1. It's good that such boring, backbreaking labor is being automated away.
2. It's bad that we're still in the middle ages when it comes to this thing where if you don't slave yourself enough to something, you starve because no money.
Well said. Too bad we didn't have an Oligarch as this could be a great thing for Humanity.
If robots took over all the jobs that nobody wants to do and people only did the things they loved whether its sitting on their arse or becoming doctors we might just evolve as a civilization to the next level. I think this is also key to becoming a monetary-less society.
Obviously the trick and hard part will be to still get people interested and motivated to become doctors and engineers,etc ..
I personally love what I do as an engineer and could see myself doing even more engineering tasks if resources wasn't a constraint.
Personally I love problem solving and could not handle sitting on my arse all day long, and I don't think I'm one bit unique in this mentality.
Will it happen ? I doubt any time within the next century if ever.
However, I think to evolve as humanity we need to change the system we have today. Currently its more beneficial to hide information than to share it because of monetary gains.
Yeah, I'm an engineer now and if we were post-money I honestly would still be an engineer, because I take pleasure from finding out how things work and making new things that work. I think there are a lot of us like this.
No one really wants to sit on their ass all day, that's just something that's made up by rich people to stress us out so we continue working like dogs for them instead of on our real projects.
If you sat me down in front of the TV with no responsibilities forever everything provided I probably wouldn't last three days.
Yeah, reality sucks doesn't it? For those infinite things we still need people to do, we can't just have some people do all the work while others get to sit around and enjoy.
Hmm, that's why I have spent every second outside work and my family working my ass off on a startup on the minute chance I create something of enough value that will free me from my m-f 40+. Huge motivator for me. Take that motivator away and I doubt you see nearly the # of people working hard to create value. I believe that's why socialism fails.. Every... Single... Time. But hey, we can do it better right?
Don't you find it alarming that the only motivation you have to work is so that you can afford to not have to work m-f 40+? What are you going to do if you fail to 'create value' (read: create something that is successfully monetized) and you're looking back on years of your life that you didn't spend more w/ yourself, family, and friends in your little free time, instead giving yourself for the success of a startup? How will you feel, seeing others do little and earn hordes of cash due to being on the right side of automation or being in the 'right' networks?
Wouldn't you prefer to be free to work for things that you think are valuable... not in your free time, y'know, the time that should be for yourself and the things you love?
What's up with all these weird open source folk, working hard to create value and giving it away for free, uplifting for all? I hear this linux thing is pretty cool. It's almost like we can capture productivity in code and then copy it endlessly for practically free and everyone benefits. How are these people motivated?!
Maybe we should pursue this cooperation thing... who am I kidding. It fails every. single. time.! Right?
Pretty much this, and I argue that it is because of motivations like his that we end up with companies purely meant to flout regulations to make money for themselves, like Zenefits, than anything that is of real value.
What is 'value'?
Escaping the rat race can be a great motivator, but I think there are many other valuable motivating facts of life that can successfully motivate people. E.g.: curing sicknesses, understanding nature and the universe, overcome obstacles to human well being... Why do you think that people like Bill Gates keep working, without the need of doing m-f 40+ ?
You seem to be justifing the concentration of capital and power in a few hands in order to 'motivate' the rest of the population.
> I believe that's why socialism fails.. Every... Single... Time.
Sweden is doing fine. Australia is doing fine. Those two countries are generally in the top 5 of any quality-of-life measure you care to name. The UK is mostly doing fine.
So you only work on things purely under threats and external pressure? Let's hope no one ever has to work with you.
Granted, no one really does anything without considering the possibility of that thing causing them to go six feet under, but you've stated that the only motivation to do anything ever, to decrease the local entropy around yourself even one bit, is under the threat of death.
Are you not aware how unhealthy, conformist, tool-like of a life-philosophy this is?
