Robots are leaving the factory floor and heading for your desk – and your job

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/09/robots-manual-jobs-now-people-skills-take-over-your-job

by edward • 11 years ago

35 62 11 years ago

miralabs• 11 years ago

if everything gets replaced by bots, how will the economy run given that much of it is because of employees getting paid and in turn spending that money?

Roritharr• 11 years ago

More Bullshit Jobs.

jqm• 11 years ago

Indeed. That is the answer.

manigandham• 11 years ago

This is a major question that has no real answer but can potentially be a big problem. Robots and "the future" are great and all but what is in store for a society that has no work/purpose to do? Some of this stuff I feel requires a closer look with regulation and maybe some checks in morality and weighing what's the greater good.

CGP Grey had a decent video explaining some of the points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

DannoHung• 11 years ago

They'll start figuring out ways to kill people or otherwise prevent the next generation of non-capitalist class people from being born.

Compulsory sterilization for those unable to fulfill the needs of their children is a thing even today.

Well, that or we could destroy capitalism as we know it. But only dirty socialists want that to happen here on Hacker News.

toomuchtodo2• 11 years ago

I'm prefer the term "proud socialist".

Qantourisc2• 11 years ago

Well at this point "labour" is free. The only logical solution I see at this point is basically communism. The only work left will be politics/ethics.

But politics is what we should replace first in my opinion :D

Side effect of free labour: prices going down a lot.

adventured2• 11 years ago

No the labor isn't free, it's extremely expensive: R&D, installation, maintenance, replacement, operation, electricity, shelter, transport, insurance.

There will never be a scenario under any circumstances in which labor is free. It rests on a principle that guarantees that: energy will never be free, nor will all the other requirements such as materials, buildings, et al.

jjoonathan6• 11 years ago

Most interesting possibility: there will be an inflection point in the way we do production & distribution. The capital costs and inefficiencies of distributed production fall every day (internet to distribute knowledge, ever-advancing low-N fabrication technology) while the disadvantages of centralized production increase (capital is becoming more important, labor less important, meaning the average split of the proceeds is ever more extractive). At some point people on the bottom rungs will find it advantageous to work for "communes" instead of employers. Scare quotes because there's a lot of back-to-nature & peacenik baggage associated with the word "commune" that doesn't necessarily apply here -- it's just a different structure for production and employment that avoids the deleveraging effects of forcing people to compete for a spot in a shrinking global pool of jobs. The communes I'm picturing would make heavy use of industrial technology and compete against one another for people by advertising the benefits they offer vs the labor required for membership.

Less disruptive: mandatory reduction in workweek to restore supply/demand balance in unskilled labor market.

Costly but traditional: Basic/minimum income. Expansion of traditional welfare programs. Society creaks along having found the minimum handout required to keep people from doing something about the problem.

Cynical: civic unrest, police crackdown, rinse, repeat, spiral out of control. We've all seen the movies.

bsbechtel2• 11 years ago

There are lots of unknowns left in this world, and lots of exploring left to do. Space, curing disease, and finding additional sources of clean water and energy are all areas that require lots of work and human ingenuity. The challenge is getting people educated to do work in these fields and allocating capital properly. The unskilled labor market was known as the illiterate labor market 100 years ago, and we overcame that challenge, lifting those people up and educating them on how to read. The same can be done again, we just need to figure out how to do so.

SixSigma4• 11 years ago

We have a similar idea to those communes already, they are called "businesses".

Htsthbjig2• 11 years ago

Ownership of the robots that do things.

Robots will do most of our jobs. For example, a robot will cook for you, a robot will make the laundry, or grow food, in other words, it will be a slave.

No such of problem if you own the robot and whatever it creates.

Again, most Romans did not work, and society worked well in the end for the owners.

We don't need jobs, we need the wealth jobs create.

