
The First Time America Freaked Out Over Automation - robg
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/30/rick-wartzman-book-excerpt-automation-donald-trump-215207
======
Havoc
Don't think this is accurate. I feel here "this time it's different" does
apply.

Previous automation waves focused on taking a mechanical task a human was
doing and making it faster by mechanical means. Compare that to the modern AIs
outperforming highly trained doctors in diagnosis. Fundamentally different -
instead of optimising a physical task we're replacing the need for a thinking
human.

It's also worth noting that the response to previous waves was a shift to
knowledge work. Now that is being threatened too. Short of moving to basic
income I don't see where humans are going to go next.

~~~
johngalt
Counterpoint: even if it is different this time, it's different in a good way.

As the need for human labor decreases, costs fall to the floor. This is
specifically true for knowledge work that is not constrained by resource
inputs. Imagine how much HN would cost to run if it was a newspaper or
magazine? This may seem like it's still bad news for humans, because where do
the new jobs come from? Yet we regularly see an increase in consumption to
compensate for the reduction in production costs. This increase in consumption
generally overruns the job reductions due to efficiency. The number of
newspaper writers may drop, but the total number of employed writers goes up.

We also see this trend in technology. Early computers took a highly trained
team to keep a single computer operating. Now technician to computer ratios
can be 1000:1 or more. Yet we seen an increase in total employment rather than
a reduction.

> the response to previous waves was a shift to knowledge work.

Computer assisted knowledge work may be precisely the answer to the unskilled
and unemployed. Ubiquitous computing made it so that your banker only needs
1/10th the knowledge in order to be effective (when was the last time you
calculated an amortization schedule by hand?).

Make it so the "knowledge work" is done by the expert system and the human
simply operates the expert system.

~~~
Havoc
>Computer assisted knowledge work may be precisely the answer

No but that's the entire problem. Why computer "assisted" when computers are
getting to the point where they can do it on their own completely?

Robotics already outperform humans physically, and AI is (in many areas)
approaching humans. So the risk here is complete replacement, not
supplementing.

In the near term your solutions are solid, but that's a band aid. Humans will
soon simply no longer be able to compete at all except for niches.

>the human simply operates the expert system.

Operate what? At the current pace the only operating required will be flicking
the ON button.

>when was the last time you calculated an amortization schedule by hand

5.5 years ago. :p

~~~
cirgue
>Robotics already outperform humans physically, and AI is (in many areas)
approaching humans. So the risk here is complete replacement, not
supplementing.

The steam drill didn't beat John Henry, the system of technology, resources,
and people behind the steam drill did. Until a computer decides that it wants
to win a chess tournament and teaches itself how to play, humans will always
be at the helm.

~~~
chongli
_humans will always be at the helm_

The problem is that it could be just one human. One person could own all of
the machines. They would advise him, protect him, and carry out all of his
orders.

Just imagine the President having his entire White House automated. The NSA?
Automated. The military? Automated. Police? You get the picture. Robots and
computers replacing everybody. One person in charge. 100% loyalty. Small
pockets of resistance trying to hack into and take over robots, data centres,
etc. Vast computing resources under _the ruler 's_ command employing all
manner of encryption, fuzz testing, logging, surveillance, etc. in an attempt
to eliminate the resistance.

It's like the plot of the Terminator movies without the general AI in charge.
Instead, it's a legion of special purpose AIs serving the one guy.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Without society owning artificial intelligence collectively, all other paths
lead to tyranny.

~~~
maneesh
society is notoriously bad at doing anything collectively

~~~
davty
As a socialist Swede, I beg to differ.

------
Clubber
By using the term "freaked out," it implies that automation isn't anything to
worry about. The difference between now and then is the scope and the speed.

------
jtwebman
This was in no way the first. It was a big deal back in the late 1800's and
early 1900's when things switched from horse powered to steam powered as well.
As well as when cars replaced horses. They said it was going to kill
industries, which it did. Yet we all moved on. You can back forever with this.
Things change, and some people embrace it and some never do.

------
flukus
Something always missed int this debate is the limits to human consumption.
The average person today lives like a wealthy one 100 years ago, but a wealthy
person today doesn't live too much differently to 100 years ago.

What we've reached now is a point where we can't consume anymore. I can't eat
more food, I don't have time to watch more entertainment, etc. Unless we
consume more there will be no new jobs created to fill the void left by the
steady march of automation.

