Submitted by pradej t3_y0ikyi in singularity
As most people work an office job of some sort, when these roles start becoming automated is when people will really start noticing how much society will change.
I feel like everyone assumes fastfood/taxis/warehouse jobs will mostly be automated within say 5-10 years.
But what about core jobs like your typical office job? When do you think they will start becoming automated in large amounts?
Rooms full of Draftsmen in factories are gone replaced by CAD, Engineers process their own drawings now. Fewer engineers too, b/c modern design programs do a lot of the calculations that they used to have to perform manually.
I worked for one, I was in an office space that was ~2500sqft shared by 4 engineers, used to sit ~30 draftsmen
What even is an "average office job" in 2022? Do you mean like data entry? Accounting? Sales? Design? Research and Development?
Excellent point. The goal posts are constantly moving. The only thing all “office” jobs have in common is that they take place mostly indoors. And email. Way too many emails…
As for when? There are many startups working on automated data entry, customer support, accounting/finance, robotic process automation,writing and many other office related tasks - an of course many jobs like accounting, supply chain management and many others.
A lot of it is relatively new, some of it just became possible because of AI.
So it's just a matter of time.
I think most jobs (including office jobs) will be automated in the 2020's and all jobs will be automated in the 2030's. Universal basic income has to be implemented to support people until nanofactories are created (at which point, people will be able to completely support themselves).
Could you elaborate on the link between nanofactories and people's independence?
The nanofactory will be capable of rearranging atoms in any way permitted by the laws of physics, and all that's required to run the machine will be air, dirt, and water, so the moment the nanofactory is created, post-scarcity emerges.
You might think that such powerful technology will only be available to the rich, but every nanofactory will be able to created another nanofactory, ad infinitum, meaning that there will be no way for corporations to stop everyone from having their own nanofactory.
Isn’t it world ending if everyone has a printer that can instantly create horrific weapons? Or is that balanced out by everyone having one?
Yes. You'll have to sacrifice your privacy or live on the frontier away from the core of civilization if you want personal use of this tech.
What makes you think nanofactories like the ones you speak of are even possible? You’re essentially talking alchemy. Is there any indication of this happening now?
Isn’t this what pharmaceutical companies do, rearrange atoms? And bakeries? And chip manufacturers? Isn’t this already happening, but in safe and tested ways that are highly reproducible?
There's no molecular manufacturing happening now.
lol, do you seriously believe that a multi-trillion dollar tech won't be patented? And you do realize that self-replicating nanobots could wipe out the planet in a matter of minutes? So your brilliant idea is that everyone should have one?
Patents typically have expiration dates. Even then, parents only stop you from commercializing something, not making it. If such a nanofactory were to exist, DRM would go further in preventing people from making their own than a patent would. Like, it could in theory make anything, but it's locked down to not make weapons or copies of itself.
and with ML/AI able to crack just about anything, how long do you imagine it would stay "locked down" for?
I figure that by the time any of this is real, we'd have quantum-resistant cryptography.
Another input is energy… lots and lots and lots of energy is needed to manipulate atoms.
Yeah, so it's good that we'll have unlimited energy soon.
well the only and very serious problems before getting to the stage you are describing is this.
The quality of earths natural environment (climate change, resource production, over population, raising temperature etc)
and also foreign relations such as US and Russia, Ukraine Russia etc. (nuclear warefare) if these all go well then i completely agree with what you are saying but we have to see if it will come to fruition
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And they probably weren’t even considering the caliber of ai we are seeing emerge now.
Seems like nobody was
Sooner than later. Check this out.
Whoa
The job losses usually appear in the form of slowing down new hires. People retire or quit and less and less of those losses are replaced over time. This is probably the major way job losses in a given sector occur, rather than big dramatic layoffs directly attributed to automation. Of course the end result is the same in the long run...jobs in a given sector gradually disappear.
In the 2030s if not earlier, not all office jobs but a lot of them.
Probably first jobs to be taken will be office one and then the delivery guy. Office work is easier than navigating in enviroment and delivering food.
Delivery jobs will last a while yet. AI can't open doors, pick up packages walk to the delivery point and hand the item to people.
It doesn't necessarily need to. Someone circa ~2005 might have said that you can't automate a grocery cashier/bagger, because a robot would have a tough time orienting barcodes towards a scanner and bagging groceries without wrecking them. Turns out a lot of people are fine scanning and bagging their own groceries. You only had to make a better UI for the register, and add enough security to convince corporate that people weren't stealing too much. People would probably be fine walking to the end of their driveway to pick their package out of a small delivery bot.
An alternative that I thought of a while back would be to have a delivery truck with a bunch of drones. The truck parks when it gets to a neighborhood, and drones ferry packages to doorsteps.
Even if you just cut out delivery jobs with something like the above in suburban and rural areas, that's still a lot of jobs.
Average office jobs started disappearing in the 1980s with the advent of the PC.
There were huge waves of corporate right-sizing. Things like typing pools don’t really exist anymore.
I expect the next wave to start next year. AI-generated art has reached a point where it can dramatically reduce (but not eliminate) corporate labor requirements for art production.
Another year or two and text generation AIs will start replacing programmers in bulk. It won’t eliminate programmers completely, but the few remaining will have very different jobs.
