Automation Thread: Imagine johnny 5 squashing your job, forever

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Automation Thread: Imagine johnny 5 squashing your job, forever

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Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

B B posted:

I am about to become an automation engineer at a software company. How long will it be until my job is automated?

Programmers have been attempting to automate themselves out of a job since the first assembler. Thus far they've been spectacularly unsuccessful.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Same thing will happened that happened like 6000 years ago, 200 years ago and 50 years ago: Jobs will just move up maslow's hierarchy (or rather, modern versions of similar ideas) and everyone will complain that all the new jobs are just frivolous and all the real jobs are gone until a generation passes and it just ends up it was actually better after all.

I at least half-agree: we'll probably see more and more jobs where people specifically value the human element. Live music is an obvious, currently-existing example of this; we've had excellent sound systems and recording capabilities for some time now, but people still pay lots of money to hear their favorite bands at live concerts. Similarly, even if computers were capable of being, say, therapists, in terms of raw analytical/language ability, you'd probably still want a human to be the one actually talking to you.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2016 18:02

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 12:39

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

JVNO posted:

Art is not a viable employment solution because it requires popularity to be economically beneficial. It relies on the fact there's only 1 mega popular celebrity making music/movies/etc. for every million regular schlubs who consume it. There will be no art based economy to replace our current paradigm of work.

I think what you see today with kickstarter, patreon, youtube, etc. shows this doesn't have to be the case. You can be moderately popular in the entertainment/art sector with some niche and still make a living. This kind of thing is only going to expand in the future.

BobTheJanitor posted:

There are already bots that are nearly good enough to do any physical labor job, without complex programming.

Are you from 30 years in the future or something? We can barely make bipedal robots that can open a door and walk through it without falling over.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2016 12:30

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Freakazoid_ posted:

Just a nit pick, but we have at least one that can meet those goals. I'm pretty sure there are a couple more but this one is the most impressive imo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY

I'm aware of Boston Robotics, but I meant being able to open the various common kinds of doors, like with a doorknob, not just being able to push on a bar. Come to think of it, they'd need to be able to use a key too, and I haven't seen any bipedal robots that can do that.

quote:

We will have functional, generalist manual labor robots much sooner than 30 years.

I dunno, while the last several years have seen large gains in some AI stuff like computer vision or natural language processing, fine motor skills still seem to be only crawling along. Like, we can make a robot that can fold a towel...in a minute and a half: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/19/407736307/robots-are-really-bad-at-folding-towels

Cicero fucked around with this message at 12:32 on Dec 5, 2016

# ¿ Dec 5, 2016 12:29

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Amazon just announced a checkout-less retail store: https://www.amazon.com/b?node=16008589011

quote:

What is Amazon Go?
Amazon Go is a new kind of store with no checkout required. We created the world�s most advanced shopping technology so you never have to wait in line. With our Just Walk Out Shopping experience, simply use the Amazon Go app to enter the store, take the products you want, and go! No lines, no checkout. (No, seriously.)

How does Amazon Go work?
Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning. Our Just Walk Out technology automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you�re done shopping, you can just leave the store. Shortly after, we�ll charge your Amazon account and send you a receipt.

Surprised that it doesn't use either barcode/QR scanning or RFID tags, apparently.

edit: It seems like the main weakness of checkoutless stores is still loose goods like produce, where they don't come in pre-made discrete quantities. Although I guess you could have a store like this and just treat loose goods as a special case where you have to go to a station to weigh them.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 16:36 on Dec 5, 2016

# ¿ Dec 5, 2016 16:32

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

BobTheJanitor posted:

Missed this, but no, just go look at the video in the OP. Or just search for news on that 'Baxter' robot that it mentions. Programming it consists of showing it what to do, and then it does it. Instead of just automatically repeating one exact task like most industrial robots, it can "learn" by being shown a new task. It's also designed to be safe enough to work next to people, unlike the industrial automated things that will mindlessly smack into someone and usually have to be caged off for safety. And it only costs about $25,000. It's not being marketed as something to take over all the jobs (yet). The line is that it will 'help' your existing workers. Which means you buy one and then maybe you don't hire the next few people you would have hired, because now you only need one person to work with the robot and you still get just as much done. And thus the gap between productivity and wages widens a little bit more.

