
What Jobs Will the Robots Take? - grej
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/what-jobs-will-the-robots-take/283239/
======
jarrett
In anticipation of someone bringing up the Luddite Fallacy: [1]

It's true that we're still below 50% unemployment, despite tremendous
increases in productivity and automation over the preceding centuries. The
standard explanation for this phenomenon is that technology eliminates certain
jobs, but also creates new jobs that couldn't have existed before.

That pattern has indeed held true (in the long run) since the Industrial
Revolution began. But crucially, _we can 't be sure the pattern will hold true
forever._ There is no proof that it constitutes an inviolable law of
economics. It could very well be that technology _can_ result in a major,
permanent, net loss of employment, but just hasn't yet.

So what could change? What might break the pattern that has held true thus
far?

Here's one hypothesis. There is an inflection point--a threshold where
automation has become sufficiently advanced. Beyond this threshold, our
capacity to automate processes is faster than the expansion of demand for
those processes. Whereas, before that threshold, new demand could only be
satisfied by human labor, owing to society's inability to immediately automate
the requisite processes.

If this hypothesis is true, then once we cross the threshold, we should see a
long-term decline in employment. That's not to say no new jobs will _ever_ be
created after reaching the threshold. No doubt they will. Even so, more jobs
would be lost than created, resulting in a _net_ decline.

If we take this idea to its logical extreme, we can envision a world in which
_every_ process and occupation can be trivially automated. If we assume such
automation always costs less than subsistence wages[2], then presumably any
given firm will choose to automate all of its processes rather than employ
people. The result being 0% employment.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment)

[2] This is a big assumption. There could be a dynamic equilibrium where
market forces balance the cost of automation against the cost of living. Thus
the TCO of a robot would in many cases be very close to the cost of a human
employee. Processes would then be divided amongst humans and robots in
accordance with the relative costs of automating each process.

~~~
saosebastiao
Sure, in the long term, employment may drop to zero. But humans have an almost
infinite ability to create, and they definitely have an infinite ability to
want. If computers and robots do all the grunt work, and humans have
sufficiently advanced economic systems to be able to benefit as a society,
what is the harm in 0% employment? People will create when they want to
create, and consume when they want to consume. Then, humans will do what they
do best: enjoy life.

~~~
normloman
You said it yourself. Do we have sufficiently advanced economic systems to
handle this thing? Ideally, everyone would benefit from robotic efficiency.
But the way things are going, only the rich will enjoy the benefits. The poor
will be at their mercy.

~~~
saosebastiao
I think it will be like this for a while, with only token changes. But change
in that direction isn't impossible...in fact, at some point it will be
inevitable.

The problem with those types of changes right now is that the world is still
highly meritocratic. I know a lot of people would scoff at that idea, but they
end up riding the bus to work in the morning thinking that the bus driver
might be worth a comfortable living wage but definitely doesn't deserve their
college-educated salary because they worked harder for it. And they think that
they are better at their job than Joe CubicleMate, and they think they can run
the company better than Director Jim, and they think that their friend's step
son is a worthless piece of garbage that shouldn't be allowed to collect
welfare unless he checks himself into rehab first.

And as such, the people who fight for reduced inequality may have a point
about billionaires and such, but they don't want so much equality that they
can't think they are better than their neighbor. If they want sweeping change,
they have to change themselves. Until then, the only meaningful change can be
targeted at the extremes.

