Originally Posted at Free Market Shooter
It is pretty accepted knowledge that a number of lower-skilled jobs will disappear in the coming 5-10 years, due to the human element being replaced by autonomous machines. One of the most at-risk professions is that of Truck Driver, which as 13D Research points out, is one of the no.1 reasons you rarely (if ever) hear President Trump discuss automation in the workplace:
A widely circulated NPR graphic shows “truck driver” was the most common job in more than half of the U.S. states in 2014?—?in part because how the Bureau of Labor Statistics sorts common jobs, such as educators, into small groups. Indeed, truck driving is one of the last jobs standing that affords good pay (median salary for tractor-trailer drivers, $40,206) and does not require a college degree. According to the American Trucking Association, there are 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the U.S. Entire businesses (think restaurants and motels) and hundreds of small communities, supporting an additional 5.2 million people, have been built around serving truckers crisscrossing the nation. That’s 8.7 million trucking-related jobs. It also represents one of Trump’s most important voting blocs?—?working-class men.
And while it may be further out on the timeline, if you think your job requires a higher, special element of skill and mental acuity that just cannot be automated, you are probably very mistaken. In fact, there are few (if any) jobs in which a machine would be inferior to a person. And this is not as far out in the future as you may think.
Just imagine, how Truck Drivers would have reacted if ten years ago, you told them that they would be at risk of being replaced by a machine? And this isn’t some far-off vision of the future… it is happening now:
But like many of the blue-collar jobs the President promised to save during his campaign, the future of these 3.5 million trucking jobs is less than certain. Fully automated trucks could put half of America’s truckers out of a job within a decade, The Los Angeles Times reported last year. This isn’t an imagined future. It’s already happening. Otto, an automated trucking company acquired by Uber, made a delivery of beer last year and has been approved to travel two routes in Ohio.
Last year, Noel Perry, an analyst at industry research firm FTR Transportation Intelligence, told The International Business Times: “Despite a shortage in high-quality drivers, pay hasn’t gone up in five years. Trucks are easier to drive.” So-called “soft-automation” features, like automatic braking and lane assist, mean the trucks can already be driven by less experienced operators commanding smaller salaries. Even ahead of automation, the profession is losing traction. Perry’s final remark to IBT strikes to the heart of the matter?—?“The free market produces jobs, the government doesn’t.”
Now imagine, telling lower level lawyers, doctors, programmers, accountants, etc, that their jobs are at risk now. While many people would scoff at the notion, they are likely the same people who scoffed at the notion of trucks being automated ten years ago. Denis Sproten explained a lot of the history and future of automation of labor recently:
A short introduction, first there were the luddites, destroying machinery, which automated mundane tasks. People tell us, we should be happy that we don’t need to do these anymore. This is all history, from which we moved on:
- Working the fields / weaving: Let’s assume that required a machine with IQ 80 or MIQ of 80, production increased and more products were sold on markets, consumption increased, transportation was needed and distribution of goods into shops. More roads were needed etc, we found a replacement occupation in the next layer.
- Working as a driver / service industry : assume it requires a machine of IQ 100-110, more complex tasks, product knowledge, navigation, forms to be filled, start of knowledge industry. These jobs are being replaced now as we get automated trucks, drones delivering, online shops replacing shops on the street.
- Working in an office Knowledge Industry : assume it requires an IQ of 100-120, even more complex tasks, which involve creation of new products, design, programming, lawyers, accountants, doctors etc. We are not there yet, but we soon will have AI which can do basic tasks of doctors, writing news articles, design thinking, algorithms which categorise knowledge and lets you search it.
People are being pushed to become Data Scientists, AI programmers, math geniuses writing algorithms, all jobs which likely require an IQ of 130+. Programs can now write music and are starting to be creative.
The trend I see is that, yes we will be able to find new jobs, but they will require really highly intelligent people, which covers only a small percentage of the population, no matter how much education they have received. Maybe becoming cyborgs will be the answer, if we believe Elon Musk.
