

The Robots Are Coming - dante9999
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n05/john-lanchester/the-robots-are-coming?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3705&hq_e=el&hq_m=3639916&hq_l=5&hq_v=eeda11b87a

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femto
The article has this to say about Google Translate's improvements in accuracy:

"Translate has hoovered up gigantic quantities of parallel texts into its
database. A particularly fertile source of these useful things, apparently, is
the European Union’s set of official publications, which are translated into
all Community languages."

The first thing I thought was "what happens when the EU starts outsourcing its
translations to Google Translate?"

Is this the future of machine learning? The learning algorithms start by
mining a corpus of human output. Once they get good enough, they replace the
majority of humans that generated the corpus. We then enter an echo chamber of
machines largely feeding off their own output. Consequently, improvement of
the machines stagnates, but the machines are still doing a good enough job to
keep humans out of a job. We then have a future of "good enough that the cost
of improvements can't be justified, but bad enough to be irritating"?

Humans have a sense of pride in their work, and will strive to improve for
their own edification, even when the cost outweighs the benefit, or they have
been told not to. A machine will just continue to deliver the level of service
that the committee in charge tells it to.

Edit: fixed spelling

~~~
throwawaymsft
> Humans have a sense of pride in their work, and will strive to improve...

Including the humans who make machine translation algorithms.

~~~
femto
My point is that those new algorithms need something to learn from, and the
humans that used to do the job are no longer in the game. The original corpus
could be reused, but then performance will be bounded by that corpus. If
better algorithms are trained on the output of worse algorithms, presumably
they just emulate the performance of the worse algorithm. Where do the better
algorithms get their input from, if a large scale human effort no longer
exists?

~~~
throwawaymsft
But why would every translator stop working or creating new works just because
machines can do the job too? I don't think computer written novels will mean
people stop telling stories.

Translation is an interpretation of the best phrase to use, and has a
subjective element. Imagine trying to translate jokes - it depends on your
sense of humor too.

------
hooande
This article was fantastically well written and comprehensive. Worth reading
if you're interested at all in the topic of automation and its potential
effects on the future of employment.

The narrative that machines will "eat" all the jobs leaving the mass of
humanity unemployed is an easy to understand story, but it hasn't ever come to
pass and probably won't for reasons that don't need to be detailed in this
comment. The nobel laureate Robert Solow compared it to worrying about the
earth being struck by an asteroid. Possible, even worth consideration, but
highly unlikely.

The idea that machines will dominate labor to the point where a few rich
people gain all the profits from labor and the rest of us are left jobless and
effectively under their control is equally unlikely. A gem from the article:

 _" Capital isn’t just winning against labour: there’s no contest. If it were
a boxing match, the referee would stop the fight."_

Income inequality is probably the biggest problem facing our society today.
But it can only go so far. If the majority of people don't have jobs, no one
will be able to pay for new iphones or driverless car service fees. Even B2B
companies depend on B2C customers for revenue at some point in the chain. The
basic, common sense economics of the world dictate that there are limits to
inequality. The idea that machines will create a truly dystopian scenario is
still the realm of science fiction, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't
take steps to address the problem.

Finally, I loved this quote:

"Robert Gordon, an American economist who in 2012 published a provocative and
compelling paper called ‘Is US Economic Growth Over?’ in which he contrasted
the impact of computing and information technology with the effect of the
second industrial revolution, between 1875 and 1900, which brought _electric
lightbulbs_ and the _electric power station_ , the internal combustion engine,
the telephone, radio, _recorded music_ and _cinema_."

Worth noting that four of those seven inventions were created by one man. Not
relevant to the topic of automation, just truly freaking amazing.

