What Undercover Boss and The Jetsons Tell Us About the Future of Jobs

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/09/27/researchers_claim_many_jobs_at_risk_for_automation_here_s_what_they_missed.html

by wikiburner • 13 years ago

30 56 13 years ago

slate.com

bgilroy26• 13 years ago

A large volume of the jobs that are being automated are are invented with computers in mind.

The more stringent accounting standards that were created over the last 20 years would have led to the demand for thousands upon thousands of white collar workers, if we still kept books and records the way we did in 1910.

On the other hand, companies would not have been able to grow large enough to need new accounting standards in the first place, if not for the productivity increases since the introduction of the computer.

d4nt• 13 years ago

What's more, there would be a lot fewer people around if computers weren't helping us grow food, generate energy, cure diseases and move everything around just in time. The more I think about it, the more I think computers are a sort of virus and we're in a symbiotic relationship with them.

crpatino4• 13 years ago

The revolution, discovery of fossil fuels and antibiotics, international trade, etc, were all widespread before the invention of computers. You could argue that operations research (a branch of applied math that deals with logistics mostly) has evolved concurrently with computer technology, but the former has one or two decades of a head start in terms of adoption by private enterprises.

I think it's more like computers allows us to do the same stuff faster and at a broader scale, but it has had little impact so far in which stuff do we choose to do.

agilebyte3• 13 years ago

I can imagine, for example, that "made (or served) by humans" could be the "organic" or "fair trade" of the future.

Actually, I would see it the other way round, on one condition. If people had a guaranteed income (or housing, healthcare & food) then paying humans to do work that robots can do would seem like an unnecessary luxury to me.

a3n• 13 years ago

There will be three jobs in the future: quants, CEOs that employ the quants, and members of Congress. Everyone else will be lazy good for nothing takers for not having a non-existent job and deserve nothing more than to starve in the gutter. At least, that's how it's going to be in the US.

_random_2• 13 years ago

Evolution is a bitch.

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

Quants don't create value, so without a healthy market a quant is powerless. Like a swimmer trying to swim in a dried-out lakebed. Thus the CEOs that employ the quants are also powerless.

cellis• 13 years ago

No, just robots. CEOs/politicians who control the robots, and people who do what the robots say and are provided with everything in return.

Retric• 13 years ago

"Organic" and "Fair Trade" are an unnecessary luxury to most people. Nobody is trying to keep hand crafted automobile assembly plants operating but some how innefecent farming is all the rage.

crpatino4• 13 years ago

The current use of automation in car manufacturing does not preclude the future capacity of building more cars by any means.

Your so called "efficient farming" does increase the yield of calories per acre at the cost of killing of the microscopic ecosystems in the topsoil and bankrupting farmers. The only thing those practices are good at is to increase the margins of fertilizer and pesticide producers.

gambiting2• 13 years ago

Well,but that is what "organic" food is at the moment, isn't it? Agricultural technology has developed so far that we can grow plants many times faster than with natural methods. Yet we still decide to do it for various reasons, and food grown organically is a luxury in most places, being 2-3x as expensive as its non-organic equivalent.

agilebyte3• 13 years ago

Yes absolutely. But we pay for organic food to get a more wholesome product that has (mostly) more nutrients and uses fewer artificial pesticides. I don't know what humans would bring to the table if robots can do their jobs. The human energy should be devoted to better things.

_random_2• 13 years ago

My suggestion for the brand: "touched by humans".

"Genuine Food - touched by humans". "Authentic Underwear - touched by humans".

Robots don't spit in coffee. Robots don't under-cook your burger when they have an ambition crisis. Robots sew neat seams.

oneweekwonder• 13 years ago

"Robots will need to defend the one percent, when the ambition of the masses has turned into a pit of despair, like a animal trapped in a corner with no where to go and nothing to lose."

crpatino4• 13 years ago

Robots don't spit in coffee... they spill it over your hand if you cannot hold the damned cup still with micro-metric precision.

jmcdonald-ut• 13 years ago

The belief that the future will be this dark and gloomy place where one struggles to find work is understandable. Certainly there are things that can indicate this is right. Manufacturing is becoming more heavily automated for example.

