
No Recent Automation Revolution - cinquemb
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/06/no-recent-automation-revolution.html
======
Zaskoda
Due to the Covid-19 lock down, my company was forced to accelerate our
automation program. We did in months what we had originally planned to do in
years. As we are able to open our operations center further, it's clear that
we'll be providing fewer jobs than we did before. At least some part of that
is the result of automation. I can't help but think this same pattern is
playing out at other companies right now.

~~~
kaybe
It really makes me sad that jobs are seen as inherently valuable. The way you
phrase it, 'provide jobs', feels like jobs are something needed.

Of course, in the current setup, this is true, but there are so many boring
and hard jobs (worked by people who are yet poor) that we shouldn't mourn once
we manage to get rid of them.

I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits
evenly.

~~~
barrkel
Unearned income is unfulfilling and the people who think they earned it resent
it being taken from them, even if it's only particularly large because there's
a big market to sell into and a big winner effect in the market structure.

I don't know the answers here but they don't look like free market capitalism
or redistributive socialist utopia, and actually I think this axis or spectrum
is an actively harmful frame for constructing a society with fulfilling lives
and less inequality. Neither more government nor more free enterprise is quite
right.

People want to live productive lives where they are valued and make a
difference. How do you do that in a society which has such enormous returns on
capital which alienates people from their work product?

~~~
wolfram74
If unearned income is unfulfilling, we should raise the estate tax, why should
the children of the poor be so blessed to need to work while the children of
millionaires and billionaires be saddled with the curse of ennui?

~~~
barrkel
You might think you're being facetious, but many wealthy people don't want
their children's lives to be wasted on consumption, and so limit their
inheritance: enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing.

The most meaning in life comes from doing things for other people - not
necessarily for money, but for other people.

I'd love if we could try and figure out a social, institutional, structural
technology which doesn't require taxes (and thus politics and government) for
this. Government slowly but surely gets captured by people with the biggest
pockets, until populists take over and everything falls apart with simple
wrong answers, or worse, kleptocracy.

~~~
shuntress
>The most meaning in life comes from doing things for other people

Exactly. So we should set up a system that provides everyone with enough to
meet their basic needs.

That way they can spend their time and effort to find the way they can most
effectively do things for other people rather than finding the local maxima
"job I can tolerate that keeps me alive"

~~~
barrkel
The most effective means we have today for determining what we should do for
other people is prices.

That means capitalism.

The downsides are lack of agency in large efficient orgs and unearned profits
from capital.

I don't know the answer, but I don't think UBI + charity++ is it.

~~~
status_quo69
I don't personally buy this. If prices were the most efficient way of
determining what we should do for other people, why does the government
already subsidize certain medications? Or agriculture? Or public
development/education? College education becoming increasingly expensive
proves this false, I believe.

~~~
SkyBelow
The core problem is that at the end of the day no one has to play nice. So we
have to have government to set rules about ownership (among other things). But
then some entity has to be in charge of government, which means they are
actually in charge of allocating ownership. At current our only options
consist of some structure made of humans, and even the best among these are
corruptible. As such people who have power to corrupt this process (which is
to say own the resources necessary to corrupt the process) can do so in an
attempt to increase their own ownership. One example is political advertising
to push an agenda that is likely to be more profitable. Be this a brick maker
getting an agreement to have the new town hall made using bricks, or be this
colleges having their customers being given access to large amounts of
financing so they can raise their prices.

>College education becoming increasingly expensive proves this false, I
believe.

Or is college education becoming more expensive because government has allowed
for loans that can't be discharged to be given to people who have been given a
false sense of the value college provides. This in turn means there is more
demand (including the ability to actually purchase the desired product) for a
product that isn't always worth it, increasing price?

One last consideration. Being the most efficient doesn't mean it is as
efficient as one could theorize, only that it is more efficient than any
alternative that can be put into practice.

------
tuatoru
An independent line of evidence looks at the formation of new occupations over
time.

If automation were taking over jobs, or jobs were being refactored because
some tasks are automated, then we'd expect to see new job titles appearing in
employment advertising and classifications such as the Bureau of Labor
Statistics's.

This does happen, as it has happened since the start of the Industrial
Revolution. "Social Media Manager" is a new job that has arisen in the last
several years, for instance.

But, and this is the point, this "job churn" been happening more slowly over
the last 20 years than at any time since WW II.

That is also incompatible with the claim that an automation revolution is
under way.

~~~
nednar
Also let's not forget that automation still means someone needs to write some
code, which needs to be written, maintained, updated, synced with other
projects etc. The act itself creates new jobs already.

For instance: In IT we also have this. Dev is the typical product development
team, Ops is the team that takes care of keeping the lights on. Now with all
the automation we have a new job called Devops which is somewhat in the middle
betwen both Dev and Ops. We thought both groups would move to the middle and
form this new Devops group. But what most companies did is completely hire
from zero for their Devops teams.

Now what we see is that Devops is growing, while Dev and Ops are shrinking.
But the sum of both shrinking groups is smaller than the sum of new Devops
jobs.

~~~
PeterisP
Automation is generally done due to cost savings. So if you replace a thousand
jobs, then you pay for automation less than you paid for these thousand jobs,
so obviously there's less than thousand people involved in creating and
maintaining and selling that automation. And if the automated jobs are low-
paying jobs and the "automators" are mostly highly-paid engineers, then the
gap is even larger.

If there's an engineer paid $200k + overhead for working on automation, then
that only can happen if his/her job alone results in automating away ten $30k
jobs.

------
lnsru
I have very interesting process when taking vacation. Automation does not mean
robots from movie “I Robot”, some software can do the job too.

To take time off I must open shitty software, enter my vacation days, then
print the sheet and sign it. My manager signs it too. Then I bring it to
secretary, she signs too, confirms the date in shitty software. Secretary
sends paper form to the HR lady, she checks, if it’s ok and forwards my sheet
to accounting lady. I see here a huge potential for automation, throwing at
least 1st secretary and HR lady out of the process. This ancient process is
happening in Germany, but automation will come sooner or later even here.

