[cobookman]

This rings home with me soo much. I've interacted with a few startups designing robots to replace human labor. Was scary to see that automation is here its just too expensive compared to human labor. But technology generally decreases in cost over time while human labor gets gradually more expensive. So its only a matter of time that all manual labor is replaced by robots.

[BurningFrog]

People have said that it's only a matter of time before all manual labor is replaced by machines since the industrial revolution started.

Yet it keeps not having happened just yet.

EDIT: I'm talking about all human work, not just physical labor. The "manual labor" part of the quote confuses my intended point.

[_bpgl]

> People have said that it's only a matter of time...Yet it keeps not having happened just yet.

That's incredibly facile. Were there solid state digital electronics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution? Was there machine learning? Motion control? Systems engineering? A robotics industry?

Just aping the "power source of the future" line from the fusion joke and pretending it's the trenchant result of long experience is the tactic of a 15-year-old.

[crdoconnor]

Why do you think that the future will similarly not have jobs that you can't conceive of now?

As far as I can tell the only special thing about automation in today's world is that the jobs being created are more often being created abroad than they are in the US (e.g. the million or so people employed by Foxconn in China) and predictions of automation destroying jobs are very blatantly being used politically as a way to draw flak away from job destroying trade agreements and austerian measures.

[_bpgl]

The first thing I feel I need to point out is that my horse in this race is not whether or not jobs will go away, but whether or not the original commenter to whom I was replying advanced the discussion at all with their remark. I think that the remark–that people have always been saying that automation will take over but it never has–is facile in that the thing that "people have been saying" is not the same over time. In the late 18th century, it could only really have been a comment about capital concentration and the death of the trades. In the 1950s, it was very probably a naive comment about the power of as-then-understood computer technology's capability to replace manual labor or work. In the 1990s, it was very probably a naive comment about the state of the art of AI at the time.

Now, the remark is about actual inexpensive robotics in the context of what seems to be a genuine AI and computer vision and control renaissance, funded by government and corporations. Those are all just different remarks. To package them all up as one "thing that people have been saying" does a real disservice to the discussion. And it's a pose.

In the current case, I find it difficult to say whether the remark will turn out to be naive. However, any competent discussion of whether or not it is has to rely on an assessment of the current situation of computer vision, AI, control theory, economics, and law.

[crdoconnor]

"In the 1990s, it was very probably a naive comment about the state of the art of AI at the time."

And it's exactly the same right now.

Any competent discussion also needs to take into the account the various special interests who want it to be believed that AI is taking over irrespective of whether that is the truth or not... and why they want that.

It also needs to take into account the various crass errors in many of the economics papers on this topic - including basing the probability of automation on how "creative" an economist considers a job (Oxford) or creating economic measures which make no mathematical distinction between a Chinese factory worker and a robot (Ball State University).

[Sammi]

Jobs are only being created where human labor is still cheaper than robots. But the price of human labor keeps rising, so the factories continually keep moving to new countries with cheap labor. Meanwhile robots just keep getting cheaper. Inevitably there must come a point where there isn't anywhere to move the factories for cheap labor, as the whole world has come out of extreme poverty, while robots have gotten cheaper than what any human can offer their labor for.

[e12e]

By that logic, mounted police and a handful of tourist taxi services are evidence that the automobile haven't replaced horses yet.

[Broken_Hippo]

That isn't really true. Not only has it been happening, but we've gotten more ambitious and broadened the definition. Now, we aren't only saying machines will take over labour, but that we'll be able to do even less with automation.

The fact of the matter is, however, that we (humans) do a lot of different things, so we need a multitude of specialized machines and automation. That takes time, and we had to pick and choose where we started. Farming is one of those that is ahead of the curve, fast food is mid-way as it is just now becoming cost-effective. Health care, not so much right now. Those are more difficult machines.

[crdoconnor]

The first automated fast food sales outlets ("automats") appeared in the 1890s in Germany. They became very popular for a while. In the US the last ones (Horn and Hardart) went into a deep decline in the 60s and had mostly disappeared by the 1970s.

[Broken_Hippo]

Some of those weren't really automated, but rather worked more like vending machines. Weirdly, I've seen an updated version of these in hospitals. In addition, I've seen vending machines with cafeteria sandwiches and frozen microwave dinners.

For clarity, what I more refer to is kitchens without human intervention save for mechanics. The machines make burgers, fries, and whatnot. It seems the first wave is going more to replace the cashier, though: McDonalds has introduced touch-screen ordering stations and grocery stores have self-checkouts.

[crdoconnor]

Why do you think we had a first wave from 1890-1970 and then again from 2017- ?

[Broken_Hippo]

Automobiles.

[MichaelMoser123]

Robert Allen says that the industrial revolution happened in Britain because had high wages compared to the rest of Europe. Machines were cost effective because labor costs were high. Later in the 19th century the rest of Europe caught up - because they too had higher wages by that time.

https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/Allen/unpublished/econin...

[SilasX]

People have said that it's only a matter of time before all horse labor is replaced by machines since the wheel was invented.

Yet it keeps not having happened yet.

What do you think about Wilson's 14 Points, by the way?