One of my worst experiences was working for some bank that used MUMPS and trying to recover the (accidentally) erased editor string before someone would notice that it was gone. (Yes, the editor is a string, and it behaves just like any other string and globals are auto persisted to disk so if you wipe the editor string then much good luck to you.)
Banks and healthcare share a number of elements one of which is large budgets and those peddling MUMPS and associated (expensive consultancy) services saw an opportunity and ran with it. The fact that it eats up your hardware probably didn't go unnoticed and I'm pretty sure that in that world 'kickback' isn't a dirty word.
That, for want of a better word is absolutely incredible. I keep using that word and I think I know what it means but really, what were they smoking?
MUMPS (har har) has it's origins in the medical world so there are a lot more people versed in mumps in that world that have domain expertise regarding hospitals but you'd hope that that chapter of the Cambrian explosion in programming was closed by now and that someone would come to their senses and would say: absolutely no more new development in MUMPS. (And 'Mapper' for that matter.)
They were dead-ends 30 years ago, they're not magically going to be better in 2015. Of course it would be hard to get rid of 1.8B euros using any other available technology so maybe that's were we can find part of the answer of why this happened.
Maintaining MUMPS code is an interesting exercise in pasta consumption, the language more or less dictates it.
Good luck with that. MUMPS is an interesting beast. Before you embark on that I suggest you look into some medium sized MUMPS based project to get an idea of the kind of flavor of madness you'll be engaging.
But I agree with you that if you can pull this off you'll be doing well financially.
Even better: a MUMPS -> Java automatic translator (or maybe Python or Ruby, but I think the Java would be an easier sell in that market).
A co-worker's son had the offer of a summer 2015 internship with a big US insurer. The system he would have worked on had a VB (maybe VB.NET) front end to a MUMPS system. He did not take the job, for something that seemed more useful came up.
One thing that struck me as I read through the list that 'programmer' will be the first one to go once we do reach that 'hard AI' goal. We'll be the first profession to make ourselves obsolete, I guess that serves us right for doing the same to lots of other professions.
What jobs do remain relevant, though, assuming hard AI? Is there anything a human person can do better than a software person if the latter can duplicate itself, requisition a larger brain to work on a hard problem, and communicate hundreds of times faster?
If you couple it with advanced (compared to today) robotics: not much.
Unattended farming: check, Unattended factories: check and so on. Leisure time by the bucket but no value to your time at all. That will be the mother of all disruptions and I'm pretty sure that we're not even remotely ready for it.
None--in the presence of strong AI, then by definition machines could do anything humans can do, but faster and more consistently, so machines would eventually make human labor totally obsolete.
I don't see it happening in my lifetime, though. I think we're still millenia away from that.
As person trying to creat Strong AI I'm really afraid somebody will beat me to it. It really feels like we are quite close. Like within a couple of decades if not less.
Is the term "strong AI" generally considered to imply that it's faster and more efficient than humans? I usually only think about it in terms of breadth of capabilities, and I expect that when we do build it, it will initially be extremely power-hungry and not necessarily real-time by human standards.
Perhaps, but then because it's strong AI, wouldn't it be capable of gathering and applying resources toward improving and reproducing itself? Even if it's very expensive and slow at first, theoretically it would be smart enough to work on making itself faster, cheaper, and better.
Perhaps I've seen too many science fiction movies, like Transcendence, but I thought that was basically what was meant by "strong AI."
It's assumed that strong AI will be able to improve itself, in an exponential fashion according to Moore's Law. But an AI still has to overcome the same very real challenges that we humans face in trying to build ever-faster computers. A strong AI can only work magic on the software problems; it can't make ultrapure silicon crystals grow any faster and it can't make electron leakage just disappear. It still faces the same risk of silicon semiconductors being fundamentally unable to scale to the performance level required, forcing humans or AI to start over with an alternative computing substrate. It can't solve any of these hardware challenges overnight because they require physical experimentation.
So I think it's reasonable to think that the development of a strong AI won't change things overnight and we could see decades of lag between first having a computer capable of strong AI at any speed and having a strong AI that outpaces humans.
I'm not going to put a time limit on it but I don't think it is in principle impossible, we're here after all. But to duplicate the feat might be a bit harder than some of us think.
The goal may or may not be possible but development is already getting so simplified children are doing it. When 8 year olds are emerging as your peer and rival then you're in trouble, and CRUD web apps aren't getting any harder to build.
How is it impossible in principle? We know that machines with human-level intelligence can be built. We do it all the time. We just don't know how it works yet.
I actually met an ice cutter fairly recently. He made a sizeable portion of his living hacking off chunks of icebergs from tidewater glaciers for fancy cocktails. He sold the ice to upscale Anchorage hotels and bars.