I think that we will see a period in the coming years that could be regarded as a "growing pain" for the human species. Jobs and professions could shift to be more inline with rapidly advancing technologies. During this time there will probably be people who find themselves either out of work, or unqualified. After this time I think that jobs and professions will again be available and that many people will be qualified for them. Perhaps even more jobs.

Who knows, maybe I'm an optimist.

DerpDerpDerp• 13 years ago

After this time I think that jobs and professions will again be available and that many people will be qualified for them. Perhaps even more jobs.

Like what?

The problem is that we're creeping up the capability ladder, and it will only be a few decades until the robots can do the math, science, design, engineering, and assembly of new robots, which can in turn produce any other objects.

What's there for humans to do?

The real problem is that robotics makes humans unnecessary for economies to function, and we'll need to change our social model to account for that.

Or just let a huge swathe of the people starve.

jedberg• 13 years ago

I'm one of those people that prefer automation

I'll actually wait slightly longer for the automated checkout at the market, mainly because I want to see it in more places.

greeneggs2• 13 years ago

Do you mean self checkout (manual checkout)? I've never heard of automated checkout, but that would be amazing!

JamesArgo• 13 years ago

It's possible with RFID. Just not cheap enough yet.

rfnslyr• 13 years ago

I prefer automation because I don't like encountering people most of the time. Less anxiety.

cgag• 13 years ago

This sums it up well for me: http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/index-mobile.php?date=062...

joezydeco• 13 years ago

One of the larger grocery chains in the Chicago area is starting to phase out the self-checkout lanes. The store nearest to me has already removed them.

The reason given is to be more "customer friendly", which seems to correspond to the upscale neighborhoods where the lanes are being removed and, not surprisingly, more upscale grocers are starting to move in (Roundy's/Mariano's, Whole Foods, Fresh Market).

Turns out it takes a lot of staff intervention to keep the self-checkout lines moving.

ufmace• 13 years ago

In a kind of odd confirmation of the article, I don't like the automated/self-checkout because I suck at scanning and bagging groceries.

I remember seeing a commercial for something one time where somebody just pushed a cart full of groceries through a portal-thing, and it automatically found all of the items and their prices, by RFID or something, found his credit card in his wallet the same way, and auto-charged it for all of the groceries. If they had that, I'd do it.

stephengillie2• 13 years ago

47 percent of U.S. jobs are “at risk” of being automated in the next 20 years.

The other way to look at this, of course, is:

47 percent of our labor force will be freed from their menial tasks.

Our societies will collectively be able to produce and accomplish almost double what we currently can.

lazerwalker2• 13 years ago

That sort of outlook implies a government and populace that's willing to embrace something resembling a functioning socialist state, rather than merely letting the "freed" labor force live in abject poverty. Based on the current political climate in the U.S., I'm highly skeptical such a thing would happen.

stephengillie2• 13 years ago

No, it implies some of them will become entrepreneurs and hire some of the others. And that some costs will go down from this newfound efficiency.

You'll never convince me that Luddism is a progressive policy.

joe_the_user6• 13 years ago

The only way that automation works is through creating a highly controlled environment where production can proceed in a predictable fashion.

The only way to have a completely automated restaurant is have a big box that spits out meals. The alternative is no automation or a lot of little boxes that are used for pieces.

The thing is that a restaurant would still needs counter-help and clean-up help so further. Let's assume the box reduces the cost of prep-labor by 50%. That reduces the labor past of your costs by 25% and your total costs by 12.5% assuming labor is 50% of costs. So it's a good savings but not an astronomical savings. But the counter-weight you have sell people on buying the food that comes out of the box. A few places compete on price alone but that's hard. Just consider that restaurants are already competing with microwave dinners in the frozen section that quite possibly are already spat out of a better, cleverer box at a central factory. It would seem restaurants compete on ambiance and human relations and a 12.5% prices savings might not compensate.

