American truck drivers could lose their jobs to robots

The difference though is that the changes are happening at a rapid pace. It used to happen across generations so people could adapt but now things happen at a pace that you cannot guarantee what you started at will still be needed in 5-10 years time.

There's no doubt that some programmer's jobs will start to disappear. Think about how many web devs/ html jockeys are no longer needed because word press or 100 other web publishing platforms are easy enough for non pgmrs to use. How long will a million programmers write custom software instead of just packaging apps? Today, places like Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon have a lot of programmers writing custom apps. And lots of other companies - eventually I think we'll need fewer of them. Maybe as a software engineer, I could be retrained to do genetic engineering or dna analysis. But it's a lot easier for me than the guy making hamburgers at McDonalds.

I don't want anyone to lose their job, but this change of reduced labor based work is inevitable. Economic forces are hard to overcome. Just like coal has been wiped out by cheap natural gas - it wasn't a conspiracy.

> If companies can eliminate those costs, they will if there's a way to do so. That is the unfortunate reality.

I have a hard time accepting the reduction in the cost of production as "unfortunate reality". This process is a key element of economic development. Why, at this point in history, is it now 'unfortunate'?

I think there are some very difficult challenges associated with the macro-trends in our global economic system but I'm pretty sure that viewing productivity increases as "unfortunate" isn't very helpful towards dealing with these challenges.

The common wisdom of autonomous transportation being lucrative for auto insurance companies may be correct, albeit for some not-so-common reasons.

As an analog to Wirth's law I'd suggest that in the transportation industry, technological advances in mitigating damage risk are offset by increased risk tolerance in seeking higher throughput / lower latency in the transport of goods and people.

So while the absolute accident rate will go down and the number of meatbag casualties will be reduced by automation removing human error, the _severity_ of catastrophic failure damaging _property_ will increase due to the incentives to push more autos through the pipes in less time: extreme tailgating, hyper-dense cargo, excessive velocity, and bountiful heterogeneity.

Really this is about a transition from (mainly) insuring against loss-of-life to (mainly) insuring against destruction-of-property. Of course, humans will still die even in 'negligible' quantities. But an actuary's loss-of-life liability assessment doesn't need to discriminate between fatal blunt trauma and fatal atomization.

I can see how the brain vs. brawn distinction could be pernicious, because mechanical robots can do one thing, but a robot that's smart like a human can do anything. Something about that formulation feels like an oversimplification though.

We've had technology replace mental labor before too.[0]

Spreadsheets democratized accounting and while making the work easier, also put a tax prep firm on every corner in the US. It vastly increased the number of people performing some sort of accounting. Some are small business owners that do it themselves, and can now hire a few extra employees.

We've had AI that can write beautiful music for ages, now it can duplicate the style of any composer,[1] but we largely don't care and still have pop stars. And composers.

The work Taylor Swift does for her millions of dollars probably involves layers of cultivating a story about a real person, responding correctly to paparazzi in different scenarios, and judging when to capitalize on interactions on Twitter between other celebrities. This probably sounds like I'm saying she's calculating, but really it has to be an enormous amount of instinct, because it's all probably not reducible to any series of tasks that can be enumerated or even perhaps knowable. Several people have tried to analyze her success, I'm not sure anyone actually understands it.[2][3]

More important for ordinary employees, we still have people compose film scores for some reason. Maybe because even if you can emulate other composers, someone has to decide which composer to emulate, which means having some ability to guess at another artist's as yet unexpressed artistic vision. Once you have the decades of training and experience to do all that, might as well write the thing yourself. Maybe recommendation engines could get there, but I'm not sure those work with novel creations, and I'm not sure we're even interested in perfecting those anymore for areas where they're proven (more or less) to work.[4]

Maybe the weird thing about mental assistants is that they expand the workforce, rather than reducing it. Robots are set up to run automatically, but all the AI we develop is driven by humans to solve day to day problems.

It's like if instead of robotics we built programmable exoskeletons or mechs. The number of employees would explode. There'd still be people building everything, inside the machines. That's what we're doing with computers in a lot of fields. Software is most often like a suit our brain wears to think faster or more reliably.

On the other hand, there are also examples of muscle jobs that haven't yet been perfectly replaced.[5]

The lack of a sewing robot (or ubiquitous clothes folding robots as another commenter mentioned) illustrates that we tend to overgeneralize. Some brawn problems are easy, and some are hard. Same for brain problems. Some problems will stick around, either stubbornly unable to be mechanized, or just not worth the cost.

Also, feedback systems kick in to ensure that labor force participation bounces between reasonable extremes. A lot of the recent downturn in the LFPR can be attributed to retirees.[6] It seems to be leveling off or even heading up again, but regardless the US rate remains well within historical norms.[7]

Sorry this turned out super long and rambly.

[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/25/389027988/episo...

[1] http://newatlas.com/creative-artificial-intelligence-compute...

[2] https://blog.longreads.com/2014/07/07/taylor-swift-is-a-musi...

[3] http://www.gq.com/story/taylor-swift-gq-cover-story?currentP...

[4] http://www.slashfilm.com/happened-netflixs-recommendation-en...

[5] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/03/488611449/episo...

[6] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-19/why-labor-...

[7] http://data.bls.gov/generated_files/graphics/latest_numbers_...

I can't seem to export the BLS page I generated. Basically fully expand the range of this page to see the entire history: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000