[HN Gopher] Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
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Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
Author : goplayoutside
Score : 137 points
Date : 2024-04-21 09:40 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (finance.yahoo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (finance.yahoo.com)
| okasaki wrote:
| > The significant investment in robotics showcases Amazon's
| commitment to innovation in its supply chain and highlights the
| company's belief in the synergistic potential of human-robot
| collaboration. Despite the massive scale of automation, Amazon
| emphasizes that deploying robots has led to the creation of new
| skilled job categories at the company, reflecting a broader
| industry trend toward the integration of advanced technologies
| with human workforces.
|
| An article about robots that's written by a robot. It's robots
| all the way down.
| smcin wrote:
| Who will inform the turtles they are no longer needed?
| tacocataco wrote:
| Trust me, they'll know.
| RowanH wrote:
| > has led to the creation of new skilled job categories at the
| company.
|
| "While systematically removing the unskilled job categories at
| the company"
|
| The robot missed out that sentence for some reason.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Well given the complaints about work conditions it would be
| good if humans were given less dangerous jobs
| RowanH wrote:
| Not saying whether it's good or bad, just the obvious bit
| left out.
|
| Does really show that UBI discussion needs to be had sooner
| rather than later ...
| rickydroll wrote:
| I'm coming to think that the wages that would have been
| paid to people who robots have replaced should now go
| into a sovereign fund to help fund UBI.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Don't forget all the robots reading it.
|
| It seems the end goal of the advertising industry -- robots
| doing, robots writing, robots reading.
|
| Like cockroaches and twinkies, one of the few things to survive
| nuclear war.
| rickydroll wrote:
| But will robots survive a nuclear war's EMP?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Military drones have to be covered in a Farraday cage layer
| to prevent jamming, so that would double as nuclear EMP
| protection. Finding a place to charge afterwards might be
| tricky though...
| exe34 wrote:
| Have you read Accelerando by Charlie stross? He talks about a
| Vile Offspring that's basically what you said!
| tacocataco wrote:
| Maybe robots should pay taxes like humans since they are taking
| the jobs and the tax base that goes along with them.
| exe34 wrote:
| Or you could tax the companies on revenue, the way employees
| are.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| That's too hard to do. What is "a robot" and "a job?"
| Replacing workers is easy enough to calculate that with, but
| what if I start a brand new factory that only ever used
| robots? The solution is wealth tax and UBI.
|
| Get rid of regular income tax, then do a progressive wealth
| tax, which is enough to pay for a progressive UBI. This way,
| it's no problem if you lay off all your workers to replace
| them with robots. In fact that's great! Because now these
| people have a UBI, which frees them up to go find (or make)
| other work. Meanwhile the factory owner's taxes should be
| going up, since his wealth is going up since he doesn't have
| to pay all the workers, unless he's still spending that money
| to further invest in things, which is also great.
|
| The biggest problem really is people just hoarding wealth. If
| they are spending or investing it, then that's not a problem.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Very few people hoard wealth. You imagine wealthy people
| like Scrooge McDuck with a room full of gold coins. It's
| almost always invested in stocks which helps companies grow
| or in bonds which helps finance public works.
| phatfish wrote:
| Pretty sure a diverse portfolio will feature gold. It
| might not be in gold coins in the owners basement though.
|
| Investing in stocks where most companies are doing their
| best to suppress worker compensation or out-right replace
| them with robots doesn't feel like it's doing much to
| help the average person either.
|
| Public investment is on a downward trend since 2008 when
| governments had to save the bankers. What government
| spending there still is often has to filter through
| private service companies that are given government
| contracts. This usually results in good dividends and bad
| service.
| rcstank wrote:
| Many people on UBI would be content enough to not search
| for more work.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| But will the robots be given piss bottles?
| agilob wrote:
| No, but they have free healthcare and time off to recharge
| their batteries
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Having an in-place battery swap is the equivalent of having
| to eat lunch at your workstation.
| odiroot wrote:
| Probably have wet sump.
| mc32 wrote:
| They'll just need oil cans instead.
| WillAdams wrote:
| When I worked in an Amazon Warehouse, while a bathroom break
| was considered time-off-task, it wasn't a big deal to use the
| bathroom (or take some other break) whenever one wished.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfi...
|
| Basically, it was just a gym membership which I got paid for
| (and couldn't skip out on beyond what my available time off
| facilitated).
| naveen99 wrote:
| Maybe jobs that require moving around should be split into 2
| hr shifts, and then people with sedentary jobs can moonlight
| for getting in their cardio, instead of paying a gym, or
| walking pointlessly.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| It's a good thing actually given that the worker conditions are
| pretty terrible there.
|
| But it is only a good thing if the increased productivity
| translates into better wages, increased vacations and reduced
| work days and not helping Jeff getting a bigger yacht.
|
| And for that, it must be an active government policy.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Soon Jeff will have ten yachts and his job each day will be
| choosing which yacht to use once he has automated himself out
| of work. It will be gruelling.
| methuselah_in wrote:
| I don't know for aging economics this is somewhat good. But for
| developing countries it's horrible. Where humans has to search
| work each day to find food for night
| FlyingAvatar wrote:
| I would suspect that in these countries labor is cheap enough
| that replacing it with robots would not be cost effective.
| exe34 wrote:
| And once it's cost effective for robots to do it, you might
| as well move the factories close to where the stuff is needed
| and transport raw material that's more fungible.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| If we also sufficiently automated food production, there ought
| to be enough calories to feed everyone, right? Right?
| red_trumpet wrote:
| Industrialized agriculture already produces enough food to
| feed the world. The remaining problem is a question of
| distribution.
| tacocataco wrote:
| Food waste is tragic. Now no one eats that $5 iceberg lettuce
| head, and people are forced to eat unhealthy low nutritional
| carbs for sustenance.
