No Recent Automation Revolution - <AUTHOR> http://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/06/no-recent-automation-revolution.html <comment><USER5> Due to the Covid-19 lock down, my company was forced to accelerate our automation program. We did in months what we had originally planned to do in years. As we are able to open our operations center further, it's clear that we'll be providing fewer jobs than we did before. At least some part of that is the result of automation. I can't help but think this same pattern is playing out at other companies right now.

<comment><USER6> It really makes me sad that jobs are seen as inherently valuable. The way you phrase it, 'provide jobs', feels like jobs are something needed.

Of course, in the current setup, this is true, but there are so many boring and hard jobs (worked by people who are yet poor) that we shouldn't mourn once we manage to get rid of them.

I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly.

<comment><USER7> Unearned income is unfulfilling and the people who think they earned it resent it being taken from them, even if it's only particularly large because there's a big market to sell into and a big winner effect in the market structure.

I don't know the answers here but they don't look like free market capitalism or redistributive socialist utopia, and actually I think this axis or spectrum is an actively harmful frame for constructing a society with fulfilling lives and less inequality. Neither more government nor more free enterprise is quite right.

People want to live productive lives where they are valued and make a difference. How do you do that in a society which has such enormous returns on capital which alienates people from their work product?

<comment><USER8> If unearned income is unfulfilling, we should raise the estate tax, why should the children of the poor be so blessed to need to work while the children of millionaires and billionaires be saddled with the curse of ennui?

<comment><USER7> You might think you're being facetious, but many wealthy people don't want their children's lives to be wasted on consumption, and so limit their inheritance: enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing.

The most meaning in life comes from doing things for other people - <USER2> necessarily for money, but for other people.

I'd love if we could try and figure out a social, institutional, structural technology which doesn't require taxes (and thus politics and government) for this. Government slowly but surely gets captured by people with the biggest pockets, until populists take over and everything falls apart with simple wrong answers, or worse, kleptocracy.

<comment><USER9> >The most meaning in life comes from doing things for other people

Exactly. So we should set up a system that provides everyone with enough to meet their basic needs.

That way they can spend their time and effort to find the way they can most effectively do things for other people rather than finding the local maxima "job I can tolerate that keeps me alive"

<comment><USER7> The most effective means we have today for determining what we should do for other people is prices.

That means capitalism.

The downsides are lack of agency in large efficient orgs and unearned profits from capital.

I don't know the answer, but I don't think UBI + charity++ is it.

<comment><USER10> I don't personally buy this. If prices were the most efficient way of determining what we should do for other people, why does the government already subsidize certain medications? Or agriculture? Or public development/education? College education becoming increasingly expensive proves this false, I believe.

<comment><USER11> The core problem is that at the end of the day no one has to play nice. So we have to have government to set rules about ownership (among other things). But then some entity has to be in charge of government, which means they are actually in charge of allocating ownership. At current our only options consist of some structure made of humans, and even the best among these are corruptible. As such people who have power to corrupt this process (which is to say own the resources necessary to corrupt the process) can do so in an attempt to increase their own ownership. One example is political advertising to push an agenda that is likely to be more profitable. Be this a brick maker getting an agreement to have the new town hall made using bricks, or be this colleges having their customers being given access to large amounts of financing so they can raise their prices.

>College education becoming increasingly expensive proves this false, I believe.

Or is college education becoming more expensive because government has allowed for loans that can't be discharged to be given to people who have been given a false sense of the value college provides. This in turn means there is more demand (including the ability to actually purchase the desired product) for a product that isn't always worth it, increasing price?

One last consideration. Being the most efficient doesn't mean it is as efficient as one could theorize, only that it is more efficient than any alternative that can be put into practice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> An independent line of evidence looks at the formation of new occupations over time.

If automation were taking over jobs, or jobs were being refactored because some tasks are automated, then we'd expect to see new job titles appearing in employment advertising and classifications such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics's.

This does happen, as it has happened since the start of the Industrial Revolution. "Social Media Manager" is a new job that has arisen in the last several years, for instance.

But, and this is the point, this "job churn" been happening more slowly over the last 20 years than at any time since WW II.

That is also incompatible with the claim that an automation revolution is under way.

<comment><USER13> Also let's not forget that automation still means someone needs to write some code, which needs to be written, maintained, updated, synced with other projects etc. The act itself creates new jobs already.

For instance: In IT we also have this. Dev is the typical product development team, Ops is the team that takes care of keeping the lights on. Now with all the automation we have a new job called Devops which is somewhat in the middle betwen both Dev and Ops. We thought both groups would move to the middle and form this new Devops group. But what most companies did is completely hire from zero for their Devops teams.

Now what we see is that Devops is growing, while Dev and Ops are shrinking. But the sum of both shrinking groups is smaller than the sum of new Devops jobs.

