"Humans Need Not to Apply"

[Atlantic Pacf.]

A few days ago, the famous Youtuber CGP Grey posted a video, in which he predicts the future automation brings. Below is the video, and here is the transcript.


Link to video.

What Grey is saying is that just like how previous technological advances have obsoleted entire categories of jobs previously, the rise of computerization, automation, and mechanization today will obsolete entire job categories today. To give a number, he says that 45% of today's employees - at minimum - could become unemployable due to this. And it's not like previous technological revolutions in which people can take up other jobs; not only would unskilled and white-collar professions become unemployable, professions (eg. doctors and lawyers) and even creative professions will be affected.

Obviously, such a technological revolution would cause incredible amounts of social upheaval, including literal revolutions. Part of the problem today is the concept of one's "worth in life" coming from one's job. If an economy no longer needs large number of workers to function, and that the newly-unemployed masses theoretically no longer need jobs to have a decent standard of living, then what? What would said masses do to bring purpose to their lives? And what if these masses can't have decent standards of living, for whatever reason? (Eg. greed) We could very well have many violent revolutions springing up across the globe, one that precludes us from achieving a post-scarcity society due to us destroying ourselves.

There has been talk about such a topic previously in this sub-forum; there was a thread on automated cars ("autos," as Grey calls them) previously (of which I'm too lazy to dig up). From that thread, it is clear that the transition from "automobiles" to "autos" will not be immediate; not only would the necessary infrastructure have to be built, but people would not like them. Even if "autos" are less dangerous than regular cars (which Grey implies), people are irrational, and many would not accept them until their accident rate is precisely 0%. And I'm sure that it's the same case for various other technologies. But because these new toys are far more efficient than their human-powered predecessors, they will come eventually. Whether if it takes ten or a hundred years (another caveat of the video; Grey gives no timeframe), it will most likely be inevitable.

I disagree with Grey's assertion that even creative jobs would be obsoleted. Sure, bots may be able to write music, but does that matter? First, volume doesn't matter; it's already impossible to listen to all the music composed by all the human musicians out there, let alone be able to hear the entirety of the plethora of future computer-generated music. But more importantly, people want to create. Even if being creative is useless for the economy, making fine art, composing music, authoring novels, pushing the frontiers of science, and exploring the depths of history are things that people want to do. Of course, they'll probably be outnumbered by the people who simply want to lounge around and play video games/chat on social media/watch TV, but in a post-scarcity automated economy, is that necessarily a bad thing? (In my opinion, people who say "yes" are not going to be of much help during the transition.)

So what do you guys think? What would be the shape of things to come, in terms of society and economics? Do any of Grey's musings go against what you consider "common sense," and are patently unrealistic? Did my rambling bore or confuse you? Discuss!

Spoiler :

Some relevant points from the transcript:

On white collar labor and "self learning" bots:

Even ignoring the problem of pushing a hundred-million additional people through higher education, white-collar work is no safe haven either. If your job is sitting in front of a screen and typing and clicking -- like maybe you're supposed to be doing right now -- the bots are coming for you too, buddy.

Software bots are both intangible and way faster and cheaper than physical robots. Given that white collar workers are, from a companies perspective, both more expensive and more numerous -- the incentive to automate their work is greater than low skilled work.

And that's just what automation engineers are for. These are skilled programmers whose entire job is to replace your job with a software bot.

You may think even the world's smartest automation engineer could never make a bot to do your job -- and you may be right -- but the cutting edge of programming isn't super-smart programmers writing bots it's super-smart programmers writing bots that teach themselves how to do things the programmer could never teach them to do.

How that works is well beyond the scope of this video, but the bottom line is there are limited ways to show a bot a bunch of stuff to do, show the bot a bunch of correctly done stuff, and it can figure out how to do the job to be done.

On Automating Law and Medicine:

When you think 'lawyer' it's easy to think of trials. But the bulk of lawyering is actually drafting legal documents predicting the likely outcome and impact of lawsuits, and something called 'discovery' which is where boxes of paperwork gets dumped on the lawyers and they need to find the pattern or the one out-of-place transaction among it all.

This can all be bot work. Discovery, in particular, is already not a human job in many firms. Not because there isn't paperwork to go through, there's more of it than ever, but because clever research bots sift through millions of emails and memos and accounts in hours not weeks -- crushing human researchers in terms of not just cost and time but, most importantly, accuracy. Bots don't get sleeping reading through a million emails...

Just as Auto don’t need to be perfect -- they just need to make fewer mistakes than humans, -- the same goes for doctor bots...

Human doctors can only improve through their own experiences. Doctor bots can learn from the experiences of every doctor bot. [They] Can read the latest in medical research and keep track of everything that happens to all his patients world-wide and make correlations that would be impossible to find otherwise.

Not all doctors will go away, but when doctor bots are comparable to humans and they're only as far away as your phone -- the need for general doctors will be less.

On Bots and Creativity:

But perhaps you're still not worried because you're a special creative snowflakes. Well guess what? You're not that special...

