AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs [pdf]

http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2014/08/Future-of-AI-Robotics-and-Jobs.pdf

by eplanit • 12 years ago

141 149 12 years ago

atemerev6• 12 years ago

Of course, there will be less and less "jobs" in the future. But that's OK. The population growth is already stopping. Productivity will rise to the new heights. Society will adapt — first, by introducing, say, 4-hour work days, then by totally eliminating the concept of a "job" — everyone will be either a temp staffer, or a business founder (or an artisan — arts and crafts will be more valuable than ever).

We are moving to post-scarcity, and the future is bright. No more office jobs, though.

randallsquared• 12 years ago

Ah, 1950's future.

clarebear• 12 years ago

I'd like to believe this, but I don't see the corresponding changes in societal structure. If we really are post-scarcity, it would be nice if some sort of average person could have a family if they choose, or at least have access to health care, housing and things to make a reasonable life. Truly part time work with a decent wage almost does not exist in most fields. The people I know trying to make a living doing artisan things would certainly not agree that arts and crafts are more (monetarily) valuable than ever.

robertfw3• 12 years ago

Rising productivity has just put more money in precious few pockets. While I truly believe that this vision of the future is technically possible, I have little faith that it will be the future we end up with.

protonfish• 12 years ago

When has technology ever resulted in the improvement of wages and working hours of the average person? The only things that have ever had a clear, direct affect in quality of life of the masses (both positive and negative) are political.

atemerev6• 12 years ago

Rising productivity has just put more money in precious few pockets.

In all pockets. Again, compare a poor person of today with a poor person of 100 years ago.

Joeri2• 12 years ago

I doubt we're going post-scarcity any time soon though. We don't have any of the technologies that form the foundation of a post-scarcity society: abundant renewable energy, fully automated just-in-time production of nearly all goods and materials, extremely low cost delivery of goods to the home and/or business, and the intelligent software that ties it all together. Some of those things are close, others, not so much. Aside from a "magic" solution, like the singularity, I do not expect in my life-time to see a post-scarcity society arise.

I do agree that the automation of jobs is not a serious cause of concern, though obviously for those whose jobs are displaced it will be. People can't stand to sit around and do nothing for any great stretch of time (although everyone claims otherwise). They will find ways to be busy, and if you automate away one part of activity, other forms will take up its place. Someone will figure out how to monetize it and presto, a new job category. Selling software was once a crazy idea. Selling virtual characters was crazy just a few years ago, and is becoming normal. We will gradually become ever more refined in the sort of virtual goods and services we create through human labor that can be sold online.

atemerev6• 12 years ago

abundant renewable energy

We have enough uranium and thorium for millions of years with breeder cycle. Even if not renewable, who cares? And it's quite ecological, compared to burning oil products.

The rest is quite close.

kornork• 12 years ago

I've thought in the past that our pursuits might be more oriented towards art, but watching the video above reminded me that machines are getting more and more capable of creating art.

Maybe it will depend on whether we're using art to drive an economy, in which case creative robots will win, or we're using art to create meaning in our lives. In the second case, we'll still have to compete with entertainment (created by AIs) fully capable of filling our waking hours.

ddeklotz• 12 years ago

Robert Owen thought the same thing at the beginning of the industrial revolution some 200 years ago. Skyrocketing productivity was supposed to lead to a new age where a society could produce all it needed with little effort, and much time would be left over for leisure and pursuit of the arts. Instead, there were mass populations of over-urbanized, overworked, impoverished people. Turns out that when the means of production are owned by the few elite, innovations in productivity are more likely to marginalize the rest.

Homunculiheaded• 12 years ago

"post-scarcity" is an illusion presented to people living at the very top of the economic pyramid. I'm sure most HNers are in the top 90th percentile of US household income on their own, living in a world mostly surrounded by other affluent individuals working in a similar field, all in jobs with increasingly flexible work hours, better benefits and nearly unlimited job prospects.