Edit: typos

~~~
Genmutant
All of that is automated at my company using SAP. Could be a nicer interface,
but at least everything is online in the portal.

~~~
majewsky
That's also why it's usually a multi-year project to introduce SAP systems at
an existing company. The hard part is not installing the software (though I'm
not saying it's always easy either). The hard part is getting all layers of
the company to change away from their pre-existing, sometimes nonsensical
processes.

(Disclosure: I work at SAP, though not on customer-facing software.)

------
hirundo
The horrors of the automation revolution have been on our collective mind for
a long time. In the '70s this was one of my dad's favorite jokes:

"It's terrible, my father lost the job he had for decades. He was replaced by
a clever mechanical gizmo just six inches long. And then my mom got one."

It plays on the fear of being emasculated by technology. Maybe that leads us
to exaggerate the threat.

~~~
toomuchtodo
The fear is very real, not about emasculation, but a loss of identity in a
society where "you are your job". I have seen this first hand in both people
who weren't "essential" during COVID shutdowns (to their horror), and people
who _were_ deemed "essential" but it was, in their words, "bullshit".

Automation is rapidly accelerating into the wall that is identity beliefs at
scale, and there is evidence that these belief systems are fairly rigid,
making adaption to change challenging to say the least.

The revolution won't be the automation. It'll be in us accepting that the job
wasn't who we were/are and it's okay to let it go (caveat systems are in place
to ensure quality of life is provided for at an agreed upon floor). It's just
a job.

~~~
Swizec
> The revolution won't be the automation. It'll be in us accepting that the
> job wasn't who we were/are and it's okay to let it go

This is perhaps the only thing socialism got right. At least the flavor we had
in Yugoslavia and the remnants it left on the psyche of my parent's
generation.

You do your job, then you go home and live your actual life. The job exists as
a way to "pay your dues" in society, but it isn't your life. Your life is
home, family, the house you're building, maybe a little side business. That
sort of thing.

My generation growing up in the 90's and 00's tossed that away and went full
american. Hustle hustle. Doing your job is not enough. You must _love_ your
job or you are a failure.

We have more prosperity and I sometimes wonder if our parents didn't have more
life.

~~~
raducu
"Money doesn't buy happiness" is just something we tell the poor so they don't
revolt -- this also applied to communism -- the communist elites lived a much
better life materially and socially. Sure, average Ivan was "happy" because
his neighbors had just as crappy flat, just as crappy car, just as crappy job,
just as crappy food and so on and there was no way for him to "better" his
life because money was meaningless because thats not what Ivan really lacked
-- he lacked freedom to do as he pleased with his money.

My point was that people are competitive, social animals and social status is
very important; sure, communism castrated a lot of those impulses and some
people claim they were much happier back then, but its mostly bullshit
nostalgia.

I was very young back then, but I remember the deprivations, my kindergarten
educator slapping me for not applauding "dear leader", my parents just leaving
me alone in the flat because they had to go the communist parades, being
lectured in kindergarden how my parents jobs(doctors) were in fact less
important than the jobs of other coleagues worker-parents jobs who "perhaps"
made the syringes my parents could not do without; I remember people having to
work on saturdays, night shifts and so on.

~~~
cameldrv
Having not lived through it, but having seen a glimpse of its aftermath living
in Berlin a few years, it was very interesting to see the contrasts between
the Ossis and Wessis (at least ones that were say, at least 18 in 1989). In
general, I found the Ossis to be more friendly and open and fun loving. For
example, an Ossi party would usually be louder, messier, and have worse food,
but everyone would be laughing and a guitar might come out at some point. The
typical Wessi party I experienced was perfectly catered, everyone was
perfectly dressed, and it was in a perfect house, but people weren't
necessarily having that much fun.

Now this is different in other parts of Germany, but it's an interesting
natural experiment, because these guys were literally in the same city.

~~~
reducesuffering
It’s not exactly a novel concept. Compare your recollection of the low class
Irish party scene on the Titanic. What’s your imagination of a suburban house
party or block party compared to the eloquent glitzy ballroom party by the
well-to-do? Not many in society are expecting the well off to have much fun in
gatherings amongst themselves.

------
JoeAltmaier
Yet automation equipment has boomed in the last 20 years. Factory floors are
largely devoid of human beings. The US factory employment figures are down by
more than half in that time, and that with a population that's doubled (so
per-capita, factory occupations down to 25% or less or what it was).

Companies move to India or China, then some move back but with none of the
assembly jobs, because they don't move back until the investment in automation
is paid back efficiently.

Its easy to confuse 'automation across the job fields' with 'automation
replacing people'. The first is slow - automation proceeds in rote assembly
tasks and continuous-flow processes. But automation hasn't proceeded across
the spectrum. I still get my fries from a human being. I still get my hair cut
by Anton at a local shop. My car is fixed by Mr. Harapat (though it got
assembled by a giant robot).

My nieces and nephews are automation Engineers. They are as busy as they can
possibly be, changing plants over to automation. It's cost effective when a
plant grows past a certain size/capacity. And with the rising tide of
population, plants that served us 20 years ago are woefully boutique now,
being rebuilt, and being rebuilt automated.

~~~
tuatoru
> automation hasn't proceeded across the spectrum.

Exactly. Its impact has been limited to areas where there is repetitive work
on standardised, clean objects[1], in standardised environments, in product
lines where volumes are sufficient to justify the investment in machinery.

> Yet automation equipment has boomed in the last 20 years.

Yes it has. The size of the needed investment has gone down a lot in
activities where automation is feasible.

But manufacturing has been a minor part of the US economy for more than 30
years, and its share is getting smaller. "Services" is over 80 percent.
Advertising, making movies, sports, construction... zillions of different
things.