(Also, you don't need to exactly buy into all this startup cult shit and work your ass off from the beginning, just do anything that makes you more money than you put in. I know this is obvious but judging from most people like you, you need that dose of reality)
Nice cult-like thinking there buddy. Hope your startup works out! I too wish I could enslave myself to something harder than most others (and throw a bunch of my employees under the bus in the process, making it a net loss), obviously the only way forward is back. I'm just a little bit more in touch with this annoying 'reality' thing :)
And here are three white collar jobs that PBS says are going away due to machines:
Pharmacists, lawyers, and journalists.
It isn't just dangerous jobs - it's repetitive or easily automated ones across the board. In very few cases does it completely eliminate a role - more often it is a force multiplier, letting fewer do more.
I've always wondered why pharmacists still exist, yet TONS of articles say that there's almost no chance of that job being automated in the foreseeable future. I don't get it. It seems like a problem that's virtually impossible for a human to do, and not too tough to solve programmatically. Doesn't make sense to me. Would love to learn exactly why it will or will not be automated.
Pharmacists aren’t just people selling drugs. They know exactly how to combine them and why you should take one or another based on how you are, what disease you have and if you have allergies. They can even sometimes replace physicians.
All my local pharmacies have automated pill dispensers that handle hundreds of medications and flag bad combinations.
The pharmacists at my local pharmacy seem to spend most of their time advising patients and dealing with their problems, verifying the pill dispensers actually dispensed the right medication and it is all intact, handling physical scripts for things like controlled substances, calling doctors when a prescription doesn't make sense or wasn't clear, flagging possible drug abuse, managing inventory, handling drugs that can't easily be dispensed by the machines like insulin and checking how much a person's insurance will cover and if it is still valid.
And 20 years ago, there would have had to be multiple pharmacists and techs to do all of the things that are being done by machines now. Just as I said above, technology is often more of a force multiplier than a strict substitute.
Well, IHS locally has a pill dispenser (looks like a pipe organ filled with pills that drop into the container), but they have two pharmacists. I guess there are still errors.
Pharmacists in small towns are often first in line for people to seek medical advice from, often for small things: chit chat about their cough, show a nasty bruise or ugly cut, a weird rash, etc... They're like doctors-lite, a listening ear, but with some authority, and some agency to suggest minor treatment. Not unlike nurses. And usually a pharmacist could recognize when something is more serious and refer somebody to a doctor.
I grew up in such a town, and as a kid, I knew the pharmacist a lot better than the family doctor: "my ma told me to ask you about this wart on my hand", that kind of thing. Heck, our pharmacists even did home deliveries to old people (on her bike, no joke). I'm in a my mid-thirties, so this is not entirely ancient history.
So I can see why that social aspect of the work - which is incredible valuable - cannot be automated.
Now, there's WebMD, pharmacists are doing a shift in CVS, "small town life" is pretty much dead, these soft relationships between shopkeepers and customers no longer exist, people no longer defer to authority as easily as they used to, ...
Also, pharmacists have the law on their side. Drugs are a political issue, so they nurture their role as gate-keeper. For that reason alone, the credentialing will persist. The only difference is that perhaps a pharmacist will just be the lady pushing the on/off button on the vending machine, but still, somebody will need to push that button. The jobs that will be automated won't be the pharmacist's job, it will be the assistant's jobs.
Another anecdote. Girlfriend recently got switched to a different generic birth control, which lead to her have super bad side-effects compared to her previous one. This was due to a Target pharmacy change in providers.
She tried to call the pharmacy to see if there was any other alternative, or chance to get on her old pill due to the nasty side-effects. All she got in response was heartless no's and not our problem.
So I totally agree with the idea that these soft-relationships are a thing of the past.
Journalists are not loosing their jobs due to automation. They are losing their jobs due to the greed of their corporate masters - who value profit over delivering news that can be trusted.
Being a real journalist is a far more creative work then being a programmer. Especially in fields like investigative journalism - you must be a 100,000X programmer if you think you can replace Glenn Greenwald with a bot.
You say it's greed but worrying about profitability isn't optional, particularly when revenues decline as much as they have been in the newspaper industry.
When customers stop paying, fewer journalists have jobs.
Well, if you go into the job of selling information, and all you have for sale is a bunch of lies salted with a few low quality non-threatening truths, the weird thing is that anybody pays for it, not that you are getting out of job.