Al-Khwarizmi2• 11 years ago

At some point, we will have to accept that a society based on the assumption that everyone should find a full-time job just doesn't make sense anymore. In Europe this is starting to become obvious, as we have high structural unemployment (very high in some countries) in spite of the jobs we keep just for the sake of it. Jobs like gas station operators or supermarket cashiers are mostly unnecessary and just kept because people boycott machines while there is unemployment, telemarketing could probably be banned altogether with everyone being the happier for it if it weren't for the loss of thousands of jobs, etc. This applies even to some intellectually-demanding jobs (not all): speaking against my own interest as professor in a small university, I often wonder if all the teaching we do is necessary when any of my neighbors with a PC is a couple of clicks away from lectures by the top professors at MIT.

At the moment, the collective delusion that we need everyone to work 8 hours a day still stands, although we need more and more patches and stitches to keep it going (artificially-kept jobs, subsidies, etc.) It will soon become obvious for everyone that this has stopped being a valid paradigm, and then we will need to make some deep changes. If we don't want millions of people to starve even in fully developed countries, we will need to choose: either we all share the diminishing demand of working hours (i.e. we work significantly fewer hours a day, which is what has traditionally been done to compensate for the advances in technology) or we just accept that we don't need everyone to work and socially admit not working at all as a valid option, with a basic income. Curiously, both choices are traditionally associated with the political left (although some intelligent right-wing liberal economists, like Friedman, have embraced variants of basic income). The traditional right just doesn't seem to have an answer to this.

I'm personally in favor of basic income. Reducing the working week may work for a while, but as the set of jobs where humans are competitive gets restricted to very high-skill jobs only, it just won't do. As sad as it may sound now, there will be people who won't be able to do any really necessary job better than a machine, and we will need to feed them. Basic income will become a historical inevitability sooner or later.

SixSigma4• 11 years ago

Or ... we let a considerable portion of humans starve to death and reduce the population

1971genocide• 11 years ago

Speaking as an bum student :

Your job security is MORE guaranteed even more than before.

All the online MIT lectures still have a high bar in terms of understanding what they talking about.

You cannot just do quantum mechanics by watching some online videos.

The online materials ( Internet, Forums ), increases the size of your market.

Notice the exponential rise of cost of college education. Its driven because more people are understanding the importance of studying in Uni. You will be surprised by how many people in the world still do not know basic arithmetic, and are still growing potatoes.

Its the american idea that winner takes all but that is very false.

Its about raising the average.

If we took a time machine and transported you 200 years in the past your worth to society would be of less importance since people would think you are a crazy person or a witch.

As no one would understand your work, notation, etc.

This is why as more and more of the 3 billion people that still operate outside of the mainstream economy enter it the value of the people doing average work in the mainstream economy increases.

coldcode• 11 years ago

Someone has to program those robots.

falcolas5• 11 years ago

Probably not the secretary, accountant or dispatcher whom they replace. And for every programmer created to develop for these devices, there will be 10, 100, even 1,000 desk jobs which will vanish.

The best and brightest will find jobs as these programmers; the rest will be left to fend for themselves - to find another meaningless job with a tiny wage, so they can live.

This, as something of a tangent, is why I support basic income.

batou• 11 years ago

This is mainly why I write software...

IndianAstronaut• 11 years ago

The best and brightest will find jobs as these programmers;

People like William Shockley had the idea of paying people not to breed further. If our society really does hit a point where we simply don't have enough jo s, maybe his crazy idea is worth considering. Though hopefully without his original racist tinge.

deathy• 11 years ago

Someone has to program a specific task for a specific robot. Then that can be copied over almost instantly all over the world to thousands or more physical robots.

Making a copy of the software for a robot can be considered as cheap as sending an e-mail. Hardware is hard, but that might change too in the near future.

I'd be interested in how the economics will work, since we already sometimes have silly pricing for software/music/eBooks. Piracy/DRM for robots?

conanbatt• 11 years ago

If a lot of people went into programming, then it would become the new working class.

