It's so fascinating that physical labor seems to be the main concern when it comes to robots doing it better/cheaper than humans. If anything, we know that automation is coming after office desk jobs first. Those jobs are much easier to automate. Language models can read a manuscript and spit out a summary/judgment with much better my friend that has read so many books and evaluate book projects. The "robot" has read more books, can memorize more of the manuscript as it reads it and does it much much much faster.
Maybe publishing houses are not comfortable replacing her with an AI but it will eventually happen.
We've been automating away office jobs for a lot longer than we've been putting ML in robots to automate factory work, though.
For example, the way business mail used to work was that the bureaucrat in question would record their message onto a tape, and then send that tape off to a special department full of typists to actually turn that voice recording into a letter. That whole concept is not only gone, but it's such a foreign idea that it sounds like something you'd write for a dieselpunk novel. The moment we started putting computers on people's desks, we expected everyone to know how to type. Same thing goes for a lot of other office tasks, which are now comfortably managed by software suites we literally call "Office".
That being said, the new wave of machine-learning powered automation scares me. Not because I'm worried that my job will be taken by software, but because said software will barely work. For factory jobs, the risks are obvious; that's why we put these robots in cages[0]. However, these office jobs are still making critical decisions that will increasingly be handled by automation. We already know how much having to deal with Google sucks; and they are pretty much addicted to automating away all their support staff. In your manuscript example, it could be that the ML model just starts burying specific genres of book or books with specific types of characters in them, for stupid reasons.
[0] Or if you're Amazon, you put the workers in cages, because Dread Pirate Bezos hates them.
I think you're right about automation coming for office jobs, but it's not that odd that physical labor would be the focus, a couple hundred years ago, like 95% of people worked in agriculture, and automation is the reason only 1% of people do today. It's harder to suss out how many factory jobs have been automated away compared to how many are just being done elsewhere, but a lot of factory labor has been automated as well.
It's almost like automation is coming for office jobs because it already claimed the low-hanging fruit elsewhere.
Even before you need language models, though, there's an insane amount of "digital manual labor" that involved people shuttling files around and validating / cross referencing data in ways that would be done far more correctly and efficiently by software. In my opinion, low code tooling threatens many more jobs than AI does in the short term.
What you'll find in a lot of workplaces you can't automate judgement of something like a book, because of the management's ever shifting definition of what they want.
Twilight is a big hit, and suddenly they want a bunch of teen paranormal romance, and it's even fine if it's poorly written by normal standards if it has the right themes. Your AI from before is largely useless.
I disagree on the order of things. Both are equally on the chopping block.
Physical labor has reasons to be focused first compared to office jobs because as a society we've scaled that up far more (more jobs that involve physical labor than office jobs/those that don't), all that physical labor and scale comes at a large cost, and physical labor is at times easier to automate compared to office work. You can decompose the steps of delivering food to a table or lifting a box and dropping it down somewhere else. Naturally, we've converged to optimize for simplicity when it comes to physical labor because people in physical labor don't like wasted effort or operations that change all the time, whereas office jobs can have many conditional branches unpruned.
There are a few publishing companies in NYC that pitch manuscript ideas and ghost writers are hired to write it. Currently a profitable company, only works around cookbooks and logical book ideas that AI could pick up (what's trending on google, etc), but either way it's coming.
I dunno, the job of customer service phone rep seems like it should be easy to automate, and they've been attempting to do so for decades, but how many people get absolutely frustrated with such systems?
Summary maybe, but a judgement I doubt. Your robot would have to be able to address how the book fits into the current zeitgeist which is not something written down. It's ephemeral and intrinsic to the climate of current affairs, pop culture and most challenging, how people actually feel about the combination of all those facts.
Humans can fail to grasp all that too, but I think you vastly underestimate the complexity of culture and it's tendency to change rapidly.
Agree. Robotics get the bad rap because it can physically be pointed at vs. an AI in the cloud. Robots mostly take redundant physical labor whereas software is taking the cush jobs away.
I’ve been watching a lot of factory tour videos (most are in China) on YouTube. Especially the electronics kind. I notice that the ones pre-2015 are full of humans and now it’s a lot more machines.
On one hand, automation will help bring back manufacturing competitiveness in the West because the capital expenditure is going down (a dobot mg400 which is ~$4k) and labour is essentially $0. On the other hand, what will happen to all the low cost labour in the developing nations? Such as the migrant workers in China?
