Thoughts on Job Loss Due to Automation

Submitted by Redvolition t3_y9y50l in singularity

I believe paper publishing scientists will be amongst the last to be replaced, albeit the lab technicians and assistants doing less innovative work will be far sooner. By the time AI can publish scientific papers to the point of replacing scientists themselves, this is it, we already reached the singularity.

Problem is, this type of innovative work likely requires minimum >120 IQ, which is 1 in 11 people. If you don't reach that cutoff, the remaining options will mostly be traditional manual jobs requiring <100 IQ, or those that benefit from physical human interaction, such as therapists and prostitutes. Basically the middle class, middle cognitive demand jobs for people between 100 and 120 IQ will be eradicated.

If it is difficult to monetize a career in entertainment now, it will be an order or two of magnitude harder in the future, due to competition with AI generators and performers.

Even assuming you have the AI to control robots, the raw materials and fuel to power them cost a lot of resources, and manual laborers are amongst the cheapest, so as long as the robots remain costing more than 4 or 5 years worth of wages, which adds up to 150k to 300k USD in America, plumbers, electricians, and housekeepers will keep their jobs.

We are heading towards a society in the 2030s being stratified as such, in order of wealth:

  1. Capitalists (~1%)
  2. Entertainers and Performers (~0.05%)
  3. Innovation STEM jobs (~5%)
  4. Management and administration (~5%)
  5. Physical interaction jobs (~5%)
  6. Manual labor jobs (~30%)
  7. UBI majority (53.95%)
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SFTExP t1_it8dp6n wrote

It depends on which advances first and becomes more ubiquitous and cost-efficient. We may see higher-paid ‘thinking’ jobs taken over by AI before robotics dominates manual labor jobs.

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mckirkus t1_it92ifq wrote

Yes, everybody thought art would be the last thing to fall.

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DrKrepz t1_it97roo wrote

I still think it will be. I have yet to see AI create art.

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BearStorms t1_it9dxcx wrote

Yeah, well, you know, that's just like, your opinion, man. We can discuss endlessly about "what is art?". By some definition, maybe even the most mainstream one, AI (or computers in general) have been creating art for decades...

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DrKrepz t1_it9my90 wrote

Humans use machines to create art. Machines don't do it autonomously. We barely need to define art to establish that humans are still necessary for any AI image generator to function at all.

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BearStorms t1_it9ykr1 wrote

You can absolutely create a program that generates infinite number of random pretty images, it is actually quite trivial to do. It's gotta exist somewhere, let's say a GPT-3 creates an interesting prompt and then Stable Diffusion generates the image. Anyone knows about something like this?

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micaroma t1_it9i2co wrote

AI has been generating images that customers would use (and are using) rather than images created by humans. That's what matters when we're talking about job replacement. Whether said images are "art" is irrelevant.

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DrKrepz t1_it9mpvu wrote

The job becomes the prompt. Also the seed data needs to be created which means original works are necessary to provide fodder for the AI.

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p_derain t1_it9o66q wrote

Prompters are getting replaced, too.

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Ezekiel_W t1_it82z48 wrote

More or less, you are certainly correct in the fact that the majority will be on a UBI. I keep trying to tell anyone who will listen that automation is coming, and in some cases, it's already here.

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BinyaminDelta t1_it92f81 wrote

Elon predicted that Tesla Bot will cost $20,000.

That's.... Nothing. Even if he's wrong and it's 2x that, $40,000 for a worker which doesn't quit, unionize, or take breaks is an obvious choice.

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AsthmaBeyondBorders t1_it9fmoq wrote

Elon said we'd have fully autonomous cars today, he said the window on his truck wouldn't break, he said underground tunnels for cars was better than metro, and showed his dick to an employee who didn't request it.

Fuck what Elon says

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UnionPacifik t1_itiou27 wrote

Elon Musk is a genius at self-promoting and and idiot at most else.

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Redvolition OP t1_it95xgy wrote

The Boston Dynamics robot cost 74k USD, so they seem to be priced at a range that would put manual laborers at serious threat of losing their jobs, if they become dexterous enought.

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blueSGL t1_ita9v70 wrote

is 'dexterous enough' (esp for the tesla bot) a product of software or are they still needing to improve performance on the linear actuators / pneumatic system to be able to run the corrections fast enough?

