Submitted by Shelfrock77 t3_yer544 in singularity
Until we have automation that can design, install, maintain, and upgrade itself, we are going to need engineers to do so. I can tell you as someone trying to hire skilled engineers right now, it's only getting worse out there. We don't have the educated population to maintain our path of global innovation.
The less people need to do other jobs the mor engineers you can have. Not everyone can be an engineer but there is more people who can be engineers than those that actually become engineers.
Those people go work on Wall Street instead.
Somewhat true. One of my profs wanted initially to work in a financial firm but at the end said fuck it. Wall Street will (or at least should if not even must) loose importance so we should free up more potential engineers.
Lose
Let loose the Import Ants!
Maybe we shouldn't have made military service a prerequisites for higher education for the majority of the population?
But think of the profits of warmongering weapons manufacturers!
SERVICE GUARANTEES CITIZENSHIP!
That joke just emanates more cruelty as the years go by.
It's the same amount of cruelty but just more evident as the years better reveal the hypocrisy inherent in Western Capitalism cloaked in jingoistic bullshit.
We don’t need a complete solution to have massive efficiencies. A car used to take 1000 workers to build in 1980. Today it takes fewer than 250 workers… and even fewer at a Tesla plant.
A gas car has 2000 moving parts. An electric car has 100. It takes way less effort to design, source, build, and test an electric car than a gas car.
Automation can actually design and code it's self now. People have no idea how advanced the next gen of robotics will be. It will be near human and the only thing we need to worry about is the power source. It will be here in 2 years.
Robots will NOT be near human in 2 years. Are you saying that in 2 years, a robot will be able to drive itself to someone’s house in a work truck, and perform any plumbing job that a human can? More like 20-30 years.
I agree on the unrealistic expectation of 2 years. The closest thing to human agility we have is Boston Dynamics robots which use hand-tuned dynamic control algorithms. This approach is not scalable by itself and it's unlikely that it will be integrated with machine learning approaches in 2 years. Or that the transformer-based robotic control will scale to realtime control of humanoid (or equally complex) robot.
But at some point AI controlled robots will start feeding back into manufacture of AI hardware. At that point AI-based economy will explode by removing inefficiencies of human-based economy (coordination problems, lengthy learning time, wages and so on).
It will not take much time after that for operating cost of a universal robot to sink below minimum wage.
Every year that passes increases probability of such an explosion. So 2040s can (and most likely will) be in an entirely different era than 2030s.
That's why I distrust confident technological predictions on the scales of 20 years or more.
The main problem besides the AI is the robot hands. We have nothing that is even close to the strength, speed, flexibility and agility of the human hand, and it may be an engineering problem that would require exotic materials to achieve.
Ah, engineering problems. They are certainly a factor. However, AIs seem to be good at coming up with potential solutions (take AlphaFold for example) and prototyping and testing could be made highly parallelized in AI-controlled R&D.
It’s possible, but it’s not close to being developed yet. I am baffled by the people who actually believe that we will have robots that can do anything a human can do in 2-3 years.
Yep, Gates' law: "Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years."
Bro, just trust him, bro. He reads about AI, so he knows.
agreed, 2-5 years
Still need people to repair them. That's what the future will be. Repair techs, managers, safety teams, compliance teams and HR.
The average person does not have the chops to become an engineer.
The average engineer does not have the chops to be an average person either. :o
Best!
You must have never met an engineer
I’ve worked with many. I don’t know what engineers are like where you’re from, but where I am, I can assure you most people would never get through 4 years of university math,physics an EE to even become an engineer. I’m sorry to hear the engineers where you’re from are idiots. Do buildings fall down a lot there?
I remember my first EE course freshman year of college after earning a reputation as a “smart guy” my whole life and I was like “This is difficult enough to learn, but you’re telling me some madman just sat around and invented this, from scratch?!”
That’s when I learned the difference between above average intelligence and genius.
The average citizen where you're from can't afford college and is an idiot? You must be American. Takes a real weirdo to need your fellow citizens to be powerless so non-threatening to feel good about yourself. Good luck in the coming years 🤧
I’m not American. And you missed my point.