The world only looks like it's moving towards post-scarcity because the resources consumed and waste produced have been nearly completely outsourced away, and the pangs of the labor issues created by automation are happening somewhere else.

Post-scarcity is not an issue of 'productivity' but of resource use. As Jevons paradox [0] points out the more efficiently we use resources the more of them we tend to use. Looking merely at productivity and efficiency without looking at resource use and waste production gives a wildly incomplete picture of "post-scarcity". What I see is that the world is increasingly separating into a small sub-population that is presented the illusion of post-scarcity and a another, growing, subset that is feeling the effects of scarcity required to maintain that illusion.

When I see data to support the argument that resource use and waste production are plummeting, then I'll believe in narratives about post-scarcity.

0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

a8da6b0c91d2• 12 years ago

There's a lot of delusion about the developing energy picture. The arithmetic shows we will not be running millions of robot slaves and self driving electric cars on solar and wind power. We will be walking places and drying clothing on clothes lines. We are running out of fossil fuel energy and still no viable replacements have been identified.

seanflyon5• 12 years ago

If labor is effectively free (because robots don't get paid) then I don't think that the products of that labor would be particularly scarce. Even material costs are primarily the labor cost to extract or recycle a material.

twobits• 12 years ago

"We are moving to post-scarcity, and the future is bright."

If you are the king, why do you need to keep those billions of loud, dirty, polluting, dangerous, depleting the natural resources, and now UNNEEDED serfs around? When you could gain by exploiting them, great. Someone had to do the hard work. But now / soon, they have nothing to offer, besides problems. Problems, are to be ..exterminated.

Imo, the (near) future, is either paradise, or total hell. Nothing in between. And history isn't offering reasons to be optimistic.

(PS: Yes, I totally understand that the above stands on the pov that there are some "kings", and we are the "serfs". It's a pov that's easy to dismiss. Personally, I don't.)

Ygg24• 12 years ago

Problems, are to be ..exterminated. Imo, the (near) future, is either paradise, or total hell. Nothing in between. And history isn't offering reasons to be optimistic.

I doubt it is either of those. People can't go against billions, not without significant casualties, and not any time soon. I fear what the solution might be... If you are rich you might be more interested in culling number of those unneeded serfs by simply neutering them and providing them enough distractions unhealthy food and poor medicine that they just slowly keel over.

Otoh, intelligence isn't hereditary, so killing off those 'serfs' might also reduce the numbers of intelligent people.

e0m• 12 years ago

CGP Grey recently put out a video along very similar lines. Worth 15 mins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU&list=UU2C_jShtL7...

robertfw3• 12 years ago

I can't recommend this video highly enough - it does a great job of showing the science fact instead of contemplating science fiction, illustrating how technology that we have in development NOW is going to impact our economy.

I have a feeling that this is an issue is going to creep up on us quickly, and I worry that our governments have proven themselves completely incapable of driving the discussion and making the decisions that need to be made.

sitkack3• 12 years ago

I really hope we dont let the bottom half of our economy fall before we strive for the restructuring we will need. Because when we let stuff fail, billions or trillions in value will vanish with it.

furyofantares3• 12 years ago

I don't understand why the video goes through the history of technology reducing the need for types of labor and doesn't acknowledge that we keep thinking of new things to do. The closest he comes to making an argument that we won't keep making new jobs is that we didn't keep making new jobs _for horses_ which seems to me like arguing that we didn't keep making new jobs for spears and hammers and pencils.

I have concerns about this myself, but I don't find that video remotely convincing.

aivosha2• 12 years ago

In the video, the analogy between horses loosing out to cars and humans loosing out to AI is false. Humans are the ones building the AI. Horses however did not build the cars. Its a very important distinction we are not at a liberty to dismiss.

ModernMech• 12 years ago

As a roboticist, this video made me very angry. This is not a great showing of science fact, but a strange distortion of the current state of robotics to fit a particular narrative. By the end, it definitely ventures well into the realm of science fiction. I'll point out some of the most egregious examples. This is a pretty long post, but if you spent 15 minutes watching the video, the least you can do is spend 15 minutes to read the following counterpoint.