Another thing about "food out of a box" restaurant is that the box might not have the flexibility of a human preparer. If you need to change your menu, you might find you have to do expensive retooling on your box rather than a quick retraining of your employees. If you have to close a given restaurant, you may find no one wants your box. You may find yourself more dependent on your small number of box-technicians than you were previously on a large number of easily replaced unskilled cooks and so-forth.

The thing is that humans are a fabulous deal once you remove the price differential. Human comes with amazing skills, often train themselves with more, supervise and trouble-shoot each other, require little capital investment and manufacture themselves. This kind of thing is a good deal for nearly everything except production at a large scale (and the most important items, cars and iphones, are going to that large scale). The only unfortunate thing from the buyers perspective is that humans have a nasty habit of expect a share of the output instead of just a bare wage. But the solution to that problem is visible all around us ... humans.

yafujifide• 13 years ago

The only way that automation works is through creating a highly controlled environment where production can proceed in a predictable fashion.

That's true today, but don't you think artificial intelligence will change that?

joe_the_user6• 13 years ago

I don't know long term.

AI has made a lot of strides doing what it's good at and basically stagnated outside that realm (it's been forty years since the first seemingly intelligent system appeared and none of these systems has become good at dealing with an uncontrolled environment). AI hasn't gotten noticeably better at dealing with complex and confusing environments.

svantana2• 13 years ago

a restaurant would still needs counter-help and clean-up help so further

Why do you assume that those tasks won't be automated? To some extent they already are in some places (kiosk ordering at some fast food places, cleaning devices à la Roomba).

joe_the_user6• 13 years ago

I assume these can't be automated easily because they involve dealing with a complex, unpredictable environment. AI has gotten there, hasn't really gotten closer.

Roomba's are really slow. There's no robot that can quickly find and clean a spill while keep people around the area safe. That kind of progress hasn't been made with robots and AI.

You can have something like a system where the restaurant is a big box that cleaned automatically, yes, but then it also becomes unpleasant. Kiosk ordering might work but then cashier is also the "public face" of restaurant.

It all comes down to "why do people go to restaurants instead of microwaving Trader Joe's stuff", right?

moocowduckquack3• 13 years ago

Food out of a box isn't thinking creatively enough. There is already a prototype wok robot capable of producing 600 different dishes.

http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2010-04/students-inven...

joe_the_user6• 13 years ago

The robot in the picture seems to be inside a cylinder. Seems to effectively have all the qualities I mention.

Notice that it is created to manufacture Chinese food. A change in taste to Korean might obsolete it.

Prototypes can do lots of things. They tend to have durability and reliability problems.

csom• 13 years ago

simpler than a restaurant: a coffee shop. coffee machines have been around for quite some time, they are easy to operate and they produce decent coffee. yet "the total number of coffee shops in the US increased by 70% between 2000 and 2005" [1] AI seems necessary but not sufficient for automation...

[1] http://www.marketresearchworld.net/index.php?option=com_cont...

joe_the_user6• 13 years ago

Yes,

The point isn't that automated food service is impossible. It's certainly possible. Indeed, it's been around for a long time [1]. The point is that it isn't necessarily a better investment than human-run food service and thus human-run food service may stay around a long time.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat

surrealize• 13 years ago

I can imagine, for example, that “made (or served) by humans” could be the “organic” or “fair trade” of the future.

... or the "handmade" of the future?

svantana2• 13 years ago

I find this quote ironic. One of the main purposes of fairtrade is to avoid poor working conditions (for humans). If a particular brand of coffee was produced without any human labor, that could probably be considered fairtrade.

bsenftner• 13 years ago

This is the future of automation: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

All you need is software that determines what needs to be done, and a minimum wage work force wearing headsets to receive task commands to carry out. Short circuits the need for ANY advancements in AI to enslave entire social classes.

