[Animats]

Actual OECD study: [1]

The study says that, for the US, 9% of people are at "high risk" of automated out of a job. (That probably means "replaceable right now".) But 38% of people are potentially replaceable.

There's an assumption in the OECD report that the entire job of a human must be replaced. But that's not how automation works. We're seeing this in the more advanced law firms. What used to take a senior attorney, a few junior attorneys, a large number of paralegals, and a big clerical staff can now be done by one attorney, one paralegal, and a lot of software and databases. The OECD study claims that the risk to people with high levels of education is almost nil. Ask any newly graduated lawyer trying to get a job.

That's the fundamental flaw in this study - it assumes one for one replacement. What really happens is that the workflow is restructured so that fewer people and more hardware are involved.

[1] http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/download/5jlz9h56dvq7...

[Bartweiss]

One for one replacement is a truly strange standard to hold to. After all, even trucking automation will not be a 100% loss - if nothing else, we'll see a rise in full-service highway gas stations to fuel driverless trucks.

On the other hand, even 10% replacement of an industry (9 workers doing what 10 workers do now) is a big deal, and there are a lot of careers (legal, HR, document handling) that should expect to see values like 75% replacement. I can't think why someone would (in good faith) treat a one-to-one statistic as the whole of the answer here.

[arcticfox]

If driverless trucking takes off, why would the gas station need to be full service (staffed with humans)?

Compared to building an autonomous truck, autonomous refueling seems like the easy part.

[infogulch]

Think of it this way:

Right now, to move one trucks' worth of cargo for one hour requires one man hour. i.e.: 1 man-hour per cargo-hour.

If you have a single human that full-services 200 self-driving trucks in one day, you have: 1 man-hour per 200 cargo-hours.

Sure, autonomous refueling is easier than self-driving, but self-driving trucks also makes the human relatively way cheaper to employ.

[Bartweiss]

My thoughts exactly.

The usual standard for automation, I believe, is 18-24 months salary - if the capital cost can be recouped in two years automation is worthwhile. For hundreds of well-paid truckers that's a relatively generous target, but automating a reliable gas pumping system just to save on one minimum-wage gas pumper looks like a much lower ROI.

[gregpilling]

I recently spent $100,000 on some automation for my factory. The first $60,000 was for a machine that will take an outside supplier cost of $5000 per month, and replace it with a machine payment of $1000 per month. I now need to supply an operator, space, electrical and consumables, but I save $4000 to do that with. My 'new' worker will be just one of the existing workers (or myself) who will push the buttons on this mostly automated machine. The human still needs to load and unload the machine.

The other $40,000 was spent on NEW machines that automatically do NEW processes which we could never do before. I have a lot of pressure from the market to deliver new goods, and I have a lot of competitors both in the USA and in China and India copying my existing products. So this investment is about new streams of revenue (and I like toys/equipment!) . This is a $500 per month investment on the lease.

I have a reasonable expectation that the new machines could help us achieve a sales doubling in the next three years.

So in my case, 18-24 months salary replacement was never the thought process. It was honestly more about getting rid of a supplier, bringing it in-house to control quality and output, and saving money. I have a lot of automation, and I think the bigger concept most don't get is that the automation is way way more accurate and repeatable than a human. Quality goes up as costs go down. The quality part is a big big part of it.

[Pica_soO]

The factor is availability- you need three of these workers for a around the clock shift. AI does not sleep.

[infogulch]

Ok, so you have 3 employees working 24/7 for an average of a $20k salary (33% more than minimum wage). That's $60k/year or $120k over 24 months (based on Bartweiss' ROI estimation).

Do you think it's possible to deliver an automated gas pump that services 4,800 trucks per day (~1 truck every 3 minutes) for $120k? I don't.

[throwwit]

Rentier economy dynamics now encroaching on human capital.

[cm2187]

But you might have more trucks, not necessarily less humans.

[Shivetya]

Until the automate the process of inspection and refueling it would be a good job to place people. Treat it like an airplane coming in from a flight. Support crew go out to verify the condition the truck thinks its in, fix minor things the truck called out, and refuel it. Sign off on the paperwork stating truck meets all acceptable Federal and State laws.

[Bartweiss]

This is definitely part of it - humans are great at flexible-requirement tasks. Gas the truck, kick the tires, squeegee off the sensors, make sure nothing is obviously falling apart. Rather than paying one human per truck, you pay one human per ~200 trucks to do all of the minor, unpredictable service tasks needed.