Baxter is still a very long way off from being able to replace human manual labor. Yes, it has the capability to learn a very basic mechanical task by being shown what to do, and that level of computer vision and mechanical control is a good step up, but it doesn't have any higher-level intelligence around that task that you would probably need to replace people. Not to mention that it's still a big, immobile robot. It looks like it might fit well in a factory, but I mean, we've had industrial 'robots' in factories for some time now.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2016 19:13

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Tei posted:

Robots don't need to be clumsy imitations of humans. They can look like a single arm, or a roomba, or a tiny truck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quWFjS3Ci7A

Yeah, it depends on what they need to do. In a lot of cases, robots may need to operate in spaces designed for humans, so they have to be able to operate like humans do (e.g. bipedal so they can go up stairs, something approximating hands to grip doorknobs, etc.). In other cases that may not be true; an automated McDonald's might just be a bunch of conveyor belts with very purpose-built robots.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2016 19:18

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

sit on my Facebook posted:

This is a hella good post and makes the current wave of automation feel way more insidious

I, too, find increasing efficiency to be insidious. Why can't we go back to the good old days of subsistence farming?

Seriously though computers have been steadily automating office tasks for decades at this point. Calling it 'insidious' is weird, it's not some secret phenomenon that evil kkkapitalists have been hiding under the covers to suddenly spring upon an ignorant populace.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2016 23:10

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

boner confessor posted:

if automation creates more jobs, what incentive do employers have to automate?

The jobs are created in other areas of the economy, like the obvious example with farms. Obviously if you have to replace a hundred retail workers with a hundred retail robot repairmen then employers would have no such incentive.

Paradoxish posted:

No, but we're likely seeing real effects on the labor market in the form of stagnating (and increasingly polarized) wages and a loss of prime age labor force participation. Automation isn't something that should be opposed, but it is something that needs to be dealt with through policy somehow.

I agree. Demonizing companies for embracing automation is incredibly dumb though; automation is the whole reason why we can enjoy a high standard of living. It's true that the market is merciless to those whose jobs get automated out of existence, but helping them is primarily the government's job.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 01:00 on Dec 6, 2016

# ¿ Dec 6, 2016 00:58

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

INH5 posted:

Yeah, Amazon claims to have found some kind of solution to this involving "computer vision." I'll believe it when I see it.

In order to even get into the store you need a valid Amazon account that's recognized as you enter, then the cameras/sensors are tracking you everywhere you go. Seems like that would cut down on shoplifting quite a bit.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2016 12:29

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Presumably they don't shop there, same as Costco/Sam's Club.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2016 14:08

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Nevvy Z posted:

I chuckle every time I see the words "reduce prices" in this thread, as though companies aren't gonna just pocket more profit and bonuses.

Agreed, companies can just arbitrarily set prices wherever they want, which is why, as mobby points out, "everyone is operating on 1000% profit margins now".

# ¿ Dec 6, 2016 15:08

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Paradoxish posted:

Automation almost never causes large scale layoffs or job losses in a really direct way.

I'm sure we could come up with plenty of examples. Carriage drivers (really anything to do with horses) once cars started to become popular, human 'computers' and punch card operators falling by the wayside as early computers became more advanced, I guess offices used to have a lot more secretaries to type stuff up before the advent of personal computers + word processors. I'm guessing taxi dispatchers are rapidly going the way of the do-do right now.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2016 19:04

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

mobby_6kl posted:

I wanted to make some point about the changes happening gradually or something but here's a chart of Peak Horse:

Change is probably even more drastic if you factor in the US population size.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2016 20:10

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Doctor Malaver posted:

Chances are decent if you live in a progressive European country.

