[egh]

The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here. We haven't automated driving; we haven't automated picking tomatoes; we haven't automated bricklaying; we can't automate cooking a fucking hamburger. But they are completely convinced that it's just around the corner, because they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people.

Frank Bardacke in his book, _Trampling out the Vintage_ describes the great skill that agriculture workers bring to the job that they do, from knowing whether something is ripe enough to pick to the dexterity required to pick it without destroying the fragile fruit or vegetable. Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not and most likely never will be.

Please, learn some humility and try to understand the skills that every human possesses and that they bring to their work.

[colordrops]

Having respect for the skills of a worker and also believing that they are possible to automate are not mutually exclusive. It's no different from people saying the same thing about chess and chess players, or go and go players, before the problem was solved.

And it's not just blue collar workers that are a target of this idea. We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and into the commercial realm, e.g. GitHub copilot.

[kragen]

We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and into the commercial realm, e.g. IBM's "FORTRAN Automatic Coding System", whose name is an abbreviation of "FORmula TRANslator". This is an enormous effort. John Backus, a longtime proponent of such "automatic programming" systems who is leading the project, reported in 1955 that in its first edition, in early 1956, "FORTRAN" is expected to include eight to ten thousand instructions. It will be distributed to all lessees of the IBM 704 high-speed electronic digital computer in 1957. Though many programmers are skeptical of the quality of programs produced by the so-called "compiler", experience has shown that it only takes 2-3 days to learn, and the programs output by "FORTRAN" are often better than those written by expert programmers!

One of the great improvements in the second edition of FORTRAN, FORTRAN II, is that an application program can be written not as the output of a single compilation, but of many separate compilations.

[The above is liberally quoted and reorganized from the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 6(1), 01984.]

[h0l0cube]

> We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and into the commercial realm, e.g. GitHub copilot.

As soon as GitHub was acquired by Microsoft I knew their intentions were for automated coding tools. I wasn't concerned about this affecting my livelihood in the short to medium term, because state-of-the-art ANNs won't be able to grasp the context of business requirements without developing adult human level intelligence. Thus, even a full program built by such a system would need to be verified by a human to be sure it will behave as desired, obviating any gain in terms of automation. Even the rudimentary boilerplate that copilot spits out suffers from this problem.

[ehnto]

I started thinking about how you might automate game development, and I think it's a pretty good thought excercise on the topic.

I feel like the end result is just what we already have, game engines with visual programming and drag and drop editors. You don't add much value by automating the programming since you still have to define the input and outcome.

The real win was building the complex logic and state editor into a good UX.

[ALittleLight]

This video really amazed me in terms of automated game development. My fantasies are something like this and GPT-3 plus a couple decades of progress.

I think we'll get to genuinely open ended sand box games.

https://youtu.be/udPY5rQVoW0

[h0l0cube]

Predicting the next frame from previous frames and learnt sequences is a neat trick, but I think automated game development is already very possible with simple techniques like genetic algorithms, or even a PRNG. I mean Rogue and it's descendants are very much automated game development, but GPT-3 could be useful for something like dynamic quest generation, world-building, narrative, adaptive NPCs (including dialogue) etc.

[eru]

I'm not sure classic procedural content generation like in rogue-likes is all that comparable to using a GAN to run the whole game?

Have a look at the video, it's quite impressive.

[h0l0cube]

And this is where I think of the game-side of games programming to be more an art form (I say this as an ex-professional game developer). GPT-3 could be used for narrative generation, environment generation, and adaptive AI, and these are all exciting areas for research and experimentation. But as you say, underneath is a solid engine, and one day an AI could feasibly build an engine from scratch, but I think that day is decades away. The AI that we have today are just toys.

[willbw]

I think it is different from people saying we couldn't automate chess or go. The difference is between a purely data domain, chess or go, where it can both be translated 1-1 into a computer simulation of the game AND the inputs are data.

I realise that you could define everything as data - laying a brick, you take the inputs of where to position the brick, etc. However I think we can make the distinction between chess where the data is "Pawn is on e4" and the much greater complexity of the real world where we are dealing with billions of atoms. Perhaps not everyone agrees with me.

[sudosysgen]

A big part of ML in robotics is actually making nearly 1:1 simulations of the world and the actuators.

It's fairly sucessful. We can simulate for example driving a car really well.

Simulating human behaviour is harder, but simulating brick laying is not that hard, we have the technology to do so already.

[willbw]

I suppose it all depends on the abstractions you make and how well those abstractions hold in the real world. Humans of course make abstractions but many of these are done subconsciously.

Simulating brick laying might be able to be done in a controlled environment, is it possible to make it low cost enough and accurate enough for all general purpose brick laying situations? Probably, given enough investment we could get closer. Is ironing out all the nuances cost effective? I don't know.

We can definitely simulate a driving environment but I given the recent struggles of self driving cars I don't think I would say that we are at the point where we've solved the problem of actually driving them in everyday situations.

[sudosysgen]

The biggest issue with self driving car isn't actually getting the car where we want it to go, it's predicting human behaviour and dealing with unseen conditions. But the actual physics of driving cars, yeah we've gotten them down beyond everyday situations.

[bumby]

>We can simulate for example driving a car really well.

Can you qualify this more specifically? In many domains (particularly safety critical ones) “reasonably well” may not be sufficient

[sudosysgen]

Car simulators are accurate enough that F1 drivers drive more in simulators than in practice laps. They are very accurate. More than well enough to train a model to drive, for example, reasonably fast. Of course the real world is always different even if simply because the conditions are different, so you keep some headroom.

[afrodc_]

I think this has more to do with cost and convenience more than being a better representation of what it's actually like driving on the extremely varied state of a track. You can see this with the practice laps being extremely important because of the way the tire compositions, weather and car set ups change the dynamic of the cars drastically. The simulators can't replicate this effectively.

[meowkit]

Self driving hours having a lower incident rate than human drivers. That’s the minimum. Having a 99.9x% success rate (put as many 9s as you desire) is your qualifier and that’s a standard measure in operational uptime.

[afrodc_]

I've heard the opposite of this in that self driving cars underperform compared to human drivers across the board. The sample size of self driving cars doing everything a driver does is also miniscule. Do you have a source?

[hakuseki]

GP doesn't seem to be saying that chess and brick-laying are equally difficult to automate. GP is saying that a belief in brick-laying AI represents no more contempt towards brick-layers than a belief in chess AI represents towards chess players.

[dragonwriter]

> We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and into the commercial realm

Every step in programming tooling since programs stopped being input as manual hardware configuration has been automation of programming, and its just made more work, and higher paying work, for programmers.

[petra]

The main reason there's more programming work, is because machines are capable to do more(connectivity, mobility, ux, marketing, etc).

[mdtusz]

What do you think enabled these things?

[eru]

Advances in hardware and software.

[exporectomy]

Not the same programmers though nor the same job though. The job of programmer-by-plugging-in-wires was still eliminated.

[dragonwriter]

> Not the same programmers though nor the same job though.

The details of job changed, as more low level pieces of it were automated leaving the higher-level, more abstract bits, but for most of the changes, while some either bailed for other work or rode the dying embers of the old way to retirement, programmers generally adapted.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Code has been getting automated since basically day one of programming.

The funny thing about automation in programming - it has always opened up more doors - and led to more employment in programming.

We are so far from anything that resembles real automated coding - that coding automation should continue to be celebrated by engineers for a long time.

GitHub Co-Pilot and VS Code aren't going to replace you - they're just going to let your company offer a better product, release a new version sooner, test different versions, etc.

[caf]

Right. A working automated bricklaying machine would be like a C compiler for brickmasons.

[coding123]

It doesn't perfectly translate IMHO. A bricklayer contractor that has a mostly automated machine doing 80% of the job would probably hire maybe 1 guy to get shit off the truck and clean dropped mortar. Normally he might have 2 or 3 extra guys to do some stretches or turns or something like that.

[colordrops]

Look at houses now vs houses from 200 years ago. Modern house are much more advanced and complex. Automation such as a bricklaying machine would allow these 2 or 3 other guys to do something else that would support further complexity and advancement in house building, or anything else for that matter, just as automation doesn't cause loss of jobs in programming.

[oriolid]

I'd rather live in a house without undefined behavior.

[caf]

Do you suppose handwritten assembly had a lesser rate of unexpected or unintended behaviour?

[ALittleLight]

Automated tools will lower the difficulty of coding to the point where it'll be easy to pick up and be massively productive. Developers will be replaced by domain experts becoming productive developers easily with automated tools.

