
The future of jobs: The onrushing wave - bootload
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-technological-innovation-has-always-delivered-more-long-run-employment-not-less
======
SideburnsOfDoom
They estimate in their chart that Athletic trainers have a 0.007 chance of
being automated, the third lowest chance after therapists and dentists.

it's hard to know exactly what they class as "Athletic trainers". For Olympic
athletes, there will always be staff. For the rest of us, what would that
"unlikely" automation of the coach look like? Perhaps it would start with a
movement sensor on the wrist? A smartphone app to track and recommend
exercise?

That's not looking unlikely to me, it's looking like it's already here in
plain sight:

[http://www.fitbit.com/](http://www.fitbit.com/)

[http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-band/en-
us](http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-band/en-us)

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/category/HEALTH_AND_FITNE...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/category/HEALTH_AND_FITNESS)

~~~
JshWright
Yeah, the same chart lists a 17% chance that "firefighters" will be
automated... I'm equally curious what then definition of "firefighter" is. If
they are talking about woodland (or "forest") firefighting, then _maybe_ (I
could see drones accomplish at least some of the tasks involved). But for
structural firefighting? No way... Not in 20 years.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Why not? Is it the chaotic environment? The temperature extremes? The
unpredictability of each situation?

All those are strong reasons TO automate firefighting. Machines can function
better in heat/smoke/violent structural collapse situations. They can make
objective analysis when their own mortality is not an issue.

Nobody made money betting against advances in computing.

~~~
walshemj
But to replace a fire fighter would require order of magnitude discoveries in
several fields you would effectively need true AI and a self powered robot
with as good strength and endurance as a human.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
Don't assume that the robotic solution will look anything like the human
solution. A fitbit does not look like a "robotic personal trainer" and a
roomba does not look like a person with a broom.

I would speculate that the obvious next wins for fire-fighting are drones to
visualise the scene from multiple angles, remote control or self-aiming hoses
and extinguishers. And various hardened eyes and arms to reach into the fire.
All with human oversight, but a reduction in the number of humans involved or
in harm's way.

This reduction in manpower is the pattern - e.g. supermarket self-checkouts
still have some human staff, but to troubleshoot and supervise.

~~~
JshWright
I'm actually most of the way done with a prototype of a quadcopter that can be
deployed on a scene that just orbits and streams video to a monitor in the
chiefs vehicle. It's mostly off the shelf components, with a little bit of
'wrapper' that makes is easier to deploy.

The biggest issue I haven't sorted out yet is the batteries... LiPo batteries
are great in terms of capacity/weight, but if you keep them fully charged all
the time, you kill them pretty quickly...

~~~
walshemj
Ok can this go into a burning building find trapped people and carry them out?

~~~
JshWright
No? That's well outside the scope of its design... what's your point?

------
josephg
There's a great 15 minute video by CGP Grey introducing the same set of
concepts that technology will contribute to unemployment:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU)

Its a bit pop-sciency, but its very approachable and well explained.

~~~
ExpiredLink
It sounds like the technology forecasts in the 50ies and 60ies but with a
pessimistic instead of an optimistic undertone.

~~~
josephschmoe
In all fairness, most desk jobs that existed in the 50's and 60's are now
heavily consolidated (it now takes one journalist and Google what it used to
take 10 to do). And most factory work is either also heavily consolidated or
moved overseas.

Would the words "service economy" even make sense back then?

~~~
nradov
Some simpler financial news articles are now written by _zero_ journalists. A
program just extracts numbers from data feeds and plugs them into a template.

~~~
detaro
Sports as well. You can't have journalists cover all lower league games, but
an aide has to write a log about plays, which you can use to generate some
metrics and generate something that fits roughly the right tone. (example that
does advertise it: [http://statsheet.com/](http://statsheet.com/) does this
for basketball)

------
gregpilling
I am always stunned with statements like this:

"For those not in the elite, argues David Graeber, an anthropologist at the
London School of Economics, much of modern labour consists of stultifying
“bullshit jobs”—low- and mid-level screen-sitting that serves simply to occupy
workers for whom the economy no longer has much use. Keeping them employed, Mr
Graeber argues, is not an economic choice; it is something the ruling class
does to keep control over the lives of others."

Yes, I, as an employer, keep my staff doing "bullshit jobs" because I want to
"keep control over the lives of others." WTF?!?! Why would I do that? Why not
fire the bullshit job person and use that money to take my family on vacation
4x a year?

It amazes me that some people think there is some ruling cabal in a dark
castle somewhere, deciding how to keep the masses in line. Maybe the answer is
less evil - I have the person doing the work because I can't afford to
automate it yet, or it is not currently possible.

What does the author think of the maker movement? This "Capital Equipment" is
now priced at a weeks wage for many US workers. Marx would love it - it puts
the means of production in the hands of the common man. I sold capital
equipment for years, and what I used to sell for $50,000 you can now do with a
$5000 machine. Prices keep coming down, and the machines I sold are no longer
made. My job was eaten by progress :)

People will keep re-inventing themselves. It's what humans do.

