
say "this is the one that you want it's $895". Instead I spent what seemed
like hours on the cisco site, the retailer sites and more and came to no
conclusion.

And by the way anyone who thinks they can just "ask HN" or post a question
doesn't understand that at the very least having someone who makes money off
you and might have to take a return on a product if your unhappy is generally
a better situation then anonymous internet advice. Advice depends on specifics
and interaction which means taking the time to listen and reply to specifics
of somebodies needs.

That said obviously there are salesmen who don't understand their product and
are of no value.

------
jrogers65
I've always seen this as a social problem - why, when we automate things, does
the demand that people have jobs persist? Surely if there's less work to do
then everyone should be working less, not finding new things to do. There's an
implicit assumption in our society that everyone must work, even when there is
nothing to be done. Productivity is put on a pedestal when it is just a means
to an end - undesirable means, at that.

I strongly believe that putting people out of work and allowing them to
continue living comfortably will bring hidden benefits. There will be more
time to think, reconcile and determine the best path to take as opposed to
mindlessly doing as much as possible just to earn enough for bread and
shelter.

Bertrand Russell wrote a good essay on this - In Praise Of Idleness:
<http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html>

As a software developer, someone who will stay employed in the coming years,
I'm willing to give up some of my salary so that the newly unemployed can
continue to survive and do what they want with their free time. They pay
people in our profession more than enough to live well. Unfortunately, I
haven't found a decent mechanism to make such a contribution, aside from
helping family and friends. There really ought to be one - a voluntary
communism, so to say.

~~~
BSousa
The main problem is then you have people that work and envy the ones that
don't.

Let's be honest, wouldn't you prefer for someone to just pay you and you could
do whatever you wanted? Go skiing, hiking, learn Ember or Haskell? Bu in this
scenario, you are working on another CRUD application that will make a few
more data entry people redundant which will go skiing, hiking, learn the
guitar, and you will be stuck at the office in Java land cursing Hibernate (or
whatever framework you hate).

We as people are quite jealous of each other, promoting a society where this
would happen as standard either grind it to a halt (those that can work would
refuse).

~~~
jrogers65
That's a great point. Perhaps one resolution is to take turns working instead.
One person goes on the grind for half a year, then the one they were
supporting takes over and they get to indulge in life instead. The sense of
fairness would remain that way. Only issue is that both people need to be
highly skilled (since low skill jobs will be the ones to go). Another approach
might be that in every family there will be at least one person who is capable
of doing complex technical work - they could support their family and, in
turn, their family could take care of some of their immaterial needs. In other
words, the giving would be an act of love, not a transaction which is balanced
on the books.

I really don't have a good solution for this, have not given it much thought.
It's a complex problem. Perhaps the issue is that we are currently locked in
this state, as a society, and need to reach a certain threshold before the
character of it changes. I'm not quite sure what that looks like or how to get
there, but I get the feeling that it is achievable. There must be better ways
to live than this. What we have now just isn't good enough.

------
dclowd9901
Like the author, I too am concerned people aren't taking this seriously. Not
to say that anything can be done about it, but just to face it (as you would
your own mortality): If you aren't developing software, your job will likely
become obsolete someday. And, indeed, if you _are_ developing software, and
not keeping up with advances, yours will too.

This is not fiction, this is truth and it's inevitable. I'm curious how
society will adapt to the fact that the finite resources of the world will
actually start to constrain them. Almost certainly birth rates will decline.
Households will probably return to a single income earner (who is now making
what both earners used to make combined).

The world _will_ be different, but people keep trying to hold onto this notion
of 6% unemployment like it's sacred. It's a relic of days where we needed the
human brain and body because it worked faster than a computer and robot. Such
is no longer the case. _That_ is the paradigm shift, and _that's_ why things
will be different.

~~~
gph
>If you aren't developing software, your job will likely become obsolete
someday. And, indeed, if you are developing software, and not keeping up with
advances, yours will too.

Even if you do keep up with advances, I don't doubt at some point Programming
compliers/interpreters will evolve to a point where a five-year old can
describe something to them in plain English and they will create/program it.

That might be the furthest into the future, but programmers will eventually
obsolete themselves if they do their jobs right.

