While this iteration of the product seems like it is not ready for prime time, a couple more years of improvements and you could have a machine able to reliably do the work of 2- 3 employees. There are many other industries where the current version of automation is clumsy such as in trucking or fast food but could look completely different in 5 years.
We are rapidly approaching a future where the entry level jobs like fast food / picking crops / warehouses can be automated away and even well paying ones such as truck driving / taxis could disappear or scale down drastically. We really should be having an urgent conversation on how to handle this and what the responsibility of those that own the means of production will be (if any) when this occurs.
Yang is obviously speaking about this and suggesting a BI as a band-aid / solution but I do think this should be getting a lot more attention that it is.
Exactly. In the 1980s people in America mostly got coffee from machines, in their home or office. Few humans were employed making coffee ("barista" was not really a job title in the 1980s and if you told people it would be in the future, they would probably think you were crazy).
I know what you mean, not sure why others are brining in spurious arguments.
Coffee shops in the 1980s were donut shops, mostly with truckers sitting around.
Well it's gone full circle now, as Starbucks (and a lot of other chains) use machines to make the espresso part of the drink at the touch of a button.
The barrister is still responsible for steaming milk, but I only assume that is because the sounds and smells of that are what make the coffee shop atmosphere.
Starbucks is selling an experience and it's central to this experience that there be a human putting a little TLC into what happens, whether it's a friendly greeting, a product recommendation, remembering your name and writing it on the cup, etc. The key is literally for there to be a human involved, because we get emotional satisfaction from a positive interaction with other humans.
There's nothing new in this discussion -- we've been automating away manual labor since the Industrial Revolution. We end up creating these human touch jobs with the resulting productivity gains (this is the transition from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, the value isn't in the muscle anymore, it's in the relationship).
In fact, thanks in no small part to capitalism's ruthless efficiency, loneliness and isolation are at record highs. The demand for a little TLC has never been higher.
We'll have fewer pizza makers but more people whose job is essentially to make you feel good.
From my experiences with coffee machines that produce cappacinos, the act of frothing milk seems to be one of those tasks that is much more difficult to automate than I would have thought. I've had a few that were passable, but none that are remotely as good as a decent human made one. The actual coffee on the other hand seems to be easeir to automate.
Fair enough, though a well adjusted Super-Automatic Espresso machine can reliably and reproducibly get you 90% of the way there hundreds of times a day. The majority of customers wouldn't be able to distinguish that last 10% anyway. Have a barista on hand to adjust the Super-Automatic daily, to account for changing bean freshness, and you're pretty much good to go.
How can a barista accomodate the variance in taste of a customer when pulling an espresso shot? The barista can dial in the pressure profiling, how long to pull the shot, and the grind size. For a given batch of beans, based on the type, level of roast, and age, there likely exists a sweet spot for those parameters that most baristas would agree upon. My understanding is that this is what baristas do anyway - adjust the machine for the beans available today, and then just crank them out all day long. A super automatic (or future versions) that's dialed in daily could achieve pretty much the same thing.
AFAIK, the barista will try to pull the best espresso out of the beans that they have. I'm not sure variance in customer tastes can be accomadated at this level, beyond a ristretto or an americano.
I never had a coffee from a Costa machine, but purely from the looks of it, and my experience with similar looking machines, I wonder: does this really produce espresso (as in say 16grams of fresh ground beans in, water at proper temperature and pressure of like 6 or more bars, yielding something like 32grams of beverage) or rather something which can best be described as 'strong coffee'?
Yes that's pretty much spot on. Making espresso with a manual lever machine isn't too hard too mess up, especially not in comparison with pressing one button or filter coffee. Yet it's apparently not that trivial to make such a machine, and keeping it working for hundreds of cups a day: prices of those are easily well over 10k$.
Sure but espresso varies, change the bean even the age of the bean and the recipe needs to adjust. Not to mention not everyone wants the same experience every single time, and not every person wants the same exact espresso that the last person had.
I think the key to this is to hide the robots from public view. Crank out pizzas, but not with the machine in human view. Have someone visibly handing them out. Let buyers assume the pizzas are made by artisans out the back.
Of course it can. One of the best machines for making coffee is the Technivorm Moccamaster (the thermo pot version). It's been in the market for decades, lasts for decades, it's easy to clean and together with a good grinder and fresh good beans, it produces a perfect mug of coffee every morning.
They were a thing in the 50s, 60s, 70s. Maybe more of an urban or hippie thing.
I know the term "coffeehouse" was a cultural touchstone in the US because it was used in titles of books published before the 80s. Sorry I don't remember specifically, but this "nothing existed until Starbucks" is ridiculous. Starbucks came out of somewhere. Coffeehouses came from Europe to the US, before and after the American revolution.
