The Guardian: If EU workers go, will robots step in to pick and pack Britain’s dinners?

[spyguy]

8 hours ago, wonderpup said:

Came across this just now;

Lots of reassurance being offered here about how those nasty robots are not out to get you- but then again ROSS is doing something that looks suspiciously like the kind of thing that Lawers are currently paid to do.

Law firms 'work' by billing you for a highly qualified lawyer whilst getting a trainee to do the work.

Then they cross fingers and hope the contract or whatever does not go to court.

Ive seen written contracts with so many mistakes that even I, a non-Lwayer, could pick out the fckups.

The UK legal system does not really have a QA filter.

 

[wonderpup]

Quote

There are all sorts of automation. I would suggest that 'intelligent automation' is only part of the story.

For certain dextrous tasks, there is always the option for 'self service' designs.

Think the advent of the first self service supermarkets. Now transitioning to self scanning and payment resulting in 10,000's job losses.

Think bank ATM's and internet transactions - thousands of branch closures down the years.

There are many examples of this - before we get scared of the future with robots and AI that may affect the middle classes at last.

If someone can fully automate a solicitor, I would welcome it.

I was talking specifically about the recent plethora of articles about artificial intelligence that seem to have this class specific bias regarding the types of work that will in future be impacted by AI.

So we get these bold  headlines announcing that 'unskilled' jobs will be the primary target of  developing AI technology. This simply is not true- these technologies will not operate along some neatly defined class or income specific line. Some 'low skill' jobs may never be susceptible to automation, while some 'high skill' jobs could be wiped out completely-in that sense technology is an equal opportunites unemployer.

I think this tendancy to try to frame technological unemployment along class specific lines is an aspect of a larger trend- one that is visible in the ROSS video above. Over half that video is not talking about the product it's selling at all-instead it spends half it's time trying to offer calming reassurance that the product is not a threat to it's intended customers- all that stuff about 'robots not taking over the world'- what is it doing in a product promotion video?

Do a google seach for AI and the legal profession and you will find a lot of articles carefully explaining why lawers will not be replaced by robots- which may well be true but the need to write entire articles pointing this out speaks of a certain anxiety. In my experiance when people start talking about how indispensible they are it's because they actually fear the opposite may be the case.

So we have this growing trend among the producers of AI based technology to spend a lot of their time talking about how ineffective their products will be- they play down the degree to which their products will displace human workers and almost seem to suggest that their products are little more than productivity aids merely designed to make the life of the employee a little bit easier.

But-of course- this is not the real USP- the real promise here is to cut costs by adding efficiency, which is code for lower wage costs which itself is code for job losses.

What seems to be happening here is that an inconvenient truth is being carefully ignored, which is that these technologies do seem to represent a genuine threat to hitherto very secure professional jobs. So we have this 'conspiracy' of wishfull thinking that either denies outright that this threat exists or asserts that while it does exist it will only really effect the 'unskilled' and unimportant people- not nice people like us with degrees and professional qualifications.

The problem is that once you find yourself arguing just how indespensible you are you have already acknowledged on some level that you no longer quite believe this to be true. And if I was working in the legal profession a system like ROSS would not perhaps keep me awake at night- but neither can it be completely dismissed as an outlier of things to come- hence all those articles about how indespensible lawers are.

[shindigger]

What the Phuctardian REALLY means is, will a bot be programmed to clean the Hampsted dwellers shithouse and look after "the children"?

[Morganite]

It reminds me of Red Dwarf.

Rimmer and Lister are 3rd class technicians. I don't remember it exactly but it went along like this.

Why aren't the maintenance droids doing this? It's because they've got a better union.

[pathfinder]

From what I am seeing Robot/AI replacement, is not just low skill worker solution. In fact picking technology is already there and about to happen. On top of this a few big UK farmers were renting Romanian land and going to source for the workers. So its not ‘Brexit’, its just another step to mass food production that was on its way anyway.

(ed

I am currently working on a project, lots of large scale earthwork landscaping (holiday park). Drones scan the land. Everyone throws in design ideas. I 3d model the landscape, diggers cut and fill it with GPS. Obviously there is still a lot of human interaction but the potential to remove a lot of it is there. As for my job well, I enjoy it still .. .for now. The software automation that has taken place, I could have provided in the 90's. But the suits never understood the skill and its potential, they prefer glossy presentations and management speak.