[noduerme]

There's an assumption that great coders eventually write themselves out of a job. It's only half true. The reality is, they write themselves into a better job. Because the more divorced these "domain experts" become from the underlying processes and scalable systems that back their GUI-based decisions, the more of a technological elite the coders are who can delve into a mess of hardware and software stacks and explain or fix it when something goes wrong. If it used to be the height of corner-suite hubris to believe that code and coders were replaceable in building a simple app, it's now become something like magic to them that it gets done at all. And we can see in realtime how this system breaks down when there aren't enough coders at any price to fix the system. To ever get system A to write system B, someone has to write system A and then know how to fix it. You're imagining a miraculous future where system A diagnoses and repairs itself. If it could do that (although it never will), it would have long ago dispensed with useless business managers, and supposed "domain experts". Every coder is a domain expert by the time she's done writing a serious piece of business software. The execs who sit on the fragile shell of a company to both parasitically raise funds and exploit coders are the only people who hold the fantasy that one day they'll never be at the mercy of investors or coders. It's a neat way of reassuring themselves that they have value, but not much else.

[nradov]

Ha ha. I remember people making those claims about 4GLs and visual programming tools 30 years ago. It wasn't true then and won't be true in our lifetimes. Domain experts typically lack the mindset to think through edge cases and failure modes.

[lr4444lr]

"If I had a nickle for every time..."

The closest a product that ever did this was Excel.

[Shorel]

Didn't happen with Visual Basic, has not happened with JavaScript.

Domain experts are all using Excel, not any other automated tool.

[eru]

And, honestly, Excel is a pretty good tool for that.

I just hope we could improve on it.

See eg https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/podcast/advancing-e...

[akomtu]

Lowering difficulty of lifting boxes doesn't eliminate warehouse personnel: it means that now every worker can lift hundred of heavy boxes a day and the company can deliver 100x more stuff. Businesses don't want to get rid of personnel; they want to increase profit-per-employee and automation does just that.

[whateveracct]

Haskell automates a lot of programming but it sure isn't easy

[eru]

Haskell is fun, but it isn't special in this regard.

Any language any human would touch these days automates lots and lots of things for you.

(Even Assemblers do a lot for you nowadays.)

[coding123]

Are we sure that the ML experts that wanted to beat real human chess players actually respected them? Wouldn't they know that at some point the enjoyment of chess itself might fade if the best in the world is a computer? Maybe chess is having a moment right now due to Netflix, perhaps maybe it's a permanent upswing. But long term, I don't know if it will remain interesting to people.

[EthanHarv]

I personally doubt chess will fade. As far as I can tell, the enjoyment of high-level chess is less to do with reaching objective perfection, rather it's more the "thrill" of seeing a _human_ who has poured their life into the pursuit of improving their game. It doesn't really matter that a computer can beat them, we care about them because people like seeing other people's talents.

And on a casual level, nothing changes if the best in the world is a human or computer, so the casual player isn't particularly affected.

[stickfigure]

Dunno, but people are still into competitive weightlifting even though the forklift has been around for over a hundred years.

[eru]

Chess is now more popular than ever before.

Not sure how important Netflix is here? There are lots of chess players on YouTube, too.

Go also get much more popular in the West for a while when Alphago came along.

[Grakel]

Programming will be automated long before brick laying. We can barely print a document with confidence.

[Overton-Window]

Programming is the conversion of ambiguous human requirements into machine readable instructions. To automate, computers would need to understand ambiguous human requirements. This is AGI.

By comparison, brick laying is trivial.

[Grakel]

Mix mortar to the consistency of mashed potatoes and apply gently but thoroughly to two faces of a heavy, but brittle object, then place that brick into a corner with both faces with applied mortar of even thickness touching receiving faces at the same time, no lateral sliding. Press the brick gently into the corner and tap, making sure that it lines up perfectly vertically with a string line and horizontally with the other bricks, then wipe off excess mortar, creating a visually appealing groove, all while standing on a muddy slope. Best of luck, robots.

[XorNot]

https://www.fbr.com.au/view/hadrian-x

Brick laying robots already exist. This isn't a problem that can't be solved, it's a question of making it economically viable.

But the future is pretty obviously going to be skilled machinery operators overseeing the automation.

Even more interesting its once you automate like this the constraints start changing: i.e. it's easier to have a robot lay bricks with epoxy then cement, whereas a non automated work flow would struggle.

There's a Perth based company which has a prototype which basically will layout an entire house on a concrete slab via a boom arm that uses this approach: pallets go in, structured bricks come out.

[Grakel]

Yes, that system is discussed in the article, and it looks like it doesn't work very well. I doubt it can keep up with human labor.

I agree. It will happen eventually, but the bigger point here that is more related to to discussions on HN is that despite a lot of enthusiasm, machine learning and AI are still in the amino acid phase of evolution, and everything still sucks.

[polishdude20]

You can mention these same difficulty of tasks for soda can manufacture or a dozen other how its made videos. And yet, a lot of those processes that are just as complicated as brick laying, have been automated by robots.

[anigbrowl]

Key difference: you deploy a soda can robot in a factory. You have an enclosed environment with all of your inputs nicely set up.

For robot bricklaying, you can depend on the electrical supply. Everything else is a toss-up. I do think it's possible, but you don't choose your working environment or the weather conditions so everything is gonna be a lot more hassle.

[throwawayboise]

And then it starts to rain.

[munk-a]

This plays exactly into the OP's comment - but if that is your sincerely held belief there are ~4,000 bricklayers~[1] in America today and you could make a whole boatload of money if you could automate their work.

1. According to the BLS link below it's actually closer to 50,000.

[heavyset_go]

> there are 4,000 bricklayers in America today

There are over 50,000 bricklayers in the US according to the BLS[1].

[1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472021.htm

[munk-a]

Oh sorry - google apparently failed me - thanks for the correction!

[onlyrealcuzzo]

No one is even thinking about trying to completely automate coding.

There's tons of "no code" solutions - but these are all just different versions of coding and programming languages - usually with GUIs and pictures instead of words.

There's more than 60,000 SWEs that work in my company. Amazon, Google, Apple, and MSFT could make >$10Bn/year each if they could automate coding.

The fact that none of them are even trying - when it sort of goes with their core businesses - should give you some indication that this is something unlikely to be automated any time soon.

The reason bricklaying ISN'T automated is probably because there's ONLY 59,000 bricklayers in the US (a $3B market), it's not generalizable, and even if it was - the cost to move a machine, set it up, and maintain it - it's hard to imagine massive cost savings - 50% seems generous.

If there were >1M bricklayers - and/or they made >$400k/year on average, the work was generalizable, and automating would bring huge cost-savings that could be captured - there would be a LOT more effort into automating bricklaying.

But none of these are true. How much of brick laying is generalizable (building a new house) vs custom (repairing some old wall with non-standard bricks)? I have no idea - but I'm guessing not a lot more than 50%. That's a $1.5B market. You'd be luck to cut the costs by 50% - that's maybe $750M.

It could easily cost more than than to automate bricklaying! Why even try?? No one is interested in investing in that risk / reward.

On the contrary - most of Radiology could be automated and most of it is generalizable. Since hospitals are monopolies and healthcare is a mess - you might be able to capture all the cost savings - which would be close to 100%!

Since there's ~35k Radiologists, and they're some of the highest paid workers in the world - there are a lot of efforts to actually automate this (and they're doing quite well).

If you think automating radiology is easier than building a hamburger-cooking robot, you're naive. If you think AGI is easier to achieve than building a tomato-harvesting machine, you're clueless.

There's just simply not hundreds of billions to be made automating cooking hamburgers and harvesting tomatoes more efficiently. And it's not easy to generalize and automate cooking or harvesting EVERYTHING. And even if there was, restaurants and groceries are commodities - not monopolies. You couldn't capture all the savings. A race to the bottom on prices would eventually just pass the savings on to the customer - not juice profits. That's not something you want to spend massive, risky R&D on. That's why we haven't automated cooking hamburgers and harvesting tomatoes. Not because it's harder than protein folding, fusion energy, or true AGI...

From another point of view - we've had machines that mop floors for decades - and there's still a lot of people employed to mop floors. Is this because mopping floors is incredibly complex and creative? No - it's because people who mop floors get paid minimum wage, and they do a lot of other things, too.

[coding123]

No code still has a bit to go. It's main focus right now is having a model and can generate a UI and have a method to update a database. When you get into the weeds of what companies want, it's that person in group A is allowed to update, group B can create things, and group C can only view. And on top of that there is private stuff that only the same user can see. It's that shit that makes no-code a non-starter for Google, Amazon, ...

Perhaps a company that wants to display the current Bitcoin price on a screen and let you do currency conversions you can do that in "no code", but then again, a programmer can also do that with code in 15 minutes...