I'm tempted to just call out the absurdity of arguing this point, but instead I'll just air-drop a factoid: if you Google "https://www.statista.com/statistics/196590/total-number-of-s..., you'll find a graph showing approximately 1,650 specialty coffee shops in the US in 1991, and 31,490 in 2015.
I'd link directly to it but the site forces you to pay to see the graph unless you clicked on it from a Google search results page, which is bad and evil. I can't find a better source.
Starbucks has something like 15,000 locations in the US, half your latter figure. They could have a million stores and it still wouldn't mean they invented coffee.
Even in NYC, a coffee shop was mostly a Greek diner. While it may reveal my Irish working class roots, I never saw espresso made or consumed outside of an ethnic Italian restaurant in Arthur Ave until I was like 17.
Last week, I had a mediocre latte from a Starbucks at an I95 truck stop adjacent to a cotton field in North Carolina.
The major difference here is the economies of scale. When you have a centralized facility, you can afford to invest in expensive, high-throughput machinery because you make up for those investments with volume. However, centralizing necessitates some distribution costs, which in the case of many foods imposes some harsh constraints on ingredients and quality; there’s a reason those pizzas are all frozen, and don’t reaaaaaallly taste all that fresh. If the cost of these small-scale production robots drops low enough (achieved through smarter control rather than high-precision parts), you can remove the ingredient constraints and make a better product while capturing savings of automation.
If you want to model a city as a circle, you should probably instead use a radius where half of the area of the circle lies within that radius. When you halve the radius, you divide the area by four!
For example, the area of a circle with radius 15 km is about 707 km², while the area of a circle with radius 7.5 km is only about 177 km². If the population density by unit land area is evenly distributed, this circle will only enclose a quarter of the city's population, rather than half.
I think an interesting future limiting factor is air traffic from delivery drones. Right now it seems absurd to worry about that because there are no delivery drones flying, but if this method becomes popular, the presence of other drones in the airspace could limit delivery drones' mobility.
I'd like to add that the pi r^2 circle we know and love isn't the only one. It depends on the "metric" which in that case is Euclidean ("as the crow flies"). If you have have traffic rules, like only flying certain routes you get a different shape circle and a different area as a function of radius. A famous example is the "Manhattan" metric where you drive around on a square grid. In this case the "circle" looks just like a square and has area 4 r^2.
I feel like there's a lot fewer SKUs involved in store frozen pizza than varieties available from a takeaway pizza store, and the volumes are also a lot higher.
So the trick might not be "cheaply and reliably automate making a fifty thousand a day of the same pizza" , but in the detail of "cheaply and reliably automate making a pizza, composed of any combination of the basic ingredients, but only amortised over a hundred an hour for a few hours each day".
That's an interesting point. Does that mean you think a chain like Little Caesars, that offers about 4 types of "Hot N Ready" pizzas could basically automate away most of its workforce? If frozen pizza is possible, it seems really weird that no one has pursued this vigorously already.
> Does that mean you think a chain like Little Caesars, that offers about 4 types of "Hot N Ready" pizzas could basically automate away most of its workforce? If frozen pizza is possible, it seems really weird that no one has pursued this vigorously already.
Little Caesar's entire business model is "the lowest quality pizza at the lowest possible price". I assume they already have automated away most of their workforce; given a minimum wage, that's a key part of low prices.
I've only been to Little Caesars a few times recently, but in none of those experiences did I see more than a single young (hourly) employee running the entire operation.
“Machines have been making frozen pizzas for years, but Picnic’s robot differs in a few respects. It’s small enough to fit in most restaurant kitchens, the recipes can be easily tweaked to suit the whims of the restaurants, and — most importantly — the ingredients are fresh.“
From my extensive experience watching episodes of "How It's Made", frozen foods still often are hand-made. There are enormous assembly lines, heavily automated but with some steps done by hand. Especially those that involve irregularly-shaped, delicate, or sticky objects[0].
They did do an episode on frozen pizzas[1], and it is fully automated. But the techniques are difficult to adapt to making individual pizzas. Sauce, cheese, and toppings are sprayed all over the assembly line; the stuff that falls off is dumped back into the hopper.
They also did an episode on building pizza-making vending machines, and it does seem as if that was technology that was ready years ago.
> I see frozen uncooked pizza in stores. I feel like it existed 20-30 years ago too although I'm not sure exactly. Surely these are not hand made.
When looking into manufacturing of things I'm often amazed how much manual labor there often is involved as humans still are cheaper than construction and maintenance of machines doing complicated tasks. Also humans can be replaced simpler on failure than a machine and can simpler be adopted to varying products.
Specifically on pizza I only found this video: https://youtu.be/OMPFlbGXdFA where humans at least fix the salami slices. It doesn't show how they portion and form the dough, which I assume to be the complicated part.
> We really should be having an urgent conversation on how to handle this and what the responsibility of those that own the means of production will be (if any) when this occurs.
