Some years back I worked for a large corporation on a team that had a large number of "engineers" doing what seemed like pretty rudimentary work so I wrote a program to automate about 90% of the job functions. I thought I would be a hero and showed it to my boss. He asked me if it could be our "little secret" because he was afraid the whole team would be replaced including him.
See, the company should really be incentivizing this sort of thing. If you automate your team out of a job, great - you all get a pension at 33% wages as long as the company is in business and 6 months to find a new job.
Company saves a lot of money, workers are incentivized to this sort of behavior, and you could probably handle the upkeep by offering to keep one or two employees on at full pay if they'd prefer, or stipulating a day or two a month to perform any necessary maintenance on your automation.
But that's probably a pipe dream; it would essentially mean funneling capital to those who produce value, which is apparently a ridiculous concept in this modern economy.
What's impressive is how much office work, from my experience, could easily be automated away. Not even with anything fancy - very simple scripts would be enough for a lot of stuff.
It's not uncommon to find people in offices doing things like manually generating the stock reports and graphs each year, collating dozens of Excel spreadsheets by hand, or even doing data cleaning by hand. For all the excitement in the news about machine learning and robots, a huge chunk of work could be automated away with relatively simple tools.
based on your description of Manger and team, I assume the Team size is 5 to 6 people at least.
If that company run so inefficiently that it could not identify 90% of work of a 6 people team can be replaced by bunch of programs, so asume that company or the division may be closed by now ( or severely down sized as competitors took their business )
It would be great if you can find out what happened to that team
was there significant incentive for you? sure, go for it, let those people lose jobs
though it's sad some people do this even without any incentive not thinking about consequences of their actions, they just wanna brag how they improved things, they will not benefit in any way from this improvement, while it will make lives of fired people miserable and only one profiting from it will be company with higher profits for those few owners on top, do you really wanna support such thigs?
at a major legal industry firm, i had an ML project torpedoed even though it showed reasonable promise. i was fairly young at the time but now thinking back, this may have been part of it.
i was an hourly consultant and they did pay me handsomely to do that little experiment though. can't complain. the world is a complicated place.
If the apps you are using for your job, store or communicate data in the cloud, you are unwittingly training your replacement. These massive troves of data that map problems to solutions are being used to train ML models that will replace or augment those tasks. On its own, I don't have a problem with the auto-macroisation of tasks. But those teachers will be invariably thrown to the wolves. I wouldn't be surprised to see startup pitch decks outlining domain specific tooling explicitly designed to capture expert-level worker knowledge.
For a year I did not automate my colleagues in Customer Service because I liked them and knew they needed income. When they outsourced everyone but the team lead I had a chat with the team lead and we decided that automation was the way to deliver timely customer service and set to work.
The hardest part was the spec. Simple and obvious changes to forms, message strings and processes were arrived at by my colleague teaching me her job. We worked collaboratively and now have happy customers.
Had I started this task earlier with the old team present then I doubt I would have done such a good job. The collaboration would not have been there, it could even have been hostile. Due to the outsourcing we got a break to work on the same side.
For our team lead we have better job satisfaction as everything is excellent with no backlog.
Now we do not need people to fill out forms and do other brainless stuff we find that we need to get more skilled and differently motivated staff for the job.
The old team are not suited to the new work that is there so I guess that is a problem for them but the new hires will be paid a lot better. I think 4 proper jobs is better than a dozen pointless jobs. We can also scale the business now without fear of recall or late shipping nightmares sinking the company.
If we scale the business 3x we will be having the larger team again, all paid better.
I don't see a magic AI system doing the real change, putting people like me out of a job even though I am the first to admit that most of my work is simple stuff.
As a junior developer, is it even worth pursuing an "standard" career in technology if line engineers will be replaced by some kind of deep learning algo in 10-15 years? What career is even safe if we get to that level? When I see events and the pace of progress, it's hard to even justify any long term planning and I feel that (American) society is completely unprepared for the impact automation will bring.