[bumby]

I imagine this goes for most skilled trades jobs. The lack of generalizability becomes apparent every time I undertake a DIY project that doesn’t go as planned

[bumby]

ONet claims nearly 82k brick masons

https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/47-2021.00

[TheSpiceIsLife]

A little bit of tongue in cheek:

As a tradesperson myself, working in a highly automated part of the metal fabrication process, I feel an urge to say something like:

The only thing standing between a programmer and unemployment is a sufficiently advanced compiler

But only because I great contempt for the hubris on display in these sorts of threads.

At the end of the day though, it's a-little-bit-form-column-A-and-a-little-bit-from-column-B.

We went from not-flying to landing robots on another planet in a handful of decades, who knows what a little bit more processing power and a few more layers of abstraction could bring.

[TeMPOraL]

Printing is hard primarily because of misaligned business incentives, which form a bubble of suck that's eerily resilient to market optimization.

Automating programming definitely seems like an easier target in comparison.

[XorNot]

Printing works really well. It's print drivers (software) that are an utter and complete mess.

I've never had a printer that didn't work: I've had plenty that wanted the correct offering to the HP website to be made and several hundred megs of adware installed before a postscript file made it to the actual hardware.

[chrisco255]

Nonsense. If you could automate programming, it would be the last thing to truly be automated before the singularity. After all, if programming was truly automated, the program for creating a brick laying robot would write itself.

[narag]

It's no different from people saying the same thing about chess and chess players, or go and go players...

Well, car assembling plants are older than Deep Blue, IIRC and they are very complex and "very robotic" in a physical sense.

[morpheos137]

Actually it is realy different since games like chess or go are closed problems, i.e. they are deterministic. The number of parameters necessary to integrate to turn an ostensibly open real world problem like "driving" into a deterministic game like computer chess or go is far greater.

[dylan604]

Is a computer iterating through every possible chess move "skill" or just being able to compute the best odds?

[throwaways885]

Is this any different from what a human is doing?

I would also say that the approaches taken by something like AlphaGo are more interesting, too. Because unlike chess the solution space for Go is too large to simply look at all possible moves.

[dylan604]

a computer iterating through things isn't skill per se, TO ME, because it's just what it was built to do. No more skill involved than a machine cutting wood. A human doing this is a skill as they have honed that ability with hours upon hours of studying and reading and playing etc. A computer can do this from the first time the devs get the bugs worked out.

Is that the same?

[cratermoon]

Where's the robot that can actually pick up and move pieces on standard chessboard, with no special guidelines or restrictions on pieces?

[jpindar]

Seriously?

There's lots of them on YouTube. Here's one with two different robots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65YDAXfSAWw

[cratermoon]

Nope. Those are pre-programmed to know "the board is here", "the pieces start here". Give them a random (but still legal) position, ask them to make the best legal move. See if they can even find a piece

Quick test: replace any pawn with a queen. See if the bot notices.

[jpindar]

There are plenty of other videos that demonstrate computer vision detecting chess pieces.

[pottertheotter]

I find this comment so out of touch with the history of the world. Would you have us stuck back at the art of knocking rocks together to create fire since the people who created matches and lighters had so much contempt for the rock knockers? If anyone has contempt, it's this line of thought.

What are we if we aren't trying to move forward--solve problems, invent, and improve lives? A few weeks back I came across Hadrian, one of the machines profiled in this piece. The idea of building with higher accuracy, lower cost, greater speed, all while allowing people doing backbreaking labor to do something else, excited me. There was no contempt for anyone.

I like woodworking. I'm currently thinking of purchasing an industrial-grade CNC router. I think it's analogous to robotic bricklayers in many ways. I have to design a piece before I make it whether I cut it with a hand saw, use a table saw, or have the CNC router do it. The reason I use a table saw instead of a hand saw is the same for using a CNC router instead of a table saw--it's faster and provides me with a more consistent and accurate outcome.

If that's not a good enough justification, you should look into how much skill is required to operate a CNC router. You can use different bits, rpms of the router, speed the machine is moving at, entry speeds, depth of cuts, etc. There is a lot of skill involved. And when a lot of that is taken away so I can focus on what matters most--creating beautiful furniture--I'll be so very happy and won't feel the least bit bad about it.

[eru]

Had OP removed the last part of this sentence:

> Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not and most likely never will be.

To read:

> Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not.

Or

> Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not and most likely will take a while.

You would have nothing to complain about.

As often with AI / automation, the things that seem simplest to humans are the hardest to automate and vice versa.

As another example, look at translation: take an average English speaker and ask them to translate Japanese texts. They will take lots and lots of training to get good.

But provide them with a literal word-for-word translation of the Japanese text into English as cheat sheet, and after a few hours of practice, she will become pretty good at rewriting those into fine English translations. Given long enough text snippets, she'll mostly be able to figure out from context how to resolve ambiguities.

(She won't be perfect, of course, and professional translators bring additional skills to the game. But she'll become pretty proficient pretty quickly.)

Try to do a machine to translate between human language, and you'll notice that doing the literal translation part is what's really easy for the computer, but all the context is hard.

(Incidentally, that's why in the stone age of AI, people thought translation would be easy, but playing chess well would be hard.)

[bserge]

Why not build the CNC router? It's a surprisingly simple machine, you could build one of any size yourself. There's even open source firmware and designs around. Bonus points for making it double as a laser etcher/cutter :D

[imtringued]

>It's a surprisingly simple machine

Yes, there is nothing dumber than a robot that doesn't know what it is doing. It is merely following a preprogrammed sequence of steps hoping nothing goes wrong.

[bserge]

Well, yeah, the thinking is left to you and the software.

[pottertheotter]

I absolutely would if I had both more time and experience with some of the skills involved. It would take me forever to do it myself.

[munk-a]

I have done some workplace automation (building support tools to automate away stupid paperwork) and I've never ever felt contempt for the people I'm building tools for. These people do extremely intelligent work and make evaluations on complex scenarios - my tools only help them minimize the silly BS that slows them down, building layered tools on top of poorly designed assistive tools or breaking out greenfield solutions to help tackle problems that need to be done entirely manually.

I really disagree that almost anyone who has built tool assistance into someone's workflow will view their workflow as simple and view the employee with contempt - actually getting to know the BS they have to put up with on a daily basis actually deepens my appreciation for what they're doing. Sure I can cherry-pick examples that make folks look bad - employees today, even millennials, are for some reason allergic to learning keyboard shortcuts and will use right-click to paste. That's somewhat on them, but more on the company for not providing training time to teach better data entry habits.

If one of these highly skilled agricultural workers was given a robot that used scent to determine which fruit trees likely had ripe fruit that needed to be harvested - I'm sure they'd appreciate it for what it is, a tool that lets them concentrate on more important things. And, if we as a society are moving into a era where automation becomes so widespread that jobs are much fewer and far between 1) we'll waste a lot more time building freemium games or whatever BS labour sink society comes up with next and 2) we should realize that taxes need to go way up on the people still employed and UBI or other social services are needed to keep us functional as a society. Having too much productivity is such an easy problem to solve - you just don't do what America is doing and let it all coagulate into the pockets of a few hundred billionaires... and then everyone gets to live a good life.

[coding123]

I don't understand UBI personally. In general it will have the net effect of dropping even more people out of the labor pool. Even with increasing population over the last 50 years the number of people participating is going down. Not as a percentage, but a number.

With that, things like getting a plumber will skyrocket in price.

I mean why should I fix your toilet if I can be at home playing video games right now? I'm going to have a roof over my head and food in my mouth either way.

Current UBI experiments don't have the experience of going 100% of the population, so there's no way to know what will happen.

[correcthorse123]

I dont know the answer, but I think people will pursue sections of the labour market which cannot (yet?) be automated. Why play video games that you're frankly sick of after a few months, if you could help someone out for both a social and comparatively large financial reward?

It would also depend on the specifics of how UBI would be implemented. Where I live I could stop working and live off welfare, providing a minimal standard of living. Yet almost nobody chooses this way of life as people strive for higher living standards, and for many work plays a part in giving meaning to life.

If more and more jobs get automated this might become a problem though, assuming no new non-automatable jobs are created.

[andrewmcwatters]

I don't have contempt for the skills; I have great respect for the skills. I have contempt for the prices of things.

If construction costs are cheaper than ever (are they really?) why can't I buy a box to live in without spending $300,000?

Why is the permits process nationally broken? And despite being skilled, that doesn't mean they're informed: why do contractors not know what they're supposed to do? Why do the people handing out permits not know what they're doing?

See also: trying to renovate or buy a home in Arizona.

[avgDev]

Cost of lumber, cost of land, cost of equipment, cost of permits, cost of inspections.