<comment><USER14> Automation is generally done due to cost savings. So if you replace a thousand jobs, then you pay for automation less than you paid for these thousand jobs, so obviously there's less than thousand people involved in creating and maintaining and selling that automation. And if the automated jobs are low- paying jobs and the "automators" are mostly highly-paid engineers, then the gap is even larger.

If there's an engineer paid $200k + overhead for working on automation, then that only can happen if his/her job alone results in automating away ten $30k jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have very interesting process when taking vacation. Automation does not mean robots from movie "I Robot", some software can do the job too.

To take time off I must open shitty software, enter my vacation days, then print the sheet and sign it. My manager signs it too. Then I bring it to secretary, she signs too, confirms the date in shitty software. Secretary sends paper form to the HR lady, she checks, if it's ok and forwards my sheet to accounting lady. I see here a huge potential for automation, throwing at least 1st secretary and HR lady out of the process. This ancient process is happening in Germany, but automation will come sooner or later even here.

Edit: typos

<comment><USER16> All of that is automated at my company using SAP. Could be a nicer interface, but at least everything is online in the portal.

<comment><USER17> That's also why it's usually a multi-year project to introduce SAP systems at an existing company. The hard part is not installing the software (though I'm not saying it's always easy either). The hard part is getting all layers of the company to change away from their pre-existing, sometimes nonsensical processes.

(Disclosure: I work at SAP, though not on customer-facing software.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The horrors of the automation revolution have been on our collective mind for a long time. In the '70s this was one of my dad's favorite jokes:

"It's terrible, my father lost the job he had for decades. He was replaced by a clever mechanical gizmo just six inches long. And then my mom got one."

It plays on the fear of being emasculated by technology. Maybe that leads us to exaggerate the threat.

<comment><USER19> The fear is very real, not about emasculation, but a loss of identity in a society where "you are your job". I have seen this first hand in both people who weren't "essential" during COVID shutdowns (to their horror), and people who _were_ deemed "essential" but it was, in their words, "bullshit".

Automation is rapidly accelerating into the wall that is identity beliefs at scale, and there is evidence that these belief systems are fairly rigid, making adaption to change challenging to say the least.

The revolution won't be the automation. It'll be in us accepting that the job wasn't who we were/are and it's okay to let it go (caveat systems are in place to ensure quality of life is provided for at an agreed upon floor). It's just a job.

<comment><USER20> > The revolution won't be the automation. It'll be in us accepting that the > job wasn't who we were/are and it's okay to let it go

This is perhaps the only thing socialism got right. At least the flavor we had in Yugoslavia and the remnants it left on the psyche of my parent's generation.

You do your job, then you go home and live your actual life. The job exists as a way to "pay your dues" in society, but it isn't your life. Your life is home, family, the house you're building, maybe a little side business. That sort of thing.

My generation growing up in the 90's and 00's tossed that away and went full american. Hustle hustle. Doing your job is not enough. You must _love_ your job or you are a failure.

We have more prosperity and I sometimes wonder if our parents didn't have more life.

<comment><USER21> "Money doesn't buy happiness" is just something we tell the poor so they don't revolt -- this also applied to communism -- the communist elites lived a much better life materially and socially. Sure, average Ivan was "happy" because his neighbors had just as crappy flat, just as crappy car, just as crappy job, just as crappy food and so on and there was no way for him to "better" his life because money was meaningless because thats not what Ivan really lacked -- he lacked freedom to do as he pleased with his money.

My point was that people are competitive, social animals and social status is very important; sure, communism castrated a lot of those impulses and some people claim they were much happier back then, but its mostly bullshit nostalgia.

I was very young back then, but I remember the deprivations, my kindergarten educator slapping me for not applauding "dear leader", my parents just leaving me alone in the flat because they had to go the communist parades, being lectured in kindergarden how my parents jobs(doctors) were in fact less important than the jobs of other coleagues worker-parents jobs who "perhaps" made the syringes my parents could not do without; I remember people having to work on saturdays, night shifts and so on.

<comment><USER22> Having not lived through it, but having seen a glimpse of its aftermath living in Berlin a few years, it was very interesting to see the contrasts between the Ossis and Wessis (at least ones that were say, at least 18 in 1989). In general, I found the Ossis to be more friendly and open and fun loving. For example, an Ossi party would usually be louder, messier, and have worse food, but everyone would be laughing and a guitar might come out at some point. The typical Wessi party I experienced was perfectly catered, everyone was perfectly dressed, and it was in a perfect house, but people weren't necessarily having that much fun.

Now this is different in other parts of Germany, but it's an interesting natural experiment, because these guys were literally in the same city.

<comment><USER23> It's not exactly a novel concept. Compare your recollection of the low class Irish party scene on the Titanic. What's your imagination of a suburban house party or block party compared to the eloquent glitzy ballroom party by the well-to-do? Not many in society are expecting the well off to have much fun in gatherings amongst themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Yet automation equipment has boomed in the last 20 years. Factory floors are largely devoid of human beings. The US factory employment figures are down by more than half in that time, and that with a population that's doubled (so per-capita, factory occupations down to 25% or less or what it was).