~~~
no_more_death
I find that really doubtful. I used to believe it, but it seems like you still
need operators to run things. Programming tools may become much more powerful,
but when it goes wrong, you will need an incredibly intelligent person to sort
out what just happened. A five-year-old won't be of much help then. I doubt
that we can make computer which simply never go wrong. For example, if a 5yo
requests a PB&J sandwich, a powerful machine might accidentally inject
something undesirable. How would he know? Or if a kid requests the computer to
invent a new skateboard, what if there's some flaw in the material that he
can't see that suddenly pops up when he least expects it? A clever machine is
only a tool to help with original design -- it really needs an even more
clever human being to operate it.

------
acabal
I was having a discussion about this topic with an economist friend of mine.
His theory was that if one took automization to its complete and logical
conclusion, the only people left employed would be "soft" creators like
artists and clergy, plus creators of hand-made goods which in that world would
fetch an enormous premium. We'd also see a boom for experience-seekers, like
tourism and sports.

Ultimately I think we're inexorably heading towards that kind of reality. The
question is how long will it take, and will it be a peaceful conversion or a
violent one. Personally I think innate human greed, pettiness, jealousy, and
tribalism is going to make that shift unpleasant for the generation stuck with
it. I hope I'm proved wrong.

~~~
woodchuck64
Automation/technology seems to drive down prices. My parent's generation had
to work an average of 4 hours a day to afford the day's food while my
generation averages less than 2 hours. Thus, we can expect the price of
necessities to continue to drop until work's primary purpose is to make money
to afford luxury items. So that seems less like a violent conversion.

~~~
s_baby
The problem is buying power isn't increasing across all domains of needs. Even
though a 3rd world individual can now afford a smart phone and nice clothes my
healthcare costs are only going up. Who cares if you can buy "luxury" items
for pennies if these formerly middle class people can't secure something as
fundamental as their health?

~~~
woodchuck64
Healthcare is definitely something technology and automation can address. We
should expect that healthcare in coming decades will be much cheaper and more
effective than that today.

~~~
s_baby
Maybe but then again people have been predicting the golden age of biology for
2 decades now and that has turned out to be a flop. Plenty of unknowns here.

~~~
woodchuck64
But look at it in context: in 1921 in the US there were 68 maternal deaths for
every 10,000 live births, and the average cost to give birth in a hospital was
probably something like $50 or about $500 in today's dollars. In 2007 there
were 12.7 maternal deaths per 10,000 and in 2009 the average out of pocket
cost was about $1148. Major improvement in quality with marginal cost
increase.

(statistics cobbled together from [http://www.enotes.com/1920-medicine-health-
american-decades/...](http://www.enotes.com/1920-medicine-health-american-
decades/health-women-children)
<http://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa11/hstat/hsi/pages/208mm.html>
[http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/18/us-healthcare-
preg...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/18/us-healthcare-pregnancy-
cuttingcosts-idUSBRE88H0LW20120918)
[http://info.med.yale.edu/library/news/exhibits/hospitals/tur...](http://info.med.yale.edu/library/news/exhibits/hospitals/turnofcentury.html))

------
johngalt
Get ready to have the same old arguments about Marxism. Only instead of 'means
of production' it will be 'means of technology'. The article isn't looking for
truth its looking to push an agenda about class with technology as a proxy.

Technology invariably leads to an overall increase in jobs and wealth. The
computer calculating amortization tables may put a banker out of work, but it
also allows thousands of unskilled workers to perform a task that would
require calculating one. A job they wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.

~~~
cgag
That invariable seems absurd to me. It seems much more inevitable to me that
we eventually will be able to eliminate the majority of jobs. Is that not the
goal? A transitory period where unemployment slowly increases is going to
happen and needs to be addressed.

~~~
wpietri
Desires are numberless. People will always have wants. Other people will
always find a way to satisfy those wants.

When I have been consulting, I've ended up taking stretches of time off to
recover from brutal projects. It seems great initially, but I get restless.
Eventually I miss doing useful things.

You'll see that writ large in the lives of the rich. Like Bill Gates, a lot of
them go from doing paid work to doing charity work.

Warren Buffett said, "I want to give my kids enough so that they could feel
that they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing." I
think that's because he recognizes that having nothing to do is bad for the
soul.

------
graeme
I'm committing the sin of commenting on the headline, not the article (I did
read the article)

Too few people in steady jobs follow this advice. They live at or above their
means, and aren't prepared for even 1-3 months of unemployment.

Many opportunities require things to get a bit worse before they get a lot
better. Keeping a buffer gives you the freedom to take those opportunities.

If you've got a job in tech, you probably have the luxury of earning more than
you need. So if you aren't doing it, an excellent policy is to scale back
expenses until you have at least 2-6 month's wages in short term savings.

Having a side project that gives some recurring revenue isn't a bad idea
either.