More “intelligent” machines below the scale of a true “A.I.” means is a growing number of jobs will be “outsourced” to machines, and they will never be coming back. Even now, you likely find yourself with less reason to visit the doctor, because you can just go on WebMD and see if there is a simple solution to what ails you. Imagine that function being extrapolated across a series of machines at the basic level of medicine, to serve your needs for more common medical questions/issues. Wouldn’t that eliminate the need for a significant number of medical professionals?
Medicine is just one example, because truly nothing is off limits. “Humans Need Not Apply” explained this masterfully over two years ago – if you think your job is “safe” because “a machine could never do it,” you better think again.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU]
(Note: This video is 15 minutes lnog, and while I’m hesitant to post lengthy videos, since the attention span of viewers for short clips drops significantly after one minute, you may reconsider your job security after seeing this one.)
All of this is a precursor to a topic I plan on discussing in the future – not if, but when, a machine is created that is as capable (or more likely, far superior to and more capable than) as a human being. What will that machine look like and be capable of? How will it view and process the existence of humans, and/or threat human beings pose to its own existence? It is something you have seen in many sci-fi movies, and discussed by many billionaire business moguls and scientists. Still, there are many aspects of A.I. that have not been touched on by the ongoing discussion, mostly related to how a machine would react, knowing that it is superior to its human creators.
In the meantime, while the machines created today and in the near future might not be more capable than their human creators, they are going to become exceedingly efficient at the jobs they are built to do. And one of those jobs a machine might replace, is yours. Whether this is something that a politician is willing to discuss or not, you should think long and hard about what it will take for a machine to replace you in the workplace, and what you will do with your life if that happens to you while you’re still in your working years.
This is a link to the top 10 jobs. Run the AI/Robotics model thru these and how many will still have jobs. And where will those that lose these jobs then find work? Doing what? Wages?
I’m not so sure. I can think of plenty of scenarios where an automated truck is not as good as a human. Sure given perfect or normal conditions you can get these systems to function ok but sometimes unusual situations occur that requires human thinking and not just machine logic.
One example, suppose the truck in going down the road and a baseball rolls across the road in front of the truck and then is gone. The human will think, “I wonder if there is a kid chasing that bell”, and will prepare to slow down and stop, whereas the automated truck will just continue doing what it’s doing. Then when the kid shoots out from between two parked cars the automated truck will not have time to stop but the human driven truck is prepared to do so.
Will an automated truck be able to function with snow on the ground and its optical sensors can’t see the white line?
The more controlled the environment the better these automated systems are against humans. In an ‘anything can happen’ environment the human has a better chance.
Will the Botbartender pretend to listen to my shxtty stories?
Ha! I thought the same thing.. who wants to go to “Cheers” when Sam is a robot who knows your name via facial recognition software?
I was just looking at this trend yesterday and found a couple of things that really threw me. One was a 3D printer that could build a 400 square foot house in 24 hours, the other was a robot on wheels that could handle severely uneven terrain, jump four feet in the air, and carry 100 lbs (not all at the same time though). The number of jobs that both of these technologies will take in the somewhat-near future is pretty high.
Videos on both:
My view as a computer scientist: Much of automation depends upon the correctness and normalization of data.
For instance retail bar codes. For this to work all the vendors of products must apply to an organization that assigns them a unique bar code number for each product. Then the retailer must enter those bar codes (that they stock) into their inventory database. Additionally the products must have the bar code on the cases and boxes, and individual retail packages on the shelf. This is an industry wide effort – if one link in the chain is broken – it won’t work. What I’m getting at is bar coding all this ‘stuff’ is a job in itself.
Same with self driving cars – I know this won’t work in Northern states with ice and snow. Additionally the sensors / road markings / GPS are all parts of a very thin thread.
With the normalization of data various entities: banks / loan companies / credit bureaus / insurance companies are capable to exchange enough data on an applicant that you can get almost an instantaneous quote on a mortgage / auto loan / insurance product. This has eliminated a lot of office jobs.
This is pure science-fiction idiocy. 40 ton trucks ready to roll, unmanned, into your local grocery store dock?? It probably won’t even happen within the span of your great-great-great-grandchildren’s lifetime.
Mars colonization will come easier, because there will be fewer variables than a public road in the U.S.
Get real.
People said that about things like Dick Tracy’s wrist radio, and later his wrist TV.
Now those are both so obsolete they’re better considered as science history than the science fiction they were at the time.