The problem with that is the people who would be in a position to make change don't feel the constriction of the immediacy of it and those who do are rarely invited to the table to talk.
Just change the ownership rules, the old concept of private property is clearly nonsensical for the same reason that the game of Monopoly was meant to be a warning, not a tutorial.
I don't mind people downvoting but you're not gonna tell me that people with the 18th century had timeless wisdom that allowed them to extrapolate to today's economy in the 21st century and appreciate all the problems of resource allocation, externalities, and financial markets. If your principles are implicitly predicated on infinite land and labor availability then its possible your understanding of economics is kinda primitive.
Our ancestors in the 18th century didn't have a time machine, but neither were they stupid. Our view of economics is going to look similarly primitive in 300-400 years. The notion that jobs, and thus work, was going to disappear has been a theme since the Industrial Revolution began, in the late 18th century. A treatise from that time period on how to avoid a depression is certainly suspect, but the crash in 2008 wasn't so long ago, so it's not our understanding of market forces is 100% either. (To be fair, our understanding did allow us to recover from it, in an imperfect way.)
We still don't have a better answer as to what the displaced will do for work than we did in the 18th century, other than "oh, we'll create new jobs". Not comforting, especially to anyone that simply can't afford to go to a coding bootcamp, or those that have gone and dropped out. They, too, deserve not to starve or die in the gutter. Thus, there is wisdom from the 1800's that is relevant, even today.
Sure, perhaps we will solve by shrinking ourselves down like the ants did to effectively expand our territory while reducing our footprint. It's clear that our current large size is economically inefficient.
"entry level jobs like fast food / picking crops / warehouses"
These things are very hard to predict. We have a long history of such "automations" and the outcomes have been often unpredictable. Effectively, "automation" is interchangeable with any labour saving tech. Production lines, tractors, etc.
Agriculture basically did shed jobs due to the green revolution and mechanisation. Fewer farmers grew the food and people moved to towns. You could argue that towns pulled agricultural workers in rather than automation pushing, but machines replaced people regardless.
Industrial manufacturing, OTOH, increased output and added jobs to the sector for hundreds of years despite labour saving "automation" progressing constantly.
It's only recently that manufacturing employment plateaued. Global trade and other shifts have caused some severe job shedding locally, but even that is only in the last 30-40 years. The long term trend was more automation and more jobs.
Computers landed on every desk very fast. Typists, mailrooms, secretaries and other such "entry" jobs became mostly obsolete. Still, the "white collar" and administration sectors experienced massive employment growth since the 80s.
Think of colleges, with their ever rising admins/academics ratio even as "administration automation" technologies became available.
When it comes to something like automating restaurants it's so dependant on "consumer preferences" and food culture that I wouldn't hazard any guesses.
Prepared food isn't a commodity and restaurants aren't driven by efficiency. There's no hard, purely rational reason why one burger is worth €3 and another is worth €20.
McDonald's us extremely efficient, in terms of labour cost per bite, but most newer competitors compete by being less "efficient" and more "artisinal."
Couldn't agree more. It is highly unpredictable. We tend to get antsy about the entry level jobs and quickly jumping to some conclusion where if you're currently doing the toppings at Domino's pizza by hand and Domino's replaces you with this machine, that you suddenly will have nothing to do but go home and lay on the couch all day while being unemployed.
There are many things someone in such a situation may decide to do next and that "next" thing for that person is what could be unpredictable. And if tens of thousands of these people were replaced over a several year period, each of them making individual decisions about what to do next, it is hard to say where they all end up. We simply don't know.
On the other hand, thinking creatively is often discouraged at the majority of bigco white collar jobs and executives would gladly replace an expensive person with cheaper software doing the same task if they could do so without tripping on labor laws.
With the amount of mind numbing easily automated work I’ve done in my career I wonder if they don’t realize or there is some kind of tacit social contract not to cause mass unemployment. Because companies could replace like 50% of office workers if they were willing to redesign their processes.
Mmm nope, they could replace the workers with more expensive programmers. So it gets into a question of how many office workers can you afford for the price of one programmer. Often not at all obvious, especially as programmers can often trend towards huge inefficiency in enterprise/corporate environments. ROI of business IT projects is not always positive you know.
Pft, please. Back when I was trying self employment in shareware games, the first thing I wrote was an AI to compose music for me. I can’t write music.
In Japan, robots to aid with elderly care are being developed[1]. Probably won’t eliminate all elderly care jobs but likely will reduce the amount required. Japan is facing worker shortages and doesn’t like immigration, hence robots. I personally wouldn’t like to be looked after 100% when I’m old by a robot, but it will be interesting to see how it plays out in Japan. The rest of the rich world will face similar problems in the future.
I've heard it said like this: AI will take over repetitive manual and repetitive cognitive tasks. The only thing required is that the task be repetitive (so plumbers are safe (every house is different), but truck drivers and radiologists maybe not).