~~~
marknutter
But that's what unemployment benefits are for! Let someone else save my money
for me ;)

------
brownbat
Here's a more banal prediction: construction will add about two million new
jobs between now and 2020, health services will add five million, other
services about 13 million, mining another 25,000. There will be declines in
manufacturing and agriculture, but only in the tens of thousands, because
honestly, we've already gutted those industries. (Meanwhile, there will be
proportionate gains in those industries in other cheap labor countries,
indicating this isn't a tech thing.) If anything, post some magic moment where
general purpose robotification (google "PR2") is super cheap, manufacturing
will flood to... dunno... whatever country is best at keeping the lights on.
Maybe Japan? (Excluding weather events, they have about 1/1000th of the grid
disturbances we have in the US, it's freakish - but then maybe it's unfair to
exclude weather).

Basically, trends will continue exactly as they have, and as exactly as almost
every trade theorist predicted at the outset of globalization. We're getting
out of manufacturing. We're doubling down on services. It has very little to
do with technology.

PS: If you have a high school diploma or less, you are fucked. Your best move
was to start advocating for trade assistance or aggressively progressive
taxation ten years ago.

------
knowtheory
This guy sounds like a sociopath, and his characterization that massive
unemployment is ultimately "a good thing" is mystifying.

Even in a hypothetical post-scarcity world, there are things to do, and
objectives to pursue. The question is just whether your survival and well-
being are dependent on your pursuits. Transitioning the world to a place where
one's job is not a major part of one's identity would be a massive, and
probably misguided effort.

Also, it's also pretty clear that this guy doesn't understand the graph he has
posted here: <http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/26/america-has-hit-peak-jobs/>

That's a static snapshot. It's not like there is a fixed group that is always
in the top 2%. In fact, one would hope in a meritocracy, there is a healthy
flow in and out of the 2% that _keeps_ people striving and attempting new
things. A world where there's a permanent fixed elite is a world of
stagnation.

~~~
eric_bullington
If you're referring the the US (that's the subject of the article in
question), then recent studies suggest that there may not be a health flow in
and out of the 2% [0, 1]. In fact, there seems to be significantly less social
mobility in the US then in other developed countries, such as those in Europe.

0\. <http://ftp.iza.org/dp1938.pdf> 1\.
[http://www.pewstates.org/projects/economic-mobility-
project-...](http://www.pewstates.org/projects/economic-mobility-
project-328061)

~~~
bearmf
If you look at the data in article [0] carefully, it becomes clear that the
problem in US is not movement in/out of the highest quintile, but movement
in/out of the lowest quintile. Middle quintiles to highest quintile and vice
versa mobility in US looks similar to other countries.

Btw, they do not have much data for US or UK, only around 2000 parent-
offspring pairs. And the conclusion that UK is on the same mobility level as
Nordic countries is highly doubtful. UK mobility level is usually considered
to be about the same as US mobility level.

------
ErikAugust
Been meaning to start reading Race Against The Machine:
[http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-
ebook/dp/B005...](http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-
ebook/dp/B005WTR4ZI)

As a guy who studied Economics in college and now programs, it's something I
think a lot about.

------
onemorepassword
This may sound very Euro-chauvinist, but I wonder if politically and
culturally Europe isn't much better equipped to deal with this. After all,
social security solutions like a base income for everyone, employed or not,
are things that can (and have been) seriously considered in most European
countries.

I'm not saying that guarantees anything, but it seems to me that the social
and political culture of the US prevents it from even considering alternatives
until it is very, very late.

------
malandrew
TBH, I really hope we stop calling the current era the information age and
instead start calling it the automation age. It's more accurate. Information
is now no longer being used by humans but by computers. In many cases now, we
simply generate too much informations for humans to comprehend, parse or
analyze without computers doing more and more of the heavy lifting. The
information is instead being parsed, analyzed and comprehended by computers
who then act upon the understanding that has been programmed into them.