It really isn't a box for $300k. You can buy a mobile home for what $60k?

Permit process isn't broken.....this is a view often held by incompetent contractors. I have performed various jobs like building retaining walls, bathrooms, electrical, decks and never had an issue as long as my work was up to code.

Permits can protect a homeowner, when the contractor bails without finish the work.

But back to why a home can be $300k, it is a lot of work and materials. From an article, "According to NAHB, the average material cost to build a house is $296,652, with the average square footage of a house being 2,594. That means your cost per square foot is $114.36 ($296,652 / 2,594)."

You are underestimating how much it costs to get lumber, copper(can use pex), brick, concrete etc.

You sound like someone saying, I can have a wordpress site for $1000, but why does it cost $500k to build an ecommerce platform.

[WillPostForFood]

>and never had an issue as long as my work was up to code

Permits cost tens of thousands of dollars, and months of processing in my area. They’re happy to sign off at the end after they’ve extracted the maximum they can from you.

[bialpio]

Sounds more like a problem with your area, or maybe you're doing different type of work compared to what I'm doing with my house (residential vs commercial maybe?). I've been applying for various kinds of permits (building, electrical, plumbing, still need to get mechanical) and in all those cases, I applied online and the permit was issued same or the next day (& precon inspections that I went through have all been scheduled for the next business day). Total cost was in the ballpark of $1000. This is in WA. I did not need any structural changes so the process for the building permit was cheaper & quicker than it could've been. I also had some work done that did require structural engineer & submitting drawings - it was a fraction of the remodel cost anyway.

OTOH, insisting on permits potentially saved my ass at least in one case - I had a contractor remodel my bathroom say that "they do everything up to code". Their work did not pass inspections on the first try (had to fix things up both for plumbing and electrical).

[lazide]

And that is assuming you can get permits - which in many jurisdictions can take years to figure out, and multiple major changes.

The intent in many jurisdictions is to tarpit change as much as possible and it shows.

It isn't the permits themselves which are usually the problem.

[Kye]

There are likely some valuable skills and services that go into that permit price. I doubt it's pure grift.

[TeMPOraL]

It never is. It would've been eliminated otherwise. There's some core of value being delivered, wrapped in a layer of corruption. The question is, what's the relative size of the core to the grift layer?

[shadowgovt]

Permit process also protects the community.

I was paying for a house to be built by a contractor who, it turns out, screwed up the permitting process and didn't do a hydrological survey of the erosion pattern on the land. The town yanked his permit to build.

I was grumpy, but when I drove by I could see clearly what the problem was: he hadn't planned for drainage at all, and the new construction and alteration of the terrain had already caused rainwater to start pooling at the base of my future neighbor's foundation. If he'd been allowed to continue unhindered, he would basically have guaranteed my neighbor's property would have been destroyed in 5 years.

[philwelch]

Permits are a local government issue. Maybe your local government is extremely reasonable and punctual when it comes to building permits, while my local government is lazy or stupid or corrupt. Maybe you have no problem with building permits because you don't live in a county where the authorities slow-walk anyone who doesn't buy them a case of whisky.

[dragontamer]

> why can't I buy a box to live in without spending $300,000?

Manufactured homes are like $20,000. The plot of land that they go on however, is subject to political rules. Turns out that people don't like cheap housing to be available, because it attracts the underclass.

Its important to remember that housing is mostly a solved problem. The politics of housing are not solved however: too much "progress" (aka: higher prices) and people complain about gentrification.

Bringing down the cost of housing is akin to inviting gangs and thieves into your neighborhood. Everyone wants to support the poor and needy, but just not in their backyard.

Its very difficult to convince a typical city / town / county to support the development of a new trailer park. That's just how politics are today. Politicians are screwed if prices go up. Politicians are screwed if prices go down. Politicians are screwed if prices remain the same.

-------------

Its not very difficult to physically build any kind of "underclass" home. Trailer parks, low-income housing / mixed-income housing (be it a high-rise or low-cost apartment/condo complex), etc. etc. But its very, very difficult to convince local board members to zone an area for that kind of home.

[imtringued]

I agree. People pretend that expensive housing is an issue and then when it's their turn to buy and own the house they insist that it should stay expensive.

[version_five]

I used to work in a family construction business and now I do machine learning contracting. When I compare the value you get for 300k worth of construction to what 300k of ML specialist time buys you, it's hard to agree with your comment. I understand the reasons, but generally I'm blown away by how cheap most labor intensive things are, compared to how much people will pay for software projects.

[andrewmcwatters]

I don't agree with your comment. $50,000-$100,000 of well placed funds with the right software consultancy can generate a project that pulls in enough cash flow to pay for itself multiple times over in just the span of months.

Machine learning is not a high return investment on its own. It is only leveraged as a technical piece of an already cash flow healthy larger pie in most organizations.

The division of labor and supply of various workers makes most labor intensive tasks self-explanatory in cost.

$300,000 can buy you a property that takes years to double in value in comparison. They're completely different categories of capital utilization.

[Plough_Jogger]

FWIW, there are many opportunities for significant ROI in ML / analytics projects.

Low-hanging fruit I've seen in this area has included automating or augmenting labor-intensive manual processes (e.g., classifying insurance claims), replacing human judgement with time-series forecasts within an ordering system, and optimizing email campaigns with RL.

[PeterisP]

It's all about the things that scale to many people vs things that don't. A feature improvement in some app that makes extra $0.01 / year value for tens of millions of users is simply a larger effect than building a house for one family.

[PragmaticPulp]

> If construction costs are cheaper than ever (are they really?) why can't I buy a box to live in without spending $300,000?

They're not cheaper than ever. Materials are expensive and in short supply. Labor is expensive because demand is high and few people want to do manual construction work.

But you're not literally buying just a structure. You have to buy a property for the house. In many locations, the valuation of the land a house sits on is higher than the value of the structure itself. My house could burn to the ground and my property would lose less than half its value, and I'm not even in a very high cost of living area.

You can buy a house for $300,000 if you're not picky about where it is. One of my family members had a new construction house built in the 2500 sq. ft. range for under $300,000 recently. The trick was that they live in a small town where property can be purchased for around $10K.

> See also: trying to renovate or buy a home in Arizona.

A quick search on Zillow shows over 1,500 listings for freestanding single family homes (not apartments, condos, townhomes, or other properties) for $300,000 or less. Many of them are even recently renovated, have 2-car garages, and frankly look quite nice.

Usually when someone is talking about starter houses being exorbitantly expensive, they're actually referring to the property being expensive. Loosen your requirements for location and it becomes much easier to find affordable housing. In most states you don't even need to move that far out of city centers. There are hundreds of properties within Phoenix and Tuscon that are $300K or less.

[dylan604]

I have contempt for the price of devs. They sit in cushy chairs in climate controlled rooms eating cushy meals. Skilled construction people hone their craft over time just as a dev does, only in a not so comfy chair nor comfy climate controlled room in a workplace that has all sorts of situations that might seriously harm/mame/kill the worker or fellow coworkers.

It goes both ways

[pvorb]

Construction costs are cheaper than ever? The prices have skyrocketed in the past year. Is this something special to Germany? I would've expected that the pandemic shows equal effects elsewhere.

[andrewmcwatters]

I'm just saying this because every but-actually poster says something like this, but I think homes come with more amenities now than they did in the 70s, so buying a home isn't really any cheaper adjusted for inflation.

[imtringued]

Yes, bigger houses for fewer people means costs still go up.

[notJim]

As far as renovations, I think the simple reality is that renovating requires a lot of very skilled labor, and skilled labor is not cheap. Good contractors where I live are booked months and months out. The weird thing is if you look the salary data, these jobs don't even pay very well. Electricians and plumbers both have average salaries of $56k, compared to ~$100k for software engineers according to BLS data.

If these numbers are representative, it's no wonder it's hard to hire a contractor. The pay sucks and it's hard work that requires a lot of training. Overall I don't understand how the economics of this industry work such that doing anything is expensive as hell, yet the workers are not paid very well.

[andrewmcwatters]

Sorry, that's just not true. Electricians in Phoenix can break $100k, and they openly tell me about it all the time. The electrician who did my house went from making $40k in his first year to $250k float month-to-month. It makes working in software look like being a peasant out here.

Ask me what HVAC companies make in the hottest city in the nation.

[notJim]

Take it up with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These are nationwide averages.

[d0gbread]

Reporting on averages is fine but you've made the mistake of thinking that average is representative of anyone. In all likelihood salaries are not normally distributed around that average, and we'd instead find a low hump (rural) and a high hump (urban, suburban).

[notJim]

I doubt it, when I looked at Phoenix salaries they seemed to be in line with the bls averages.