Self-service checkout – “What used to be 30 humans is now 1 human overseeing 30 self-service check outs” – At all the grocery stores I’ve been to in my area, there are still ~30 human-staffed checkout lanes and 4 – 6 self-service machines, which replaced maybe two rows of check outs and still employs a human for oversight. However, these self-service checkouts allow the stores to operate 24/7, because after 10:00 they are the only lanes open. Now the store is open longer so it can make more money, whereas before they closed at 10:00. More money for the store means perhaps a whole new store opening, employing more people than would have otherwise been employed without self-service lanes.

Self-driving cars – “They are not the future, they are here and they work” – For narrow definitions of "here" and "work". There's a big difference between being developed in a lab and driving up and down the coast in sunny Cali, and being deployed to millions of consumers around the globe in multitudinous climates. He lists some things self-driving cars do better than humans, but fails to mention that self-driving cars lack the complex decision making, cognition, and communication abilities that are required in every-day driving. Self-driving cars are low hanging fruit for roboticists because we have a set of rules governing transportation, and that’s prime material for automation. Take the rules, code them up, done. Problem is, the rules are broken constantly, and in a way that driving a million miles up and down the west coast won’t solve (How many miles exactly has the Google car driven in snow?). Self-driving cars will come, but as long as there are still human drivers and weather, they will not live up to the hype they are currently generating. Take it from someone who actually engineers these types of robots.

Law Bots – He claims that bots will replace the bulk of lawyering because they can sift through a million e-mails quickly. And what happens when the bot is done? The lawyer gets back to work. It sounds to me like the bot is making the lawyer more efficient. Instead of spending weeks going through e-mails, he can use a computer to help him, and do his job more efficiently. So maybe we need fewer lawyers? The only reason we needed more in the first place was because of the amount of e-mail and electronic documents created by computers. To say we shouldn’t use a computer to fix a problem caused by computers is beyond ridiculous.

Doctor bots – He says that knowing the reaction of every drug between every other drug is beyond the scope of human capability… sounds like a great job for robots then! Again, this is an instance of a robot augmenting the capabilities of a human, not replacing one. He goes on to say that the doctor bots will be able to read the latest research, understand it, and then go on to implement the knowledge. First, one has to wonder how the research is being generated if human doctors are being replaced by robots. Second, as long as we’re assuming an AI advanced enough to read a research paper, generate inferences and implications based on that research, and act on that new knowledge, we might as well assume that all disease has also been cured, eliminating the need for doctor bots in the first place.

Creative bots – Finally, and most egregiously. Creativity is right up there next to sentience in the totem pole of AI capabilities, and is well into the realm of science fiction. The (only) example he gives, Emily Howell as a source of machine creative music is a complete joke. Here’s what the inventor of the bot has to say about it:

Professor Cope argues that Emily Howell’s music is still predominantly created by humans. “Computers are not separate things,” he said. “The computer is human-made. The program itself is human-made. The music in the database is human as well. There’s so much about this that is human. There’s just a lot more humans involved in making this than usual.”

Emily Howell is a program designed by a human to output a specific kind of music. It may be music that has not been written before by any human, but it is not creative. In the end, the music is the result of an algorithm, designed by a human. In my view, a creative machine is one that performs a task, on purpose, it was not programmed to perform.

So those are the big problems I have with what he showed. What is even more aggravating is what he left out. What about robots that do things humans can't do. What about a robot that can fit into a 1/2" pipe, or one that can fly (we call them drones), or one that can go into a nuclear reactor or the bottom of the sea. Those robots are taking away 0 jobs, and create hundreds (if not thousands) of jobs for those that design, engineer, manufacture, repair, sell, program, manage, and use those robots.

