Neo-Luddites Unite!

Stuart Staniford predicts there will be more robots than people by 2030:

He extrapolates the depressing implications:

• This trend will continue because it's in the short-term interests of societal elites.  The median influencer's life can be made better with more robotically produced consumer goods and with service robots to perform tedious chores (or human labor made cheap by competition from robots).
• The creative classes can have fun with new toys and with thinking up new uses for the technology.
• Ever larger numbers of people will continue to be made technologically unemployed by this trend.
• Managing the "class formerly known as working" will become an increasing challenge.  More and more of them will present as "criminals", "terrorists", and other undesirable labels since society is not able to provide them with a meaningful way to contribute (and people need meaning).
• The least disruptive approach to managing this is for the underclass to disappear into technologically mediated secondary universes (whatever TV & video games evolve into).
• However, the traditional cultural ethics that despise welfare/dependency etc will prevent easy/full use of this solution, and the alternative is to lock up more and more deviants and use more and more sophisticated technology to find and monitor the deviants - managing the risk that they become organized and attempt to overthrow the existing order.
• Some people will reject the automation trend and there will be an ongoing romantic/back-to-the-land/local food/anti-globalization/anti-technology movement.  To the extent it relies on resources not needed by organized global society, and doesn't oppose "progress" violently or too-effectively, it will be tolerated.
• Depending on how good the roboticists get how quickly, there's going to become a point where there really isn't enough in it for a sufficiently large fraction of humanity.  I simply see no way this trend can continue without eventually rendering almost all of us irrelevant.  People's basic survival instincts will not tolerate that.
• However, by that point, there may very well be no easy way back, and all hell will break loose.

I thought about this over the weekend, when I held a seminar for translators. I think within about 20 years there will no longer be a significant market for human translators. The only things that will really still need human translators will be high-status but low-paid literary translation, where style counts. As for technical and legal translation, algorithms will probably be good enough to generate near-perfect rough drafts, which specialists will then correct. In 2020, you'll only need 1 human translator to do the work of 100, or 1000, today.

Other jobs that have no future: air-traffic controllers (possible pilots too), auto assembly-line workers, cashiers, non-specialized nurses and caregivers, bus drivers, accountants, car mechanics, pharmacists, radiologists, the list goes on. There will still be a market for some humans to oversee the robots, but brilliant algorithms and highly sophisticated robots will do 98% of the preliminary work and handle 98% of the non-problematic cases.

So get ready for, as Max Goldt calls it, our sad technological future...

Comments

[Christian]

I think that is a fairly scary view you are showing but it is not as close to reality as you seem to think. For translation, I can't see machines taking over the jobs of human translators in the near future, especially for legal translation. There are so many features, i.e. context, style, that machine translation cannot take into account, regardless of how good the machine gets.

[Zaungast]

Andrew, you present the obvious extrapolation of current developments into the future.

I'm not knowledgeable and/or smart enough to come up with better predictions, but I think this is perfect example how such extrapolations can go wrong.

Let me pick out the accountants you mentioned. True, computers do more and more of what used to be their job. But then - surprise! - the requirements to accounting have multiplied, in terms of speed, accuracy, details, flexibility, output presentation etc. Having the standard software doesn't do the job; you have to put in some manpower to keep this running in the right way. To top this off, rules change in ever shorter intervals, so you need a lot of people to constantly update your systems and processes.

True, adapting a program that thousands of companies use doesn't require thousands of accountants in these companies. But I would rather diagnose a rise rather than a fall in demand. I don't have such numbers, but I would guess today's companies have more accountants and financial mangers per employee than firms in former decades.

Similar arguments may apply to other examples.

The funny thing about changing the world is that it changes back ...

[Jerry]

Well, this perspective is only depressing, as long, as two of todays major principles are at work. First, labour to be distributed freely with the right to live an average or better life earned through this work (or in short, capitalism). Second, the core of what is called "protestand work ethics", the belief, that a sense to ones life is given and must be given through labour, up to the point, that other forms of giving meaning are denied by society.
If both of these are overcome, ways to lessen necessary work and giving it to machines will no longer be seen as a threat but a relief. "Arbeit" once had a meaning of torment, other languages have similar roots.

The modern Sysiphos is freed from his burden. It's up to us, wether for good or bad.