| exe34 wrote:
| Why don't they eat the $5 lettuce? Is the argument that
| it's too expensive here? I thought fast food was more
| expensive.
| onion2k wrote:
| Is humanity really at a point where we can't think of anything
| more useful than "carry things about" and "put things in a box"
| for those people to do? If that's really the state we're in
| then a bunch of robots doing it instead is the least of our
| problems.
| tacocataco wrote:
| I think getting adequate housing, food, and Healthcare is
| useful for workers.
|
| Perhaps if people didn't need to prove that they deserve
| these necessities this conversation about robots replacing
| humans wouldn't be so dire.
| humanrebar wrote:
| It doesn't seem like we are close to robotics providing
| housing, food, and healthcare for nominal costs to
| everyone. Seems like we still need a lot of humans working
| in those spaces.
|
| In particular, durable goods (and human bodies and even
| hair) need a lot of maintenance. So far, at least, robots
| aren't especially gifted at maintenance tasks.
| UberFly wrote:
| Isn't it also a problem that we've put people who's
| capabilities are equal to those kind of tasks into the
| "useless" category? Not everyone is cut out to be a
| programmer, which by the way, will also eventually be in the
| "useless" bucket. In reality, "better things to do" usually
| means just a lot of people in poverty.
| hackerlight wrote:
| Welfare systems are nationalistic. The US will tax companies
| using robots and redistribute it to Americans while the
| people assembling widgets in developing countries will be out
| of a job. I'm still optimistic that the raw increase in
| economic productivity will somehow sort everyone out
| eventually, but it could be bumpy.
| kypro wrote:
| I assume this is being upvoted because HN thinks this is good? At
| least that's what I hear in AI threads...
|
| AI just allows humans to work more efficiently right? The few
| fulfilment center workers left are probably now 100x fulfilment
| workers now that they can manage a fleet of robotic workers
| instead of human ones. As HN says, these types of innovations
| historically only create new job opportunities so there's
| probably loads of new amazing jobs these replaced workers can go
| do instead.
|
| For those who are worried about the future we're creating for
| their children, don't worry, because when robotics and AI can do
| everything humans can do (and better) businesses will still want
| hire humans, because they still hired humans when the combustion
| engine was invented. I'm sure it will be the same this time.
| Don't be so anti-progress!
| onion2k wrote:
| Amazon's role in society is not to provide menial jobs to keep
| people busy though. If anything, the automation provides good,
| innovative jobs in robotics. Those are the sorts of jobs I
| think _everyone_ should have. Leave fetching and carrying to
| robots, and educate people to be useful in more meaningful,
| fulfilling, and impactful ways.
|
| Suggesting that robots are bad because they take jobs from
| people doing horrible, boring jobs just says that you want
| people to carry on doing that work. That's not a good look.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| If the robots are the ones altering the position of matter at
| or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter,
| there are still roles for telling them to do so, and history
| suggests the latter work is capable of indefinite extension:
| there are not only those who give orders but those who give
| advice as to what orders should be given.
|
| (plagiarism intentional)
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| >just says that you want people to carry on doing that work
|
| Or that we don't want them to starve. We are talking about
| the US where their isn't really an effective solution to help
| people without jobs.
| rcstank wrote:
| Can you share your data on starvation in the US? I'm
| sincerely curious about it.
| coupdejarnac wrote:
| The people working in the low skill jobs being eliminated
| aren't capable of contributing in more meaningful, impactful
| ways. That's why they work in low skill jobs.
| techdmn wrote:
| About 20 years ago I was a programmer at a manufacturing company.
| I worked on a project to automate part of materials requirements
| planning. The woman who was in charge of it was spending about 20
| hours per week wrangling Excel spreadsheets to figure out what
| materials they needed. It was all based on data we had:
| inventory, orders, etc. A few weeks later, and with a fair amount
| of her help, I'd automated the whole thing. She was happy, it was
| her least favorite part of her job and she desperately needed
| time for other things. I was happy, I was showing that I was
| worth what they were paying me! (Salaried at the equivalent of
| $12.50 per hour.) BUT: That project took half a job out of the
| economy. A decent one at that, a nice cushy desk job.
|
| Automation is definitely having an impact on labor demand, with
| software driving out some jobs much the way cars and trucks drove
| horses out of our economy. I think it points to an increasing
| bifurcation, with jobs being high skill / high pay or low skill /
| low pay, without much in the middle.
|
| Of course here in the U.S. this is also being driven by our
| monetary policy, our tax policy, our trade policy, our labor
| policy, I could go on. I'm in favor of UBI, but that seems about
| as likely as the use of any of those levers to reduce income
| inequality and spread the wealth our society generates in a way
| that supports most of those contributing to it.
| pydry wrote:
| There's plenty of stuff in the middle it's just been moved
| overseas and the output is sent back to the US on a shipping
| container.
|
| Chinese and Mexican factory workers != robots. It sounds
| obvious but the establishment, media, and economists do like to
| blur the distinction.
| K0balt wrote:
| This sounds a lot like one of the last projects I worked On,
| where some significant operations were to be assigned to "AI"
| which was meant to mean Artificial intelligence for marketing
| slicks but everyone knew it would be "Actually, Indians" for
| the foreseeable future.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _drove horses out of our economy_
|
| A graph of the process is in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39604784
|
| (it also includes a bifurcation: between draft and
| sport/companion horses)
| exe34 wrote:
| I enjoy automating the boring parts of my job - plus if I
| don't, somebody else will. At least now I can just go on to
| automate the next thing.
| capybara_2020 wrote:
| Assuming the world is moving towards more automation and high
| skilled(not sure this is the right term. But places where you
| need to be more adaptable and think more) jobs. Also assuming
| for a moment todays adults are the transitionary generation.