Finally, robots are great at replacing some tasks that can be automated, but not so great at others. We've had robot receptionists for a while now. They are so terrible, that having a human receptionist is now a competitive advantage for some businesses. I think the general point that this video misses, is that robots are terrible at interfacing with people. Any human-facing occupation, even if it has aspects that can be automated, will probably still exist no matter how pervasive robots become in our lives. When robots can interact with humans well, we're probably talking about a future that is too far out for us to accurately predict.

3rd33• 12 years ago

That video was actually briefly on the HN front page. I’m still wondering why some people apparently flagged so that it was quickly relegated to page 3 or so.

tachyonbeam• 12 years ago

Might have been bots. There seem to be people using hostile bots to downvote things on reddit, for example.

dang• 12 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8172461

No one flagged it.

zokier2• 12 years ago

I found it surprisingly shallow in that it didn't really delve into post-scarcity economics. With stuff like basic income or negative taxing the loss of jobs will not look as severe societally.

3rd33• 12 years ago

Grey said on reddit that he purposely didn’t include possible solutions in the video.

Ygg24• 12 years ago

In all honesty, it would be a really bad video if it included it. Because we have no knowledge what post-scarcity economics will look like.

At best he could write about his ideal of an utopia or his vision of a dystopia.

Dewie3• 12 years ago

I think that part was deliberately omitted as kind of beyond the scope of the video.

JoachimS6• 12 years ago

The big question is being able to finance basic income when a large and growing part of the population is unemployed. Where is the tax base?

bottled_poe• 12 years ago

The point of the video is that robots will soon exceed humans as workers in every conceivable way. "Post-scarcity economy" is obviously incompatible with free market capitalism. I can see how one might believe that prices could decrease towards zero as the efficiency of technology increases, however there still needs to be an incentive for production. At the moment, the incentive is profit. But if nobody can afford a loaf of bread, then what is the incentive to produce loaves of bread? Good will? Government mandate? What happens when companies possess more power than the government? Google for one appears to be positioning itself as a contender. Interesting times ahead.

fred_durst• 12 years ago

I'm very glad this video talks about the most likely first to be removed.

I'm so confused why everyone thinks the least expensive to purchase(low skill labor) will be replaced first when it requires the most expensive version of AI(robots).

Some more insight on this is research into why Wal-Marts did not cause as much employment loss as feared, but instead removed "community leaders" from the area. Because Wal-Mart did all of it's professional services back at corporate headquarters, the area it moved into lost all of those people. The first line of true AI will be very similar to a WalMart moving into town.

bduerst• 12 years ago

There is some serious bias with this video.

For example, within the first few minutes they show this graph: http://i.imgur.com/IDXYI9Y.png

But the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows this: http://i.imgur.com/BPNyjM8.png

They've excluded other industries in forming their basis and it's clearly cherry picking to fit a narrative. I like the idea of a fully-automated utopia as much as the next person, but jobs are simply not going to disappear - they're going to shift industries.

Chinjut2• 12 years ago

Those graphs aren't in any conflict; of course if the proportion of workers in one industry goes down, the proportion of workers employed in some other industry must go up, mathematically (the BLS graph being percentage of the total workforce, rather than percentage of the total population).

I see your objection that to consider agriculture's decline indicative of the future of labor in general could be considered cherry-picking, but I think the video at least attempts to respond to this charge, explaining why its author does not feel other industries will "pick up the slack" in the same way in the future as happened in the past for jobs lost to automation.

[For what it's worth, while enamored of the dream of leisure-society utopia, I am quite skeptical of the author's assessment of the current state of progress on various forms of automation (and thus, a fortiori, of the projected speed at which such automation will take off as ubiquitous in the near future). But I did want to defend them against the charge of not even considering the idea that jobs will simply shift to other industries.]

burkaman• 12 years ago

What is the discrepancy you're seeing between those two graphs?

AndrewKemendo2• 12 years ago

Those graphs look pretty spot on

vanderZwan4• 12 years ago

He blatantly ignores the issue of energy constraints, more specifically the concept of embodied energy[0], which in the near future will be a very real very limiting factor that right now goes unnoticed because we're burning up energy reserves the earth has built up for hundreds of millions of years.