~~~
ScottBurson
All your hypothetical example people are male.

~~~
saosebastiao
So are you, and half the world.

------
beat
According to a libertarian friend of mine, if you raise the minimum wage, jobs
will get offshored or replaced with automation. I told him good luck with his
new robot McDonald's in India.

Basically, any job that _can_ be automated _will_ be automated, as soon as
it's feasible. This has been going on for millennia, ever since the first
genius learned to herd goats rather than hunt them. People just have a very
narrow definition of "automate". We don't plow our fields or harvest our crops
by hand anymore, leading to massive reductions in farm employment over the
past 100 years. But we don't think of tractors as "robots", so it gets
ignored.

I have this saying that drives my whole career's thinking... "Have computers
do what computers do well, have humans do what humans do well." Computers are
wonderful about performing precision tasks perfectly, at incredible speeds.
But they are terrible at making decisions in the face of incomplete data. They
can be programmed to sort of simulate it, but it's not the same. Meanwhile,
humans are incredible at making correct decisions using incomplete or
incorrect data, but it's almost impossible to get them to do the same thing
the same way twice in a row.

So the jobs that will last are the ones that require decision-making in the
face of incomplete/incorrect data. The jobs that will be automated are the
precision, repeatable tasks.

~~~
saosebastiao
I think you overestimate what humans are capable of doing (comparatively)
well. By your definition, computers should be terrible at Air Traffic Control,
Driving Cars, Logistics Planning, and even playing Chess. But computers are
incredibly advanced at those tasks...performing well above their average human
counterparts, and in some cases even better than the best human specialists.

Humans have developed a large skillset through evolution, and it is a skillset
that includes highly sophisticated heuristics for problem solving,
communication, and physical interaction. Even 15 years ago, the top Ops
Research and Artifical Intelligence researchers and their computer models
couldn't outperform an ordinary truck driver on the Traveling Salesman problem
on average. Now, there isn't a human in the world that can outperform their
models. 15 years ago, there wasn't a single robot in the world that could
compete with an ordinary human in the task of _walking_. Now we have Boston
Dynamics.

The idea that humans are special at making decisions with incomplete data is
short sighted. It assumes that computers can't improve at the task. They are
certainly a far ways away from making general purpose decisions with
incomplete data, but there are _several_ current systems out there that make
very sophisticated (even unparalleled) decisions in specialized domains, and
they do it with incomplete data.

That isn't to say that your saying is wrong. It is just to say that it isn't a
given that something that humans do comparatively well today may not be that
way in the future.

~~~
beat
Computers do not play chess well. They play chess badly, but incredibly fast.
Deep Blue was capable of analyzing 200 million board positions a second, but
it could be defeated regularly (if not a majority of the time) by a human
being. I'm pretty sure Kasparov wasn't calculating 200 million board positions
in his head!

Pick a harder problem - the game of Go. Computers have only recently been able
to beat a reasonably talented child or inexperienced adult at the game. When
the data set becomes too large to brute-force (Go has many more possibilities
than chess), computers can't hold a candle to human intuition.

Sure, it's possible that at some point, computers will be able to produce
better results than humans at some surprising real-world tasks. But that
doesn't mean computers will do them _well_. Doing it well versus doing it very
fast are two entirely different things. If you can't understand the
distinction, you can't understand where humans will continue to outperform
computers.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Deep Blue was using search-tree algorithms, not learning algorithms. Has
anyone tried putting modern machine-learning engines up against professional
chess players?

~~~
beat
Given the incredibly well-documented history of professional chess, learning
_during play_ isn't efficient. If you're going up against a player, just
program every game they've ever played professionally into the system to study
their behavior. You can be sure the human players do something similar.

Heck, I'm fairly certain that every master game ever recorded was shoved into
Deep Blue and other high-end chess programs.

------
stormqloud
I'm just waiting for the first robots that can sand and plaint interior
rooms/walls.

There is a crazy amount of wall square footage in
offices/commercial/malls/hallways etc where a robot traveling on a mobile
linear beam can totally do the work.

As somebody that spend some amount of time every week hiring, one of the
biggest issues is not automation but the workforce itself.

Finding people that are willing to show up and do jobs is just a major
problem.

Companies want to hire but the candidates that show up at the door can often
be barely employable.

All the millenials want work from home jobs with executive pay.

The idea of starting in the back sweeping the floors (no matter your education
but to show work ethic and flexibility) is gone.

The working world will get harder over the years. The "raised like a delicate
flower" to "love their job" are in serious trouble in the future.