[zardo]

Far fewer units to move and a much longer expected life on the hardware. Hiring a fuel filler is an easy retrofit.

[freehunter]

It would also likely be prudent to have a human visually inspecting the trucks and able to perform small maintenance tasks. My car can tell me the tire pressure is low, but it can't change the tire. It can tell me the backup sensor is obscured, but it can't clean it. Maybe it didn't even notice it hit something/something hit it (like a fast, low flying bird) and now the fender is hanging off. Things that might need to be done in between distribution centers that would be easier for a human to check, at least in the short term.

[sdenton4]

Yeah, my guess is we'll see convoys of automated trucks first, with one operator for each line of five or ten trucks. In part for small upkeep and correction in real time, in part to increase the risks of straight up highway robbery... If you can blow out an automated truck's tires and know it will take a day for a repair vehicle to show up, you might as well go for it...

[jsprogrammer]

Trucks would be standardized and have sensors to detect many types of damage and the truck could be rerouted to an automated repair facility (or perhaps a repair vehicle would be dispatched). Visual inspection could be done better automatically.

Automation that relies on humans to minimally function is garbage.

[freehunter]

There will always be humans overseeing automation for the foreseeable future. At least until we figure out what all will/can go wrong. There are humans supervising automation in factories and warehouses, just in case. It's simply a good idea until we have AI as smart and observant as a human.

[justanotherbody]

By this logic should we have autonomous refueling already?

After factoring in the cost of the robotics I suspect paying humans minimum wage is quite a bit cheaper. Especially given the diverse outdoor environments such a system would need to be maintained in

[Animats]

By this logic should we have autonomous refueling already?

It's been done a few times.[1][2] The systems are rather slow and clunky, but work. Dealing with all the variation between cars runs up the cost.

Tesla has a charging robot.[3] This is much easier, since Tesla controls both sides of the interface. The car actively cooperates, opening the charging port door. Tesla also interlocks the car so that you can't drive away while plugged in. I'm surprised that Tesla hasn't deployed those robot chargers yet.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y_J7fg03fA [2] http://mashable.com/2014/01/29/robotic-gas-pump/#hDxoRZBZ5Zq... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMM0lRfX6YI

[icebraining]

They did deploy one station, between SF and LA. They say it has barely got any traffic, so they aren't planning to build any more. Others have pointed out that building the station was a requirement to get some CA tax benefit.

[gambiting]

There is no value in automated refueling - almost everywhere in the world drivers re-fuel their cars themselves, so there is no money to be saved by making this process automated. The only exception to this are some american states where you can't do it yourself by law.

[unclebucknasty]

Not really. There's not a lot of value in autonomous refueling when everything else about vehicle operation is manual.

[Robotenomics]

By 2050 gas stations will disappear to be replaced by electric charging stations which will be automated.

[cm2187]

I'd say rather than refueling, repairing. Right now there is a human in the truck who will do basic repairs, change a wheel, etc. If you have driverless trucks, they will need people available all over the country to service them on a short notice. Although admittedly these jobs could also be automated in the long term.

[Robotenomics]

My thoughts:

Fleets of self-driving trucks will be on the roads worldwide by 2020.

Those same trucks will have a ‘delivery driver’ inside the cabin for at least another 10 years.

By 2030 all sales of new trucks will be self-driving From 2030 onwards a robot such as the latest generation Atlas will be in the cabin to handle deliveries.

By 2050 very few, if any, human couriers will be used, instead people will have new jobs coordinating the self-driving trucks, delivery robots and facilitation depots.

DHL recently hosted journalists, customers, and experts in the field of robotics at “Robotics Day” in their DHL Innovation Center in Troisdorf, Germany. The company says “Robots will be part of the future of logistics, and we’re excited to be on the ground floor of what that future cooperation will be like.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeL-YtaUkWc&feature=youtu.be

[orkoden]

There was a story about a Tesla's radar being blocked by a moth, that smashed to its front. A fully autonomous vehicle would have had to stop and wait for someone to come by and clean the radar. Or there need to be lots of additional minor repair gadgets added to the car to clean sensors in case of dirt.

[robotresearcher]

There are already lots of failure modes that require a tow truck to rescue a human-driven car. I bet the reduction in human-caused accidents (sleepy, drunk, distracted driver) will more than make up for weird new failure modes like sensor-splats.

