
The rise of robots and the future of jobs - juanre
http://timharford.com/2013/12/the-robots-are-coming-and-will-terminate-your-jobs/
======
effdee
Two quotes come to mind:

"Never send a human to do a machine's job." \-- Agent Smith

"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to
earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a
technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of
today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living.
We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be
employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian
theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of
inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors.
The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about
whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told
them they had to earn a living." \-- Buckminster Fuller

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kybernetikos
It's been my worry for a while that we will achieve the marxist workers utopia
technically, where the vast majority of work is done by robot, but culturally
we will be stuck with a small group of people enjoying the rewards of capital
and technology and an enormous group of miserable poor fighting each other to
get the rare chance to work.

Even if you think that such an outcome is 'deserved' for the capitalist and
technologist in the short term, in the long term, as the divide grows sharper,
I believe most people will come to see that there's something appalling about
giving all of the wealth of the world to the descendants of the few and
nothing to the rest. Already one family in the USA control more wealth than
approximately half the population. And this will get starker.

Technology enhances power, and we are currently stuck with a system where much
more worrying than the 'rich getting richer', the 'powerful get more
powerful'. And the technological concentration of power in the hands of
capital goes alongside the concentration of military and political power too.
In the past, when capital got too far ahead of labour, there was always the
spectacle of revolution to act as a last ditch moderator and equaliser, but
the future will give those in power unprecedented access to surveillance,
intelligence and military ability to allow the divide to grow bigger than ever
before.

We need to find a way to share the amazing gains that technology brings with
labour as well as with capital, and do so in a way that doesn't disincentivise
the creation of new technology, and we need to start coming up with this
really soon to have any chance of heading off a disaster. I think this is one
of the most serious issues facing us as people who care about technology and
the world.

~~~
beat
That's why I think Guaranteed Income schemes are inevitable politically, in
the developed countries. Sooner or later, one is going to do it
(Switzerland?), and within a couple of decades, all the rest will follow.

Hopefully, this will lead to a realignment of society's sense of "value" away
from currency and things exchangeable for currency. Money-driven thinking is
the curse of Marxists as much as capitalists.

~~~
anonymfus
The problem is that capitalism, as any other paperclip maximizer, will not
stop working just because of one country decision. Minimal income will
increase cost of labour because nobody would want to do shitty job. This will
make local products more costly and less competitive, and most of the labour
will be outsourced. Most of the export will be natural resources.

Switzerland owns huge chunk of world's banking system and due to direct
democracy has minimal corruption, so it could afford minimal income by
exploitation of other countries. How to make it work for Ethiopia without
Earth's unite government and worldwide wealth redistribution system?

~~~
beat
A few problems with this. First, most of the modern crap jobs are service-
oriented jobs that are done locally because they _can 't_ be outsourced.
You're talking about "products", which often can be outsourced, and thus have
already been outsourced. Not every job is manufacturing. You can't outsource
your janitor or dishwasher.

Second, Ethiopia doesn't have a functioning modern economy. So no, they can't
do Guaranteed Income. If they want it, they need to modernize to the point
where they can provide a stable economy first. Exploited? No one bothers to
exploit them. Given the political and economic instability, it's not worth
exploiting. Much better to exploit countries like Indonesia that can provide
basic stability.

But you're also stuck on the whole exploitation thing. That's a very 20th
century attitude. Exploitation for natural resources is no longer the driver
of economics. The primary resource now is labor, particularly skilled labor,
and that becomes increasingly expensive as it becomes successful - in other
words, being "exploited" is the best and fastest way for countries to become
wealthier and more independent.

------
beat
Robots have been taking over jobs for a long time. The problem is that people
have too narrow a definition of "robot". Is a Bobcat a robot? A job that 30
years ago might have been done by a row of men with shovels can now be done
faster and far more cheaply by one guy with a Bobcat. How about a forklift?
Hauling 100 pound bags of stuff around used to be a major source of human
employment. Now, we put those bags on a pallet and carry them with a forklift.

Is a food processor a robot? A century ago, fine French cooking was defined by
its labor-intensive sauces, manually grinding and sieving vegetables down to
liquids. Now, it can be done in seconds by a cheap little machine. Meanwhile,
two people and a Hobart can wash all the dishes generated by a large
restaurant. Is that Hobart a robot?

Automation doesn't just replace labor. It allows new forms of labor. Most of
us here work on computers. What would we have been doing 100 years ago, before
there were computers? Would we have been clerks? Adding numbers manually?
Artists drawing things by hand for print?

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alexholehouse
So I was having a debate with a colleague a few weeks ago: the suggestion was
that in 20 years time the a large percentage of surgeries done in hospitals
will be done by robots .

Importantly, we didn't specify which surgeries, but through the conversation
the implication was not that robots would be removing millions of weird moles
and skin marks - we're talking serious, long surgeries.

I'd be really interested to hear the HN community's view on this. I have my
own (strong) opinions based on my knowledge of AI and ML as a field, but
perhaps other people have their own strong opinions (and perhaps people can
change my mind!)

~~~
cycrutchfield
If you think that liability issues pose a significant barrier to entry for
self-driving cars getting to market, just wait until you consider robotically
automated surgeries.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Just wait until the probability of error with a robot surgeon is _lower_ than
that of a human surgeon.

~~~
eloisant
Even if it's lower, a single mistake from a robot surgeon will not be
forgiven. That's the same problem with self-driving cars. I'm pretty sure that
they're already safer than a human driver, but a single mortal accident for a
technical problem will be all over the news and block any progress in
legislation.