The greedy non-news model predates the internet for a long while. The internet just brought some competition.
> Being a real journalist is a far more creative work then being a programmer
At this point, there should be a name for "No True Scotsman" applied to creativity. I have a tough time seeing the comparison between someone reporting what actually went on to someone creating wholly new things. I actually don't want creativity in my journalists or historians. I want ethics and fact checking.
Reporting what actually went on is an act of creation. Any good story requires detective work, something that is based a lot on intuition, interpersonal communication, and lateral thinking. These skills are not easy to automate. Also, you'll never get the complete story, some guesswork and logic is required to fill in the holes and deliver a cohesive narrative. So in that sense you'd need quite the impressive program to uncover the truth behind, for example, watergate.
I am surely not one arguing robots, etc. can do a reporter's job better than a person. No, what I am arguing is this continued BS of who is creative is basically a "No True Scotsman" commentary.
On the other hand, I am very little impressed by the quality of what passes for journalism and am pretty confident that a computer could write much of what I see with better fact checking. Very much like CASE tools of old were used to write programs. At least a robot might be programmed with the courtesy to quote the whole thought and not make cuts that can be attacked or change the meaning.
As to the narrative, too many journalists write their articles as if they were pundits defending their beliefs and "trying to change the world". It is great to be engaging and write something that interests people, but leave the punditry for the political campaigns.
Sure they are, it's just not their work being replaced - it's the printing press. Journalism used to be a loss leader for the real revenue making activities of the newspaper press, advertising. The most profitable were the classified ads and car ads. Well, Craigslist gutted classifieds, and a combination of services have supplanted car ads in newsprint.
Frankly, while technology has a part in this, I feel this media noise is cover for the much larger impact of globalization, cheap-labor driven free trade, TPP, etc. that the banksters and elites push for.
Nothing pretty much happens unless those in power want it done. It's not the fault of the geeks but the bankers/board-of-directors/ceos/majority-share-holders.
Still, global manufacture is now efficient enough that a tiny part of the world can supply all the rest of it with all goods it needs. Neither China nor Malaysia manage full employment, and the rest of the world is even worse off.
We really have to get past the "people would totally get a job if they weren't so damn lazy" mentality.
Seconded. All that mentality does is create "bullshit jobs" (not my wording) designed to employ people without actually giving meaning to their lives. http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
No necessarily. Imagine a world where startups and artists didn't have to worry where their next meal came from because a bare-minimal livable income was guaranteed, and supplementing that wasn't punished with substantial clawbacks until you started making real dough.
Obviously this depends on a post-scarcity economy, but it sounds like a better world than one full of assistant HR support analysts.
The dirty banksters and elites helping to pull people in poor countries out of poverty. Maybe some people in poor countries speak english and are available thanks to the internet.
I was kind of thinking that all potential effect from globalization was in place about 5 years ago, if not more. Since then, wages in outsourcing-related industries in destination countries like China have skyrocketed making outsourcing a lot less profitable and relieving pressure on the American jobs in same areas.
Take software outsourcing: what was the going rate for an Ukrainian developer 10 years ago and what it is now? The is no longer much of an arbitrage, American developer can compete easily just because of better English and working in the same time zone.
And that is NOT because Ukraine became richer. It didn't. Nominal current-dollar GDP growth since 2003 in USA and Ukraine was about the same (about 1.60x). But the developer salaries which were 5% of American in 2003, at best, are now at least 25%. Which leaves very little sense in outsourcing (and yes Ukrainian developers live the same if not better than American ones these days, at least in a purely material sense - of course crime, environment etc. are much worse there)
I think same is the case with most outsourced industries, except for the few where outsourcing has been so complete in past years that the American skills in these areas are no longer available.
A while back I was reading an article about how to get a job at an upcoming Volvo plant in SC and it mentioned a "mechatronics technician" degree program.
I have found articles from BusinessInsider to be of such low quality that it became an easy filter to reduce the overwhelming size of my Pocket reading waiting list. If only they could write articles as well as they can write titles.
