from Hacker News

The Automation Paradox

by ergest on 1/19/16, 7:40 PM with 64 comments

• by riskable on 1/19/16, 10:06 PM

  Are you kidding me? The article stopped making sense right at the beginning:

  > But, perhaps surprisingly, electronic discovery software has not thrown paralegals and lawyers into unemployment lines. In fact, employment for paralegals and lawyers has grown robustly.

  WHAT?! The statistics they chose from the US Department of Labor were cherry picked and out-of-context. Lawyers are seriously hurting right now:

  > The national unemployment rate for law graduates has grown for the sixth year in a row to a whopping 15.5 percent, according to a report by the National Association for Law Placement. This unemployment exists despite soaring law school tuition.

  Taken from:

  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/natalie-gregg/mamas-dont-let-y...

  More:

  http://qz.com/206705/the-us-lawyer-bubble-has-conclusively-p...

  Another good read (don't have to watch the video to get the gist):

  http://abovethelaw.com/2013/10/this-pretty-much-sums-up-the-...

• by beat on 1/19/16, 9:23 PM

  Automation will be used as much as possible, up to the point where a human must be involved, either to exercise judgment or because that human's job hasn't been automated away yet.

  Consider the farming industry. In a couple of centuries, it has gone from 90%+ of the population to a couple of percent, while the number of people being fed has increased several times over. That's automation at work, pretty fast in human terms. Did it cause a massive dislocation and unemployment when 90% of the human population was more or less replaced by machines?

• by Animats on 1/19/16, 10:53 PM

  Here's US employment by category: [1] Only 14.1% of the workforce makes "stuff" - that's agriculture, mining, construction, and manufacturing combined. Those are shrinking slowly. Most of that is already automated. A century ago, that was 90% of the workforce. That's the "hollowing out of America" people talk about. The US manufactures more stuff than ever, but with far fewer people.

  The big sectors remaining are retail, professional/business services, health care, and state and local government. (The Federal government is tiny - 1.8%.) Health care is growing. State and local government (which is mostly teachers and cops) is down a bit. Retail is declining slightly. There's a little growth in professional/business services.

  Retail is struggling. America is littered with dead malls. (See "deadmalls.com") Online ordering hasn't crushed brick-and-mortar retail yet; it's still only 7.4% of total retail sales.[2] It's gaining another 1% or so each year. There's still a future in retail, but the jobs are low end.

  "Professional/business services" is the category IT automates. It's where most of the good middle class jobs are. 12.7% of the workforce now. (This doesn't include finance, at 5.3%, down a bit, and also highly automatable.) This is the sector likely to clobbered next, as machine learning gets going.

  That's what's going on. Take a good look at those numbers and evaluate your future.

  [1] http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm [2] https://ycharts.com/indicators/ecommerce_sales_as_percent_re...

• by ergest on 1/19/16, 7:41 PM

  According to the article, when computers start doing the work of people, the need for people often increases. I simply cannot take anymore the doom and gloom of the supposed AI revolution and how it will make us all jobless.

• by panzagl on 1/19/16, 9:28 PM

  Number of jobs is only half of the equation though- are the wages of all of those new jobs the same? If automation replaces expensive skilled labor with inexpensive labor than there is still plenty of room for concern.

• by ThomPete on 1/19/16, 10:08 PM

  Most people are grossly simplifying this discussion. The worst for me still is those who yell "Luddite Fallacy" whenever this discussion comes up.

  What most people are missing is that it's not so much automation but rather digitalization which allows for a completely differen kind of automation thats not just mechanical but instead has some kind of intelligence embedded in.

  The point is that technology is simulating higher and higher levels of abstraction and thus are replacing not just human physical abilities but also our intellectual ones.

  And if you want to understand what that means. Then ask yourself what profession did the horses enter once cars made them obsolete in transportation.

  It's also interesting to notice that the last 100 years only new kind of job have emerged and that's computer scientists. Most other jobs today are really just modernized versions of older ones.