~~~
chr1
Driving is different. Thought `robot is better driver than me` is much harder
to accept than `robot is a better surgeon than someone i don't know`.

------
scrabble
This is a key reason why I feel it's important to be working in technology,
especially as a developer. It will take longer before your job is automated
away.

My wife works in a position that I feel could be automated, and it's scary
when you give it much thought.

When the time comes that there are people who are able to work because their
skills keep them valuable and people who can't work because their skills are
no longer needed, I know which side I want to be on, regardless of any sort of
moral implications.

------
Killah911
Things that are formulaic, repetitive and doesn't necessarily need "human"
input will inherently be reached barring any catastrophic events that set all
of humanity back. Terminator is robots with agency bias added, so that
scenario happening is a bit unlikely. Elysium on other hand might be a
slightly better portrayal of things to come.

There are some other serious implications of the rise of such technology too,
political ones. The "elite" & "powerful" have depended on the masses for
labor, economic output etc. When a good chunk of the masses become somewhat
"useless", what happens to them? Thanks to drones and "big dogs", it can be
somewhat ensured that a massive population of people will have no real
recourse to socio-economic or other inequities and injustices.

~~~
dualogy
> Thanks to drones and "big dogs"

What are "big dogs" in this context? (Bit of a challenge for the Goog!)

~~~
cabalamat
It says in the article that Big Dog is a robot made by a company Google
bought. Here's a video:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNZPRsrwumQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNZPRsrwumQ)

------
JoeAltmaier
Personal service will probably continue. In fact its a large part of the
American job scene. Somebody cuts your hair, your lawn. Somebody does your
taxes. Some of these can be done by robots, but its hard to replace the human
interaction.

Will that mean personal services will become as rare as employing a butler is
now? Maybe. Or maybe some of these will never be efficiently replaced by bots.
And new ones may come up.

In some countries, the 'haves' employ dozens of 'have-nots' in an effort to
allow everybody a position in society. With robots, it may be enough to nanny
an industrialist's children to school each morning. Then return to your bot-
run apartment to enjoy automatic perfect coffee and read your blogs.

~~~
kybernetikos
There will not be enough industrialists for there to be many of these jobs.
The wages will be driven down, the expected duties will increase, they'll be
fought over by the large numbers of unemployed. They'll probably end up being
given away as prizes on reality TV shows.

------
nopinsight
The article's central point at least partially hinges on the continuation of
Moore's Law. However, if the exponential rise in computing power at stead cost
does not continue, the coming 'rise of robots' might be substantially slower.

There is some evidence that Moore's Law might come to an end:
[http://www.economist.com/news/21589080-golden-rule-
microchip...](http://www.economist.com/news/21589080-golden-rule-microchips-
appears-be-coming-end-no-moore)

Our knowledge of AI suggests that performing basic human tasks like perception
and navigation in the physical world is extremely computationally expensive.
Even though improvements in algorithms would speed things up somewhat. The
required computing resources would still be fairly expensive for complicated
tasks many workers routinely perform.

On the bright side, this might give us time to adjust our institutions to the
new reality.

Thoughts?

------
_random_
"We tend to miss this because the bloated copies of Microsoft Word we use do
not seem faster than 20 years ago." \- person obviously not familiar with
Office 365.

"Even the Chinese must fear the robots." \- especially them IMHO (world's
manufacturing outsourcing center).

~~~
elliottkember
> person obviously not familiar with Office 365

More like, a person in an office. Adopting new technology has less to do with
new technology becoming available, and more to do with retraining, support and
backups. I imagine the majority of the workforce is not familiar with Office
365.

------
Morgawr
Moore's law has not much to do with computational power anymore, it's always
been about transistor numbers in cpus. While this has traditionally mapped 1:1
with computing power, it doesn't work like this anymore. It's not an
exponential growth in computing because our techniques of parallelism and
algorithms haven't been keeping up with all this power.

Very interesting article nonetheless, just felt like clarifying this tiny
point.

------
eli_gottlieb
And this is why I want to find work in automation, robotics, or AI or
something.

Labor against capitalist. Sharpen the contradictions! Radicalize the
moderates[1]! Bring it all on!

[1]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6GLoKkkCtY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6GLoKkkCtY)

~~~
bananacurve
Steady comrade.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Let me have a _little_ fun with it. Glory to Arstotzka!

------
mrfusion
This other article on the front page of HN today seems to contradict this [1].

[1] [http://www.economist.com/news/21589080-golden-rule-
microchip...](http://www.economist.com/news/21589080-golden-rule-microchips-
appears-be-coming-end-no-moore)

------
contextual
Automation and the mass annihilation of jobs will be the biggest story of the
next five years.

~~~
mooreds
I remember reading a story in Analog science fiction about just this scenario:
inexpensive, multi purpose robots (and the riots they caused when people
realized they could be replaced).

The solution? Have each robot owned by one, and only one, human being, who
could lease out the robot's "labor" as they wished.

I doubt that solution is possible, but I do think the issues the story raised
are going to be, as you put it, "the biggest story" of the near future.

(I wish I could remember the name of that story!)

~~~
rett12
This one is similar:

[http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

~~~
mooreds
I love that story--the contrast between the US and Australia illustrates the
fact that it really is a political choice how to spend fantastic wealth that
automation gives us. (It's not _only_ a political choice, there are moral
components as well.)