|
| How do we prepare the next generation for what is to come? It
| feels like schools are still stuck in the industrial age. How
| do we teach them not math and science but the actual act of
| learning/adapting. Our parents could not predict what the world
| would look like today, neither can we. How do we educate the
| next generation on the foundational skills rather than specific
| skills which they can learn on their own depending on what the
| situation calls for?
|
| This is an idea I am thinking about, so I would love to hear
| other opinions and thoughts.
| Loughla wrote:
| >How do we teach them not math and science but the actual act
| of learning/adapting.
|
| This is literally what they're trying to do. People complain
| about the way things like math (concepts instead of rote
| memorization of facts) and spelling (stems and etymology
| instead of rote memorization) are taught. People complain
| that kids aren't learning cursive and other things like that.
|
| But schools are trying to teach critical thinking and how to
| reason your way through problems, rather than blanket
| "facts".
| doktor_oh_boli wrote:
| I, personally think teaching kids critical thinking is
| great. Here in Eastern Europe they are only taught useless
| facts and not to think too much on their own, remnant of
| the past I guess...
| simonw wrote:
| I have been contributing to open source software for more than
| 20 years. My contributions have always been to help save other
| developers time.
|
| How does the impact from that on jobs differ from the impact
| had by AI tools like LLMs or robotic automation?
|
| It certainly /feels/ different, but I'm having a little bit of
| trouble explaining why.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > That project took half a job out of the economy. A decent one
| at that, a nice cushy desk job.
|
| Or it allowed the employee to shift to more valuable,
| interesting work rather than menial tasks that could easily be
| done by a computer.
| Engineering-MD wrote:
| I would disagree with the inference that menial tasks are
| automated and interesting work isn't. I can clearly see a
| future where the pleasure is automated away leaving the
| stressful uncomfortable tasks to the human.
| 0xedd wrote:
| But, some already operate at their peak. Then, you automate
| that and they can only shift to unemployment. The
| conversation shouldn't be about replacing the most skilled
| workers. The conversation should be about what happens to the
| average worker. That has an average IQ level. That can't
| learn something to compete with the automation. These people
| have families. These people will suffer.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Has anyone claimed technological changes will impact every
| group and subgroup on a literally equal basis?
|
| Some will have better prospects and others will have worse.
| Since roughly half the population must have below median
| average prospects by definition.
| starbugs wrote:
| > Has anyone claimed technological changes will impact
| every group and subgroup on a literally equal basis?
|
| No, but too much inequality is not sustainable. Since in
| a democracy everyone has an equal vote, there will be a
| force that balances things out over time one way or
| another.
| RGamma wrote:
| Democracy won't survive the tech trillionaires. At that
| point you can buy the executive.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| We already are at the point where the ultra rich just buy
| politicians. Hell, we _were_ ever since oil production
| was mainstreamed and the oil tycoons were able to tell
| the US to go to wars for oil.
| Tyr42 wrote:
| By that logic every backhoe constructed removes hundreds of
| jobs of men with shovels.
|
| But we instead build.mpre and bigger things using our tools.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| > That project took half a job out of the economy. A decent one
| at that, a nice cushy desk job.
|
| It's effectively a form of the broken window fallacy [0]. You
| don't actually have a closed system when you say a "job was
| removed". The company one way or another got more efficient -
| more widgets were manufactured per $ spent. It might be tiny
| but this saving was then passed on to every downstream
| purchaser of the widgets who, with that left over money ....
| could employ someone else to do something. By the time you add
| all the net effects back to regain a "closed system", economic
| theory says you actually have _more_ jobs.
|
| But the key here really is that this doesn't account for
| temporal effects, and especially when there is rapid disruptive
| change, you can absolutely have a huge dislocation and mismatch
| of labor supply / demand in the economy.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
| aczerepinski wrote:
| I wish I could believe that all this automation would lead to
| more leisure time for all of humanity, but it certainly won't
| happen on its own out of generosity from the robot owners.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Why does the Ampere-Maxwell law, the largest of Maxwell's
| equations, not simply eat the other 3?
| VHRanger wrote:
| We've been saying that for a long time. [Keynes predicted we'd
| be working 15 hour weeks by now](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.co
| m/doi/full/10.1111/ecca.12439)
|
| The thing is, people don't actually want to tradeoff their
| labor time for leisure time all that well. They value
| consumption too much.
|
| There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. You can get one
| right now!
|
| But you'd need to have a smaller appartment, an older car, and
| eat more lentils.
|
| While people say they want to work less, their [revealed
| preference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference)
| is that they value buying stuff above having more leisure.
| seper8 wrote:
| How detached from reality are you that you think people can
| make ends meet while working 15 hours a week?
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| Some people do do that. Try stepping outside of your
| bubble.
| ameister14 wrote:
| The average hourly wage in the United States is $30, so
| 15 hours a week is $450 pre-tax. Live on that with a
| family.
| rfwhXQ5H wrote:
| If you don't think that there aren't people doing that
| already in this country, get out of your bubble. How much
| do you think farmers are making?
| maxsilver wrote:
| Farmers (i.e., Farmers, Ranchers, and Other Agricultural
| Managers) make a lot more than $450 a week. Average
| salary for these folks is $70k/yr.
|
| A _farm hand_ only makes like $15 /hr on average, which
| puts it on par with a job at McDonalds or such.
| nabla9 wrote:
| All what you say is true, if the wage share stays constant.
|
| The "working poor" phenomenon where you can't pay for
| necessities like rent, healthcare etc. while working full
| time is the result of declining wage share.
|
| Wage share has steadily declined in OECD countries since
| early 1970s. In the US since 1960s.