>While this iteration of the product seems like it is not ready for prime time
Yeah just looking at it I couldn't stop myself from imagining how nasty it's bound to get after getting put to work full time. Too many nooks and crannies and it would need to be easy to tear down and put together again for cleaning.
you do know we've been replacing humans with machines since the Industrial revolution, right? These people that were replaced didn't just go off and die. They found other more advanced work, allowing our civilization to produce more wealth allowing all of us to be richer. The same will continue.
Most people who use this argument forget about the scale and duration of this transformation back then and now. Back in 1800s there were merely ~1 billion people, then in 1900s it was ~1.6 billion. Lets say even if 50% of people back then lost jobs you had to find new jobs for 'only' ~0.8 billion people and you had more than 100 years for that transition. WWI and WWII at the beginning of 20 century 'helped' to reduce population and keep other busy to rebuild what got destroyed during the war. I guess we would like to avoid that scenario.
Now we have 7.7 billion people and it is estimated we will have 10 billion by 2050. Pace of current technical development is much faster than in 1800s and education for acquiring new skills probably takes even longer than in 1800s.
Will we be able to hypothetically reskill 5 billion of people in the next 50 years? Personally I doubt it.
Absolute numbers are a distraction. Retraining 1 person in a population of 10 has the same net demands as retraining 100,000 in a population of 1,000,000. Human society is massively parallel by default.
I think most people don't imagine properly the world as automation increases at all levels.
The first expectation is perhaps that mass unemployment would abide; clearly we don't have mass unemployment in most places (most of the world has a relatively high employment), so the phenomenon must not be occurring or there's the oft-mentioned effect of workers moving to high level tasks.
Since Quantum Supremacy was en vogue, let me coin another term: Robotic Supremacy. That is when a robot (i.e. some kind of automatic machine, not necessarily a humanoid robot) will be able to perform each and every task a human can do more economically. Humans will become unemployable. My hypothesis is that Robotic Supremacy is still far away (maybe a century); and also that this milestone doesn't matter as much as it appears.
The scenario of unemployability is highly unlikely; there's almost always something you can get a human to do that'll pay their food and shelter (we're fantastic machines evolved for billions of years; robots are still far away from domination in many niches). The question is how much this person will earn -- perhaps increasingly less, not more; because it has more competition and the tasks are not as essential as before. So a natural manifestation would be rise in income/wealth inequality. That's precisely what we're seeing. If left unchecked, most places will see a spiral of a tiny elite concentrating all wealth.
Except good chunks did go off and die because they couldn't adapt, or because they were easy to exploit. (E.g. child workers). Or lived in subpar housing due to urbanization, which made perfect breeding grounds for typhoid, cholera and assorted fun.
You can't just handwave those changes away by saying "ultimately, they found other jobs". They didn't. There were entire generations that suffered. At some point there was an equilibrium, but it was far from instant, and "advanced" work doesn't help the person displaced.
They didn't die out, but they died in much larger numbers, because the industrial revolution lead to an exploitation of child labor. Combined with non-existent protections, a lot of them did die on the job.
Children started to be children for longer because labor unions helped end the practice. That was a good chunk of time after those jobs changed, and it wouldn't have happened without active pushback. (The AFL pushed for an end for child labor under 14 in 1881, and it took until 1938 to get the Fair Labor Standards Act)
The idea that paradigm-shifting transitions somehow don't affect anybody because "there will be new jobs" shows a stunning unawareness of historical precedent, or how capitalism in general works.
"because the industrial revolution lead to an exploitation of child labor"
I'm skeptical of the idea that before factories, farms didn't use child labor. Isn't the practice of closing school during the summer kind of suggestive?
Anyway, you seem to be arguing the opposite of the previous post, that there were more jobs and this was bad. I thought the issue was there were fewer jobs and that was bad.
What does "education wasn't a given for the poor" mean? That's such a vague statement I don't see how you can link it to anything. Education can mean grammar school, high school, college...people in the past, who were farmers, were generally poorer and less educated. However, less educated doesn't mean no education. My grandfather was a farmer in the 19th (and early 20th) century, and no, he didn't have a college degree, but that doesn't mean he never went to school or was illiterate.
Linking to a google query like that is a step below even Wikipedia. If you have a source you consider authoritative, why don't you provide that. I'm not going to read the clickbait garbage in those hits.
"Journal of Inquiry & Action in Education, 5(1), 2012" was a top link for me, apologies for not picking that, but I figured Google has something for every bias.
> Except good chunks did go off and die because they couldn't adapt
Maybe that's a feature, not a bug. It's worthwhile imagining how life might be impacted in the present if a sizable portion of the homo genus has not died off over the past ~2.5 million years because they couldn't adapt. How would humans today handle the continued co-existence of homo austalopithecus, habilis, erectus, etc over those ~2.5 million years up until the present?