Companies move to India or China, then some move back but with none of the assembly jobs, because they don't move back until the investment in automation is paid back efficiently.

Its easy to confuse 'automation across the job fields' with 'automation replacing people'. The first is slow - automation proceeds in rote assembly tasks and continuous-flow processes. But automation hasn't proceeded across the spectrum. I still get my fries from a human being. I still get my hair cut by Anton at a local shop. My car is fixed by Mr. Harapat (though it got assembled by a giant robot).

My nieces and nephews are automation Engineers. They are as busy as they can possibly be, changing plants over to automation. It's cost effective when a plant grows past a certain size/capacity. And with the rising tide of population, plants that served us 20 years ago are woefully boutique now, being rebuilt, and being rebuilt automated.

<comment><USER12> > automation hasn't proceeded across the spectrum.

Exactly. Its impact has been limited to areas where there is repetitive work on standardised, clean objects[1], in standardised environments, in product lines where volumes are sufficient to justify the investment in machinery.

> Yet automation equipment has boomed in the last 20 years.

Yes it has. The size of the needed investment has gone down a lot in activities where automation is feasible.

But manufacturing has been a minor part of the US economy for more than 30 years, and its share is getting smaller. "Services" is over 80 percent. Advertising, making movies, sports, construction... zillions of different things.

[1] If any manufacturing work _should_ be automated, it's meat packing. Unpleasant, boring work that gives you carpal tunnel syndrome and other joint and tendon injuries. Plants are always short of workers and absenteeism is rife because of the nature of the job.

But automation is impossible, because animals are not standardised enough. Putting that another way: because machine vision is still so ludicrously bad. And so is the state of robotics.

<comment><USER24> Impossible is a big word. "Not yet practical" is closer. "Will soon happen" is arguable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Automation happens not where many expect it (including the media). It is frequently expected that automation will come as _replacement_ for humans, while it actually is coming in the form of better _tooling_ and _assistance_ to humans. This theoretically should be reflected in work productivity, not in employment numbers.

<comment><USER26> This is true, but better tooled, equipped humans do more work and so you need fewer of them.

When your landscaping company buys an excavator, one person can now move as much earth as 15 people used to. You don't keep the other 14 on the payroll.

<comment><USER27> A larger amount of people can now afford landscaping services because earth moving cost have now gone down. Poor people used to go barefoot before industrialization.

Producing more with less human input is how we raise the living standards of everyone in the long term.

<comment><USER26> The Jevons paradox absolutely does play a part, especially at first, but I don't believe it's enough for higher efficiency to result in an overall win (edit: for the employees). Most markets saturate surprisingly quickly when you apply 10x - 100x efficiency increases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> As a robotics engineer I too once bought in to the notion that automation would lead to a massive jobs crash. But the more experience I get the more I see how big the problem space is. There's a million simple tasks we cannot do with robotics, and even when we can do them the machine costs $100k. Instead I am beginning to understand that humans and machines will work together for a long time.

I still think we can use automation to do radical things. I want to see us automate food production and meal preparation, to lower the cost of healthy food. By intentionally lowering the cost of human survival with automation, and with changes to intellectual property restrictions which keep costs high, we could create a world where food is so cheap we give it away to those in need. With changes to our cultural norms and broad application of this theory, it is literally possible to eliminate material poverty.

Think about it - in a world where there are only private book collections, some people are book-rich and some people are book-poor. But that kind of poverty is effectively eliminated if you introduce the concept of libraries to that world. If we share the automation we create the same way we share books at a library, we can create societies where everyone is provided for at no direct material expense to others.

Years ago I wrote an essay [1] where I used the concept of impending job loss from automation to emphasize the importance of this better way of living I proposed above. But I've realized that we don't need to see automation as an impending crisis - millions of people are already in crisis because they cannot afford the food, medicine, or housing they need. So the need for change is still there, but the cause is not some future problem, but the problems of the status quo.

[1] [http://tlalexander.com/wealth/](http://tlalexander.com/wealth/)

</comment><comment><USER29> There used to be local record shops and big ones downtown - music distribution has since become pretty automated. There used to be many bookstores around - book distribution has become fairly automated. Gamestop has been closing stores and has been hit by automated distribution in recent years.

I used to buy Hagstrom map books filled with detailed current maps - they were sold in gas stations and bookstores and they even had some of their own stores. Their stores all shut down and their business shrank enormously as map navigation became automated.

There used to be a lot of tour and travel agencies around. They still exist, but are much less prevalent and are scaled down.

In fact, automation of commodity distribution has had a major effect on retail, and consequently commercial real estate.

Insofar as office work - people who work in law tell me the large number of secretaries who shuffled through cabinets full of folders containing records have largely disappeared as record retrieval has been automated. I had data entry jobs many years ago, itself a type of automation - but the jobs I did have disappeared as data distribution has become automated.