I would love this to be wrong.

lgieron• 13 years ago

I think the story got it wrong - that it's the "thinking" that is harder to automate (as opposed to "doing"). Once we have AI capable of managing a fast food restaurant, the workers will probably be long gone anyway (replaced by robots).

waps• 13 years ago

Having done some automation with actual robots, I must disagree. Determining what needs doing is a policy problem. Sure there may be variables, but it seems to me essentially you have a priority list, a list of workers and other resources, and essentially a bucket fill algorithm. Further enhancement might be to verify that the store is actually operational during all the different times (e.g. at 6pm, refill the fries before you do the cash register counting, even though the cash register stuff is more important in the end). Add to that that you can make significant mistakes and not have real consequences. In fact you could screw up a few things and still have better overall results than a human planner. And manna like planners are pretty normal in

Doesn't sound like it's a huge problem to me.

Having a 3 segment robot arm pick up a salt shaker requires balancing 7 codependent feedback loops, while constantly checking if you're hitting anything and requires constant evaluation of forward and inverse kinematics. As if that problem is not bad enough, you have to do it not just fast, but in real-time (as in, you have to calculate all this at ~50hz at least. If a single decision takes 100 msec, you've just damaged or lost the robot). State of the art in robotics is picking up and unboiled egg 10 times without breaking it, and most robots can't do it. If you start to use those robots to hand people burgers, expect broken bones at least, casualties at worst.

Replacing a burger flipper requires solving not one, but actually most unsolved AI problems. You need voice recognition + understanding. Okay that's one. Then you need to understand the meaning in what was actually said. You know, the problem that google's 35000 employees from amongst the "world's best" don't quite know how to solve. I mean, they're far ahead of the pack, but nowhere near open-ended conversations with a human, never mind doing so with social grace. If your robot can walk around you need to manage an unsolved 30-dimensional feedback loop problem. State of the art for that problem is pathetic as well[1][2]. If it can't walk around you have other problems, and it's still at least a 14-dimensional feedback problem (two six-dimensional arms + 2 grippers). There's the mechanical problem of creating a robot that stays robust when working with "gooey" stuff like food (it will build up inside the robot, then fail or cause overheating). Then you need to solve all the problems that the "manna" system solves, or there's no point having a robot in the first place.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjgkV77gVcs (note the obviously reduced dimensionality that wouldn't fly in the real world, and that the robot sees no problem moving through itself. It's stability under disturbances is also not at the point that it would keep operating for long periods. Do that in real life and the thing will topple over) [2] And before you say Bigdog, note that 4 feet locomotion is a much simpler problem. Bigdog is solving for 8 dimensions, and that's state of the art (and it is not sufficiently reliable to operate a single day without assistance). 2 feet locomotion in a human is ~140-dimensional, the minimum you can reduce it to while still having a nice mobile robot is 12-dimensional.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

Which part, the Manna part or the Australia Project part? The latter is sort of the 'Star Trek Society' that has a number of advantages. As written the next stage would be for Australia to dominate the world of course :-)

But the thing that I found interesting, both in the story and in real life, is that the story's author has his characters as 'worker bees' with not thought to living their lives, and then switching over to living full lives. If you subscribe to that philosophy, then nobody would ever be 'useless' for more than about 8 years since you could pretty much learn everything from high school through a masters degree in some subject in that time if you dedicated your time to it, and assuming like the story author did, that these people didn't have to do anything to maintain their lives (food, shelter, clothing).

The difference between people who are naturally curious, and the people who aren't, is where I am most intrigued. When do people switch over to being victims? And what keeps them in that mindset?

Thanks for the link, it was an interesting read.

What Undercover Boss and The Jetsons Tell Us About the Future of Jobs

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