Also if you live in Alaska you already get one (albeit not a very large one). Alaska: America's most socialist state.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2016 12:27

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Main Paineframe posted:

As a general rule of thumb, if a company claims there just aren't enough X workers to meet their demand, what they really mean is that there aren't enough X workers interested in what they're willing to pay for X, either because the company insists on underpaying for the level of skill or experience they're asking for, or because there's some massive distortion of the labor market going on (for example, the main cause of the "programmer shortage" is the massive over-concentration of tech companies in one specific place, oversaturating the local labor market).

To be fair, by this definition there's basically never a shortage of anything anywhere. Like you couldn't say "there's a shortage of [game console] at launch, it's sold out at stores" because hey there are some up on ebay for 2 grand, right? The nature of the word 'shortage' is that it means 'harder to find than expected/reasonable'.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2016 15:07

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Blue Star posted:

AI is still a buzzword that doesn't mean anything.

Every time we make computers smarter in a particular domain, the goalposts instantly move and people declare "well that's not AI, that's just an algorithm, [next thing] is AI" and the process repeats. Production services have made huge strides in natural language processing and computer vision the past few years. That's AI.

I work on Google Photos. When we had our 1.0 launch with automatic content search and face clustering, it was a big deal. Yes, those existed in some academic form or in a lower-quality consumer form (Flickr) a bit earlier, but AFAIK this was the first time in a major consumer service where the quality was generally good (my sister has identical twin boys, and it could tell them apart even in baby pictures, when even she struggled). Now this probably didn't eliminate any jobs, some AI advances will be like this where they're just a minor quality of life improvement. It's still machine intelligence though.

quote:

Selfdriving cars, for example, are pure hype. We're still decades and decades away from having the necessary technology.

Lol no they're not. I mean I know D&D likes to mindlessly hate on technology (and some projections like Musk's are clearly very aggressive/optimistic) but you can't possibly think they're actually several decades away for the general case. Basically every car manufacturer thinks it'll be ready at least by like 2030.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2016 22:50

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Nevvy Z posted:

Was info about this published anywhere becuase that is super interesting

I dunno that's just something she and her husband told me. As far as computer vision work in general I think Googlers publish some stuff yeah. I just work on the Android client myself so I'm not aware of most of the details, but there's more info if you google around: https://research.googleblog.com/2015/06/google-computer-vision-research-at-cvpr.html?m=1

Edit: looks like my sister isn't the only one with this story:

quote:

Google Photos is scary good in face recognition

u/clutchswag11m

In the plethora of pictures of my gallery, I have pictures with identical twins. I've never taken a picture with both of them together, but Google Photos can differentiate both of them as different people. Thats wicked crazy!

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/40ozkh/google_photos_is_scary_good_in_face_recognition/

Cicero fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Dec 23, 2016

# ¿ Dec 23, 2016 22:57

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

boner confessor posted:

also lol at self driving cars being better than the average human when they've only been tested in perfect, pristine conditions

???

Have you seriously not read any of the articles talking about Ford testing their cars in snow or Google expanding testing to the Seattle area to work on rain handling? Not to mention the basic fact that just in general these cars are being tested on real roads with real human drivers, yes they can't handle all the things there yet, but how the heck does that qualify as being tested in "perfect, pristine conditions"?

# ¿ Jan 7, 2017 02:58

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Solkanar512 posted:

I think my biggest concern about autonomous cars (and drones for that matter) isn't the technology but rather the culture of the companies making them.

These companies are accustomed to exponential growth, pushing the boundaries, skirting regulations, issuing patches after release and so on. That's fine for software. Yet it sets up some really lovely attitudes, habits and expectations when it comes to designing things that will contain people and transport them at speed in close proximity with others.