Forget about here in North America where UBI is a possibility - I think we can agree UBI is not possible in low income countries.
One thing about all this is that Trades or service jobs such as salons - I don’t see that being automated anytime soon.
Btw whenever the topic of Amazon workers comes up I think about the movie Nomadland. Check it out if you haven’t watched it yet.
> I think we can agree UBI is not possible in low income countries
No, we won't agree. Any country can tax its industry (GDP) by certain percentage and redistribute this among its population as an UBI. It might not sustain you, but it is a form of universal dividend.
The actual percentage is only a matter of political choice. I don't think any country (unless there is like a disastrous famine, and even most famines today are actually redistribution problems in disguise) can really say that redistributing 100% of its GDP would not be able to sustain its population. So there must exist a lower percentage from which this is possible.
I wish modern Western economies would have the guts to do this with about 20% of their GDP. Economic history shows that (especially progressive) taxation actually matters very little when it comes to economic growth.
The simple answer to all these questions of "what will happen to people currently working in industry X or job Y" is – they will retire, and won't be replaced. Those studying or entering the workforce will see the reduced opportunities and pursue other career paths.
Automation isn't going to happen overnight. It is a generational change.
> I think we can agree UBI is not possible in low income countries.
This got me wondering, what is the best analysis of whether UBI is feasible economically for a given country? How low is too low? Does it boil down to something like the difference between average per capita income and average per capita GDP? Or something else; is it possible to afford UBI even if GDP is lower than personal income?
Basic income works from parents to children, for example trust funds. Sometimes it’s expanded to families, for example emirates in UAE. The next level is small countries with large sovereign wealth funds. Of course family seems to lose its meaning once you have 7 billion family members.
re: dobot, that's an impressive robot arm, and it's even cheaper than what you cited! ($2700 on the product page)
My first thought is why don't we see more food automation? ex. retrofitting these in a mcdonalds kitchen should be in the realm of possibility. Food is my largest expense behind rent and taxes, I imagine the same is true for most.
The fidelity and affordability of these machines has definitely taken a huge leap forward in the past few years. Many will echo "the technology isn't there yet", but it certainly feels like we're on the cusp of full robo revolution. Excited to see how far this will go by 2030.
What a boon for small businesses. Standing at a punch press is not only tedious but can be dangerous work. That person who did that could spend their time inspecting the stamped parts, loading the material and supervising the robot instead of wearing themselves out doing a repetitive task. Automation doesn't have to replace the complete manufacturing process, just the easy parts.
>> That person who did that could spend their time inspecting the stamped parts, loading the material and supervising the robot instead of wearing themselves out doing a repetitive task. Automation doesn't have to replace the complete manufacturing process, just the easy parts.
Automation always reduces labor costs. If the company wants to spend the savings on a human doing something else that's an option, but the notion that automation creates more jobs is false.
I am an accountant. Automation is for sure coming for a lot of my jobs. What I have seen is that automation guts out the middling jobs. So, you still need data entry clerks, and you still need "strategy" type roles. But the middle ground are the ones that go, or rather, you don't recruit for those roles. The machines get them.
It is honestly the same in tech. The idea/product guy is still there and so are the people piecing it together. But the people in the middle: task masters, documentation writers, manual testers, etc are always being automated away.
The middle jobs are under attack.
Future jobs will just be feeding the AI til it no longer needs us.
Some people point many factors as a "need" for basic income. Automation is one of them. Without basic income, robots (as an analogy for automation) will benefit only its owners.
I donno, we already have automation doing a lot of things today. Lack of work is only due to lack of imagination and tools like this make us more capable than ever.
The universe is infinitely complex and large, there is plenty for people to do.
I conceptualize a UBI as a dividend, where every citizen has exactly one nontransferable ownership share of the nation state and has the right to share in it's profit.
This would be a plausible argument if automation of farming agriculture resulted in 90% of the population being destitute (the vast majority of humans used to work in agri). On the contrary, extreme poverty is at the lowest level ever since agricultural automation was introduced.
So, I don't buy this argument. Huge, society changing automation has happened already. We didn't need UBI, and people were lifted out of poverty in huge numbers.
This time around, factory and transporation automation will drive the price of commodity goods like food and electronics to just above the cost to create them. After we have an end-to-end automated food production line (from farms, to trucks, to warehouses, to supermarkets, to homes) then the price of food will be so cheap that it's almost free.
