Page 1 of 2

the robot economy

PostPosted: Wed May 17, 2017 1:43 pm
by everything
There is quite a lot of chatter about "robots" and AI. In case you haven't followed this story, some highlights:
- many lower wage/skill jobs are going away due to automation. think about how Netflix (a robot) streaming has replaced DVD delivery, Blockbuster, etc. and the jobs that went away. or that Walmart has totally automated lights-out 24x7 distribution warehouses. Amazon wants to deliver things to you by drone. Uber and the rest of Silicon Valley want you to use self-driving cars. etc.
- many higher wage/skill jobs are going away due to automation. machine learning can diagnose well. robots can perform procedures. robots can do better financial investing. robots can give you good legal boilerplate and "read" documents much faster and more accurately. Having SaaS and everything aaS means a lot of sysadmin type work goes away (why would you have your own computers, data centers, etc., instead of renting services). People are paying less and less for things like quality journalism. Advertising is more automated, not just on Google but across media as Google, Apple, etc., automate television, etc.
- Google's CEO and others say AI and machine learning are the key technologies now.
- Siri/Alexa/other assistants can do more and more tasks for you.

So of course some jobs that will exist are the ones involved in designing and programming the "robots". That will create certain high skill jobs for a short time. But many jobs are forecasted to go away (both lower and higher wage). Supposedly creative jobs (harder to automate) will be more important but how many of those do you need? My question is what other jobs will be good as this story unfolds? If you want to cheat a little, here is a list of BLS fastest growing occupations: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm, but what are your own ideas here?

Re: the robot economy

PostPosted: Wed May 17, 2017 1:54 pm
by Taste of Death
Robots are better poker players, too. But they suck at salsa dancing.

Re: the robot economy

PostPosted: Wed May 17, 2017 2:09 pm
by Bao
This was a discussion already in the 80s. But we don't have robots in our homes yet who clean and make food for us.

Taste of Death wrote:Robots are better poker players, too. But they suck at salsa dancing.


This is an interesting subject for a discussion board dealing with arts of bodily movements. A robot can store a great deal of information. But No machine can copy human movement.

Many scientists believe that the development of the human brain and it's size was not caused by a growth of intelligence or stacking information, but more so due to the development of coordination of complicated and fine-tuned body movement. Intelligence and memory comes later, as a result of more and more complicated movements pattern. Because memory is necessery for the body to remember and become better on body coordination. You can see this in animals too. Elephants have a great memory and the eight armed octupus is in fact a very intelligent thing that can be taught to solve simple puzzle. Animals that use more complex coordination of movement are in general more intelligent and have better memory than others.

In IMA we say that we practice our brain and nervous system, and in fact when we use fine tuned movements and practice body awareness through coordination, we practice exactly what our brains were designed for.

Re: the robot economy

PostPosted: Wed May 17, 2017 3:04 pm
by Bill
#1 job will be robot repair man because robots will have lots of moving parts and will need servicing.
Robots will need to communicate with each other so whatever means is used to do that, there will always be problems and people who can trouble shoot and repair those communication issues will be needed.

Re: the robot economy

PostPosted: Wed May 17, 2017 4:21 pm
by everything
Bill wrote:#1 job will be robot repair man because robots will have lots of moving parts and will need servicing.
Robots will need to communicate with each other so whatever means is used to do that, there will always be problems and people who can trouble shoot and repair those communication issues will be needed.


Yes. The "robots" many times are made up of software (not necessarily moving part type robots) and the communication issues are software API and network issues. The first part, software, just means software developers, testers, technical support and similar workers may need to work on the repairs.

The second part is similar. Many times if your software uses the "cloud" (Netflix, for example, uses Amazon's infrastructure and services, even though Amazon tries to compete against Netflix), you are paying other humans who themselves are mostly using "robots" to provide the service (for example, Amazon's extensive automated "robots" that help services like Netflix to stay running). Many times those robots are actually "fault tolerant" and "self repairing" to a point. For example, one node of the network of computers eventually will fail, but other nodes take up the job, and eventually a human worker can come around and replace that node.