In places like India or Argentina, the median salary for programmers and computer scientists is really low(1/20th of theUS). Its only a stronghold for so long.

salmonellaeater• 11 years ago

But they note that the boundaries of what counts as routine and non-routine are moving all the time. It was once thought that driving was a skill so complex it couldn’t be automated only to see it turned on its head by Google and others.

What happens when programming becomes routine? I expect there will be a very scary moment when we all realize that someone with the right resources has discovered the right learning algorithm, before all of us plebes die.

Qantourisc2• 11 years ago

At that point in time, the robot understand the real world well enough to implement it in software and make your software and real world exceptions match up.

At this point it's basically "We welcome our computer overlords." and not only programming will be at risk.

danso• 11 years ago

A lot of programming has become routine. Think of all the programming involved to build even a 1/10th of the functionality of what can be created, literally, in a single command. Yet anyone who is acquainted to programming and web dev would say that running the Rails generator does not obviate the use of programming. And for those who are relatively experienced, this automation is a huge benefit, allowing the programmer to focus on designing more features and expending more of their creative energy on non-routine work.

In other words, as some programming tasks becomes routine, many more non-routine tasks become available to us.

vezzy-fnord• 11 years ago

Furthermore, the idea of the "one single algorithm" followed by extinction that the parent poster proposes is overly simplistic.

Assuming the sheer level of interconnectedness and computational ubiquity where every conceivable piece of matter used by humans out there has a bus or exports a remote API for most of these far-fetched AGI apocalypse scenarios to work, it's probably wiser to worry about crippling cyberwar way before AGI is even a consideration.

logicallee• 11 years ago

This shouldn't be downvoted, it's a legitimate question: what if non-programmer domain experts had sufficient tools to program whatever they wanted done. This actually has happened on the cloud: no small sized organization needs to set up their own servers. Server maintenance has become literally done by robots. (Someone wrote a script, the script does the maintenance and abstracts the server hardware away from you.)

In programming languages, there has never been a push toward easy programming. Everyone thinks it's great to make people do useless work to become an expert before being able to achieve anything. Elegant, simple, obvious syntax like Python that is suitable for beginners makes programmers scowl: to the point that they would like to require users to learn a new non-obvious meaning for a semicolon, and put it at the end of each and every instruction they write. (Just one of many, many examples, other examples being library and package management, nature of error messages, interfaces, API's, etc etc etc. Everything is about making things harder, to the point that you would be mistaken for thinking that "require user to spend more than 15 seconds interacting with documentation before achieving what is obvious and easy using our solution" is a design requirement.)

I would say that a lot of programmers could program their job out of existence if they wanted to.

Htsthbjig2• 11 years ago

"It could be said that the job of bridge toll collector was invented in San Francisco."

Romans did collect taxes for using a bridge 2.000 years ago.

There was the alternative of crossing the river yourself or hiring someone to do it(ferrymen).

I have been working in automation for a while. It is true that companies could fire more and more people and replace it with robots because they are less expensive.

It is also true that now people could compete with big guys much cheaper because robots will become dirt cheap. We are starting to see with 3d printers(that are robots themselves).

War has started, big guys are ok with people playing with toys in their basements, but want to make it illegal for small guys to compete with them.

This is what software and business patents are about. Only big guys, most of whom were in the past little guys , creating a legislation in order to make it impossible for newcomers to do with them what they did to others in the past.

mschuster91• 11 years ago

Currently, if a company disposes of all of its workers and replaces them by robots (minus a bit of left human staff for administration), the profits end up entirely in the pockets of the owners instead of getting redistributed to the working population.

Therefore, I believe that companies operating this way should pay a "robot tax"; the funds gathered by this tax must be redistributed as unemployment/social benefits or, better, as guaranteed income.

Otherwise funds will accumulate in the hands of a very few and not be put into any productive use - hell, just look at Apple's cash reserves, Apple alone could bail out Greece and even profit from it. Currently, the Apple money is just lying around and doing nothing productive at all.

maxerickson• 11 years ago

Unless it is literally sitting in a vault (it isn't), Apple's cash is being used for stuff. Here's an article about that:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/1246081-apple-does-not-have-...