I work in aerospace, and I like to remind my friends in tech that when one of my company's products crash, it's on the front page of every major newspaper in the world. The majority of the regulations we follow designing, building or maintaining our products were made because someone died. There are museums and memorials scattered all over the world dedicated to those who died because someone hosed up. One museum at Haneda Airport contains personal effects from the victims of JAL Flight 123, including handwritten farewell notes from victims to their families. 520 people died, as well as a maintenance manager and an engineer who both committed suicide for signing off on the faulty repair. I'm told that JAL employees visit each year to honor those who were lost and to remember why you don't cut corners.

I know that cars aren't airplanes, but unlike everything else in tech, loving up/going cheap/ignoring regulations will get people killed and the attitudes of tech employees just aren't instilling me with much confidence.

Well, if you look at Tesla, while they've been somewhat reckless with Autopilot (mostly just by naming it 'Autopilot'), their cars are still extremely safe overall, probably moreso than the industry average.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2017 14:44

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Walmart apparently is now rolling out its Scan & Go app on Android (before it was iPhone-only) that lets you skip the checkout line: http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/01/09/walmart-finally-rolls-scan-go-app-android/

Still works in only one store, but probably a portent of things to come?

# ¿ Jan 10, 2017 14:12

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Because this time a robot was sort of in charge of the car! (even though you're still supposed to pay attention and keep your hands on the wheel in case something goes wrong)

# ¿ Jan 10, 2017 20:49

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Solkanar512 posted:

This is pretty much the definition of meeting effort with no effort. You can clearly see the companies that take shortcuts and don't have any experience with loving up on a scale that kills beside the drive to be "disruptive" is more important. Yet instead of dealing with your industry's lovely culture, you post this instead.

Yeah, it's not like other car companies have driver assist modes that require the driver to still pay attention right? Oh wait, tons of them do.

Tesla's autopilot is not a full self driving solution. It's a driver assistance feature. That's not "lovely culture", it's the same drat thing other car companies do! The only irresponsible thing is probably naming it Autopilot.

When Tesla tells drivers they can take a nap when autopilot is enabled and someone dies, then you can complain. Until then, get a clue.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2017 13:19

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Solkanar512 posted:

Read my post again, I'm specifically speaking about tech companies that have little to no experience making vehicles or programming things that can have life altering consequences. Companies that completely lack the culture or standards to keep us safe.

Yeah and my point is that so far the one Silicon Valley car company we have has been doing fine overall as far as safety.

quote:

Look, folks like you just don't loving get it. You don't understand nor hold yourself to a standard that says, "if you gently caress up, people will be hurt or even die". The fact you can't understand this only serves to prove my point.

I understand completely that you're really mad about SV tech companies, and don't seem to understand that maybe a company that has looser standards when people's lives aren't at stake can enforce stricter standards when that's no longer the case.

Also didn't the investigation into Toyota show that their code was a spaghetti-ish abomination?

# ¿ Jan 11, 2017 14:48

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

To be fair those other modes usually have stricter licensing requirements.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2017 21:00

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

The bigger issue is that nobody in the US really cares. If we did, then even absent better safety performance from car manufacturers, we could easily do much, much better in how we design our streets and roads to reduce traffic fatalities. Heck, even many supposed progressives' response to Vision Zero is nitpicking "well we can't actually literally get to zero traffic deaths across the country".

# ¿ Jan 12, 2017 14:58

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Blue Star posted:

Im still not convinced that automation is actually happening. Go into any store like Wal-Mart, Target, or into any food place like McDonalds, it's still the same. There may be self-serve kiosks but the technology is still very primitive.

Technology has a habit of not being there for a long time until it suddenly is; it's slow for a long time, then suddenly fast. For a long time attempts at good natural language processing or image interpretation were terrible and useless...until suddenly they were useful.

quote:

Artifical intelligence doesnt exist.

That's because every time machine intelligence starts to do something we reclassify AI as "not that". For example, being able to recognize different objects in a photo was AI until computers got reasonably good at it, now it doesn't count anymore.

quote:

Robots are still dumb and clumsy. People are still going to be driving trucks and taxis, making and serving food, selling stuff to other humans, etc for a long time to come. I go on the internet and its OMG automation, but when i go outside into the real world, it's the same as its always been. So it seems like this histeria over automation and robots and ai is just bunk.