That's aside from the fact that UBI is not possible economically (it would plunge the disabled into poverty by reducing their welfare, as well as tank the entire government budget). Most UBI proposals would cost in excess of 100% of the US government budget. Which means, no more healthcare, no more roads, no more firefighters.
Lots of comments, as usual for this topic, suffering from what I call "The broken glazier fallacy".
In "the broken glass fallacy", windows are smashed. In "the broken glazier fallacy", it's the glaziers who essentially have their arms broken (or at least, their modern tools are confiscated).
Automation does not harm the economy or populace at large.
The issue is not automation, but the *speed* of automation.
We just need to create new jobs faster than we displace then.
> The robot arm performs a simple, repetitive job: lifting a piece of metal into a press, which then bends the metal into a new shape. And like a person, the robot worker gets paid for the hours it works.
So they hired Bender Bending Rodriguez. Fair enough.
More seriously, seems like the job market is in a perfect storm for more robots to be hired in workers’ steads. They’re not subject to “vaccine or testing mandates”, in fact they won’t even get COVID, they’re not going to unionize, and they’re not going to quit on you.
Oh, wow. Wasn't expecting hardware automation by the title. Figured this would be a piece on how a lot of soloproneurs and SMBs are beginning to use No-Code tools like Integromat and Zapier. I'm an ex-software developer, and I even prefer to use Integromat these days as opposed to writing something myself.
So I worked on robots for a fair bit of my career before quitting because the reality just didn't mesh with the hype. I've worked on self-driving cars, computer vision applications for automated surveillance, physical robots for warehouse automation similar to what is being described in this article, and more.
This is ignoring all the problems with these systems. Workplace injuries are completely ignored, and I have never worked somewhere with a physical robot that did not harm someone at some point, no matter how seriously safety was taken. The reality is, with current tech (which is always improving!) that robots are more dangerous - full stop.
It talks about the simplicity of these systems which is true, but the problem is they're so simple something as weird as changing the color of the box can completely break the system with no resolution. I made up that example because I can't talk about real things that broke the workflow for warehouse automation companies due to NDAs, but they were equally stupid. Basically if you wanted to change anything then the robot usually had to be scrapped and redesigned, which costs millions and takes months or even years.
It mentions the theoretical gains of using cheaper robots to replace expensive labor, and this is how these systems are sold to everyone who has never really worked with robots. Speaking for the robotics company, the upfront cost of the robot was usually more than they ever recouped from revenue. When you factor in the cost of maintenance (these robots are monitored by people that make a lot of money), not to mention the R&D then it never turned a profit. Speaking for the warehouses, they would frequently complain about the robots breaking, the inability to get work done, and the biggest complaint was "it's worse than the humans it's supposed to replace."
The technology just isn't there yet. I don't know when it will be. If you are interested in research then robotics is a fascinating field. If you are trying to make money by solving real problems that aren't subsidized by VC then it's demoralizing as hell. Most robotics companies never make a good product. Amazon has Kiva Systems which work great, but you'd be surprised that most of their competitors still never figured out how to have positive margins on their products. iRobot had the Roomba which is still going strong with lots of competitors. There are a handful of companies that sell robotic arms that make money. There are a handful of companies that sell sensors that make money (a lot less than you'd think). There are contracts you can get with the military that usually go nowhere. Rodney Brooks, who cofounded iRobot, failed with his cobots approach at Rethink Robotics. There are lots of other failures I haven't mentioned as well.
Robots have a long way to go before they're seriously competing with humans.
If only they hadn't sabotaged the Universal Basic Income that Richard Nixon proposed back in the 1970s, this would be pretty much good news, instead of more to worry about.
Time to discuss the paradigm shift in how people, especially the ones traditionally in these low paying jobs are supposed to support themselves in the next generation.
[+] [-] anonporridge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msoad|4 years ago|reply
Maybe publishing houses are not comfortable replacing her with an AI but it will eventually happen.
[+] [-] kmeisthax|4 years ago|reply
For example, the way business mail used to work was that the bureaucrat in question would record their message onto a tape, and then send that tape off to a special department full of typists to actually turn that voice recording into a letter. That whole concept is not only gone, but it's such a foreign idea that it sounds like something you'd write for a dieselpunk novel. The moment we started putting computers on people's desks, we expected everyone to know how to type. Same thing goes for a lot of other office tasks, which are now comfortably managed by software suites we literally call "Office".