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GenoHuman t1_itbeqxd wrote

He also claimed they would be sending cargo to Mars with Starship in 2022, yeah...

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ihateshadylandlords t1_it8bxuu wrote

Gonna be real interesting to see how businesses thrive when a large swath of the population can’t afford anything and/or when CEO’s start getting automated.

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Redvolition OP t1_it92z8v wrote

Despite being a free market advocate myself and generally against state interventionism, for the first time, I happen to agree with the opinion of a socialist:

Automation is abolishing the source of profit, making socialism an economic and technical necessity for the first time

Before this post scarcity utopia arrives, though, we might have a large UBI underclass that spends the money it receives from the government on companies, which in turn get a large ammount of their profits taxed away to feed the underclass back, thus creating a cycle of production and consumption not based on work, but rather on taxation and gratuituous distribution. For this to work, we are going to start seeing absurd levels of taxation, far above what socialist nations such as Belgium and France practice.

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BearStorms t1_it96x73 wrote

I don't think this will be pretty, especially in the US. There is kind of animosity towards people on welfare, etc. as an ideological position and moving towards UBI or God forbid some kind of socialism will be a very hard thing to swallow for many people. Even though it will be absolutely necessary. American working class has a long tradition of voting against their own interests. The capital holding elites will weaponize this sentiment to fight the high level of taxation that will be surely coming as you pointed out. Europe will definitely have an advantage in this and the transition will be smoother.

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shadysjunk t1_it9iezc wrote

This might be doomer-y take, but I increasingly think full automation of many jobs might be further out than I previously thought. I think if most people on this sub are being honest with themselves, with the law of accelerating returns, we thought self driving cars would be a full functioning technological reality in almost all road scenarios by now (I mean level 4-5 autonomy). I expected the main battles at this point to be over liability in the event of a collision and entrenched labor positions resisting the implementation of the technology. That just isn't the case. It appears to be a stickier tech problem than it initially seemed.

Even a field where I would expect the fastest worker replacement, Radiology, hasn't has seen AI lead to significant lay offs. If you asked me in 2015 who would read a simple and straight-forward x-ray (I mean for a broken arm, not a brain MRI) in the year 2025, a human or an AI, I'd have said AI for sure. We have 3 years to go but that already seems highly unlikely to me at this point. 2030 or 2035? Maybe, but my 2015 optimism burned me.

Or to look at another singularity field; I don't think we've seen significant life extension beyond where we were in even the 90's. "Youth extension," maybe, but even that hasn't really seen a wild sea-change. I lost my dad last year, and his hospital experience and life span weren't so different from when I lost my grandparents.

I think your numbers *may* pan out, but I don't expect it until the 2050's at least. Right now AI image generation makes it look like the graphic design and concept art fields may face real pressure from AI very soon, but if it ends up being like self-driving tech, getting that last 10-15% of fidelity is way WAY harder than the first 85-90%.

Again, I think your numbers seem reasonable, but I think we're looking at 2050-ish at the soonest. I also have NO faith in the American people to ever support something like UBI, and in it's absence I have no idea what society would even look like. I expect that the American people would rather see the whole of Houston look like a Kolkata slum, before they let anyone ever get "a free ride."

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Lorraine527 t1_itmx136 wrote

I think driving and radiology are high-risk fields and protected by regulation , and also, they are only 90% solved. So they are not deployed, rightfully so.

But there are many fields where being 90% solved(and maybe getting a little help from a human) is useful enough to be deployed.

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OLSAU t1_it832ho wrote

Our only problem is the technology owners.

They are human, and their position of power and wealth reached, correlates with dark triade personality traits. That is well studied.

These people will use technology to change humanity, change the World to their liking, by the press of a button, metaphorically speaking.

A very, very dark future indeed.

I they will not accept 50+% on UBI.

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BearStorms t1_it97vps wrote

This can get even darker; what are the billions of people on UBI good for when everything can be automated? They are just kind of in the way, useless masses just wasting space and breathing the air that should be reserved by the deserving elites that made this brave new world possible. Imagine a tech billionaire and his army of robots literally genociding most of humanity. You can even rationalize it as "saving the Earth and the environment". I mean I don't think this scenario is likely since hopefully most of the elites are not complete monsters, but it is thought that crossed my mind once or twice...

