Some people have spent decades investing in skills and careers that become obviated in a matter of years by new technology.

It's easy to see today which lines of work can be better done by computers than by humans-- today. What's less obvious is which lines of work will be automated in two decades. Having your job description written out of the economy by software is a non-event when you're 26, rough when you're 36, and a disaster when you're 46.

The problem is that company funded training is dead. There are some leftover countries like Germany that do formal apprenticeships with reduced pay and they tend to have lower youth unemployment but they are the exception. I know some people who just did an apprenticeship in their 30s and got a new job that way.

The alternative would be to have a government mandated long term unemployment insurance program that funds education. It would be a general solution to career loss of any kind. I personally dislike that coal worker communities are being protected by the government. If there was an effective program that helped these people get better jobs we wouldn't even have to worry about protectionism.

The big unsolved problem is people who are 10 years away from retirement. They can't just spend 3-5 years retraining without delaying their retirement.

Programming, remote surgery, judging(law), farming. Hardly "bad investment" from society point of view!

It is well known bias(supported by numerous studies) that 90% people with your "attitude" are certain that THEIR job is somehow special and immune to automatization.

It's the same old shit, hansor... no one considers a problem to be "their" problem, right up until it becomes their problem.

I spent 3 months at a small court room last summer. 99% of what was ~done (or not done depending on how you see it) could fit on a laptop. The whole service, if in digital form would require near zero human intervention. These people are mostly trying to navigate bad software, bad bosses, bad archives and bad workflow. Oh and angry users of course. The computational needs are not even GPU worthy.

I'm not advocating a digital future[1], but a humongous amount of tasks at the service layer are really nil.

[1] humanly and sociologically I'd be much more happier keeping most of the system, people contributing to society together, but with better tools and better team spirit (achievable through a little cultural shift), I don't see value in replacing all tasks and letting people idle or live 100 years of leisure, I don't even think it's mentally sane.

I think that it's okay to say this to yourself and look for a different type of work. Saying this to other people misses a couple of important points.

- If you can reskill, you're very fortunate. Not everyone is in the same position.

- It doesn't scale to large numbers. The demand in the market for people with skills that can't yet be automated isn't necessarily enough to absorb all the people who are losing their jobs to automation.

Computer was once a job title.

People used to get paid to shine shoes and press clothes everyday.

Banks used to employee hundreds of people to staff their operations.

The DMV is a sprawling human operated date entry firm fronting for a database and camera.

Paralegals and research assistants are being replaced by the dozens.

Entire factory campuses that employed towns are now operated by mere dozens.

Fields that took dozens to manage can now be handled by a few people and traveling farm hands.

Hedge funds are out performed by indexes. Many are cooking their books.

Self driving cars will happen and displace millions of jobs over what, a decade? Two or three max? I'll bet my current retirement that it happens within the century.

Jobs like shelf stocking, burger flipping, and the like could be automated today if the displaced employees wouldn't lead a violent revolution.

That's the political reality. How the fuck do you keep 200 million working people happy without repressing them or inciting a revolution?

>The DMV is a sprawling human operated date entry firm fronting for a database and camera

This one really hit home. I went to the DMV a few months ago for the first time in over a decade to upgrade my drivers license to a Real ID (must be done in person, previous renewals were done by mail). The entire process was unchanged from when I first got my license almost 30 years ago.

Stand in one line to check in. Sit down. Wait for your name to be called to stand in a second line to have them manually keypunch the paper form you have to fill out into their computer system. Sit down. Wait for your name to be called to stand in a third line to get your picture taken. Sit down. Wait for your name to be called to stand in a fourth line to pay (slight change here in that they now accept credit cards, up until a few years ago it was cash or checks only). Sit down. Wait for your name to be called to stand in a fifth line to pick up your new license. Leave after several hours.

This whole transaction could have been accomplished with kiosks, 1/10th the number of employees, and 1/4 the amount of floor space in 5 minutes or less.

sounds a little like an experience out of another time, like a live museum with actors.

It's nothing more than a jobs program at this point.

Point is, you can't find not just a better way, but you can't find any way. You either own the CPU farm, or you're out.

Yeah this is the Charles Murray point. We can't all be AI repair or developers. A lot is capped by intelligence. A greater proportion of the gains go to those with the most intelligence and everyone on the bottom gets left behind. That is the real outcome of automation this time.

You can see it in the shrinking middle class in the developed world. In the smaller proportion of productivity gains going to labour in the last 60 year ala Piketty

You are conflating things. The gains go to people who have privilege. For example, developers in less-wealthy countries can earn a fraction of what those in richer countries earn. Or those born to wealthy parents who don't really need to work and so go into business rather than engineering.

Also, in general the idea that greater intelligence means higher income is false.

And the assumption many scientists and engineers make is that within a certain number of generations, maybe one, maybe ten, is that we will have AI much smarter than humans. That means smarter than you, and much better at your job than you (whether its "AI repair" or anything else). Smart guy.

> Also, in general the idea that greater intelligence means higher income is false.