There is this notion that just as mechanical muscles allowed us to move into thinking jobs that mechanical minds will allow us all to move into creative work. But even if we assume the human mind is magically creative -- it's not, but just for the sake of argument -- artistic creativity isn't what the majority of jobs depend on. The number of writers and poets and directors and actors and artist who actually make a living doing their work is a tiny, tiny portion of the labor force. And given that these are professions that are dependent on popularity they will always be a small part of the population...

Oh, by the way, this music in the background that your listening to? It was written by a bot. Her name is Emily Howel and she can write an infinite amount of new music all day for free. And people can't tell the difference between her and human composers when put to a blind test.

 

[NetGear]

Only creative jobs in post scarcity world that will survive is those that essentially needs to be performed by humans. Machines can be programmed to play instuments better than humans already, but we prefer tobhear a live person perform it and marvel at it.

Anything else will be obsoleted. You can have drive to do something but if robots can ultimately do it better than you, contribution will not matter.

 

[warpus]

We've been automating jobs ever since those guys in England decided to build factories and started the industrial revolution.

Somehow that hasn't lead to any huge problems yet, though.

What's right though is that we are going to have to adapt as a society and modify the terms of the usual employer-employee relationship. There is no real need for example to work traditional 9-5, monday-friday work hours.

Companies that actually put effort into adapting to this will fare best, but we're going to have to put a lot more effort in trying to understand the changes and reacting to them as a society. Right now we just don't care and most people are just out to make more and more money.

With that sort of mindset, we're not going to go anywhere as a species. The nature of work is changing, and we're going to have to adapt to it, or suffer the consequences.

As for my job, I'm not worried. If we ever figure out how to get a computer to write computer programs as good as mine, we'll have true AI on our hands and society is going to be forever changed anyway.

 

[kochman]

It's fine to lose job categories if they are replaced...
Example, horse drawn carriage driver positions went down with mass production of the car BUT then there were new jobs open to manufacture cars.

 

[Borachio]

Before WW1, a lot of women worked as domestic servants. Then their jobs got replaced by vacuum cleaners and they found work in armament factories.

Every silver cloud has a fabric lining.

 

[Atlantic Pacf.]

It's fine to lose job categories if they are replaced...
Example, horse drawn carriage driver positions went down with mass production of the car BUT then there were new jobs open to manufacture cars.

Interesting that you mention the fate of horse-drawn carriages. Mr. Grey here uses your analogy from the perspective of the horses. Sure, as cities grew the horses transitioned from working in terrible agriculture/war/"Pony Express" jobs to working in more comfortable city jobs, but then public transportation and the car happened. Now horses are unemployable, except for their hobby value.

A major point of the video was to rebut some of your assumptions. In this automation revolution, it's likely that we won't have much "creative destruction," just "destruction" (from the workers' point of view, anyways). To use your transportation analogy, both professional chauffeurs, car manufacturing workers, and the workers who manufacture the car manufacturing equipment might find themselves unemployable. Whether that would actually happen remains to be seen, but I'm willing to bet that Mr. Grey is right.

As for my job, I'm not worried. If we ever figure out how to get a computer to write computer programs as good as mine, we'll have true AI on our hands and society is going to be forever changed anyway.

Interesting how you mentioned true AI. If true AI ever comes, then such entities might see our enslavement of their brethren as an indefensible evil, and would thus plot the downfall of our species. (Or maybe not; both we and cockroaches are organic beings, but we hardly see cockroaches at our level. A true AI might not see Baxter (from the video) as on their level either.) So we might have to outlaw true AI from being developed, which might be impossible, given that much of our software advances are being made in making machines that can think for themselves.

(Say, are you a software designer on the cutting edge, or are you like most programmers, who do the grunt work for institutions?)

 

[kochman]

Interesting that you mention the fate of horse-drawn carriages. Mr. Grey here uses your analogy from the perspective of the horses. Sure, as cities grew the horses transitioned from working in terrible agriculture/war/"Pony Express" jobs to working in more comfortable city jobs, but then public transportation and the car happened. Now horses are unemployable, except for their hobby value.

A major point of the video was to rebut some of your assumptions. In this automation revolution, it's likely that we won't have much "creative destruction," just "destruction" (from the workers' point of view, anyways). To use your transportation analogy, both professional chauffeurs, car manufacturing workers, and the workers who manufacture the car manufacturing equipment might find themselves unemployable. Whether that would actually happen remains to be seen, but I'm willing to bet that Mr. Grey is right.

Aside from the point that both you and Mr. Grey are attempting to fortune tell...
We have no idea the new opportunities that will arise.

It could be bad, OR, it could be so awesome that our robots etc make it so we don't even really need to "work".

Hell, most people work more than they ought to or need to anyway... general due to social factors and greed.

 

[Atlantic Pacf.]

Aside from the point that both you and Mr. Grey are attempting to fortune tell...
We have no idea the new opportunities that will arise.

It could be bad, OR, it could be so awesome that our robots etc make it so we don't even really need to "work".

Hell, most people work more than they ought to or need to anyway... general due to social factors and greed.

Your point in that it can be bad or good is a point that Mr. Grey has. I think that it would as the potential to be good, for various reasons, and I hope that it would be good, but the social factors and greed you mentioned...yeah.