I don't know what they are measuring but I have seen the effects of a automation all around. Maybe with the closing of bookstores and record stores and video game stores, they mean the role of a retail clerk has not been much automated, which may be true. But I have seen automation have a large effect on many industries, and then rippling effects onto industries like real estate.

</comment><comment><USER30> The frequent problem with these types of reports is that they only focus on one part of the geography (USA).

That said, I recall reading a report that mostly middle class administrative and coordination roles are eliminated due to digitalization and dedicated software. Leading to negative wage pressure on the middle class.

These are repetitive human jobs like looking at a bunch of papers and creating a report.

Manual work is getting more productive and often shifted abroad but on a global scale is actually expanding in line with global gdp growth. [https://reports.weforum.org/future-of- jobs-2016/employment-t...](https://reports.weforum.org/future-of- jobs-2016/employment-trends/)

Interesting in this report is that geopolitical instability is more destructive to jobs than artificial intelligence for now.

<comment><USER31> Very much so; the current wave of automation is taking semi-skilled middle- class jobs and replacing them with low-skilled minimum wage jobs that can be filled with gig workers.

High-skill jobs are still there, but the middle is rapidly being hollowed out. I don't think it's a coincidence that the middle class is shrinking as a result.

<comment><USER32> That's an interesting take on Uber that I don't think I've seen before.

I know Uber's end-goal is automation such that taxi drivers aren't necessary. What I didn't realize is that it is route planning automation that allowed them to move from dedicated drivers to gig drivers.

<comment><USER31> Yeah, I recall an article about London taxi drivers having to memorize the labyrinth of streets in and around central London to get a taxi license. They were paid very well and the jobs were stable as a result — until Uber / Waze came along. Then the market was flooded by recent immigrants working for much less who were able to navigate unfamiliar streets with GPS and the job became way less stable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I don't know enough about industrial automation to form an opinion, but RPA is definitely coming for the rank-and-file office drones.

You'd be surprised how many "paper pushers" still fill the cubicles of this world (their job literally to copy stuff from this ERP to this CRM or to this legacy Access / Excel / BI system). This is the low hanging fruit of job automation and enterprises are quickly figuring out what kind of cost savings RPA can offer them.

I have a feeling RPA will have a much higher adoption rate than the "digital transformation" trickle.

<comment><USER34> RPA?

<comment><USER35> Robotic Process Automation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's basically modified Parkinson's law at play - work will expand to most available workforce.

With increased automation, either new jobs are created(thereby increasing the overall output of the economy) OR expectation for individual productivity is reduced, decreasing individual stress.

History is your proof. Automation has been constantly increasing forever and there's no job loss en masse because of that. Empirically speaking there are almost always more jobs created.

Not saying anything about quality of life.

<comment><USER37> While the adage is true, you also have to consider the _quality_ of work. There are a LOT of people in the US right now with a college degree who can't find any jobs related to their majors, so they end up as baristas or Amazon order pickers - their education, talents, passions being wasted, their future pretty much on hold because jobs like that don't pay enough money to pay off student debt or buy a house.

<comment><USER14> In 1920 or 1950 if we'd had as many people with college degrees as we do today, we'd also have a LOT of people who can't find any jobs related to their majors.

What you describe is not the quality of jobs decreasing, it's the increase in (unfulfilled, unreasonable) expectation of job quality just because you have a college degree. IMHO we have _much more_ "good jobs" than in 1920 or 1950, it's just that the number of college graduates has grown faster than the number of good jobs. In 1920 or 1950 there weren't enough good jobs for everybody, and the good jobs mostly went to people with college degrees. But the problem was not actually in the lack of college degrees - if most people have college degrees, then all that means that college degree ceases to be the pathway to good jobs, and other filtering mechanisms inevitably need to appear (and have appeared) to select which people will get good jobs and which will be left behind despite having a college degree.

<comment><USER36> Potentially somewhat controversial take on this: why do college grads deserve a better job than, say, high school grads if the subject they studied in college is not particularly relevant to the society at this point(which the lack of jobs for that qualification is indicative of)?

There was probably a point in time when learning hunting was like going to college and along comes farming to make all those hunters jobless. That's how the wheel of "progress" rolls.

The idea that going to college will make you more bucks or guarantees you a job in your field of study is very arcane at this point.

<comment><USER14> The traditional answer to this comes from the age when college graduates were a distinct minority. In the 1950s environment, if a job applicant has a college degree even with irrelevant subject, then this means that the applicant has passed two filters (getting into college, and actually graduating with decent grades) for qualities that are relevant to most jobs but are hard to measure directly, so that degree is a very useful signal for evaluating people in a way that you can't do during an interview or two.