[cratermoon]

You can buy a box to live in for $50K. A place to put it, on the other hand....

[orev]

The price consumers pay for something has nothing to do with the cost of producing it. Not counting the cost of the land itself, an identical house built in the city costs the same in hours and materials as one in the country. Price is determined by one thing, and one thing only: how much other people are willing to pay for it (i.e. the market sets the prices).

The costs vs sale price are relevant to the builder in making the decision on whether to build and whether to sell, as they wouldn’t do it if they’re going to lose money.

[savanaly]

This is only true in the short run by the way. In the long run, in a competitive market, cost is absolutely the driver of price.

[dap]

As I get older, I’m increasingly skeptical of the idea that many markets are competitive. There’s so much overhead to so many businesses, plus heavy use of price discrimination — it doesn’t feel like a lot of the stuff I buy comes from a competitive market. (I’m sure less likely to notice the stuff that is.)

[d0gbread]

How is this true for generally appreciating assets like a house? It makes sense for commodities but until location and style don't matter I'm unconvinced there's a such thing as cost driving price in the housing market on any timeline.

[heavyset_go]

Why renovate someone's bathroom when real estate investors will pay you more and will throw years of work at you?

Also, housing isn't expensive because of labor costs. In many places, the land itself is worth more than the improvements made to it.

[elhesuu]

Why do you assume construction costs are the only factor that drives property value?

[dredmorbius]

In attempt to turn this teachable: the costs that go into housing aren't just labour, whether skilled or unskilled. It's a number of economic goods and services, each of which has its own price dyanmic.

The chief cost of housing is land, and that follows the laws of economic rents and assets, in two principle ways:

- For goods subject to rents, that is, where supply is nonresponsive to price, any surplus value accrues to the seller rather than the buyer. The marginal price tends toward the marginal value rather than the marginal cost.

- Moreover, as an asset, land is subject to the general behavioural tendency that holders of assets will tend to act such that the value of assets inflates. This is through constraining supply, sale, credentialling, regulation, certification, and other elements. This shows up in zoning, construction, certifiction, lending, insurance, and other obligations or limitations on new construction.

- Unskilled labour is subject to wages, which tend to fall to the level of marginal cost, if not below that. Incidentally, in a simple society of labourers vs. rentiers, surplus value accrues to the rentiers as a case of the law of rent vs. the iron law of wages.

- Skilled labour wages deviate from those of unskilled as skill itself is a rent-generating factor, and hence skilled labourers can command somewhat higher wages. (Adam Smith's discussion of the five factors involved in the wages of labour are a fascinating read.)

- Materials follow natural resource pricing, which ... is very poorly understood by modern economic theory, but tends to follow the marginal cost of provision by the marginal supplier. That is, the supplier with the highest viable cost structure sets the market price for the commodity. Perversely, when the market is oversupplied, prices often fall (expected) and production rises as the only way producers have of meeting their own fixed costs is to produce and sell more at the lower price. (This occurs because marginal costs may fall below fixed costs.) The situation is not long-term sustainable, but may persist for a substantial period of time. For purely extractive resources (mining, gas, oil), the replacement cost of the good is not factored in at all, and market prices may be hundreds to millions of times below any rational fully-accounted cost basis.

Net productivity of labour has increased markedly. The land-cost of housing has increased far beyond that. Materials have shifted in several ways, with numerous older materials having been replaced by nominally-cheaper modern equivalents. Restrictions on construction methods, materials, designs, etc., impose additional costs and constraints in design and building as well.

The question largely reveals a large ignorance of the factors involved.

[andrewmcwatters]

None of this is a mystery. There's nothing to teach to me here. It's just a complaint about the market.

[imtringued]

No, it's a complaint about private land ownership.

[nickthemagicman]

Because people have great skill in exploiting other people as well.

[chias]

Laying brick is hard. I bricked up a small gap in a two-foot-tall brick wall in my back yard recently. It took me literally all day, and looks exactly as messy as someone who lays bricks might expect from someone who uses a computer for a living.

Watching those people on youtube who make tutorial videos that go super fast and make it look really easy... You can record yourself writing a python script and make it look easy. Those people are pros, and have skills and experience to back it up. It isn't easy.

[Permit]

> But they are completely convinced that it's just around the corner, because they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people.

Can you think of any other reasons that people might believe something like automated driving is right around the corner?

Or is "contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people" the only reason one might believe this?

[ghaff]

You can phrase it more nicely. But it boils down to things like: "How hard can it be?" "Humans suck at it (though they really don't)" "We do great at 90% of the problem" and so forth.

Computers can do really well in controlled, specced situations. Not so well in a complicated environment where humans live and operate.

[philwelch]

I don't think this is it.

Computer people tend to work in office settings. The reason the old joke about threatening to replace people with shell scripts works is because a lot of office jobs can be replaced with shell scripts. This is because, rather than physically working in the real world, most office jobs entail manipulating symbols, which is easy for computers but hard for humans. (That's why we invented computers).

A lot of work in the real world entails some decision-making component that can be expressed in terms of symbol manipulation. This overlaps with the part that many people find difficult, because people are naturally good at physically manipulating the real world. So when we talk about automating driving or picking tomatoes or bricklaying, we are only accounting for the difficulty of automating the symbol-manipulation abstraction of that task.

(This is basically the conceit of "Manna", a science fiction story where a ton of jobs are "automated" by a computer that just gives a continuous stream of verbal instructions to a poorly paid human being.)

If you're measuring the skills of manual workers against the standard of how hard it is to build a robot that replaces them, they are surprisingly hard. The same is true for the skills of trained animals. Maybe we should start worrying about replacing human beings with robots after we've managed to figure out how to replace dogs with robots. Once we have enough bomb-sniffing robots, drug-sniffing robots, livestock guardian robots, police pursuit robots, search and rescue robots, and so forth, to the point where we don't need dogs, then maybe we can start to worry about the human jobs. (Or maybe not--dogs have a really good sense of smell that might be harder to replicate than some human capacities.)

[danhor]

> ton of jobs are "automated" by a computer that just gives a continuous stream of verbal instructions to a poorly paid human being.

Isn't that basically amazon warehouses today? (though text based)

[cgrealy]

> We haven't automated driving

Yeah, we pretty much have... it just hasn't been widely adopted yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjztvddhZmI

And honestly, from a business perspective, most people really don't care about the skills ordinary people have.

Look at the wine industry for example. Top shelf wine is hand-picked, for exactly the reasons you outline, and some people are willing to pay top dollar for that end product.

But the vast majority of grapes are harvested by very simple machines, because scale and profit, and most people just want a $10 bottle of decent-ish wine.

We absolutely can automate cooking a fucking hamburger, and as soon as it's cheaper than the cheapest labour, McDonald's, Burger King, etc, WILL automate cooking a fucking hamburger.

Will it be as good as a "hand made" burger? Maybe.. maybe not?

Will the people paying a few bucks for a burger care? Nope.

This isn't an issue with "computer people"... this is an issue with economics.

[TeMPOraL]

> We absolutely can automate cooking a fucking hamburger, and as soon as it's cheaper than the cheapest labour, McDonald's, Burger King, etc, WILL automate cooking a fucking hamburger.

Curiously, McDonald's is probably as close as you can get to automating burgers and fries without crossing that final step of removing human labor entirely. It's not really cooking anymore, it's process chemistry[0], with some final assembly required.

--

[0] - Which I actually consider to be a good thing.

[munk-a]

This is the pattern you'll see repeated if you go looking for jobs that have been "automated away" - they get the dumb bits removed. No longer does the mail room call your desk to inform you that a package has arrived - scanning a barcode does that. The jobs in those sectors slowly shrink down (until eventually they just get rolled into the gigantic umbrella of responsibility that is IT) but the work never completely disappears.

Once upon a time I'm sure some dude had to constantly monitor the temperature of the cellar that holds the wine casks and occasionally call into town for a block of ice to keep things cool. Now we have refrigeration - and that mind-numbingly tedious portion of running a winery can now be conveniently avoided (except for the occasional maintenance) so you can concentrate on more important things.

Eventually it might be that McDonalds automates it's POS and menu to such a degree that for every ten franchises there's just one dude in a car that drives around responding to error codes and, ideally, the people who worked there will find something more creative and fulfilling to do with their lives. I don't hold those people with contempt - I feel like their skills (and everybody has skills) are being underutilized.

[XorNot]

Keeping the humans honest is generally the biggest problem with automation. Left unsupervised, people will trash everything. Add one overseer and that goes down a lot.