[vl]

>we'll see a rise in full-service highway gas stations to fuel driverless trucks

Not really - all AV trucks will be owned by consolidated corporations, think Uber for trucks. These corporations will have service centers in strategic location, AV trucks will come for refueling to these centers.

[baudehlo]

I am still yet to see an answer to the liability question on driverless trucks. Are the truck manufacturers going to take that insurance on? It cost Airbus billions of dollars when their software screwed up and they got massive amounts of government support to basically bail them out.

[laurentoget]

Presumable automated trucks will kill less people than human operated ones, so the insurance will be cheaper.

I am sure the companies who will operate those trucks and the manufacturers can figure a way to divide liability.

They seem to be doing just fine figuring out how to deal with the liability associated with the 3600 or so people who die in crashes involving big trucks every year.

[zacharycohn]

Refueling of long haul trucks is already automated.

[maerF0x0]

9% more unemployed is a recession. 38% more unemployed is a crisis/revolution (unless we play our cards right)

[rhino369]

One for one replacement is a flaw, but also it doesn't take into account that efficiency often times leads to more work being done.

Like accountants. Excel and other software resolved a ton of their work. You didn't see a collapse in the number accountants. They just crunch more numbers, do more analysis.

uber made taxi's more efficient and I now ride in one 10X as often.

>We're seeing this in the more advanced law firms. What used to take a senior attorney, a few junior attorneys, a large number of paralegals, and a big clerical staff can now be done by one attorney, one paralegal, and a lot of software and databases. The OECD study claims that the risk to people with high levels of education is almost nil. Ask any newly graduated lawyer trying to get a job.

Software has barely put any lawyers out of a job. There have been staff cuts but that is more because babyboomer and older attorneys didn't know to word process. WordPerect (and now Word) are the reason legal secretaries are a dying profession. GenX and Millenial attorneys find it easier to it themselves.

Like accountants, a lot of this increased efficiency just leads to doing more work to make the end product better. You used to have research cases in books. This sounds inefficient, but it's actually not that bad. The book sellers summarize and catalog cases. You look up the issue and see what cases there are, read them and that is that.

Now, it's all done in digital databases. But it's not really faster. The digital databases still require a person to read the case, summarize, and catalog it. But it also allows you to read cases that weren't published. So it's now possible to find better cases, but you gotta spend the time reading it. So instead of spending an hour to get 10 cases sort on point, you have access to every case. But it takes well over an hour to get the perfect case. You get the better case, but you spent more time. Maybe you'd need a team of 50 lawers to find that case in the 1970s, but nobody would actually do that.

Ross--that startup claiming to be an AI lawyer--is spamming legal news with press releases vaguely claiming it can do all of that instantaneously. I sincerely doubt it. There is a reason they don't have a demo on their website.

The only software that I know that is doing what I'd consider legal work is the machine learning applied to document review--called predictive coding. But even that is only a response to the massive amount of information generated in digital offices. Workplaces produce many times more emails and documents than they did 40 years ago. E-discover exploded in the late 90's and early 2000's.

And even that work had already been outsourced to contractors who hired reviewers--often in India--to do the big projects. It's reduced some legal jobs, but only jobs that were created by technology. You can't apply the machine learning to smaller sets of documents since there isn't enough data to learn from.

The reason the legal market crashed in 2008 is because the M&A stopped and because those mortgage backed securities required a ton of legal work. And then the overall recession made companies sensitive to legal bills.

Newly graduated lawyers had a hard time finding a job even when the market for corporate lawyers was hot. Because tons of schools opened up law schools to cash in. They flooded the market with people who had no business being a lawyer. Even in 2005, the median law grad made less money than a programmer.

edit: wow I really ranted here. embarassing. I'm actually putting off doing document review because it's boring. I wish I had an AI that could do it for me.

[cm2187]

I just realised that I plagiarised most of your points in another comment before reading yours.

The lawyer industry as it is, is I think a form of archaism. In most transactions there is zero justification to custom make a contract. Most sales of houses and businesses have exactly the same terms and the only reason you need lawyers to read and customize contracts is because other lawyers customized contracts previously and someone has to do the due dilligence of figuring out what they did. I am sure you could design a robust legal system with simple laws, where citizen do not need an expert to understand their rights and obligations, and where everyone would use standardised contracts for the quasi totality of transactions.