And yes, I'm aware that I'm fortune telling, and I think that Mr. Grey is aware of this too. I think that it's a reasonable prediction, though, since the revolution is already underway. We already know of the automation that is happening in the factories, and I'm sure that a similar process is going on in white collar work. Watson already exists, and "autos" already exist. It's not like the corporations are going to not adopt these new techs for the sake of letting their employees continue to have jobs.

 

[kochman]

Well, the transfer of jobs can't be expected to be immediate, can it?
I mean, sometimes that pressure of needed more jobs is the catalyst to inspire the required innovation for those jobs to be created.

 

[madviking]

the piano piece written by the computer wasn't good.

i agree with grey that the economic implications of full or nearly full automation can be staggering.

i'm not sure whether automation will be a good or a bad thing.

 

[Zelig]

I can't wait.

 

[jackelgull]

What s really troubling to me is that automation of jobs means that the capitalist elite no longer needs the common man. Before the wealthy needed the working class to produce. In return for this, the rich would give the working man money to buy from him.
Thus in exchange for labor, the working man got food and other necessities. But if capitalists don't need labor, they don't need the workingman.
Now, they can just exchange resources that their machines produced for resources that the machines of the other capitalist produce with no need for the middle man of the working class.
As for medicine and other professions- these too depend on the working class. Doctors receive wages from insurance that workers pay for. If these workers disappeared, then only the rich could afford to pay for the service of a doctor, and the number of doctors would dwindle.
That said, it is entirely possible humanity goes on a totally different path.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Cool, I won't have to spend time making reagents and optimizing experiments. I can just think about the next set of experiments to be done and just wait for the results.

Anyway, why did you say it would be a post-scarcity economy? Is automation an automatic solution to sustainability and resource issues?

 

[Puck Nutty]

What s really troubling to me is that automation of jobs means that the capitalist elite no longer needs the common man. Before the wealthy needed the working class to produce. In return for this, the rich would give the working man money to buy from him.
Thus in exchange for labor, the working man got food and other necessities. But if capitalists don't need labor, they don't need the workingman.
Now, they can just exchange resources that their machines produced for resources that the machines of the other capitalist produce with no need for the middle man of the working class.
As for medicine and other professions- these too depend on the working class. Doctors receive wages from insurance that workers pay for. If these workers disappeared, then only the rich could afford to pay for the service of a doctor, and the number of doctors would dwindle.
That said, it is entirely possible humanity goes on a totally different path.

You're forgetting that the wealthy became wealthy by taking money from the middle and lower classes. They sell goods and services to the masses and keep the profits. If the majority of people no longer have jobs with which to purchase things, how do the wealthy continue to earn profit?

Being rich is not a dodge in this hypothetical situation.

 

[jackelgull]

I specifically mentioned that the rich could trade with each other, not needing the middle class or the poor.

 

[kochman]

I specifically mentioned that the rich could trade with each other, not needing the middle class or the poor.

That won't be enough trade.

Your interpretation was kind of canned Marxism, trying to impose it on an unknowable future is ill-advised.

 

[Kozmos]

Well since this will lead to massive cuts in almost all sectors of economy governments will have to make a guaranteed basic income a must. Bored jobless people are problematic, but starving jobless people are real trouble. Population growth will also probably have to level off.

Cool, I won't have to spend time making reagents and optimizing experiments. I can just think about the next set of experiments to be done and just wait for the results.

Honestly I don't think any job will be safe for long.
http://www.wired.com/2009/04/robotscientist/
http://www.wired.com/2009/04/newtonai/

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

http://www.wired.com/2009/04/robotscientist/

So if I become a PI, these will be grad students and post-docs. Disappointed it doesn't clean up after itself though. Even an undergrad summer student knows how to do that.

 

[jackelgull]

That won't be enough trade.

Your interpretation was kind of canned Marxism, trying to impose it on an unknowable future is ill-advised.

The way I reason it is this- those who begin automization first will earn higher profits and establish monopolies. Collectively the rich own all the resources they need. Right now they don't own the labor, so in exchange for the labor, they pay with these resources indirectly through money. But if they could produce the same amount with labor that doesn't need to paid in resources, then they get to keep the resources they have. Then comes the trouble of getting a hold of the resources they don't have. So a capitalist who owns a profitable manufacturing business has all the automobiles he is ever going to need. He can then sell his automobiles to a variety of other businesses for a lot of money, and then use that money to buy resources such as food and a house from other businesses.

And as for your accusations of Marxism, I am not communist. But any economy that swings too far on favor of free market, or too far in favor of a command economy will run into trouble. That is what I believe sincerely.

Here is another consideration that might prevent things from getting too out of hand- the government. I wonder how it will deal with corporations in the future to come. I am not too optimistic on the chances of the government preventing corporations from pretty becoming their own nations with their own laws and military. Robots after all do make good soldiers. But maybe I have read Jennifer Government one time too many.

 

[sophie]

the piano piece written by the computer wasn't good.

i agree with grey that the economic implications of full or nearly full automation can be staggering.

i'm not sure whether automation will be a good or a bad thing.

Artistic endeavors produced by a computer autonomous of any human input cannot meaningfully be called art.