These qualities are not guaranteed but are correlated with being able to get into college and graduate - everything from conscientiousness, ability to follow arbitrary complex rules, general intelligence and also socioeconomic status (in e.g. sales and management, the social contacts of a high-SES employee and their family are very valuable in achieving business goals, and the social contacts of a low-SES employee are not). A graduate might not have these qualities, and a non-graduate might have them, but it's hard to tell so the degree is a useful proxy because it _does_ (or did?) correlate with these qualities.

So it made all sense for businesses to prefer college graduates for certain types of jobs ("the good jobs") even if the college major was something like history or literature in a field of business where that's not relevant, and they did just that. And because of that employer preference, a college degree was a ticket to one of these good jobs.

However, if almost everyone gets a degree that means that there's no real filtering happening, and that benefit gradually becomes useless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Is it just me or does it feel like this timeframe was too short?

Personally, I expect the largest disruptor of jobs to come from autonomous driving, but we're still 5-10+ years from seeing that hitting the ground.

As far as today is concerned, I largely agree. ETFs BOTZ and ROBO have increased, but not in such a way that would suggest huge automation revolution.

<comment><USER37> In the meantime, the disruptor for driving jobs has been the race to the bottom; services like Uber, Lyft, etc popping up, decimating the taxi industry by having their not-employees compete with each other for work, driving the prices down while they laugh all the way to the bank - they get their cut anyway.

While those jobs haven't been automated away as such, they are being priced away.

<comment><USER39> >while they laugh all the way to the bank

Uber has been consistently losing money every single year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Labor force participation in the US has dropped heavily in since 2008 and even since it peaked around 2000.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART)

This in spite of the reported very low unemployment rate, which is not really the meaningful measure.

The labor force participation was lower a long time ago, but I think that is when there were more single income families.

I am not sure how much this drop in employment is from just bad economics or how much could be attributed to automation.

</comment><comment><USER41> I've been having trouble reconcilling compelling evidence for and against automation based job loss / wage suppression, and usually the arguments against them look at super high level macroeconomic numbers (see: Pail Krugman's analysis on productivity dropping for some recent years) while most people in support of the automation argument will go directly on the ground to places where auto manufacturers have had strong presence and also cite cohort analysis where laid off manufacturing workers take up gig jobs.

The primary impetus for automation are labor cost related but not necessarily to take over humans intrinsically. The top reason I heard uttered in my amateur research was a common theme of the past 100+ years - unions make things more costly whether in terms of capital or general speed / agility of the business. Wages are suppressed through automation effects noticeably around factories that automate compared to nearby cities that don't. The suppression is concurrently correlated to labor suppression / arbitrage though so it is hard to detangle the automation v. labor angle because the biggest job losses and wage suppression happened before modern automation - <USER3> happened during the late 80s to 90s as unionization started dropping faster. Diminishing returns on outright hard balling unions would lead to more investment in machinery to drive down hiring needs and avoid the need to hire while also putting the companies that do automate in a better operational cost position.

<comment><USER42> We build quite the "contraception" for circuit board mounting anything not compatible with reflow soldering. It mostly works but the women that do it usually are just way faster and less error prone.

We have quite the high wage standard and even then the device is mostly used to show off.

Real automation is probably needed in bureaucratic workflows even if we usually think about manufacturing. There are probably advantages and disadvantages here as well.

Since order situation is great at my current company (strangely the covid- quarter was particularly good), we have significantly expanded workforce in production.

I doubt that unions really drove automation in my country though. Price plays a role but also technological feasibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> How does this square with the type of automation Amazon is doing? The type that people rarely think is automation.

Retail jobs are being decimated across the USA not because robots are directly replacing them, but because as more people shop online these companies collapse and Amazon is able to perform the same service without the staff.

Maybe warehouse worker, delivery jobs and coders are increasing at the same place? That doesn't pass the sniff test to me as they seem to have much higher efficiency than your average salesperson at a retail store.

</comment><comment><USER44> With all due respect, I thought Robin Hanson was better than this.

I followed him briefly during the 2013-2015 automation hype (which hasm't died yet; far from it), and I found him to be carrying out reasonable analysis of tech economics. I found him to be one of the few economists who are in touch with tech reality, and so things weren't that bad in the econosphere in terms of keeping up with tech trends.

This blog post doesn't help maintain that perspective at all. I'm sorry.

As a tech person myself, I'm extremely busy with making this happen instead of being a negative nancy towards other tech folks, but I'll finish my though with this:

I have a close friend who is a typical naysayer of tech progress, "business as usual", "old jobs replaced with new jobs", "capital is what makes thing work", "economics good technology meh"

He will not stop for a minute, and will not entertain a single of my counter- arguments.

What is super-surprising to me though is that in the last 5-7 years, he has pivoted from a non-tech job to complete-alignment with one of the big-tech companies, has been investing heavily in all kinds of big tech stocks, and watching his stocks with a keen eye day-in and day-out.

And everytime we talk, the first thing he discusses is my opinion and forecast of where technology is headed. Once having absorbed all that information, he goes back to his same old rotten cassette tape.