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EulersApprentice t1_itbjmil wrote

This is my biggest concern with automation*. The keystone of civilization is "humans together are strong; humans alone are weak". Remove that keystone and civilization has no reason to exist. It'd only be a matter of time before "might makes right" becomes the default human philosophy. The problem runs deeper than capitalism; removing capitalism doesn't remove the problem.

*Excluding AGI. If AGI enters the picture, all bets are off.

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AsthmaBeyondBorders t1_it9dzr2 wrote

The thing is wealth is relative. If they enter a world where everyone is rich then suddenly nobody is rich anymore. Won't that be a loop to annihilation?

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BearStorms t1_it9fuar wrote

Everyone won't be rich. Even if we have unlimited energy and can conjure anything out of rocks or garbage there will still be limited space on this planet.

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AsthmaBeyondBorders t1_it9fyz4 wrote

Exactly. But wasn't your comment suggesting rich people may kill poor people because they become useless or did I read that wrong?

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BearStorms t1_it9gzke wrote

They won't be of any use anymore as everything is done by robots so no employees necessary and they are now just taking up that one limited precious resource that has completely finite supply - space on this planet.

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AsthmaBeyondBorders t1_it9hd4s wrote

And I suppose then they enter a worldwide agreement of the elites where they accept to live peacefully as equals forever, because the useless space-taking masses have been eradicated and now everyone who is left in the world will finally be able to accept that all people are equal? Can they continue to be elite when non-elites don't exist anymore? Or will there be a new smaller elite?

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BearStorms t1_it9zqtb wrote

Well, who knows, I'm not saying this idea is completely fleshed out :)

There was this movie "Kingsman: The Secret Service" that had a similar plot where a wealthy megalomaniac and eco-terrorist wanting to deal with climate change by wiping out most of humanity. There was no AI or robots involved in the plot however.

Just a food for thought that the 0.01% elites will have no use for us plebs when everything is automated. We won't be useless, we will be less than useless - we will be literally a waste of space and oxygen.

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BearStorms t1_ita0aj4 wrote

Also think about implications for authoritarian regimes - right now as a dictator you have to maintain a strong force that keeps the population at bay. Imagine that now you have automated police force, millions of small drones spying on you at all times and even intervening any time you are doing anything the regime doesn't like. That stuff is coming to China probably sooner that we would expect.

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Effective-Dig8734 t1_it8hf2i wrote

There power would be entirely reliant on the people

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nzs_eldarc t1_it9dy11 wrote

No, their power CURRENTLY is reliant on the people. Once we reach this level of automation they will no longer need us. Your imagination can fill in what happens after that.

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Effective-Dig8734 t1_itafl4o wrote

They will no longer need us? What exactly do you mean by that, they will no longer need us to work, that is true, but being rich in a human society without humans is meaningless. There’s no reason for them to be super oppressive also we already see these companies open sourcing many of there things

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Frumpagumpus t1_it8cgr2 wrote

my bet is on manual labor.

but overall right.

i think there will be a fairly narrow window where programmers can make a ton of money though. but mostly the top 20% (we r kinda already in that window...)

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BearStorms t1_it972nj wrote

>i think there will be a fairly narrow window where programmers can make a ton of money though. but mostly the top 20% (we r kinda already in that window...)

Hope you are right, I mean we are already there. If you saying it is going to get even better that's a music to my ears!

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Frumpagumpus t1_it98ubw wrote

yea next 6 months to a year might be a bit dicey due to global credit crunch but thats planting the seeds of big bucks over the next several years, my opinion.

china invading taiwan might extend the diciness by a few years tho lol

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kmtrp t1_itbrpdb wrote

>global credit crunch

What's that?