------
rrggrr
> that most any job that can be given to a machine will be, and that machines’
> capabilities are improving by the day.

Automation tax. If employment, payroll and healthcare taxes are justified for
the employment of people, than why shouldn't there be taxes levied on
automation? Given the impact automation has on employment and wages, isn't a
countervailing tax on automation a necessity?

~~~
neon_electro
How do you tax automation? How do you ensure you don't stifle its development?

Shouldn't we be focusing on distributing the fruits of automation as widely as
possible?

~~~
maxerickson
A VAT.

~~~
rrggrr
Correct, a Value Added Tax. It may be necessary to levy additional taxes on
high employment businesses hurt by automation (eg. Transportation). The
responsible thing to do would be to tightly earmark the proceeds, and to have
the taxes sunset, requiring a 2/3 majority to renew, after 10 years.

------
Theodores
A lot of freaking out is about the A.I. automations of the future that can
think like us, talk like us and know everything. However, I am doing regular
computer automation with regular code that works with normal data. In the
process transforming a company from working 1990's style 'personal computing'
to where the web server 'does all that for you'. Many thousand of 'if'
statements later I have automated many things have changed, three teams
working from same-but-different spreadsheets now just use the same data in a
proper database. If anyone enters the data wrongly then the computer corrects
it and probably had it right before someone changed it.

The thing is that some quite 'simple' office jobs are quite complicated to do
in code, debug and test. But then you do it 'the computer way' so it can check
thousands of records or millions of them to see if that email address has been
used before. A mere human would not know that or be able to just casually
check a million or so previous sales orders etc. in a couple of seconds. So
with these 'computer special' ways of doing things, the finished automation
goes beyond what is possible by hand, or if attempted by hand the time taken
would just not be available. The human role has been deskilled and the
computer code is already approaching 'self awareness' even though it is just a
lot of if statements with no Google brain A.I. in sight.

A lot of thought about information architecture is needed for this, more like
applying the Toyota Way to 1's and 0's with changes to business processes and
new properly thought out databases of sorts built to support this new 'web'
way of working. Essentially lots of data entry work is taken out of all
departments in the company with the web replacing documents as we know them.

If you ream through a company taking the data entry out of a person's job here
and there, this is usually a help because it does free these people to be more
productive and do the things that they wanted to do and joined the company
for, which is rarely data entry. They can progress within their career and use
new tools that are part of a better company wide team thing, enabled by the
web.

Companies that do not automate like this cannot compete on price with those
companies that do get 'web' ways of working properly automated. The companies
that don't fully embrace the web tend to have 'the web' as a hybrid 'typing
pool' of sorts, a cost, they don't get it, but it happens.

In this future the company that automates its processes just with if
statements, cron jobs, a sprinkling of SQL in the reporting and everything
going through [https://](https://), this company can scale. If all the
customers decide to return product for a refund at the same time (e.g. Note7)
then this can be handled without a bottleneck in back office processes and
resultant customer dissatisfaction about money not returned etc. In this way
automation is crucial for existential threats that could ruin a company's
reputation. This scale-able company is able to take up the market occupied by
non-automated rival companies, not visa-versa.

'If' statements are very cheap when written and tested, sending data is also
very cheap. It is this simple, non-AI automation that is the thing people need
to fear. Despite how many hours someone works or time served or how high up
the hierarchy they are, there is the risk that half of their job could go, to
be replaced by some helper module code that is a mere handful of kilobytes.
Relatively speaking the Google grade AI self-driving car stuff that replaces
rocket surgeons is not the thing to be scared of, it is the insidious 'if'
statements of regular code and how the winners will all have to use 'web' ways
of working.

~~~
ohhhwell
And now these simple ifs can say stuff like "if(photo of a yorkshire
terrier){}"

------
ThomPete
I find it rather troubling how many people have issues with seeing the
difference between automation in the 50ies which was about replacing manual
labour and then AI which is about replacing the mind.

Unless humans have some extra secret advantage besides our intellect I have a
hard time understanding why so many people just can't see that this is a very
different situation than they had back then.

Since 2009 95% of all jobs created in the US were temp jobs. Bush expanding
the definition of what constitutes a job and Obama didn't change that. So we
are dealing with highly inflated job numbers not including the number of
people you simply don't count as available for the job market anymore.