Funny how it works.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm disappointed by my and others ability or lack of ability in automating.

The humble takeaway is that it is _far_ more difficult than people imagine.

<comment><USER46> There are probably only a couple thousand people in the would that could write the appropriate code or make robots perfect enough to do many of the automated manufacturing tasks. And most of them are employed by places that mostly waste their talents

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Economics noob here: the paper concludes that past automation is predicted by 2 key factors: pay and employment. What does that mean exactly?

Are they saying that higher a job pays, the more likely it is to get automated? Or the other way around?

Also what does 'employment' refer to exactly? Is measuring how well the demand for labour is being met in a certain job?

<comment><USER48> > _Are they saying that higher a job pays, the more likely it is to get > automated?_

Yes. "Simple economic theory predicts that, all else equal, employers are more eager to automate jobs with higher pay and more workers. So these two factors should predict job automation. And we do in fact see such effects in Table 3, though more consistently for pay than employment."

> _what does 'employment' refer to exactly?_

Number of people employed.

<comment><USER49> No one will automate for automations sake - businesses choose how to deploy capital to improve efficiency, which can be achieved through scale or going after the largest cost

<comment><USER50> In the mid-twentieth century (IIRC) there was a "paradox" observed that the US was capital-rich but its exports were labour-intensive. Is this situation still true?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> > Last December, Keller Scholl and I posted a working paper suggesting that > this whole narrative is bullshit, at least so far.

Thing is, when you are calculating the color of the sky, then it is either a bluish looking spectra, or you are in trouble. And consequently physicists will look outside immediately after that calculation.

The entire post needs an explanation of why they don't find any automation in that timeframe? I mean, just from administration we have things like package managers, containers, several cloud stuff, and so on. If they don't see that in their data, then my immediate assumption is, that they need a more reasonable approach.

<comment><USER52> > I mean, just from administration we have things like package managers, > containers, several cloud stuff, and so on.

Automation replaces human work, business can do better now, then they want to produce more than before so they up hiring as well. It's much easier to set your target higher (production, profit) than to automate anything. As soon as you have automated something new work pops up, work that was probably not done before for lack of resources.

Programming has been automating tasks for decades yet here we are, so many of us. Cloud should have automated many jobs, yet with this new found ease of deployment we chose to deploy more rather than hire less. As long as humans have needs and desire for betterment I don't think we can surpass our ever growing ambition with automation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Tasks makes up Jobs.

Certain tasks that form a particular job are being automated more now than ever before.

This is more true of knowledge workers where they are operating and working in a digital environment already (e.g. traders, accountants, lawyers, marketing, admin...)

This is less true of manual labour - like cleaners and gardeners - why? Well look at robotics, its good but nowhere good enough to replace these dexterity required which a human can provide.

For knowledge workers it is very hard to automate all the tasks that make up a job. Hence why automation has not resulted in mass unemployment (excluding all other factors).

</comment><comment><USER54> > Two metrics created by groups trying to predict which jobs will get > automated soon did predict past automaton, but not after we included 25 > mundane job features like Pace Determined By Speed Of Equipment and > Importance of Repeating Same Tasks

This sounds like a thoroughly fallacious argument? Automation is progressing not by automating jobs in the exact form that they were previously done, but by more automatable (and therefore more automated) forms of job displacing less automatable forms of those jobs. Isn't that exactly what we'd expect?

</comment><comment><USER55> I think it's far too early to conclude.

The ongoing "web 2.0" revolution is finally reaping the benefits of computers and networks, more than 50 years after they were invented. Paper processes are finally on the verge of being eliminated. Remote work is finally possible for many people.

Deep learning will have a transformative impact too, but these things take time. Let's talk again 10 years from now.

</comment><comment><USER56> Star Wars used painstakingly crafted models and photography effects to produce the film. Now, people using modern tools can do much more, with considerably less work. The 'jobs' analysis wouldn't necessarily reveal that.

Taking inventory in a retail store used to be a paper and pencil mass bureaucracy - it's now streamlined.

We don't stand at the line anymore to withdraw or deposit money.

Secretaries don't type memos.

Many newspapers are dropping photographers in lieu of training journalists on how to use their iPhones.

We don't manage a lot of paper records anymore.

So a lot of things have accelerated, it might not show up in the job market, it may not even show up in the GDP if consumers are in fact getting all the surplus. Life can get a lot better in many ways without a hint of GDP growth. GDP growth usually only happens (all things being equal) if there is either more cost (edit: 'maybe' bad for consumers but not necessarily), more profit taking (also bad for consumers), or more government spending (neutral for the citizenry - depends on the efficiency of spending).

<comment><USER57> I understand your point, but that doesn't seem to be what the article talks about. From the linked article:

> Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that for many years the > media has been almost screaming that we entering a _big automation > revolution_ , with huge associated job losses, _due to new AI tech, > especially deep learning._

Emphasis mine.

