
Robots have been about to take all the jobs for more than 200 years - apsec112
https://timeline.com/robots-have-been-about-to-take-all-the-jobs-for-more-than-200-years-5c9c08a2f41d
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taylodl
200 years is only a blip in human history. First the machines automated
physical labor, then they started automating mental labor, and now they're
even starting to automate creative labor. As a friend of mine is fond of
saying, society has yet to deal with all the ramifications brought by the
steam engine. And we're moving way beyond that.

~~~
xiphias
The big difference now is that the progress is fast enough for people to start
to understand that their job may be automated in their life. Smart truck
drivers in rich countries know that they have only at most 10 years left.
Children from villages need to move to big cities to survive, as they
understand the trend that farming jobs will worth less over time. Also more
people that I know are getting interested in programming, though they do that
for the money, not because they would understand the power of creation with
code.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The big difference now is that the progress is fast enough for people to
> start to understand that their job may be automated in their life.

The other big difference is that US hourly wages peaked in the 1970s, and
there are enough people experiencing the divergence between expectations of
continued improvement and reality since then that its no longer a prediction
of harms that might occur in the future, but an explanation of harms that are
being experienced in the present.

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kolbe
I can't find the video, but a very powerful example of the folly in this way
of thinking is in the mind of a horse. When the car came out, horses could
have looked around and said "I know they're taking our jobs today, but for the
past 10k years, every time one of our jobs got replaced, we found another
one." Yet, despite such a lengthy history of adaptive value, after cars became
prevalent, horses were never useful an laborers ever again. It's not far
fetched to think that humans are just a better horse, able to stave off
economic obsolescence slightly longer than they did.

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no1youknowz
This was the video.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU)

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toddmorey
This is a clever collection. I'm sure at least one article, on the eve of the
moon landing, asked "We've been wanting to go to the moon forever. What's
different this time?"

Concerning robots, I can answer that question. This time, we have cheap
sensors and connectivity, powerful processors, and machine learning.

It's early, but it's a sea change. Since the beginning, robots have been
instructed what to do. Now, increasingly, they can _decide_ what to do. They
can react to the environment. Recover from failure. Handle variance.

Most of the focus has been on autonomous driving, but the same sensors and
algorithms are applicable to so many varied tasks that have traditional been
unapproachable by machines. (The moment this technology enables a laundry
folding robot, I'm buying it, not matter what it costs.)

And it's not just manual labor but knowledge work as well. We laugh at strange
errors from Siri and Google Now, but I have also started to notice that more
and more of my calls don't involve a phone tree and don't have to get
escalated to a human.

~~~
dmd
> laundry folding robot

You mean this?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDljo6UUWps](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDljo6UUWps)

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clock_tower
The Luddites were right; they were just early.

As for the 1930s and onwards, I once described the Japanese war in China as
indefensible even from a narrowly economic perspective, because developing
Manchuria was enough to _absorb Japanese industrial productivity_ for the next
thirty or forty years. That phrase is historians' standard way of describing
what the Japanese wanted to do, but it was an absolute revelation to a non-
historian friend of mine, who realized from that phrase that industrial
productivity has been a waste product for the past eighty years or so...

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rm_-rf_slash
When AI replaces programmers, mass employment is over. There will be nothing
that can be done by a human that a machine cannot do better. _Fallout_ -style
"synths" will be able to do everything we need our feet and fingers for.

My only real concern is that the more autonomously powerful and self-aware
these new intelligences become, at what point will they perceive humanity to
be a net liability? What happens when they don't need us anymore? What if by
then (esp with climate change and antibiotic resistant bacteria) we can't live
without them?

We'll be lucky if we get the _Neuromancer_ ending, where machines travel the
universe while humanity happily farts around on earth. Lucky.

~~~
bertiewhykovich
It seems like a category error to worry too much about machines deciding that
humans are an "inefficiency" or a "liability." The drive towards maximizing
efficiency is alien to computer systems that have not been explicitly
constructed with that in mind. Organic creatures have an evolutionary impetus
to maximize efficiency; machines (at this point and in the foreseeable future,
at least) do not.

~~~
dfischer
That can be constructed logically with win conditions on what efficiency is.

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transfire
Correction, Robots _have been taking_ all the jobs for more than 200 years.

They just haven't _finished_ yet.

~~~
laughinghan
Sure, but the article is about fear. In those "more than 200 years" there's
been a worldwide explosion in prosperity, and each time a rise in unemployment
was blamed on robots, it later fell again without any retreat by the robots.
This suggests that your claim that "Robots have been taking all the jobs" is
nothing to fear.

~~~
riprowan
We have nothing to fear as long as we can learn and adapt as a society faster
than robots can take our places.

The question is, for how long will that realistically continue?

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visarga
We already have almost "self driving cars". They are called busses, where 30
people are almost automatically driven by one so it's already 96% automated.
We're automating that one last job. If you think about trains, ships and even
farms, they are already automated to a higher degree than buses.

And if people are afraid they will be jobless in an economy dominated by
robots, there is a way out - becoming more independent. There are a number of
ways a person, a community or a city could become more independent from
imports and big corporations.

1\. agriculture - if the person or group has land, they don't depend much on
other external agents

2\. solar and wind energy - they can be built on premise and don't depend on a
central energy production system which could be hard to pay for, in the long
run, if you don't have much cash

3\. 3D printing - making us independent from factories which are often on
another continent and owned by big corp

4\. open source - anything we put there becomes our common legacy; fortunately
AI research publishes almost everything, and we hope to keep it like that

5\. capital - who has capital can invest and have a steady stream of income

So, if big corp doesn't want to hire us and we don't have money to buy their
products, we still have our hands, our brains and help from the community to
find solutions. We can be independent even from jobs provided by big corps.

By the way - a robot and a 3D printer could build more robots and 3D printers.
Think about that. When they can automate the process to a high degree, then
any community can self-bootstrap into economic viability without depending on
continuous delivery of tech and products from large corporations. That would
be great for independence.

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sgnelson
Also, can we stop calling it "robots." I know it's silly, but I always picture
a sci-fi style humanoid robot when they tell me they're taking my job. But
we're not talking about that, we're simply talking about machines and
computers with vastly more automation than previously.

(A dumb criticism, I know.)

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pepematth
Thinking about robots is thinking about cheaper, smaller and more energy
efficient devices. For example think about smart phones and communications,
think about information storage and transformation. Those aspects are not a
single extrapolation of the past, they are a revolution. I see many advances
in nanotechnology, machine learning and miniaturization that could give rise
to a new revolution, this is like the transistor, we are at the verge of a big
change.

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lzhou
John Henry dies at the end of the story.

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SoonDead
There is still a lot of things waiting to be invented/discovered in space
travel, the humanity could use the help of robots in that regard.

And when ready I can travel to my own planet, terraform it and live out my
artificially enhanced lifespan there.

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jeena
They don't stand a chanse because we're so good in inventing bullshit jobs
[http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/](http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/)

