US Political Discussion: Biden/Harris Edition (Rules in OP)

[narad]

Joking aside, that's why I exempted white collar jobs from the "eliminated by automation" list.

Eventually an HR persons job may literally just be hitting the "send" button on the hire/fire email that's generated by AI, and directed at a candidate AI has chosen, but they're still going to put a person behind it for the sake of culpability. I can't imagine software scraping lists of people that apply, automatically hiring them and then using data to automatically fire them without human interaction.

Yea, I think the meta-point is that it's a lot easier to take a creative task (in the general sense, even writing an email), and turn it into an accept/reject task, than to have a human actually make the thing. And when that person is just signing off on the decisions and creations of AI, then you have a super-charged HR person. And then you have a lot less need for the other 4 HR people. I don't know why we have to always leap to the thought of AI replacing 100% of people when entering the debate, when just cutting the number of those positions in half is a catastrophe.

Honestly living in Japan has made me so slow in terms of my English thought. These posts, and trivial emails I write, wind up taking a ton of time in just making sure I'm phrasing things appropriately. I've used the AI to write some of my emails and it's done a great job, apart from sounding like a better, more patient, more polite version of me.

 

[Randy]

when just cutting the number of those positions in half is a catastrophe.

Agreed, although still "catastrophe" if we assume the dynamic going forward is still an expectation of a 40 hour work week, traditional unemployment and onus in the individual to find work or find a new career.

Imo, accelerating automation will actually expose the mess we're already living in. Like Mike said earlier, the amount of workers needed have dropped, efficiency has risen, while compensation has stayed flat and prices have raised.

The quality of the jobs available hasn't kept up with the volume of people that need them. Actually, this debate about student loans kinda makes that clear. The only reason going to college (or trade school) is a problem is because it's like one job opening for every 50 qualified people that are looking to get it. All to land a median or slightly above median income. A lottery just to get a regular ass job.

If automation finishes the job off that it's already been doing, at some point industry and the government will have to come to grips with the fact traditional employment just won't work going forward. Which is why I brought up the Yang thing.

 

[narad]

Agreed, although still "catastrophe" if we assume the dynamic going forward is still an expectation of a 40 hour work week, traditional unemployment and onus in the individual to find work or find a new career.

Imo, accelerating automation will actually expose the mess we're already living in. Like Mike said earlier, the amount of workers needed have dropped, efficiency has risen, while compensation has stayed flat and prices have raised.

The quality of the jobs available hasn't kept up with the volume of people that need them. Actually, this debate about student loans kinda makes that clear. The only reason going to college (or trade school) is a problem is because it's like one job opening for every 50 qualified people that are looking to get it. All to land a median or slightly above median income. A lottery just to get a regular ass job.

If automation finishes the job off that it's already been doing, at some point industry and the government will have to come to grips with the fact traditional employment just won't work going forward. Which is why I brought up the Yang thing.

Yea, I can't see it going any other way. Though I'd like if it sort of moves into a 4 (or even 3) day work week average, and let the try-hards optionally work the 5th day for extra cash. As I would up until I can afford an NSX.

 

[DrewH]

Agreed, although still "catastrophe" if we assume the dynamic going forward is still an expectation of a 40 hour work week, traditional unemployment and onus in the individual to find work or find a new career.

Imo, accelerating automation will actually expose the mess we're already living in. Like Mike said earlier, the amount of workers needed have dropped, efficiency has risen, while compensation has stayed flat and prices have raised.

The quality of the jobs available hasn't kept up with the volume of people that need them. Actually, this debate about student loans kinda makes that clear. The only reason going to college (or trade school) is a problem is because it's like one job opening for every 50 qualified people that are looking to get it. All to land a median or slightly above median income. A lottery just to get a regular ass job.

If automation finishes the job off that it's already been doing, at some point industry and the government will have to come to grips with the fact traditional employment just won't work going forward. Which is why I brought up the Yang thing.

People have been raising alarm bells about automation since the 70s. It hasn't put anyone out of work. It won't. It just frees up human beings to do jobs that require a human. There are plenty of those still, and good ones at that.