[1] If any manufacturing work _should_ be automated, it's meat packing.
Unpleasant, boring work that gives you carpal tunnel syndrome and other joint
and tendon injuries. Plants are always short of workers and absenteeism is
rife because of the nature of the job.

But automation is impossible, because animals are not standardised enough.
Putting that another way: because machine vision is still so ludicrously bad.
And so is the state of robotics.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Impossible is a big word. "Not yet practical" is closer. "Will soon happen" is
arguable.

------
dgudkov
Automation happens not where many expect it (including the media). It is
frequently expected that automation will come as _replacement_ for humans,
while it actually is coming in the form of better _tooling_ and _assistance_
to humans. This theoretically should be reflected in work productivity, not in
employment numbers.

~~~
taneq
This is true, but better tooled, equipped humans do more work and so you need
fewer of them.

When your landscaping company buys an excavator, one person can now move as
much earth as 15 people used to. You don't keep the other 14 on the payroll.

~~~
aga98mtl
A larger amount of people can now afford landscaping services because earth
moving cost have now gone down. Poor people used to go barefoot before
industrialization.

Producing more with less human input is how we raise the living standards of
everyone in the long term.

~~~
taneq
The Jevons paradox absolutely does play a part, especially at first, but I
don't believe it's enough for higher efficiency to result in an overall win
(edit: for the employees). Most markets saturate surprisingly quickly when you
apply 10x - 100x efficiency increases.

------
TaylorAlexander
As a robotics engineer I too once bought in to the notion that automation
would lead to a massive jobs crash. But the more experience I get the more I
see how big the problem space is. There's a million simple tasks we cannot do
with robotics, and even when we can do them the machine costs $100k. Instead I
am beginning to understand that humans and machines will work together for a
long time.

I still think we can use automation to do radical things. I want to see us
automate food production and meal preparation, to lower the cost of healthy
food. By intentionally lowering the cost of human survival with automation,
and with changes to intellectual property restrictions which keep costs high,
we could create a world where food is so cheap we give it away to those in
need. With changes to our cultural norms and broad application of this theory,
it is literally possible to eliminate material poverty.

Think about it - in a world where there are only private book collections,
some people are book-rich and some people are book-poor. But that kind of
poverty is effectively eliminated if you introduce the concept of libraries to
that world. If we share the automation we create the same way we share books
at a library, we can create societies where everyone is provided for at no
direct material expense to others.

Years ago I wrote an essay [1] where I used the concept of impending job loss
from automation to emphasize the importance of this better way of living I
proposed above. But I've realized that we don't need to see automation as an
impending crisis - millions of people are already in crisis because they
cannot afford the food, medicine, or housing they need. So the need for change
is still there, but the cause is not some future problem, but the problems of
the status quo.

[1] [http://tlalexander.com/wealth/](http://tlalexander.com/wealth/)

------
peisistratos
There used to be local record shops and big ones downtown - music distribution
has since become pretty automated. There used to be many bookstores around -
book distribution has become fairly automated. Gamestop has been closing
stores and has been hit by automated distribution in recent years.

I used to buy Hagstrom map books filled with detailed current maps - they were
sold in gas stations and bookstores and they even had some of their own
stores. Their stores all shut down and their business shrank enormously as map
navigation became automated.

There used to be a lot of tour and travel agencies around. They still exist,
but are much less prevalent and are scaled down.

In fact, automation of commodity distribution has had a major effect on
retail, and consequently commercial real estate.

Insofar as office work - people who work in law tell me the large number of
secretaries who shuffled through cabinets full of folders containing records
have largely disappeared as record retrieval has been automated. I had data
entry jobs many years ago, itself a type of automation - but the jobs I did
have disappeared as data distribution has become automated.

I don't know what they are measuring but I have seen the effects of a
automation all around. Maybe with the closing of bookstores and record stores
and video game stores, they mean the role of a retail clerk has not been much
automated, which may be true. But I have seen automation have a large effect
on many industries, and then rippling effects onto industries like real
estate.

------
cynusx
The frequent problem with these types of reports is that they only focus on
one part of the geography (USA).

That said, I recall reading a report that mostly middle class administrative
and coordination roles are eliminated due to digitalization and dedicated
software. Leading to negative wage pressure on the middle class.

These are repetitive human jobs like looking at a bunch of papers and creating
a report.

Manual work is getting more productive and often shifted abroad but on a
global scale is actually expanding in line with global gdp growth.
[https://reports.weforum.org/future-of-
jobs-2016/employment-t...](https://reports.weforum.org/future-of-
jobs-2016/employment-trends/)

Interesting in this report is that geopolitical instability is more
destructive to jobs than artificial intelligence for now.

~~~
wayoutthere
Very much so; the current wave of automation is taking semi-skilled middle-
class jobs and replacing them with low-skilled minimum wage jobs that can be
filled with gig workers.

High-skill jobs are still there, but the middle is rapidly being hollowed out.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the middle class is shrinking as a
result.

~~~
jtbayly
That’s an interesting take on Uber that I don’t think I’ve seen before.

I know Uber’s end-goal is automation such that taxi drivers aren’t necessary.
What I didn’t realize is that it is route planning automation that allowed
them to move from dedicated drivers to gig drivers.

~~~
wayoutthere
Yeah, I recall an article about London taxi drivers having to memorize the
labyrinth of streets in and around central London to get a taxi license. They
were paid very well and the jobs were stable as a result — until Uber / Waze
came along. Then the market was flooded by recent immigrants working for much
less who were able to navigate unfamiliar streets with GPS and the job became
way less stable.

------
gigel82
I don't know enough about industrial automation to form an opinion, but RPA is
definitely coming for the rank-and-file office drones.