  The luddite fallacy is in itself a fallacy and everyone who subscribe to that view really should explain exactly what new kind of areas humans will be going into. Surely they should already exist today.

  And if you want to claim that new jobs are being replaced when technology takes some away then you really need to explain this graph.

  https://plot.ly/~BethS/8/job-growth-by-decade-in-the-united-...

• by inanutshellus on 1/19/16, 9:27 PM

  The example is a bit cherry-picked. You could argue that the process went like this:

  * 1980s - "takes a lot of time and money to churn through old legal docs, let's hire a paralegal"

  * 2010s - "it's easy to churn through old legal docs, making it much easier to manage multiple legal cases in parallel. Let's hire a paralegal to help me juggle all of these cases."

  ...

  * 2020s - I've hired HireASuperParalegal.com to do all of my paralegal sleuthing. They help me manage the workload of four paralegals for the price of one.

  Meanwhile, how about telemarketers? Have their numbers increased in droves like--apparently--paralegals? I suspect not.

  Anyway, @ergest mentioned that the doom-and-gloom is tiresome, and it certainly is. Personally though, I just find it a fun thought-exercise to think through how we'll matter in the long-run. In the meantime there'll be a "new" class of workers whose jobs move from paper-pushing to being specialized software-users and from there... what? Certainly "computer-or-software fix-it guy" jobs will be universally useful from now into the foreseeable future, but will they pay well? :-)

• by InclinedPlane on 1/19/16, 9:44 PM

  I'm still a bit mystified by the people who believe that automation can, or will, destroy jobs. It takes a very weird view of the economy to see it as fundamentally static, fixed in a given form that can't be changed other than who or what does the work that's already been done. In nearly every corner of the economy there is an infinite amount of work that needs to be done, but of course not all of it can be done so only some of the available work actually gets done. But if you automate some of that work it's not like the undone work goes away, it's not like people won't pay good money to do that undone work.

• by nefitty on 1/19/16, 10:18 PM

  Yes, it is easier to find the dead-end roads when speaking of future societal changes. It is easy to panic about massive global unemployment in the face of automation. The fact that a conclusion is easy to come to doesn't make it any less likely. The patterns we see now are based on recent, past trends. What we can't see, or extrapolate from what we've experienced already, are the effects of accelerating exponential change in the tech sector. What I get from this article is the beginnings of the political rationalizations for denying basic guaranteed income. When your spreadsheets say there isn't a problem, when your economists tell you that work for humans is actually increasing, it is much easier to ignore the needs of the people on the ground.

  I have been wracking my brain about this problem for a few years now, and I still can't seem to find the essential leverage point human labor would have against automated, robotic labor. I once thought it was our ability to synthesize and generate novel solutions to problems that would keep us in a dominant position within the economy, but that is quickly turning out to be a naive delusion. I don't fully understand the direction neural networks and machine learning are moving, but it looks like they will match us in those "uniquely human" areas of cognition very soon.

• by YeGoblynQueenne on 1/19/16, 10:27 PM

  While electronic discovery software has become a billion-dollar business since the late 1990s, jobs for paralegals and legal-support workers actually grew faster than the labor force as a whole, adding over 50,000 jobs since 2000, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The number of lawyers increased by a quarter of a million.

  I'm not convinced by this. Maybe paralegal jobs grew more than other jobs, but what does that say? Weren't other jobs also automated? Why then, if automation was what fueled the paralegal jobs' growth did it not also fuel other jobs to grow at the same rate? Might there not have been another reason why paralegal jobs in particular grew more?

  For instance- did that growth in paralegal jobs have nothing to do with the growth in lawyers' jobs? Could it just be that a quarter million more lawyers needed at least 50,000 more paralegals? Is it possible 50,000 paralegal jobs are actually too few for a quarter million lawyers?

  Also- just growth over a period on its own doesn't mean anything. Was growth more than what was expected? What was the trend in the decades before and after the "late 1990s"?

  Or more generally: is that amount of growth really surprising? And why is it surprising?

• by hyperpallium on 1/19/16, 11:16 PM

  "Commoditize your complements"