~~~
api
Bullshit jobs arise in two ways. One is through the crazy inefficiencies of
huge companies and governments. This is likely not you. Second is as an
emergent property of red queens races in the economy, escalating complexity or
overhead that does not actually increase overall macro productivity. The
latter requires at least a casual familiarity with evolutionary game theory,
but once comprehend cannot be un-comprehended. Most global military
competition also falls into this category, and that's double digits of the
economy in some countries.

I feel like these kinds of emergent pathologies are a species scale IQ test
that so far we have utterly failed.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
_Utter_ failure would have been nuclear self-annihilation.

~~~
api
True. Guess we passed the first pop quiz.

~~~
bro-kaizen
But unfortunately pop quizzes take place literally every day :(

------
danmaz74
Very interesting analysis. But they don't consider at all one very relevant
change that happened during the last 30 years in most wealthy economies,
especially the USA: That the taxation of the rich and the highest-earners in
general was massively lowered. This contributed a lot to the concentration of
wealth and capital in fewer hands.

~~~
ap22213
Taxation for the purpose of running a government and providing basic services
seems to be long gone. Most of the discussions these days are more about what
the 'right' and 'fair' level of redistribution should be.

But, the rates of taxation are so arbitrary. Legislators get together to
determine fixed rates and tiers of taxation.

Aside from the complexities of accounting (which should be simpler with
computers), couldn't it make more sense to tie tax rates to real mean wages?
Then, the very rich would have incentive to increase jobs and increase mean
wages.

~~~
Adlai
As much as I like this idea, there's an equally strong incentive, for those
who can afford to do so, to engage in "tax optimization".

------
desdiv
The chart claims that economists have a 43% chance of being replaced by
automation.

If they're wrong, then they'll be replaced by algorithms that are better at
predicting economic trends than they are.

If they're right, then...

~~~
vosper
I've pointed this out elsewhere in this thread: That's not what the chart is
saying. The description reads "Probability that computerisation will lead to
job losses in the next two decades", not "probability that computerisation
will completely replace this job".

For example, in economics, there might be a need for fewer economists because
computers are able to do some of the work that previously had to be done by
humans. But they're not suggesting that there's a 43% chance that there will
be no human economists in 20 years, or that there will be such a thing as a
computerised economist - it'll be aspects of the work that are automated (at
least initially), not the whole job.

------
grandalf
If unemployment ever becomes a problem we can simply outlaw the wheat combine,
which will open up hundreds of thousands of jobs harvesting grain manually.

~~~
glesica
I hope you were being sarcastic... but in case you weren't, why would we ever
create meaningless work instead of just giving people money for pursuing
whatever makes them happy? A basic income guarantee seems like a much more
reasonable solution than "put everyone to work digging holes and filling them
in again".

~~~
kamaal
>>just giving people money for pursuing whatever makes them happy? A basic
income guarantee seems like a much more reasonable solution

Because recent history suggests, when offered money/stuff/income gurantee for
free:

a. In the eyes of the individual receiving money, the value, importance and
the perceived hard work that had to be done to earn it, as time passes, tends
to zero.

b. A vast majority of people tend just take the money and chill doing nothing,
while wanting others to work and make more free stuff/money for them.

c. Because a few people tend to do nothing and keep the status quo going,
other people who like to break the norm and make value/money are immediately
perceived as heretics who break the 'equal misery for all' norm and are
perceived as evil.

d. Brilliant, hard working and creative people like to work with people of
their own kind and generally go and live at places where they can find them.
And such places always exist.

e. 'Right to free stuff' generally becomes the norm after a while and people
who the real work are expected to make over the skies sacrifices and offer
bulk of what they do 'for greater good of society'.

f. Equality for all in general tends toward, equal misery for all. Over big
periods of time.