In practice, technological changes are often slow enough to where the large changes are only obvious in retrospect. E.g., when's the last time you carried around and looked at an actual paper map to navigate?

# ¿ Jan 19, 2017 11:31

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

If you're just gonna post dumb nihilistic poo poo why are you even in this thread

# ¿ Jan 19, 2017 14:44

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Technology just needs to be stopped at the level it was where I was growing up when it was good and natural. Not all this future stuff that is scary and bad.

-every generation literally ever.

Similar to "the growth that accommodated me living in this city was a great idea, all the growth since then is terrible and ruining neighborhood character".

# ¿ Feb 7, 2017 13:49

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Doctor Malaver posted:

Sure but it is possible to act between two extremes. One extreme being the strawman that you are attacking and the other "automate whatever you want, fire as many people as you want, the only thing that matters is profit".

Actually the latter is basically fine as long as you have a decent social safety net to handle when certain occupations become obsolete. The problem in the US is that our safety net is pretty threadbare.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

If you are talking about laws that delay things by a few months or a year or two to make a better and more orderly transition then cool, fine.

It's not like any industry automates a given occupation overnight, it takes years or even decades as it is. Like sure eventually self-driving cars will replace most driving occupations, but the total transition time is going to be many years long.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2017 16:43

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Call Me Charlie posted:

I brought this up in the last automation talk but it's self-serve gas is illegal in two states and that's been a success story. Jobs that would have gone *poof* were able to be kept around at a minimal cost. And ironically, the small business gas stations that lobbied for it decades ago as a way to prevent them from getting snuffed out are now lobbying to repeal that law since they're having trouble finding people that want to pump gas in the dead of winter for minimum wage.

I don't get how it's a success story. It creates a tiny number of McJobs in exchange for making gas a little bit more expensive than necessary. Like the best thing it has going for it is "probably not a big deal either way".

I can see how some progressives might be cool with it because they want gas to be more expensive, but it'd be more intelligent to achieve that with a tax that can fund alternative modes of transportation.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2017 17:20

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

p much, future technology could potentially eliminate human drudgery but technology we've had for your entire lifetime could factually eliminate human hunger.

It's not eliminated but it probably is way down compared to 50 years ago or whatever.

edit: Percentage-wise it looks way down in the developing world since 1970 -

quote:

Number of undernourished globally
Year 1970 1980 1995 2005 2007/08 2014/16
Percentage in the developing world 37% 28% 20% 16% 17% 13.5%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition#Epidemiology

Cicero fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Feb 22, 2017

# ¿ Feb 22, 2017 19:54

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

We can teach a computer to think that.

Ratoslov posted:

Yeah, one of the fun things about neural networks is they're highly 'impressionable'. Biases like that can sneak into your neural networks quite easily.

Yes, but it's presumably a lot easier to identify and eliminate biases like that when you're using essentially a single model across thousands of software deployments vs trying to identify and eliminate biases across thousands of individual brains.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2017 12:25

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

BrandorKP posted:

Discussion is one of the best ways to identify and eliminate those biases. So the best tool is out for the model.

This is kind of like saying "well these computers aren't smart enough, and we can't send them away to college, so one of the best tools is right out!"

Discussion is one of the best tools for the human mind, because conducting testing/inspecting/'debugging' are all somewhere between difficult to impossible there. This is not true for a computer model. Even neural nets, which are relatively opaque in their decision-making as far as computer programs go, are still easier to inspect and adjust than a human brain.

An amusing example of this is Google reversing its image detection neural net and discovering that it thought that dumbbells pretty much had to have arms attached to them: https://research.googleblog.com/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html

Once you discover that kind of bias in machine learning, it's generally possible to undo it by adjusting your training data (e.g. in this case you would just feed the neural net more images of dumbbells sans arms).

