The inevitable automation of a large part of the job market & how to profit.

[VAL9000]

Also education is just awefull.

This is either hilarious or tragic.  I'm not sure which.

 

[yadayada]

Also education is just awefull.

This is either hilarious or tragic.  I'm not sure which.

THE SPELLING POLICE HAS ARRIVED. Can you speak dutch? yes no? It is my second language.

[VAL9000]

Also education is just awefull.

This is either hilarious or tragic.  I'm not sure which.

THE SPELLING POLICE HAS ARRIVED. Can you speak dutch? yes no? It is my second language.

Sorry, I didn't realize English is your second language.

 

I'm sure you can appreciate the humour, though.

 

[yadayada]

Nah I can't, I lack a sense of humor. I bumped my head really hard when I was about 8 years old. That is also why I cannot spell awefull.

[jouni1]

it's not unheard of to know how to spell in more than one language's

[wachtwoord]

it's not unheard of to know how to spell in more than one language's

 

Especially with the existence of in browser spell checkers ;)

[jouni1]

they're actually pretty hard to set up for multiple languages? at least my browser underlines kanker piemel, which i know to be right.

[wachtwoord]

they're actually pretty hard to set up for multiple languages? at least my browser underlines kanker piemel, which i know to be right.

 

Just install the correct dictionaries and switch between them. When I have English active of course it underlines your beautiful prose, but when i have Dutch active it does not ;)

[tombgrt]

they're actually pretty hard to set up for multiple languages? at least my browser underlines kanker piemel, which i know to be right.

 

Nitpicking here, but "kankerpiemel" should be written in one word.

 

Maybe that's why? Edit: Nope.

[jouni1]

;D this got out of hand quickly

[rmitz]

Well, I've worked about 20 years as a scientist (h=47), I am married to a scientist and practically all my friends are scientists. In fact my children were astonished when they learnt that some grown-ups do not have a PhD.

 

Ah, good.  Then I think we can have a good conversation about our differing experiences.  I've been at Carnegie Mellon for 18 years, 16 working full time, and many of my friends here are faculty in the Computer Science department, which may be skewing my perceptions. Many others have gotten their PhDs (or BSs) and gone into industry.  I don't see a huge difference in quality, in fact, some have gone back and forth.

 

  People were complaining about specialisation 50 years ago. It is not a new phenomenon. What is new to me is that, generally speaking, the young people coming in (and there are of course some exceptions) do not seem so bright as the people who got into science a few decades ago. It is not so difficult to see. Just sit them side by side at a conference dinner and float different conversation topics. For example you will see very few well-read postdocs (and I am not talking about Stalin's 500 pages/day quota which is often mentioned around here).

 

That seems to me more a matter of time.  There seems to be more pressure these days to produce research, and quickly, so that reduces time available for other activities.  Hell, just having a family by itself can use up all the time outside the business day. So, since much of our education system has deemphasized breadth and these younger faculty have been on a sprint for their entire education lives and subsequent education career, that is a natural consequence.  I posit that it will change as they get older.

 

  I don't think it is so difficult to understand. People with high IQs are also affected by incentives. In the sixties, a household with two  Professors at a top university were upper middle class. Now they won't make it into the top 1%. Look at the houses old professors bought when they got tenure and compare them with what young assistant professors are buying now. So you tend---and remember I am saying "tend"--to get smart people who are dysfunctional and would not fit in a corporate environment, or absolute fanatics, who live science as a cult, I know of a guy who abandoned his pregnant wife because it thought it may hurt their career. Which, in the best case scenario would end up with him working 60hrs/week and earning 150$/year.

 

I think that a household with two Professors--in the scientific fields--at a top university are still easily upper middle class.  That doesn't mean they're in the 1%, and I don't know that they ever were.  Housing is a red herring as that observation is true across most careers--housing has appreciated much faster than income, at least in high-demand areas, which may tie into the whole arc of education institutions itself.

 

There are some discontinuities in pay scales depending on what a particular institution focusses on.  Some people may end up leaving the field since it's just so much easier to go into industry and make at least as much, if not more, money. So I agree that there is at least some sentimentality required, or at least a particular attraction to education.  What I haven't seen, though, is that these people are zealots like you describe.  Everyone I know could easily go into industry and be successful, and there's no particular lack of well-roundedness either.

 

Your anecdote is shocking to me, but I'm sure that crazy things have always happened.

 

  Politics in science is very amateurish. The kingdom of the blind. Although some of the older folks are really good.

 

I would not compare it to politics in the real political world, but in my discussions with folks, it does seem more than a match for corporate politics.  There is the old joke that people fight harder when they're fighting over scraps...

 

So, in summary, I don't really have stats to back this up, but I wanted to write that my experience and observations have not matched yours.

[Laxputs]

http://www.valuewalk.com/2014/09/tesla-ceo-musk-predicts-autonomous-car-in-six-years/

[dolce far niente]

Andreessen Horowitz's take on this using 140 characters.

 

“1/One of the most interesting topics in modern times is the “robots eat all the jobs” thesis; best book on topic:

“2/The thesis is that computers can more and more substitute for human labor, thus displacing jobs and creating unemployment.”

 

“3/At core, this is Luddism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite ) — “lump of labor” fallacy, that there is a fixed amount of work to be done.”

“4/The counterargument is Milton Friedman: Human wants and needs are infinite; there is always more to do. 200 years of history confirms.”

 

“5/To avoid the Luddite mistake, must believe “this time is different”, that either (a) there won’t be new wants and needs (vs human nature),”

“6/Or (b) It won’t matter that there are new wants and needs, most people won’t be able to adapt to contribute & have jobs in new fields.”