That’s cherry-picking a little bit. They’ve also been promising the flying car for decades now. Chances are it ain’t gonna happen. Drivers these days can barely keep track of traffic in 2 dimensions let alone 3.
I can see driver-less cars if *all* cars are that way since the computers could ostensibly communicate and keep things flowing nicely. But since human drivers actually communicate with each other (other than the one-figure salute) by waving people through and such, it’s hard to see that working very well, particularly in very dense areas.
A few questions………..
How long will it take to build the 3.5 million, specialized trucks that the article speaks about?
If a truck drives to a liquor store, how does it ask the store owner what brands of beer the store wants that month, remove the beer from the various stacks in the truck and then dolly the beer inside and stack them in displays or the walk-in fridge?
We see the millions of hypochondriacs and self-medicating druggies in our country now, what happens if WebMD becomes a legit form of self-diagnosis?
Most Americans go to the Dr expecting to walk out with some type of prescription, drugs cannot be prescribed without an evaluating Dr assessing.
I could go on, and no doubt that automation has-and will continue to replace some jobs, but I don’t foresee humans becoming obsolete in several lifetimes.
The milkman, paperboy, ice trucks, TV repairmen etc have all become outdated by tech—but now there are tons of different jobs that didn’t exist 50 years ago also that have replaced them.
Same way automated warehouses fulfill orders today, and running inventory computer tallies in stores reorder stock as needed based on what has been sold.
The very low percentage of people working in the work force suggests otherwise.
Actually long haul trucking should go on trains.
More than 50% of teachers could be replaced by on-line classes.
Houses could be pre-built and assembled on-site eliminating many construction workers.
Fast food employees could be replaced by sophisticated vending machines.
Farming and agriculture could be almost completely automated eliminating seasonal farm workers.
Actors and actresses are being replaced by CGI.
And with fewer jobs there is less need for cars.
As someone who works in the real world, we are a long ways off either in time, or in technological breakthroughs before this stuff begins to hit “doomsday” levels. Robots are good at very specific things, but are shit at “changing gears” so to speak. Modern AI are pretty much just software robots. Sure, they can beat you in chess, but they can’t get up and walk across the room to open the door for someone. A poor analogy, but you get my point.
However, eventually these changes will arrive, and can you image how cheap our quality of life will be then? I mean, we already have a quality of life far superior to 100 years ago, and we’ve seen the rise and fall of several industries in that time. If the past is any indication, the deletion of those old jobs will see the creation of whole new sectors, and the reduction in price for those industries effected.
In your analogy, the door would open itself automatically when it sensed you wanted it open.
And you could probably teach a robot like this to play chess, vacuum the floor and do the laundry as well as other duties so you would have an all purpose house robot.
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Hence the poor analogy. How about, get up and do ANYTHING?
We have robots here, several of them. I work in manufacturing, and also the sciences. Robots can do a lot. Robots can save us a lot of money.
There is a lot of things robots can’t do without exorbitant cost. Every automation system I’ve seen has been a pain in the ass.
Frankly, if we’d stop making labor so expensive you’d see a shit ton of people hired over night for just this occasion. I fucking hate having to coordinate with some fatass computer programmer in another state because his software suddenly stopped working with our computers thanks to a microsoft auto-update that somehow forced its way past our IT’s admin privileges.
Expensive labor is why we’re developing robotic labor at an increasingly rapid pace.
No economic incentive, no development.
That’s why we need to raise the minimum wage. It will boost the robotics industry.
Raise the minimum wage will create more unemployed with nothing to do but soak up benefits and protest. Neither of which we need more of.
OMG, who did they use as a model for the face of that robo-slut.. Ronald Perelman?
Re: opening the door. You may not want to open it, depending on who’s behind it. Will the robot know that?
It would have to be better looking.
Robots, automation of existing machines and AIs have already destroyed millions of jobs, and the pace seems to be accelerating due to low interest rates.
The core problem isn’t automation per se. It’s who owns the robots in the first place. Since our money supply has been corrupted, ownership of all the assets has been severe concentrated in those who have access to the creation of new money at the expense of everyone else.