The reason Log Drivers don't exist anymore isn't because of logging trucks, it's because the quality wood adjacent to rivers is mostly gone. Water transportation and sorting of logs is still very much a thing; come up to coastal BC Canada and you'll see it frequently.
Here in Brazil Log Drivers still exist, mostly in the Amazon Rainforest (lots, lots and lots of rivers, even between cities most transportation is by boat).
But usually it is done for illegal logging companies (it is illegal to log near a river, because the soil falls on the water and makes the river shallower).
Is there a reputable non-profit that works on stopping this illegial activity? This a good site to mention a legitimate
charity? It would be great to hear from someone who lives in Brazil?
I think there are some non-profits, but I think they are mostly foreign.
First, Amazon rainforest is HUGE, VERY HUGE, dense, hard to navigate, among other things, this make patrolling it effectively impossible.
Second, there are still uncontacted tribes there, and they are very violent (it is the reason why they are still uncontacted, they DON'T want contact, and are not afraid to turn white or black people stalking around into arrow pincushions), and some other tribes that deeply distrust white people for past transgressions, thus wandering around is dangerous (including for the loggers, it is not uncommon to see natives vs loggers wars that leave a couple of people dead, also natives vs miners happen frequently too, Amazon rainforest soil is rich in very valuable minerals).
It is a very hairy problem, the brazillian government has two specialized agencies working on this (Funai, that works with native americans, and Ibama, that is the envionmental agency), has satellites dedicated to that (Brazil builds satellites to track deforestation, and I believe China launches them for us, since we exploded our launch platform and rocket), and there is the police and the army working with this.
That said, it is still not working, not because of the loggers, or miners, but because of corrupt politicians that own land there, there is a huge problem of politicians (and some other high power people, like judges) that "somehow" end with huge tracts of land that have only forest in it, then they clear the land to put cattle in it, the activity of illegally clearing forest to put cattle in its place is making the deforestation rate rise (instead of declining despite all the efforts).
Finally, a couple of non-profit workers and Ibama workers were murdered around the area, seemly usually by politicians, one notorious case two Ibama workers were murdered by a city mayor, that even after conviction and arrest still got re-elected (yay for democracy), and Dorathy Stang case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Stang
I figure in the next ten about any job requiring a driver may be automated out of existence, excepting last mile delivery. Freight,buses, and the like.
While a lot of jobs won't vanish the numbers needed should be drastically reduced.
I wonder if that's an artifact of the camera producing harsh shadows on the people's cheekbones. Also, some of them are wearing very poorly fitting clothes, which, on a skinny person, could cause them to look even skinnier.
At "Platz der Opfer des Nationalsozialismus" in Munich (DE) we have an eternal flame, powered by gas, to remind of the people who have died during the 3rd Reich.
I actually use such a service at home sometimes. If I am supposed to take an important early flight, I use a service called "Personlig väckning" - Personal wakeup. Its been around forever. You call them, tell them that you want to be woken up at 04. They call you at that time. Its a bit safer option than the alarm clock for me. Because I actually have to answer the phone, say good morning and say my name to confirm they called the right number. One time they called me again because I didnt sound fullt awake.
Of course there a modern solutions to this problem but I kind of like the "human contact aspect" of it. It costs like $5.
That's pretty neat, is it Eniros? Never knew it existed. I like the personal aspect of it. And on that topic I remember the recent app "Wakie" [0] that has a similar concept, maybe more towards the fun aspect.
It'd be a lot more interesting to see a list of these jobs from much later in history, rather than most being circa 100 years ago or so.
As for jobs that surprisingly still exist, how about the people who manually, in San Francisco in 2015, set the Caltrain reader boards for each train at 4th and King.
Switchboard operators still exist. They're used in the field in infantry units and they're part of the communication platoon in a Marine Corps infantry batallion's H&Q company, MOS 0612: http://usmilitary.about.com/od/enlistedjo2/a/0612.htm
In a combat situation, wires from fox holes that go to HQ or artillery are super important. These guys have to run over to fox holes laying or repairing wire from the switchboard during enemy fire. This type of communication cannot be jammed or intercepted remotely. At the switchboard they're doing exactly what you see in that picture, connecting lines to another manually, with like a SB-22:
They were used more recently than the wikipedia article implies. My high school maths teacher worked on Concorde and said how they had a room of computers (all women) that did the various calculations requested.
It also turns out that the floor panels had a huge amount of engineering effort. Whenever other items being designed were blocked, the engineers worked on floor panels.
I've always wondered if there were techniques of parallel computation used to maximize the effectiveness of a roomful of human computers that would be useful for electronic computers with multiple processors.