If we do look at this from an energy spending point of view.. this robot/AI revolution is gonna have a few interesting twists and turns along the way. One has to remember, the evolution of life has been a constant "economic" struggle for limited resources, with energy being the most limiting factor. Right now our economic development is largely based on a temporary liberation from that. However, that won't last, and energy-wise, life is far more energy-efficient than machines for most tasks[1] (I'm not entirely sure how this translates to robotics and computers, but for now I doubt they win). Energy spending also scales sub-linearly for living things[2], and I'm not sure if that holds true for machines.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_energy

[1] http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/03/how-sustainable-is-di...

[2] http://peakenergy.blogspot.se/2011/07/geoffrey-b-west-why-ci...

yen223• 12 years ago

"However, that won't last, and energy-wise, life is far more energy-efficient than machines for most tasks"

I really have to question this. Humans are notoriously inefficient at converting nutrition to usable energy.

bsgreenb• 12 years ago

Technology could be used to solve the problems that it's causing. E.g. better utilization of existing resources (self-driving cars), alternative sources of energy, and perhaps even space colonization.

SiVal2• 12 years ago

There is enormous energy "embodied" in uranium, too. If (when?) the time comes that we can no longer sustain our economies on fossil fuels, we will increasingly turn to nuclear power, which should last us for several more generations.

I'm not promoting this; I'm just predicting it. The sustainability of fossil fuels will be reflected in prices. More demand, political restrictions, and fewer new discoveries: prices go up; conservation, carbon sequestration/removal tech, and growing efficiencies supplemented by new sources such as fracked gas: prices relax. At some point (you say "very near", I say no one knows), hydrocarbon prices will go so high that the developed world will either have to voluntarily undevelop (not going to happen politically) or pay what it costs to solve some nuke problems and live with others, and we will continue to grow our use of energy.

The spread of robotics will proceed apace.

Ma8ee2• 12 years ago

life is far more energy-efficient than machines for most tasks

I'll be blunt and say that that is just bullshit for quite obvious reasons. Your [1] does not support the claim.

elleferrer• 12 years ago

There will be a bright future for our growing aging population.

pacala• 12 years ago

There will be a bright future for our capital owning population.

There is a weak correlation between old people and capital ownership and easy to mistake the two if inferring from the age axis, e.g. person X owns more capital at 50 than at 25. However, this doesn't generalize well when doing a cross section at a given age, see for example the average savings for a 50 year old, which is a meager $43,797 http://www.statisticbrain.com/retirement-statistics.

atemerev6• 12 years ago

Under capitalism, it's good to own capital, naturally. You can start by saving a $100.

TeMPOraL3• 12 years ago

That's why we need to move away capitalism before it's too late, if we want to have part in that bright future.

JeremyReimer• 12 years ago

If a panel of experts are evenly split on their opinions about the future of jobs, it seems to me that nobody really knows what is going to happen. It's one thing to point to how historically new technology created new jobs to replace those it displaced, but I get the feeling that this time it might be very different. All the rules go out the window when technological acceleration reaches a certain point. I'm not saying that we'll hit the Singularity and upload our brains into computers, but we might hit a sort of "economic singularity" where it no longer becomes economically viable to create new jobs. What happens then is very much up to our society to decide.

hvs• 12 years ago

Peoples' wants and desires are infinite. As long as there are things to desire, there will be jobs to do.

atemerev6• 12 years ago

True!

clusterfoo2• 12 years ago

So long as machines are not far more effective at building (and possibly some day even engineering) those things we desire...

jjoonathan2• 12 years ago

That's hardly a point of comfort if the new jobs all tend to be subject to the laws of "extremistan" (which seems to be the case for most artistic/creative/high-level ventures):

http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/21/welcome-to-extremistan/

If today you replaced half of the blue-collar jobs in our economy with jobs that had a 10% chance of paying 100x as much but a 90% chance of paying effectively nothing (10x the average productivity, woohoo) you would still have widespread starvation, revolution, and violence tomorrow.