No it isn't. This is only one study of dozens, possibly even hundreds, that have been conducted over the years:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602....

The findings are always the same... the more IQ you have, the better off you end up doing, once you control for every other variable.

But I get why no one on HN wants to hear that. IQ is something you didn't earn. It's not yours. It was given to you, and not only was it given to you, you're not allowed to refuse it either. You either have it or you don't. And what's worse, even if you want to be smarter, that's almost nothing you can do that'll raise IQ by a few points - at best. Someone with a 100 IQ will never be able to study enough or learn enough to match someone with a 160 IQ.

Its a lifelong, glaring, undeniable reminder that the Universe is not fucking fair and does not fucking care about anyone. And I've known enough people that are the demographic of HN to know that, not only does this intrinsically eat at their core because you can't deny it or evade it, but it also shatters their utopian ideals - that if we just eliminate all <insert social justice term of the zeitgeist here> that we can lift everyone up.

Well you can't. And you won't. Life's not fair and there's literally nothing you can do about it right now.

Could you help me find where they controlled for family income in this particular study? The thing most correlated with IQ test score is your parents wealth (and childhood pleasure reading.) If you then say that IQ score is then correlated with income, it's just saying that rich parents have rich children, and laundering that fact through theories about the existence and detection of general intelligence.

You'd want to look for radical changes in income from parents to children, and look for reflections of that in IQ scores.

> Well you can't. And you won't. Life's not fair and there's literally nothing you can do about it right now.

The only reason we can't is because people like you think we can't and take the status quo as a god given immutable system which is inherently "right". There are plenty of things to be done to reduce, instead of increase, inequalities

You can't do anything about it because we don't genetically enhance children. Yet. As of two years ago, we mapped out about 2000 genes that contribute to intelligence. A decade ago, we knew of 100. Another decade or two from now, we'll have it entirely mapped out and we'll start to engineer our kids.

The reason we'll do this is because our enemies will do this and a high IQ population is a strategic advantage.

Its not about "systems" or the status quo. The status quo changes over time, always. Used to be, your ability to throw a spear and kill an animal for the tribe set you apart. Then, what vagina you came out of and what sperm were used to create you designated your station in life. Then, it became your ability to facilitate trade between parties. Later, it shifted to your ability to leverage the output of your fellow man to build a factory or a railroad. Now, in the Information Age, you're limited solely by your IQ, your creativity, and your grit. Those who advanced in the systems above all had grit, determination, willpower, drive. That's a necessary condition and likely always will be, but the other conditions all changed.

IQ will likely be the stopping point, at least for humanity. What happens beyond us, that's anyone's guess.

Unfortunately, you're still falling back into "utopia-vision". You think if we just build the right "system", we can eliminate all this. Not for a very long time. Probably not ever, and if we ever do, we won't be humans in the current sense, because whereas you're concerned with systems, I'm concerned with human nature, and as it we exist right now, human nature won't support any system where billions of people are propped up by millions for their survival. The resentment it generates, on both sides, is simply unsustainable. The "smart" people who generate all the wealth that the rest of society survives on will resent having to work to maintain society, and the rest of society that receives that wealth will resent not having the same quality of life as the "smart" people who make it all possible in the first place, usually not realizing they'd all be starving to death if the "smart" people decided to merely shut off access.

And we won't end up a society of all philosophers and artists because frankly you have to be smart to be a decent philosopher and you have to be creative to be an artist. Most people have middling qualities of both traits. Furthermore, due to the interconnectedness of our global society, people are interested in, can access, and generally are only interested in the "best". Andrew Yang said it best during the 2020 presidential campaign cycle in regards to trying to "regulate" and "break up" Big Tech. No one's interested in using the second-best tech product. Don't believe that? Android and iOS are essentially at parity. You could also say Samsung and Apple are at parity. Almost no one uses Windows Phone OS even though its perfectly acceptable as an operating system and was more than capable of doing what almost every single person needs. But it was the second-best choice, with Android / iOS being the best.

We see how that played out.

I'm afraid we're in a really rough, really shitty ride. I want to be wrong, because if I'm wrong it means a better world, but I'm using the history of human nature as my reference.

> Unfortunately, you're still falling back into "utopia-vision". You think if we just build the right "system", we can eliminate all this.

Aiming for an utopia seems better than building a dystopia. I also never said "eliminate" but "reduce". You seem very focused on IQ as if it was the only metric to measure human lives potential. My grandparents aren't geniuses, neither I am, but they seemed to have had least a more positive life to aim for when they grew up and built a family

I think we're both converging toward the same point but you view the system as a necessary evil that has to create inequalities due to things out of our reach like IQ and that we neither can nor should do anything about it. All I'm saying is that we could use a bit of that IQ to steer the system towards a society that doesn't systematically shits on the lower 70% of the population. Of course I'm also very pessimistic about the achievability of this, but I believe this is something we should strive for instead of just shrugging it off, yes the world is unfair, it doesn't mean we should make it more so.