The dude probably doesn't even have a degree, or if he does, it must be in a subject like history or art. Anyone who comes from a STEM background will know that engineering is a difficult major. It has one of the highest dropout rates.
I'm fairly confident in saying that the average person would be unable (or unwilling) to finish a bachelor's in engineering.
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LMAO that's probably because you have a degree in history or art. It's a well known fact that the majority of engineering students dropout.
Do you think it's likely that all of those students had experienced some unfortunate life-changing event which suddenly forces them to dropout, or is it more likely that they simply aren't smart enough to complete the degree?
Also, you shouldn't use words if you don't know the meaning of them. Genetics isn't the same as eugenics, idiot.
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Maybe AI won’t automate engineers but surely it will augment and improve the current workload?
Of course it will automate engineers. Many but not all engineering problems are described as a simple optimization problem you can autograde.
I think “autograding” is what a robotic teacher does, right? :)
Yeah basically. Typing on my phone but yes. Basically like if you want to engineer a gear train you are really asking for "the cheapest set of gears that does function X, has a 99 percent chance of working past warranty period Y, and fits in as small as space as possible".
So the machine can propose various gear sets and you can auto score how well it met the 3 terms I gave above.
It can use that score as an RL signal to propose better gears.
At scale - with millions of simulated years of practice and hundreds of thousands of variations of the "design a gear train" problem - even a very stupid algorithm that learns poorly will still be better than any human alive.
Simply by brute force - it has more experience and can propose a thousand solutions in the time a human engineer needs to propose one.
I don't think it'll be a huge issue if there are enough workers and it's just a matter of there not being enough with the proper qualifications in a particular field. There are many things you can do to encourage people towards certain jobs that we mostly just don't want to invest in. Make tuition and housing free for anyone in that course as long as they're passing their classes and guarantee them a good job afterwards. We need to be willing to invest in the kind of workers we have shortages of.
Not only is it getting worse but so are standards. Imagine how many incompetent engineers are out there.
On top of that because demand is so high there is essentially zero benefit to working hard and bettering yourself. They do not reward hardwork in tech at all, they just promote you instead. That's how they can justify it to their investors. I want to be paid more for what I do, not take on more responsibilities.
Sry for the rant. It's been a day.
Automated tools will allow 1 engineer to maintain 100 robots.
Probably won't even take an engineer just a technician working remotely.
Actual engineers are generally level 3 or level 4 of tech support chains.
a decade in engineering:
it's been happening for a while, cad/cam improves, less engineers needed, ai is already in common use to optimize structures...
it's just a matter of time before the majority of people just aren't competent enough to be useful...
So the automation will be developed regardless of if usaians are available to do it. China is investing heavily in AI also and has less obstructive regulations actually enforced. (They care a lot less about the risks to workers and pollution)
A shortage of workers means more potential profits for automation.
We absolutely do have the numbers. What we also have is a gross misalignment in the economy where many developers and engineers are being paid to make bullshit, and a lot of them are doing redundant work because the idiotic "competition is always good no matter what" stance of capitalism, even when it's purely wasted effort.
In addition, a lot of people who are smart and hard working enough to be engineers simply don't have reasonable access to education.
We do still need more educated people, but we could be putting who we have to more productive use.
AI has entered the chat.
The labor shortage is NOW in 2022. Automation isn't here yet to fill up the empty job openings yet.
If only they paid living wages then that labor shortage would disappear like magic.
There are more job openings in the world than workers to fulfill those roles, so no. That's not the case. Even if the job would provide everything somebody would want there would still simply be too few people to fulfill those roles.
The true solution is to automate away those jobs but we don't have the technology yet and having children takes ~18 years before they can enter the workforce.
So we're going to experience a crisis of labor shortage one way or the other. There's no real solution going forward just a notice that things are about to get worse.
Unless you're working class/lower middle class. Then things are going to be great as employees have to compete for your labor which will result in higher compensation and working conditions.
We do not have to produce soo many things if there is less people so a lot of jobs will dissapear if the population is becoming smaller
Not how it works. There is an explosion in job applications right now because of the transition to a digital economy. Digital goods are already unlimited, meaning if there are fewer consumers it doesn't mean a (programmer/artist) just has to produce less. The worker needs to produce the same amount, the end product just gets distributed to fewer people digitally at the end, which doesn't impact it as much.