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS84006173 Wages make
| smaller and smaller portion of national income while capital
| share increases.
| VHRanger wrote:
| FWIW, the wage share declining is a result of many other
| factors. See here:
|
| https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2008/where-has-all-
| th...
|
| Health insurance and other benefits, household composition
| have hurt wage share. Not that it didn't decline in real
| terms for the lower skilled workers, just less than the
| naive chart you put.
|
| Here is good reading on the topic (maybe my favorite paper
| of the last decade):
|
| https://www.nber.org/papers/w25588
| xemra wrote:
| Or maybe it's the security net that comes with it.
| dpflan wrote:
| What if you bring the ideas of measuring productivity and
| wage growth of employees? How have productivity, wage growth,
| and corporate profit changed over the decades since Keynes?
| What was that 15 hour work week, how "productive" and paying
| is it supposed to be?
| Adverblessly wrote:
| > There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. You can get one
| right now!
|
| Not without a 90% pay cut (i.e. as opposed to the ~60% pay
| cut you'd expect for working 40% of the hours), I've checked.
| actuallyalys wrote:
| Agreed. I think this is clearest when you look at benefits,
| e.g., the many American companies that only offer health
| insurance benefits to their full-time workers, but you see
| it in terms of pay, too. Most middle and high-paying jobs
| are exclusively full-time (and some expect 50, 60, or even
| more hours a week).
| paxys wrote:
| > There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. You can get one
| right now!
|
| What 15 hour/week job pays enough to afford rent, food,
| medicine?
| timClicks wrote:
| That was the prediction at the start of the 20th century as
| thinkers considered the consequences of increased
| automation and therefore productivity.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The thing is, people don't actually want to tradeoff their
| labor time for leisure time all that well. They value
| consumption too much.
|
| Or simply they want to live. The amount of money we gotta
| spend on rent is _insane_.
| maxsilver wrote:
| > people don't actually want to tradeoff their labor time for
| leisure time all that well. They value consumption too much.
|
| We don't actually know that. Most people don't have the
| option.
|
| For all but a select few industries, there is no such thing
| as _" work a part time job, and trade the rest for extra
| leisure"_ since almost no part-time job can sustainably cover
| cost of living. (Heck, most _full time_ jobs don 't really
| cover basic cost of living today).
|
| > There are plenty of 15 hour jobs out there. But you'd need
| to have a smaller apartment, an older car, and eat more
| lentils.
|
| The average wage in Michigan is currently $21/hr. ($36k/yr
| after federal, city, and state taxes). The average basic
| 1-bed apartment here is about $1300/month or $15k/yr. Minimum
| income requirement to qualify for an apartment is usually
| 2.5x to 3x times monthly rent.
|
| Math that out and you can quickly see that the vast majority
| of people simply aren't going to ever afford basic housing on
| 15hours a week. Or even 30hours a week.
|
| --
|
| And on the flip side, when it was _actually possible_ to pull
| this trick off, more people used to use it. In the 60s and
| 70s, when you could actually live off a part time 20hr a week
| job, people routinely did so (and then used their free time
| to do things like enroll in college and pay for it on the
| side).
|
| You don't see that anymore, because wages have fallen so
| drastically, and costs risen so drastically. It simply
| doesn't math out for the vast majority of folks.
| nabla9 wrote:
| If things go as before, wage share continues to decline while
| unemployment does not increase.
|
| Wage share has steadily declined in OECD countries since early
| 1970s. In the US since 1960s.
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS84006173 Wages make
| smaller and smaller portion of national income while capital
| share increases.
| ed_balls wrote:
| It would in places where robot owners care about. To avoid
| social unrest they will be forced to pay for UBI.
|
| The two remaining problems would be:
|
| - purpose and identity.
|
| - places like Bangladesh where industries like textile will
| disappear.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Be careful what you wish for. Humans tend to do poorly when
| they have a lot of leisure time. Especially young people,
| especially males.
| air7 wrote:
| It's clear that technological development creates a _shift_ in
| jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a
| result. Whether the total #jobs increases or decreases is
| debatable.
|
| The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs
| require by definition, a higher skill set. (You wouldn't displace
| 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires 105 workers
| to maintain). So by definition, the average intelligence
| requirement for jobs increases over time (though never stated
| directly). This means that as time and technology progress, a
| growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they are
| capable of doing. [o]
|
| What's the proper social response to that, I don't know.
|
| [o] If and when AGI comes along, that will be all of us.
| exitb wrote:
| Jobs are a byproduct of capital owners needing labor to sell
| things and services with a profit margin, so they can buy the
| good stuff. I'd argue that once the capital owners possess the
| technology that brings the cost of labor near zero, they will
| have no need for an economy at all, not to mention other people
| - unless it's something more akin to a zoo.
| acestus5 wrote:
| This reminds me of the Chinese white monkey jobs.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _once the capital owners possess the technology that brings
| the cost of labor near zero_
|
| Most Americans are capital owners. You're describing a world
| in which most Americans live in a utopia.
| dhosek wrote:
| A quick google says that 53% of Americans own publicly
| traded stock, but that means that 47% do not. There will be
| some fraction of that 47% who have their own businesses,
| but I'm guessing that these would be people at the bottom
| end of the business scale. Would it really be fair to call
| the guys driving a truck through the alleys collecting crap
| metal capital owners who would live in a utopia?
|
| The same article that cites the 53% number also says that
| the top 10% of income earners own 70% of the stock market.
| That doesn't really sound like a recipe for utopia.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _53% of Americans own publicly traded stock, but that
| means that 47% do not_
|
| Does that include 401(k)s and pensions?
| gnz11 wrote:
| > they will have no need for an economy at all
|
| Who is going to buy all of their crap then?