I do question what reality you inhabit because we are nowhere near a job shortage or 50 people vying for one opening. Not in the normal work sector. Maybe in a prestigious law firm or a wall street corp.

 

[narad]

People have been raising alarm bells about automation since the 70s. It hasn't put anyone out of work. It won't. It just frees up human beings to do jobs that require a human. There are plenty of those still, and good ones at that.

I do question what reality you inhabit because we are nowhere near a job shortage or 50 people vying for one opening. Not in the normal work sector. Maybe in a prestigious law firm or a wall street corp.

Lol there might be something qualitatively different about the incoming sort of automation.

 

[DrewH]

Lol there might be something qualitatively different about the incoming sort of automation.

Yeah yeah, I know. AI. People are making far too much of a fuss about that. Computers have been automating things more and more as time goes. That is just the next step. But, I have to laugh at the comments saying the human resource person is going to be AI. That's ridiculous and predictable of we go to the extremes in our thought patterns when there is a new tech emerging.

 

[narad]

Yeah yeah, I know. AI. People are making far too much of a fuss about that. Computers have been automating things more and more as time goes. That is just the next step. But, I have to laugh at the comments saying the human resource person is going to be AI. That's ridiculous and predictable of we go to the extremes in our thought patterns when there is a new tech emerging.

Yea I guess that's your opinion of the technology. But probably the smartest most influential scientist in the field thinks otherwise (Hinton) and left his job to warn people to start preparing for the sea change. Who should I side with?

 

[DrewH]

Yea I guess that's your opinion of the technology. But probably the smartest most influential scientist in the field thinks otherwise (Hinton) and left his job to warn people to start preparing for the sea change. Who should I side with?

if AI wants my job, it can have it.

Seriously, there will be inevitable laws put into place for this sort of thing and a lot will depend on that. BUT AI is just AI. It's not a conscious being so it's going to be limited in it's applications.

 

[Randy]

People have been raising alarm bells about automation since the 70s. It hasn't put anyone out of work. It won't. It just frees up human beings to do jobs that require a human. There are plenty of those still, and good ones at that.

I do question what reality you inhabit because we are nowhere near a job shortage or 50 people vying for one opening. Not in the normal work sector. Maybe in a prestigious law firm or a wall street corp.

I'll agree there's some scenarios that automation "taking people's jobs" has been overstated but I think "hasn't put anyone out of work" is a stretch, especially if you're starting your count in the 70s. Was randomly watching YT videos the other day and saw this. Count how many human workers there are:



As for the second part... It depends on the industry.

My day job is in broadcast. I've automated my position so much that I was working 5 days a week, most of the day just farting around on my phone. Figured I could use some extra money and condense the broadcast gig down to just one or two days a week, so I applied for some positions in the fields I have the most experience: graphic design (20 years) and CAD/CAM design and machining (15 years). Ive got a pretty decent resume and was surprised when I didn't get a single response when I put in 10, 20, 50 and I think I ended with 85(!) applications. Then I checked the number of respondents to the openings I applied for, and 50 is a conservative number. Most of them had 80 to 300+ respondents. At that point I decided to stop wasting my time.

If you're talking about jobs like nurses, sure there's absolutely always openings. One reason is because the turnover is so high in that line of work. My mom was a nurse (still is part time) for almost 50 years. My girlfriend is a medical courier and works inside the hospital. Administrative personnel stick around longer but the nurses move around or leave the industry entirely ALL the time.

So if you set the bar of a "good job" as a nursing job, fine. I'd set the bar of a "good job" as one you're realistically going to stay at long enough to collect your pension.

 

[Drew]

There's a lot of nuance missing here.

Modicon, originally proprietary to GM, didn't become cheap and scalable till the mid 80's, but it wasn't until the 90's where it really started taking jobs. By then A-B got cheaper too.

In the late 90's/early 00's D3 and ProLeit made operator control easier and less specialized. It was around then that GPI brought out their Quick Flex packing equipment which was entirely computer controlled, not just cycle timed. Kronos came out with their own competing equipment and thus began the packer arms race.

Any industry involved in bottling, canning, and carton encasement felt these changes big time. Those industries especially tend to stay fairly close to where the product will be sold and marketed.