Yes so fewer people will pay for the digital product and it will not be profitiable to compete if the costumers can not pay for the digital products and services
What if... In the movie "Sleep Dealer", some tasks in "first world" countries were conducted by residents of second/third-world countries, remotely. What if we could engineer process that would make those jobs available to robots/remote humans?
At some point. Meanwhile, in my hood I've got restaurants and stores limiting hours and, in some instances, outright closing because the can't find employees. There's going to be a lot of pain throughout the system as the new automation integrates itself.
If only they paid living wages then that labor shortage would disappear like magic.
Paid living wages and lowered working hours so they have lives outside of work*
The margins are so thin that it often isn't possible to do that. It's not like restaurants choose to shut down because they're really that obstinate about wages, the math just often doesn't work out.
What I see around here is the rent the restaurants have to pay make it really hard to be profitable.
I was talking about this to my friends the other night. Restaurants are in an especially hard place right now. Inflation means people go out to eat less. Supply issues mean everything costs more. Labor shortage and wage hikes means hiring workers is difficult. Inflation also means rents have skyrocketed.
Restaurants are just taking hit after hit after hit. And that's considering that most restaurants fail within a couple of years of opening, anyway.
Something I can't explain myself is why more restaurants didn't jump on a more digital process?
I have seen a few (chain) restaurants where most of the process is supported by an app/website/tablet where you can book your table, see the menu, order stuff and pay for it.
This makes it much easier for the staff and optimizes a lot of the flow. It doesn't remove the ability to ask a human to help you and it makes reordering much easier. Add some AI to the mix and recommandations/promotions could be very opportunistic.
I was at a Panera the other day, and they only allowed ordering from the kiosk in store. They had no one to run the registers. It actually went pretty quick.
Then we have to ask should that business even exists then? I think any business which can't pay living wages shouldn't exists.
There wouldn't have been, had it been introduced years and years and years ago when it should have; nor would it have been as much of a struggle if human beings were actually being paid properly during the transition.
Thank God.
On the bright side, wages should go up. Oh no. Wait. All that worker demand will go to something that can work longer hours with far fewer defects or failures in output, no expectation of better working conditions or workers safety, other than the usual maintenance which is completely mutually beneficial and probably 100% automatable, doesn't require pay or benefits, won't likely be the object of or the instigator of sexual harassment, most likely would consumes far fewer overall resources per unit of output especially when you add in the defect/error rate, as far as anyone can tell really likes what it does and never tries to do anything else (no job ghosting or moonlighting), and a million other reasons I don't have the time or patience to detail, but I think ya get the point. Finally, we'll be able to what we want instead of what we have to too.
>Finally, we'll be able to what we want instead of what we have to too.
Well, for certain definitions of "we" anyway.
Automate my sponge bath and diaper change, just picture that
something like this: https://youtu.be/X5i0JU_NsZU?t=419 (7.00)
and if you'd prefer a dub (but the video is worse quality): https://youtu.be/itg4zKaUMgY?t=435 (7.15)
That was everything I imagine and more
A lot of these articles really don't need to be posted here. That title is just silly.
Yeah. I don't know why this certain person spams all irrelevant links here all the time. If I wanted to read articles like this I would go to /r/Futurology. People shortage has nothing to do achieving singularity.
Agreed!
Yeah, this is actually great news. Those jobs are leaving no matter what…
Bold prediction. We need enough workers to build all that automation first.
Sure, but it is not like that we need to build 10 billion robots with human hands. No, once we have achieved certain level of AI we don't need humans to do that. After that robots can build and maintenance robots. Robots factories build automatically robots with very minimal supervising from humans.
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If only these researchers knew what singularity is
The singularity won't come by itself, we have to work hard towards it. There's lots of work in transitioning.
What is this article? Population is not really expected to decline in the next 40 years, barring massive sudden and unexpected events.
Yes, will population decline as it has started to in some of the most wealthy nations? Yes, but that is much different than the overall world population descending.