Image

Sometimes, the robots' brains (machine learning and AI code) need repair and a human data scientist/engineer/programmer or a team does that repair. However that kind of repair is also being automated. For example, no one software engineer can understand Google's complete "Page Rank" algorithm now, supposedly. The robots can start to adapt. Again a human may be required to do a relatively lower skill job of removing/replacing some parts (such as a computer in the massive data center).

Re: the robot economy

PostPosted: Wed May 17, 2017 4:24 pm
by everything
Much of the entire "supply chain" of creating goods/services and getting them to the suppliers and ultimate end consumers can be automated to some extent:
- farming productivity requires fewer and fewer humans
- transporting the food to markets can be somewhat automated
- the grocery store can be more automated
- you can have food delivered right to you (today by human drivers)
- other stuff like cars, refrigerators, TVs, computers can mostly be built by robots.
- getting that stuff to you using e-commerce (delivery by human now) is so good that malls are dying (researchers claim it's new malls not just e-commerce that are killing malls).
- some creative work like advertising is best done by humans. however, algorithms predicting what you want (from your surfing habits, shopping data, demographics, etc.) could possibly reduce the need for advertising - or just help get it efficient and 1:1 targeted (think about Minority Report advertising to Tom Cruise's character).
- information products like movies can be streamed right to you
- a lot of education can be had from online teachers like Khan Academy
- there is some progress on cleaner, cheaper energy (this last one seems farther away but who knows).
- various teams are working on "TriCorders" (hand held medical device from Star Trek).
- if you have food, medical care, a roof over your head, education, transportation, goods, services, what else do you really need?

There may be less and less need to live in cities so you can move to less populated areas and have better quality of life (assuming humans can have jobs or money ... but what are humans actually going to do? maybe IMA/MMA teacher is a good idea: can we all have jobs devoted to self-actualization hobbies?)

Re: the robot economy

PostPosted: Wed May 17, 2017 4:36 pm
by Bill
everything wrote: - if you have food, medical care, a roof over your head, education, transportation, goods, services, what else do you really need?


A fleshlight ?

Re: the robot economy

PostPosted: Wed May 17, 2017 4:40 pm
by everything
lol maybe there are robots for whatever

Re: the robot economy

PostPosted: Thu May 18, 2017 12:58 am
by wiesiek
more robots needs more ...:),
I`ve heard , that one robot needs four men for service

Re: the robot economy

PostPosted: Thu May 18, 2017 6:55 am
by everything
I'm trying to get my kids to see this future. Maybe they can go into robot-repair. "Plastics."

In the meantime (I know there are at least a few IT nerds here), I'm working on my own robot and learning a lot about PaaS --- most services are "robots" that you assemble. There is a sort of API economy going on behind the scenes that economists probably do not study. They realize there is automation but they don't seem to have any hands-on understanding of the topic.

Re: the robot economy

PostPosted: Thu May 18, 2017 9:26 am
by Snork
Wherever a human signature is required to satisfy legal requirements, there is likely to be a job reasonably safe from automation. Compliance officers for industry regulators, for example. Can't sue a robot.

Re: the robot economy

PostPosted: Thu May 18, 2017 10:36 am
by everything
Yes that is part of what makes the debates about self-driving cars so interesting. What happens to auto insurance for drivers if there is no driver? Then, what happens to your premium? Then, what happens to those agents and jobs, not to mention their robots they use to predict your risk and set your best predicted payments? What do the police do if spotting a moving violation? etc.

Re: the robot economy

PostPosted: Fri May 19, 2017 2:46 am
by wiesiek
software or hardware company will pay all claims,
depends-
what didn`t work,
you risk premium only if you drive personally :)

Re: the robot economy

PostPosted: Fri May 19, 2017 10:32 am
by everything
the robot builders pay the insurance company who has fewer humans running those robots on risks. but actually the insurance company now has far less data on how to predict issues and risks --- the car companies have it. still, we are probably a way off from practical self-driving car usage. it's just an interesting example for discussing this future.

a lot of people say that these technologies will mainly augment human control, which is fine, but there is still this question of how things like the google search engine/ad auction system is more efficient for things like advertising, finding information, etc., but displaces many types of human jobs with fewer jobs for the "robot builders".

Re: the robot economy

PostPosted: Fri May 19, 2017 11:45 am
by Strange
pardon me, but if robots can make robots
they don't need a human to service/repair them