Dewie3• 12 years ago

Is there any convincing data on this point? I know that it was an economist that uttered this theory, so I'll assume good faith when it comes to research effort or at least diligent argumentation on the behalf of this statement. But without anything to back it up, it just comes off as something it's proponents take for granted as a truism.

"Consumerism" (which goes beyond "stuff" and materialism, at least here) has been criticized by many in the western world. Even just leaving aside the argument that involves a finite planet sustaining ever-more needs and desires, I'm not convinced that the average human's needs and desires are infinite in any practical sense. It might be that "more is more", but I also suspect a sharp decline due to diminishing returns as one gets ever more needs fulfilled. How much better does spending 1,000 million on yourself feel than spending 100 million on yourself? Significantly better? I guess we could theoretically get to the point where everyone takes what is in today's currency billion-dollars worth of vacations by going on trips 'round the Solar System. But at some point, maybe before we're at the point of the Solar System joyrides, it just might not seem so exciting any more (travelling to the red wasteland of Mars might not be so exotic and exciting as it is today when a lot of people can and have already done it).

3pt141592• 12 years ago

This isn't true. If you could buy a robot that could do everything you could do for a $1 per day then there would be no more human jobs.

lilsunnybee2• 12 years ago

Workers capacity to fill those desires for people with capital is limited though. At what point does the majority of un-capitaled humanity become irrelevant?

sesteel2• 12 years ago

Economist Louis Kelso (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Kelso) was talking about many of these issues in the 1950's. He proposed the concepts behind Binary Economic Theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_economics) which helped usher into law the Employee Stock Ownership Program (ESOP). Whether or not you agree with it, it is certainly interesting to learn about. It isn't something that is widely taught.

Gravityloss• 12 years ago

That's excellent and very relevant.

"Kelso claimed that in a truly free market wages would tend to fall over time, with all the benefits of technological progress accruing to capital owners"

digitalengineer• 12 years ago

"Race against the Machine" is actually a good book about the topic: "In Race Against the Machine, MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee present a very different explanation. Drawing on research by their team at the Center for Digital Business, they show that there's been no stagnation in technology -- in fact, the digital revolution is accelerating.

"...digital technologies are rapidly encroaching on skills that used to belong to humans alone. This phenomenon is both broad and deep, and has profound economic implications. Many of these implications are positive; digital innovation increases productivity, reduces prices (sometimes to zero), and grows the overall economic pie."

http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-Accelerating-...

QuantumChaos• 12 years ago

From the point of view of classical economics, AI increases the productiveness of capital, and certain specialized kinds of labor (e.g. creating and improving AI).

While this increases the total output of society, it also increases inequality.

We already have in place mechanisms to deal with inequality, namely income tax and welfare. As the total output of society grows, we will be able to afford more generous kinds of welfare, until eventually we probably settle on a negative income tax scheme.

Note that a correctly designed welfare system wouldn't result in lots of people living on welfare, but rather everyone working fewer hours.

So I imagine that the future could be quite good, as long as our methods for redistributing wealth are able to keep pace with technological change (and there are some great examples to follow in the Western world, e.g. Scandinavia, Australia and NZ)

ztko2• 12 years ago

Why do you say that AI will automatically increase inequality? Not necessarily disagreeing but interested to hear your thoughts. I'm also wary of the impact that AI and robotics may have but am cautiously optimistic. While I do think that many jobs will be displaced by automation, I wonder if we'll also see a labor revolution or rather emergence of a new sector/type of jobs. E.F. Schumacher talked a lot about the dehumanizing nature of many jobs, and I think in a perfect world automation and robotics could take over the repetitive or dangerous jobs, freeing those workers to take on more fulfilling and important jobs.

altcognito• 12 years ago

I hope as you do but.... Small scale tools for small groups and individuals might be more flexible but will absoltuely be less prodigious/efficient than large scale factories and therefore margins and pricing will always put the little guys on the edges of the economy, thereby exacerbating inequality.