[slacktide]

As a mechanical engineering intern in the early ‘90s, I worked for a company that among other things, designed food handling equipment for McD. For them a lot of automation is about safety - young/inexperienced employees around potentially dangerous equipment = workers comp claims. I helped develop a fully automated pushbutton system to change fryer oil out from a bulk storage/disposal system. They had a lot of burn claims from teenagers changing it manually back then.

[gorgoiler]

I would be interested to know if there is feedback in the McD process chemistry loop.

A fun part of cooking by hand is dealing with the quirks of fresh produce. These once-living plants and meats are inconsistent enough to require decisions on the fly, mid cook. One cut is 50g thicker at one end than the other, one parsnip is 10% more dense at the top, this cod retained more salt than yesterday and requires less seasoning, etc.

Of course this kind of cooking is miles from what happens in fast food, but there’s a reason the burger station is the most senior position. Cooking patties properly requires skill to get them crispy, fully cooked, but still juicy. Hot damn I’m hungry now.

[TeMPOraL]

> I would be interested to know if there is feedback in the McD process chemistry loop.

There must be, running an open-loop process is rather tricky. If it's like any other process in food manufacturing, there are likely both continuous automated checks of trivially measurable properties and regular (every hour or less) manual lab tests[0].

> These once-living plants and meats are inconsistent enough to require decisions on the fly, mid cook.

As I understand their process (from what little I read and watched about it in the past), the keystone of it is minimizing input variance at every stage. They stick to specific varieties of potatoes, they keep bun production centralized, they place specific requirements on slaughterhouses for the meat they then blend into standardized pulp, etc. This makes it possible to constrain variance downstream - e.g. the meat pulp has roughly uniform properties, so it can be shaped and processed in tightly controlled fashion.

At the end come pre-processed food pieces that are then shipped to restaurants for assembly. McDonald's venues don't really cook this food, they put it through the last stage of processing pipeline - heating it in programmable ovens/fryers. Restaurant workers aren't making any cooking decisions. That's how McDonald's ensures its product consistency - there's no place left for a human to screw things up.

--

[0] - Industrial food processing plants have labs on-site, which receive samples from the production line on an ongoing basis. This is used to check the batches for contamination / pathogens, verify measurements from automated sensors, and to provide ground-truth data for models used in model predictive controllers, if such are used in the process.

[LanceH]

I would expect to see it done at places like stadiums or other events where you have a crowd of 100k who all want to eat at the same time and the expected quality if near zero.

[Animats]

We absolutely can automate cooking a fucking hamburger, and as soon as it's cheaper than the cheapest labour

It's time to link to the AMFare video again.[1]

This was done 50 years ago, but wasn't cost-effective.

Country Garden in Beijing has several automated restaurants. They have 6 restaurants on this system now, one of which seats 600 people. So at scale, this is starting to work. Maybe. Looking at the videos, it looks hard to clean. Commercial food processing equipment has a look of "can be blasted with boiling soapy water daily", and not seeing that here.[2]

[1] https://youtu.be/FmXLqImT1wE

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1GipbISX54

[adamdusty]

We have not automated driving. Phoenix is step one but there are parts of the world that get weather other than sunshine. Yeah those cars are cool, but the roads in Phoenix are better than any other major city in the US, the weather is binary, sun or rain, the city is modern, and the stop lights communicate with audi (I think its audi) cars and you can see when it's going to turn green on the instrument display. Phoenix is the absolute ideal place for self-driving cars. Again, its a great achievement. They are doing great work, but I think it's a stretch to make the general statement that we've automated driving.

[andrewmcwatters]

McDonalds effectively did automate making a hamburger through supply chain and on-site process. It's cleaning that those professionals say is difficult, which seems to be why machines don't handle the very last portion itself 100%.

[mbesto]

> Yeah, we pretty much have...

"Pretty much". heh, there are 6 distinct levels of car automation for a reason.

> it just hasn't been widely adopted yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjztvddhZmI

Now try this in Wisconsin in January with 8 inches of snow on the ground. I consider Wisconsin wide adoption, do you?

[cgrealy]

And how many accidents are there in Wisconsin in January with 8 inches of snow on the ground?

We don’t have to perfect automated driving; we just have to get it better than the average human… and that’s a pretty low bar.

And we don’t even have to automate driving everywhere. Who cares if we can’t automate it for 5%? Can we automate it for 95%? Hell, if we can automate it for 30-40% with a lower accident rate… that’s already a win.

[dukeofdoom]

These jobs are usually slow torture for humans to do. Do them long enough, and your body will break under the sun or you will look like a prune, get back pain or a hump and possibly skin cancer. Let the robots do them as soon as possible.

[NoPicklez]

And sitting in an office chair in front of a computer all day doesn't bring its own health problems? Weight gain due to limited daily movement, forward posture due to sitting and looking forward all day, RSI due to typing and mouse movement.

[XorNot]

Sitting in an office chair you can do despite numerous problems. But crawling through attics, lifting heavy items - once your injured that's it, you won't be doing anymore, potentially permanently.

[dukeofdoom]

Some Suggestions if I was having this problem:

1. Get a standing desk, so you can alternate between sitting and standing.

2. Learn to use a mouse with both left and right hand. And/or ball wheel mouse.

3. Try Speech to text software

4. Try an Ergo keyboard. Logitech makes an ergonomic keyboard (Ergo k860)

5. Get up and Stretch every hour

6. Go the the bathroom as much as you're allowed to

7. Go for a Walk during your lunch break

8. Go for a walk after work

9. Do some yoga. It's totally free.

   https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWN2FPlvg9r-LnUyepH9IaQ

[NoPicklez]

My point being duke is that physically intensive jobs such as carpentry, bricklaying and other labor intensive jobs also have their own safeguards to prevent these injuries you mentioned. Not completely remove but prevent, the same way that office jobs still impact people's health. They're required to use hats, hard hats, safety glasses, long sleeved clothing, sun screen, steel capped boots, lifting belts etc.

The things you mention do not particularly happen to everyone and even less so since safety standards have improved.

[sharkweek]

A question for the crowd, then: what is the “best” job for the human body?

Because sitting at a desk all day for me definitely isn’t it.

[esailija]

Well unfortunately it doesn't get better than that, except when working as remote you can lie on a sofa or bed. After a full day you still have full energy to do optimal amount of physical exercise, just enough (which is relatively little) to stay in optimal condition without destroying your body.

[IdiocyInAction]

I have absolutely no contempt for the skill. Why would I? But I do recognize that building costs are expensive and that building stuff could be faster and safer and thus think that automation would be good. Same goes for my job, really. Automation has so far been a net good for humanity and if we ever transition to a true post-scarcity society, it will be through automation.

Also, if you speak with people in ML/AI, they will not tell you it's around the corner. They know that physical stuff and robotics in general is hard.

Also, builders and the like often have a great amount of contempt towards any desk job - is that OK? Why?

[cogman10]

It's always a little weird the jobs that are easy to automate vs the jobs that are hard to automate.

Jobs that require interaction with the physical world and people will almost always be a hard to automate thing. There are simply too many variables.

The real problem is when we make the results of a job worse to aid in automation. The prime example here is tomatoes being breed with thick skin, picked before ripened, and then squirted with some chemicals to make them red so people will buy them. All while sacrificing taste.

[MontyCarloHall]

Your observation is closely related to Moravec’s paradox of artificial intelligence: “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

[mrshadowgoose]

I can only speak for myself, but I can assure you that on my end it's not contempt in the least bit. Rather, it's excitement at the hope of an amazing future; one in which people who work do so because they choose to, and not because they have to. A future in which we can celebrate life, creativity, hobbies, friends and family, without having to toil away the majority of our waking life to obtain the means of survival.

One can absolutely admire the skill of a bricklayer, while celebrating the eventual fact that bricklayers will not be forced to perform that labor if they don't want to. Those are not mutually exclusive things.

"We haven't automated driving"

One can, today, fly to Phoenix Arizona, download the Waymo app, and summon a self-driving vehicle. Although it would be disingenuous to claim that self-driving is a completely solved problem for ALL use cases, it absolutely is "good enough" for very many of them, and will be scaled out faster than you expect.

"but many more have not and most likely never will be."

Unless there's some yet-to-be-discovered supernatural process at-work inside the human brain, this is just plain false. The human brain is an incredibly complicated machine, and nothing more. It's only a matter of time until we understand, or in the worst case, simulate it with sheer computational power.

[pradeep_m]

I think this is a rather harsh take. Most of the people working on automating it understand how hard it is and are striving through it. You need some of these irrational believers for progress!

[LanceH]

It looks like he has contempt for the people trying to automate something. He doesn't realize how hard they are actually working, nor they insight they have into the problem. From his perspective he thinks they are wrong for thinking they are taking on an easy job.