| rcstank wrote:
| They won't be selling anything by that point.
| quaintdev wrote:
| It's time we take on bigger and harder problems to solve.
| Living on another planet is a hard problem but only one company
| is working on that. We need multiple such companies tackling
| bigger problems. Solving climate change, dealing with plastic
| are other bigger problems.
|
| I beleive there's no shortage of jobs. What if we start
| cleaning earth or reverse effects of human civilization on
| earth to make it more sustainable. The amount of people needed
| for that job are huge but we can't pay them at all because how
| our economies are structured. We need tectonic shift in how the
| world works today. Machines are taking human jobs, good. Now
| humans are free to do the work which machines can't do.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Living on another planet is a hard problem but only one
| company is working on that.
|
| There's an organization called NASA working on it.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Does NASA have any planetary colonization program?
|
| They do plan the Artemis mission, but AFAIK that is about
| establishing a tiny scientific base on the Moon, probably
| with regular exchange of the crew. I don't think they
| proclaimed an ambition to settle massive amounts of people
| there.
|
| For me "living on another planet" is only really SpaceX's
| goal. Build a semi-independent nation on Mars, with a
| million or more people necessary.
|
| That is very different from a scientific base project.
| zztop44 wrote:
| Proclaiming things is very easy.
| robofanatic wrote:
| > Living on another planet is a hard problem but only one
| company is working on that.
|
| There's a lot of unknowns in that and ROI can take very very
| long time. Not many people can or are willing to take that
| risk. If that one company is successful then you'll see that
| space flooded with new companies.
| quaintdev wrote:
| Our generation is highly advanced but we have become very
| short sighted. We have made a mess of our world because of
| it.
|
| I remember a story about Oxford. When it was built they
| planted entire forest of Oak trees so that in 500 years
| when Oxford will need repairing they have ample amount of
| wood available. In that age people were capable of thinking
| 500 years ahead. And we with all our advancement can't even
| think beyond ROI. Living on other planet should not be seen
| as choice but something that is necessary.
| robofanatic wrote:
| The problem is resources and money are not unlimited.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new
| jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. (You wouldn't
| displace 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires
| 105 workers to maintain). So by definition, the average
| intelligence requirement for jobs increases over time (though
| never stated directly). This means that as time and technology
| progress, a growing percentage of people will have no jobs that
| they are capable of doing.
|
| You might look up what economics has to say; this issue is
| well-addressed there. Some fundamentals:
|
| The comment above assumes a static marketplace - the same
| technology, needs, etc. - and one that addresses the entirety
| of economic demand, rather than a dynamic market where those
| things change and resources are scarce (thus when resources
| become available, they are applied to other unfilled needs).
|
| For example, which skills are in demand changes but there is
| still growing demand: If you look at the jobs performed 100
| years ago, you'll see that most of them are no long needed. Yet
| not only are most people employed today, we have ~3-4x as many
| people - most of the jobs disappeared, yet, 3-4x people have
| jobs.
|
| And yes, a growing economy requires higher-skilled work, but
| that's good because that work comes with higher pay.
| ameister14 wrote:
| >yes, a growing economy requires higher-skilled work, but
| that's good because that work comes with higher pay.
|
| The problem, of course, is that wages stagnated from '99 to
| 2014 and the job participation rate has been decreasing since
| 2000 while cost of living and general production increased;
| so no, in a dynamic market work does not necessarily come
| with higher pay. It actually wouldn't really make sense for
| all new work to come with higher pay; if you have changes in
| supply (which is what we are really talking about) that come
| with associated lower labor costs, the people that used to
| provide higher cost labor for the initial supply level will
| have to accept significantly reduced salaries in their
| industry.
|
| That's what happened with the industrial revolution. Wages
| overall increased because people entered the workforce for
| the first time as skill requirements went down, but the
| average wage of previously employed people went way down as
| artisan and highly skilled labor was outcompeted by factory
| work.
| bamboozled wrote:
| _while cost of living and general production increased_
|
| This is a major problem! Why ? Corporations chasing profits
| without enough competition ?
| genedan wrote:
| Technology can also reduce the skills needed for jobs. For
| example, you no longer need to have an entire city's streets
| memorized to be a taxi driver.
| layer8 wrote:
| I don't think there was ever a taxi driver shortage because
| city streets are too difficult to memorize.
| genedan wrote:
| Rideshare and delivery apps have enabled more people to do
| those jobs than before.
| layer8 wrote:
| Because of less skills required? What are you basing this
| on?
| bombcar wrote:
| More like because of the non-necessity of supplying a
| livable wage.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Prior to the advent of GPS, taxi drivers in many cities
| were tested on their orientation skills and had to memorize
| a lot of streets. I would be surprised if no one ever
| failed this part of the exam.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Until you get replaced by a robot taxi.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Wait a minute. Higher skill jobs? For at least a decade, the
| place jobs shifted to was Amazon. If you lost your job because
| Amazon put your company out of business, you could get a worse,
| more humiliating job working at an Amazon warehouse, or as an
| Amazon driver. It was not higher skill jobs the market shifted
| to, it was Nomadland jobs. Now that Amazon is switching to
| robots, where are those people Amazon is putting out of work
| supposed to go?
| ranger_danger wrote:
| That's the point.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Not by my reading of the original comment. Seems like
| they're saying that layoffs result in higher skilled jobs.
|
| And here's my basis for that conclusion:
|
| > The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new
| jobs require by definition, a higher skill set.
|
| And what I'm saying is that there may not be new jobs, and
| if they are they may be lower skill jobs if history is any
| indication.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| My understanding was that they're saying it's the act of
| replacing the worker with a robot that requires more
| skilled workers to maintain/design/manufacture/etc., not
| that it merely resulted in a layoff.