Putting food on the table takes time and effort. It's called "work" not "play"
for a reason.

~~~
kasey_junk
I really doubt your company actually pays someone full time to sweep the
floors. More probably, you've outsourced this to a specialist company that
only sweeps floors (well they probably buff them, vacuum them, etc.).

That company has no reason to promote people beyond the cleaning floor job as
that is their main business & curtailing HR costs is probably their biggest
driver to profit. So in the best case they keep workers who can't find better
jobs at low cost at the same position for years, and in the worst case they
actually "sub-contract" those positions out to companies that exploit illegal
immigrants, who have a near limitless supply of under payed workers to cycle
through.

So forgive me, if instead of reading your comment as a jab against overly
entitled "millenials" and instead read it for what it is, companies reaping
what they sow. If companies wanted employees who will start on the ground
floor and work up, they should foster an environment where that can actually
happen rather than treating their employees with a cavalier mercenary
attitude, and getting huffy when their employee pool reacts in kind.

~~~
stormqloud
Actually I do employ somebody to "sweep the floors" fulltime.

Some random service doesn;t take any amount of care of interest in the job.

You are far better off to pay somebody to do it and be invested in the task
with a sense of pride then to employ a random cleaning company and whatever
worker they happen to send that week.

What I do find is that employee's think hiring is like being on a talent show.

Clearly you have never done any hiring. Once you get out of tech you'll be
lucky if 50% of workers show up for work the day after they have been hired.

Fully 10% of workers will be hired, you will arrange a day to start work and
they won;t even show up. You'll never hear from them again.

Companies can spend time training people over and over. Millenials expect to
be promoted in 6 months and be constantly feted for their work.

Hopefully one day you can own a company and spend your time training workers
to have them leave when they become competent.

~~~
kasey_junk
You are in a huge minority of companies that actually expect to hire someone
to clean floors and move up. If it works for you (which it sounds like it
doesn't) that's great, but it doesn't change the standard hiring practices in
current businesses which is the opposite of that.

I've never been responsible for hiring outside of the technology sector, that
said, I've been responsible for hiring, and have hired across a variety of age
groups and have noticed no trend among any of them for who works harder/more
efficiently/etc. Employee retention is most certainly a hard job, but it isn't
because of the age of my employees, it's because I strive to hire really good
ones.

For what it's worth, I put this question to my wife who hires in a non-tech
small business setting, and she has also never experienced specific problems
with millennials that don't exist in other age groups.

Perhaps it is your hiring practices that are at issue not who you are hiring?

------
guimarin
We are moving from a world where everyone has to work to one where no one can
work. From closed allocation and hierarchical control to open allocation and a
decentralized control structure. This process will probably take a long time,
and to the point, machines have not been shown to be better than humans at
taking away human fear. Like a nurse does for a terminal patient. Certainly
any pattern recognition job will go in the next decade or so, be it paralegal,
general practitioner, or accountant.

------
bitcuration
Look the bright side, automation is the reason everyone in the first world now
live like the 1% of the third world, as well as the 1% from any human history.

How to fiddling through the coming automation without unrest the society is
the only question, before our next generation all live like the 1% of today's
first world someday in the future.

Automation, not war, should be the only force to propel civilization and
living standard. Instead of minimum wage, minimum welfare would be a feasible
answer to the future.

~~~
noir_lord
The thing that worries be sounds like something out of a bad dystopian sci-fi
novel.

What if the super rich are the ones who get the most advantage out of the
automation and use it to keep the rest of the poor under control, I'm talking
Ghetto's with automated riot control.

I'd think such things where unthinkable but if you look at the history of a
company like Nestle nothing would surprise me.

~~~
a8da6b0c91d
People seem to ignore the idea that the super rich and the automated
production will get as far away from the democratic masses as possible. They
won't bother controlling them or setting up a welfare system, they'll just
leave them to scrape by however they can.

Fully automated enterprises will have huge incentives to avoid the taxing
power of large states. They don't need a workforce, remember. A robotized
manufacturer would set up in some small, possibly autocratic state.

How are the unemployed masses going to get their subsidies when the taxable
productivity is on some small island in the pacific?