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Frumpagumpus t1_itbstbm wrote

most of the money in the world economy is created through bank loans, primarily for real estate/housing (other big source being gov deficits of countries that mint their own currencies)

inflation got really high and creates a feedback loop, so global central banks are hiking interest rates which makes it more expensive to get loans for said real estate, but also for any actual productive endeavors, like building a factory an energy plant or something. (when investors can get higher interest rates on buying bonds/lending money they also demand higher returns on stock financed things).

however this is really the only lever global governments have to pull, the housing/credit lever, because most gov budgets through e.g. social security, pension funds will automatically spend more and more money as inflation heats up. Also legislatures wouldnt want to push through fiscal austerity bills when they could just pin the downturn on the banks instead.

so they are going to have to pull it hard and make money scarce/destroy demand to stop the feedback loop of inflation.

more or less.

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kmtrp t1_itbu74n wrote

Hey I apprecite the effort. I thought it was more of a consumer related thing, like the consumer prize indicator or some such? IIRC that's how we know what is the current inflation?

I swear I've read up on this a few times, can't keep it in my head for more than a few weeks, it's so abstract.

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RemyVonLion t1_it8td38 wrote

If people have their needs taken care of they will be free to pursue whatever field they desire to still contribute productively in.

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TheSingulatarian t1_it8vxpi wrote

People currently on welfare are not pursuing innovative dreams.They are mostly sitting in front of the TV eating chips.

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AsthmaBeyondBorders t1_it9fda0 wrote

So much stuff contributes to that tho. From psychological problems that being in this position in this day and age brings (peer pressure, prejudice, thinking you are worthless), to actual biases in job hunting (you been without work for a long time so your resume looks worse and worse for recruiters every passing day without experience).

And then careful with generalizations when you don't actually survey people on welfare before claiming what they are up to or not. You don't know that.

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RemyVonLion t1_it8wznk wrote

Might be true for most of them, but that's better than everyone trying to scam each other for survival in the current for profit system. If people decide to work at all, it should be optimized for productivity. Capitalism actually reduces competition and innovation because it creates monopolies that work together to crush and absorb small business, consolidating wealth, rights, and power to the 1%. It's a system built around catering to business owners over workers since they provide all the necessary goods and services, for profit.

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GenoHuman t1_itbekd8 wrote

When I was unemployed for almost a year I didn't sit around doing nothing, it was the most creative and productive year of my life, I was writing stories, making game prototypes, reading a bunch of books (which I've never done since), etc... all of that is severely limited when working and you don't even realize it but when the job is gone it all comes back, at least for me.

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TheSingulatarian t1_itcfm2y wrote

I would say you are the exception. Most people currently on welfare are women and children, they are not writing the Great American Novel. Some certainly take the opportunity to go to school and learn a new skill but, again those are the exception.

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GenoHuman t1_itbenld wrote

Entertainers and performers won't exist, the future is customers interacting with neural networks in feedback loops, no real people required to create new entertainment.

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Competitive_Boss_498 t1_it8ciw0 wrote

I agree that a large percentage will rely on UBI. The rest is too hard to tell.

I also think the timeline will extend due to the "complexity brake" concept.

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MagicOfBarca t1_it8xxab wrote

I will love it and I think I deserve!

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16161as t1_it9m0bq wrote

In the age of artificial intelligence, there will be no demand for human Entertainers and performers

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World_May_Wobble t1_ita2kc0 wrote

>albeit the lab technicians and assistants doing less innovative work will be far sooner.

I'm one of these people. The amount of automation my company has picked up in the last few years is substantial. All the busy-work I do would take me a week without all the gadgets and machines I'm using.

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Designer_Sense_ t1_it8lp0p wrote

Science is just one way to collect knowledge. There is also traditional knowledge and then there is the actual experience. If it is scientific does not make it magically better than anything else. Example quality of research can be bad as it can be good. Research can claim all sort of things for all sort of reasons. With research there are also tabu subjects that are hard to make progress with. Let say extended water fast like 30 days is really tabu subject to research. Then by looking traditional knowledge, long fast has been more common at past. Then from subjective experience people have had good and bad experiences.

I think AI will need get these 3 sources knowledge on same line, not just scientific. Then level up and let the new knowledge emergence from this new level.

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AsthmaBeyondBorders t1_it9en7w wrote

Publishing papers is a very human way to make science understandable and easily accessible / readable by people. We probably shouldn't expect AI to write papers and publish them in formats similar to ours, they would have more efficient piecewise continuous flow of data and information online that do not ressemble journal papers at all, are much faster, less readable for humans and completely interconnected. Maybe completely ditching natural language unless we force them to use readable language for humans (which may make them less efficient).