We change. Jobs change. The planet changes. The only thing which will never change is that we will never be able to see into the future. Low quality articles predicting something which triggers gut reaction doom are auto trash. I don't even need AI for that filter.
These look excessively conservative to me. Projections from present-day plans that don't take upheaval into account. Example: good luck finding a job as a postie if drone delivery takes off. Or a trucker, competing with self driving vehicles.
AFAIK, there is no changes in accounting process since, I don't know, 50 years ago? Accounting should have been replaced by software and people start teaching/learning how to use the software instead of teaching at university.
Well there's a reason it hasn't been replaced. Accountant's job is far from easily automated. Companies use different types of documents, make different kind of papers. Accountant not only needs to blindly write and rewrite numbers, but also understand and comprehend the intent and that includes some knowledge of business logic even in some cases. Companies like oracle have tried to make automation tools for accounting for decades, but manual work is still required absolutely everywhere. Unless everyone adopt some kind of universal standard and fill same papers in same way, automation won't happen there, not on large scale at least.
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[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 100.0 ms ] thread2. It's bad that we're still in the middle ages when it comes to this thing where if you don't slave yourself enough to something, you starve because no money.
If robots took over all the jobs that nobody wants to do and people only did the things they loved whether its sitting on their arse or becoming doctors we might just evolve as a civilization to the next level. I think this is also key to becoming a monetary-less society.
Obviously the trick and hard part will be to still get people interested and motivated to become doctors and engineers,etc ..
I personally love what I do as an engineer and could see myself doing even more engineering tasks if resources wasn't a constraint.
Personally I love problem solving and could not handle sitting on my arse all day long, and I don't think I'm one bit unique in this mentality.
Will it happen ? I doubt any time within the next century if ever.
However, I think to evolve as humanity we need to change the system we have today. Currently its more beneficial to hide information than to share it because of monetary gains.
No one really wants to sit on their ass all day, that's just something that's made up by rich people to stress us out so we continue working like dogs for them instead of on our real projects.
If you sat me down in front of the TV with no responsibilities forever everything provided I probably wouldn't last three days.
Somehow I don't think that m-f 40+ hour work week is the most relevant thing about our live once we die.Yet its the most time consuming part of it.
Wouldn't you prefer to be free to work for things that you think are valuable... not in your free time, y'know, the time that should be for yourself and the things you love?
What's up with all these weird open source folk, working hard to create value and giving it away for free, uplifting for all? I hear this linux thing is pretty cool. It's almost like we can capture productivity in code and then copy it endlessly for practically free and everyone benefits. How are these people motivated?!
Maybe we should pursue this cooperation thing... who am I kidding. It fails every. single. time.! Right?
You seem to be justifing the concentration of capital and power in a few hands in order to 'motivate' the rest of the population.
Sweden is doing fine. Australia is doing fine. Those two countries are generally in the top 5 of any quality-of-life measure you care to name. The UK is mostly doing fine.
Socialism is not communism.
Granted, no one really does anything without considering the possibility of that thing causing them to go six feet under, but you've stated that the only motivation to do anything ever, to decrease the local entropy around yourself even one bit, is under the threat of death.
Are you not aware how unhealthy, conformist, tool-like of a life-philosophy this is?
(Also, you don't need to exactly buy into all this startup cult shit and work your ass off from the beginning, just do anything that makes you more money than you put in. I know this is obvious but judging from most people like you, you need that dose of reality)
You probably have a different definition of need than I do. Want != need.
Pharmacists, lawyers, and journalists.
It isn't just dangerous jobs - it's repetitive or easily automated ones across the board. In very few cases does it completely eliminate a role - more often it is a force multiplier, letting fewer do more.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/3-white-collar-jobs-robo...
(Even really simple things like computerizing prescriptions and flagging known bad combinations make them more effective, roughly for free)
The pharmacists at my local pharmacy seem to spend most of their time advising patients and dealing with their problems, verifying the pill dispensers actually dispensed the right medication and it is all intact, handling physical scripts for things like controlled substances, calling doctors when a prescription doesn't make sense or wasn't clear, flagging possible drug abuse, managing inventory, handling drugs that can't easily be dispensed by the machines like insulin and checking how much a person's insurance will cover and if it is still valid.
