[awinter-py]

Scary parallel here with the recent jeff dean talk about NN. He claims he won't let his team touch any 'research task' that takes more than a week, and prefers to stick to experiments that take under a day to set up and run -- that there's so much low-hanging fruit that every ML project should be simple.

Very very scary if tech that most of us still haven't touched is also in a sense routine.

I hope I'm misquoting him. But my takeaway is that between manually coding processes that could be solved with ML & doing infrastructure profiling, most devs are spending half their time fixing problems that are 'routine' at the big three.

[savanaly]

>Very very scary if tech that most of us still haven't touched is also in a sense routine.

Isn't that more properly regarded as exciting than scary? The long term benefits to automation have rarely failed to outweigh the temporary costs.

I would personally be very happy if my own current job- software developer- were somehow automated out of existence. Not only would it allow me to put my money where my mouth is regarding praising automation but it would mean huge gains for the human race.

[FilterSweep]

> but it would mean huge gains for the human race.

This entirely depends on the model the human race is running off of. With the current state of mass-centralization in tech (see, again, the big 3), you will never get to experience such gains. In fact, you would quickly grow dependent on someone else to feed and shelter you, considering you can no longer provide a benefit to society that puts food on the table. In fact, most people wouldn't provide value anymore.

> The long term benefits to automation have rarely failed to outweigh the temporary costs.

For some people, yes. You are correct when it comes to the numbers. GDP increases. A nation has more "wealth" to work with altogether. But the other side of the coin is that wealth disparity becomes more extreme.

Big however - If we ran off a decentralized model - arguably the way the Web was originally intended, I could see how the human race would be placed in an unprecedented position for future growth, and humanity would really thrive.

Granted, regarding the current state as ""exciting"" boils down to what you value, I guess.

When (not if) I automate myself out of existence, I'm sure as hell not telling anyone I did it.

[nostrademons]

The assumption that the "current model" (I assume you mean capitalism) makes is that people, when placed in a position where they no longer provide a benefit to society and yet must in order to put food on the table, will find a way to provide a benefit to society.

In my experience, this is true over longer (1-2 year) timescales, even if it's not obvious how at the outset. Most people, when made redundant, find new ways to make themselves relevant. The process isn't exactly pleasant, but the outcome often results in a lot more lucrative and fulfilling career than they had before.

[abakker]

If you owned the product of your labor (i.e. the automation of your job) then it should make no difference. The trouble is, then when you create an automaton that replaces a $100K/year employee, then the creator gets f*ed.

Put another way, if you could create a way to automate your job entirely, then there also has to be a guarantee that doing so will not result in you getting fired. Alternatively, if you automate someone else's job, then the company needs to be responsible for training them to do a new job. Even if this is not practical or possible in all cases, it needs to be the case more often. Right now, corporations pay the government to solve this problem (not voluntarily), but the government does a pretty bad job of helping. Ideally corporations interested in any social responsibility need to solve this problem themselves. When the automation revolutions becomes real enough to threaten executive jobs, I suspect they'll solve it pretty quickly.

[nostrademons]

Or you could automate yourself out of a job and get a new job.

There's nothing that says that jobs are sacred. Indeed, most folks born since 1980 believe that they'll have to switch jobs every few years to a.) stay relevant and b.) get paid what they're worth.

[abakker]

Jobs are not sacred, but salaries are. Your automation has a certain NPV on it, just like your job, and just like the "value" of not working. So, there are really 3 scenarios.

a) do your job, same as always b) automate your job, and either end up unemployed, or find a new job, still working xx hours/week. c) don't tell anyone you automated your job, don't work, collect the money.

If you are capable of automating your job (you have the skills, the know-how etc.) then all of these options have different moral and economic tradeoffs.

a) if you like your job, you get to keep doing it, but, by not automating it, you are maybe not doing your job as well as it could be done, and/or are costing the company money which could be reallocated. As an employee, you maybe have a responsibility to automate your job and by not doing it, you are shirking your duties (its a stretch) b)You automate your job, get a new job, and take everyone else who was doing the same job as you and automate their jobs as well. You end up ok, because you're talented enough to automate your job. the other people who weren't talented enough just get fired and have no shiny new credential. c)You are definitely dodging the obligation to your employer, but at the same time, they don't know the difference. If the work is unchanged, then you are free to use your time for an alternative economic benefit. It seems unfair, since you get to double-spend your time.

In my mind, B is the choice most people worry about. There are fewer people who can automate a job than there are people currently doing that job, and that doesn't even touch the problem that few low-skill jobs are filled by the people that can self-automate their jobs. So, more worrying is that someone invents the roomba of floor waxers, or the self cleaning toilet stall and then we don't need janitors anymore.