| downrightmike wrote:
| USA stem grads are too expensive, so companies are just
| opening body shops in asia/south america.
|
| So stem education was largely just a grift to get
| everyone they could into college.
| throwaway4220 wrote:
| Your first statement doesn't really match your second
| statement
| downrightmike wrote:
| Get a stem(tm) education! It'll get you a job! Wait.. you
| cost too much now, so we're not going to hire you,
| instead we'll outsource.
| starttoaster wrote:
| The robots replaced the frontline laborers, yes. But
| someone now needs to maintain, build, and engineer new
| robots. Hence they said the laborer's job was replaced
| with one that requires fewer people at a higher skill
| (and probably pay) level. Or at least that's what I
| picked out from their comment.
| trimethylpurine wrote:
| The fact that you can now warehouse with robots lowers the
| barrier of entry for warehousing, which creates new companies
| that will host competition against Amazon, offer contract
| labor for Amazon, and in both ways create jobs that are
| superior to the previously needed entry level pick and
| packer. The same laborer can now be promoted at a new company
| to a higher pay job that requires no greater skill set,
| simply because there are now more of those better jobs at
| more companies. We can't all be managers at Amazon. But we
| can all be managers at 100000 different warehouses that
| previously didn't exist. That's where they are supposed to
| go.
| oblio wrote:
| That's assuming the warehousing robots are commodities,
| which they aren't and maybe they'll be in a few decades.
|
| It also assumes the moat to warehousing isn't huge, which
| seems kind of silly for such huge capital investments.
| karaterobot wrote:
| That seems wrong. Why would robot warehouses lead to more
| and better warehouse jobs for humans? Fewer humans would be
| necessary overall in the existing warehouses, and it's not
| obvious to me why a lot more warehouses would be created.
|
| Did replacing manufacturing jobs with robot assemblers in--
| for example--the automotive sector, lead to more auto
| manufacturers and better jobs for auto workers? I don't
| believe it did. There may be more manufacturers now, and
| more jobs, but they aren't high skill or highly-paid jobs,
| and they aren't staffed by the people who were laid off
| originally (because they were mostly moved to other
| countries, where people can work more cheaply than the
| countries where the jobs were lost).
|
| For capital intense upgrades like robots, why wouldn't the
| advantage go to a few big players, rather than a ton of
| small ones?
|
| I also don't understand why the number of new skilled
| workers in this new world would somehow equal the number of
| warehouses workers laid off. What's the connection between
| those two seemingly unrelated phenomena? Why wouldn't it,
| for example, be a lot of laid off low-skill workers, and a
| just a few new, high-skilled workers?
|
| Or for that matter, why the next generation of robots
| wouldn't just replace those higher-skilled warehouse jobs
| in a few years. And so on.
| 6510 wrote:
| Let me help you with that one.
|
| Fewer jobs & lower pay > fewer orders > fewer warehouses.
| logicchains wrote:
| >The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs
| require by definition, a higher skill set
|
| No they don't. If AI reached the point where it was capable and
| willing to do all white collar work, there'd be no more need
| for humans to do that kind of intellectual work. What would
| still be needed is service jobs that rely on the "human touch",
| and trades that AI lacked the dexterity to do. We're already
| seeing that now, with AI posing a greater threat to
| programmers' jobs than to plumbers or electricians' jobs.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Oh good, now instead of creating things, everyone can have a
| fulfilling career at Starbucks.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| the job displacement could be in the care sector. that is what
| usually happened.
|
| I don't think being a caregiver necessarily is a more complex
| job than the ones being displaced.
| ben_w wrote:
| The chain of logic is falsified by the Whitney cotton gin: it
| was a labour saving device, which saved enough labour to make
| cotton much more profitable, which led to the growth of the
| cotton plantations in southern USA, which led to increased
| slavery, and those slavers actively prevented their slaves from
| learning to read.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-literacy_laws_in_the_Unit...
|
| That said, I would also agree with the conclusion that "a
| growing percentage of people will have no jobs that they are
| capable of doing", but for different reasons.
|
| I expect the abilities of AI to expand over time.
|
| IQ is a poor measure, but suitable as a shorthand especially
| for a comment like this.
|
| Imagine a general purpose AI that runs as fast as a human on
| 100 watt hardware; first one will be an idiot. Let's say IQ 50:
| only 0.1% of humans are dumber than this, nobody was employing
| them anyway. Version 2, say IQ 85: now about 16% are beaten by
| the AI, this absolutely matters, they're unemployable forever
| through no fault of their own, give them a basic income of some
| kind. Version 3, IQ 100, now half the world can't get work.
| Version 4, IQ 115, now it's 84% who can't get work, etc.
|
| Reality is a lot messier than that, so nobody needs to bother
| picking holes in the specific details such as "that's a lot of
| electricity" or "AI isn't a robot" or "comparative advantage":
| this is a comment, not a research paper.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| IQ is sort of useful to measure humans because we have
| roughly comparable skills. It's not applicable to AI at all
| in terms of measuring job fitness.
|
| If I need someone to move some furniture it might only need
| an IQ of 85 but that doesn't mean AI is doing it any time
| soon.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > It's clear that technological development creates a shift in
| jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a
| result.
|
| That was true in the past, but as technology gets better that
| won't be the case. Yes new jobs will be created, but there'll
| be fewer and fewer.
|
| Technology will allow for more generalized approaches that can
| be quickly adapted to new solutions. So new jobs will also be
| replaced quicker and quicker.
| hackerlight wrote:
| Comparative advantage will keep people employed for a while:
| https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-
| in-...
|
| There's a recent NBER paper that predicts wages will increase
| in the beginning of the AI revolution, even as AI displaces
| some jobs. _Eventually_ there will be mass unemployment, but
| only when AI dominates humans (cost & capability) at almost
| everything.
