A table in the article says Technical Writers have an 89% chance of losing their jobs. But it's only 6% for editors.
Why? Will technical instructions be automatically generated? How?
The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
101–110 of 141 posts
Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
#102I am always stunned with statements like this: "For those not in the elite, argues David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, much of modern labour consists of stultifying “bullshit jobs”—low- and mid-level screen-sitting that serves simply to occupy workers for whom the economy no longer has much use. Keeping them employed, Mr Graeber argues, is not an economic choice; it is something the ru…
>Yes, I, as an employer, keep my staff doing "bullshit jobs" because I want to "keep control over the lives of others." WTF?!?! Why would I do that? One reason bullshit jobs exist is because decisions are made by managers, not some ultimate rational owner who thinks only of profit. In many big companies a manager's status is based on the number of people they manage, if they invent more jobs for people they are more…
Somewhere, in the last few months -- alas, I don't recall where -- I read about a company that rates its managers on how much their teams accomplish, divided by the size of the team. They claimed, plausibly I think, that this system effectively discouraged such fiefdom-building.
Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Creating "bullshit jobs" doesn't need a coördinated cabal. The wrong incentives can manufacture such roles in a distributed fashion. Consider our tax system. Government bureaucracies refine the tax code. The same bureaucracies that fight each year for their budget allocations from Congress. Districts reward Congressmen who bring jobs home. Increased staffing, cost, taxation and knock-on bureaucracy ensues across gove…
One example i recall Graeber using for such jobs are call center cold call marketing. Rooms filled with people who sit there all day calling number after number with the hope that whoever answers have any interest in their product.
But is that really a make-work job? I doubt they would pay people to do that if it doesn't make more money than it costs (or at least they believe it does.)
Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
#104I am always stunned with statements like this: "For those not in the elite, argues David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, much of modern labour consists of stultifying “bullshit jobs”—low- and mid-level screen-sitting that serves simply to occupy workers for whom the economy no longer has much use. Keeping them employed, Mr Graeber argues, is not an economic choice; it is something the ru…
>Yes, I, as an employer, keep my staff doing "bullshit jobs" because I want to "keep control over the lives of others." WTF?!?! Why would I do that? One reason bullshit jobs exist is because decisions are made by managers, not some ultimate rational owner who thinks only of profit. In many big companies a manager's status is based on the number of people they manage, if they invent more jobs for people they are more…
Not to be pedantic but the wholesale culling of available iron during the great leap forward was not at all similar to the maker revolution. The goal was to pull resources (iron) from the population to be centralized for re-distribution so that the iron could be turned into communal tools like plows and railroad ties.
Arguably the inverse of a maker revolution.
Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
#105I am always stunned with statements like this: "For those not in the elite, argues David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, much of modern labour consists of stultifying “bullshit jobs”—low- and mid-level screen-sitting that serves simply to occupy workers for whom the economy no longer has much use. Keeping them employed, Mr Graeber argues, is not an economic choice; it is something the ru…
To some extent, bullshit jobs, given however slight of a start, make and propagate themselves.
People jealously guard their career territory through legislative or other means and seek to expand it, even though what they are doing is ultimately of little (or even negative) value. Anyone who has spent any time in an organization of any size has no doubt seen micro examples of this. No dark cabal needed.
Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm all for advances in technology making things safer and putting fewer people in harms way. I just don't think there is anything close to a 17% chance that it will happen in the next two decades. I say this as someone who has a foot in both worlds, so to speak... I work in technology, build UAV quadcopters (including playing with various sensors) as a hobbyist, and work at least one shift a week as a firefighter/pa…
It seems like you're stuck on the automaton aspect. Would not remote control robots decrease the number of firefighters necessary? If each building came equipped with remotely operated firefighting drones, response time would improve by orders of magnitude. The same for car accident incidents: would a precisely controlled remote robot not be able to more aptly apply the jaws of life, especially in situations dangerou…
>Would not remote control robots decrease the number of firefighters necessary?
Perhaps, but I think the loss of situation awareness would be a big problem to overcome (certainly not insurmountable, just the first challenge I see).
I absolutely agree that this is the direction things are headed, I just think the timescale is a little optimistic.
Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish I could be as optimistic. But AGIs are physical beings with computational limitations that run on energy. The Sun can produce so much over a given period of time. It's not hard to imagine a competition trap involving AGIs, each trying to get as much resources as possible to increase its capacity and crush the competition.
I would hope artificial agents are intelligent enough to realize that erasing their own utility functions to grab resources has very low utility! Cooperation is a high expected-utility strategy for the mean agent, which is why it evolved in the first place.
I don't cooperate with ants.
Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
#108Ftee trade destroys wages, of this there is no secret. De-regulation subverts democracy. Time to revisit the relationship between capital and well-being. Ricardian theories of comparative advantage drive wealth into the hands of those who control capital, not into the calloused hands of the poor suckers who sweat.
Automation destroys far more jobs than free trade. If anything we should ban automation.
Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would hope artificial agents are intelligent enough to realize that erasing their own utility functions to grab resources has very low utility! Cooperation is a high expected-utility strategy for the mean agent, which is why it evolved in the first place.
I don't cooperate with ants.
Don't make me come over there, kid.
Re: The future of jobs: The onrushing wave
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bullshit jobs arise in two ways. One is through the crazy inefficiencies of huge companies and governments. This is likely not you. Second is as an emergent property of red queens races in the economy, escalating complexity or overhead that does not actually increase overall macro productivity. The latter requires at least a casual familiarity with evolutionary game theory, but once comprehend cannot be un-comprehend…
Utter failure would have been nuclear self-annihilation.
True. Guess we passed the first pop quiz.