Might as well go for my masters now, given that no one with a BS degree will be needed long term? Given a long enough timescale, even that won't matter I guess...
When they invented the COBOL compilers, the assembly language programmers were scared. "Now every business man can write their own code!".
Same when they invented the spreadsheet.
Same when they invented garbage collection.
Same with every new library, framework, "its just like legos"-invention.
Yes, they make it easier. But, the world then demands more software.
Sofware begets software.
Without compilers, there would be many many fewer programmers in the world.
Someday we might have the computer from the Enterprise. Then we can ask it "Give us the answer to the ultimate question about Life, the Universe, and Everything".
I wouldn't lose sleep over it. Deep Learning is great at making recommendations or classifications, given petabytes of data, but not even close to automatically solving general-purpose computing problems.
For example, I can type an error message into Google, and get sent to the solution, since thousands of others before me have provided the training data. But can I just describe my task to Google and have it produce the solution? Not even close.
As long as I get my food from humans in McDonalds I'm not too concerned about me being replaced by a robot. Society is lagging behind state of the art AI and robotics by decades.
Interesting that the possibility of training a computer to replace parts of your job has existed for a while. There is an excellent, thought-provoking paper by Robin Dawes that shows that a linear regression trained on human decisions will soon beat the decisions of the human, because it will pick up the trend and follow it with less variance in the future. He refers to this idea as "bootstrapping."[0] (obviously not the same bootstrapping statisticians are used to).
The takeaway was that experts should make decisions about which variables should go in the regression and the signs they should have. The model should produce the forecasts.
Real world application: doctors should figure out which tests to run, models should say whether the patient has the disease conditional on the test results.
> Waymo’s cars have driven two million miles in the real world and billions more in computer simulations. But it’s impossible to program for every event.
I wonder what will happen if two people cross the street with a big painting of ... a road :)
I imagine this feels slightly worse than training your replacement in a different country, where the labor is cheaper, which is something I have done before. At least in that case, another human is making a living.
I don't mean to bash you because it is a valid point considering the current state of affairs, but this comment really highlights how we as a society don't understand that the purpose of automation is humanitarian.
The Toyota Way includes the idea that continuous improvement should increase quality and efficiency, and that the efficiency should be re-invested.
If the smartest thing your company can imagine doing with a person who is able to automate their job is fire them, your company is wasting valuable resources.
This assumes that a company's ultimate goal is growth. For a large, publicly traded company like the article is talking about, this is probably true. But many companies I do business with on a day to day basis (local stores, contractors, etc.) have not interest in growth. Automation is a way of reducing workforce and costs.
> Can human agents find new ways to be valuable as quickly as the A.I. improves at handling parts of their job?
The classifiers we call AI right now can take over a lot of tasks if not whole jobs -- which points at how remedial many tasks & jobs are, for better or worse.
What ML can't do yet is tell you that you asked the wrong question. Some jobs will go away, but not all of them, for now. And some jobs have gone away with every technical development so far.
The interesting and open question is whether it's turtles all the way down - is it possible that a large enough classifier that's seen enough examples of everything will be sentient? Is it possible that we are just walking fleshy classifiers, and there's no actual line between consciousness and a large enough neural network?
Nitpicking but the article has 5 examples, only 2 of which are true to the title. The travel agent and the customer representative actually train the "robots" to do their own job. However the software engineer, for example, doesn't train A.I. to write software - she writes code which helps A.I. to get trained in driving better. At present, I think very little of a software engineer's task can be replaced by an A.I - understanding requirements, debugging, deployment, and the likes. Mind you programmatic automation has to be distinguished from A.I.
>for example, doesn't train A.I. to write software
Actually there is reasearch in that direction. Genetic programming comes to mind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming)
It would be something which takes a specification and retuns a computer program. Somebody still needs to write the specification though.
As an engineer, I consider it my job to automate myself out of a job. It's a sisyphusian goal, but a healthy way to think about your duty to the company and leads to a good kind of laziness.
As an engineer, you are in the comfortable situation that if your job is automated, pretty much the entire humanity can stop working because your job is among the last to get automated.
