I had a ‘special’ mailman at NASA Ames in 2007-2009. This guy was the best mailman ever; he was 100% focused on his job and did it with the seriousness of handling CBRN materials. You might wonder how someone can go from good to great at mail handling, especially to someone that doesn’t send or receive much mail. There were lots of unexpected things. Address errors always got to me. Mail was sorted by ‘importance’ in the box. Hand delivery of government mail and warnings about anything anomalous. I got the feeling that you could give this guy any small job and he would study the minutiae intensely, finding ways to get better long after any ‘normal’ person would have gotten bored and started thinking about something else. I see a lot of problems when people don’t employ them well. They often live institutionalized and do odd jobs part-time like grocery bagging. At Stop’n’Shop, they are switched around and perform poorly. At the Westford Market Basket, there was a special bagger that had a rough first few years, but learned everything about the store, and ended up managing it, superlatively imo. 100% focus on whatever they are told to do for years at a time. My mailman would have made a great project manager, a set of well-defined human tasks that are almost always ignored and subverted because of the power that comes with the position. Imagine a person in a power role that was actually focused on doing their job right.

In my home-town there is a garage/factory which mainly recruits all kinds of disabled people. They produce e.g. wooden chairs, cup holders and the-like but also purely artistic decorative stuff. All on very different levels i.e. some people nail some wooden sticks together as they have been told, some have complex jobs (if they are able).

For sure, all of the tasks they do during the day can be automated and in-fact are automated at the big facilities. However, people like to buy their products - not only because they like to support them and to give them the chance to contribute to the community (like it was said in the video: they pay taxes and everything) but also because there is a general market for hand-made stuff. There is always a small niche of consumers who prefer hand-made stuff because of its individual charm etc. over the soul-less mass-manufactured alternative. I believe that this demand exists precisely because of the rise of automation (and thus is unlikely to vanish is automation is pushed furhter).

I'd also argue that working in a woodworking shop - being able to actually create something and (if the handicap/IQ allows for it) even be creative - has a much better effect on overall quality of live than working on a assembly-line bullshit job. I don't know of a handicap which does not allow you to work in any of these kind of jobs but does allow you to assort plastic from paper within reasonable amount of time (but I'm sure someone can give me an example; in that case I'd argue that its up to us to find or "invent" a suitable job or some helper-device to enable them to do so - we have the money to do this).

So yes, maybe getting rid of that particular job is the best thing that could happen to the guy in the video - provided there is another job-alternative available that does not only let him add value to the consumer-society but also to the intellectual and creative parts of it as well as of himself (relative to his level of disability).

Yeah these are great insights in the macro-scale, but on the individual level automation can screw your life completely. Specially if you are older.

What you as a 50 y.o. trucker are going to do when Waymo takes your job instead? There is no way you can get the same 6 figure job somewhere outside the truck-driving business.

It's only a matter of time until automation replaces humans with normal IQ in a way that they're permanently out of jobs.

So far automation has only created more jobs. Why would this suddenly change?

Because eventually all the tasks that a normal human can do can be done cheaper by a machine. Whenever more automation enabled economic growth in the past, a (large) part of the new economic activity had to be done by humans. We were lucky that the growth was big enough that more new jobs were created than old jobs were lost. In the near future the fraction of new tasks that can be done by humans will shrink. It is plausible that economic growth as a whole will shrink too.

And of course there are the short term effects to consider too. If truck driving is automated, a fifty year old truck driver is unlikely to find a similar job. Changing careers gets progressively harder as you grow older. Many people will be unemployed for the rest of their lives despite other new jobs being created.

I don’t disagree at all. The point is I never really stopped to consider those folks who really will have a hard time moving up to better things, or even laterally. The video I linked, a commercial about a human doing the very job the AI/robotics project aims to do so instead.

It’s short. I hope all commenters take 30 seconds to watch it, and maybe within the discussion in this thread, someone will make a salient point that explains away the nuance I referred to for this exact specific instance.