Once automation got cheap and reliable, headcount quickly dropped.

There's some nuance missing, sure, but even those dates don't really align with changes in manufacturing employment - for example, the 90s saw essentially flat employment, but nearly a 50% increase in output.

Meanwhile, living standards rose significantly during this time - median incomes may not have kept up with productivity, but a bit of googling suggests the average manufacturing workweek fell from 70 hours to 40 hours, and this was really the heyday of corporate pensions. It was also a time of ubiquitous manufacturing unionization, so it appears like this was a conscious labor decision to focus on quality of life, living standards, and post-retirement protections, over current income (which, IMO, as this was also a period of rapidly rising life expectancy, in large part because of the improvements in living standards, was a rational choice).

Long story short - it's not an easy argument to make that robotics and automation destroyed manufacturing employment, so much as changed it, once you start looking at the data. I think AI is going to do the same thing for white collar labor, much as computerization has already done.

 

[MaxOfMetal]

There's some nuance missing, sure, but even those dates don't really align with changes in manufacturing employment - for example, the 90s saw essentially flat employment, but nearly a 50% increase in output.

Meanwhile, living standards rose significantly during this time - median incomes may not have kept up with productivity, but a bit of googling suggests the average manufacturing workweek fell from 70 hours to 40 hours, and this was really the heyday of corporate pensions. It was also a time of ubiquitous manufacturing unionization, so it appears like this was a conscious labor decision to focus on quality of life, living standards, and post-retirement protections, over current income (which, IMO, as this was also a period of rapidly rising life expectancy, in large part because of the improvements in living standards, was a rational choice).

Long story short - it's not an easy argument to make that robotics and automation destroyed manufacturing employment, so much as changed it, once you start looking at the data. I think AI is going to do the same thing for white collar labor, much as computerization has already done.

I don't know, looks like a drop off to me.

Notice: Data not available: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

data.bls.gov

My dates might not be exact, it was some time ago. But pretty much every facility I've been to, every industry, headcounts have gotten much, much lower and it's usually due to newer automated equipment.

I don't see the work hours trending down much either.

Average Weekly Hours of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees, Manufacturing

Graph and download economic data for Average Weekly Hours of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees, Manufacturing (AWHMAN) from Jan 1939 to Apr 2023 about nonsupervisory, hours, establishment survey, production, employment, manufacturing, and USA.

fred.stlouisfed.org

Nor was the 90's much of a boom for union participation.

In 2020, the number of unionized workers dropped, while the share of union members increased

Union membership has steadily decreased over the past several decades, though membership is much higher in the public sector than the private.

usafacts.org

I think we agree on the overall message: fewer manufacturing jobs, but I don't see why there's so much pushback on automation being a significant factor.

 

[bostjan]

Growing up in a city that was super industrialized, there were definitely tons of production jobs lost during the automation push. Maybe the younger workers were able to eventually get through community college or trade school and eventually get new jobs, but a ton of older people retired or just became poor. It was a huge pain for a lot of people. I think dismissing the whole thing the way we are here is maybe even borderline disrespectful for the people who struggled.

 

[MaxOfMetal]

Growing up in a city that was super industrialized, there were definitely tons of production jobs lost during the automation push. Maybe the younger workers were able to eventually get through community college or trade school and eventually get new jobs, but a ton of older people retired or just became poor. It was a huge pain for a lot of people. I think dismissing the whole thing the way we are here is maybe even borderline disrespectful for the people who struggled.

So much this.

 

[PuckishGuitar]

Long set of incoming.

I see AI as a tool in the same light as when computers and CAD were introduced for white collar jobs. We used to have rows of people that would solve a specific equation and pass the solution to the next person to work on their specific equation, or drafters that only structural and engineering drawings, and those jobs largely disappeared as a result and were instead added to the jobs of the engineers and scientists. Both situations jobs are destroyed as a result, but in the larger scheme that manpower is freed to pursue other opportunities. Manufacturing output is massively increased but requires far fewer people to do. Yes it sucks for people who are put out of work and we need to have a plan to get them back on their feet (and no, learning how to code is not the answer); my view is to have the owners that reap the majority of gains of these tech breakthroughs to use some of those gains to jumpstart the new jobs, a rising tide floats all boats and all that. So I am onboard overall with AI becoming mature, as another tool to make my work easier, even if it puts me in a more tenuous position. In an abstract sense it's like any tool, the better you are at using it the more valuable you are and likely to stay in your career path. AI will have an outsized impact compared to many other advances, but it's no different from the steam engine or computers in the grand scheme.