You'd be surprised how many "paper pushers" still fill the cubicles of this
world (their job literally to copy stuff from this ERP to this CRM or to this
legacy Access / Excel / BI system). This is the low hanging fruit of job
automation and enterprises are quickly figuring out what kind of cost savings
RPA can offer them.

I have a feeling RPA will have a much higher adoption rate than the "digital
transformation" trickle.

~~~
kristianp
RPA?

~~~
ilaksh
Robotic Process Automation.

------
dpenguin
It’s basically modified Parkinson’s law at play - work will expand to most
available workforce.

With increased automation, either new jobs are created(thereby increasing the
overall output of the economy) OR expectation for individual productivity is
reduced, decreasing individual stress.

History is your proof. Automation has been constantly increasing forever and
there’s no job loss en masse because of that. Empirically speaking there are
almost always more jobs created.

Not saying anything about quality of life.

~~~
Cthulhu_
While the adage is true, you also have to consider the _quality_ of work.
There are a LOT of people in the US right now with a college degree who can't
find any jobs related to their majors, so they end up as baristas or Amazon
order pickers - their education, talents, passions being wasted, their future
pretty much on hold because jobs like that don't pay enough money to pay off
student debt or buy a house.

~~~
PeterisP
In 1920 or 1950 if we'd had as many people with college degrees as we do
today, we'd also have a LOT of people who can't find any jobs related to their
majors.

What you describe is not the quality of jobs decreasing, it's the increase in
(unfulfilled, unreasonable) expectation of job quality just because you have a
college degree. IMHO we have _much more_ "good jobs" than in 1920 or 1950,
it's just that the number of college graduates has grown faster than the
number of good jobs. In 1920 or 1950 there weren't enough good jobs for
everybody, and the good jobs mostly went to people with college degrees. But
the problem was not actually in the lack of college degrees - if most people
have college degrees, then all that means that college degree ceases to be the
pathway to good jobs, and other filtering mechanisms inevitably need to appear
(and have appeared) to select which people will get good jobs and which will
be left behind despite having a college degree.

~~~
dpenguin
Potentially somewhat controversial take on this: why do college grads deserve
a better job than, say, high school grads if the subject they studied in
college is not particularly relevant to the society at this point(which the
lack of jobs for that qualification is indicative of)?

There was probably a point in time when learning hunting was like going to
college and along comes farming to make all those hunters jobless. That’s how
the wheel of “progress” rolls.

The idea that going to college will make you more bucks or guarantees you a
job in your field of study is very arcane at this point.

~~~
PeterisP
The traditional answer to this comes from the age when college graduates were
a distinct minority. In the 1950s environment, if a job applicant has a
college degree even with irrelevant subject, then this means that the
applicant has passed two filters (getting into college, and actually
graduating with decent grades) for qualities that are relevant to most jobs
but are hard to measure directly, so that degree is a very useful signal for
evaluating people in a way that you can't do during an interview or two.

These qualities are not guaranteed but are correlated with being able to get
into college and graduate - everything from conscientiousness, ability to
follow arbitrary complex rules, general intelligence and also socioeconomic
status (in e.g. sales and management, the social contacts of a high-SES
employee and their family are very valuable in achieving business goals, and
the social contacts of a low-SES employee are not). A graduate might not have
these qualities, and a non-graduate might have them, but it's hard to tell so
the degree is a useful proxy because it _does_ (or did?) correlate with these
qualities.

So it made all sense for businesses to prefer college graduates for certain
types of jobs ("the good jobs") even if the college major was something like
history or literature in a field of business where that's not relevant, and
they did just that. And because of that employer preference, a college degree
was a ticket to one of these good jobs.

However, if almost everyone gets a degree that means that there's no real
filtering happening, and that benefit gradually becomes useless.

------
irjustin
Is it just me or does it feel like this timeframe was too short?

Personally, I expect the largest disruptor of jobs to come from autonomous
driving, but we're still 5-10+ years from seeing that hitting the ground.

As far as today is concerned, I largely agree. ETFs BOTZ and ROBO have
increased, but not in such a way that would suggest huge automation
revolution.

~~~
Cthulhu_
In the meantime, the disruptor for driving jobs has been the race to the
bottom; services like Uber, Lyft, etc popping up, decimating the taxi industry
by having their not-employees compete with each other for work, driving the
prices down while they laugh all the way to the bank - they get their cut
anyway.

While those jobs haven't been automated away as such, they are being priced
away.

~~~
bobcostas55
>while they laugh all the way to the bank

Uber has been consistently losing money every single year.

------
gpsx
Labor force participation in the US has dropped heavily in since 2008 and even
since it peaked around 2000.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART)

This in spite of the reported very low unemployment rate, which is not really
the meaningful measure.

The labor force participation was lower a long time ago, but I think that is
when there were more single income families.

I am not sure how much this drop in employment is from just bad economics or
how much could be attributed to automation.

------
devonkim
I’ve been having trouble reconcilling compelling evidence for and against
automation based job loss / wage suppression, and usually the arguments
against them look at super high level macroeconomic numbers (see: Pail
Krugman’s analysis on productivity dropping for some recent years) while most
people in support of the automation argument will go directly on the ground to
places where auto manufacturers have had strong presence and also cite cohort
analysis where laid off manufacturing workers take up gig jobs.