It just gave me pause, and opened my eyes to that the issue - and my beliefs - can be more nuanced, in light of such things as the PSA from the 80’s I linked in my original post. What’s that guy supposed to do? He Eve said he learned it slowly but now he’s good at it. When all the sun-menial tasks are automated, what becomes of them?

For the record I am a cynical technophile by any measure. I have been called callous (and much worse) for statements like “starvation is a self-solving problem. Eventually there will be enough food for all, as the population decreases”… don’t think me anti-automation; this edge case is a thing that makes me go “hmmm…”

I agree that it's generally been true up until now that we've invented new jobs to replace those which we've automated away, but I don't think that is the whole story. Going back to at least the industrial revolution with for example handloom weavers, people who have had their jobs automated away were often impoverished for the rest of their lives. I don't have any statistics to back this up, but I'd argue that this will be true for most displaced workers today -- any career change later in life will put you behind the curve, and it's not like someone working as a coal miner is likely to learn how to code or whatever. My thought is that these new high-tech jobs we invent have been and will be performed by new generations leaving the displaced to suffer.

I also don't think this trend of inventing new jobs will hold true forever. To the poster who asked why this would suddenly change, it's because we now have algorithms which can learn. We may be long dead (though perhaps not), but I am absolutely convinced that eventually we will invent machines which are able to perform any given task at or exceeding normal human ability. When that happens, and when we deploy it in mass across the economy, I think we'll have to face an existential crisis as a species.

Today we want everyone to have a job because we want everyone to have a means of independently supporting themselves. We want each of us to contribute to society, to not be a burden. We want people to have a job because it often provides a sense of dignity and a sense of purpose.

My thought is that, just as you say that normal people will find another job as automation advances, the attitude we will need to adopt instead will be that people in general disabled or not will need to find another means of providing meaning in their life. Because honestly, my thought when watching that commercial was not, "oh how nice that this individual is working." My thought was that the job looked terrible, is probably not good for health, and that it's not a job that human beings should even be doing. I generally think this about most jobs, but especially so about jobs where you're sorting through waste.

Real people will suffer from automation, but I think the process is inevitable, and personally wished I existed in a time where automation freed all of us to pursue what we were interested in rather than serving the purposes of making the economic machine spin round. Let it spin on its own.

The wealth produced by those robotic replacements will not go to the replaced humans, or it will go in small pieces as social services, doubling down on the frustration. This sounds volatile to me.

> For the record I am a cynical technophile by any measure. I have been called callous (and much worse) for statements like “starvation is a self-solving problem. Eventually there will be enough food for all, as the population decreases”… don’t think me anti-automation; this edge case is a thing that makes me go “hmmm…”

Here is the thing, this isn't as linear as you make it out to be and is seemingly not taking into account very obvious escalation of things as Society fails to deliver and fail it's populace: protests, strikes, peasant revolts, and eventually total war. You cannot exclude the lower rungs of Society and expect that because of 'progress' things will sort themselves out.

Just look at the wide-spread amount misery we've seen since 2008, people creating tent cities and the mass homelessness has led to a Humanitarian crisis, and an epidemic itself.

With that said, recycle sorting is a MVP for AI/ML applications: it's a low paid, and hard job that requires a perpetual stream of exploitable underclass based labour: even if someone would want to do the job short term out of desperation, it isn't one that will be held long term so the churn, specifically turnover, is probably not worth the cost in retraining Human based worksforce.

Matanya Horowitz a grad from CU Boulder, and eventually PhD grad from CalTech, was working on this [0] when I used to work out of the engineer department, he eventually went on to start an AI based robotics company (AMP) and raised 75 million since it's inception.

