[problems]

What makes you think we're at a peak of mental productivity?

For the most part the mental labor we're automating isn't actual mental labor, but physical labor things which are difficult to make a computer do - like drive, cook or stitch.

[bad_user]

You haven't been watching the news dude: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603431/as-goldman-embrace...

Yay, bring the downvotes, doesn't change the fact that not even our jobs are safe and downvoting such opinions won't make the problem go away - in the future we'll probably build software systems the way we train dogs today! And yes, we'll taste our own medicine :-)

[inderLogging]

Stock trading and software development aren't tasks I'd rate as difficult mental labor.

In fact, the reason such jobs are desirable, is specifically because they're actually kind of cushy.

Stock trading is a task that has been over-complicated mostly because investors need to engage in double-speak, so that motives for trades that lead to financial gain can be sufficiently obfuscated, when explained to auditors, judges, juries and regulatory officials. Behind the curtain of quants, it's really just a lot of grocery shopping.

Software development is mostly about stacking legos in ornate fashion. Bytes cobble together as building blocks. There are a variety of 256 different building blocks. The computers themselves, the syntax of the code, the methodology of data structures and loops, these aren't the hard parts. It's just plumbing.

Plumbing is probably a similar target of automation.

[whiskers08xmt]

Every mental task can be reduced to putting 0's and 1's in the right order. However, reducing the tasks to this point isn't really helpful in the discussion. You pretty quickly arrive at a mind bending number of ways to order 0's and 1's, or "legos".

[goda90]

But there are mental jobs being replaced. Finance, insurance, data entry, law, etc are all being disrupted. Some slower than others, but its more the cost of hiring the software developers to replace them with automated systems than it is the technology not being ready.

[notahacker]

There are mental jobs being created at greater speed. Hard though it might be to believe, the desire to put things in tables and pivot them and respond to customers' sentiments in real time didn't really exist for the most part before technology made it necessary to hire people to perform those roles. And there's a whole cottage industry of people trying to find Big Data algorithm-enabled solutions to problems companies didn't think they'd have. If they actually work, sometimes, the companies that purchase them can afford to employ more sales staff...

[StRoy]

> There are mental jobs being created at greater speed

But not of the type that most of the population could ever do, and most of HN, possibly you, seem to think it too because HN tends to support the idea that things like H1B are needed because of a shortage of tech labour. So, there are jobs created, but not the ones the local population can completely fulfill. Do you think that solves the unemployment problem?

And then there is the fact that some forms of work, while they had left developed countries like the US, still existed because they were "moved" and not "destroyed", like many factory jobs that went to China, are actually now going to disappear for good, because even in a country where labor is extremely cheap, like China, automation is now on the verge of being cheaper on the long term, which leads to things like Foxconn planning to fire half of their employees (!) which also leads to the fact that any solution populists like Trump may have presumed to unemployment, like bringing back those jobs that were outsourced, may not actually work in the present age. Building iPhones in the US is not actually going to create any measurable amount of jobs in the future so it's pretty pointless.

http://fortune.com/2016/12/31/foxconn-iphone-automation-goal...

The present situation is nothing like the age of the luddites and if people don't become aware of it soon enough we might have large % of the people going unemployed, starving and potential revolutionary climates. Modern job creation is not something that can solve the problem. Ask the people who were laid off in Michigan to all become machine learning researchers?

Consider this classic :

> https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

> Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz".

> Most good programmers should be able to write out on paper a program which does this in a under a couple of minutes. Want to know something scary? The majority of comp sci graduates can't. I've also seen self-proclaimed senior programmers take more than 10-15 minutes to write a solution.

This is with the current comp sci graduates, which are likely to be more motivated by the field than if we tried to make the entire general population attempt this kind of job. There is no good possible future for some % of the population once we enter the next stage of the automation age and start replacing jobs like truck drivers, taxis, have supermarkets like the planned Amazon Go everywhere etc.

Also, think of the impact the disappearance of some jobs can have on local economies and the dominoes effect. Truck drivers, for example, are essential to many remote places. Without truck drivers stopping there their economy would break and many other jobs would die. Meanwhile large cities have massive rents and ownership costs so it's not like all these people losing jobs and living paycheck to paycheck could suddenly move to the wealthier and more active areas of the country after automation turns their place into ruins, like Detroit (not saying automation was the root cause of Detroit, but comparing the aspect of what happens when the economy of a place turns it into a literal ruin).

[notahacker]

You don't need to have the skillset of a programmer to do pivot tables, never mind become a social media manager or a salesperson, so I think we can dispense with that straw man. And the "mental" jobs this discussion speculates about being automated out of existence already have learning curves and some level of intellect/education threshold associated with them.

"Disruption" creates and transforms jobs all over the place: sometimes it's the incredibly specialised jobs being augmented by technology that allows them to be replaced with a below-average graduate using a user-friendly GUI app and sometimes it's incredibly specialised jobs being created because the last generation of analysts that did simple calculations aren't as useful as people that can write algorithms to process bigger datasets than before. Net effect: the middle class mental jobs in "finance, insurance, data entry, law" are different rather than disappearing. One thing companies in these industries certainly don't do is conclude their competitive position is such that after automating part of their work there's no further advantages to be gleaned from throwing staff and technology at solving new problems in their domain.

I've no idea why you're bringing up Foxconn labourers (1.3 million people manufacturing things things for which demand didn't exist a generation ago!) and truck drivers (median age 49 and rising) in a discussion about the supposed hollowing out of the middle class?