~~~
glesica
Aside from being generally inaccurate, your points completely ignore the fact
that we are talking about the future, not the present. Specifically, we are
talking about a future in which there is simply no _useful_ "work" for most
people to do.

You can read more about the idea here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income)

There is also:

[http://isa-global-dialogue.net/indias-great-experiment-the-t...](http://isa-
global-dialogue.net/indias-great-experiment-the-transformative-potential-of-
basic-income-grants/)

and

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome)

------
jfoster
The interesting thing is that a wave of redundancy due to automation or
unprecedented efficiency contains problems that those made redundant might be
able to work on.

Eg. Joe can't afford X due to lack of employment, and Bob can't afford Y for
the same reason. Assuming Bob can supply X and Joe can supply Y (or some more
complicated network of bartering), it seems like should be possible for an
economy to arise.

~~~
pacala
While commerce and trade are important, the basis of our existence is
physical. We are physical beings with physical needs. Physical resources
(energy, land, lumber, food, water, etc.) all have owners in the real economy.
Joe and Bob are unemployed, thus have no resources, thus have nothing to
trade. The best they can do in your scenario is called dumpster diving,
assuming recycling tech is not making garbage valuable to the real economy as
well. Mass dumpster diving, that's your dystopia right there.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Specifically, Bob and Joe need oil (energy) to produce anything and it's
expensive. If they create less value than oil they spent, they're a net loss
for society.

------
prodigyboi
"However, society may find itself sorely tested if, as seems possible, growth
and innovation deliver handsome gains to the skilled, while the rest cling to
dwindling employment opportunities at stagnant wages."

As insurmountable as it may seem, people living in and affected by these
innovative societies just need to adapt accordingly. It is in our innate
nature to do so rather than remain stagnant and perpetuate mediocre jobs that
were created as a result of the industrial revolution. People can acquire new
skills and leverage themselves to appropriate some of the "handsome gains".
Also, globalization would only exacerbate the issue of "dwindling employment
opportunities". Nowadays, more and more corporations seek to outsource jobs to
other countries due to cheap labor costs. For most people, it'll be a
paradigmatic shift in thinking and seeking ways to contribute to society.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence will only serve those who can
transcend the repressive jobs which are inherently repetitive and meant for a
machine to accomplish as they are the jobs most susceptible to
computerization.

------
doctorstupid
Of course, the other side of the coin says that there are too many people.

~~~
tomwalker
I think that this is a very important piece of the discussion. Improving the
efficiency of a lot of workers and increasing automation does not marry up
well with a constantly increasing world population.

~~~
sumedh
The growth rate is falling though.

------
13hours
This makes me think : what are good ways to try and protect myself against
this? How can I, as a software developer and entrepreneur leverage this to my
advantage? What does this tell me about where the big opportunities will be in
3,5 and 10 years so I can begin positioning myself there?

------
tokenadult
I see the dateline of this interesting submission (which looked familiar) is
"Jan 18th 2014 | From the print edition." There seems to be a whole spate of
year-old submissions to Hacker News this weekend. Are we trying to do a year
in review, to see which predictions of 2014 turned out in reality?

As for the substance of this interesting submitted article, the historical
facts are reviewed in a key paragraph before the article goes off into
speculation about the future: "For much of the 20th century, those arguing
that technology brought ever more jobs and prosperity looked to have the
better of the debate. Real incomes in Britain scarcely doubled between the
beginning of the common era and 1570. They then tripled from 1570 to 1875. And
they more than tripled from 1875 to 1975. Industrialisation did not end up
eliminating the need for human workers. On the contrary, it created employment
opportunities sufficient to soak up the 20th century’s exploding population.
Keynes’s vision of everyone in the 2030s being a lot richer is largely
achieved. His belief they would work just 15 hours or so a week has not come
to pass." The nub of the article's argument is that new forms of technological
change might not leave us with any new forms of gainful employment.

After its interesting text discussion and chart predicting what kinds of
employment are least likely to be automated out of existence, the article
points out one difference between the world of the past and the world of
today: "Another way in which previous adaptation is not necessarily a good
guide to future employment is the existence of welfare. The alternative to
joining the 19th-century industrial proletariat was malnourished deprivation.
Today, because of measures introduced in response to, and to some extent on
the proceeds of, industrialisation, people in the developed world are provided
with unemployment benefits, disability allowances and other forms of welfare.
They are also much more likely than a bygone peasant to have savings. This
means that the 'reservation wage'—the wage below which a worker will not
accept a job—is now high in historical terms. If governments refuse to allow
jobless workers to fall too far below the average standard of living, then
this reservation wage will rise steadily, and ever more workers may find work
unattractive. And the higher it rises, the greater the incentive to invest in
capital that replaces labour." Indeed, it may be that the funding of
governmental benefits will become secure enough through rising productivity
that many current workers will have children who do not need a job at all.

------
j1o1h1n
Decent sci-fi reading list in the sub-headings.