~~~
signa11
> ... and probably won't for reasons that don't need to be detailed in this
> comment...

i would _really_ appreciate if you could sketch your thoughts on this. thanks
!

~~~
hooande
Only because you have so much karma...

Automation won't destroy jobs because technology and society change faster
than automation can keep up. Think of all the job titles that didn't exist 30
years ago (social media marketer, seo specialist, etc). By the time those are
automated away, they will be replaced another set of jobs that we can't even
conceive of. It's tempting to think that it's different this time, but it
probably isn't.

Secondly, the number of jobs and job titles is entirely arbitrary. We often
think of the world as though there are a fixed number of jobs and once
machines take them all then we're out of luck. But there is no limit or
constraint of any kind on what a human can be hired to do. If you've ever
worked at a growing startup you'll understand the impact of Parkinson's Law:
Work expands to fill the time and resources allotted. In practice, companies
tend to use the savings from automation to hire more people. And they should,
it usually turns out to be a smart investment in human capital.

Ultimately, very few managers will say "I have enough people working for me
and I don't need to hire anyone else". Those words have been uttered maybe 5
times in all of human history, including when I typed them just now. People
like hiring, and the numbers just don't support the hypothesis of technology
destroying jobs. The US unemployment rate now is similar to what it was in
1920. Despite automation in factories, Ford employs a similar number of people
now to what it did in 1970, albeit no longer in factory jobs. If the advance
of technology was truly putting people out of work, don't you think it would
be evident by now?

~~~
asdkl234890
_Think of all the job titles that didn 't exist 30 years ago (social media
marketer, seo specialist, etc_

I like that you picked those two because they happen to be two that are
already disappearing.

Search engines have been fighting SEO for years. And they have pretty much
won. SEO was a hot industry just a few years ago, and is already disappearing.

And social media specialization of marketing and PR was taken on by very young
people and thought to be a special skill, until recently. But already
businesses have figured out that there is nothing special about it. And every
marketer is expected to be a social media expert. It's not creating more new
jobs, it's just adding those skills to existing jobs.

 _It 's tempting to think that it's different this time, but it probably
isn't._

I am sorry, but to me that argument sounds just like the future will be the
same as the past. It's not exactly wrong, it's just an intellectually lazy
argument to make.

Just one example of this time it's different is the income split between labor
and capital. Historically it had been fixed at 70/30\. This is across all
industries, and all nations, since the industrial revolution. But now labor's
share is down to just 62%. And that's happening in places like China and
Mexico too, so it can't be simply due to offshoring. Source:
[http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-
economics/21588900...](http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-
economics/21588900-all-around-world-labour-losing-out-capital-labour-pains)

 _Secondly, the number of jobs and job titles is entirely arbitrary._

That's not at all true. Automation has always created unemployment. There was
no such thing as 3rd world before the industrial revolution. The economies of
countries like China and India, which realized on a lot of textile production,
collapsed when the industrial revolution took off in the UK. The UK exported
both goods and unemployment. And what we call the 3rd world was brought into
existence. We are seeing a very similar process today with Germany and the
Southern belt of the EU. Germany too is exporting both its product and its
unemployment.

 _If the advance of technology was truly putting people out of work, don 't
you think it would be evident by now?_

Yes, I do. But I don't think we'd see the unemployment rate go up. I am sure
we'll first see labor's share of income drop, and wages should stagnate. Which
is quite similar to what we are indeed seeing right now.

------
crdb
These articles always exaggerate the disruptive potential of technology, the
pace of change and the consequences, particularly ignoring the concept of
wealth creation (the reference to Piketty was telling).

For example: I've been to China and Japan countless times in the last decade.
On my last trip to both, I finally had Google Translate on my phone. The
difference it made in communication - particularly in Japan - was phenomenal.
Both ways - both in scanning local characters with the camera and getting an
instant translation (you lose the fun of the restaurant roulette, but you no
longer end up with mapo tofu by accident), and in communicating with the other
side by typing your English meaning and showing the translation. I had a 20
minute conversation near Chengdu with our hotel manager, she would type her
side into Translate, wait for the slow internet to send it over, we'd read,
reply... we both wrote each other a long thank you letter before leaving!

