I don't think it's fair to just wave away such concerns. Automation lowers the number of people necessary to create something. This shrinkage of the available labor pool only happens faster with computer automation. The way the world currently works, this is a problem - people need jobs for money.
As entire classes of skilled labor evaporate, there will be significant societal implications. There is also the problem of the significant centralization of power and money that comes with a future where AI performs the work.
I don't think people see automation per se as a negative. Rather, they are skeptical of our ability to restructure our society, and fear the social impact of automation in that context.
I mean, what happens when AI replaces programmers? When a designer can "write a program" just by telling a computer in natural language what he wants to do? Not only will most of HN be out of work, but many of our hobbies will be irrelevant. Who will read a blog post about Rust making it easier to write correct concurrent software when some AI is going to handle that much better than a human ever could?
In the short term this is not something to fear, but in the long term it is. There is a qualitative difference between Turing-complete and non-Turing-complete automation.
Imagine what the great Chinese outsourcing wave has done to the West's labor market, but without the normal economics of labor factoring into it. As more and more has been outsourced to China, Chinese wages have risen. That would not happen with automation. Instead you'd have the hyper-deflationary economics of high tech, with "wages" effectively dropping geometrically with volume.
In the end we will face two choices:
(1) Abandon the puritan work ethic and its liberal forms such as the labor theory of value.
(2) Create a future that looks like "The Hunger Games."
A lot of that subconciously assumes the doomsday outcome - machines and automation will sweep people aside, and then the reasoning becomes circular.
> At a certain point we're automating new tasks faster than humans can learn them.
That assumes the pace of automation is increasing, but similar concerns have been around for a long time, going back to the industrial revolution. Read Dickens or HG Wells (though a specific cite doesn't come to mind), or look at the 1927 silent film, Metropolis.
But right now businesses can't find enough employees.
> Say it takes 1 year to train a human in something, and 1 year for a robot/AI. well it might take 1 year for the first AI, but copying software is easy. Training the next person takes another year. Even if it's parallelized and you save some time, the cost of training the marginal additional person is was larger.
That's how automation works. Then the people go on to the higher skilled jobs that the machines can't do, including designing, manufacturing, operating, and servicing the machines. Cars made the entire horse industry redundant; calculators and computers put lots of human calculators out of work.
Yet today, with a much larger population, employers can't find enough workers.
If things like that didn't happen, then productivity wouldn't increase and we would be able to afford more shelter, food, healthcare, education, etc.
> there’s no evidence the pool of available work for humans will even _decrease_ in a highly automated economy
That depends on how you define "available work". Historically automation has replaced the jobs requiring the least skill with fewer jobs that required more skill. As the skill cutoff rises, the eligible labor pool shrinks. Assuming the trend continues (in fact it appears to be accelerating) at some point the vast majority of humans won't be capable of any work that might still be available.
The other side of this, that I rarely hear discussed, is "What happens when automation renders some people permanently redundant?"
It's an easy platitude to say that technology obviates some jobs whilst creating others, but the new jobs tend progressively to more complex and/or creative work, that use the leverage of technology to do work that would have once needed many people (if possible at all).
Currently, the issue is cloaked in arguments over protectionism and trade, because Chinese workers are (for now) cheaper than robots for many things. What happens when automation is cheap and sophisticated enough that starting a manufacturing business is only slightly more difficult than a web startup is today? (Exhibit A: Projects such as Fab@Home and RepRap) It is, I suspect, not reasonable to expect even a significant percentage of people to handle the kinds of career that will remain.
While it's fun to imagine a world where one person can create enough wealth to support hundreds of people... what do you do with those hundreds, who can no longer create any wealth a machine can't do better?
Even if we cannot automate everything, we are going to be in big trouble (on a social level) if the work left to humans only occupies anything less than about 50% of adult people. The relevant thing will be the ratio of decay rate of jobs that are automated away vs. creation rate of new jobs, but that's hard to estimate because technological advances are hard to estimate.
This is some weird nonsense that folks who read too much sci-fi (not realizing how unrealistic it is, with the state of modern society and technology) seem to fantasize about, and politician talking heads happily repeat because populism is on the rise again and it's easier to fight imaginary windmills than real world issues.
I believe a more realistic concern is that some workers will lose their jobs to automation as it becomes capable of running more and more complicated tasks, because it's cheaper to run or, more likely, contract to run some fancy software that can be taught its job in a natural language. And if this scales up it may require significant socioeconomic changes to work around the associated issues.