The system isn't a necessary evil, its merely too big to topple by outside forces. The insiders have no incentive to bring the system down because of the myriad benefits to which it provides them. For every one insider who legitimately wants to balance the system out, there's 95 others that will pay lip service to this ideal, then do whatever they want, followed by four or so real jackasses who either believe the system is totally fair, or that the rest of society "deserves" it.

Every year we get to see this in action at Davos. You have a bunch of billionaires all flying to hang out with each other on their private jets while wringing their hands over global warming / climate change. They're all smart enough to know that their private jets output enormous amounts of CO2 emissions relative to the amount of passengers being moved, but no one changes... no one changes because if you arrive on a commercial airliner, even if you were to fly Emirates on their most luxurious fare, you still "look poor" compared to your peers, who all arrived on Gulfstream G650s or whatever...

Michael Crichton pointed this out almost 15 years ago in a speech entitled, "Who Will Do The Sacrificing For Global Warming?" and literally pointed out what I just said above, only with a different location.

People follow leadership, not rhetoric. If people in power aren't willing to change, no one will. After all, why should I reduce my consumption if Al Gore won't? He's worried about global warming, yet still lives in an 8000 sq. ft. mansion that consumes $1000 of power per month. Hate to quote a video game, but its so succinct, so powerful, I just feel compelled - "Deeds. Not words." - Sejuani, League of Legends

This is very similar to the storyline and theme of Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut,

Yes, there is an effect, but it's nowhere near as strong as you think:

>“Each point increase in IQ test scores is associated with $202 to $616 more income per year,” he says. For example, a person with a score of 130 (in the top 2%, in terms of IQ) might earn about $12,000 more per year than someone with an average IQ score of about 100.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11711-smarter-people-...

I'm sure IQ has some effect on inequality but I'd bet money it's logarithmic rather than exponential.

>that's almost nothing you can do that'll raise IQ by a few points - at best

Actually, poverty can drive IQ down. You can raise your intelligence by not being poor. By instating government policies that prevent the worst kind of poverty you can directly drive IQ gains.

The summary of the study you linked to points to the opposite of what you're saying:

> Regression results suggest no statistically distinguishable relationship between IQ scores and wealth.

> ... higher IQ scores sometimes increase the probability of being in financial difficulty.

It's a mix of intelligence and privilege. You only need to be just smart enough to take full advantage of said privilege. IIRC nobel prize winners have a median IQ of 120. You don't have to be that smart to win a nobel prize, but damned if it doesn't help to have parents to back you every step of the way through your education and training, and the sympathetic ear of a rich and connected network of peers and friends to help you secure grant money.

out of what? what if you own a sustainable farm house with solar grid. you don't give a shit about anything else..

Except entertainment, human contact, travel, and anything else you can't produce on your own. Took me a while to realise a wage was selling my labour to buy stuff other people produce. The higher the wage the more leverage I get over other people's production.

A similar view leads to banks with massive loans and low interest rates own more of our productive capacity than feudal lords did over serfs. In Australia tax 35% average, 10% VAT, capital gains and bankls take 30% of your after tax income as a mortgage...

> Except entertainment, human contact, travel, and anything else you can't produce on your own. Took me a while to realise a wage was selling my labour to buy stuff other people produce. The higher the wage the more leverage I get over other people's production.

These are extremely new concepts (besides human contact, but that you can always have), people use to live differently for 99% of human history. Saying there is no other way than the current way is plain wrong and borderline dangerous. Just talk to your grandparents and you'll feel like they lived on another planet.

Our current lifestyle of unchecked consumption, absorption entertainment 3+ hours a day, traveling to the other side of the country/world thanks to cheap airlines &c. are not the norm, they're an anomaly

> The higher the wage the more leverage I get over other people's production.

While not technically wrong, this is a choice you have to make for yourself. There is more to life than consuming other people's production, be careful not to get trapped in the rat race

Most people can't, and more and more people are thrown in these jobs. This is a direct consequence of automation... and this is why we're in for a bad time unless we rethink our concept or work

Thus the Expanse. The only palatable solution for government is print money (ie. tax everyone's purchasing power) and pay it in increased welfare. E.g 1400 cheques and more coming. As long as everyone prints there is no debasement of currencies.

Well look, if all this is becoming The Expanse, I'd like to make my way to the Ring Gate to a new world sooner rather than later. I find the idea of exploring strange new worlds far more enticing than getting my 1400 credits, or even worse, my €$ Eurodollars.

If everyone prints, there is no relative debasement across currencies.

There’s a massive debasement against hard/productive assets.

Till they come for your job :)

Ive seen a lot of jobs that have been automated that are not pattern matching even in IT security. Even where the job is not fully automated like firewall admin it is greatly reduced and the labour is not replaced. E.g 10 years ago at an Aussie bank we had 40 people performing firewall changes and 30 security designers writing and reviewing the rules nedded. Algosec came along, we did software defined networking , things moved to AWS and there are zero dedicated firewall admins anymore and all the designers were absorbed into the architecture and consulting teams and eventually returned to its original size of 20 i.e those 30 security design jobs disappeared