In fact it is a bit shocking that a common citizen cannot possibly understand the hundreds of thousands of pages of law and jurisprudence they he is required to comply with and needs to pay (dearly) an expert to do that for him.

[petra]

What about neota logic ? they seem to build pretty capable software for legal.

Also, as for your claim that "works fills the available time", what about competition, new models of billing(fixed-fee), etc ?

[rhino369]

I'm not sure what Neota Logic does. Looks like it's a best practices guide prepared by Litter Mendelson turned into software.

This could be a good example of advancements creating more work. My firm does a ton of employment law advising. My coworker in that department is always bitching about HR workers in her clients organization making dumb legal choices on their own. This software is designed for that sort of thing. The HR drones will instead use this software instead of their intuition. And I'm willing to bet this drives legal work when the HR drones run into issues that aren't clear (much of the law has no clear answer). Before the HR people wouldn't even know they had a legal issue to talk about.

Nobody was ever paying 500 dollars an hour to a firm to ask general compliance questions. In fact, compliance work is generally not considered legal work. They had an HR person making their choices before, not a lawyer.

Though I think my firm sometimes prepare best practice guides for clients. I'm not entirely sure if they are paying it, but I suspect they do. So maybe that software would reduce that sort of work.

>Also, as for your claim that "works fills the available time", what about competition, new models of billing(fixed-fee), etc ?

You'd think it would have a bigger impact, but we see this in many industries over a long time. Clothing got cheaper, and now we own a lot more clothes.

It's really shocking how much lawyers get away with charging based on how many unemployed and underemployed lawyers there are. I think it's partially because a lawyer is only worth something when they are experienced, and unemployed lawyers never get experience.

but also the value of legal work is really hard to objectively value. I can't even tell if the quality of work actually pays real world dividends.

[petra]

>> I'm not sure what Neota Logic does. Looks like it's a best practices guide prepared by Litter Mendelson turned into software.

As i understand , it lets lawyers decode their logic/thinking into the software, so you get more than a best-practice guide(assuming best practice guides are like what we have in software) - because to build a full best practice guide that includes all the corner cases and the fine details, etc is just not practical(too much to read, you'll need an expert anyway).

But once you can gather information from the client(in a branching logic kind of way), you can create detailed advice that's very focused to the client's exact problem, and that usually offer much higher value - if you do it well.

>> (much of the law has no clear answer)

So many decisions in law are probability based ? the lawyer knows that doing X has 90% chance of being OK and 10% of being not OK (roughly) depending on corner cases or how laws will be interpreted in the future, etc - and builds a plan upon that, taking risks into account ?

Because maybe neota supports probabilistic logic, not sure. But for example i know some medical expert system software do us that.

>> Clothing got cheaper, and now we own a lot more clothes.

We probably consume more of most things, and yet employment in some sectors decreased.

>> I can't even tell if the quality of work actually pays real world dividends.

So selling is key. And probably risk reduction is key.Right ?

Computers have a pretty good track record doing risky stuff in a safer way and handling complexity, because humans make mistakes, and are limited with regards to complexity. It could be a big selling point once legal software matures.

[cm2187]

I work in a bank and we regularly pay for legal opinions or advice on whether something we are thinking to do is legal or compliant with the laws and regulations. Are you referring to something else when you say compliance work?

[internaut]

It's ok Mr Rhino.

I come here primarily for the rants :-)

You learn interesting things and it sparks ideas.

Rant on Mr Rhino!

[anonbanker]

As someone constantly dealing with lawyers on a day-to-day basis, I cannot wait for the day that self-empowered "legal hackers" are able to compete against lawyers using tools such as Watson/ROSS.

Imagine being able to dictate grounds for relief, and have the machine draft the paperwork for you, ready to sign/witness and file.

Imagine not having to pay a lawyer $400/hour to answer what should be a simple question.

Imagine being able to have computer-based training about the acts/statutes you are currently referencing in your process.

I can't wait.

[alkonaut]

> one attorney, one paralegal, and a lot of software and databases

Now imagine what would happen if common law in the US was abanonded in favor of civil law, so that the data was a book of laws, rather than a history of cases...

[746F7475]

>Ask any newly graduated lawyer trying to get a job.

Is this actually a global thing? I mean does this apply to smaller cities as well?