> You'll sing a different tune if you find yourself on the wrong end of that equation.
(We all, eventually, end up on the other side of the equation.)
Given that resources are indeed not infinite, there must be a limit to this planet's capacity to sustain human beings. Most governments don't seem to want to limit childbirth and instead _encourage_ it (more babies == more taxpayers).
Once that limit is exceeded, barring technological advances, what other outcome can there be?
Right, that's historically been true for humans because we are pattern recognition workhorses.
We have some other examples worth considering though, like literal workhorses. Once the engine came around, horses became inefficient and were relegated to shows and races. With AI able to do superhuman pattern recognition, it's only a matter of time before humans also become a luxury, as they're no longer needed for traditional work.
In a lot of data science focused places, like mine, people are more or less researchers. There is no repetitive work, and everyone must show creativity and autonomy. You can't automate that.
Uh, yes you can. Robots are already being used for battlefield simulations coming up with moves humans couldn't think of. They beat humans in Go by finding better moves that's entirely creative. They write news articles, paint, create music, and help in diagnosis of disease. Humans are all going to be replaced soon enough. We'll be serving AI masters or wiped out within 50 years tops.
AI's permutate artwork. They don't feel, they don't assign or derive meaning. They don't feel, they aren't inspired, they aren't moved.
They don't derive joy from the beautiful, despair and disgust from the loathsome, awe at the sublime, and dissolution and insignificance in the face of the all encompassing.
They don't dance with glee at a bright and bouncy tune, they aren't struck to the edge of tears by the melody of wind through a forest of bottles. They know and can reproduce patterns that are labelled for them, but they don't get it, ya dig?
They don't relate or understand the soul of Jazz, the message of Blues/Rock and Roll, the Struggle and perseverance evoked by a good fight song.
They can't appreciate the byproducts of their work, or "make 10 more, but different."
They can't appreciate, display, or develop technique; they cannot perform. When composing, they generate content based off of higher-dimensional correlations between words as encoded through syntax and grammar, but a poem generated by a machine is not but a permutation of words ejaculated forth, with no rhyme, reason, or correlation to the world at the time; even being removed from the whimsy of it's programmer.
Art is a tricky thing. It is what it is because a human found that at that time in their life, in the details of their personal situation was the right time for that work to be born forth into the world, in all it's symbolism, ugliness, beauty, sublimity, and to affect all those who gazed upon it.
Think hard about the significance of that. That man's mortality factors into the fruits of his labor; something a machine, deriveable from a prescription can never truly know or imitate.
It isn't humanistic chauvinism...merely that as the clock is not the first cause of time, so the AI is not the creator of the Art it produces, if what it produces can even be truly called Art.
It may not always remain that way. Right now though, it is.
Art isn't born in the mind of the creator. It's born in the mind of the consumer.
People are moved everyday by music created by machines. That's enough to put artists out of business because the output is the same even if the input is different.
So you see art as an emotional response in a bottle?
I never really accepted that. Otherwise, the response I've gotten to a hypothetical man under a rock perfectly replicating the Mona Lisa without having witnessed or heard of it before would be as great and worthy of celebration of artistic work as the original; many of more artistic inclinations I've spoken to balk at the very suggestion. Man that was a fun day in Philosophy of Art class.
Most of the artistic I've gone back and forth with do not see the end product alone as Art, but also the process, from ideation, to execution, and finally display. The reason behind the creation of that particular work and not another even has a place in the Art-Ness of the work-of-art.
Just because something is moving to someone, somewhere can be said to be necessary, but not quite sufficient to bestow the quality of being Art. It's a rather perplexing problem to discuss. I tend to approach it like linguists do language. Descriptive, not prescriptive. Though I haven't mingled in artistic circles recently to reconduct a census with regard to generative music/art. Most of those I do run into though tend to be non-committal on the subject and just treat it as just what I've described. A pleasant, and surprisingly novel sensation from an unexpected origin.
Given the fact that the economy is at full employment and that there are more job openings than people looking for a job, I'm not too worried at the moment.
> Given the fact that the economy is at full employment
The economy might be at full employment, but people are often underemployed, getting few hours, and shit wages. Most people are employed but many don't make enough to support even just themselves on their earnings let alone a family. Real wages have barely increased since the 1970s while costs have risen. We've had the first generations of Americans who are worse off than their parents. I wouldn't say our current situation was at all encouraging.
I don't get why we use this term. You're either employed or you're not. Just because you got an education in something that is no longer valued by society doesn't mean you're entitled to a job doing whatever you're educated to do.
Society rewards those that provide some good or service that is wanted/needed.
Furthermore, employment by others is not the only option. You can also work for yourself (except when the state forbids it through licensing and permits)
We have a term, "employed", for people who work and earn a living wage.
We have another term, "unemployed", for people who have no work.
