6 ms·

I find it amazing that with all the progress around us every day, people still think there is an impossible line automation can’t cross, and that their job is s

I find it amazing that with all the progress around us every day, people still think there is an impossible line automation can’t cross, and that their job is safe. Even as a programmer, I imagine a lot of coding work being at the minimum offset by automation.

bamboozled 9y ago
What are people supposed to do though ?
adrianN 9y ago
A lot of coding has already been automated. We don't write programs by manually punching the bits in anymore and programs that once were a major project are now homework exercises for students. Luckily the demand for programming has so far outstripped any productivity enhancements.
- bjelkeman-again 9y ago
  Not only is it automated to a degree, but a lot of the tech stack is shared so we can achieve a lot more quicker. But it still outstrips demand by far.
manojlds 9y ago
The article actually says that in this case there is a labour shortage.
coldtea 9y ago
>I find it amazing that with all the progress around us every day, people still think there is an impossible line automation can’t cross, and that their job is safe. Why don't have any contracts signed with nature on infinite progress. Or that any desired progress will be timely. We might never be able to pass some local maxima. Or we might go extinct, or go back to barbarism after a few good wars of famines, before we get to solve some problems. Or it might take 50 or 100 years in the future to do so. We still don't have personal robot (with bodies) assistants, flying cars, space colonies, or general AI -- all things that were considered (by experts nonetheless) "just around the corner" in the 60s. And don't get me started on mass market holographic storage and memsistors...
- oldcynic 9y ago
  For at least some of those things just around the corner, they could have been here, tax cuts and the occasional vastly expensive defence gewgaw were chosen instead.
  - crusso 9y ago
    tax cuts and the occasional vastly expensive defence Then again, maybe tax cuts allowed private companies to get us further than where we would have been if we had spent ever-more money on government. Maybe defense spending is what kept communism and the Soviet Union from setting progress back a hundred years.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >Maybe defense spending is what kept communism and the Soviet Union from setting progress back a hundred years. When they gave up the ghost they weren't that behind. And when they started operations back in 1917, they were vastly behind the US. Plus they got to space (and tons of other space related things) first. So there's that... Not to mention the plethora of government funded stuff we take for granted in the West as well -- the internet (ARPA) and the web (CERN) for starters... (And most of early computing, also heavily subsidized)
      - crusso 8y ago
        The USSR achieved some narrow technical/space/military successes by focusing themselves on those few things and utterly subjugating and impoverishing the rest of their society. And in the end, they couldn't even keep that up. They burned out their economy and produced conditions that could easily have resulted in a civil war there. There's a reason the USSR felt the need to construct Potemkin villages.
- onion2k 9y ago
  We still don't have personal robot (with bodies) assistants... The vision of a having a robot assistant just shows the lack of imagination that people in the 1960s who were making these predictions. They couldn't see further than a mechanised version of what they already had. On the face of it a robot is a replacement for a physical person, but the reality is that the physical person bit is what's unnecessary. Automation of processes is largely about removing as much of the 'physical' bit as possible. What was needed was to distill the tasks down to the absolute minimum and then automate that, and that's what we've got now. We automated the physical side of posting a letter and now we have email. We automated filing by using databases instead. Scheduling meetings is now done using shared calendars. Automation of jobs is not about making a machine that does the job of a person. It's about removing the person and building systems to replace the processes that person did. We do have robot assistants. They just don't look like robots.
pjc50 9y ago
There were a lot of abortive claims of this round about the start of the 1980s with the "4GL" revolution. e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1293278/what-became-of-the-last-one https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1293278/what-became-of-t...
tabtab 9y ago
Re: Even as a programmer, I imagine a lot of coding work being at the minimum offset by automation. Most CRUD applications could be about 90% defined by filling in data dictionaries (tables describing tables). However, trends & fads, mostly UI fads, keep mucking up the details of the implementation. Sometimes UI-related trends are good, but a good many are just wasteful fads. Bosses, users, and customers like shiny fancy dancy new things. Vulcans would puke. Fads are great for creating jobs because they keep moving the goal-post: often being different JUST to be different; but fads are lousy from a pure efficiency standpoint. Humans are still apes who follow the shiny red things.

