Hey Rosie clean the house while I'm gone

One of the common talking points around the fallout of the election is how Trump won the Rust Belt by making promises to those voters that he'll bring jobs - particularly manufacturing - back to those areas. The consensus of course is that those jobs aren't coming back because even if the factories come back most of the jobs will be replaced by automation.

Automation has been inexorably taking over jobs for the past 45+ years and shows no sign of slowing down. The next big impact in automation will be the trucking industry as we get closer and closer to self-driving vehicles. Doubtless many trucking jobs are going to be lost due to this and those people are going to have to find jobs in other fields. Time will tell how this all unfolds. I'm still feeling pretty safe in my field since I'm an auditor and still think we're pretty far away from replacing me with a robot, but you never know what the next technological breakthrough will be...

Focus: Discuss automation and it's current and future impact on society. What's the endgame? What does society look like in the future if robots can perform 50% or more of the required jobs?

Alt-Focus: How safe is your job from automation? Is it likely that you can be replaced by a robot in the next decade or do you feel you're safe from being fired so C3PO or R2-D2 can have your cubicle?

 

If you think this election was bad, either the 2024 or 2028 election is going to be a total bloodbath. Trucking and the economy that supports truckers is an 8 million job economy that's going to vanish overnight. And unlike manufacturing, there's not going to be any delusion that these jobs were shipped overseas or were taken by cheap immigrants. You're going to see trucks driving themselves on our roads every single day with your own eyes, no matter where you live.

 

Automation will be a necessity in the future. We're going to have a huge problem in the labour force over the next 10-20 years. All of the baby boomers are going to retire or die over this period and there won't be enough people replace them.

I think we'll start to see a decline in populations in every 1st world country (maybe even globally) in this period and those countries will be begging for immigrants to fill positions or be scrambling for robotics/automation to replace them.

 

I don't know that my job could be replaced. I mean I guess it could, but Im pretty sure it's far off.
I think the thing that may fight automation is a return to craftsmanship. There's a leather worker back home who's doing well for himself making wallets, portfolios, briefcases, etc. and selling them. Same with a knife maker.
Basically people are going to have to learn to do something and create, I think, to hold off machines taking their jobs.

 

It's starting in construction as well. This will do away with tenders almost immediately, who generally are learning to become a mason. It won't be long before other trades are taken as well. I don't know how far off I am from being redundant, I don't do the actual construction, once robotics goes into supervision, then I will start sweating.

It's scary to think about the what future will hold for humankind if we continue with a Capitalist economy and robotics/automation continues to spread. I think Elon is right, you are going to have to provide a basic income for people because there could come a time where huge swaths of the population never have a job because there are no jobs for them to do. I think about the article that Shimmered posted in the political thread; the disaffected working class and what seeing their industries off-shored has done to their psyche. What is this going to do the overall psyche of humankind?

 

If Trump overhauls the EPA, my job with our counterparts south of the border just became easier. Much easier.

I'm in Regulatory Affairs. While the hazcom component can be somewhat automated (ie SDS generation), the bulk of what I do requires hard knowledge of a bunch of regulations across borders and industries, and how to apply them and the loopholes therein. So, ultimately, my job is safe from automation. It is not, however, safe from me calling out my moronic boss for being a fucking imbecile who occasionally does illegal shit. So... if any of you fine folks know anyone hiring in Reg Affairs, shoot me a PM. kthxbai

 

I don't work for the Big 4; I'm an IT Auditor that works in the internal audit department for an integrated health plan company. CAATs make sample selection, population evaluation, and data testing easier, but for me those generally aren't a very time consuming part of my audits anyway. Since I'm an internal auditor my department has a lot more flexibility in determining our audits and a lot of time is actually spent determining what areas of the company we want to audit and then the scope of those audit projects. Where CAAT is going to have an impact is where you have large, periodic audits that are pretty much standardized from year to year and audit teams spend a lot of time pouring over data. If CAAT can cut down on that tedious work then you won't need as large of audit teams to perform the audit.

 

I would love to find a robot that could do sales calls for me.