Their point doesn't seem to be that automation isn't happening, but that there is no revolution incoming that is driven by new tech. You can see that in their bulleted point summary:

> * Which job features predict job automation how did not change from 1999 to > 2019.

If new tech was breaking the frontiers of automation and making it possible to automate jobs which couldn't be done before, these features should've changed.

<comment><USER58> I think a lot of people that are in the AI/Tech space are probably a bit detached from the realities of non-tech businesses. While you talk of "new tech" being AI and deep-learning, I'm still in the process of implementing barcoding systems in warehouses. I think the vast majority of businesses just aren't ready to move into the data-driven AI space that you call new tech. They're 20 years behind it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Automation has been progressing for at least three hundred years now, from the era of the Jacquard loom and the cotton gin. I was born in a country where when I was little there still were telephone operators. Those thousands of jobs disappeared long ago, around the time when rotary phones disappeared. Nothing to do with AI.

</comment><comment><USER60> Wages and employment remain constant because companies are still more like social constructs that provide minimal support in exchange for membership in a social hierarchy. They'll always find something for you to do.

Learn to code" is popularizing the conversion of everybody into software engineers, but actually we don't need most SWE either, so now we have an entirely new class of useless jobs on a SWE assembly line where 99% of the work product is simply discarded, but we still use the old industrial productivity model to drive productivity by aggressive management.

</comment><comment><USER61> I actually disagree with this article. Based on my experience in the insurance industry, it is slowly but surely coming. It will appear not as a sudden drop, but as a gradual need for fewer and fewer roles as technology initially allows humans to do more with their time, and eventually replacing some of them. It is going to be a small effect on any one company. But a large effect over all, which will manifest over a long period.

</comment><comment><USER62> So, an Amazon warehouse works like a grocery store from back then? What is the ratio #sold goods / #human worker for Amazon and for an old fashioned grocery store?

</comment><comment><USER50> Living in a country where people are expensive and machines are cheap, I can attest the automation level is higher here. For instance, I often see cows at farms here enjoying automated brushing systems. There are youtube videos in english, but I don't recall ever having seen something like that in the US, even at Harris Ranch.

(I have yet to witness a farmer using fully-autonomous hay feeding robots, but the ag magazines have been running articles on them)

<comment><USER6> The rules (in Germany, but also other places) say you either have to offer the cows these brushes or brush them manually. It's not really a choice.

<comment><USER50> Wasn't the choice between offering the brushes or brushing them manually? Around here I see that farmers find installing a EUR 2'500 brush to be much cheaper than attempting to pay cheap foreign labour to brush cows.

(TIL automated pig brushes also exist)

<comment><USER6> Yes, I meant it's not a choice whether to brush at all. And if you have more than one or two cows the choice between the autobrush and manual seems clear, especially since the cows seem to love them and can use them whenever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> There will always be competition, innovation, and new markets. New needs will arise in consumers, driving new product and service needs. We may automate more low-level legal tasks, but more money will be spent on massages, or therapy, or art. It's unlikely there will be mass automation any time soon.

<comment> pg-gadfly In fact automation often goes top-down, reeucing complexity of difficult jobs and allowing lower-skilled workers to deal with the rest that isn't yet profitable to change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I don't think anyone believes that the automation revolution is happening right now, but that it's imminent and we should start preparing our societies to cope with it now.

> Our paper has so far received zero media attention

Because you're answering a question no one asked.

</comment><comment><USER57> I thought about this article in context of the recently reposted piece "There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence" [1]. While it may be true that we haven't been able to automate new kinds of jobs, maybe we are just moments away from having an AGI that would make that kind of automation easy. That would contradict this article's claim that the narrative around an incoming automation revolution is bullshit. Just as likely, though, is that we actually are decades out from AGI and that kind of automation.

[1]: Link to the piece: [https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire- alarm/](https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/), recent HN Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23401328](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23401328)

<comment><USER48> > _maybe we are just moments away from having an AGI that would make that kind > of automation easy_

What evidence do we have for being closer to AGI today than we were twenty years ago?

My point isn't that AGI is useless. But it's currently an article of faith. Faith is fine. Faith is essential. But isn't a good way to make huge allocations of resources.

<comment><USER65> His assertion that we could always be one discovery away is not false, it's just irrelevant. The article states no evidence that there's been any past effect of "increasing automation" and assumes the near future will look like the recent past. Just inventing AGI wouldn't actually change much the next day, it would just be a new paradigm, and things would eventually change... so I agree with TFA.

(Also, AGI would be not so useful. Humans are notoriously difficult to work with, and we seem to have General Intelligence. It would have to have a strange concoction of motivations to be immediately --- or even eventually --- useful for anything that we would want to automate).

<comment><USER57> I definitely don't mean it as in "AGI is invented; humans need not apply", but in the point you've covered:

> The article states no evidence that there's been any past effect of > "increasing automation" and assumes the near future will look like the > recent past.