~~~
devingoldfish
Good catch, thanks for pointing it out.

------
wittedhaddock
The article refers to a 2013 paper by David Autor of MIT...
[http://economics.mit.edu/files/9014](http://economics.mit.edu/files/9014)

The Nissan anecdote starts on page 3.

------
yellow_and_gray
A table in the article says Technical Writers have an 89% chance of losing
their jobs. But it's only 6% for editors.

Why? Will technical instructions be automatically generated? How?

------
DanielBMarkham
Science is by definition the creation of causal chains. If I do X in this
system, Y will result. Hence the importance of falsifiability and
reproducibility.

This is yet another in a series of economic articles that sound much more like
a typical op-ed column than an observation, hypothesis, or proof.

------
api
If it does turn out to be different this time, it will be because Turing
complete automation is qualitatively different from single purpose machine
automation.

------
aaronhoffman
I'd recommend reading Economics in One Lesson
[http://mises.org/library/economics-one-
lesson](http://mises.org/library/economics-one-lesson)

------
jokoon
the domain of computer science that seems to have a bright future is machine
learning.

------
michaelochurch
I don't blame _technology_ for the stagnation of the American middle class. I
blame poor leadership, but I think there's something else going on that isn't
getting a lot of press: _latency skew_.

Instead of waiting two to three days for a piece of postal mail, we're annoyed
if that email takes two _minutes_. I'm not going to moralize about "instant
gratification" as if it were wrong, because it's mostly not conscious and it's
not a moral issue; we're just being neurologically retrained to resist delays.
From a website, 10 seconds means "never": it's down, or in an unusable state.
We're also (some of us, at least) at a ridiculous level of comfort; we have
people who program their garages to heat up 30 minutes before they leave for
work, because they can't stand the thought of 45 seconds' exposure to winter
cold.

What's _not_ becoming instant is human learning. If something can be learned
quickly and will become rote, we can now program a computer to do it. So the
things that we need humans for tend to be those that require subtlety or
experience. That hasn't gotten faster. It still takes 6+ months before someone
is good at his job. That's not a new problem. It's just less tolerated because
people are more primed to expect instant results. So we're seeing an aversion
to training people up into the better, more complex jobs that technology
creates.

------
SixSigma
Ftee trade destroys wages, of this there is no secret.

De-regulation subverts democracy.

Time to revisit the relationship between capital and well-being. Ricardian
theories of comparative advantage drive wealth into the hands of those who
control capital, not into the calloused hands of the poor suckers who sweat.

~~~
Houshalter
Automation destroys far more jobs than free trade. If anything we should ban
automation.

~~~
SixSigma
It wasn't automation that destroyed US manufacturing

~~~
Houshalter
Manufacturing only became the major source of employment after all the farm
laborers had become unemployed due to automation. As another comment
mentioned, just banning wheat harvesters alone would create thousands of jobs.
If creating jobs was our only goal.

~~~
SixSigma
Farm labourers became unemployed as a result of govt. policy to undermine farm
worker political power.

More labour intensive farming would be a good thing. At the moment the US uses
10cals of energy to produce 1cal of food. Pre "get big or get out" it was 1 in
2 out.

Back to manufacturing, it is free trade that has gutted US manufacturing
capability. Just look at the trade deficit, the rest of the world benefits
greatly, capitalists get great returns on their free movement of money. The US
loses taxes, jobs, and wealth and is eroding its long term economy while the
short term policy makers make hay.

~~~
Houshalter
>Farm labourers became unemployed as a result of govt. policy to undermine
farm worker political power.

No, in the last 2 centuries we have simple automated the vast majority of farm
labor.

>More labour intensive farming would be a good thing. At the moment the US
uses 10cals of energy to produce 1cal of food. Pre "get big or get out" it was
1 in 2 out.

This is an entirely meaningless metric.

>Back to manufacturing, it is free trade that has gutted US manufacturing
capability.

Yes but my point was that banning automation would be more effective at
creating jobs than banning trade. They are economically equivalent. A port is
essentially a machine that produces stuff with less (local) labor.