We need a third term, "underemployed", to describe people in between those two situations, who have some work (so they're not "unemployed") but nonetheless do not earn a living wage (so counting them as "employed" is disingenuous).
Correct me if I am wrong but doesn't under employed often also refer to when you have part time / casual work but want full time employment? You might not be able to survive of what your earning but your not part of the Unemployment statistics?
Where are you getting this? From the govt statistics that don't include people who have dropped out of the workforce entirely? The same stats that don't differentiate between a salaried career and scraping by in the transient gig economy?
I'm extremely skeptical. Can we afford to just dismiss all these legitimate concerns because, "the govt told me everything is okay"?
Seems like a poor way to rationalize avoiding planning ahead.
The number of open positions says nothing about the nature of the work. I can open a position for a doctor to work for me for $100 a month and while it's an "open position" it will not be and could never be filled and yet it's still a job opening.
In addition some people are working multiple jobs to barely survive so again there is no defined relationship of number of jobs to number of workers or whether that's a good or a bad thing.
I would agree with you if wages had risen enough that workers could work one job and have their needs met but that won't happen any time soon, especially with robots on the horizon. The only thing that makes sense is to plan ahead.
I think that caused by social separation. Today people have hundreds or even thousands of "facebook friends" but not one where they can sleep on the couch when they are down.
Also consumerism. Lots of people have the latest and greatest iPhone and OLED TV but don't have 6 months worth of savings(I think that's the minimum you should have) in the bank.
It's a lot harder to find your next job when you stressing because you are going to be evicted.
> These people that were replaced didn't just go off and die
This is exactly what's happening in every large metro area today. Larger amounts of work are being by fewer, highly paid individuals using technology. This drives up rents and fuels the homeless crisis everywhere.
You do know that the rate we're replacing humans with machines far outstrips what we've previously seen, right? As in, this time around it's happening much quicker and is much more widespread compared to the first time around. That people and legislation are already struggling to adapt which will ultimately cause far greater chaos, market disruption and unrest than we've ever seen.
We as technologists know better than anyone how quickly new tech can sweep across the industry. Once the tech/product/process is figured out, scaling it is trivial in comparison. This is the same song and dance but 100x as loud and 100x as fast.
I don't know that actually. Can you please prove it with data?
I studied the industrial revolution quite extensively at school and I follow AI research today, reading individual research papers.
It's not clear that we're going through anything even close to as disruptive as the industrial revolution. In fact I'm sure we're not. Absolute numbers may be higher because the population is so much larger, but as astutely pointed out elsewhere in this thread, civilisation is massively parallel by default so it's proportions that matter.
And when we get to that, we're not seeing massive job displacements caused by automation. If anything we should be asking why not: why is the software industry apparently so unexpectedly bad at reducing employment? This isn't just me waffling by the way. Economists say (caveat emptor) the same thing:
Productivity growth i.e. the rate at which machines replace people, has been falling over the decades. The spike you might expect from massive automation is not only not present, the data shows the opposite - we are getting less bang for our technological buck, it's a long term trend, and economists are worried/puzzled by it. If productivity growth continues trending towards zero, what it means is that our society is getting no automation benefits whatsoever. It means the only way to produce more stuff is to use more people!
We can join economists in speculating as to the reasons, but either the data is flawed, or we're in a time of unprecedented job stability, despite the froth and hype around AI (whose impact is so far extremely limited).
This is automation on a scale that we have not seen before where machines are actually capable of decision making and precision work. This is combined with a massive concentration of wealth at the top. Also there are a whole lot more people now. Potential long term could be colonization of the moon / mars. Plenty of unskilled labor required and opens a new frontier.
It's not at all obvious to me that colonization of another planet, if we're ever in a position to actually undertake it, will involve "plenty of unskilled labor".
Agreed. Pretty much the opposite, actually - shipping, housing, feeding, etc. a bunch of humans is obscenely expensive in the context of space exploration. You're far better off sending a bunch of robots with a couple mechanics to keep them running. Additionally, I'm pretty sure that by the time we're in any kind of position to do actual colonization efforts, automation effects will have long since taken their toll.
Consider that universal high school, labor union-friendly laws, and labor day were government responses to the last industrial revolution. How will our society change for the next one?
> These people that were replaced didn't just go off and die. They found other more advanced work ...
This almost never happens in real world. The next generations do benefit that. But the current generation is fucked.
You wont retrain 40> years old truck drivers into anything that will pay even remotely the same. Most of them will be stuck doing minimal wage jobs somewhere, and be happy that they have them.
(of course there are exceptions)
I have seen that play out in ex communist countries, where whole swaths of jobs became obsolete over few years.
It's been almost 30 years, newer generations have moved on somewhat, but there are still a lot of people that were better off before.
Industrial revolution was great in general, but its effect on people also gave rise to communism (i am not defending it).