Reading down the comments I can tell that several people here can see the obvious: Duane gets a little carried away. Check back in 20 years and see how this robotrucker idea has worked out. I’d bet him $10k on it, but in 20 years, I’ll be gone and $10k might not be enough to buy a burger.
Robotruckers mean the truck stops fail, and all the “commerce” thereabouts.
sooo, get robot roommate and have him pay the bills. seriously tho I find it hard to believe a bot will be able to custom repaint paint houses before I’m dead or enfeebled. so the bright side is I will have a job, the dark side is I will still have a job, worse case scenario il buy a robot to paint for me
I wonder if an automated vehicle can take evasive action when it’s being shot at?
I think they will be prone to a lot of vandalism, and how will they defend themselves and -more important to the bottom line- their cargo?
That rather old Boston Dynamics video of the “mean” robot tech trying to kick over the walking robot comes to mind. That high-cost item would certainly would be vulnerable to a group of 2-3 people rather than one, or to one with a more clever mode of attack.
OR EMP’d. Or hijacked/hacked. Imagine when an entire factory of bots gets hacked and starts producing crystal meth all shift, instead of baby formula…
The best set of comments I’ve seen on robots and the future of robotics.
Robot cars and trucks aren’t going to happen anytime soon except in very specialized settings. Mini-buses in an airport or shopping district, sure. Personal care for the elderly, yes, Japan is leading the way — that one’s right around the corner. Many routine warehouse jobs, yes, already happening. AI robots manning call centers — earliest stages are already there and in ten years they’ll mostly past their Turing test: You won’t be able to tell it’s a robot. The Japanese are also working on human-appearing robots for receptionist jobs.
S3x robots will come as soon as the money’s there for mass production. The technology for limited-movement humanoids with reasonable AI and interactive behavior is already there but too expensive for self-funding of mass production and no source of big money will touch it. But when lower level hospital nursing staff and care of the elderly are fully robotized adding a few parts and relatively minor programming will make this a huge — if controversial — field.
But in every one of these examples — and dozens more — the work and work environment can be standardized. We’re a VERY long way from robots that come off an assembly line and can be told “You go down to the recruiting station and join the army,” and then for the next one “Plug yourself in to the teacher training outlet over there and then go apply at B.H. Obama Elementary across town.”
Judgement, flexibility, curiosity … these will remain human traits well into the future. (That’s why driving a car or truck under ‘whatever’ circumstances won’t soon be a robot’s job.)
About the oddest thing about the current status of robots is the discussion of whether (or when) they must have some sort of human rights. Rights come from a creator — noted in the Declaration of Independence. WE created robots in order to make human lives better. We can give them ‘rights’ if we wish, just as you can dress your dog in a frilly costume, but Fifi doesn’t become a little girl and ‘Rosie’ the robot housekeeper won’t be a person.
It’s a computer chip, Dude. Kick it if you feel like it but remember the repair bill the last time you did that.
As to what robots can already do mechanically, this is the best I’ve seen:
” AI robots manning call centers”
Those ain’t working too well right now:
AI: Welcome to verizon. In a few words please say the nature of the support you need.
Me: Activate a new phone.
AI: You need to borrow a screwdriver, right?
Me: No, activate a phone.
AI: Your phone has bitten your penis, correct?
Me: No, activate a phone.
AI: Please hold while I transfer your call.
Greetings,
I’ve given this a lot of thought and I firmly believe that the doctor and lawyer are in far more danger than the truck driver. This holds true for upper and middle management as well.
It would cost more to create a robot that drives a truck, stocks shelves or makes hamburgers than it would to create a Lawyer bot. Why spend a bunch of money to automate something any average Joe can do when you can replace very very very expensive lawyers. Hear me out.
1. A lawyer bot has instant access to, well, everything.
2. You can outfit the Lawyer bot with features that allow it to know if someone is telling the truth or not. (changes in blood pressure, heat patterns on the face, pupil dialation etc)
3. The lawyer bot, making millions of calculations per second will bury any human lawyer just like Deep Blue buried the World Chess Champion. The lawyer bot has brute force on its side.
4. The lawyer bot doesn’t charge 500 per hour.
We’ll have truck drivers long past the time we have doctors and lawyers.