I'm actually trying to unpack what I meant. I had one of those rare, sober bursts of the kind of trippy insight that usually occurs to people when stoned. :)
I'm guessing what I mean here is that chalkboards serve as a shared resource, on which multiple humans can perform operations together, or with larger problems addressed in smaller chunks in tandem. It's not "parallel computing" per se, but it's an analog analogue.
Let us have a thought for the the profession of longshoreman, eliminated by the commercial viability of the shipping container in the 60's and subsequent total automation of port operations.
Not sure if it's licensed copying or blatant plagerism, since they technically give "credit" at the bottom, but if it's the latter, it would nice to see links to vintag.es banned from HN, since this is the sort of thing that just sucks the air out of the web.
Edit: Good lord Googling for "bights" rat catcher these sites have no shame - Going by other clickbaits I'm assuming the reddit thread is the original for now
9 out of 10 have explanatory text. Curious that the 'switchboard operator' is apparently a 'modern' enough occupation not to warrant an explanation. Funny, because I don't think many currently five year old kids will ever know what a switchboard operator did without websites like this teaching them.
Several of these jobs seem to involve poles. Other similar jobs, like [tree] fruit-picking, seem to lend themselves to use of stilts.
Stilts can be dangerous - but there are surely advantages too, a knocker-upper could knock on the window until they hear movement, they could also sell them a morning paper/loaf/whatever through the window; I'd imagine they could do their round faster too.
My mother and her family used to pick hops. It was a holiday for them. They'd travel to the countryside for a week, work to pick hops and get a bit of money for it.
EDIT: thinking about stilts in an orchard are a bit scary. You have all that pressure on one skinny little stilt-foot, on mud which might be soft, walking through grass which might be long. I don't know if that's difficult or if I just have terrible coordination.
EDIT2: a google image search for [stilt-men orchards] returns many interesting images of stilts being used in orchards.
84 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadSeriously, dont.
One of my worst experiences was working for some bank that used MUMPS and trying to recover the (accidentally) erased editor string before someone would notice that it was gone. (Yes, the editor is a string, and it behaves just like any other string and globals are auto persisted to disk so if you wipe the editor string then much good luck to you.)
It's a disease primarily limited to the healthcare system, in my experience.
MUMPS (har har) has it's origins in the medical world so there are a lot more people versed in mumps in that world that have domain expertise regarding hospitals but you'd hope that that chapter of the Cambrian explosion in programming was closed by now and that someone would come to their senses and would say: absolutely no more new development in MUMPS. (And 'Mapper' for that matter.)
They were dead-ends 30 years ago, they're not magically going to be better in 2015. Of course it would be hard to get rid of 1.8B euros using any other available technology so maybe that's were we can find part of the answer of why this happened.
Maintaining MUMPS code is an interesting exercise in pasta consumption, the language more or less dictates it.
See also: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS
Anyone want to build an LLVM backend + FFI module? Probably worth a small fortune to shops that want to migrate out of MUMPS
But I agree with you that if you can pull this off you'll be doing well financially.
Even better: a MUMPS -> Java automatic translator (or maybe Python or Ruby, but I think the Java would be an easier sell in that market).
[edit: specified which summer]
Unattended farming: check, Unattended factories: check and so on. Leisure time by the bucket but no value to your time at all. That will be the mother of all disruptions and I'm pretty sure that we're not even remotely ready for it.
Would you want your child to be educated by a machine? In a world where education is a pastime, rather than a productive tool, would you even bother?
Would we have algorithmic justice systems, or would you still desire a lawyer you can trust on a human level to take your side?
I don't see it happening in my lifetime, though. I think we're still millenia away from that.
Perhaps I've seen too many science fiction movies, like Transcendence, but I thought that was basically what was meant by "strong AI."
So I think it's reasonable to think that the development of a strong AI won't change things overnight and we could see decades of lag between first having a computer capable of strong AI at any speed and having a strong AI that outpaces humans.
Jobs where the it's important that another human is involved - prostitution for one.
Anything with social value, where the social value comes from specifically human effort being involved.
You can collect donations for a charity marathon. It's rather harder for a machine to do the same.
i.e. once we reach the in principle impossible goal
http://blogs.microsoft.com/firehose/2014/03/11/8-year-old-cr...
Here's one for the "Hotel of Ice near the glacial Balea Lac in the Romanian Carpathians" - http://www.depotpicture.com/2014/08/italy-romanian-balea-lac...
But usually it is done for illegal logging companies (it is illegal to log near a river, because the soil falls on the water and makes the river shallower).