I mean we already have way better automation for pizza making and at huge scale and efficiency -- that's what frozen pizzas are with few exceptions. And some of these are great; safeway brand rising crust pizza is pretty damn good and can be had for as little as $3 a pie.
The machine in the video kind of sucks. Slow, one pizza at a time, poor control of amount and placement of toppings, poor consistency, lots of waste with toppings flying off everywhere.
I don't think machines are going to be putting pizza places out of business. The margins are already quite high, and paying one guy to sling pies at a restaurant and get high quality product isn't a huge expense.
Maybe a place like little Caesars would use this tech but local pizza joints? nah
Have you ever actually picked a crop? It's an extremely complex problem. For the bulky crops (s.a corn) we've had machines for decades. For fruits... we're decades away from automation.
Fruit picking robots are being worked on, strawberries if I remember correctly. Search for strawberry picking robot. It’s possible thanks to advances in computer vision.
Yes, but there will be fewer jobs. That's a problem.
The industrial revolution removed a large number of jobs (basic manufacturing skills) and created a load more (advanced manufacturing skills / logistics / etc.).
There is no expectation or even hope of a new class of jobs coming out of the high-power automation that we are liable to see in the next couple of decades.
Last wave of automation took out millions of manufacturing workers. Instead of retraining to become software engineers they largely went on disability and then as a cohort started dying of drug overdoses and suicides at higher than normal rates.
Most of the new jobs created in the past 10 years are temporary / gig jobs without benefits, nothing like the manufacturing jobs lost.
So, great opportunities for some, but many will suffer.
Just as a side note, but I wouldn't in any way idealize the manufacturing jobs that were lost. A lot of them were so horrible that the new hires quit in the first day (often just not coming back from a break). I'd probably prefer to be an Uber driver than to work in a car factory.
The difference is that automation is now targeting skilled, social, and technical work. Traditionally they've been aspirational fields of work due to their resilience. Limiting capacity to enter these fields is only going accelerate the destruction of the middle class.
No I disagree. This is not "progress", this is "technological progress". We need to make sure that we don't leave older people behind, and we don't pull the rug from under our childrens feet. Of course we should not stop technological progress, but we all (big businesses, governments, everyone) need to think and plan ahead on what will happen to the people. I believe that there is a statistic that 1/2 or 1/3 of USA citizens have at some point worked on Macdonald's. I remember a piece of news about a robot burger flipper and discussion here on HN a few months back, and people were writing how working on Macdonald's paid for college or what have you. Eliminating fast food jobs is depriving important resources from the youth. Who will be paying for that?
We cannot just move forward and leave the people behind. Capitalism should try to care for more than jist the few.
I do state that we should never halt technological progress. All I was saying is that while progress moves forward, we (as a species) should ensure that we don't just consider the shareholder value of decreasing Payroll costs, but we should also consider that the hell will happen to those thousands/millions.
This is not a threat, this is the reality. If we take the food from the table, and exclude them from retraining etc, then at some point they will go hungry and will seek food that is in other tables.
This is already happening to a small degree in some countries. Let's make sure it won't happen to a higher degree and in more countries.
> We need to make sure that we don't leave older people behind
old people can now summon rides on their phone and be out and about instead of being home-bound.
> and we don't pull the rug from under our childrens feet
Everything we build, our children will inherit. It will be their responsibility to improve upon what we leave them. It's not like older people end up taking these technological improvements with them to their grave.
There are more jobs than just fast food. People did jobs that weren't fast food before McDonald's existed and people will do jobs that aren't fast food once McDonald's is fully automated. Right now, on the Internet, you can learn so many things for free. The necessity to learn a skill that pays the bills will drive people to learn skills that can be used to provide goods and services others are willing to pay for. All that is necessary is to open your eyes and look around and see what people are willing to pay for.
When I moved to the SF Bay Area in 2011, I spent ~8 months living on about $32 a day for all living costs including housing. That's under the US poverty line and well below the SF Bay Area poverty line. I bought rice, beans and other dry goods in bulk and had my daily meal costs averaged around $2 a day. People need to learn to budget better.
Also, old people are not necessarily only use-less consumers. Giving them Uber is nice, but if they can and want to offer/produce it would be a waste to put them in the sidelines just because they can't use the latest technology.
Four year degrees need a re-evaluation. A lot of alternative entry level jobs that are hard to automate exist but they have a reasonable degree requirement. A two year job specific degree and a restructuring of higher education is needed.
Why only re-evaluate non-high school degrees? Career oriented education could start significantly early. There's no real reason why 16-18 year olds couldn't already be appropriately skilled to work in many fields save individual maturity.
My big priority would be ensuring continuing access to education. Schooling that pushes certain students toward skilled blue collar work seems potentially a little classist if folk aren't given the appropriate opportunities to achieve something else, if they want it, throughout life.
How is the AI revolution different from the industrial revolution(s)?