| chucke1992 wrote:
| Neither computers nor cars, nor office nor photoshop decreased
| the amount of available jobs...
| chillingeffect wrote:
| But exactly as the person you replied to said, they increased
| the average intelligence needed to do the new jobs. That
| leaves so many marginal people unemployable. They could have
| maintained horses but working in cars is harder. I like this
| observation.
| ameister14 wrote:
| They actually resulted in a decrease in overall skills
| required. It takes a lot of skill to use a loom and make a
| napkin, the same is not needed for factory work yet you can
| make 100 napkins at the same time.
|
| Similarly, we had the rise of the service industry in the
| US - manufacturing required a lot of skilled labor; retail
| and wait-staff do not require the same skill.
| ben_w wrote:
| I'm not convinced that _animal husbandry_ is less skilled
| than working in cars. Different skill, and as I 've never
| done it I can't be certain, but horses are wet and messy
| biology with brains that are terrified of anything they've
| never seen before. Production line work I did do as a
| summer holiday job during my A-levels aged 17 or 18, it
| wasn't skilled work but also that was HVAC production line
| not cars.
| bombcar wrote:
| The specialization has certainly taken off - people are
| much more specialized in their jobs now whereas "farmer"
| was really a jack-of-all-trades with passing capabilities
| in many different skill sets.
| zztop44 wrote:
| Yes and it's not at all obvious to me that being a jack-
| of-all-trades farmer (builder, mechanic, etc) requires
| less intelligence than learning Python.
| oblio wrote:
| There is a thing to say about "unnatural-ness". Handling
| horses up to a point had to be more intuitive and more
| approachable, we've been around horses and other mammals
| since forever. Around spreadsheets? 40 years, max.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| > It's clear that technological development creates a shift in
| jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a
| result. Whether the total #jobs increases or decreases is
| debatable.
|
| It's not debatable; we have over 200 years of technological
| development to look back on and the trend is clear: the total
| number of jobs has increased at least as fast as human
| population growth over that time.
|
| In addition, the nations driving the most technological growth
| domestically have experienced the greatest job growth over that
| time. With the result that many of them, like the U.S. and UK,
| have had to develop robust immigration programs.
|
| Even within a single nation, like China, there is temporal
| correlation between technological development and job creation.
| As China has leaned into tech over the past few decades, job
| creation accelerated there.
|
| > So by definition, the average intelligence requirement for
| jobs increases over time (though never stated directly). This
| means that as time and technology progress, a growing
| percentage of people will have no jobs that they are capable of
| doing.
|
| Again, the evidence shows the opposite correlation:
| technological development results in more people working, not
| less.
| simonsarris wrote:
| > It's not debatable; we have over 200 years of technological
| development to look back on and the trend is clear: the total
| number of jobs has increased at least as fast as human
| population growth over that time.
|
| 200 years ago the town [severely mentally disabled person]
| could chop wood and carry water. What's he doing today?
|
| There are ~9 million people on SSDI (disability) and ~5
| million on SSI (considered _completely_ unfit for work, the
| US version of basic income), and ~50 million retired.
| Retirement conceptually slowly became a thing around the late
| late 1800s. Many of these people are in one of these three
| categories because there is no job that would be a good fit
| for them, especially SSI, which most Americans don 't even
| know about.
| rdedev wrote:
| The key point being it's created more jobs so far but we
| cannot extrapolate the same thing if AGI comes up tomorrow.
| Like let's say open ai comes up with a new LLM that is
| capable of replacing a human in let's say software
| development. What new jobs would it create?
|
| All technological advancement so far has created new jobs
| because you need someone to actually work on it, like a chip
| factory or doing devops. As far as I can see an AI is general
| enough that you don't need much effort to specialize it and
| with how things are currently going, only a few players have
| the capability of building and deploying it.
| thechao wrote:
| I'm sorry, why would an AGI be interested in programming?
| My kids are AGI, and they're not interested. I think
| there's a real moral conundrum when we say "programmer AGI"
| because, I think, we're implicitly talking about
| terminating every non-programmer AGI, to meet our labor
| force whims. Replace "programmer" with intellectual task of
| your choice.
| jrflowers wrote:
| Your kids are artificial general intelligence?
| echelon wrote:
| > It's not debatable; we have over 200 years of technological
| development to look back on and the trend is clear: the total
| number of jobs has increased at least as fast as human
| population growth over that time.
|
| That isn't some immutable law of the universe. 200 years is a
| short sample size relative to geologic time.
|
| Once we have robots doing the cooking, cleaning, heavy work,
| etc., what becomes of the Waffle House and Walmart worker?
| There will be a lower bound capability threshold, and
| automation will eventually exceed that.
|
| I think a smart comparison would be to look at what job
| opportunities are available to the intellectually
| disadvantaged.
|
| Then what happens when that lower bound inches higher?
| bamboozled wrote:
| But how do you know what that future looks like? For example,
| What if we use AGI and make _ourselves_ smarter and more
| capable as Kurzweil has argued ?
|
| You can't imagine what that will look like so why worry about
| jobs ?
| starbugs wrote:
| > You can't imagine what that will look like so why worry
| about jobs?
|
| I'd rather worry about what that would look like given the
| current trends in tech and society.
| PKop wrote:
| Eugenics
| oblio wrote:
| Sure, who's volunteering to be the first one? For sure I
| won't volunteer for it :-)
| Nesco wrote:
| If it comes through rna/dna editing it will be a good
| evolution
| pjmlp wrote:
| So much for IA helping to create jobs.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| If the jobs is moving boxes around, then I think we are good.
|
| monitary and fiscal policies will keep employment high
| regardless of AI and robotics.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Wishful thinking.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| are you saying that employment is low now because of the
| automation we have seen over the past 100 years?
