
The Last Robot-Proof Job in America? - hhs
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-last-robot-proof-job-in-america
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alexgmcm
Robotics still seems a long way off being able to automate many physical jobs
- would you trust a robot to look after your aging parents without hurting
them?

Likewise jobs like computer programming seem pretty 'robot-proof'.

It seems only repetitive, predictable work can be automated and we shouldn't
waste human labour on those tasks in any case.

Personally, I think the threat of automation has been greatly exaggerated in
the media, it is true that self-driving cars would have a huge economic effect
but progress appears to be slowing down in that area.

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imtringued
Taking care of parents without hurting them is very easy. The bigger problem
is whether they can take care of them at all.

Also the real threat of automation is wealth inequality. If workers own (a
share of) the robots that replace their jobs then there is no problem. If all
the robots are owned by corporations there is a massive problem.

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throwaway13337
Actually, wealth inequality is a big threat /to/ automation because lower
wages means automation isn't economically efficient.

The first places where automation is put in place is where labor is expensive.
That is, both geographically and industry-specifically.

It's not the factory workers so much as the accountants, lawyers, and doctors
that are marginalized first. Software is cheaper and the reward greater.

And with respect to geographically, Scandinavia employs the most robotics to
augment manually labor jobs. They will continue to lead in this area.

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chosenbreed37
I found that interesting. I've also heard it said that unemployment is higher
in France compared to England. But their (France) productivity is higher. I
wonder which is better...

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alexgmcm
Productivity in my opinion - there is no point in employing people if it isn't
efficient.

But it seems most societies still seek jobs for jobs sake.

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unnouinceput
Last robot proof job is a fish buying guy? Definitely not. It seems that way
because it relies on their vendors to be humans that you need to create
personal relations in order for them to give you their best stock. Take those
oldies out, make the fish stay fresh in water tanks and slaughter them just
before delivery, all done automatically and poof, the job is done by robots. I
predict this can be done with current tech nevertheless; automatic fisheries,
automatic ships to catch fish, automatic feeding the tanks, automatic
delivery.

You wanna know what is the ultimate robot-proof job? Be a politician. That job
will never be handled by a robot. Or if that will happen then Terminator style
world upon us.

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whatshisface
Although politicians themselves will probably stay human for the foreseeable
future, they have already outsourced their speechwriting and campaign
strategizing. The robot ruler won't be an actual robot, it will be a human who
uses machines to write their speeches and prioritize their campaign movements.

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slfnflctd
This seems both highly plausible and deeply chilling. We already saw what
happened with electronic voting.

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whatshisface
I think it's already chilling that speeches are written by speechwriters who
are carefully optimizing for the same things that the machines would optimize
for.

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tyleo
I went through yoga teacher training recently. One of my instructors mentioned
they think yoga instruction will be difficult to automate because students
show up for a personal connection and not just fitness. I think this is an
interesting perspective. Especially considering that you can already find
instruction on YouTube, yet in-person instruction is still popular.

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hannob
Hot take: This is true for a lot of jobs.

Very often you actually don't just pay for the job done, you pay for the
social surrounding.

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tyleo
Yep, I figured it was true for many jobs. If there is a class of “personal
connection” jobs that will be difficult to automate, I wonder if other
difficult to automate classes exist.

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scottlocklin
Moravec's paradox is _still_ in full effect.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox)

It only makes sense; brains were doing navigation and control of bodies for
billions of years before they were playing chess.

~~~
perl4ever
I've seen that page before but I was rereading it and thinking how _dumb_ it
is to equate a symbolic integration program with, say, what a mathematician
does. This is the exact same mistake being criticized w.r.t. sensorimotor
skills - what you don't understand seems easy.

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scottlocklin
Well, before stuff like mathematica, stuff like symbolic integration is what
an awful lot of applied math people spent their time doing. Them integrals
ain't gonna integrate themselves!

~~~
perl4ever
Before compilers, programmers spent a lot of time writing assembly language,
but that doesn't mean a compiler is doing the job of a programmer.

~~~
scottlocklin
In fact, a compiler is doing part of the job of an old school programmer who
only had machine language to work with, just as mathematica is doing part of
the job of an old school mathematician or physicist who needed to work out
integrals by hand.

It's not "AI" in the sense of actual intelligence of course, more like a labor
saving device.

That said, it's entirely possible that letting the computers do these tasks,
something important has been lost. It's more obvious in programming when
people ship 10 or 300 megabyte "hello world" output when entire operating
systems used to fit in 4k binaries. Might also be true in mathematical physics
anyway, as they haven't exactly covered themselves in glory for the last 40
years.

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neonroku
Fact check: “It is the second-largest fish market in the world, after Tsukiji
market, in Tokyo”

Toyosu Market replaced Tsukiji in October 2018

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Hitton
Although the content of the article is rather interesting, the title is very
clickbaity.

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rolfvandekrol
Why are they calling this a 'Robot-Proof job' while describing how the guy is
training a model?

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JBReefer
The models not doing anything, it’s a straightforward e-commerce play. It’s
the relationship and curation that matters.

He’s barely using the software.

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ThomPete
Cleaning lady is one of the most secure jobs that exist.

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crankylinuxuser
Is lady a requirement? Is she providing a pregnancy or being a wet nurse for
someone where she cleans?

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mruts
I live in Africa and around here, people don’t trust men with this kind of
work. I have a housekeeper and so do many people, and every single one is a
women. You might not be able to prevent them from stealing, but you feel a lot
safer than you would with a man.

This has to do with the different evolutionary strategies that women and men
pursue. Women tend to pursue a low variance and consistent strategy (which
makes sense considering their reproductive cap) while men take a high-risk
high variance strategy (which also makes sense given their lack of a
reproductive cap).

Women here take stable but probably mediocre jobs: hotel waitress, cleaner,
food vender. Men on the other hand are always trying to get a big break and
are never satisfied with a job and consequently often jobless. In fact there’s
a saying over here translated goes something like this: A man that walks for
nothing is different than the man who sits for nothing.

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buboard
Most automateable jobs are already automated. If there is an increasing
robotization of jobs, i m not seeing it. Titles like this are just nonsense.

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patentatt
Lol, this comment will be viewed as “nobody will ever need more than 640k of
ram” in the future. The next big wave of automation will be the knowledge
workers. Robotics for manipulating objects (manufacturing, transportation,
skilled labor) will always have some additional cost to them. But if your job
is (data in) -> (data out), it will be much easier, quicker, and cheaper to
automate your job.

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perl4ever
"Lol, this comment will be viewed as “nobody will ever need more than 640k of
ram” in the future. "

No, it's nothing like that. 640k of ram is an absolutely fixed point.
"Everything that can be automated" continually increases indefinitely, but the
point is that it's not going to _discontinuously_ increase. Or at least,
nobody who is concerned ever states a reason that it should.

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ken
> If Warren Buffett orders a red snapper, the company needs to insure that his
> fish is fresh

A rare grammatical error from the New Yorker?

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mruts
Maybe he gets his money back if it isn’t?

