
Are Robots Coming for Your Job? Eventually, Yes - sylvainkalache
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/technology/artificial-intelligence-jobs.html
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blfr
Hopefully, they will start with the job of writing "robots will take your job"
articles because they seem to be exactly the kind of boring task best suited
for robots. Rewording McKinsey's content marketing should be possible even
today.

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emodendroket
Even if we take the source as completely trustworthy, the estimate is one-
third of jobs -- a lot, but not the totally jobless world the headline
suggets.

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CM30
Honestly, I think the worries about AI taking jobs are overblown. Will AI get
better? Yes. Will some jobs be doable by AI? Yes. May that eventually end up
being all jobs? Guess so.

But that doesn't mean people won't be able to find work or make money. I mean,
you don't have to be the 'best' at something to get rich off of it, nor to
even simply earn a living at it. I mean, think about it. Objectively the
majority of products, services and businesses out there now are worse than at
least one competitor. If people were always rational about what they were
buying, said businesses/products/services would go broke.

But they're not rational. People buy things and use products because of many
things, whether that's convenience, location, price, name
recognition/branding, marketing, word of mouth type marketing, social proof,
quality of service/employees/whatever, pure luck or heck, without even
thinking at all.

So even if every market in existence gets AI involved in, it still won't
necessarily mean old fashioned human run businesses can't compete and win
customers.

There's also the additional effect of branding that people never really think
about here too. People don't just watch 'a' TV show or film or what not, they
watch Star Wars or Game of Thrones or what not. Same with music, games, books,
art, internet media and basically anything celebrity related in general.
Eventually, the greats sell on their name alone, and that's one barrier that
even the best use of AI may not compete with. Just look at a popular book for
example, in some cases the author's name is literally more than double the
size of the title!

So that may also be another area where robots won't eventually come for
jobs/take all the jobs. Perhaps we'll end up in a world where the 'Patreon'
style model is the norm and the standards for success are how well you market
your own brand rather than the exact quality of what you do...

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EB66
Is it just me or did the article not offer much in the way of how or why said
robots would take our jobs?

The article only seemed to say that it would happen eventually and, as a
result, the labor force of the future will require more software engineering
skills.

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subjectHarold
Maybe I am just an idiot...but I don't understand what the fuss is. Through
1870-90, the economy went through a similar phase and the world didn't
end...and this was with no unemployment protection. If anything that period
was more severe than anything that can happen next: productivity in some
industries went up more than ten times pretty much overnight (cigarette
production is the archetypal example).

The only thing that doesn't appear to function well now is education, which
appears to be stuck in the post-WW2 mentality of a job for life and which the
author does identify as a problem. That doesn't seem like a particularly big
deal however (at least half of the problem is convincing people that they need
to keep learning).

The real concern for me is people constantly predicting the end of the world.
Politicians are taking it seriously and they will inevitably fuck it up. Also,
the world that journalists seem to live in has pretty much never existed. The
only reason a "job for life" occurred after WW2 was because of the huge
barriers on trade/capital that were put in place around this period. No
competition, high prices...yes, the true glory days.

~~~
dboreham
My theory is that writing articles about "the robots commin' to get ya" is
someone's business model. Exactly how that works I can't fathom. But there
have been so many articles like this in the past couple of years (vs the
actual probability that robots are really coming -- which is pretty low) that
I have to believe there's a command center somewhere where someone is running
some kind of disinformation operation against us..

~~~
subjectHarold
...we are talking so maybe that it is proof that the business works...maybe
the author is a robot preying on human weakness...is this how they get us?

Srs though, ppl aren't particularly interested in being told that stuff is
okay or even learning from past experience. The present is always extremely
unique and very dangerous.

For example, I am not from the US but follow US politics...as far as I can
tell, every election over the past ten years has been "the most important
election there has ever been". I remember 2012 specifically: it was hyped into
oblivion but was totally inconsequential.