For past couple of years I have been involved in standardizing and digitizing a lot of our engineering and operating processes. It’s not AI, but I see it building the dataset that AI will use to do our jobs. We have a success story to promote the initiative where an inexperienced engineer was able to perform a complicated scope of work in a shortened cycle time as a result of the standardization, and all I can see is that this is the first step towards one engineer doing the work of three once AI can automate all the components we are putting together. The hard part isn’t the calculations anymore but trying to link different solutions together, identify if and how they meet value drivers, risk them appropriately, and fit to a schedule. It’s managing a lot of different data streams with large amounts of uncertainty, and I think this is where AI will disrupt white collar technical jobs now. Hard for humans but easy for AI.

The ones who will succeed with AI will be those that can adapt best to using it, like what happens in most technology advances. AI won't kill off white collar jobs, but it will transform their value and how they fit in the overall economy.

Jumping back to the whole STEM/liberal arts/trade discussion; I’m a licensed engineer, my wife is an English PhD. Although I have the higher income currently, I believe she will be more successful overall since she has a far better entrepreneurial attitude than I do and runs a successful writing business. She's extremely talented at finding new work and making good on it, I work with a few also that currently enjoy the leisure of working for the man but would be able to pivot to successful self-employment if they must. I know I'd struggle some if the same happened to me, just who I am. I think no matter what your education level or training, having that same spirit and being able to deliver, is a big factor to career success. Education may help give you the context and tools to make entrepreneurship more viable, but I think it's a personality trait more than anything.

 

[narad]

Long set of incoming.

I see AI as a tool in the same light as when computers and CAD were introduced for white collar jobs. We used to have rows of people that would solve a specific equation and pass the solution to the next person to work on their specific equation, or drafters that only structural and engineering drawings, and those jobs largely disappeared as a result and were instead added to the jobs of the engineers and scientists. Both situations jobs are destroyed as a result, but in the larger scheme that manpower is freed to pursue other opportunities. Manufacturing output is massively increased but requires far fewer people to do. Yes it sucks for people who are put out of work and we need to have a plan to get them back on their feet (and no, learning how to code is not the answer); my view is to have the owners that reap the majority of gains of these tech breakthroughs to use some of those gains to jumpstart the new jobs, a rising tide floats all boats and all that. So I am onboard overall with AI becoming mature, as another tool to make my work easier, even if it puts me in a more tenuous position. In an abstract sense it's like any tool, the better you are at using it the more valuable you are and likely to stay in your career path. AI will have an outsized impact compared to many other advances, but it's no different from the steam engine or computers in the grand scheme.

AI is not a tool like a computer or CAD. This is such a trap. Once AI can replace one job, it instantly replaces essentially all of those jobs. It is not just enabling one person to do the work of X people.

And the demographics here are really unfortunate. A lot of this is like semi-skilled mid-career white collar BS that, while I doubt is bringing a lot of joy to people's lives apart from a paycheck, is going to create a real dilemma for getting these people tooled up for other work. A lot of design work and graphic work is going to be gone. These people are skilled and generally love their fields. It's a real shame being mid career in something you enjoy and having to somehow switch over to a job you both don't enjoy and aren't especially good at.

 

[DrewH]

AI is not a tool like a computer or CAD. This is such a trap. Once AI can replace one job, it instantly replaces essentially all of those jobs. It is not just enabling one person to do the work of X people.

AI is missing a couple of things that it will never have in our lifetimes. Genuine creativity that applies to problem solving and being able to make judgement calls. That's sentient being type stuff. AI could surely replace what other techs have done prior, which are the more mundane jobs. But, there are jobs and always will be jobs that require human specific elements for success.