The primary impetus for automation are labor cost related but not necessarily
to take over humans intrinsically. The top reason I heard uttered in my
amateur research was a common theme of the past 100+ years - unions make
things more costly whether in terms of capital or general speed / agility of
the business. Wages are suppressed through automation effects noticeably
around factories that automate compared to nearby cities that don’t. The
suppression is concurrently correlated to labor suppression / arbitrage though
so it is hard to detangle the automation v. labor angle because the biggest
job losses and wage suppression happened before modern automation - they
happened during the late 80s to 90s as unionization started dropping faster.
Diminishing returns on outright hard balling unions would lead to more
investment in machinery to drive down hiring needs and avoid the need to hire
while also putting the companies that do automate in a better operational cost
position.

~~~
raxxorrax
We build quite the "contraception" for circuit board mounting anything not
compatible with reflow soldering. It mostly works but the women that do it
usually are just way faster and less error prone.

We have quite the high wage standard and even then the device is mostly used
to show off.

Real automation is probably needed in bureaucratic workflows even if we
usually think about manufacturing. There are probably advantages and
disadvantages here as well.

Since order situation is great at my current company (strangely the covid-
quarter was particularly good), we have significantly expanded workforce in
production.

I doubt that unions really drove automation in my country though. Price plays
a role but also technological feasibility.

------
TimJRobinson
How does this square with the type of automation Amazon is doing? The type
that people rarely think is automation.

Retail jobs are being decimated across the USA not because robots are directly
replacing them, but because as more people shop online these companies
collapse and Amazon is able to perform the same service without the staff.

Maybe warehouse worker, delivery jobs and coders are increasing at the same
place? That doesn't pass the sniff test to me as they seem to have much higher
efficiency than your average salesperson at a retail store.

------
fizixer
With all due respect, I thought Robin Hanson was better than this.

I followed him briefly during the 2013-2015 automation hype (which hasm't died
yet; far from it), and I found him to be carrying out reasonable analysis of
tech economics. I found him to be one of the few economists who are in touch
with tech reality, and so things weren't that bad in the econosphere in terms
of keeping up with tech trends.

This blog post doesn't help maintain that perspective at all. I'm sorry.

As a tech person myself, I'm extremely busy with making this happen instead of
being a negative nancy towards other tech folks, but I'll finish my though
with this:

I have a close friend who is a typical naysayer of tech progress, "business as
usual", "old jobs replaced with new jobs", "capital is what makes thing work",
"economics good technology meh"

He will not stop for a minute, and will not entertain a single of my counter-
arguments.

What is super-surprising to me though is that in the last 5-7 years, he has
pivoted from a non-tech job to complete-alignment with one of the big-tech
companies, has been investing heavily in all kinds of big tech stocks, and
watching his stocks with a keen eye day-in and day-out.

And everytime we talk, the first thing he discusses is my opinion and forecast
of where technology is headed. Once having absorbed all that information, he
goes back to his same old rotten cassette tape.

Funny how it works.

------
emmelaich
I'm disappointed by my and others ability or lack of ability in automating.

The humble takeaway is that it is _far_ more difficult than people imagine.

~~~
rdtwo
There are probably only a couple thousand people in the would that could write
the appropriate code or make robots perfect enough to do many of the automated
manufacturing tasks. And most of them are employed by places that mostly waste
their talents

------
jsmith12673
Economics noob here: the paper concludes that past automation is predicted by
2 key factors: pay and employment. What does that mean exactly?

Are they saying that higher a job pays, the more likely it is to get
automated? Or the other way around?

Also what does 'employment' refer to exactly? Is measuring how well the demand
for labour is being met in a certain job?

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Are they saying that higher a job pays, the more likely it is to get
> automated?_

Yes. "Simple economic theory predicts that, all else equal, employers are more
eager to automate jobs with higher pay and more workers. So these two factors
should predict job automation. And we do in fact see such effects in Table 3,
though more consistently for pay than employment."

> _what does 'employment' refer to exactly?_

Number of people employed.

~~~
foogazi
No one will automate for automations sake - businesses choose how to deploy
capital to improve efficiency, which can be achieved through scale or going
after the largest cost

~~~
082349872349872
In the mid-twentieth century (IIRC) there was a "paradox" observed that the US
was capital-rich but its exports were labour-intensive. Is this situation
still true?

------
yk
> Last December, Keller Scholl and I posted a working paper suggesting that
> this whole narrative is bullshit, at least so far.

Thing is, when you are calculating the color of the sky, then it is either a
bluish looking spectra, or you are in trouble. And consequently physicists
will look outside immediately after that calculation.

The entire post needs an explanation of why they don't find any automation in
that timeframe? I mean, just from administration we have things like package
managers, containers, several cloud stuff, and so on. If they don't see that
in their data, then my immediate assumption is, that they need a more
reasonable approach.

~~~
visarga
> I mean, just from administration we have things like package managers,
> containers, several cloud stuff, and so on.

Automation replaces human work, business can do better now, then they want to
produce more than before so they up hiring as well. It's much easier to set
your target higher (production, profit) than to automate anything. As soon as
you have automated something new work pops up, work that was probably not done
before for lack of resources.

Programming has been automating tasks for decades yet here we are, so many of
us. Cloud should have automated many jobs, yet with this new found ease of
deployment we chose to deploy more rather than hire less. As long as humans
have needs and desire for betterment I don't think we can surpass our ever
growing ambition with automation.

------
monkeydust
Tasks makes up Jobs.

Certain tasks that form a particular job are being automated more now than
ever before.

This is more true of knowledge workers where they are operating and working in
a digital environment already (e.g. traders, accountants, lawyers, marketing,
admin...)

This is less true of manual labour - like cleaners and gardeners - why? Well
look at robotics, its good but nowhere good enough to replace these dexterity
required which a human can provide.

For knowledge workers it is very hard to automate all the tasks that make up a
job. Hence why automation has not resulted in mass unemployment (excluding all
other factors).

------
lmm
> Two metrics created by groups trying to predict which jobs will get
> automated soon did predict past automaton, but not after we included 25
> mundane job features like Pace Determined By Speed Of Equipment and
> Importance of Repeating Same Tasks

This sounds like a thoroughly fallacious argument? Automation is progressing
not by automating jobs in the exact form that they were previously done, but
by more automatable (and therefore more automated) forms of job displacing
less automatable forms of those jobs. Isn't that exactly what we'd expect?

------
joelthelion
I think it's far too early to conclude.

The ongoing "web 2.0" revolution is finally reaping the benefits of computers
and networks, more than 50 years after they were invented. Paper processes are
finally on the verge of being eliminated. Remote work is finally possible for
many people.

Deep learning will have a transformative impact too, but these things take
time. Let's talk again 10 years from now.

------
jariel
Star Wars used painstakingly crafted models and photography effects to produce
the film. Now, people using modern tools can do much more, with considerably
less work. The 'jobs' analysis wouldn't necessarily reveal that.

Taking inventory in a retail store used to be a paper and pencil mass
bureaucracy - it's now streamlined.

We don't stand at the line anymore to withdraw or deposit money.

Secretaries don't type memos.

Many newspapers are dropping photographers in lieu of training journalists on
how to use their iPhones.

We don't manage a lot of paper records anymore.

So a lot of things have accelerated, it might not show up in the job market,
it may not even show up in the GDP if consumers are in fact getting all the
surplus. Life can get a lot better in many ways without a hint of GDP growth.
GDP growth usually only happens (all things being equal) if there is either
more cost (edit: 'maybe' bad for consumers but not necessarily), more profit
taking (also bad for consumers), or more government spending (neutral for the
citizenry - depends on the efficiency of spending).

