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No Recent Automation Revolution

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Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#41

Post by pragmatic »

adventured wrote: post #31
lettergram wrote: post #25

We are only a couple years away from automating most customer servicing. You’ll still need a few, but if we collect data on the few it’s possible to scale those answers to millions. That’ll put millions out of work and is basically text generation... easy to deploy, easy to maintain, and we probably already have the technology just not productionized. Now, those people will be retrained to do something. Maybe even ju…

Also in the customer service segment, we continue to accelerate the move to wipe out fast food jobs. Four million people work in fast food restaurants in the US. I'll be surprised if around 1/4 to 1/3 of those jobs don't vanish this decade. That is part of the automation revolution and it is underway. Just the process of automating ordering at fast food restaurants as we already easily can, will remove several hundre…

The sceptic in me wonders how much capital the fast food industry is willing to invest to replace cheap labor. I'm not really arguing with you just reflecting on my own experiences with current start of the art tech.

"Did you say at fries to that?" No "Added 27 orders of fries, anything else" Arghhhh!

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#42

Post by mortenjorck »

The post implies that the authors' paper has received limited attention from the economic establishment due to its heterodox conclusion, but elides any supposition as to why its heterodoxy should be so controversial. Why should it be?

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#43

Post by Animats »

jariel wrote: post #2

Star Wars used painstakingly crafted models and photography effects to produce the film. Now, people using modern tools can do much more, with considerably less work. The 'jobs' analysis wouldn't necessarily reveal that. Taking inventory in a retail store used to be a paper and pencil mass bureaucracy - it's now streamlined. We don't stand at the line anymore to withdraw or deposit money. Secretaries don't type memos…

Star Wars used painstakingly crafted models and photography effects to produce the film. Now, people using modern tools can do much more, with considerably less work. The 'jobs' analysis wouldn't necessarily reveal that.

Sit through the credits at the end of an effects-heavy movie and look at the thousand or so people involved. The physical effects operations were never that big. I visited Kerner Optical, the physical effects end of Lucasfilm, once, and they had maybe 100 people. (They're gone now, spun off and didn't make it as a standalone company.) Overall, the number of people involved in a major movie seems to be up, not down. Much to the annoyance of some people in the industry, who, 20 years ago, thought they'd be able to make major films with 30 people.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#44

Post by dragontamer »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #7
Swizec wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The revolution won't be the automation. It'll be in us accepting that the job wasn't who we were/are and it's okay to let it go This is perhaps the only thing socialism got right. At least the flavor we had in Yugoslavia and the remnants it left on the psyche of my parent's generation. You do your job, then you go home and live your actual life. The job exists as a way to "pay your dues" in society, but it isn't yo…

> We have more prosperity and I sometimes wonder if our parents didn't have more life. When I was younger and naive, I judged the Amish. As I've grown older and wiser, I realize they had the right idea all along. Family, loved ones, community first. Everything else serves those.

The Amish are actually some of the most successful businessmen.

So... its probably not all just "friends and family values" in the Amish world. Despite a luddite-based culture and "technically" an 8th grade education, they're probably one of the hardest working people around.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/06...

--------

They just figured out where to focus their business chops. Organic foods, hand-crafted customized furniture, etc. etc. And the Amish have a huge reputation as among the best craftsmen and freshest foods for these sorts of things.

Their sense of community probably also helps keep the various Amish businesses alive since they help each other so much.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#45

Post by jariel »

d3nj4l wrote: post #9
jariel wrote: post #2

Star Wars used painstakingly crafted models and photography effects to produce the film. Now, people using modern tools can do much more, with considerably less work. The 'jobs' analysis wouldn't necessarily reveal that. Taking inventory in a retail store used to be a paper and pencil mass bureaucracy - it's now streamlined. We don't stand at the line anymore to withdraw or deposit money. Secretaries don't type memos…

I understand your point, but that doesn't seem to be what the article talks about. From the linked article: > Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that for many years the media has been almost screaming that we entering a big automation revolution , with huge associated job losses, due to new AI tech, especially deep learning. Emphasis mine. Their point doesn't seem to be that automation isn't happening,…

"If new tech was breaking the frontiers of automation and making it possible to automate jobs which couldn't be done before, these features should've changed."

This is definitely not self-evident, moreover, I'd totally disagree with it.

The authors are essentially missing the point by trying to categorize jobs or features of jobs as 'automatable' when in the grand scheme, it's just not how it works.

Everyone's jobs are evolving due to automation.

1) Automation has been steadily happening due to progress in IT for decades.

2) AI, in particular, is a nascent field, moreover, it's really on a 'tool' in the tool chest of IT systems overall. The time horizon for impact for direct impact of 'AI' will be a long way off, and when it is, it won't be directly apparent in most cases. There will be very few jobs where we'll be able to say 'AI replaced me'. Maybe Taxi drivers.

3) And my point - is that automation is tremendously difficult to measure in reality, and that it changes the nature of some jobs more than others, and in ways that cannot be measured by using employment numbers.