Contrast that with the obvious scalability problem with humans: with a herculean effort, you might be able to get enough serious training and education to undo a handful of biases in most doctors, but they simply don't have enough time to constantly be attending that kind of education while also, y'know, attending patients and studying the newest medical techniques and information (which they already struggle to do). With a computer model, you can train it endlessly at HQ and then push out the updated version everywhere overnight.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Feb 27, 2017

# ¿ Feb 27, 2017 17:32

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

that would depend on who's doing the QA to check for those biases (it's the same closed institution of 98% young bougie white libertarian dudes that built the search engine in the first place), and how motivated they are to aggressively identify and correct that particular shortcoming (enh). you're proposing replacing thousands of doctors, some lovely, with an encyclopedia and a tech bro who can be in thousands of places at once.

Wow, so many wrong things:

1. Tech companies are usually actually less white than the national average.
2. Most techies are center-left, not libertarian. The libertarian ones are just unusually loud.
3. Medical regulations exist and tech companies would obviously have to play ball to operate in this sphere, like how Google's DeepMind is partnering with the NHS in the UK.
4. AI replacing doctors entirely is the extreme long-term scenario after they've already proven themselves augmenting doctors for a long time. We're not going to go from "no AI" to "all doctors replaced with AI" overnight.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2017 17:46

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Brainiac Five posted:

Acting, restaurants, shops- all things invented in the last 200 years.

Nah he's right. Not that those things are all entirely new, we just have a lot more of them. E.g. 100 years ago 'eating out' was much less common than now.

Percentage of food budget spent on eating at home vs eating out

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/cheap-eats-how-america-spends-money-on-food/273811/

Cicero fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Feb 28, 2017

# ¿ Feb 28, 2017 16:29

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Brainiac Five posted:

No, he's saying those are new things. Furthermore, there are some obvious limits on how many restaurants can exist.

Maybe he phrased it poorly, but I'm pretty sure he's including 'way more jobs of something that used to be less common' when he says 'we just keep making up jobs'.

Brainiac Five posted:

An economy where everyone is an actor would be a neat Borges short story because of the raw absurdity of it.

So in your universe, what happened as farm employment collapsed? 80%+ unemployment?

# ¿ Feb 28, 2017 16:34

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Brainiac Five posted:

I want you to imagine what lunch looks like in a society where everyone works at a restaurant.

So is your gimmick that every time someone says "we have more of X than we used to, that's one of the places that new jobs came from" you just reply "WELL NOT EVERYONE CAN BE AN X Y'KNOW GOSH THAT'D BE SILLY!!"

Like can you please stop being intentionally obtuse, it's pretty dumb.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2017 16:38

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Brainiac Five posted:

You don't seem to understand that there are limits to existing jobs because they are efficient. Ten waitstaff serving 200 people, etc. Inventing bullshit sinecures that are purposely inefficient is pointlessly degrading compared to basic incomes or direct distribution of goods and services.

The increase in waitstaff was because demand went up, not because they got less efficient. As automation destroys jobs is also tends to make things cheaper, and then people choose to spend the money they saved on X on something else; this happens gradually enough that you don't really notice at the time, but if you look back far enough you can tell it happened.

In the long run robots/AI will probably eliminate almost all the actually important jobs in society, but that's still a long way off.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2017 20:11

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Amazon is planning on drive-up grocery stores: https://www.engadget.com/2017/03/14/amazonfresh-pick-up-retail-store-seattle/

From the user's perspective this isn't fundamentally different from other grocery stores that let you order ahead and then pick up your stuff, but I'm guessing Amazon will be able to make heavier use of automation since it sounds like the store will be set up only for ordering and not for regular shopping (you'll be able to order stuff at the store too, but it sounds like you can't walk around in it like a normal supermarket).

# ¿ Mar 15, 2017 18:15

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 12:39

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Do they? I've never heard of a grocery store in the states that was solely for pickup orders before.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2017 11:25

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Automation Thread: Imagine johnny 5 squashing your job, forever

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