~~~
d3nj4l
I understand your point, but that doesn't seem to be what the article talks
about. From the linked article:

> Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that for many years the
> media has been almost screaming that we entering a _big automation
> revolution_ , with huge associated job losses, _due to new AI tech,
> especially deep learning._

Emphasis mine.

Their point doesn't seem to be that automation isn't happening, but that there
is no revolution incoming that is driven by new tech. You can see that in
their bulleted point summary:

> * Which job features predict job automation how did not change from 1999 to
> 2019.

If new tech was breaking the frontiers of automation and making it possible to
automate jobs which couldn't be done before, these features should've changed.

~~~
_AzMoo
I think a lot of people that are in the AI/Tech space are probably a bit
detached from the realities of non-tech businesses. While you talk of "new
tech" being AI and deep-learning, I'm still in the process of implementing
barcoding systems in warehouses. I think the vast majority of businesses just
aren't ready to move into the data-driven AI space that you call new tech.
They're 20 years behind it.

------
credit_guy
Automation has been progressing for at least three hundred years now, from the
era of the Jacquard loom and the cotton gin. I was born in a country where
when I was little there still were telephone operators. Those thousands of
jobs disappeared long ago, around the time when rotary phones disappeared.
Nothing to do with AI.

------
jl2718
Wages and employment remain constant because companies are still more like
social constructs that provide minimal support in exchange for membership in a
social hierarchy. They’ll always find something for you to do.

Learn to code” is popularizing the conversion of everybody into software
engineers, but actually we don’t need most SWE either, so now we have an
entirely new class of useless jobs on a SWE assembly line where 99% of the
work product is simply discarded, but we still use the old industrial
productivity model to drive productivity by aggressive management.

------
sparcraft
I actually disagree with this article. Based on my experience in the insurance
industry, it is slowly but surely coming. It will appear not as a sudden drop,
but as a gradual need for fewer and fewer roles as technology initially allows
humans to do more with their time, and eventually replacing some of them. It
is going to be a small effect on any one company. But a large effect over all,
which will manifest over a long period.

------
stewbrew
So, an Amazon warehouse works like a grocery store from back then? What is the
ratio #sold goods / #human worker for Amazon and for an old fashioned grocery
store?

------
082349872349872
Living in a country where people are expensive and machines are cheap, I can
attest the automation level is higher here. For instance, I often see cows at
farms here enjoying automated brushing systems. There are youtube videos in
english, but I don't recall ever having seen something like that in the US,
even at Harris Ranch.

(I have yet to witness a farmer using fully-autonomous hay feeding robots, but
the ag magazines have been running articles on them)

~~~
kaybe
The rules (in Germany, but also other places) say you either have to offer the
cows these brushes or brush them manually. It's not really a choice.

~~~
082349872349872
Wasn't the choice between offering the brushes or brushing them manually?
Around here I see that farmers find installing a EUR 2'500 brush to be much
cheaper than attempting to pay cheap foreign labour to brush cows.

(TIL automated pig brushes also exist)

~~~
kaybe
Yes, I meant it's not a choice whether to brush at all. And if you have more
than one or two cows the choice between the autobrush and manual seems clear,
especially since the cows seem to love them and can use them whenever.

------
josephjrobison
There will always be competition, innovation, and new markets. New needs will
arise in consumers, driving new product and service needs. We may automate
more low-level legal tasks, but more money will be spent on massages, or
therapy, or art. It's unlikely there will be mass automation any time soon.

~~~
pg-gadfly
In fact automation often goes top-down, reeucing complexity of difficult jobs
and allowing lower-skilled workers to deal with the rest that isn't yet
profitable to change.

------
mdoms
I don't think anyone believes that the automation revolution is happening
right now, but that it's imminent and we should start preparing our societies
to cope with it now.

> Our paper has so far received zero media attention

Because you're answering a question no one asked.

------
d3nj4l
I thought about this article in context of the recently reposted piece
"There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence" [1]. While it may
be true that we haven't been able to automate new kinds of jobs, maybe we are
just moments away from having an AGI that would make that kind of automation
easy. That would contradict this article's claim that the narrative around an
incoming automation revolution is bullshit. Just as likely, though, is that we
actually are decades out from AGI and that kind of automation.

[1]: Link to the piece: [https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-
alarm/](https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/), recent HN
Discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23401328](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23401328)

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _maybe we are just moments away from having an AGI that would make that kind
> of automation easy_

What evidence do we have for being closer to AGI today than we were twenty
years ago?

My point isn't that AGI is useless. But it's currently an article of faith.
Faith is fine. Faith is essential. But isn't a good way to make huge
allocations of resources.