The 'AI replaced the taxi drivers' example, derived from our 'Industrial Revolution' thinking about automation and productivity, is an outlier.

Seeking to find ways in which 'AI replaced cab drivers' is probably worthwhile on some level, but it's going to miss 95% of the revolution.

Think of an Amazon product picker - their jobs have changed tremendously due to automation. There may be all sorts of flavours of AI baked into an Amazon warehouse pickers job now and in the future: a lot of AI in the vision/3D control for the robots which incrementally replace humans. AI in the route optimisation, AI in labour scheduling (no longer done by humans), AI in facilities management (ordering parts, service automatically).

All of this may lead to considerably more efficient workplace and yet not a single job may be lost nor might it lead us to think of some magic tech replacing some workers in a specific way, rather 'the system got smarter'.

The economic equilibrium may in fact lead to considerably more people being hired to do 'different kinds of more automated picking', not fewer.

The AI revolution is the same as the information revolution and it's happening across the system in myriad ways that will be very hard to measure as we would like.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#46

Post by d3nj4l »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #16
d3nj4l wrote: post #14

I thought about this article in context of the recently reposted piece "There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence" [1]. While it may be true that we haven't been able to automate new kinds of jobs, maybe we are just moments away from having an AGI that would make that kind of automation easy. That would contradict this article's claim that the narrative around an incoming automation revolution is bull…

> maybe we are just moments away from having an AGI that would make that kind of automation easy What evidence do we have for being closer to AGI today than we were twenty years ago? My point isn't that AGI is useless. But it's currently an article of faith. Faith is fine. Faith is essential. But isn't a good way to make huge allocations of resources.

> What evidence do we have for being closer to AGI today than we were twenty years ago?

None; I agree. But we have no evidence we are 20 years away from it either. The article I linked gives reasoning for why we shouldn't assume the latter, and prepare for the former.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#47

Post by toast0 »

maxerickson wrote: post #35
adventured wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also in the customer service segment, we continue to accelerate the move to wipe out fast food jobs. Four million people work in fast food restaurants in the US. I'll be surprised if around 1/4 to 1/3 of those jobs don't vanish this decade. That is part of the automation revolution and it is underway. Just the process of automating ordering at fast food restaurants as we already easily can, will remove several hundre…

Fast food automates tasks more than jobs. Which the link doesn't particularly seem to be analyzing. McDonalds eliminating ~1 near minimum wage job at every store isn't going to be reflected in wages of the remaining employees.

Wages are going up, so McDonalds is reducing the number of jobs. If you come inside to order, you have to fill your own drink; if you drive through, a robot does it. Stores have ordering kiosks and app based ordering so less staff needs to take orders. They've experimented with call center drive through processing before (it didn't work well at the time). It's harder to see, but they do lots of labor saving in the kitchen too.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#48

Post by d3nj4l »

jariel wrote: post #45
d3nj4l wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your point, but that doesn't seem to be what the article talks about. From the linked article: > Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that for many years the media has been almost screaming that we entering a big automation revolution , with huge associated job losses, due to new AI tech, especially deep learning. Emphasis mine. Their point doesn't seem to be that automation isn't happening,…

"If new tech was breaking the frontiers of automation and making it possible to automate jobs which couldn't be done before, these features should've changed." This is definitely not self-evident, moreover, I'd totally disagree with it. The authors are essentially missing the point by trying to categorize jobs or features of jobs as 'automatable' when in the grand scheme, it's just not how it works. Everyone's jobs a…

Their definition of "automation" isn't a binary toggle, but a grade scale based on expert research:

> For our purposes, a key ONET job feature is “degree of automation,” ranging from “not at all” to “completely.” [...] (Note, these scores are expert judgements, not model predictions. Such scores for all jobs are found here: https://www.onetonline.org/find/descriptor/result/4.C.3.b.2?...)

From the linked paper.

> The economic equilibrium may in fact lead to considerably more people being hired to do 'different kinds of more automated picking', not fewer.

I think you agree with them, then:

> Labor markets change more often due to changes in demand, relative to supply.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#49

Post by trixie_ »

There's no technical or physical limit to why so many things can't be automated, which means everything that can, will be automated eventually.. Super popular games like Factorio and Satisfactory are glimpses of a potential near future.

Re: No Recent Automation Revolution

#50

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

lettergram wrote: post #25

We are only a couple years away from automating most customer servicing. You’ll still need a few, but if we collect data on the few it’s possible to scale those answers to millions. That’ll put millions out of work and is basically text generation... easy to deploy, easy to maintain, and we probably already have the technology just not productionized. Now, those people will be retrained to do something. Maybe even ju…

> That’ll put millions out of work and is basically text generation... easy to deploy, easy to maintain, and we probably already have the technology just not productionized.

Yea, but does it...you know, work?

Why didn't the internet already eliminate most customer service? The common inquiries can easily be found solutions to online. if I'm calling support it's almost always because the resources available don't solve my problem. And spending 20 minutes on the phone with an automated system asking about billing is very frustrating.

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