[romaniv]

It's all fine and well, as long as all "non-routine" jobs don't require a Master's degree and 10 years of hands-on experience.

[gutnor]

> but the outcome often results in a lot more lucrative and fulfilling career than they had before

Not sure about that, that's not at all my experience coming from a poor area which has gone through several mass-scale outsourcing. ( i.e. a whole vertical slice of the economy just moves away )

You need an set of positive circumstances in order to make yourself relevant again. Access to appropriate education/resources, capability to identify a new opportunity, capacity to actually take it ( i.e. money, flexibility, ... ) If you miss any of that, you just enter a vicious circle that drags you down.

Over the course of a generation, what you say is true. Most of the youth has moved away from that poor area I came from, including me.

[nostrademons]

What are outcomes like for the people that did move away and retrain? A key point of the "redundant workers will find new work" hypothesis is that they make rational decisions to find & take advantage of opportunities elsewhere. These rational decisions can often be emotionally wrenching - like giving up your home, your identity, and your social support network - but I'm curious what happens to the folks who are willing to make those decisions.

[gutnor]

The main problem is not the emotional aspect. After all the majority of the people affected had left their country only 1 generation before.

The real problem is that you don't know what is the rational decision at the time you need to take it, only in hindsight. It is not in the business owners to share their 10 year strategy with their employees. Everything is positive, all green, until the very day you have 2 weeks to pack. You don't necessarily know the big picture. Is your company having trouble or is the whole region is going to be in ruin. You can make the rational decision to start a local business and have your market vanish way before you have benefitted. Same thing with the local politician, we are always at the end of the tunnel.

Same problem with training and moving. How much do you leverage your current competence. As a DevOps, do you learn development, or plumbery ? How far do you need to move. It is even worse here as you have even less information about the target sector or region.

So what happened to people that made the right decision, they did alright of course. But there have been a lot of people that trained in using newer better technology of their field and that did not help them when the job moved to India. Some moved to Spain and France, but the crisis started a few years later there. A lot opened businesses, and failed as new businesses do, but also because the whole region went under. Same outcome for people that moved to different field in the same region, they were caught in the ripple effects. None of those decision were irrational, or necessarily easy. They were just not the right decisions when you have perfect information.

[ZoeZoeBee]

You keep using the word willing instead of the word you should be using capable. Case in point old manufacturing towns like Detroit and Flint where the literacy rate hovers around 50% graduation rates in the 20s and the likelihood that a graduate from the school district did not receive the same education as someone from a functioning school district(Standardized Tests Provide this Measure).

So how do these people "will" their way past illiteracy, plummeting home values (Makes it quite difficult to sell and start somewhere new), and the need to suddenly compete with all of their former co-workers? Economic data suggests these people simply become "Disassociated" from the Labor Force and are no longer counted as unemployed whether they found employment or not.

[carleverett]

> In fact, most people wouldn't provide value anymore.

History has shown this not to be true. The labor force has evolved several times in the relatively short history of the US. Markets are able to adjust these changes pretty efficiently: people whose skills become obsolete learn new ones, and higher unemployment winds up encouraging companies to find uses for cheaper labor.

Sure, it's not in your best interest to tell your boss you found a way to automate your job, but it's definitely in everyone else's.

[ZoeZoeBee]

I'm sorry but the notion the the Labor force will evolve because it has in the past is just an over simplification of a complex process and presupposes most humans are capable of being retrained for a job not slated for obsolescence. Technology can only be useful to those who can use it, if we're honest with one another and looking at the futures for the uneducated masses of the planet most of them aren't necessary going forward. Like it or not seismic shifts in technology have often been coupled with massive reductions in human population, and this will most likely be the case as below replacement birthrates in first world nations sets us on a collision path in the next decade, which will be exacerbated by automation of repetitive task jobs.

[iamcurious]

It is scary and exciting. It drastically changes the socioeconomic landscape and it is yet to be seen how (if?) we will adapt.

[ghurtado]

> I would personally be very happy if my own current job- software developer- were somehow automated out of existence.

Considering that my own personal theory is that software developer (also my profession) is the last job that will ever be automated (there will have to be one last person that writes software to run "the robots" before "the robots" write all their software), I can't say that I share your excitement at this milestone.

But then again, maybe it's simply evolution and nothing to fear, since we are as temporary in the universe as the last species we evolved from.

[mziel]

Could you post a link to this talk?

[awinter-py]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSaZGT4-6EY

Tech Talk with Jeff Dean at Campus Seoul

'deep learning for building intelligent computer systems'