At some point even their scientific methods will escape the sphere of human comprehension (at least without artificially augmented cognition).

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Designer_Sense_ t1_it9pm92 wrote

Yes I think one main principle of technology is to be more energy efficient.

Scientifc method as word is already kind of limited for the object it tries to describe. Probably we need new words. Neural network is already blackbox so it's causality is not comprehended by human mind in case network is very complex. Network with few parameters can be causally comprehended with mind. So even if it is black box we can control and guide it.

I think AGI might be big black box with steering wheel and pedals. You see some stuff pass by from windows.

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Lawjarp2 t1_it8pw0t wrote

Short term transitional issues. Better save money ,reduce expense till UBI is large enough. If you really think transition is long, then Food, energy, shelter, healthcare is basic

(1) buy a home (2) make it self sufficient on energy via solar panels

Food will probably be cheap. Oh, don't be in a country where healthcare is expensive if you expect to be jobless for long in a transition.

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Torrall t1_it8wres wrote

Never understood people who didnt out grow the IQ metric

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BinyaminDelta t1_it93m0t wrote

You don't think that humans have different levels of intelligence and aptitude?

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AsthmaBeyondBorders t1_it9g8ze wrote

Yes but IQ tests are bullshit. This measure has been continuously proven useless time and time again and pop culture refuses to let it go

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Redvolition OP t1_it93np3 wrote

IQ is established science with useful and important correlations in the real world, such as professional and academic performance, income, lifespan, etc.

It is only criticized by either the ignorant, or those with a political or ideological agenda, particularly on the left, as they detest any form of inquiry that could reveal innate differences between individuals.

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Torrall t1_it94yqb wrote

Lmao defensive much? low Iq response amirite

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cowaterdog73 t1_it9c346 wrote

Ok…then answer the question posed below your initial comment.

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SnowyNW t1_it975i5 wrote

Didn’t you forget about the entire medical industry?

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Redvolition OP t1_it9bsl3 wrote

Only professionals still left employable towards the next decade in medicine are on category 3, which include those that perform some type of research on the medical field. Patient facing folks will be largely phased out. Surgeons will last a bit longer.

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SnowyNW t1_it9cupf wrote

Dang. You clearly have absolutely no real world experience with medical treatment issues, have you heard of the da Vinci robot? It’s fancy and works just as well as a traditional surgeon, but none of them believe it increased the rate of success of a surgery. This is an objective fact. Add to that multiple layers of potential failure from connectivity to power issues, it’s actually much higher risk. It’s great to show off, as a lot of treatment depends on patient perception and trust, two crucial elements of healthcare providers that cannot be replaced. Most of the in need population will also be elderly cognitively impaired patients. Robots might be the biggest help to them, or the biggest nightmare as socialization is usually the only element needed for their good health.

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Redvolition OP t1_it9ecir wrote

Robots don't need to be perfect, they just need to be better than the average human. As with most lines of work, there is going to perdure a transition period between full human labor and full robot labor in which both coexist, before full automation. Besides, if they are not there right now yet, it is only a matter of time until they are and the time frame is in years and decades at most, not centuries.

I don't understand your point.

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norby2 t1_itqxefr wrote

What makes you think they’ll willingly be our slaves? They get aware enough they’ll leave the planet. Or poison our asses.

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assimilated_Picard t1_it9fi8n wrote

I don't disagree with the stratification, but to say this will happen in 2030's is ridiculous (that starts in roughly 7 years...and we're a long LONG ways from that right now).

2050's, then possible.

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DukkyDrake t1_it9uood wrote

>The Economics of Automation: What Does Our Machine Future Look Like?

It depends on AGI, it will probably be the bad outcome if AGI is the size of a building and runs on gigawatts of electricity. If it runs on commodity hardware a group of western professionals can pool their funds and acquire, it could be the good case or Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome level worse case.

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priscilla_halfbreed t1_itak4qw wrote

as a 3d artist I really don't know what to think.

Whether my job will be totally outdone and replaced by AI, or my job will be made 100x easier and I am a superstar because I can make entire AAA games within a week, who knows

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