Are We Sacrificing Too Much For Automation? (fastcompany.com) 134
Fast Company shares an essay from an anthropologist who researches human agency, algorithms, AI, and automation in the context of social systems:
With the advent of computational tools for quantitative measurement and metrics, and the development of machine learning based on the big data developed by those metrics, organizations, Amazon among them, started to transition through a period of what I refer to as "extreme data analysis," whereby anything and anyone that can be measured, is. This is a problem. Using counting, metrics, and implementation of outcomes from extreme data analysis to inform policies for humans is a threat to our well-being, and results in the stories we are hearing about in the warehouse, and in other areas of our lives, where humans are too often forfeiting their agency to algorithms and machines. Unfortunately, after decades of building this quantitative scaffolding, a company such as Amazon has pretty much baked it into their infrastructure and their culture....
As the world continues to automate things, processes, and services, humans are put in positions where we must constantly adapt, since at the moment, automation cannot, and does not, cooperate with us outside of its pre-programmed repertoire. Thus, in many instances we must do the yielding of our agency and our choices, to the algorithms or robots, to reach the cooperative outcomes we require.... If every process is eventually automated and restricts human agency, while simultaneously requiring our servitude to function, we will be pinned to the wall with no choices, nothing left to give, and no alternatives for coping with it.
One example provided was the Amazon worker who complained the warehouse temperatures were always kept too hot -- to accommodate the needs of Amazon's robots. But the article argues we also forfeit agency "Every time we use a computer, or any computationally based device...
"We do this by sitting or standing to use a keyboard, by typing, clicking, scrolling, checking boxes, pulling down menus, and filling in data in a way that the machine can understand."
As the world continues to automate things, processes, and services, humans are put in positions where we must constantly adapt, since at the moment, automation cannot, and does not, cooperate with us outside of its pre-programmed repertoire. Thus, in many instances we must do the yielding of our agency and our choices, to the algorithms or robots, to reach the cooperative outcomes we require.... If every process is eventually automated and restricts human agency, while simultaneously requiring our servitude to function, we will be pinned to the wall with no choices, nothing left to give, and no alternatives for coping with it.
One example provided was the Amazon worker who complained the warehouse temperatures were always kept too hot -- to accommodate the needs of Amazon's robots. But the article argues we also forfeit agency "Every time we use a computer, or any computationally based device...
"We do this by sitting or standing to use a keyboard, by typing, clicking, scrolling, checking boxes, pulling down menus, and filling in data in a way that the machine can understand."
and the rich people lose X2 when the poor use jail (Score:1)
and the rich people lose X2 when the poor use jail as there doctors + free room and board.
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You're a lot more optimistic than I. If the rich control all the wealth (and thus most of the power), why would they fund prisons for anyone but the professional class? If the masses contribute nothing, then a bullet (or nitrogen chamber if you're feeling compassionate) is much more cost effective, and has a 0% recidivism rate.
WE NEED MORE UNIONS!!! (Score:3)
WE NEED MORE UNIONS!!!
Unions cause more automation (Score:3)
Those are easy enough to control (Score:3)
Still, it's a solvable problem.
Unions are correlated to more automation (Score:1)
Unions don't make the decision to automate tasks. The corporations with more unionization (=workers who were treated badly enough, at some point in history, to unionize) are making cost-cutting decisions to replace human employees with automation. (captcha: automata)
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The more unionization (=higher wagers for workers) the more tasks were automated in order to make up for the higher wages.
But isn't "make up for the higher wages" just another way of saying "allow the employer to hire fewer people"?
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Re: WE NEED MORE UNIONS!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Boy, things sure are great for us non-unionized tech workers!
* Pay that hasn't risen in more than a decade, while cost of living more than doubled. Check!
* Long hours with no overtime. Check!
* No time off. Check!
* No job security. Check!
* No career development path. Check!
* No autonomy. Check!
