Ask HN: What happened to robots taking all our jobs?
Before the pandemic, I recall reading many articles on how burger flipping robots would put all the fast food workers out of the job. I imagined that they weren't widely deployed because of the cost compared to the cost of an average fast food worker. Now that hourly wages have gone up and I can assume the cost of the robots have gone down, why haven't we heard more robots deployed? Was it really just a scare tactic to depress wages or are they being used by not widely reported? When can I expect robots to take our jobs?
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadIf you ever want a fun adventure try to get a milkshake in Phoenix at 3AM in the middle of summer. All the machines are conveniently “broken”.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/24/us/mcdonalds-ice-cream-machin...
We've had car assembly robots for decades because the ROI is incredible. Burger flipping robots less so. McDonald's does flip lots of burgers worldwide and apparently the bots are saving some money. But they flip a lot of burgers, so it's likely they haven't replaced all humans yet.
When reading statistics like this, though, it's important to ask two things:
1. If the report lists how many jobs were lost due to automation, does it also talk about how many were created due to automation? If 20k are lost one year, and 19k are created, the article may not mention the latter, though it is relevant. In one sense, only the delta is important.
2. But, in another sense, the delta isn't what we care about. New jobs created by automation is misleading too. Because, are the jobs created by automation better than the ones that were lost? Is it the same people who lost their manufacturing jobs who got the new jobs? Are those people happy about the trade?
My point is that it's a complicated situation that has been (and likely will be) commonly oversimplified.
Just my $0.02.
That being said, I think the robots that have taken peoples jobs are generally in warehouses and manufacturing and hidden away from the public eye. Think Amazon fulfilment centres, or auto manufacturers. There are a lot of robotics at play there replacing a lot of people.
Self checkout is logic automation, making the checkout job easy enough that customer can be trusted to do it.
Checkout used to have two jobs: a checker and a customer standing around waiting. Self-checkout merged those two jobs into one.
It was pretty surreal. I used to enjoy going to the grocery store with my parents as a child.
In the 90s, people imagined it was a few years away. But it was conceptual, like how we think about asteroid mining or Mars settlements.
Today, these concepts are proven. Waymo has been doing self driving in Phoenix. People here in SF are starting to take Cruise self driving cars. There have been successful self driving trucks that have made cross country deliveries. The proof of concept is already here. But the definition of “coming” has changed. It might not be economical or advanced enough for general availability. But the technology to do it is no longer a dream — simply a function of execution now.
Truck drivers and Uber drivers aren’t going to lose their jobs in the coming years. But these jobs are genuinely in danger in the coming decade.
Look at real wages of the working class since then, vs productivity. Workers keep generating more profits, and don't get more pay.
> Even former Nixon advisor Daniel Moynihan stopped believing in basic income, following a fatal discovery upon publication of the final results of the Seattle experiment. One finding in particular grabbed everybody’s attention: The number of divorces had jumped more than 50%. Interest in this statistic quickly overshadowed all the other outcomes, such as better school performance and improvements in health.
> Ten years later, a reanalysis of the data revealed that a statistical error had been made; in reality, there had been no change in the divorce rate at all.
From https://thecorrespondent.com/4503/the-bizarre-tale-of-presid...
We pretend to be able to keep up with technological progress and most people do. Unfortunately not everyone has access to good schooling or the mental / physical capability.
If enough low to mid level jobs are automated away without securing people from getting lost in society, we could be facing anti-technological groups rising.
It seems like science fiction now, but will it?
Politics need to grow with our capabilities.
Automation destroy jobs, but others are created.
The belief in job stealing robots is mostly tech bro lore and not based in science nor empirical observation.
it's not that they're wrong - they're just arguing that automation is destroying _their_ livelihood.
The argument isn't that automation is bad - it's great...for the rest of society, at least in the medium-to-long term. It's poor for those being displaced.
But most jobs - making hamburgers, cooking, laying brick, pouring cement, packing stuff in warehouses or assembly lines - stuff that matters, automation looks as far off as ever. Sure machines do a lot to help in these fields but it's going to be a very long time if ever when machines can replace people completely. Even self driving cars appear to be much further away than people think.
We cannot and should not plan the economy around Silicon valley hype
funny you mention that, because discovery automation (the job that a lot of starting lawyers do) is huge. It used to take weeks or even months, to just sort through the mountains of papers and emails. Now it's indexable and searchable, and probably even have machine classifications to identify the valuable pieces of info.
The reason lawyers haven't been fired (and that you think lawyers aren't automate-able) is that they move up the value chain - provide client focused advice, etc, where the client prefer not to see a robot.