[cratermoon]

Robots that can identify and pick up things in the environment haven't materially improved since the 60s. What has changed is how factories and warehouses are built, so that the 'environment' and the 'things' are strictly constrained to enable robotic arms to grab and move them. But let one thing get a little out of place, or worse, let a human get between an industrial robot and the thing it's trying to pick up and.. well. RIP.

[Nasrudith]

That simply isn't true - the machines of the past were pretty much blind but safety interlocks are able to detect an approach. The reason for the constraints are efficency in manufacturing is preferrably reducing the process to simple repetitive actions for improved throughput and reliability.

[cratermoon]

> simple repetitive actions

Exactly, and those actions are able to be simple and repetitive because the machines don't have to try to identify objects in the environment, they just reach X meters, open their grappler Y centimeters, close it until it reaches Z Pascals of pressure, move, repeat.

No real "AI" required, just programmed to handle expected conditions. But get just a little bit outside the pre-programmed constraints and... https://www.engadget.com/2018-12-06-amazon-workers-hospitali...

As a result, the humans are now forced to accommodate the failings of the machines. https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/8346932/amazon-factory-workers...

[Guest42]

I see this pretty frequently in manufacturing. Oftentimes, larger products will have curves, design changes, layering complexities, and judgment calls that simply can’t be performed via machine, further, the parts will come in at different times and assembly lines themselves will have to be flexible and optimize for the given real estate.

[zamalek]

> The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here.

Agreed. My mother was involved in my local city theatre, and always told us kids that "there would be no show without someone to lift the curtains." These people had their cameo in every finale. That has always stuck with me.

Ever wondered what would happen if there wasn't someone flipping burgers to satisfy your 2AM craving? You, no matter your riches or power or fame, would have to do it yourself.

The most innovative thing you could do is shut the fuck up and start listening. Instead of trying to replace the bricklayer with robotics, how about asking them how robotics could help them? They are the SMEs, they do a job considered easy to automate daily (and that job isn't easy to automate). They can tell you how they are wasting time on inefficiencies.

The job of technology is to allow the human to stop worrying about the rote. It is not to replace the human, or to solve imaginary problems. That's when problems arise: Facebook, racist/sexist AI, etc.

[alfalfasprout]

It's funny that the other comments here prove your point, egh.

They miss that the contempt is not directed at those doing the work but instead directed at the skills-- this is evidenced by how they tend to trivialize the skills that are trying to be automated.

This is especially true when looking at the spectrum of quality of human work for a given field. Take, for example, masonry. There is simple bricklaying for the front of the house. Then there is intricate stonemasonry that requires a lot of careful planning, know-how, and knowledge of historical techniques.

There is machining a piece of metal in a simple way. Then there is intricate hand-finishing of that metal at the other extreme.

I suspect that over time we will see the less artisan, less "skillful" aspects of manual work be replaced but that fine craftsmanship won't really disappear. The more you learn about what goes into making certain things by hand the more you appreciate how foolish it is to claim that it can all be automated easily.

[wlesieutre]

There's also machining a piece of metal in an incredibly complex way, but with the right automation can be turned into a comparatively simple process. If you showed someone 100 years ago what we could do with a block of metal and a 5-axis CNC machine it would blow their mind. That's the type of area where automation can do great things. Look for places where "simple for a machine" and "simple for a human" diverge.

I could do the job of every logic gate in my computer, but I wouldn't want to try and boot a copy of Windows with a pad of paper and a pencil.

As an example, not something you'd want to make on a hand operated milling machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnIvhlKT7SY

But to look at something that's easy to do for people and think "That's easy, a machine could do it!" It's always going to depend on why it's easy. Handling situations that differ from one job to the next is a pretty strong point for humans, especially when those differences are handled by grabbing and moving things.

But then, five years ago we would've put "playing Go" on there with grabbing and moving things, so you never know.

[coderjames]

Automated hamburgers at https://theroboburger.com/ and https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/16/business/white-castle-flippy-... and https://sf.eater.com/2018/6/21/17489084/creator-robot-burger...

Automated cement-pouring in place of brick laying at https://www.nbc12.com/2021/06/24/virginias-first-3-d-printed...

The robots have arrived. Unskilled labour needs to be concerned.

[chrisco255]

We'll see if / when they hit scale. From what I recall your 2018 example was a flop and the machine did not produce burgers any cheaper and needed a lot of maintenance from the staff in order to operate.

EDIT: Yes, they didn't last long: https://hackaday.com/2018/10/11/i-ate-a-robot-hamburger-befo...

[robomartin]

I don't think it is contempt. I truly believe most people --event technical folks-- who don't work in robotics and AI lack an understanding of just how difficult it is to build and program a robot that can do what "simple" insects (fly, ant, spider, worm, cockroach, etc.) are able to accomplish. Most of the "impressive" robotics videos we are treated to on YouTube are highly staged, choreographed sequences where one out of N attempts is used as some kind of a PR showcase not even remotely linked to real-world useful capabilities of the robot in display.

I remember how people were amazed when robots like Asimo could not be used during the Fukushima disaster. Anyone who works in these fields, even peripherally, has a very different perspective of reality vs. fantasy and knew the score as it pertained to robots like Asimo, their actual utility and capabilities.

[neutronicus]

Trying to grow plants outdoors is a humbling experience for sure

[bsder]

People also seem to always miss that we always engineer the product in order to be able to automate it.

The most automated things have been designed by engineers with robotic assembly in mind.

[SV_BubbleTime]

> [mortor] it’s a non-newtonian fluid, and it’s viscosity increases when it’s moved or shaken.

Which is why the points about non-Newtonian fluids like mortor changing viscosity seems right on the money. Anyone trying automation with normal mortor gives me zero confidence. I like the robot truck idea, seems like a winner compared to others.

Exo suits / better humans in the meantime, purpose built machines later.

[exporectomy]

Bogus reason. Plastic melt is also a non-Newtonian fluid and yet plastic parts production is thoroughly automated.

[SV_BubbleTime]

I’m not sure that tracks exactly. I think the issue is the stacking of very heavy things on top of a nnf goop.

[bsder]

The issue is that "buildings have been engineered to be built by humans".

So, the building tasks are set to be a compromise of materials and human skill.

If we want machines to build them, then we need different systems and materials.

[danielodievich]

My grandfather spent his entire working life after the war in the cement and brick factory, and built 3 houses and various sub-buildings out of brick. Since very young age my brother and I were tasked with helping, starting with just sieving sand via mesh to remove rocks, and then once we got just a bit older and stronger, actually mixing mortar out of cement and sand and carrying the mixture to the job site.

I think I laid my first brick before the age of 9, but first just a couple here and there. Bricks are heavy! I think was 12 when I was given a straight stretch of the wall close to foundation to, and after review of my work I had to take everything apart, it was saggy, uneven and ugly. Eventually I learned to do straight walls, but the corners eluded me until at least a year doing it with very qualified masons coaching. I don't think my joints were ever pretty enough with that lovely groove that some people do, and avoiding mortar onto the brick is devilishly hard.

Where I live there is little brick construction but I love seeing what is there, it is always so pretty.

Based on my experience of the changing by the minute mortar, heavy bricks, continuous looping feedback, I don't believe it is something that will get automated.

[rowanG077]

You must interpret everything people say in the worst possible way to have this viewpoint.

Besides that It's not my experience at all that "computer people" think that these things will be automated in a short time frame. It's the opposite. The "computer people" are highly skeptic because they know much better then anyone what a computer is capable of. It's almost always the managers and marketing people parading automation around.

[gibolt]

'Most' and 'never' are strong words. I'd imagine many people thought that in the past about modern automation (and it's well documented).

Things will become automated. That is the natural human progression. We are creative, and their are 7+ billion minds with new giants to stand on the shoulder of every day.

AI, soft/compliant robotics, and globalization are strong unrelenting factors/motivators.

[caf]

Yes. For example, see this video of a Continuous Tamping Machine in operating, tamping railway ballast:

https://fb.watch/79KwlAt2Fz/

You probably wouldn't have to go too far back to find people sceptical about the possibility of automating that.

[nitwit005]

> computer people

The article suggests efforts go back over 100 years, so it seems bizarre to suggest this has something to do with "computer people".

There is a commercial burger cooking machine north of me in SF (https://www.creator.rest/), and there are similar machines for pizzas and other fast food. That isn't an unsolved problem.

[paxys]

And yet the list of jobs that have been successfully automated over the decades is considerably longer. Everything you mentioned will eventually be conquered as well (driving, farming and cooking are probably the worst examples you could have used – we are well on our way to automating all of them).