So long as any form of automation has existed, people have been claiming that the sky is falling and that automation will put people out of work. And in some respects it does, but in the grand scheme of things, quality of life improves and people find work.
So long as there are people with money, there will be jobs to be done. Perhaps in the future, AI employers will hire human workers that are trained by AI educators to do human tasks. There may come a time where AI/Robotics are better than humans at every task, and when that day comes, humans will compete on price, and when they're priced out of the market, they'll either merge with the machines or simply be left behind. But that time is many hundreds of years away, and I'm not convinced that machines would even want to stay on Earth. Space is much more conducive to a machine society.
I think that the fruits of all these contemporary advancements won't be really seen until the global population starts dropping. Right now, automating generally puts someone out of a job and forces them into one that is more or less made up just so that they can have a job[1]. With a declining population, automation will pick up whatever slack worker 'scarcity' creates.
It's interesting to think about how that world would look like. Imagining a constant rate of production, this means that cheaper goods will be spread around fewer people. I imagine that this would drive a push away from mid-level jobs, probably into highly educated roles that innovate or maintain complex autonomous systems.
I know that the suggestion that these are going to eliminate human positions is an unpopular sentiment here at HN because economics. However, are we really so sure that there will always be a human labor demand to effectively meet the human labor supply?
What do we do when there is an excess of human labor? Everyone here is opposed to make work for good reason. But a suggestion that solves the moral issue of what to do with an unemployed human who is not contributing due to a lack of labor demand has not been proposed in the general case. It is typically waved away by saying, "There will be a new industry." But can we really not imagine that this new industry will remain un-automated for long? What about the new industry that begins by being automated?
I am not opposed to automation in the slightest. I think that if we can automate every task in the world, that would be the best thing. If anything I am just opposed to insisting that as technology changes, we must maintain the same social values and behaviors.
Unfortunately, the more automation, fewer and more skilled workers are needed. That's always been the case and will only continue to happen. People will be able to specialize and diversify more.
As automation gets better and better, the difficulty of the remaining jobs for humans goes up. Not everyone is cut out to be a software engineer, doctor, or lawyer. We have to deal with the fact that people of average (and below average) skills and intelligence still need to support their families.
I think hampering technological progress to protect jobs is the wrong approach though. We need to contend with the fact that traditional supply-side economics will start to break down as we enter an era where most or all human needs can be met with automation.
It should not be overlooked that this is less of a problem of automation but one of how we organize society. What do we do once large parts of society become redundant? With many of them already having had bullshit jobs doing busywork? The effect of substantial numbers of high paying jobs vanishing alone will be disastrous for the economy. Technological progress is just highly deflationary.
The assumption that automation creates (or at least does not destroy) jobs is an extrapolation from the past despite the fact that the nature of automation is constantly changing/evolving.
Also, one thing that everyone seems to ignore is that even if the number of jobs are not reduced, the skill/talent level for doing those jobs may (actually DO) increase and also, switching careers does not work for everyone. So you'll inevitably have people without a job even if it's just that the job market is shifting.
But I argue that as automation reaches jobs with higher levels of sophistication, i.e. the jobs of more skilled workers, some people will simply be left out because of their talent won't be enough to do any job that has not been automated.
Automation will start causing job loss by the millions in 5 years. So no I mean it's a problem creeping up very quickly. Initially it will be less qualified workers, but the fact is that many university grads, say art majors, end up in less qualified jobs (if they exist).
The way I see it, automation destroys jobs for stupider people and creates jobs for smarter people. Ten jobs making widgets are replaced by one job as a widget robot repairman (and 0.001 of a job of a widget robot designer) and bam, we're making ten times more widgets. But the job of robot repairman is a more intellectually difficult job than the factory workers had in the first place.
Hundreds of years ago, 95% of jobs could be done with a two-digit IQ, because they were things like ploughing fields and herding goats. But we've been automating all the easy jobs and creating new, more fulfilling jobs, and getting richer in the process.
At some point though, which I think is right about now, we cross the point where less than 50% of the jobs can be done with a two-digit IQ. We no longer need manual labourers, we need people who can design and maintain robots. And the fact is that 50% of the population is of below-median intelligence and will have trouble doing these new jobs.
What do we do with all these people who are incapable of performing any worthwhile role? In the longer run perhaps we can genetically engineer people so that everyone can be a robot engineer. But in the meantime?
So yeah, I think it is a genuine problem we're going to have to face eventually.
As entire classes of skilled labor evaporate, there will be significant societal implications. There is also the problem of the significant centralization of power and money that comes with a future where AI performs the work.
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