How do you think the job of a programmer will change? Do you think they'll be more of an ML/AI type of engineer? More data engineering? Less web development, but more complicated computer science stuff?
> Another year or two and text generation AIs will start replacing programmers in bulk.
Nope. In two years AIs will be more useful and will make less errors in the produced code snippets than, say, copilot, but you can't scale a language model enough for it to be able to make sense of even relatively small codebase to meaningfully contribute to. The AIs for starters need to have episodic and working memory to replace or vastly improve performance of an average programmer.
The demand for programmers could decrease a bit (or not grow as fast as it could), but no bulk replacement yet.
And no, it's not "my work is too complex to be automated that fast" (I'm a programmer). The current AIs do lack in certain aspects like memory, explicit world models, long-term planning, online learning, and logical thinking. I find it not feasible for those shortcomings to be overcome in a year or two. Maybe in 5-10 years.
>you can't scale a language model enough for it to be able to make sense of even relatively small codebase to meaningfully contribute to
They were saying similar things about text-to-art just last year.
Superficially similar maybe. There are real technical reasons why you can get a pretty picture using the existing technology, but cannot employ the same technology to analyze a small codebase (say, 10000 lines of code).
With no operating memory other than its input buffer a transformer model is limited in the amount of information it can attend to.
For pictures it's fine. You can describe a complex scene in a hundred or two of words. For code synthesis that is doing more than producing a code snippet you need to analyze thousands and millions of words (most of them are skipped, but you still need to attend to them even if briefly).
And here the limitation of transformers come into play. You cannot grow the size of input buffer too much, because required computations grow quadratically (no, not exponentially, but quadratic is enough when you need to run a supercomputer for months to train the network).
Yes, there are various attempts to overcome that, but it's not yet certain that any of them is the path forward. I'd give maybe 3% on something groundbreaking appearing in the next year.
5-10 years ago everyone said fast food would be automated in 5-10 years...
Yeah, I think people underestimate how much corporations focus on the short-term over the long-term.
It's a lot simpler than that. The systems are not ready. If they had a turnkey system that could do it we'd have it.
It will eventually happen. Almost every grocery store has self checkout lanes now. But it took quite awhile. CVS finally got them in the last year.
Ditto for "driverless cars". Elon Musk keeps saying it's this year... eventually he will be right if he says it every year.
They could automate drive through ordering yesterday. They don't (and I'm speculating) because the economy is far more top-directed than we realize and "the powers that be" know that eliminating jobs too quickly will cause riots.
The Fed exists to create employment, and the Fed is what props up the stock market where the McDonalds of the world get their funding.
Henry Ford said that if the average person understood how the economy really works there would be riots, and I think this is a glimpse of that. The economy is not really about making money - these big, Fed linked companies, essentially get free money - the economy is really about control over the population and solidification of the class system, i.e. the economy is not necessarily about efficiency - it's about power, and the last thing the ruling class wants is revolution.
I agree with a lot of that, but they keep cashiers because they need subs for cooks when they go on break and drive thru to hand the food over.
When robots gets a little further along we'll see a feasible shift.
I'm talking about the person who takes your order, but I agree that a few fast food jobs are irreplaceable - for now. I've notice that many chains still have not open their dining rooms back up. They are basically anticipating drive through to be like a giant vending machine. No humans other than to maybe stock the machine every week.
That is the future. If I was wealthy right now I would buy up a large restaurant in a nice area. Keep one kitchen and split it into 3 micro restaurants and rent the space out to three small businesses. 3 counters - no seating possibly a drive thru.
I am in tech/marketing design. I would offer all my services in exchange for profit percentage to get them all set up with a good brand, marketing and online ordering.
People want quick delivery/pickup, less interaction with affordable prices.
i believe that began decades ago... where have you been?
They are mostly gone already
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Scary stuff!
The "average" job has been disappearing for more than a century, changing what the "average" job is. It is happening right now, and will just speed up.
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Prompt based computing is probably when office workers will begin to lose their jobs. If all I need to do is say "get a list of all the addresses on the street in Google maps and import them into autocad at their proper coordinates" and it does the work then at least 30% of office workers just went out the door.
According to experts we are two years away from that (I've also heard three)
Office workers have already mostly lost their jobs. The economy is propped up to prevent revolution. The jobs are fake, and the pandemic proved it. You can find stories from "the average office worker" all over Reddit talking about how their job is basically just sending a few emails a day, attending a pointless Zoom and then browsing Reddit for the remaining 7 hours.
When all the Boomers are dead we can start to talk about it.
Nearby_Personality55 t1_irs246n wrote
If you're over 45 then you have already seen a ton of office jobs disappear, even more if you're over 60. We don't have typing pools anymore. You don't have the records clerk at a hospital who works there 30 years and retires with a pension. There is a ton of office work that no longer exists and a lot is because a smaller number of workers can do a larger amount of work with modern computers.
A young woman used to be able to get an office job with a typing certificate and a high school diploma.
A lot of my arguments with Boomers have been around the fact that the same jobs just are not available for Gen X and younger.
So basically we've always expected office work to go away, and now office work requires a degree, an unpaid internship, and some nepotism to even get. Which speaks to its having largely already gone away.