Yup. Peak world population projected as 10.4 billion in the 2080’s. https://reliefweb.int/report/world/world-population-reach-8-billion-15-november-2022-enarzh
I'll say the quiet part out loud: it's not the population that is in decline, it's the average IQ
Does anyone else think aging will be solved by the time this happens?
Longevity Escape Velocity within forty years? Absolutely.
Yeah. I’d be surprised if we haven’t figured it out by then.
I'm not betting on aging being solved per se but I bet we will see many more cancers and conditions that kill people in old age treatable/curable by then and drastically expanding lifespan.
Less population, less demand.
And less to maintain, the media just loves to make up fake problems
The problem is that the working population will decrease faster than the population itself, as the proportion of retirees will continue to grow over time
That's why automation and robotisation is so important.
row-botz
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Robots anyone? Sheesh
Christ sakes. People are more than just workers. They’re also consumers. Decrease in demand will be met with decrease in supply. Net neutral. Oh, and robots
The population will be older though, many in need of resources and care they can't provide for themselves. Japan is probably the country to watch and see what happens, since they lead on this trend.
Have these researchers ever heard of A.I.?
It's a wild new concept, maybe they're not quite up to speed yet!
The future isn't built for us to work. That's the job of AI to replace work and most likely innovate a way around traditional work through technology.
My hope is that AGI will be so intelligent, so useful, that it can solve most of the worlds issues. The need for money would be completely arbitrary if something like a replicator existed, and I'd fail to see why someone would keep that from others. What power would there be to gain from normal people by elites if AGI could do anything? What importance would that relationship have?
The need for menial labor would be gone, and the idea of scarcity would be gone as well. Regular folks wouldn't have anything to offer. The whole world would have to restructure from the economic collapse that would ensue, and what would be rebuilt would hopefully be a united human race.
The idea of greed in this scenario might only be a factor for a short period - until the cats out of the bag.
No one can afford kids anymore.
Yeah A.I. Is bonkers advanced it will be robots for everything soon.
Weren't people freaking out about over population like 5 years ago? This seems like a bunch of sensationalist bullshit. Truly not sure which side is correct in this, but I think the root of the issue is poverty not overpopulation or underpopulation.
Robot rolls its unblinking eyes
imo this is a direct result of the sharp decline in the future financial stability caused by the greediest generation ever born. Climbing the ladders of society and then promptly locking all the doors behind them and installing further measures to disqualify more of the population from obtaining the same. (Red tape).
I won't care because i've spent 20 years building my skills through various trades/assignments/jobs to not have to depend on anyone. I'm just as comfortable with a hammer and nails building a house as i am troubleshooting a microcontroller or writing code. I've re-wired houses, installed PV set-ups, built numerous tiny homes, changed my transmission on my truck, you name it, i do it.
Until the "status quo" remove the 75,000$ barrier to entry for an over-rated piece of paper that states you can pay universities and memorize and regurgitate facts as opposed to genuinely understanding the principals at hand and understanding the engineering, i'll never use any of these skills to help the older generation due to their attitudes about the situation and lack of empathy towards destroying an entire generations future.
Lol why is that people who don't have a university-level education are always the most critical of it? Do you truly believe that it's possible for someone to get through a math-related degree simple by regurgitating facts?
I think it's horseshit that is so heavily paywalled. As per maths related degrees, yes, understanding the how and why interactions between equations etc requires instruction, but the heart of this article is about population decline and lack of work force, getting "great paying work" for the mass majority (not including entrepreneurs, or other outlying situations) this mass of wealth requires a giant paywall to make a living wage. If you've not been blessed with super stable life, the 80% of jobs out there, vs cost of living are simply inequitable. It doesn't make sense to populate anymore. The societal economics of the country are fundamentally destroyed because the hamster wheel of chasing a better life doesn't exist anymore. Most things are unattainable without disproportionate sacrifice
Good
Robots to the rescue
In 40 years there aren't going to be any jobs for (non-augmented) humans anymore. AI is coming like a tsunami and any projection about the job market that doesn't account for that is going to be hilariously wrong.
You mean it won’t be the vaccine that depopulates is?
Societal collapses and apocalypses have been predicted countless times, and they've always been wrong. This latest prediction will be no different. AI, automation, and robotics will become a gigantic factor, providing virtually unlimited "workers" and labor.