|
| are you saying that interest rates are not being lowered to
| allow kapital. investment for job creation?
| ben_w wrote:
| Doesn't say much about that either way, as Amazon in particular
| already had a known problem of running out of people willing to
| work for them: https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-
| amazon-memo-wareh...
|
| The last 200 years of automation being followed by new jobs is
| slightly stronger evidence that further automation will lead to
| new jobs, but I don't see any way that could remain true once
| AI is _actually_ human performance when on hardware that runs
| under some appropriate electrical power threshold. Induction
| and Turkeys.
| 0xedd wrote:
| My guess it has to do with shit conditions. I mean, shit
| break must be off the clock? F that.
| ben_w wrote:
| Likewise, but "we pissed everyone off and they refuse to
| work for us any more so we had to invent and manufacture
| robots at a huge and expensive scale" is very different
| from "we made robots for funsies with our big pile of money
| and you're all redundant now".
| pjmlp wrote:
| It turns out that for the time being robots don't complain to
| be handled like slaves.
|
| The real problem is when others follow Amazon in scale,
| leaving humans to survive in a new order.
| ben_w wrote:
| > The real problem is when others follow Amazon in scale,
| leaving humans to survive in a new order.
|
| No, the problem is if humans _in the set of those who have
| to work_ are able to keep ahead of the creation of new
| automation.
|
| UBI short-circuits the problem because then nobody would
| need to work. "Who pays for UBI?" you may well ask... well,
| Amazon can't ship anything when nobody has any money to buy
| stuff with.
|
| Separately from that, AI currently needs a lot of examples
| to learn from, relative to humans, so "business as usual"
| with no further AI breakthroughs will mean lots of people
| shifting employment every few years. That scenario doesn't
| force the world economy to choose between UBI and
| collapsing due to all the jobs being automated and
| therefore nobody having any money to buy the products made
| or delivered by the automation.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| They certainly have no shortage of recruiters with weird ass
| names to spam me.
| batch12 wrote:
| Is there an index that ranks companies by their benefit to
| society? Something like amount of taxes paid, number of
| employees, benefits, environmental impact, etc?
| starbugs wrote:
| There's ESG. But that comes with its own challenges.
| rcstank wrote:
| Who would create the weights that balance this system?
| batch12 wrote:
| Whoever managed the index, I imagine.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Value delivered or increase of value per unit of labour is very
| murky to measure, but something to think about. In some sense
| Amazon improving efficiency of retail could be a good thing in
| general improving the purchasing power of average consunmer.
| batch12 wrote:
| Good point
| notyourwork wrote:
| Amount of taxes paid is a benefit to society? Does that mean
| anyone who uses deductions is less valuable to society?
| batch12 wrote:
| Any company? Maybe. It depends on what the company does.
| Either way, that was just an example of a metric off the top
| of my head to support the question, not a proposal for a
| solution.
| paxys wrote:
| Every attempt to algorithmically boil down a complex economy
| into a single number does more harm than good. Figure out your
| own priorities and decide for yourself.
| batch12 wrote:
| Do most people have the time to evaluate every company they
| choose to do business with? Is there something in the middle?
| seydor wrote:
| Wait until amazon replaces china
| shrubble wrote:
| This is self-reported: remember the 1000 Indians that were
| watching people shop at the Amazon Go stores?
|
| Amazon told us it was all "sensors" because it fit their company
| narrative to do so.
|
| I am not saying that Amazon doesn't have 750k robots and hasn't
| laid off 100k people... but they usually have some seasonality,
| plus, the quoted number is from 2021, the height of at-home
| shopping.
|
| "The world's second-largest private employer employs 1.5 million
| people. While that's a lot, it's a decrease of over 100,000
| employees from the 1.6 million workers it had in 2021"
|
| I think a bit of skepticism is in order, is all.
| jedberg wrote:
| The 1000 Indians story was completely incorrect though. They
| has 1000 people in India tagging the videos _after the fact_
| for improvements to the machine learning algorithms. They weren
| 't watching in real time.
| godsfshrmn wrote:
| Very true. Could be counting 50k IR sensors that count how many
| items pass on a belt. (Plus maybe a PIR motion sensor in the
| bathroom )
| actuallyalys wrote:
| > the height of at-home shopping
|
| I wondered that, too, but I did see that Amazon revenue has
| continued to grow since 2021. Of course, it's possible AWS and
| other divisions are compensating for a decline in physical
| goods sold. Unfortunately, I don't have time to find revenue
| numbers for specific divisions.
| jairuhme wrote:
| > remember the 1000 Indians that were watching people shop at
| the Amazon Go stores?
|
| > Amazon told us it was all "sensors" because it fit their
| company narrative to do so.
|
| I think you, like many others, fell into the trap of just
| looking at the headline. The 1k people were labeling training
| data, not watching you shop like a puppet master..
| callwhendone wrote:
| Wonder what the job is like fixing those robots.
| mandibeet wrote:
| Robotic future is coming
| Animats wrote:
| As Amazon really using that humanoid robot in production? Or is
| that just a demo?
|
| The first big breakthrough was when Amazon bought Kiva, which
| makes those little mobile platforms that move racks of goods
| around. Those are mechanically simple and cost-effective, and
| have been very successful. Amazon is now making about 1000 units
| a day of the current model.[1] This is about 10% of the human
| birth rate in the US.
|
| Moving standardized totes around automatically is decades old.
| Picking things out of bins has been difficult, and gets better as
| computer vision gets better. Amazon is still struggling with
| that.
|
| Amazon Prime Air drone delivery starts soon.[2]
|
| [1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/amazon-
| robotics-...
|
| [2] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazon-
| prime...
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