[throwaway17_17]

Driving and farming I can agree with having automation potential. But the issue I have with cooking is that automation for the culinary area is limited to McDonalds’ type assembly of uniform pre-made food items that require the absolute minimum in terms of culinary ability. I can comprehend robotic prep machines, slicing, dicing, maybe even butchery. But it is a significant step from there to a robot following even a well written recipe for demi-glacé or for a custard, let alone being able to tell when potatoes are roasted to the right fineness and have a sufficiently browned appearance. Maybe my kids won’t work at Burger King in high school, but I can’t see line cooks at any real restaurant being replaced any time soon.

[8note]

My dad automated cooking meatballs ages ago. I can't imagine a hamburger would be too much harder.

There's folks on YouTube already who can automate the assembly of a hamburger using Lego. It's just slower than having a person do it in a semi automated manner.

Per the article, we have automated some of bricklaying (for roads), and I've definitely had ads show up for tools that reduce the skills needed to do bricklaying.

We've also automated parts of driving - staying the same speed, parking, etc. The automation all changes which skills are important, and steadily makes high skilled jobs into less skilled jobs.

[dylan604]

I totally see/hear your position, and mostly feel the same way.

Devil's advocate asks, what about the skill of the devs that can automate that kind of stuff? The types of things that might be learned in building articulating robotically controlled apendages to pick tomatoes without crushing them or the entire plants, the skill of a robot to cook the perfect burger to the perfect temp, etc. It would be impressive.

Sending people to the moon and building atomic weapons brought us some very cool and useful unintended things. So who knows what could come from some other boondoggle type of projects?

[richardw]

> because they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people

No. They just don’t know what makes it hard. I don’t know where the robot train drivers are. We’re doing cars and planes but it seems trains have fewer things to worry about. I don’t feel contempt for train drivers, the limitation is mine. I don’t understand. I still think I deserve to live.

I love this guy’s videos. He’s a fantastic insight into a world I barely know: https://youtu.be/qP1AmDRhoas

[Meandering]

People also tend to ignore that automation minimizes craftsmanship and art to a MVP. I know a few masons and they are literally artists. Sure, you can lay bricks and have a wall but it's not the same as a mortar-less stone wall crafted with artistic skill. They are completely different objectives and render completely different impressions. Automation eliminates the humanity of a task by existence. We will lose those unspoken qualities when automation breaks into the mainstream and no one will know everything they have lost in the process.

[soheil]

Why not both? You make it sound like only as long as we don't have an automated hamburger maker we should respect the people who cook our hamburgers, but not afterwards. Progress in any field is usually a function of amount of money poured into it, if the margins for hamburgers were large enough, ie. no cheap labor or higher food prices we would have invested more engineering effort into making smart enough robots that make hamburgers and probably by now have them being made automatically.

[lumost]

Alternately, The problem may be that human labor is "cheap" for the activities which still require brick laying and in cases where it's "expensive" alternate materials can be used.

In order to make automation economically viable there would need to be a niche for "cheap" brick powered by automation. It's unclear to me that this niche exists and can't be similarly achieved by scaling up the blocks or switching to more labor efficient building materials.

[ddoolin]

You've got enough replies at this point, but I guess I really am curious who you're talking about? You seem to have a chip on your shoulder so it sounds personal or nearly so. If I had to guess, most attempts to automate things, whether they go poorly or not, are begun by people who have that expertise or skill which you're claiming "computer people" scorn so much (which I also don't think is a very common opinion).

[rendall]

> The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here.

Kind of an unfair generalization, I think. I see far more comments in defense of the skill of masonry and masons, insisting that automation may be too difficult, and almost none that "display contempt" as I see it. But I could be missing something. Would you be willing to expand on what you see here?

[Someone]

> we haven't automated picking tomatoes

I wouldn’t know whether their claims hold water, but http://www.automatorobotics.com/autonomous-single-tomato-har...:

A robot that can reliably detect ripe tomatoes and harvest them with consistent quality at a rate of 10-12 tomatoes per minute.

[…]

reducing the harvest costs by 50%

(The videos give me the impression that “10-12 tomatoes per minute” is best-case)

[deltarholamda]

I can see an automated tomato picker working well for tomato varieties that are uniform and grow on largely uniform plants. But those tomatoes are bland.

Heirloom tomatoes look like a topology project gone horribly wrong, and the colors aren't found in any Pantone catalog. They are also the most delicious.

There's definitely a place for both. We have to get ketchup ingredients from somewhere, and gourmands will always want the ugly heirlooms.

[TeMPOraL]

> I can see an automated tomato picker working well for tomato varieties that are uniform and grow on largely uniform plants. But those tomatoes are bland.

Throughout history, our main trick when solving a problem with technology was to constrain the problem to something that's much easier to solve, by changing the environment.

For example, all-terrain mechanized transport is hard, and to this day, nobody except hobbyists and militaries even bothers to try tackling it. Our solution was to flatten the terrain into roads, so that we could just use wheels. We've been iterating on that idea ever since.

[somenewaccount1]

I agree with you in general, but not about the hamburgers. https://www.creator.rest/

[OnlineGladiator]

That thing is well-known to break all the time. You can even find people on Yelp talking about how the robot is broken. It's mostly old technology anyway; it's still a fundamentally mechatronic system similar to what AMF made several decades ago.

https://youtu.be/FmXLqImT1wE

That one didn't make money either, and it also broke a lot, and had all sorts of other problems. Believe it or not, the core technology has improved a lot less than you might think. They may have put a prettier skin on it but it's still the wrong approach.

[shreyshnaccount]

it's not just computer people. it's everyone. we haven't automated most jobs which require skill, precisely because they aren't easy to- and yet, teachers, agriculture workers, and construction crews are some of the lowest paid sectors. and then there are complaints about these people being lazy and there not being enough people who want to pursue these professions. wel guess what? pay them a decent wage for a change!

[exporectomy]

Complaints that there aren't enough workers in the labor market are equivalent to complaints that wages are too high. Your proposed solution is really just a restatement of the problem.

[nsonha]

> they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people.

Where do you get that? While you focus on the "skill" and "intelligence", automation is about productivity and freedom (from labor)

> learn some humility and try to understand the skills

What do you think automation is, if not to try to understand the skills, then turn it into the program?

[TaylorAlexander]

Reminds me of a $BIGTECH project with a one armed robot on a wheeled base they thought could do house cleaning. I mean the damn thing couldn’t operate a windex bottle. I don’t think the executives who made this pitch actually clean their own homes.

[BurningFrog]

There is great contempt for "computer people" in this post.

[drivingmenuts]

How much does a bricklaying system cost vs the cost of a human? Seems to me that humans are just way cheaper and lower maintenance.

[Nasrudith]

It isn't the cost of one human vs one machine - that is a harder point to get to. Instead it is about the number of humans and their cost vs the machine adjusted equivalent. Scale is where industry takes its crown.

[morpheos137]

Actually it really reflects poorly on their intelligence when they fail to conceptualise the complexity of the real world.

[ashtonkem]

It’s not contempt computer people have for manual labor; it’s the contempt that bosses have for paying wages.

[pasquinelli]

the best part is programming has been getting automated since it began. the assumption that since that process of automation hasn't cut into programmers' salaries and job prospects yet that it won't ever, like making software is something special.

[dragonwriter]

Automation of a field:

(1) increases the value produced per unit of labor input in the field at the low end of quantity, but potentially resulting in reaching the point of rapidly diminishing returns faster.

(2) and, increases the domain in which creating/maintaining automation has value, increasing the value of automation work and pushing out the point where automation work reaches diminishing returns.

Which is why programming (viewed broadly)—itself part of automating any field—keeps being resilient against adverse impacts from automation. Because as long as we are increasing the scope of automation generally, we’re pushing out the diminishing returns point for programming, and automation of programming isn't pulling that point down fast enough to offset that effect. And automation—both of programming and of everything else—keeps pushing up the starting value of programming work. (It also makes it more abstract and about providing input to higher-level automation tools.)

[IdiocyInAction]

I think many programmers do assume that their job could be automated. I showed GPT-3 to coworkers and they immediately took that into consideration.

[spideymans]

When you have a hammer, everything look like a nail. Technology is our hammer.

[dredmorbius]

Technology is a generalisation of a hammer.

Technology is the domain of means to ends. It's literally how things are done, and includes such factors as skill, training, technique, organisation, and logistics.

As such, your comment is self-negating.

[jelliclesfarm]

Please stop. The only ‘skill’ human beings bring to picking fruit or vegetables is their willingness to work for minimum wages because we as a society have failed to keep up with tech even as our population’s food needs exploded.

[grandmczeb]

> The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here.

I'm confused - based on your Github profile I assume you'd fall under the category of "computer people". Are you saying you feel this way? Because I certainly don't.