And what robots won’t be more common and sophisticated by then? Like the robotics industry is just going to stop progressing over the next 40 years along with other automation and AI?
Except for the ever increasing number of increasingly sophisticated, artificially intelligent robots who will be able to do just about everything.
Tesla Bot. Easy
all departments at my grocery store are already running low on staff...nobody seems to want to apply...I work in the meat and seafood area, and a month or two ago we had enough employs to manage the place, but they left...now we are down to a skeleton crew, its getting kinda bad already...
20 feet of water covering coastal cities will kill more people (and the economy) well before the great people shortage occurs.
What would scaling back business/economic growth look like? Is the need to automate so that we can continue to increase an excess standard of living or to prevent a dramatic decrease in standard of living. What jobs are most essential that aren't getting filled, are they being prioritized already? Why not?
Likely people getting poorer/stuff becoming more expensive
At Least the Planet will be overjoyed!☘️😂
Population decline will cause many, many more problems than just a worker shortage.
But continuing to grow the population will cause even more problems. We’ve built an unsustainable system with an embedded growth obligation on a planet that simply does not have the resources and something will have to give.
We could kill 99.99% of the population tomorrow and we wouldn't be short. We can't just keep having babies and using up the planet indefinitely. At some point the population will reach a steady state where we're hovering around the point of "so bad nobody will have kids".
See I always see this, but I also see that we're going to have mass unemployment due to AI replacing workers. Which is it? Of course many people would have to change what kind of work they do, but you can't have both catastrophic unemployment and a catastrophic worker shortage.
Dey took our jerbs!
We're in the beginning of the age where the labors of the poorly educated masses are no longer necessary. The approaching problem of this age is how to humanely deal with large unwanted populations that serve no useful function, the depraved economic imperative encouraging endless population growth by those that can't cope with change should be resisted by all means.
Trying to mess with population growth is dangerous business, you know.
capitalism can't last another 40 years... there's going to be plenty of work for everyone fixing our planet
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Yeah but if there’s les s people won’t there be less work overall
Yes, west and china population is declining rapidly. You can feel it in poorer EU countries that start to have shortage of workers for everything.
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality." Stephen Hawking, 2015 Reddit AMA
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ― Buckminster Fuller
"...This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals..." Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
Lost Einsteins: The US may have missed out on millions of inventors
Jobs for everyone and less people consuming the earth beyond it's capacity. How awful.
Greedy politicians and Billionaires have created this society with their fuck you i got mine policies
You're gonna have to mobilize every welfare recipient sitting on the couch. Get out them flaming whips.
Sometimes I'm amazed how solutions seem to come right as problems get too big to handle.
This article states that labor productivity is stagnating. This must be wrong, because there are everyday now posts on this subs from people who "feel" that progress is quickening. Statistics must be wrong.
I think it's because AI's impact on economy is still low
Yeah. Just a few elite companies are able to get AI to even work. You need a critical mass of skilled AI experts on one company, a bunch of other people to support the infrastructure required so the AI development is productive, and tens of millions in hardware. You need technically savvy managers who know the context of the decisions they are making, people person's who fake it can't make effective decisions on cutting edge ai projects.
Thos excludes almost all companies.
Steam engine was easy to measure because it has increased the things that were already consumed, but how do you measure a new thing like organ printing. My answer would be that you don't because it's stupid.
Healthier people are more productive/live longer, thus producing more
Those things can both be true simultaneously. The real problem is that most people don't understand economics.
I would have to know what exactly is labor productivity measuring. Is it a per capita average? If so that could be misleading.
Laughable to think human society will be about in 40 years time. It aint the lack of fucking and babymaking that will get us, it's the overpopulation and climate catastrophes.
They put this shit out to allude to the fact everything will still be fine and dandy in decades to come. Spoiler alert: >!It won't!<
it’s really crazy how hard this narrative has been getting shilled this year, the billionaires really want us to buy into this huh?
But more food for us living right?! World hunger is defeated!
Here's an idea, let's have a nuclear war and terminate half the world's population.
RavenWolf1 t1_itzg56w wrote
No it won't. Automation will take most jobs before that.