~~~
bcoates
That's not how taxes work. You can tax anything you can get your hands on.
Unless this hypothetical robo-island has a mercantilist military capable of
ensuring access to markets by force, the states would just tax the goods or
resources moving in or out.

------
zackmorris
[http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

------
ggreer
Economist Robin Hanson has a good talk about the economics of nanotech and AI:
[http://vimeo.com/9508131](http://vimeo.com/9508131)

Around 22 minutes in, he talks about whether labor and capital (machines) are
complements or substitutes.

I'll summarize his argument for the time-constrained: There are many tasks
that need to be done in an economy. Machines are more efficient at some of
these tasks, humans at others. Over time, machines have been able to do a
greater portion of these tasks efficiently.

Today, machines are mostly complements. They help humans do tasks more
efficiently. But as machines get better, they're able to do a larger portion
of tasks. At some point, they'll start substituting for people. This has
happened for some basic jobs in the past, but not to the extent we'll soon
see.

On the bright side, the limiting factor in most of our economy today is
people. Machines can be mass-produced, but raising and training people is
hard. Machines can augment people, but run into diminishing returns. Having
two monitors won't make you twice as productive, and two keyboards won't let
you type twice as fast. If we can do all the tasks in our economy without
people, we can get _insane_ growth rates in GDP.

Unfortunately, with no people in the economy, everyone would be out of work.
Only the machine owners (or investors) would benefit. Everyone else would be
dependent on social programs or charity.

In Robin's example, AI is the machine that can do all tasks. But we don't need
to build such amazing machines before putting a lot of people out of work.
Most jobs are not AI-complete.

~~~
avmich
Imagine how nicely this problem - with machines gradually becoming better -
would play out in a country resembling Soviet Union.

In SU, everyone works for government, and salaries aren't too different. So,
with greater and greater employment of robotics, salaries can gradually rise,
and working hours gradually decrease - and the whole society gets benefits
more or less at the same time. More money supports demand for products - to
some extent - and more time allow to improve the quality of life - people
devote more time to kids, to arts, to each other, to interesting ideas etc.

------
gnaritas
Eventually, all of them.

~~~
splike
Software testing is pretty safe.

Thanks, Halting Problem!

~~~
gnaritas
That would presume humans solve the halting problem, they don't. An
intelligent machine could do it far better than a human and do exactly what we
do, time out if it takes too long.

------
johngalt
A test to determine if a robot will take job X in the future. Ask: would this
job be automated today if hiring a human cost $500,000/year? If yes, then the
clock is ticking. Over time the robot will only get cheaper and the human will
only become more expensive.

~~~
anon4
A programmer from Eastern Europe, India, etc. costs less than 500 000$/year
(maybe as low as 50 000$/year). I don't see any progress in automating their
work.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Then you tell me why Google sponsors the Artificial General Intelligence
conference every year ;-).

------
ladzoppelin
In my opinion unless political and social changes are made to the system, the
lack of money in the "middle class" will greatly hurt the economy. Who has
money for smartphones, fast internet, fart apps and tablets when you have no
way to make a living. Why advertise to people who are not in a position to buy
anything? Why steel from people with no money? Obviously a standard income of
some sort make these automation scenarios more believable.

------
njharman
> But this time is different: Nearly half of American jobs today could be
> automated in "a decade or two,

As most things, I really doubt "this time" is any different. I have no numbers
/ research to back it up but I'd bet pre-steam loom UK, every agricultural
country, and many others faced similar job elimination with advent of
mechanization. Not as fast as 20 years though.

------
anon4
> Telemarketers at 99% chance of being replaced by robots

That's awesome. That means I can then automate answering the phone and
determining if it's a telemarketer on the other end (in the case of an unknown
number).

------
coldcode
Hoping for them to replace our politicians.

------
enupten
I can only hope that this doesn't lead to another AI winter.