lilsunnybee2• 12 years ago

Automation increases the benefits of owning capital over providing labor, in ever growing proportions. The less people are needed to provide labor, and have any resources distributed to them at all, the more fruits accrue solely to capital-holders.

nabla9• 12 years ago

There was only two economists discussing the future of jobs :(

Robotics and automation are changing business from labor intensive to capital intensive. Wage share (share of wages from the GDP) has been going down since early 70's in all OECD countries. Automation will continue to increase that trend together with more competition from third world.

The job loss should be considered as one issue in downward pressure for wages caused by automation. Workers can compete with with automation by earning less. People from developing world will be able to compete against automation longer.

Removing cashiers and logistic workers with automation and more sophisticated vending machines might generate bigger dent to the jobs than self driving cars (They have vending machine in Italy that makes fresh pizza starting from the flour).

electromagnetic2• 12 years ago

My local grocery store has a fresh food department, that basically sells the cooked version of the stores prepared foods (so the pizza they sell is their pizza dough, their marinara sauce, their carton of cheese and their packs of pepperoni, all of which you can grab and make the same pizza right at home) and the store brand foods.

The thing I find amazing is that they have a couple of kids working barely above minimum wage essentially doing the task of a vending machine. Their most labour intensive task is rolling out the ball of pizza dough.

I won't be surprised to see grocery stores rapidly change to near full automation. We already have automated shipping warehouses, stocking store shelves is essentially the reverse process and with proper inventory monitoring a shelf would never be empty. Checkouts are already becoming self-serve in many places as it allows more "cashiers" to be open thus reducing lines.

Every job in a grocery store is shockingly automatable, from assembling the loads at the distribution warehouses, we're already talking automated tractor trailers for freight, automated fork lifts to load and unload, automated shelf stackers and self-serve cashes. Whose going to be working? Security, at least until we automate that.

I work construction, and its honestly a matter of time before I'm automated out of a job. I'm blessed by the fact that rough terrain is the main limiting factor, that I might actually stay employed longer than most.

The reason I see automation taking over is because we're approaching onsite manufacture of a lot of materials. It used to be just eavestrough, but now every form of steel roofing can be made on site. It's only a matter of time before someone starts mounting them on boom lifts and running them out in place for workers to just screw down. From there its only going to be a short time until the machine makes and screws the piece.

We're starting to see vinyl products that can be bent to make fascia, which means a machine can easily produce vinyl siding and accessories on site. So how long until they get mounted on a scissor lift and parked at one end of the wall and you can have a 50ft wall of seamless siding.

dqdo• 12 years ago

As a society, we need to ask ourselves two questions: (1) what is the purpose of work? and (2) what do people find valuable?

The premise of question 1 is that we should not work just for the sake of saying that we are working. Rather we should work because we are creating something of value for others and ourselves. I think that automation will have a profound impact on the economy by making certain types of work economically infeasible. But this is not necessarily a problem as long as people realize it and move on to work on more highly value areas. I believe that as individuals our desires are limitless and there will always be a demand for something. We just need to figure out what that demand is and work in that domain.

Overall automation will free us from many manual labor jobs and allow us to produce more art, poetry, mathematics, and science.

ewzimm• 12 years ago

I think we also have to consider conservatives who believe that there is inherent value in certain lifestyles that is independent of the products of those lifestyles. Automated labor will also free us to compete in whatever inefficient way we want. Just as garment technology has not stopped people from knitting, automated labor will still allow people to choose to be Amish.

Personally, I think we can find better things to do than work most jobs that exist today. We need to be open to the idea of perpetual changes in what we can and should do with our time.

__Joker• 12 years ago

One of intended or unintended consequence of the work is distribution of wealth. And the effects of the growing robotics and automation will be breaking this distribution. Per se, this should not negative, unless we are prepared for this.

AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs [pdf]

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