I don't want to disclose where I worked, but you can take a look at Ocado, they are in a similar space (although focused on a different target market) and expanding from being online grocer to making those FCs for other companies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E
One way to look at this is to say the bicycle increased someone's productivity by a factor of 3.
But another way to look at it is to say that one man and one bicycle can do the work of 3 men now. So 2 men will lose their jobs. A bicycle just replaced 2 men.
The bicycle does not look like a robot at all, but is just as good, if not better, at replacing human workers.
The same with other jobs. You don't need to replace 100% of the workers. You just need to bring machines that increase someone's productivity by a factor of 5, and boom, you are able do let go of 80% of your human workforce.
At the same Whole Foods store there are lots of self service lines now. My guess is the number of cashiers went down by at least of factor of 3.
Amazon has shops where you don't even need a self-service line. You just go in, pick whatever you want from the shelves, and leave. The cameras keep track of what you pick and charge you appropriately. They started using this technology in Whole Foods stores (one in Washington DC is already functioning, one in LA is coming this Fall).
I went on a road trip last week. I noticed there are no more manned tollbooths. Everything is fully automated. That's probably some thousands of human jobs lost. Big win in my opinion, the passage through the tollbooths is much, much faster now.
There are still some, mostly getting rid of the people was pandemic related I do believe. But if you really want to you can still make them get out in the rain by handing them a $100 bill and they have to get out of the little booth to record your license plate number — for posterity,
2. The cost of developing Chips, Robotics is still ridiculously high. If Robotics ( which really is nothing more than Automation 2.0 ) did make cost savings, I can assure you, you will see it first being tested and deployed in the likes of McDonalds where they get an economy of scale. And it is happening, but no way near ready yet.
3. Tech people, or mostly Silicon Valley Tech people have vastly underestimated human being. How flexible we are and how quickly we could adopt to different task and needs, while giving comparatively little wages.
4. This is the same with Foxconn.
5. You should take a look at Car manufacturing and Amazon Warehouse on Automation or Robotics.
>>When can I expect robots to take our jobs?
Cost will still need to come down. And it is going to be a long and gradual path. Steve Jobs wanted a Giant Machine that makes the machines. That was in the 90s.
Robots are complex machines and thus the R&D to get them to work well is huge. And they need (re-)programming for every change in the tasks. It all adds up to a very large capital outlay, considerable ongoing operating costs and thus financially is not competitive with minimum wage labor.
We have people working on ML for understanding multilevel tasks, recognizing the souroundings, understanding items, generic ai etc.
Digital twins become normal.
The race for the robot has already started and with companies like Tesla now talking about it much more than before, we might see it happening in the next 10 years.
Buy a robot,.show it what it should do, replace low skill workers.
1) I think it really depends on how you define "robots". If you defined robots to include servers, many jobs have already been taken.
2) Transitions are slow. Jobs our parents knew don't exist any longer. But it won't happen faster than that.
3) People move on and learn new things. It's great to get rid of receptive tasks that a computer/robots can do. It is liberating. No one wants to wash their dishes or clothes by hand these days.
But: There are cases where humans are just missing. For example many restaurants can't find waiters after the pandemic. That's where you see innovation happening. There are actually more and more restaurants using service robots like this one: https://www.pudurobotics.com/product/detail/swiftbot
You might only see self-service in stores, but there's so much more going on in the back office.
Hardware automation takes time, but software automation is eating the world.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adigaskell/2021/09/02/does-auto...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adigaskell/2021/09/02/does-auto...
At the global level we've been automating away jobs for 200 years now, and while predictions of the end of employment have been a constant, if you look around now it really doesn't seem to have worked out that way. I grew up on 200AD comics in which the Judge Dredd and Halo Jones strips depicted a world of 95%+ unemployment because the robots had taken all the jobs, but back then in the 80s we did have mass unemployments in the UK as the economy went through a painful transition, so such a future seemed more credible.
Having said all that, any shift in industrial and employment patterns creates winners and losers. I'm all for social support to ease and manage such transitions, but trying to slow down and block change of this kind as a strategy has a really poor track record. It's incredibly expensive and inevitably fails anyway.
Amazons factories would have employed every human on Earth if they had to use humans. That's what happened to the robots taking our jobs. They took them from the future, decades ago, and you didn't even notice.
I currently work at a small eocm business, the number of systems and integrations availble have gutted the typical career progression.
I am concerned at how to navigate from data entry clerk to CFO. This path was available historically, however, it is becomkng less-so.
Audit jobs are going too. Previously, a firm would need a big staff to check numbers. Now it's a lot easier to audit a process becuase the company uses SAP, Netsuite, or some other big name ERP.