~~~
jvanderbot
His assertion that we could always be one discovery away is not false, it's
just irrelevant. The article states no evidence that there's been any past
effect of "increasing automation" and assumes the near future will look like
the recent past. Just inventing AGI wouldn't actually change much the next
day, it would just be a new paradigm, and things would eventually change... so
I agree with TFA.

(Also, AGI would be not so useful. Humans are notoriously difficult to work
with, and we seem to have General Intelligence. It would have to have a
strange concoction of motivations to be immediately --- or even eventually ---
useful for anything that we would want to automate).

~~~
d3nj4l
I definitely don't mean it as in "AGI is invented; humans need not apply", but
in the point you've covered:

> The article states no evidence that there's been any past effect of
> "increasing automation" and assumes the near future will look like the
> recent past.

My point was that predictions of AGI being so far away may be false, as
explained the article I linked. If they were false, and we ended up with AGI,
I don't think the article's assumption about the near future will apply. This
does not need to happen overnight, it can take time, but the kinds of jobs we
could automate would change drastically over time (and the time scale in the
article is two decades long!)

On your second point, though. Part of why humans are difficult to work with
because we have our own emotions and motivations and sometimes decide not to
do things other people want. An extremely intelligent AI that did only what it
was told to do would probably not be as difficult to work with?

~~~
jvanderbot
The idea that intelligence is disconnected from the "baser" instincts like
emotion, need to eat, need to reproduce, need for social recognition, etc is
probably just false. Akin to there being a useful measure IQ which predicts
ability to solve the worlds problems (hint: Nope). Our story-telling mind can
construct all kinds of intelligent hypotheses, but was probably evolved to
appear rational to our fellow people and attribute agency where possible. Our
wander-through-the-woods mind can visualize and hypothesize about spatial
relations and transformations, etc.

There's much to do for AGI, but I believe that motivation-engineering will be
the hardest part. Morality is intrinsically connected to our role as sorta-
hive-minded monkeys.

Caveat: All the above is poorly presented opinion from the following
resources:

\- Learning how to learn on coursera

\- Buddhism and modern psychology on coursera

\- Righteous Mind by Haidt.

\- Happiness Hypothesis by Haidt

\- Bullshit as an honest indicator of intelligence

Building a machine using our evolutionary history as a prior design is the
only way we know how to produce general intelligence, but all the strange,
varied, "Emotional" baggage that goes with it means we never would. Why would
a computer be afraid of snakes? If what you want is a computer that can come
up with solutions you wouldn't have imagined, then you need clever search,
problem specification, and significant computation, not general intelligence.
If you want to automate something, you may need learning, but don't need
intelligence.

------
trixie_
There's no technical or physical limit to why so many things can't be
automated, which means everything that can, will be automated eventually..
Super popular games like Factorio and Satisfactory are glimpses of a potential
near future.

~~~
rdtwo
There is an economic limit. If the cost of the machine is more than the human
then your competitors will use humans and you’ll loose a ton of money on every
product you sell. Of course that doesn’t matter because there is no technical
limit on the value of your stock so as long as you are the golden boy it
doesn’t matter

------
mortenjorck
The post implies that the authors' paper has received limited attention from
the economic establishment due to its heterodox conclusion, but elides any
supposition as to why its heterodoxy should be so controversial. Why should it
be?

~~~
colinmhayes
It's in a shit journal, so that's a start. I think part of it is that he's
strawmaning here. The fear of automation isn't quite that it's immediate, it's
more about the ability of machines to erode away economic opportunity of
communities. People haven't been saying jobs are gone, just that eventually
they will be soon(ish). Arguing that jobs aren't gone yet isn't helpful.

~~~
ameister14
It's also incredibly difficult to read. I studied this and find it confusing -
I can only imagine what a journalist would be able to take away from it.

------
naasking
1999-2019 is not the interesting period of automation. I'm surprised the
authors think it's even relevant. 2020-2040 will be the period to watch.

~~~
randallsquared
Except the spirit of this statement was being expressed in 2000, as well, on
mailing lists and usenet of the day.

~~~
naasking
Sure, but I doubt they gave firm timelines. Future projections are always
murky, but it seems pretty clear that the tech is in a much better spot and
the incentives are now stronger than ever. Human workers get sick and can't
work? Automate them away!

------
paulsutter
Has anyone found the raw data behind this paper? If they want this more widely
coveted they should publish the datasets and code in github

------
cancerSpreads
This article comes too soon.

How long have we been able to use millions of entries to machine learn?

I'm still limited by processing speed.

I imagine between math improvements, electrical engineering, computer science
improvements/discoveries, and more we can automate jobs that require thinking
or fine motor movements.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _This article comes too soon_

Most estimates a decade ago forecasted massive automation-caused job losses by
2020.

> _How long have we been able to use millions of entries to machine learn?_

How long did mechanical looms need to show they wouldn't become sentient?

> _I imagine_

I do to. But based on current technology, we have no idea how to achieve these
goals. We can't even model how or when we might do so. This implies a deep
lack of meta knowledge.

~~~
082349872349872
> _How long did mechanical looms need to show they wouldn 't become sentient?_

They didn't become sentient, but at the time how the Quality distinguished
themselves from the rabble was through art, literacy, and music, all of which
were achievable (to some degree) by mechanical loomwork substituting brass for
brains.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8u93VQfHmw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8u93VQfHmw)

------
partingshots
I imagine automation will result in the creation of entirely new industries
and jobs like with self-driving cars for example.

