The Robots Are Coming • Hacker News Board

Re: The Robots Are Coming

#21

Post by eli_gottlieb » Fri, Feb 27, 2015, 10:46 AM UTC

hooande wrote: post #12

signa11 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... and probably won't for reasons that don't need to be detailed in this comment... i would really appreciate if you could sketch your thoughts on this. thanks !

Only because you have so much karma... Automation won't destroy jobs because technology and society change faster than automation can keep up. Think of all the job titles that didn't exist 30 years ago (social media marketer, seo specialist, etc). By the time those are automated away, they will be replaced another set of jobs that we can't even conceive of. It's tempting to think that it's different this time, but it…

Technology has always reduced the total amount of work people need to do. That's why we now work 40-hour work-weeks in service outlets, factories, or offices instead of 100-hour work-weeks on farms.

The difference is that, once upon a time, we redefined "job" and "full-time" to balance between the economy's actual need for labor and humane living standards that allowed for active citizenship. We reduced the work-week and redefined a worker's life as involving more leisure, because our technology allowed us to do that.

These days, unemployment is high and labor participation is falling because technology has advanced, but we still expect the same work time. The result? A bifurcation of the labor market into a broad section of underemployed, unemployed, or just plain low-paid unskilled and semi-skilled workers, and a small cadre of overemployed professionals now working more than they ever previously did.

Stop trying to pretend the problem isn't there, and let's just fix it.

Re: The Robots Are Coming

#22

Post by throwawaymsft » Fri, Feb 27, 2015, 3:33 PM UTC

femto wrote: post #19

throwawaymsft wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans have a sense of pride in their work, and will strive to improve... Including the humans who make machine translation algorithms.

My point is that those new algorithms need something to learn from, and the humans that used to do the job are no longer in the game. The original corpus could be reused, but then performance will be bounded by that corpus. If better algorithms are trained on the output of worse algorithms, presumably they just emulate the performance of the worse algorithm. Where do the better algorithms get their input from, if a l…

But why would every translator stop working or creating new works just because machines can do the job too? I don't think computer written novels will mean people stop telling stories.

Translation is an interpretation of the best phrase to use, and has a subjective element. Imagine trying to translate jokes - it depends on your sense of humor too.

Re: The Robots Are Coming

#23

Post by anon4 » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 9:56 AM UTC

robbrown451 wrote: post #7

femto wrote: post #2

The article has this to say about Google Translate's improvements in accuracy: "Translate has hoovered up gigantic quantities of parallel texts into its database. A particularly fertile source of these useful things, apparently, is the European Union’s set of official publications, which are translated into all Community languages." The first thing I thought was "what happens when the EU starts outsourcing its transl…

Maybe we will be content to have "good enough," but I'd think that there is enough value in good quality translation that Google and others will pay people to "train" their algorithms and data set. Instead of waiting till someone tediously translates things, and then trying to learn from it, it would have skilled translators skim over the output, and correct it where it deviates from perfection, while providing conci…

You're assuming there is a single perfect translation, or even a single perfect translation algorithm across all domains. I'd wager that translating legalese and translating prose will need completely different algorithms trained on them and in the latter case you won't find two translators that fully agree on the best way to translate a given text.