* Always managed by nepotists with no technical background. Check!
* Preposterously one-sided "contracts", required by every employer. Check!
* Replaced by lawfully-imported H1B scabs at every opportunity. Check!
* Required to work on unethical software (snooping, "ads", lawful fraud, etc) or be immediately shitcanned. Check!
Boy oh boy, it sure is great to be a worker with no rights, no voice, and no union.
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Solution obvious and reasonable, make robots pay tax, equivalent to the tax that would be paid by the human labour it replaces. Pay that to workers not working, well not working so much. So the obvious, share the labour. If all of us working and contributing together with automation and can supply all the labour required working say a 6 hour day, three days a week, then why the fuck would we not do that, there would be zero change in available resource, it would be as it is now.
What to spend the rest of th
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Solution obvious and reasonable, make robots pay tax, equivalent to the tax that would be paid by the human labour it replaces.
Robots don't have income, so their tax rate would be zero.
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Solution obvious and reasonable, make robots pay tax, equivalent to the tax that would be paid by the human labour it replaces.
We should start by taxing everyone with a dishwasher to make up for the scullery maid they didn't hire.
Flush toilets destroyed a lot of chamber maids jobs.
But the biggest tax should be on phones with rotors or touch pads. Those put a lot of telephone switchboard operators out of work.
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On that note, any boat or ship should be taxed for the number of oarsmen they're not using due to the invention of sails. And steam engines, of course.
Likewise, any freight train that uses locomotives instead of horses, pack mules, and human bearers...
The printing press put a lot of scribes out of work. That should be rectified by an enormous tax on each printing press (and printer) to cover the literally hundreds of scribes so replaced.
And don't get me started on tractors and other farm machinery!
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bullshit, I don't want the pay cut. If a machine can do your job better or more cheaply, you should be replaced with a machine and have to get a different job.
we don't need the kinds of unions that would fight progress and improvement.
No (Score:2)
We will never sacrifice to much for automation because the question itself is a red herring..
With automation technology, we already have the capacity to end all world hunger and live peacefully with technology doing most of the work for us. The problem is that people in power want to keep that power and will eternally make efforts to keep the poor oppressed and entrenched in their abysmal situations. The poor will never be rid of the powerful because they desire powerful people to exist to secure their sa
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The problem is that people in power want to keep that power and will eternally make efforts to keep the poor oppressed and entrenched in their abysmal situations.
Actually, the real problem is that capitalism is currently geared to be predatory by reward bad outcomes. Market sectors like food have a finite profitability selling even the most desirable goods because people can only eat so much. Human creativity found a way around this by making foods that don't register properly with the human brain. This was brilliant in terms of optimization problem solving but the result is rewarding bad behavior which has led to mass obesity and chronic health problems for mill
Re: No (Score:2)
I don't believe it is a panacea, but a universal basic income that is high enough for basic needs, but low enough to incentivize people to create, produce and add value would make rich people irrelevant. As long as poor people have access to sufficient capital then it doesn't matter of rich people have too much.
Re: No (Score:2)
The nobility still control the laws, the government, all the land, and all the productive capital. But hey - _everyone_ gets a piddly welfare check! Yay! Now we enjoy our serfdom!
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And exactly how long do you imagine that you'll be getting that UBI check when the wealthy control the laws, and you contribute nothing to their well-being?
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Depends - before or after they receive their drone-allocated bullet?
Moot Point (Score:5, Insightful)
If company A doesn't automate, and company B does, company A goes out of business.
In a free market, there's not a choice. Automation is happening. I'm making it happen, and a whole lot of you are as well. "Replaced with a small shell script" has exploded into, "Machine learning is better at directing calls than you are", and "AI can find patterns you can't."
We can piss and moan about whether or not it's good for workers (probably not), but it doesn't matter. It's happening.
The question is how we continue to function as a society when more and more people are unable to beat automation and are thus unemployable.