What is relevant about this example: the job of "translator for tourist" has
been created, not automated. Before I had Translate, I made do with sign
language and the few words hastily scribbled or learnt before a trip. I didn't
hire a local to walk me around and talk to everybody. Conversely, I take the
MRT in Singapore because it's 80 cents a trip. If an automated taxi comes
along for $2, I might take it, but doing the same trip for $10 is not
something I'm interested in. This is added productivity for me, just as the
flying shuttle enormously increased the quality of life of hundreds of
thousands of housewives in the 18th century, instead of creating the "mass
domestic unrest from idleness" allegedly feared by the ruling class.

Another point missing from the conversation is manager laziness. In my
experience as a DBA/data person, most companies do not care about automating
away their reporting function (amongst other things). I've seen people doing
"manual joins" (yes, that's a manual lookup then copy paste each value one by
one) as late as last year, in both tiny "modern" tech startups and enormous
corporations with several hundred thousand employees; for the latter, 50MB
files were "big data". Today, you can run a DWH for a fairly large business
with an employee working part time, provided he knows what he's doing - with
AWS and modern tools like Postgres, it's incredibly easy to be high level -
but few companies do it. Maybe it's today's relatively permissive high capital
low opportunity environment, which tolerates very low IRR.

------
Animats
Why it's different this time: computers are so cheap and so general-purpose.

For decades, there have been many jobs that could be automated, but weren't,
because the machinery wasn't cost-effective. It might have to be custom-
engineered for the job, and if you didn't have the volume, it didn't pay. An
automated hamburger outlet was built in the 1960s by AMF. There are machines
for almost every picking job in agriculture, but much picking is still done by
hand. There are still hand car washes.

Now, if a computer can do it, the computer will be far, far cheaper than a
human doing it. The computer can also provide 24/7 operation, and, even
better, once one computer knows how to do something, a million computers can
be doing it tomorrow. Deployment is very fast in this area.

The list of things humans can do and machines can't keeps getting shorter.
That's not going to reverse. But what gets checked off next? More desk jobs.

Actual physical robots are still rather inept. That's getting better, but
progress is slow. What makes robots work? Money. For decades, robotics R&D was
under 100 people in the US, mostly at CMU, MIT, and Stanford. Then came the
DARPA Grand Challenge, when DARPA told the universities to get results or
robotics funding would be cut off. Suddenly entire CS departments were devoted
to automatic driving. After that success, DARPA tried throwing money at Boston
Dynamics. It took about $125 million to get the fieldable version of BigDog
working. Now Google is in the game, spending who knows how much.

A key point in robotics, and AI generally, is that there's now enough known
that spending money gets results. There was a false dawn in the 1980s; look up
the Fifth Generation project and the NASA Flight Telerobotic Servicer, notable
failures. This time, though, many of the old ideas work, powered by four or
five orders of magnitude more compute power, and lead to new ideas which also
work.

Advanced robotics right now is about at the Xerox Alto level - there are
impressive prototypes that work, but they're not cost-effective yet. Robotics
has not yet had its Apple II or IBM PC. (The Roomba is too dumb. The Dyson
robot vacuum, though...) It's going to take a while to break through the cost
barrier, even once the smarts are there.

The implication for jobs is that manual labor is, in the near term, less at
risk than intellectual labor. If your job is to do something where the inputs
and outputs are through phone or computer, be afraid.

------
isaiahg
Fantastically written article. I found the most interesting question near the
end. I've never been a proponent of socialism, but in a world where work can
be filled by the push of a key by unquestioning automata, could it become
viable?

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LukeFitzpatrick
Google uses machine learning in emails, basic AI. Robots exist now. The
concerning factor is when these 3 industries merge:

\- iOT \- Robots \- Artificial Intelligence

Jobs, yes, lots of jobs will be lost. Experts predict that everything will be
done by robots in the future: Medical, Education, Factory Work, Law etc.

I'd expect virtual companies like Occulus Rift, will be come the next thing,
when job opportunities diminish.

------
mturmon
The torrent of money and talent going in to self-driving cars seems to be only
increasing. One of the strong points of this smart and level-headed article is
pointing out how disruptive this will be, and how fast the disruption can
come. I'm aware that there will be a lot of benefits, but the problem is, they
are not distributed evenly. Some people will lose.