Ladies and Gentlemen, perhaps it’s time for General Ludd to return to this good Earth and work his benevolent brand of leadership on duh masses
.
I think when the time comes, robots will be trashed left and right.
I think most Americans know union workers are some of the most violent, low-down, nasty people who ever walked the Earth, so I suspect we’re going to see some nasty incidents in robot parking lots, on the highways with robot trucks, and at the homes of robot-treprenuers. For instance, does anyone else remember when West VA coal miners would go on strike and snipe at non-union workers? All it will take are a few union supporters monkeywrenching robot trucks or causing major accidents to scare politicians and regulators away from robot trucks. A few molotovs or acid-in-the-face assaults will be enough to give anyone pause when considering replacing meatsacks with robots.
That gruesome photo above made me think of a brilliant business idea: robot sex workers.
Think about it. The robots could feature single-use replaceable genitalia for uh, sanitary reasons. The proprietor (robot pimp?), would just have to tidy things up a bit after every service call, and the robot can work all day, every day, no breaks. No laws are broken, no women have to get beaten up, killed, addicted to drugs, and so on. There could be a whole fleet of different types, one for every taste.
You wait and see: it’s gonna happen.
Awright, the creatED is NEVER above the creatOR. That said, we have individuals with IQ’s ranging from about 70 to 160- that’s a YUGE difference and the question that comes to my mind is WTF do we do with the sub-100’s when the robots created by the 160’s are far and away superior to them? (I use ‘we’ loosely, as I myself am mid 120)
Whole swaths of humanity fall into obsolescence, not because they did anything wrong, but were born stupid. It’s happening before our very eyes.
My gut says there’s gonna be a reset of some kind. How that materializes, I have no idea.
Soylent Green?
We are much closer to self-driving vehicles being far better then human drivers then most people think. Years ago we had optical character recognition that converted a picture of a document into text. A self driving car is at its core, nothing more the OCR changed to optical object recognition plus logical programming added. Will that cover every possible situation? Of course not, but it doesn’t have to. All it needs to do its identify enough objects and logically process it at a better rate then the average person. And as George Carlin used to say, just think how stupid the average person is, and realize that half are stupider then that.
Robots-Russia’s new soldiers
http://www.blacklistednews.com/Russia%E2%80%99s_New_Weapons_Of_War%3A_Robots_To_Take_Over_For_Soldiers%3F/57193/0/38/38/Y/M.html
Thoughts:
1) Driving is 99% robotic, and 1% life-or-death (Sure my rounding is off, but you get the point). The comments above about the dangerous aspects of the trucking changeover indicate it will take a lot longer than 10 years to work out.
2) Low-level professionals are already challenged by a different kind of robot — the internet. The idea that rings most true in the article is how automation is climbing the IQ ladder — unevenly, to be sure, but climbing nevertheless.
3) Robots, not being human, are not emotional, and would not ‘feel’ superior, or feel anything else, for that matter.
4) Machines, no matter their level of sophistication and mastery of their function, are profoundly stupid, oblivious and even inert otherwise. This will not change, however broad or deep their programmed knowledge base becomes. And let’s not forget that machines are designed and built by humans! LOL Even in the future, in cases where machines are built by other machines, that limitation can be traced back.
5) I’ve said it before, and I will keep on saying it: We must adopt laws and practices that ensure that each and every machine can be shut down and turned off easily by a 10-year old child — without any resistance from the machine itself. The human race must retain the power of the plug! This feature might become increasingly important to the future of the human race over time.
Take a look at the tent cities for a peek at the future.
You can bet the farm that the ones with the jobs and the money will look down on the unemployed masses as just a bunch of lazy f–king bums who wouldn’t work in a pie factory.
This may be the reset moment coming in just a few years. Imo, life is about to get a lot shorter and more brutish for millions of us.
1) my kid, a software engineer, is convinced that self-driving cars are closer than folks imagine
2) doctors and lawyers will come under stress
3) as an employer most of my life, the reason to replace workers with robots is less and less about costs, and more and more about how unpalatable it is to employ people. They frequently don’t come to work, are lazy, dishonest, entitled, ignorant, and are generally unpleasant to employ. Only idiots or people with no alternatives employ people.