First, Amazon rainforest is HUGE, VERY HUGE, dense, hard to navigate, among other things, this make patrolling it effectively impossible.
Second, there are still uncontacted tribes there, and they are very violent (it is the reason why they are still uncontacted, they DON'T want contact, and are not afraid to turn white or black people stalking around into arrow pincushions), and some other tribes that deeply distrust white people for past transgressions, thus wandering around is dangerous (including for the loggers, it is not uncommon to see natives vs loggers wars that leave a couple of people dead, also natives vs miners happen frequently too, Amazon rainforest soil is rich in very valuable minerals).
It is a very hairy problem, the brazillian government has two specialized agencies working on this (Funai, that works with native americans, and Ibama, that is the envionmental agency), has satellites dedicated to that (Brazil builds satellites to track deforestation, and I believe China launches them for us, since we exploded our launch platform and rocket), and there is the police and the army working with this.
That said, it is still not working, not because of the loggers, or miners, but because of corrupt politicians that own land there, there is a huge problem of politicians (and some other high power people, like judges) that "somehow" end with huge tracts of land that have only forest in it, then they clear the land to put cattle in it, the activity of illegally clearing forest to put cattle in its place is making the deforestation rate rise (instead of declining despite all the efforts).
Finally, a couple of non-profit workers and Ibama workers were murdered around the area, seemly usually by politicians, one notorious case two Ibama workers were murdered by a city mayor, that even after conviction and arrest still got re-elected (yay for democracy), and Dorathy Stang case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Stang
While a lot of jobs won't vanish the numbers needed should be drastically reduced.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2015/01/15/377470376/carr...
Oxford also has some, but they may be faux.
Don't they still do this within, say, hotels?
Many hotels now have an automated system where you punch in a time on the phone's number pad and it stores it and robo-dials you.
Of course there a modern solutions to this problem but I kind of like the "human contact aspect" of it. It costs like $5.
[0] http://wakie.com/
As for jobs that surprisingly still exist, how about the people who manually, in San Francisco in 2015, set the Caltrain reader boards for each train at 4th and King.
In a combat situation, wires from fox holes that go to HQ or artillery are super important. These guys have to run over to fox holes laying or repairing wire from the switchboard during enemy fire. This type of communication cannot be jammed or intercepted remotely. At the switchboard they're doing exactly what you see in that picture, connecting lines to another manually, with like a SB-22:
http://www.prc68.com/I/SB22.shtml
Although there are more modern switchboards now, they aren't used by infantry. These things are sturdy and very simple to repair.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer
The computer put the computer out of work.
It also turns out that the floor panels had a huge amount of engineering effort. Whenever other items being designed were blocked, the engineers worked on floor panels.
https://archive.org/stream/generaltheoryofp00adam#page/n2/mo...
even the Census 2002 Occupation Index[1] still lists a few of them:
[1] http://www.census.gov/people/io/files/occ02_pdf.pdf[1] http://www.census.gov/people/io/methodology/indexes.html
I'm guessing what I mean here is that chalkboards serve as a shared resource, on which multiple humans can perform operations together, or with larger problems addressed in smaller chunks in tandem. It's not "parallel computing" per se, but it's an analog analogue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_occupations
Snarky meta-commentors who insist on proper attribution soon to follow.
[EDIT] It's worse, no editor here, only copy-paste operator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8949065
http://www.boredpanda.com/extinct-jobs/
Not sure if it's licensed copying or blatant plagerism, since they technically give "credit" at the bottom, but if it's the latter, it would nice to see links to vintag.es banned from HN, since this is the sort of thing that just sucks the air out of the web.
For instance, will Huffington Post have issues later for starting to not care about the quality of their posts? Maybe.
Edit: Good lord Googling for "bights" rat catcher these sites have no shame - Going by other clickbaits I'm assuming the reddit thread is the original for now
Several of these jobs seem to involve poles. Other similar jobs, like [tree] fruit-picking, seem to lend themselves to use of stilts.
Stilts can be dangerous - but there are surely advantages too, a knocker-upper could knock on the window until they hear movement, they could also sell them a morning paper/loaf/whatever through the window; I'd imagine they could do their round faster too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stilts
http://www.britishpathe.com/video/stiltmen-aka-stilt-men
My mother and her family used to pick hops. It was a holiday for them. They'd travel to the countryside for a week, work to pick hops and get a bit of money for it.
EDIT: thinking about stilts in an orchard are a bit scary. You have all that pressure on one skinny little stilt-foot, on mud which might be soft, walking through grass which might be long. I don't know if that's difficult or if I just have terrible coordination.
EDIT2: a google image search for [stilt-men orchards] returns many interesting images of stilts being used in orchards.