But with online ordering(PillPack ,etc) ,the laws are different, so there's more automation.
I grew up in such a town, and as a kid, I knew the pharmacist a lot better than the family doctor: "my ma told me to ask you about this wart on my hand", that kind of thing. Heck, our pharmacists even did home deliveries to old people (on her bike, no joke). I'm in a my mid-thirties, so this is not entirely ancient history.
So I can see why that social aspect of the work - which is incredible valuable - cannot be automated.
Now, there's WebMD, pharmacists are doing a shift in CVS, "small town life" is pretty much dead, these soft relationships between shopkeepers and customers no longer exist, people no longer defer to authority as easily as they used to, ...
Also, pharmacists have the law on their side. Drugs are a political issue, so they nurture their role as gate-keeper. For that reason alone, the credentialing will persist. The only difference is that perhaps a pharmacist will just be the lady pushing the on/off button on the vending machine, but still, somebody will need to push that button. The jobs that will be automated won't be the pharmacist's job, it will be the assistant's jobs.
Why would using a bike to make deliveries be a joke?
Lots of things are delivered by bike.
She tried to call the pharmacy to see if there was any other alternative, or chance to get on her old pill due to the nasty side-effects. All she got in response was heartless no's and not our problem.
So I totally agree with the idea that these soft-relationships are a thing of the past.
Being a real journalist is a far more creative work then being a programmer. Especially in fields like investigative journalism - you must be a 100,000X programmer if you think you can replace Glenn Greenwald with a bot.
When customers stop paying, fewer journalists have jobs.
The greedy non-news model predates the internet for a long while. The internet just brought some competition.
Well, the robots don't buy newspapers.
At this point, there should be a name for "No True Scotsman" applied to creativity. I have a tough time seeing the comparison between someone reporting what actually went on to someone creating wholly new things. I actually don't want creativity in my journalists or historians. I want ethics and fact checking.
On the other hand, I am very little impressed by the quality of what passes for journalism and am pretty confident that a computer could write much of what I see with better fact checking. Very much like CASE tools of old were used to write programs. At least a robot might be programmed with the courtesy to quote the whole thought and not make cuts that can be attacked or change the meaning.
As to the narrative, too many journalists write their articles as if they were pundits defending their beliefs and "trying to change the world". It is great to be engaging and write something that interests people, but leave the punditry for the political campaigns.
Picking from the top of BI list, do these jobs even exist today?:
3. Switchboard operators, including answering service
1. Telephone operators
The article portraits these jobs are in process of disappearing, looking at the numbers above, looks like BI is rather late with their "news".
[1] http://www.deptofnumbers.com/employment/us/ (assuming data is correct)
We really have to get past the "people would totally get a job if they weren't so damn lazy" mentality.
Obviously this depends on a post-scarcity economy, but it sounds like a better world than one full of assistant HR support analysts.
Take software outsourcing: what was the going rate for an Ukrainian developer 10 years ago and what it is now? The is no longer much of an arbitrage, American developer can compete easily just because of better English and working in the same time zone.
And that is NOT because Ukraine became richer. It didn't. Nominal current-dollar GDP growth since 2003 in USA and Ukraine was about the same (about 1.60x). But the developer salaries which were 5% of American in 2003, at best, are now at least 25%. Which leaves very little sense in outsourcing (and yes Ukrainian developers live the same if not better than American ones these days, at least in a purely material sense - of course crime, environment etc. are much worse there)
I think same is the case with most outsourced industries, except for the few where outsourcing has been so complete in past years that the American skills in these areas are no longer available.
http://www.wltx.com/story/money/2015/05/12/technical-college...
We change. Jobs change. The planet changes. The only thing which will never change is that we will never be able to see into the future. Low quality articles predicting something which triggers gut reaction doom are auto trash. I don't even need AI for that filter.
AFAIK, there is no changes in accounting process since, I don't know, 50 years ago? Accounting should have been replaced by software and people start teaching/learning how to use the software instead of teaching at university.