That being said, the new wave of machine-learning powered automation scares me. Not because I'm worried that my job will be taken by software, but because said software will barely work. For factory jobs, the risks are obvious; that's why we put these robots in cages[0]. However, these office jobs are still making critical decisions that will increasingly be handled by automation. We already know how much having to deal with Google sucks; and they are pretty much addicted to automating away all their support staff. In your manuscript example, it could be that the ML model just starts burying specific genres of book or books with specific types of characters in them, for stupid reasons.
[0] Or if you're Amazon, you put the workers in cages, because Dread Pirate Bezos hates them.
[+] [-] ksdale|4 years ago|reply
It's almost like automation is coming for office jobs because it already claimed the low-hanging fruit elsewhere.
[+] [-] newhouseb|4 years ago|reply
Even before you need language models, though, there's an insane amount of "digital manual labor" that involved people shuttling files around and validating / cross referencing data in ways that would be done far more correctly and efficiently by software. In my opinion, low code tooling threatens many more jobs than AI does in the short term.
[+] [-] nitwit005|4 years ago|reply
Twilight is a big hit, and suddenly they want a bunch of teen paranormal romance, and it's even fine if it's poorly written by normal standards if it has the right themes. Your AI from before is largely useless.
[+] [-] usui|4 years ago|reply
Physical labor has reasons to be focused first compared to office jobs because as a society we've scaled that up far more (more jobs that involve physical labor than office jobs/those that don't), all that physical labor and scale comes at a large cost, and physical labor is at times easier to automate compared to office work. You can decompose the steps of delivering food to a table or lifting a box and dropping it down somewhere else. Naturally, we've converged to optimize for simplicity when it comes to physical labor because people in physical labor don't like wasted effort or operations that change all the time, whereas office jobs can have many conditional branches unpruned.
[+] [-] UnpossibleJim|4 years ago|reply
https://www.nber.org/papers/w28061
[+] [-] dogman144|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nojito|4 years ago|reply
Excel is a great example of how new technology created more jobs than it destroyed.
[+] [-] ModernMech|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehnto|4 years ago|reply
Humans can fail to grasp all that too, but I think you vastly underestimate the complexity of culture and it's tendency to change rapidly.
[+] [-] gigel82|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vba616|4 years ago|reply
I would like to hear peoples' experiences with taking non-programming jobs and automating them.
[+] [-] danvoell|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonporridge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mint2|4 years ago|reply
This automation is not new.
[+] [-] WalterBright|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antoniuschan99|4 years ago|reply
On one hand, automation will help bring back manufacturing competitiveness in the West because the capital expenditure is going down (a dobot mg400 which is ~$4k) and labour is essentially $0. On the other hand, what will happen to all the low cost labour in the developing nations? Such as the migrant workers in China?
Forget about here in North America where UBI is a possibility - I think we can agree UBI is not possible in low income countries.
One thing about all this is that Trades or service jobs such as salons - I don’t see that being automated anytime soon.
Btw whenever the topic of Amazon workers comes up I think about the movie Nomadland. Check it out if you haven’t watched it yet.
[+] [-] js8|4 years ago|reply
No, we won't agree. Any country can tax its industry (GDP) by certain percentage and redistribute this among its population as an UBI. It might not sustain you, but it is a form of universal dividend.
The actual percentage is only a matter of political choice. I don't think any country (unless there is like a disastrous famine, and even most famines today are actually redistribution problems in disguise) can really say that redistributing 100% of its GDP would not be able to sustain its population. So there must exist a lower percentage from which this is possible.
I wish modern Western economies would have the guts to do this with about 20% of their GDP. Economic history shows that (especially progressive) taxation actually matters very little when it comes to economic growth.
[+] [-] paxys|4 years ago|reply
Automation isn't going to happen overnight. It is a generational change.
[+] [-] dahart|4 years ago|reply
This got me wondering, what is the best analysis of whether UBI is feasible economically for a given country? How low is too low? Does it boil down to something like the difference between average per capita income and average per capita GDP? Or something else; is it possible to afford UBI even if GDP is lower than personal income?
[+] [-] naveen99|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] disambiguation|4 years ago|reply
My first thought is why don't we see more food automation? ex. retrofitting these in a mcdonalds kitchen should be in the realm of possibility. Food is my largest expense behind rent and taxes, I imagine the same is true for most.