I'm also of the POV, after having done Ag myself and seeing the complexity of supply chains and the inherent pitfalls and obstacles it relies on, that farming must go at least 90% automated: primarily it is based on the fact that ~99% of the population relies on the other 1% to feed itself since that is Globally the amount of people involved in Ag--and the average age of farmers Globally is well into late 50s an early 60s. This is an imperative issue that requires more talent focus on automated processes in the laborious and most physically straining aspects that require often short-term and poorly compensated migrant labour--it's essentially slave labour 'with more steps.'

Instead of creating scripts for IT departments you should perhaps you should stop focusing your energy on such low-hanging fruit if you really believe what you wrote and focus on the major existential issues before you start wielding your technophile iron fist and talking about social engineering on this scale. Moreover a month's work of seemingly meaningless manual labour would also give you some much needed clarity and perspective.

With that said, I went from fintech founder to working for a megacorp and quit because I felt my skills were being wasted and did my last stint in kitchens right before COVID when the 'burger flippers, and food delivery people are obsolete and will be automated' rhetoric was at ATH. After COVID (which is still a thing) it's pretty clear now that reality hit those people incredibly hard, and salaries in those Industries have finally caught up with the demand from the Market as more people refused to come back and the 'automate everything' crowds are licking their wounds with mediocre results.

I went back to school to study AI and ML because I want to focus on automating Ag, and even with the leap it has amongst most other Industries, there are still a myriad of issues to work on in regards to Computer Vision and engineering feats that are optimized for crop-specific harvests and weeding.

We're getting a taste of what broken supply chains and surging costs is having to Society, and the truth is as bad as it is still (barely) working; and when food stops being delivered is when Society starts to undo itself incredibly fast.

0: https://businessden.com/2017/11/02/cu-grad-raises-3m-recycli...

1: https://www.colorado.edu/coloradan/2021/07/02/cu-alum-create...

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

One point I would like to respond to is that the only specific instance I mentioned where I said we should be “automating ourselves out of” jobs, was in the context of those systems/network/devops roles; roles I myself have held.(Incidentally, automation at the enterprise level involves far more than “writing scripts for IT departments” that you reduce it to, and that is somewhat what I was referring to when. I mentioned that there would be bigger and more important business processes to support as infrastructure becomes commodity, and some automation framework(s) become SOP. Sorry, I digress.)

I did not suggest anywhere - at least I didn’t mean to - to wield a techno “iron fist” (although that does conjure a pretty cool image in my head <grin>) and I don’t think I suggested that every job everywhere should be automated, and in fact the memory of an 80’s PSA coming to mind giving me an immediate feeling of sympathy for that guy in the video, was really the whole point of why I posted.

Also, I wasn’t born into high-paying tech jobs. I was once young, and indeed have worked some pretty shit jobs. I don’t however, think they were meaningless. They may have meant nothing to me, but obviously someone thought they were worth paying me for. So aside from “dig a hole and refill it” type work, I don’t view anyone’s job as not having worth.

It does beg the question, “what will the shit jobs be for future teenagers?”, which I will for the sake of simplification lump into the same category as the glass-sorting job in the PSA. I don’t have an answer for that, at least not yet.

Perhaps this is tangential to the existential crises you describe, but, like you, I have been learning ML/AI, since about 2016 (whenever that “A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style” paper was published) and I do have some fears about AI, superintelligence, etc and what bad things will (not just may) come of it, though admittedly my fears of the negative are far outweighed by my excitement for the positive potential. This is why I own paperclipmaximizer.ai though admittedly my tongue was firmly in my cheek when I bought it. We can only hope our super intelligent AGI overlords are as optimistic as the GPT-generated quote from Maximo on that site.

I appreciate everyone’s input and time taken to provide it. I have been reading HN for a long time, but never registered or posted until last week. It is really great to have a community of intelligent people not trolling or shitposting and I was pleasantly surprised that you all actually watched the video and came back with real points of conversation. Thanks!

"No model, regardless of size, outperformed the best-performing human on any task. However, for some tasks, the best-performing model beat the average human."

https://read.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-150/

To be fair, it's hard to predict the future.