On the craftsmanship side of things, there is one thing I have yet to see a machine do as well as a human hand and that is checkering, that crosshatching pattern you see on the grips of guns and stuff. For obvious reasons of profitability, CNC and laser cut checkering is become more and more popular for manufacturers because the task is so labor intensive, but in terms of design and overall quality the machines cannot match a human. They can cut lines perfectly straight and with perfect spacing (which a skilled craftsman can approach) but by nature of the cutters, they leave a finish that is dull compared to hand tools- you can tell what is hand vs. machine cut by both appearance and feel. Starting a checkering pattern by machine and then doing the final cut by hand to sharpen it up can be a good method but you're still limited by the pattern that can be cut. So far the CNCs/lasers have a much harder time going over all of the curved surfaces on stocks versus just flat work so you often see more simplified mechanical checkering to accommodate for this. Plus a human can handle one-off custom checkering easily whereas that can be a lot more difficult to program. Many high-end custom gunmakers are successfully embracing CNC technology but there's some tasks that are still finished by hand, checkering is just one example.

 

Alt. Focus: As a mechanic, my job is literally fixing broken machines, so I'm safe from the automation revolution.
I don't give a shit how well engineered they say a car/truck/piece of equipment is, they will ALWAYS need some kind of service, even if it's preventative maintenance.

 

A lot of the places where by-hand outperforms mass produced have a great deal to do with organic materials: butchers, woodworkers, etc. I think this is because they are working from raw materials that are not, and cannot be, standardized, and thus human expertise is necessary just to fully understand the material being worked with. It'll be interesting to see how ever more complex algorithms built around extremely complex natural patterns attempt to understand these types of materials and if they can match or exceed humans at doing so.

 

Oh you can certainly fit farm work into an automated paradigm, but there is a sacrifice there. An automated butcher will not give you as good a cut with as little waste as a human butcher will ...at least not yet.

 

I think conceptually automation can be split in to "tiers of ability", for lack of a better phrase. Repetitive simple-manual tasks were the first tier and the first to be impacted by automation. Next were the complex tasks requiring precision, and now the technology has almost arrived to where we can design a program to respond to variable external stimuli and events, such as self driving cars. The next real tier is when we're capable of creating machines that are able to exercise judgement in a decision making process, but I think large advancements in AI will be required before we get to that point. I think the last stage is being able to design machines that are able to create original artistic works, but that's veering into a philosophical discussion by then.

 

Same thing is going on in the medical field, on a much larger scale. When I had my brain surgery 9 years ago, a doctor had to move scalpel, by hand, two millimeters from my brain stem in order to remove the tumor. If he so much as flinched, bye bye me. If I had the same tumor today, they would simply lay me on a bed and put a machine over me while they stepped out of the room to turn it on. The machine would shoot an invisible laser through my skull to basically zap the tumor into pixie dust, and I would be good as new, nothing invasive, not so much as a scratch on me. I had over a dozen doctors and nurses in the OR with me. If I had it now? I'd only need one or two.

Fortunately my neurosurgeon will retire before he is completely replaced, but last time I talked to him he was spending just as much time behind a desk as he was in the OR. He was doing over 650 brain surgeries a year when he decided not to kill me. Those days are gone.

In my opinion, for the better. Machines don't flinch.


Alt. Focus: Teaching isn't going anywhere. At least, in terms of early education. Machines don't have empathy, and no parent is going to leave their child in the care of something that can't hug them when they're crying. Technology has VASTLY improved what we can do in the classroom, how the students can interact with their world, given them different methods for learning, exposed them to ideas and experiences they wouldn't have had without it. There's an old-school generation that says they don't want to be teaching their students with a computer (or a smart board), but those who don't embrace the technology are going to be weeded out when they can no longer understand it.

My job has already proven to be recession-proof, and it's not going anywhere with an increase in automation either. Especially now that I'm largely managing people and teams and doing strategic planning within the company. I am proud that we've never laid off a single person in the history of our company. Sure, I could make more pushing paper somewhere or sitting behind a computer, but I also know that I'm still going to have a job 20 years from now.