I don't really get the idea of a robot tax, why make special rules for one particular type of productivity? Should accountants that use better software also pay higher taxes than less efficient accountants that use simple calculators and paper?

adventured2• 11 years ago

Even if you parked $200 billion in cash in a vault, its removal from circulation for any meaningful amount of time would generate a purchasing power increase for every other dollar holder.

The idea of a robot tax is not a rational one. It's based off of an emotional response to the fear of workers losing jobs and income. It will become a very loud, common argument over the next decade. It rests upon the incorrect notion that productivity gains through automation must inherently result in fewer jobs - when in fact, history has proven the exact opposite to be true (the industrial revolution being the overwhelming proof, but there were prior examples including the agriculture revolution). The most productive economies are always among the wealthiest for the median of people, and come in at the lower quarter of unemployment rankings.

jacquesm• 11 years ago

By that reasoning we should have been paying a 'robot tax' for a long time (and an outsourcing tax as well).

branchless• 11 years ago

land value tax.

jasode• 11 years ago

Therefore, I believe that companies operating this way should pay a "robot tax";

Well, we have a lot of "robots" in the house. We can listen to music via Compact Disc robots or mp3 iPod robots instead of employing human musicians to play live music. For example, composer Haydn's job was the "on call" music director for the family estate.

We also run take our C++ or Java code and let our personal desktop robots of file systems submit them to compilers to parse and execute the source code. The acts of "cl helloworld.cpp" or "javac hellowold.java" puts many human punch card operators out of work.

The elevator robots with automatic safety doors and algorithmic braking systems replacing elevator attendants manually closing the gates and guiding the elevator to the right floor. Robot freon compressors replacing ice delivery men. Etc,

I don't think people realize the oppressive nature of all the robot taxes we'd pay unless we listed every "robot" we interact with that replaced human jobs.

gress• 11 years ago

This is false. The Apple money is invested in other companies.

massysett• 11 years ago

"Will robots cause unemployment or create new types of jobs and increased leisure time for humans?"

Usual false dichotomy. It can be both, or neither. Robots are nothing novel. You can replace "robots" with "farm machinery" or "construction equipment" and ask the same question--except then, then answers are clearer, which makes the absurdity of this question apparent. Farm machinery probably created unemployment among farm hands. On the other hand, rich countries would not have the same standard of living they have today if half their labor forces were on farms.

chillingeffect• 11 years ago

Yup, typical dramatic headline technique.

Anyway, consumer's hunger increases with productivity increases. In 20 years, when even more robots than we already have are deployed, we will all want more complex, highly integrated stuff, requiring the same amount of employment to produce.

Anyone who doesn't believe me, think back to the days before interchangeable parts. We could live that way today and have lots of free time, but we apparently don't choose to. We have higher standards, want more diverse food, more complex entertainment, cleaner everything, fancier, more decorated houses, vehicles with more features.

Additional robots - on top of the ones of which we already have lots of - won't take away jobs, they will deliver us finer consumer items and health standards.

SixSigma4• 11 years ago

We exported the low standard of living to agriculture dependent economies in the third world and keep them there with free trade agreements.

EDIT: I'm not some ranting nut job

http://www.freetradedoesntwork.com/

IAN FLETCHER: Libertarians simply don't know their history. Take out a $10 bill and have a look at the portrait on it. Alexander Hamilton, founding father and intellectual architect of American capitalism, was a protectionist, and protectionism was American policy from Independence until after WWII.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-hughes/free-trade-does...

callum85• 11 years ago

"Will robots cause unemployment or... increased leisure time for humans?"