 

[narad]

AI is missing a couple of things that it will never have in our lifetimes. Genuine creativity that applies to problem solving and being able to make judgement calls. That's sentient being type stuff. AI could surely replace what other techs have done prior, which are the more mundane jobs. But, there are jobs and always will be jobs that require human specific elements for success.

I mean, I don't know where this opinion comes from. Or the confidence in it. Sure, there will (at least for a long time) always be jobs that require a human element for success, that's not really the argument. But just the natural fluctuations in unemployment can result in a lot of hardship. There are really a lot of jobs that are in a seriously tenuous position of surviving the next 5 years and AI is not going create jobs for them in the same way the computer or complex machinery did.

 

[TedEH]

AI is not a tool like a computer or CAD.

Except that it is. It literally is. It IS a computer, or bunch of computers, running some software. It's a machine. It's not a brain, it doesn't "think" in the way a person thinks, it doesn't feel or reason - it's literally a set of instructions and weights and patterns being carried out by a machine, albeit a very complicated set of instructions.

That doesn't mean it won't have an impact, that jobs won't be lost, but I remain unconvinced that the general public have a solid grasp of what AI is now or will become later - and what its limitations are and will be.

Take as an example - the one that comes up often: graphic design. AI is really good at generating anything at all given a prompt. But what it can't do is understand what a client wants to convey and come up with something novel or clever to serve that purpose. Like the "hidden" arrow in the fedex logo: an AI could not have done that. You still need people for stuff like that. I'd be willing to believe that AI will take over the "I only care about this enough to pay someone on fiver for it" segment of graphic design, and the "I need something like a texture that's been done 100 times before but needs to be just unique enough" segment of art (which is a large segment, granted). But there's no data set for innovation, there's no data set for novelty.

And the other example that keeps coming up for some reason is HR. AI HR would suck more than HR already sucks. HR serves two purposes: protecting a company from its employees, and resolving inter-human problems. Sure, an AI can point you at the right form if that's all you need. What happens when you're raising a complaint or an issue that needs to be investigated? What happens when someone is harassed, or you need to ask for a raise or time off? Given HRs first purpose of protecting the company there's WAY too much risk to allow AI to answer all of those with boilerplate answers. Having an AI "front desk" to direct you to the right forms and to the right people for more complex issues make sense - but HR as a whole remains a very human job.

And many people who don't know what they're talking about think it'll make programmers obsolete - which it can't. What it can do is mimic existing code, generate a lot of boilerplate, and solve some basic (aka already solved) problems - but it can't architect larger systems or do any meaningful debugging. Say a weird rare bug pops up that only happens on Tuesdays for people using out-of-date Macs but only if they're on a VPN. There's no training data for that. The best an AI can do is generate generic troubleshooting steps, recommend testing for better coverage, etc - but it doesn't understand the codebase well enough, or have a picture of the typical use-cases or the contexts the software might be used in, in order to intuit why the bug might be happening and to propose a solution.

We also don't know that AI isn't going to have some kind of giant push-back kind of like the art community had. Just because it exists doesn't mean everyone will embrace it. It's a complicated enough tool that comes with enough risk and complexity that I'd be fully willing to bet that some industries will skip it entirely, for reasons of fear, for moral reasons, for not knowing what to do with it, for not having the desire or time to invest into training models on their specific needs, etc etc. We're not at the "push a button and it solves all our problems" stage yet.

 

[MaxOfMetal]

industries will skip it entirely...for moral reasons,

Say what?

 

[TedEH]

Say what?

I mean, a lot of the art-world pushback on AI isn't just that it's killing jobs but that it's stealing work. AI creations are, by definition, derivative of the materials you trained it on. It's only so good at creating things "in the style of artist xyz" because it's recreating xyz from it's data set. To some, that's a theft or an infringement.

The same thing happened with AI "copilot" features for software -> it scraped things like github and was trained on not-publicly-licensed code, so you end up getting snippets generated by AI that were debateably written by someone else who never gave license for it to be used. Derivative code like that would be a fireable offense if a person did it. It's a AI equivalent of "I copied my answers from StackOverflow".

Maybe "moral" is the wrong word, but I never put it past people to have "moral objections" to just about anything.