Every human used to have to hunt or
gather to survive. But humans are smart-ly lazy so we made tools to make our
work easier. From sticks, to plows to tractors we’ve gone from everyone needing
to make food to, modern agriculture with almost no one needing to make food —
and yet we still have abundance.
Of course, it’s
not just farming, it’s everything. We’ve spent the last several thousand years
building tools to reduce physical labor of all kinds. Mechanical muscles —
stronger, more reliable, and more tireless than human muscles could ever be and
that's a good thing. Replacing human labor with mechanical muscles frees people
to specialize and that leaves everyone better off even though still doing
physical labor. This is how economies grow and standards of living rise.
Some people have specialized to be
programmers and engineers whose job is to build mechanical minds. Just as
mechanical muscles made human labor less in demand so are mechanical minds
making human brain labor less in demand.
This is an
economic revolution. You may think we've been here before, but we haven't. This
time is different…
PHYSICAL LABOR:
The old
kind of automation, the one you are probably thinking about, are the giant
mechanical arms in big car manufacturers, that really only take a very small
percentage of works, but not anymore…
Meet
Baxter, a robot programmed not to do a certain task, but rather to learn how to
do a whole bunch of low skilled task. This is what we may call a “general
purpose” robot, which costs cents on electricity, rather than minimum wage.
Baxter may only be the beginning, but sooner rather than later robots could
take over a lot of low skill works, for example a janitor.
AUTOMOBILES:
Self-driving
cars aren’t the future, they are here. They already exist and have driven
hundreds of thousands of miles in streets. So the question isn’t “will they
take over human transportation work?”, But rather “when?” Self-driving cars don’t
need to be perfect, just better than humans, which they already are since they
don’t text and drive, get drunk, sleepy, etc.
CREATIVITY:
Our
brain is complicated to simulate, maybe impossible, but that hasn’t stopped us
from trying. Robots have been programmed to create pattern, unique patterns
every time, in the form of music, paintings, etc. Maybe you are a unique
creative snowflake, but automation is coming for you as well, robots like Emily
Howell who writes music all day, for free.
PROFESSIONS:
Surely
professionals are safe, they are experienced and have studied hard to get to
where they are, well, no. When you think of a lawyer you think of trials and
intelligence, but its really getting the evidence organize for the convenience of
your client. This normally includes going through a lot of paper work, but specialized
robots can go through hundreds of documents in seconds.
Doctors
you ask? Well meet IBM’s Watson whose day job is to be the best doctor there
is.
You may have seen him, not beat, but destroy humans in
Jeopardy, but that was only an experiment. He is already giving diagnosis and
treatments for lung cancer patients. And again, robots don’t need to be
perfect, they just need to be better than humans.
CONCLUSION:
This post is not made to say that
automation is bad, rather to say that it’s inevitable. We don’t need to be
scared, just prepare ourselves when, for most jobs, Humans Need Not Apply.
Video
CREDITS: Information from and video property of the CGP Grey Youtube Channel (https://www.youtube.com/CGPGrey)