So now 'unskilled' people in the industry can produce the same work. But the thing is it is too fast, checking work is a nightmare! The design process, "first draft" has shrunk from 2/4 weeks down to 2-3 days. Worst potentially within a week they will be digging it! Currently ! swap between 2-4 projects in the day. You no longer comprehend the project. Sure you can speed read a book but did you read it. We are now just in full panic mode and I am pretty sure the profit margins are the same! So all this automation has brought high pressure to the coal face, for the same money in 2000. The next step will be Software overall design checks (some checks are automated as you design already). That was when I went 3 days a week with the boss pleading me every 3 weeks to go full time….. ,‘ah no thanks’.

But I think things are going to go one step further, I fully expect software to do a lot of designing, with just a very few specialists to guide it. Forget Accountants that has been done for the most part via software. We are going though a drawing board revolution right now where design is done as you draw, and Engineers are becoming client bureaucrats. I wonder if it will be the middlemen that have the last laugh. Or perhaps the client will do it all themselves, a whole industry designed out of the equation.

God knows what will happen when a ton of educated, pro active, driven individuals get kicked off the high pressure thankless job just to see a bunch of asset rich families carrying on as normal. I am willing to bet in 15 years it will not be a utopian society :D.

Okay I clearly span out of control.

Edited March 27, 2017 by pathfinder

[wonderpup]

Quote

 

I am currently working on a project, lots of large scale earthwork landscaping (holiday park). Drones scan the land. Everyone throws in design ideas. I 3d model the landscape, diggers cut and fill it with GPS. Obviously there is still a lot of human interaction but the potential to remove a lot of it is there. As for my job well, I enjoy it still .. .for now. The software automation that has taken place, I could have provided in the 90's. But the suits never understood the skill and its potential, they prefer glossy presentations and management speak.

So now 'unskilled' people in the industry can produce the same work. But the thing is it is too fast, checking work is a nightmare! The design process, "first draft" has shrunk from 2/4 weeks down to 2-3 days. Worst potentially within a week they will be digging it! Currently ! swap between 2-4 projects in the day. You no longer comprehend the project. Sure you can speed read a book but did you read it. We are now just in full panic mode and I am pretty sure the profit margins are the same! So all this automation has brought high pressure to the coal face, for the same money in 2000. The next step will be Software overall design checks (some checks are automated as you design already). That was when I went 3 days a week with the boss pleading me every 3 weeks to go full time….. ,‘ah no thanks’.

But I think things are going to go one step further, I fully expect software to do a lot of designing, with just a very few specialists to guide it. Forget Accountants that has been done for the most part via software. We are going though a drawing board revolution right now where design is done as you draw, and Engineers are becoming client bureaucrats. I wonder if it will be the middlemen that have the last laugh. Or perhaps the client will do it all themselves, a whole industry designed out of the equation.

God knows what will happen when a ton of educated, pro active, driven individuals get kicked off the high pressure thankless job just to see a bunch of asset rich families carrying on as normal. I am willing to bet in 15 years it will not be a utopian society

 

Your point about profit margins not being increased by automation is interesting, given that a big argument in favour of automation is supposed be it's ability to improve the bottom line.

But it does make sense if we view human labour as a commodity- because like any other commodity the less scarce it is the less exchange value it will have. So there seems to be this law of diminishing returns in play whereby the more we 'de-skill' the task by automating parts or all of it, the less we can then charge for the execution of that task.

What you describe above is a process of convergence where at some future point the ability to more or less fully automate the process will erode away much of the profits to made from doing it.

This is nothing new of course- our standard of living is based on the fact that improvements in technology have made many things cheaper over the years to the point where a well made pair of shoes or a car are within the reach of millions.

What might be new  is the commoditisation of intelligence itself via AI. If, as you say, relatively unskilled people can now produce the same work that once required a higher level of skill due to technology then inevitably the market value of that skill will fall.

Which leads us to the apparantly paradoxical insight that in economic terms automation might be the opposite of what it's claimed to be- instead of increasing economic value it destroys it, by taking that which is scarce and therefore expensive and making it abundant and therefore cheap. Which is great if you are talking about shoes- but less great if you are a Cobbler, who finds the value of his skills in the marketplace have been reduced.

Most of us are not Cobblers (though I've often been accused of talking it)  But we are all selling something- usually today our brainpower and the various skillsets it supports.

But In a world where certain kinds of cognitive capacity can be purchased by the hour via a cloud based app we might well find ourselves in a similar position to the maker of handmade shoes who finds a shoe factory has just opened up down the road.

Edited March 27, 2017 by wonderpup

[Errol]

8 minutes ago, wonderpup said:

here certain kinds of cognitive capacity can be purchased by the hour via a cloud based app we might well find ourselves in a similar position to the maker of handmade shoes who finds a shoe factory has just opened up down the road.

We will be in the position of the horse post-industrial revolution.