Sisyphus’ fate could be a punishment because of the effort, or because everything he does is undone each day. Bad jobs when people are young or have poor bargaining power often seem to involve a manager who is disconnected from profitability of the business telling their inferiors to continue doing something in an inefficient way.
I understand wanting to continue taking home a paycheck to support your family, but I don’t understand wanting to continue doing a job if there is a vastly less labor-intensive way to get the same output.
What you describe sounds like Sisyphus always finding out at the end of the day that he only reached a ridge partway to the top of the mountain. A typical menial job, where you do the same work every day without improving the process is more like the classic tale of the boulder rolling back down to the base of the mountain at the end of each day.
When I first read "The unreasonable effectiveness of neural networks" I realized that the writing is on the wall for the software development profession as we know it.
I'm glad my employer is sponsoring my part-time M.Eng in AI. Otherwise I fear my job will eventually go the way of the telephone switchboard operator.
this is pretty much what microsoft has done with reviewers of their app store, they fired ("downsized" in newspeak) pretty much 80-90% of staff after automating their jobs with help of few young and eager people not thinking about consequences. at same time they lowered requirements for submitting apps due to falling amounts of developers willing to code for their platform. did it help microsoft? i don't think so, good riddance...
As AI attains emotion...the boss is like, "Why is this AI telling me to fuck off?", "Why does this AI hate me?", "Why does this AI always have a bad attitude toward work?". It was trained to at a very specific time. Hmmm. This could be termed "Human Cruft" at some point.
Well, we are all trained (as children) to hate people who mistreat us, perceived unfairness, etc. The question would be if the AI was capable of learning to like a good boss if it was trained to hate a bad one first. This is a common problem for humans and their relationships, for the same reasons...
but dont you hate it when you call customer service and want to talk with a human but the robot asks you what you want ?
now I remember, I think it was PayPal that I called.
Last time I had to repeat twice that I want to talk to customer service. However nobody told me that repeating two times the same thing would do the trick. A novice would be lost at that.
[+] [-] zw123456|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leggomylibro|9 years ago|reply
Company saves a lot of money, workers are incentivized to this sort of behavior, and you could probably handle the upkeep by offering to keep one or two employees on at full pay if they'd prefer, or stipulating a day or two a month to perform any necessary maintenance on your automation.
But that's probably a pipe dream; it would essentially mean funneling capital to those who produce value, which is apparently a ridiculous concept in this modern economy.
[+] [-] Chathamization|9 years ago|reply
It's not uncommon to find people in offices doing things like manually generating the stock reports and graphs each year, collating dozens of Excel spreadsheets by hand, or even doing data cleaning by hand. For all the excitement in the news about machine learning and robots, a huge chunk of work could be automated away with relatively simple tools.
[+] [-] LrnByTeach|9 years ago|reply
If that company run so inefficiently that it could not identify 90% of work of a 6 people team can be replaced by bunch of programs, so asume that company or the division may be closed by now ( or severely down sized as competitors took their business )
It would be great if you can find out what happened to that team
[+] [-] maxxxxx|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Markoff|9 years ago|reply
though it's sad some people do this even without any incentive not thinking about consequences of their actions, they just wanna brag how they improved things, they will not benefit in any way from this improvement, while it will make lives of fired people miserable and only one profiting from it will be company with higher profits for those few owners on top, do you really wanna support such thigs?
but yeah, I was once young and idealistic too...
[+] [-] iamacynic|9 years ago|reply
i was an hourly consultant and they did pay me handsomely to do that little experiment though. can't complain. the world is a complicated place.
[+] [-] sitkack|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olewhalehunter|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Theodores|9 years ago|reply
The hardest part was the spec. Simple and obvious changes to forms, message strings and processes were arrived at by my colleague teaching me her job. We worked collaboratively and now have happy customers.
Had I started this task earlier with the old team present then I doubt I would have done such a good job. The collaboration would not have been there, it could even have been hostile. Due to the outsourcing we got a break to work on the same side.