 

“7/While it is certainly true that technological change displaces current work & jobs, and that is a serious issue that must be addressed…”

“8/It is equally true, and important, that the other result of each such change is a step function increase in consumer standards of living.”

 

“9/As consumers, we virtually never resist technology change that provides us with better products/services even when it costs jobs…”

“10/Nor should we. This is how we build a better world, improve quality of life, better provide for our kids, solve fundamental problems.”

 

“11/Make no mistake, advocating slowing tech change to preserve jobs = advocating punishing consumers, stalling quality of life improvements.”

“12/So how then to best help individuals who are buffeted by producer-side technology change and lose jobs they wish they could keep?”

 

“13/First, focus on increasing access to education and skill development — which itself will increasingly be delivered via technology.”

“14/Second, let markets work (voluntary contracts and trade) so that capital and labor can rapidly reallocate to create new fields and jobs.”

 

“15/Third, a vigorous social safety net so that people are not stranded and unable to provide for their families.”

“16/The loop closes as rapid technological productivity improvement and resulting economic growth make it easy to pay for safety net.”

 

“1/The flip side of “robots eat all the jobs” not being discussed: The current revolution in the “means of production” going to everyone.”

“2/In the form of the smartphone (and tablet and PC) + mobile broadband + the Internet: Will be in almost everyone’s hands by 2020.”

 

“3/Then everyone gets access to unlimited information, communication, education, access to markets, participate in global market economy.”

“4/This is not a world we have ever lived in: Historically most people in most places cut off from these things, usually to a high degree.”

 

“5/It is hard to believe that the result will not be a widespread global unleashing of creativity, productivity, and human potential.”

“6/It is hard to believe that people will get these capabilities and then come up with… absolutely nothing useful to do with them.”

 

“7/And yet that is the subtext to the “this time is different” argument that there won’t be new ideas, fields, industries, businesses, jobs.

“8/In arguing this with an economist friend, response was “But most people are like horses; they have only their manual labor to offer.”

 

“9/I don’t believe that, and I don’t want to live in a world in which that’s the case. I think people everywhere have far more potential.”

 

More at: https://medium.com/life-learning/how-andreessen-horowitz-is-disrupting-silicon-valley-208041d6375d

 

[yadayada]

I  think the thesis here is that almost all the 'needs' type of jobs will be replaced by robots and AI systems somehow. You could argue that a car is a need, but a pet rock or a boat are wants. Sure there will always be more products and services that people want, but most of these will be done by machines anyway. After the average person has his car house food and entertainment, I doubt there will be much more things he/she really needs. Law of diminishing returns. There is simply not that much more valuable things to add after all the abundance we have already. You have only so much time in a day. And materialism is already rampant.

 

If you look at this list:

http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm

 

80% is services already. And the argument is that they will be replaced.

Retail trade: more then 10% of jobs, likely replaced for the most part by either self service or online delivery?

 

Health care and social assistance: 12%, likely partially being replaced by preventive medicine (not a bad thing at all, but not labor intensive). Things like lifting an old person out of bed might not be done by 2 people, but by some robot arm if they do get old. And this is not an industry you want to see growing. Because all those sick and old people do not add value. They only take value and cost us money.

 

Transportation:3 %, likely being replaced for the most part by self driving cars and trucks.

 

So let's say that is -15% work done by humans in these sectors alone. Manufacturing is about 12% still and shrinking. And other sectors will also require less labor in the future. So not hard to see how 20% of jobs will disapear in the sectors that provide stuff that people really need.

 

And unemployment is already something like 20%. So people arguing that new jobs will be created, they have not been created in the past 14 years. if 20% of jobs dissapear in above sectors, that is like 115k jobs over a population of almost 400 million people in the US. You already see this trend in the last 10 years. Job growth lagging population growth. But now it will start to speed up.

 

Im not sure if this is a bad thing in the long run, but in the short run it probably is?

[rukawa]

People were complaining about specialisation 50 years ago. It is not a new phenomenon. What is new to me is that, generally speaking, the young people coming in (and there are of course some exceptions) do not seem so bright as the people who got into science a few decades ago. It is not so difficult to see. Just sit them side by side at a conference dinner and float different conversation topics. For example you will see very few well-read postdocs (and I am not talking about Stalin's 500 pages/day quota which is often mentioned around here).

 

I see this too but I don't think its just Academia. I think all of us are dumber in some sense.

 

One thing I have realized is that people in the past could think in a more systematic and organized way. You can read Graham's Security Analysis and you definitely get a taste of this form of thinking. What is strange is the performance on things like IQ tests has improved. 

[dolce far niente]

Yada, I think that's too simplistic.

"There is simply not that much more valuable things to add after all the abundance we have already."

100 years ago, car wasn't a need. 80 years ago, TV wasn't a need. 25 years ago, PC in each home wasn't a need. 20 years ago mobile phone wasn't a need. 10 years ago, mobile data/LTE wasnt a need. (I don't know how I killed my time on train ride)

 

I'm a saver and I watch my spending carefully. I'm noticing my need/want expand with higher income.

 

There are new jobs/fields being created that were not there 20 or 10 years ago. App developers, website coders and UX designers, data scientists, system/warehouse optimizer, cloud computing, social media person to man FB & twitter, drones specialist. If we look at Etsy, there is a resurgence in hand-crafted goods. But maybe 10 jobs were destroyed for each of these new jobs, I'm not sure of the plus and minus.

 

From what I understand new fields usually have problem getting qualified people. Just ask the companies in Silicon Valley. Could be a case of temporary/structural skills mismatched. I have met entrepreneurs/business owners who have problem filling vacancies.

 

Having said that, I have no strong opinion on all this. I'm just ranting and taking a break from my work.