And sure, that's not the status quo now, but every new company that shows up is starting with more robots and automation and less workers. If the established businesses can resist automation for some reason, union or otherwise, all of the new ones will start there to get a leg up. It doesn't always work to the extent they hope (Tesla, e.g.), but it works, and there's no going back.
We're at the dawn of a new age where automation is better than the bottom 5%-10% of workers, and it's only going to increase from here. The question is how we deal with those (and us ourselves) who fall into that category.
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"If company A doesn't automate, and company B does, company A goes out of business."
This is not true, I still see loads of businesses that are competing against automation systems with human effort. Automation systems are not perfect and often times when they fuck up they just make bigger messes meaning more human effort to recover.
"In a free market, there's not a choice."
Why do people constantly make these worthless types of claims? We have not culturally changed enough for this to be the case yet. Perh
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> I still see loads of businesses that are competing against automation systems with human effort. Automation systems are not perfect and often times when they fuck up they just make bigger messes meaning more human effort to recover.
Of course, but you are now comparing humans to chaos. People often think that transformation happens like this: humans -> machines, but it actually happens like this humans -> chaos -> machines.
Once the machines are past the chaos phase, there are so few flaws that
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This is not true, I still see loads of businesses that are competing against automation systems with human effort. Automation systems are not perfect and often times when they fuck up they just make bigger messes meaning more human effort to recover.
In cases where automation is better, it will take over.
Automation is getting better every day.
So, yes, you are correct that there's still plenty of cases where humans are better, but the bigger point that you're missing is that the march towards increasing automation is inevitable.
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In cases where automation is better, it will take over.
Better in what way?
I see lots of "automation" that really isn't, the end result isn't actually better than what was before, but it gets pushed in and forced through anyway because "it's the future". This is the giant straw elephant in the room.
Automation is getting better every day.
The techniques employed will indubitably improve, and it's likely to become more pervasive and ubiquitous for a while yet, but whether the end result is "better" is not a given at all.
According to the summary (the original doesn't render here) we can only afford so mu
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Better in what way?
More efficient/profitable for the company using it.
Simply enough humans deciding that they don't want to go there is enough to prevent us going there.
No, because as the GP argued, as soon as company B uses a more profitable way to generate business (using automation), they'll force business A to do the same thing, or drive them out of business.
And even if we adopt a legal framework that would forbid all business to replace humans by machines, then you get the same competition on a global scale. Other countries will have different laws, and they'll end up dominating.
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It is not a given that "more automation" implies "more efficiency" or "more profilt".
The perception is often that it is, but it doesn't always work out that way.
AC, you're missing the forest for the trees. Nobody is saying, "Automation is always better than humans the first time it's tried." Yes, there are missteps, fits and starts. But the march of progress is unstoppable.
Where one company is unsuccessful, another eventually will be. New materials, techniques, engineering, software, you name it, come along all the time. And once that new process is implemented, everyone else follows or falls behind.
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The problem is that the people making the immediate decisions in our society, - the "village elders" as it were, are business executives who will likely profit handsomely from automation, and have a long track record of evidence that they generally don't care about the impact on the population unless it interferes with profits, and especially not long-term impacts that may not fully manifest for years or decades.
We could try to fight back with boycotts of companies selling almost identical goods and service
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In the past the upper classes required the cooperation of the manual-labor classes to maintain their position - so anything that sufficiently disrupted the laborers could bring down society, and there was motive to treat them at least as well as your other draft animals. But as you eliminate the need for those laborers they become dead weight on the system, and the only limit on the quality of their treatment is the conscience of the upper classes and their chosen professional class.
I don't disagree. The issue is that being short-sighted about the long-term consequences of this is both likely and incredibly disruptive to everyone, rich and poor alike.