For our team lead we have better job satisfaction as everything is excellent with no backlog.
Now we do not need people to fill out forms and do other brainless stuff we find that we need to get more skilled and differently motivated staff for the job.
The old team are not suited to the new work that is there so I guess that is a problem for them but the new hires will be paid a lot better. I think 4 proper jobs is better than a dozen pointless jobs. We can also scale the business now without fear of recall or late shipping nightmares sinking the company.
If we scale the business 3x we will be having the larger team again, all paid better.
I don't see a magic AI system doing the real change, putting people like me out of a job even though I am the first to admit that most of my work is simple stuff.
[+] [-] jorblumesea|9 years ago|reply
Might as well go for my masters now, given that no one with a BS degree will be needed long term? Given a long enough timescale, even that won't matter I guess...
[+] [-] grandDesigns|9 years ago|reply
Same when they invented the spreadsheet.
Same when they invented garbage collection.
Same with every new library, framework, "its just like legos"-invention.
Yes, they make it easier. But, the world then demands more software.
Sofware begets software.
Without compilers, there would be many many fewer programmers in the world.
Someday we might have the computer from the Enterprise. Then we can ask it "Give us the answer to the ultimate question about Life, the Universe, and Everything".
[+] [-] wikwocket|9 years ago|reply
For example, I can type an error message into Google, and get sent to the solution, since thousands of others before me have provided the training data. But can I just describe my task to Google and have it produce the solution? Not even close.
[+] [-] dorgo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtraffic|9 years ago|reply
The takeaway was that experts should make decisions about which variables should go in the regression and the signs they should have. The model should produce the forecasts.
Real world application: doctors should figure out which tests to run, models should say whether the patient has the disease conditional on the test results.
[0] http://www.niaoren.info/pdf/Beauty/9.pdf
[+] [-] amelius|9 years ago|reply
I wonder what will happen if two people cross the street with a big painting of ... a road :)
[+] [-] noonespecial|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Paul-ish|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sharkweek|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wu-ikkyu|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jstanley|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csours|9 years ago|reply
If the smartest thing your company can imagine doing with a person who is able to automate their job is fire them, your company is wasting valuable resources.
[+] [-] stinkytaco|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dahart|9 years ago|reply
The classifiers we call AI right now can take over a lot of tasks if not whole jobs -- which points at how remedial many tasks & jobs are, for better or worse.
What ML can't do yet is tell you that you asked the wrong question. Some jobs will go away, but not all of them, for now. And some jobs have gone away with every technical development so far.
The interesting and open question is whether it's turtles all the way down - is it possible that a large enough classifier that's seen enough examples of everything will be sentient? Is it possible that we are just walking fleshy classifiers, and there's no actual line between consciousness and a large enough neural network?
[+] [-] skydoctor|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dorgo|9 years ago|reply
Actually there is reasearch in that direction. Genetic programming comes to mind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming) It would be something which takes a specification and retuns a computer program. Somebody still needs to write the specification though.
[+] [-] joeybaker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kenji|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rz2k|9 years ago|reply
I understand wanting to continue taking home a paycheck to support your family, but I don’t understand wanting to continue doing a job if there is a vastly less labor-intensive way to get the same output.
What you describe sounds like Sisyphus always finding out at the end of the day that he only reached a ridge partway to the top of the mountain. A typical menial job, where you do the same work every day without improving the process is more like the classic tale of the boulder rolling back down to the base of the mountain at the end of each day.
[+] [-] rm_-rf_slash|9 years ago|reply
I'm glad my employer is sponsoring my part-time M.Eng in AI. Otherwise I fear my job will eventually go the way of the telephone switchboard operator.
[+] [-] bjornlouser|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xenihn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Markoff|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebringj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blacksmith_tb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] id122015|9 years ago|reply
now I remember, I think it was PayPal that I called.
Last time I had to repeat twice that I want to talk to customer service. However nobody told me that repeating two times the same thing would do the trick. A novice would be lost at that.
[+] [-] downrightmike|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hindsightbias|9 years ago|reply