------
makmanalp
The point about the cars reminds me of Rush - Red Barchetta:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAvQSkK8Z8U>
<http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/108819/>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barchetta>

About a person who finds an old red sportscar in his Uncle's countryside
house, after the passage of a "motor law".

------
tgrass
Two points.

1\. GDP growth is a historical anomaly. Many post industrial peoples base
today'financing decisions on tomorrow's expected income gains. In a world of
low to no growth, you must save early and significantly for retirement, and
retirement will still require working.

2\. Technological advances will shift the jobs to those that can add value.
That is precisely marketing and sales.

------
Qantourisc
It's rather "simple" after you get over the social issues.
Socialism/Communism: in this case there is a LOT of mone.. eu resources to
give away ! Or work very little :)

The biggest problem are going to be the 1% who will be screaming ... and
reaping the benefits before revolution?

<cruel mode>Then again we would only need to kill 1% of the
population.</cruel>

------
jere
>Not everyone can become a computer programmer, genetic counselor, or startup
CEO; a whole lot of Mead’s “ordinary people” will be stripped of their jobs
and left behind in debt, poverty, and despair.

So basically if you're reading HN, the title probably doesn't apply to you.

~~~
jiggy2011
You aren't totally safe as a programmer either. As software improves, each
piece of software can take care of a wider number of people's needs.

For example in ~2001 setting up an ecommerce website probably involved hiring
a web developer, setting up an email system for business probably meant hiring
an IT consultant.

Now shopify and google apps etc greatly reduce these sorts of needs.

You also have ever expanding and improving open source solutions devouring
categories of software.

------
robotjosh
Get ready to lose your job- unless you have the skills to automate peoples'
jobs.

------
Aron
CurtWelch's comments in that article are fantastic.

------
wpietri
Techcrunch plus a trolling title means I'm not reading it. Fool me once, shame
on you. Fool me seven thousand times and maybe I'll start to learn a lesson.

------
ryguytilidie
Haven't people basically been saying this since computers were invented? Hey
lets try it again, probably right the 300th time!

~~~
marknutter
Do you think, maybe, the transition will take some time to happen?

------
no_more_death
Two possibilities: continuation of existing trends, leading to a hyper focus
on education, or a sudden reversal, where we live in a post-technological
world.

Some are speculating about needing to work less or not at all. I would argue
that we WILL work less, only because we will have to spend more time in
education. It seems like however much society & science advances, we still
need people to sort things out and run the whole huge machine of society. For
example, machines can't parse Mochizuki's conjectured proof of the ABC
conjecture. That requires clever humans to wade through hundreds of pages of
analysis, carefully inspecting for holes. It takes more clever humans to
program clever machines.

The little work that we do becomes incredibly powerful, but most of our time
is spent learning. We will learn as teams instead of as individuals, where
each person takes a tiny wedge of the pie and learns to master it and learns
to master the tools necessary to deal with the wedge. This already happens
with scientific papers. New scientific papers are published by teams of old
people, but almost never by young people. This pattern is going to spread from
the hard sciences into every line of work, until everything operates like
science. Construction, engineering, marketing design -- everything will be
huge dollops of education to a small speck of actual application, but that
speck will be incredibly powerful.

Now, if we eventually unlock a new frontier, like exploring other planets or
underwater / underground cities, then we'll probably have a place for people
who simply thirst for adventure. (So far information technology has been
basically a place for adventure-seekers -- an immature discipline where you
can get by without following the dictates of some elite, because even the
elites do not fully understand this discipline yet.) The conditions those
societies will experience will be extremely new and different, and may require
new tools and new ways of making things happen. But for the most part, I see
the (comfortable) person of the future on the one hand being a great
generalist, able to switch directions when a position becomes unnecessary, and
on the other hand a great specialist, learning everything there is to know
about less and less, and that's what he actually lives off of.

What if there's a reversal? The whole thing may come crashing down, and we
might have to start over. We would live in a bizarre world where life is about
recycling all the astonishing things synthesized in a previous culture,
instead of being about making new things at a blistering pace. We make more
and more things that are better and better, and we're just throwing away
astonishing amounts of stuff. Rummaging through garbage cans and land fills
might be the work of the future, if the higher class (1%) were to collapse
permanently. If there's no one to spearhead the increasingly difficult march
to technology, it may become cheaper to reuse previous things instead of
inventing new ones.