The upper class is still going to want a lot of things that are only available because of the lower classes. They are going to want exotic foods, movies, music, roads, jewelry, wines, the internet, furniture, houses, cars, planes, etc. All of these things require vast supply chains that depend wholesale on the bottom half of society. The
Re: Moot Point (Score:2)
So you're basically saying the vast majority of the world will work in artisan bakeries or as limo drivers for the rich?
The industrial revolution created jobs in industry, thus people moved to the cities and took manufacturing jobs (it was a mass migration). Future automation is not creating new forms of employment for those that are displaced and if you are honest you will realise you proved it with your own argument. Out of work lawyers are not going to move en masse to the local villages and become sel
This has been foreseen. (Score:2)
The question is how we continue to function as a society when more and more people are unable to beat automation and are thus unemployable.
This is where social safety nets are supposed to help people. Unfortunately, under the current US system there will be mass starvation which will increase crime and social unrest. In the event of an entire sector being wiped out in a period of a decade (e.g. manned transportation) extreme unrest will boil over. The reaction will either revolutionary or very tragic. The tragic outcome we be burnished with violence, starvation and death while the revolution (investing in citizens) will suddenly be confron
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"Ultimately, the future is full of resentment and social unrest. Prepare for the worst, strive for the best."
So just like the past then...
Humans were born in the fire of struggle. We clawed our way out of Africa and tamed every environment in which we gained purchase. Ever since, human society has been locked in cycles of domination and overthrowing; what is this weird idea that this is somehow new or different. The only thing that has changed is the scale of our ability to generate conflict and destruction
I remember a saying from years ago... (Score:2)
... whereby anything and anyone that can be measured, ...
"To manage something, you first have to measure it." I suppose that's true, but I'm not convinced that it's always 100%.
... and the development of machine learning ... "AI can find patterns you can't."
Ahh, yes. Here's one I'm sure it'll find:The Lack of Pirates Is Causing Global Warming [forbes.com]. A pic for those who can't read. [cbsistatic.com]
There was a SF book written a long time ago by James P. Hogan (who I really like, look up his books.) This one, The Two Faces of Tomorrow [goodreads.com], had an AI computer "assisting humans." Near the front of the book, 2 astronauts wanted a ridge on the moon cleared and sent of
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>Just because you've got robots doesn't mean it's always cheaper for every action.
It doesn't need to be - what we're facing is a situation where it's usually cheaper for an ever-growing number of actions, and the rate of growth is increasing. If automation is cheaper than humans for 80% of actions, then you work to compartmentalize those actions so you can do the work of five people with five robots and one guy that does the remaining 20% for all of them. And then you work on further streamlining your
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What's more, companies are never going to start up with humans doing everything at this point in history. New companies won't start with secretaries, they'll start with Siri and Ok Google. They're not going to design a line where a human is going to stand for 10 hr shifts sorting widgets, they're going to start with machine vision and RFID tagging of parts and design around that, such that you couldn't fit a human in there if you wanted to. They're not going to start with a bunch of rolled steel and an army
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One machine that runs 24/7 is already doing the work of more than 3 humans.
I'm sure the resources needed for those 3+ humans are more than that needed to build, run and maintain the machine. And I suspect actual cost to the 'employer/owner of machine' is less than 3+ humans, over not a very long time.
Machines will win in many industries, it's simply cheaper for the owner of the business.
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And machines can be cloned. Everyone who's worked in any business with any exposure to HR knows how much of a pain in the ass it is to recruit, interview, do background checks, hire, onboard, and supervise people. They know how much of a kick in the gut it is to have your foundation of institutional knowledge give their two week notice.
Need to do 2x as much with your machine? Install a new one and copy over the software. Machine died? Install a new one and restore from backup. FFS, if it's critical you can
Kaczynski (Score:1)
This is the anthropologist's take on the same problem the mathematician Unibomber's manifesto covered.
Our systems are too big to fail. Ourselves are too small not to obey.
Can anyone translate into coherent sanity? (Score:2)
Re: Can anyone translate into coherent sanity? (Score:2)
It made perfect sense. Maybe the problem lies elsewhere?