A farmer in 1700 would have seen the 1880 machine and said « We’ll all lose our jobs »... and he’d be right. Also « and money will be centralized in the hands of the factory owner ». He’d be right too. « We’ll never be able to make everyone learn ti read and work in a desk job ». Right again. We just raised everyone’s education, and also raised everyone’s IQ in levels that would seem impossible to a 1700 farmer. We’ve also have the underside: poverty for those who can’t get office jobs and socialism to try level the field.
Similarly it seems to us like we’ll all lose our jobs to AI, wealth will be concentrated by 99% more and we’ll never be clever enough to make each of us an AI scientist. That’s what it seems today. You can call to regulate but it’s hard to know in which direction. After all, we had to spend 2 centuries of wars and famines till we figured a merely stable system, and even today, we wouldn’t stand upright if we didn’t rely on Chinese workers being poor. So all the regulation in the world didn’t suppress any problem, we just put it out of sight.
I see no difference between the scale of the AI revolution and the scale of the industrial revolution.
1) Speed. The industrial revolution took place relatively slowly, over the course of 60-80 years (2-3 entire generations). Once a tipping point in automation is reached, it will very likely happen extremely quickly in our connected, easy-capital, globally competitive economy.
2) Reach. The industrial revolution primarily impacted manufacturing and to some extent farming. Today's automation is attacking almost every single major industry on the planet at the same time. Farming, manufacturing, finance, construction, food service, you name it. If your warehouse picker job gets automated away it's unlikely you'll be able to go get a job at Burger King because those jobs will be automating at about the same time.
3) New economies. The Industrial Revolution led to the industrial economy, which enabled the service/information economy. It's unclear what new economy is waiting beyond automation for the workers who lose out. Entertainment economy? Personal servant economy? What's left if most of the manual labor jobs and a good chunk of white collar jobs all go away within a generation?
> How is the AI revolution different from the industrial revolution(s)?
Just to add to what everyone else is saying, the first industrial revolution led to one tiny island conquering a 24% of the planet while simultaneously their historical enemy and immediate neighbours controlled an additional 7.7%, and then a newly unified and industrialised nation [1] managed to drag both of those two into a war that killed 16 million people and which stalemated against those two superpower empires for a few years until America joined in, so even if the AI revolution is basically equivalent to the industrial revolution, I’d still say it’s not going to be fun for quite a lot of people.
I assume the counter-argument is that this time change is happening faster since it's driven by intangibles like code. It took a long time for the effects of the first industrial revolution to spread out because transportation was slower, the world's communication infrastructure was not as developed, etc.
But honestly, I could see both sides of the argument here.
The best thing we can do is to allow the labor market to be more dynamic. This means reducing barriers to entry, including licensing, employer-mandated benefits, minimum wage, etc.
Placing minimum employee costs upon an employer or minimum qualifications upon an employee both have the same effect: reducing the ability of entry-level employees to get work. Either the jobs don't exist due to minimum costs, or the labor that qualifies demands too high a wage.
A highly-restricted labor market doesn't make any sense in an ever-changing global economy.
First, I get there's a lot of people supposedly looking for work but I've spent a solid 20 years now in a "we are constrained on labor" environment across a few industries. I think this is a problem more of what work people are able or willing to do rather than the existence of jobs themselves.
Second, the concept of "means of production" is now not just about the factory the workers work in but the factory that makes things on it's own. We have to accept that if someone else owns something, if they have property rights over it, it just isn't mine no matter how much I want it. If I own a breadmaker machine and it makes me bread anytime I want, I still don't owe anyone my bread no matter how much they want or need it. They can ask. They can't take.
A person might ask "why can't they take? what goes wrong when they have a right to your bread?" The answer is that without strong property rights, we fight over who gets to own eachother's stuff instead of making new stuff for ourselves. Making new stuff instead of trying to take someone else's stuff is how we have more stuff. And before anyone says we don't need any more stuff; If you don't need any more stuff, don't take anyone else's. I disagree; I want more stuff. I want a space ship. But I'm not going to try and take bread from another or a space ship from another. I'll have to find a way to buy or build my bread or space ship.
Except the strawman of abject simple property rights falls apart when you acknowledge that taxes, especially sales / capital gains / etc, are the absolute and certain forfeiture of your property - your money - to the government, to almost exclusively be given to others. Societies are erected on a foundation of the seizure of private asset for public benefit. If you own the breadmaker machine, what is the difference between the seizure of bread and a 100% tax on your revenues of said bread?
We are rapidly approaching a future where the entry level jobs like fast food / picking crops / warehouses can be automated away and even well paying ones such as truck driving / taxis could disappear or scale down drastically. We really should be having an urgent conversation on how to handle this and what the responsibility of those that own the means of production will be (if any) when this occurs.
Yang is obviously speaking about this and suggesting a BI as a band-aid / solution but I do think this should be getting a lot more attention that it is.