The states deficit is at record highs because we have funded all this with
borrowed money either from other countries who buy our currency or the future
through quantitative easing.

Yet somehow most people think everything is just another luddite fallacy being
replayed.

New sustainable jobs aren't created, the number of entrepreneurs is actually
going down and the economy move from labour heavy to capital intense
industries.

And our politicians are being advised by economists who treat technology as an
externality.

Somethings gotta give.

~~~
Kenji
>AI which is about replacing the mind

Give me a break. AI replacing the mind... Put zebra stripes on an upside down
sofa and the best image recognition algorithms see a zebra. That's how far the
"understanding" of our AI goes. What you are doing is fearmongering.

~~~
ohhhwell
I know that was a tongue in cheek comment, but I couldn't resist a quick
google images + clarifai.
[http://i.imgur.com/rwwVDe1.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/rwwVDe1.jpg) (Forgot to
flip it though. Left as an exercise to the reader)

That being said, the argument that because there are some things AI can't do
yet[0] we shouldn't worry about automation doesn't really hold. If you manage
to make a "brain worker" 10x as efficient by automating a big part of their
job, possibly leaving some oversight to catch zebra sofas, you simply won't
need as many employed in that profession any longer.

[0] to be fair a small picture of a zebra striped sofa without context might
fool people too

~~~
Kenji
Actually, it was not a tongue in cheek comment. It is based on a real example
I read some time ago. And the upside down part is important ;)

------
good_vibes
Winter is coming. Robots are exponentially different from that generation of
machines.

~~~
majewsky
Winter, you say? Because my money is on at least another
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter)
before the real breakthroughs. ;)

------
b1daly
The worrying over the effects of extreme AI always strike as being a peculiar
quirk of human psychology. It's a hypothetical worry, about a hypothetical
problem, when there are actual problems happening now, that could be
addressed.

For example, there is a the phenomenon of increasing income disparity in
developed economies. It seems like the solutions to this problem should be
much easier than the challenges of creating advanced AI, thereby displacing
even more workers, and then solving the problems created by the displacement
of workers.

Given that corporate profits have been pretty good, changes to the tax and
regulatory environment that would encourage modest shifts of those profits
from owners and managers, to labor, would go a long way towards relieving real
economic stress for individuals and communities.

There have been virulent, and absurd, political movements that have supported
this system that is shifting the surplus of the economy ever more to the
"haves."

I'm not going to pretend I understand the sociology behind this, but there is
some low hanging fruit I can see. One is the increasing influence of money in
our electoral system.

Citizens United didn't have to decided the way it did. Humans chose this. We
could choose different.

We are starting to see cracks in the alliances that make up both the
Democratic and Republican party. Perhaps there is an opportunity for more a
modicum of more progressive ideas to take hold.

As some other posters have alluded to, one possible solution to the economic
displacement of automation would be to increase cooperative ownership of the
"means of production."

In my town, the local food coop is incredibly successful, and has just opened
a third store. They had around $50 million in sales last year, with a small
profit. I think the managerial philosophy is to aim for a modest profit, and
to provide a living for the workers, food for the community, and social
capital to the neighborhoods they operate in.

This is a complicated, and mysterious, area of human endeavor.

But attempting the social engineering to make the US economy more
"progressive," as well as mm more productive would go a long way.

I am hoping, for example, the abject failure of the Republicans to craft a
plausible health care plan might break the spell this malignant political
party commands over a disturbingly large segment of the voters.

For all of their manifest flaws, I think the Democrats have never succumbed to
the kind of blatant "know-nothing-ism" of the Republicans, with their
repugnant "guns, God, and gays" messaging.

Again, not easy, but doable. And this is all happening right now. The
singularity is an imaginary scenario, st this point!

------
pg_bot
This article nails the point on why people should embrace automation instead
of fear it. To give a HN themed example, how many people made a living telling
you what was in a picture 20 years ago? If you told someone that you make a
living by telling people that there is a horse in a picture they would have
looked at you like you were crazy. Yet today hundreds of people make their
living through image recognition. This is one example of hundreds, it just
turns out that predicting the future is a bit more difficult than people
realize. If you believe otherwise I suggest that you should go into investing
or starting your own startup.

