I thought about this problem a bit more, and let’s drop speculation about what may or may not be possible in the future. And just talk about specific professions over the last 50 years.
Primary schoolteacher. That person has to give a lesson, in front of a limited number of students as children need personalized attention. So you need 1 teacher per about ~20 students, give or take 10, and that’s their full time job. Computers make it where the teacher can fill out their paperwork more easily, but there is more of it, so it’s about the same. Maybe they do slightly better a job than in the 1970s but the productivity is the same.
Janitor. You have a mop, a broom, brushes, a cart full of supplies. For large open areas there are electric floor washing machines of various types. Pretty sure all of this was available by 70s. Only improvement I know of is that companies don’t have their own staff to do it, they outsource, and the outsourcing firms may get slightly more labor per work week out of their workers.
Retail clerk. Once the bar code and register able to scan the code, look up the price, and add it to a total was readily available, late 70s at the latest, that’s about the limit. A clerk has to scan each item, and credit cards take about the same time as cash.
restaurant waitstaff, cook—totally unchanged
accountant—computers have automated huge swaths of it, but companies are far more complex than they were.
Anyways we can go down the list and find a long list of jobs that have changed minimally if at all. And therefore the productivity per worker cannot be expected to improve if the amount of human labor needed hasn’t shrunk. Some tasks, like nuclear plant worker, over time they have become less productive as more of them are needed per megawatt of power, due to more and more long tail risks being discovered.
And then you can talk about how you might get a meaningful increase in productivity from each of these roles. And, well, it’s all coming up AI. I know of no other way. You must build an automated system able to perform most of the task. Some (like schoolteacher) are nearly impossible, others like janitor are surprisingly hard, and some are being automated as we speak. (Amazon Go for retail clerks)
Some tasks, like nuclear plant worker, over time they have become less productive as more of them are needed per megawatt of power, due to more and more long tail risks being discovered.
It’s not just about discovering more tail risks but about having a different culture on risk in those companies. One example someone from the industry gave me is that they tell their workers in yearly seminars about how to avoid cutting themselves with paper.
Right. So this is one of those anti-progress patterns I see around. What happens internally to the company is that over the Very Serious People create some Very Serious Internal Processes like There Shall be Risk Management Training (on the prevention of papercuts). And anyone suggesting that maybe they could run the company more efficiently by skipping this training has to argue either (1) elders in the company were wrong to institute such training or (2) they (personally) are pro risk.
Hard to be “pro risk” in the same way if you spoke against, say, diversity quotas by definition you are for discrimination.
So over time the company adds more and more cruft—while not really deleting much—making it less and less economically efficient. This is why big rich companies have to constantly be buying startups for the technology, because they are unable to get their own engineers to develop the same tech (because those engineers are too busy/beat down by mandatory training). And why eventually most big rich companies fail, and their assets and technology get bought up by younger companies who, when the merger goes well, basically throw out the legacy trash. (except when the opposite happens, like in the boeing mcdonnell douglas merger)
Sure. Point is that this lets you go from 10 workers in a restaurant to 9.5 or other small increments. It’s not like the innovation of the tractor and fertilizer and other innovations, which have reduced farmers from 50% of the population (1900) to 2% (today).
To get this with restaurants the only way is intelligent robotics, at least the only way I can see. Other than just “everyone stops eating restaurant food and starts eating homogenous soylent packets.” We could automate that fully with today’s tech. Where today a restaurant with 10 workers gets replaced with 0.4 workers, who work offsite, and respond to elevated customer servers calls and elevated maintenance issues. (‘elevated’ means the autonomy tried and failed to solve the issue already. While automated maintenance isn’t too common, Amazon is experimenting with automated customer service, where in my experience a bot will basically just give a refund if you have any complaint at all about an order)
I thought about this problem a bit more, and let’s drop speculation about what may or may not be possible in the future. And just talk about specific professions over the last 50 years.
Primary schoolteacher. That person has to give a lesson, in front of a limited number of students as children need personalized attention. So you need 1 teacher per about ~20 students, give or take 10, and that’s their full time job. Computers make it where the teacher can fill out their paperwork more easily, but there is more of it, so it’s about the same. Maybe they do slightly better a job than in the 1970s but the productivity is the same.
Janitor. You have a mop, a broom, brushes, a cart full of supplies. For large open areas there are electric floor washing machines of various types. Pretty sure all of this was available by 70s. Only improvement I know of is that companies don’t have their own staff to do it, they outsource, and the outsourcing firms may get slightly more labor per work week out of their workers.
Retail clerk. Once the bar code and register able to scan the code, look up the price, and add it to a total was readily available, late 70s at the latest, that’s about the limit. A clerk has to scan each item, and credit cards take about the same time as cash.
restaurant waitstaff, cook—totally unchanged
accountant—computers have automated huge swaths of it, but companies are far more complex than they were.
Anyways we can go down the list and find a long list of jobs that have changed minimally if at all. And therefore the productivity per worker cannot be expected to improve if the amount of human labor needed hasn’t shrunk. Some tasks, like nuclear plant worker, over time they have become less productive as more of them are needed per megawatt of power, due to more and more long tail risks being discovered.
And then you can talk about how you might get a meaningful increase in productivity from each of these roles. And, well, it’s all coming up AI. I know of no other way. You must build an automated system able to perform most of the task. Some (like schoolteacher) are nearly impossible, others like janitor are surprisingly hard, and some are being automated as we speak. (Amazon Go for retail clerks)
It’s not just about discovering more tail risks but about having a different culture on risk in those companies. One example someone from the industry gave me is that they tell their workers in yearly seminars about how to avoid cutting themselves with paper.
Right. So this is one of those anti-progress patterns I see around. What happens internally to the company is that over the Very Serious People create some Very Serious Internal Processes like There Shall be Risk Management Training (on the prevention of papercuts). And anyone suggesting that maybe they could run the company more efficiently by skipping this training has to argue either (1) elders in the company were wrong to institute such training or (2) they (personally) are pro risk.
Hard to be “pro risk” in the same way if you spoke against, say, diversity quotas by definition you are for discrimination.
So over time the company adds more and more cruft—while not really deleting much—making it less and less economically efficient. This is why big rich companies have to constantly be buying startups for the technology, because they are unable to get their own engineers to develop the same tech (because those engineers are too busy/beat down by mandatory training). And why eventually most big rich companies fail, and their assets and technology get bought up by younger companies who, when the merger goes well, basically throw out the legacy trash. (except when the opposite happens, like in the boeing mcdonnell douglas merger)
Ordering at MacDonalds is very different then it was in the past. You can now both order and pay digitally.
For cooks Googling finds https://magazine.rca.asn.au/kitchen-innovations/ . According to it there are various innovations in commencial kitchens like induction cooking.
Sure. Point is that this lets you go from 10 workers in a restaurant to 9.5 or other small increments. It’s not like the innovation of the tractor and fertilizer and other innovations, which have reduced farmers from 50% of the population (1900) to 2% (today).
To get this with restaurants the only way is intelligent robotics, at least the only way I can see. Other than just “everyone stops eating restaurant food and starts eating homogenous soylent packets.” We could automate that fully with today’s tech. Where today a restaurant with 10 workers gets replaced with 0.4 workers, who work offsite, and respond to elevated customer servers calls and elevated maintenance issues. (‘elevated’ means the autonomy tried and failed to solve the issue already. While automated maintenance isn’t too common, Amazon is experimenting with automated customer service, where in my experience a bot will basically just give a refund if you have any complaint at all about an order)