These aren't mutually exclusive.

jjoonathan6• 11 years ago

They don't have to be, but right now I'd argue that they are.

falcolas5• 11 years ago

So long as you need to work to provide yourself with food and shelter, they are. And since we as a society put so much value on how one contributes to society (i.e. their job), it's unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

uuilly• 11 years ago

One's fear of robots taking over the world is usually inversely proportional to the number of times they've debugged a brownout.

suttree• 11 years ago

Seems like now might be a good time to repost this:

https://medium.com/@somewhere/how-i-learned-to-relax-and-sto...

ekianjo3• 11 years ago

Always coming back to this silliness:

They all float the idea of basic guaranteed incomes for everyone, or tax credits to supplement low-wage workers.

Yeah, just like tractors made 90% of farmers permanently unemployed and they decided to take early retirement and spend time on the beach. It's so disappointing to see otherwise smart people ending up with these kind of conclusions.

tachyonbeam• 11 years ago

There is a difference though. Tractors can take away some farm jobs. Robots will become increasingly versatile. They'll eventually be able to take away all retail jobs, all the low skill jobs. Then eventually, higher skill jobs too.

What will be left for humans to do? Art? Sex work? We might be able to build robots to do that as well.

ekianjo3• 11 years ago

No difference whatsoever. Robots don't build themselves yet, and don't program themselves either, so you'll still need a bunch of humans to do that work in the back. Or you will have people who will be willing to pay more to have a human touch instead of robots.

Robots may become more versatile, but the day they can be as versatile as humans is not going to be in your or my lifetime. I hope you realize that, unless you are a member of the "Church of Singularity" :)

falcolas5• 11 years ago

just like tractors made 90% of farmers permanently unemployed and they decided to take early retirement and spend time on the beach

Early retirement wasn't an option for those farmers - they had to find a way to support themselves or their families. As a result they took up desk jobs (many of which are, in the broader view of things unnecessary) in the city. When those desk jobs go away, where will they go next? Into manual labor? That's pretty ripe for automation as well.

ekianjo3• 11 years ago

When those desk jobs go away, where will they go next? Into manual labor? That's pretty ripe for automation as well.

The service industry is not going to be replaced by robots anytime soon. Many jobs wont even be replaced because robots wont be economical enough to do so (hairdressers robots anyone?).

And the more you have robots out there, the more you will need maintenance people, industries to manufacture robots, and the whole lot of engineering that goes with it. Because, like it or not, we have not discovered a way to do super smart robots than can design themselves just yet.

And just like farmers got more education in order to do desk jobs, the ones at the lower end who get more educated to do the jobs that are needed, because you know, the job market is dynamic.

pharke• 11 years ago

You make it sound so peaceful and orderly and yet it was quite the opposite. Mechanization allowed farms to become more productive with fewer workers and in part led to the industrial revolution by creating a large labour pool that could be exploited by other industries both by eliminating existing jobs as well as by increasing the population. That process resulted in a loss of livelihood for a large portion of the population. The transition was largely to other forms of manual labour, mostly in manufacturing. This didn't happen smoothly, a notable example being the Swing Riots[1] in Britain.

To support your point, if we suffer a similar disruption in employment where the largest occupations start an irreversible downward trend, what sector is going to take up this burden? If you look at the statistics for the current largest employers[2] you'll see a list of jobs where automation has already made significant inroads. To name the three largest:

* Retail salesperson

* Cashiers

* Food preparation and service workers

I doubt that the other large employers on the list could absorb these workers. We just don't have that other large employer to take up the slack as when manufacturing absorbed and made use of former farm labourers. We also don't have the frontier of a new world to provide a second start for families seeking a better future. We've managed to paint ourselves into a corner with our current system and we can either sit here and suffer or bite the bullet and start over.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_Riots

[2] http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/area_emp_chart/area_emp_chart...

glaberficken• 11 years ago

When I saw this photo[1] in the article I thought: "What would happen if the customer kicked the robot really hard making it topple over?"

Sorry, i get these random thoughts in my head sometimes! :P

[1] http://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictu...

Robots are leaving the factory floor and heading for your desk – and your job

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