Though, on second thought I guess self-driving does end up taking away a lot
of taxi driver / trucking jobs. Nevermind...

~~~
PeterisP
It's also worth noting that if we get a major switch to self-driving cars,
that won't create a new industry but rather diminish one - a big hypothetical
benefit of a self-driving-car world is that much less cars would be needed; as
most current cars are idle most of the time and even in peak driving hours, so
a societal switch to "self driving cars on demand" services would mean that we
would need much less cars than today.

Which is great for the planet, but not so great for jobs in car manufacturing
industry, at least in the long run.

------
Gatsky
This could be partly because America has quite low wages.

------
ericol
I have sort of a first hand account of what the current problem with (At least
one area of automation) is.

Up until the quarantine I was working in a cowork space; and it happens that -
I'm the sole employee of the company I work for in my country - all the desks
around me were occupied by a company that makes a lot of their income
providing automation to other parties.

I even worked for them for a few months as an "on demand" consultant; the idea
would be that I would provide assistance to their devs when they needed help
with the "programs" they were developing, and that fastly turned into a
process review that eventually cooled off because they weren't - the project
manager, at least - very keen on taking my advice.

What I observed was that - bear in mind this is a 3rd world country - the
salaries were rather low, so obviously they couldn't get experienced people.

This lead to they having to train them, but as they had no experience, the way
in which they approached solving the issues where, a lot of times,
"complicated".

Usually they suffered from the apps being interfaced having changes along the
project (Or after). This meant they had to fix a lot of problems that were not
there in the beginning.

AS the devs had only experience with this tool, and was their first experience
coding, they couldn't make the most of the other tools at hand. This mostly
lends to processes that take hours to complete, being the execution time only
marginally better than a person. This coupled with the issue right above this,
many of the projects had a time excess of around 100% (Effectively taking
double the time that was allotted in the beginning). Last I heard from them,
thought, is that they made a lot of improvements here.

In one particular project I practically had to threat the person responsible
to use javascript to fetch data from the browser instead of the "native" way
of doung that (Basically, querying the page through the tool with xpath
expression). When they did change to javascript, the process execution time
was reduced by >90%

All in all, the problem I see with automation is that the people doing that is
not formally trained in coding, and the tools I looked at have rather weak
integrations with the most used apps today (Namelly, browsers).

I think the idea for many of these tools is to allow people to automate
themselves, but that will lead in my opinion into the "phpization" of the
automation area.

All in all, there are a few caveats: I know from them of at least one company
that had a rather strong and professional dept., and they where _very_ good at
it.

I think that eventually automation is going to take the world by storm in the
next 5- 10 years. And those that adopt early will have a clear advantage over
those that not.

For the record, the tool they use is Blue Prism; according to the CEO of this
company BP has some sort of marked edge over UIPath when it comes to
enterprise settings. I know there are other tools in the market, but I don't
know them except by name.

------
lihaciudaniel
I wonder who still reads Overcoming Bias?

------
lettergram
We are only a couple years away from automating most customer servicing.
You’ll still need a few, but if we collect data on the few it’s possible to
scale those answers to millions.

That’ll put millions out of work and is basically text generation... easy to
deploy, easy to maintain, and we probably already have the technology just not
productionized.

Now, those people will be retrained to do something. Maybe even just do more
detailed customer service. So I’m not too concerned - just saying automation
is coming

~~~
adventured
Also in the customer service segment, we continue to accelerate the move to
wipe out fast food jobs. Four million people work in fast food restaurants in
the US. I'll be surprised if around 1/4 to 1/3 of those jobs don't vanish this
decade. That is part of the automation revolution and it is underway. Just the
process of automating ordering at fast food restaurants as we already easily
can, will remove several hundred thousand jobs permanently.

~~~
pragmatic
The sceptic in me wonders how much capital the fast food industry is willing
to invest to replace cheap labor. I'm not really arguing with you just
reflecting on my own experiences with current start of the art tech.

"Did you say at fries to that?" No "Added 27 orders of fries, anything else"
Arghhhh!

~~~
gremlinsinc
w/ touch screen you don't need to 'speak' unless maybe blind or something...
So, you could be more accurate.. I mean I ALWAYS use mobile ordering now when
going through drive through. I'll pull over, sit for a moment, place my order,
then get in line.

~~~
yurishimo
Since COVID started I've been using some mobile ordering apps more and more.
One of my new favorites is Whataburger here in Texas.

Texans know that Whataburger is infamous for being slow since everything is
made to order. In-n-Out has figured it out but Whataburger is still so slow
for some reason. With the app, I can place an order in my driveway, then
arrive at the drive thru about the time its ready. If I'm lucky, I can skip
the line and pull up and have it brought out in a few minutes. What used to be
a 20 minute parking lot wait crawling through the line is now 5~ minutes.

Sometimes if it's busy or late at night and they don't have as many staff, I
have to wait my turn in line, but I'm usually not sitting for 5 minutest at
the window after paying waiting for the grill. Oh and that's another benefit.
Apple Pay makes it seamless to place an order and not deal with CCs that are
wearing out being declined.

My biggest complaint is still being required to download a separate app for
each restaurant, but for now I can tuck them all away into a folder and forget
they exist. If an app isn't in my home screen, I'm going to open it from a
spotlight search.

For restaurants I don't visit as frequently, I'll call them and place an order
for pickup. This also has the benefit of not incurring many of the BS fees
that specialty online ordering platforms charge. It's going to take me a few
minutes to order anyway, app or call, so I might as well save 10% by calling.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Texans know that Whataburger is infamous for being slow since everything is
> made to order. In-n-Out has figured it out but Whataburger is still so slow
> for some reason.

The analysis is obviously incomplete. Making your order to order, in a timely
fashion, was the point that distinguished Burger King from McDonald's.

~~~
yurishimo
Un-lucky for you, I am uniquely qualified to rebuttal this with evidence from
my time working at Burger King. Very rarely was the burger cooked to order.
Assembled, yes, but the cooking was done in a giant broiler machine with a
conveyer belt and the patties were stored in heated containers for up to 2-3
hours until you ordered it.

~~~
thaumasiotes
This doesn't conflict with my pre-existing idea of Burger King, though it
might be a difference between Burger King and Whataburger.