The fidelity and affordability of these machines has definitely taken a huge leap forward in the past few years. Many will echo "the technology isn't there yet", but it certainly feels like we're on the cusp of full robo revolution. Excited to see how far this will go by 2030.
[+] [-] hourislate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phkahler|4 years ago|reply
Automation always reduces labor costs. If the company wants to spend the savings on a human doing something else that's an option, but the notion that automation creates more jobs is false.
[+] [-] deelowe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giantg2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gidorah|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thinkagainbro|4 years ago|reply
The middle jobs are under attack. Future jobs will just be feeding the AI til it no longer needs us.
[+] [-] marcodiego|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mountainriver|4 years ago|reply
The universe is infinitely complex and large, there is plenty for people to do.
[+] [-] anonporridge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xy|4 years ago|reply
So, I don't buy this argument. Huge, society changing automation has happened already. We didn't need UBI, and people were lifted out of poverty in huge numbers.
This time around, factory and transporation automation will drive the price of commodity goods like food and electronics to just above the cost to create them. After we have an end-to-end automated food production line (from farms, to trucks, to warehouses, to supermarkets, to homes) then the price of food will be so cheap that it's almost free.
That's aside from the fact that UBI is not possible economically (it would plunge the disabled into poverty by reducing their welfare, as well as tank the entire government budget). Most UBI proposals would cost in excess of 100% of the US government budget. Which means, no more healthcare, no more roads, no more firefighters.
[+] [-] monkeydust|4 years ago|reply
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
[+] [-] joey_bob|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris-orgmenta|4 years ago|reply
In "the broken glass fallacy", windows are smashed. In "the broken glazier fallacy", it's the glaziers who essentially have their arms broken (or at least, their modern tools are confiscated).
Automation does not harm the economy or populace at large.
The issue is not automation, but the *speed* of automation.
We just need to create new jobs faster than we displace then.
[+] [-] deeg|4 years ago|reply
Edit: new title is much better.
[+] [-] SllX|4 years ago|reply
So they hired Bender Bending Rodriguez. Fair enough.
More seriously, seems like the job market is in a perfect storm for more robots to be hired in workers’ steads. They’re not subject to “vaccine or testing mandates”, in fact they won’t even get COVID, they’re not going to unionize, and they’re not going to quit on you.
[+] [-] tjbiddle|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TechoChamber|4 years ago|reply
This is ignoring all the problems with these systems. Workplace injuries are completely ignored, and I have never worked somewhere with a physical robot that did not harm someone at some point, no matter how seriously safety was taken. The reality is, with current tech (which is always improving!) that robots are more dangerous - full stop.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54355803
It talks about the simplicity of these systems which is true, but the problem is they're so simple something as weird as changing the color of the box can completely break the system with no resolution. I made up that example because I can't talk about real things that broke the workflow for warehouse automation companies due to NDAs, but they were equally stupid. Basically if you wanted to change anything then the robot usually had to be scrapped and redesigned, which costs millions and takes months or even years.
It mentions the theoretical gains of using cheaper robots to replace expensive labor, and this is how these systems are sold to everyone who has never really worked with robots. Speaking for the robotics company, the upfront cost of the robot was usually more than they ever recouped from revenue. When you factor in the cost of maintenance (these robots are monitored by people that make a lot of money), not to mention the R&D then it never turned a profit. Speaking for the warehouses, they would frequently complain about the robots breaking, the inability to get work done, and the biggest complaint was "it's worse than the humans it's supposed to replace."
The technology just isn't there yet. I don't know when it will be. If you are interested in research then robotics is a fascinating field. If you are trying to make money by solving real problems that aren't subsidized by VC then it's demoralizing as hell. Most robotics companies never make a good product. Amazon has Kiva Systems which work great, but you'd be surprised that most of their competitors still never figured out how to have positive margins on their products. iRobot had the Roomba which is still going strong with lots of competitors. There are a handful of companies that sell robotic arms that make money. There are a handful of companies that sell sensors that make money (a lot less than you'd think). There are contracts you can get with the military that usually go nowhere. Rodney Brooks, who cofounded iRobot, failed with his cobots approach at Rethink Robotics. There are lots of other failures I haven't mentioned as well.
Robots have a long way to go before they're seriously competing with humans.
[+] [-] mikewarot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giantg2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdtwo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] breadzeppelin__|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giantg2|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] anonporridge|4 years ago|reply