bamboozled 9y ago

What are people supposed to do though ?

adrianN 9y ago

A lot of coding has already been automated. We don't write programs by manually punching the bits in anymore and programs that once were a major project are now homework exercises for students. Luckily the demand for programming has so far outstripped any productivity enhancements.

bjelkeman-again 9y ago
Not only is it automated to a degree, but a lot of the tech stack is shared so we can achieve a lot more quicker. But it still outstrips demand by far.

manojlds 9y ago

The article actually says that in this case there is a labour shortage.

coldtea 9y ago

>I find it amazing that with all the progress around us every day, people still think there is an impossible line automation can’t cross, and that their job is safe. Why don't have any contracts signed with nature on infinite progress. Or that any desired progress will be timely. We might never be able to pass some local maxima. Or we might go extinct, or go back to barbarism after a few good wars of famines, before we get to solve some problems. Or it might take 50 or 100 years in the future to do so. We still don't have personal robot (with bodies) assistants, flying cars, space colonies, or general AI -- all things that were considered (by experts nonetheless) "just around the corner" in the 60s. And don't get me started on mass market holographic storage and memsistors...

oldcynic 9y ago
For at least some of those things just around the corner, they could have been here, tax cuts and the occasional vastly expensive defence gewgaw were chosen instead.
- crusso 9y ago
  tax cuts and the occasional vastly expensive defence Then again, maybe tax cuts allowed private companies to get us further than where we would have been if we had spent ever-more money on government. Maybe defense spending is what kept communism and the Soviet Union from setting progress back a hundred years.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >Maybe defense spending is what kept communism and the Soviet Union from setting progress back a hundred years. When they gave up the ghost they weren't that behind. And when they started operations back in 1917, they were vastly behind the US. Plus they got to space (and tons of other space related things) first. So there's that... Not to mention the plethora of government funded stuff we take for granted in the West as well -- the internet (ARPA) and the web (CERN) for starters... (And most of early computing, also heavily subsidized)
    - crusso 8y ago
      The USSR achieved some narrow technical/space/military successes by focusing themselves on those few things and utterly subjugating and impoverishing the rest of their society. And in the end, they couldn't even keep that up. They burned out their economy and produced conditions that could easily have resulted in a civil war there. There's a reason the USSR felt the need to construct Potemkin villages.
onion2k 9y ago
We still don't have personal robot (with bodies) assistants... The vision of a having a robot assistant just shows the lack of imagination that people in the 1960s who were making these predictions. They couldn't see further than a mechanised version of what they already had. On the face of it a robot is a replacement for a physical person, but the reality is that the physical person bit is what's unnecessary. Automation of processes is largely about removing as much of the 'physical' bit as possible. What was needed was to distill the tasks down to the absolute minimum and then automate that, and that's what we've got now. We automated the physical side of posting a letter and now we have email. We automated filing by using databases instead. Scheduling meetings is now done using shared calendars. Automation of jobs is not about making a machine that does the job of a person. It's about removing the person and building systems to replace the processes that person did. We do have robot assistants. They just don't look like robots.

pjc50 9y ago

There were a lot of abortive claims of this round about the start of the 1980s with the "4GL" revolution. e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1293278/what-became-of-the-last-one https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1293278/what-became-of-t...

tabtab 9y ago

Re: Even as a programmer, I imagine a lot of coding work being at the minimum offset by automation. Most CRUD applications could be about 90% defined by filling in data dictionaries (tables describing tables). However, trends & fads, mostly UI fads, keep mucking up the details of the implementation. Sometimes UI-related trends are good, but a good many are just wasteful fads. Bosses, users, and customers like shiny fancy dancy new things. Vulcans would puke. Fads are great for creating jobs because they keep moving the goal-post: often being different JUST to be different; but fads are lousy from a pure efficiency standpoint. Humans are still apes who follow the shiny red things.