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Farm work, work around waste and trash, fishing, transport.
That was all going to be good.
Now robots are doing the service work. Then the computer networks will support entry level legal, medical, banking questions.
The world no longer needs a low of low skilled, low IQ people who can only do a job after getting a lot of support on how to do that job all day. W
nothing new (Score:2)
Since we first used a tool instead of our bare hands, we have been adjusting our lives to fit the tools and giving up our natural capabilities. Our ancestors were undoubtedly more diversely intelligent, socially adept, and stronger than we are, because they had to be.
Personally, I believe the only way back is forward. If we wish to retain relevance, we need to start incorporating the tools into ourselves instead of continually giving ground. It's time to evolve.
Metropolis (Score:2)
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we also forfeit agency Every time we use a computer, or any computationally based device... We do this by sitting or standing to use a keyboard, by typing, clicking, scrolling, checking boxes, pulling down menus, and filling in data in a way that the machine can understand.
Agency is the ability to act in your environment, not where you park your butt at work or how you move your arm. The workers in Metropolis had no agency and moved as directed by the machines. But someone who operates a computer is the one in control, even if controlling the computer involves providing input that is meaningful to it. Computers have vastly increased our agency, our ability to act as well as the scope and complexity of our actions.
Hot Bot? (Score:2)
Why do the bots need heat? I thought electronics prefer cool temperatures. Cheap lubricants?
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Could be the plot of Soylent Green II.
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It seems like a dubious claim. Amazon says that it checks the temperature to maintain 73 degrees. (For our international friends, those are American degrees. 73 to us is slightly warmer than standard office temperatures, and nowhere near the well-done temperature for beef.)
Human agency... it's served us so well... oh wait. (Score:2)
Human agency is killing our planet. Has created the very capitalism that many posters are decrying. Has kept billons poor and suffering. Honestly, if you look at the data, we're not fit to have that kind of agency in a modern world. We did not evolve to be able to effectively manage thousands of employees. We didn't evolve to handle the responsibility of the life or death of the entire planetary ecosystem. Humanity is demonstrating again and again and again that we are cruel, vicious, callous and irres
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It's not just human agency. Every other species does the same thing in its own environment.
Competing exponential growth combined with finite resources will always cause situations such as these. People living today just were lucky to be born in an era of expanding resources, so it's been hidden for a while.
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Has kept billons poor and suffering.
This reminded me of a Heinlein quote.
"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded -- here and there, now and then -- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck."
Re: Human agency... it's served us so well... oh w (Score:2)
Well, he was just an author. That's no guarantee of correctness.
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Wrong.
Progress has lengthened human lifespan, brought better health and is bringing prosperity to more and more, uplifting them out of poverty.
You spew memes with no knowledge of reality.
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the world has 7.5 billion people, anon. pry your head out of your U.S.A. fixated ass and have a look around
human vs automation dilemma (Score:1)
This is a question that will not be answered by clever quips on Slashdot. Nor by the left-brained thinkers at Forbes or The Economist. The most inspired answer is in the deep analysis of a science fiction writer who lives in her mother's basement in East Springfield. Unfortunately no publisher has 'discovered' this writer, so you may never see her brilliant analysis of this topic.
Meanwhile, you may turn to me for answers. For the modest sum of a buck three-eighty I can offer the essentials in the field. In-
Re: human vs automation dilemma (Score:2)
I've seen it. It's not all its cracked up to be.
Human interaction is a value... (Score:2)
... all on its own. Ditching that for automation can have unintended consequences. Point in case: I actually like cute 20-something ladies making my coffee and asking me how I want it. Yeah sure, a robot probably can do it better and way cheaper and already knows what I want due to machine learning my habits, but a bot isn't that cute Japanese 22-year old. Huge difference. Robots need not apply for her job.
My 2 Eurocents.