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barbecue_sauce
What is the intended effect of articles like this? Motivate people to work
harder a la John Henry? Motivate people to learn technical skills despite the
negative net job creation of automation? Would having a more widely educated
workforce even help?

~~~
crispyambulance

        > What is the intended effect of articles like this?
    

How about just promoting an understanding of changes which will happen between
now and the next couple decades.

Or should we just give up and accept our fate? :-)

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droidist2
I wonder when this will become a major issue in a US presidential election.
Also I wonder what the major parties' stances will be on how to deal with the
effects of automation.

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teeray
It will be a big deal once we have a robotic presidential candidate :)

~~~
dsfyu404ed
As long as he likes blackjack and hookers I'm sure the electorate will be just
fine with him (:

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jl6
When a job disappears due to automation, it’s bad for the person losing their
job, but it seems to be good for everybody else.

Is this always the case? Is there a tipping point where automation becomes
_not_ good for everyone else?

~~~
anoncoward111
I think the world probably took a turn for the worse when surveillance became
automated.

Stasi were evil people but could only do what was humanly possible. Now look
at what NSA can do.

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b3lvedere
I wonder if the saboteur will also make a comeback then.

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dev_dull
It’s almost the end of 2018 — have you raised alarms bells yet for this years
most hyped tech bogeymen?

\- deepface will change laws.

\- killing robots.

\- blockchains will make X obsolete.

\- AI will take your job.

Am I missing something?

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3minus1
I see a lot of news stories and anecdotes about automation via robots. Are
there any statistics that describe this trend?

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wetpaws
You must be new here

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skrebbel
tl;dr:

(Not a typo, it's just that if you summarize this article, there's nothing
left. No point, no insight, no argument, just some rambling, a submarine, and
some links to other headlines)

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cyc116
Are Robots Coming for Your Job? Eventually, Yes

Is The Bull Market Coming to an End? Eventually, Yes

Does my cat like Sushi rolls? Eventually, Yes

Does Titles like these bother You? Eventually, Yes

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Your cat might (and probably will) die before they like sushi roles, so your
understanding of eventually might not be canonical.

~~~
chimeracoder
> Your cat might (and probably will) die before they like sushi roles, so your
> understanding of eventually might not be canonical.

Do you... have a cat? It's harder to get them _not_ to eat the fish you _don
't_ want them to have.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
As far as I know, most cats won’t eat rice.

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Timmah
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that "coming for your jobs " is completely
overblown and no different than automation throughout the previous decades.

Isn't there a separate shadow issue of lack of diversity in the market? I
mean, we can't all be app developers, web designers, and project managers.

Sure, you say, there will always be non-tech jobs. Ok, like lawyers? That will
be decimated by strong AI-as-a-service eDisocvery and legal analysis bots that
replace paralegals and associates. So now the firm is a partner or two, and a
$14/hr runner who drives to court and files motions.

Doctors? Ok they read their FDA-certified AI and make sure it's sane and send
you to the ePharmacy where biometric auth and videos replace the pharmacist.

The cleaning staff at both offices are replaced by smart-bots that auto mop
and empty trash. So each building has a security/facilities person.

Restaurants? Most have kiosks and a chef-bot. Just a hostess and manager to
make sure the fryer doesn't burn the building down. Uber has long been
automated.

So again, what's left? Government jobs most likely. And going back to my
original supposition, let's ignore how people make their money. Can we all be
"data scientists" using AI to analyze customer behavior at restaurant kiosks
to apply predictive suggestions for their dessert? Can we all write websites
for the small businesses (that don't exist because they can't afford the AI
services that BigCorp has)? What happens when Google computes every last
datapoint about us? Facebook has reached complete saturation and there's no
new info to sell to advertisers. How would our economy function if there's
basically one industry left? You can't compute analytics about yourself or
sell website services to website service people.

~~~
pitaj
You left out the entire entertainment industry. I imagine that many people
will end up doing creative endeavors, including art, engineering, philosophy,
and science. Also, people (being more flexible than robots) could be the main
actors behind space exploration.