My point was that predictions of AGI being so far away may be false, as explained the article I linked. If they were false, and we ended up with AGI, I don't think the article's assumption about the near future will apply. This does not need to happen overnight, it can take time, but the kinds of jobs we could automate would change drastically over time (and the time scale in the article is two decades long!)

On your second point, though. Part of why humans are difficult to work with because we have our own emotions and motivations and sometimes decide not to do things other people want. An extremely intelligent AI that did only what it was told to do would probably not be as difficult to work with?

<comment><USER65> The idea that intelligence is disconnected from the "baser" instincts like emotion, need to eat, need to reproduce, need for social recognition, etc is probably just false. Akin to there being a useful measure IQ which predicts ability to solve the worlds problems (hint: Nope). Our story-telling mind can construct all kinds of intelligent hypotheses, but was probably evolved to appear rational to our fellow people and attribute agency where possible. Our wander-through-the-woods mind can visualize and hypothesize about spatial relations and transformations, etc.

There's much to do for AGI, but I believe that motivation-engineering will be the hardest part. Morality is intrinsically connected to our role as sorta- hive-minded monkeys.

Caveat: All the above is poorly presented opinion from the following resources:

\- Learning how to learn on coursera

\- Buddhism and modern psychology on coursera

\- Righteous Mind by Haidt.

\- Happiness Hypothesis by Haidt

\- Bullshit as an honest indicator of intelligence

Building a machine using our evolutionary history as a prior design is the only way we know how to produce general intelligence, but all the strange, varied, "Emotional" baggage that goes with it means we never would. Why would a computer be afraid of snakes? If what you want is a computer that can come up with solutions you wouldn't have imagined, then you need clever search, problem specification, and significant computation, not general intelligence. If you want to automate something, you may need learning, but don't need intelligence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> There's no technical or physical limit to why so many things can't be automated, which means everything that can, will be automated eventually.. Super popular games like Factorio and Satisfactory are glimpses of a potential near future.

<comment><USER46> There is an economic limit. If the cost of the machine is more than the human then your competitors will use humans and you'll loose a ton of money on every product you sell. Of course that doesn't matter because there is no technical limit on the value of your stock so as long as you are the golden boy it doesn't matter

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> The post implies that the authors' paper has received limited attention from the economic establishment due to its heterodox conclusion, but elides any supposition as to why its heterodoxy should be so controversial. Why should it be?

<comment><USER68> It's in a shit journal, so that's a start. I think part of it is that he's strawmaning here. The fear of automation isn't quite that it's immediate, it's more about the ability of machines to erode away economic opportunity of communities. People haven't been saying jobs are gone, just that eventually they will be soon(ish). Arguing that jobs aren't gone yet isn't helpful.

<comment><USER69> It's also incredibly difficult to read. I studied this and find it confusing - I can only imagine what a journalist would be able to take away from it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> 1999-2019 is not the interesting period of automation. I'm surprised the authors think it's even relevant. 2020-2040 will be the period to watch.

<comment><USER71> Except the spirit of this statement was being expressed in 2000, as well, on mailing lists and usenet of the day.

<comment><USER70> Sure, but I doubt they gave firm timelines. Future projections are always murky, but it seems pretty clear that the tech is in a much better spot and the incentives are now stronger than ever. Human workers get sick and can't work? Automate them away!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Has anyone found the raw data behind this paper? If they want this more widely coveted they should publish the datasets and code in github

</comment><comment><USER73> This article comes too soon.

How long have we been able to use millions of entries to machine learn?

I'm still limited by processing speed.

I imagine between math improvements, electrical engineering, computer science improvements/discoveries, and more we can automate jobs that require thinking or fine motor movements.

<comment><USER48> > _This article comes too soon_

Most estimates a decade ago forecasted massive automation-caused job losses by 2020.

> _How long have we been able to use millions of entries to machine learn?_

How long did mechanical looms need to show they wouldn't become sentient?

> _I imagine_

I do to. But based on current technology, we have no idea how to achieve these goals. We can't even model how or when we might do so. This implies a deep lack of meta knowledge.

<comment><USER50> > _How long did mechanical looms need to show they wouldn 't become sentient?_

They didn't become sentient, but at the time how the Quality distinguished themselves from the rabble was through art, literacy, and music, all of which were achievable (to some degree) by mechanical loomwork substituting brass for brains.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8u93VQfHmw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8u93VQfHmw)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> I imagine automation will result in the creation of entirely new industries and jobs like with self-driving cars for example.

Though, on second thought I guess self-driving does end up taking away a lot of taxi driver / trucking jobs. Nevermind...

<comment><USER14> It's also worth noting that if we get a major switch to self-driving cars, that won't create a new industry but rather diminish one - a big hypothetical benefit of a self-driving-car world is that much less cars would be needed; as most current cars are idle most of the time and even in peak driving hours, so a societal switch to "self driving cars on demand" services would mean that we would need much less cars than today.

Which is great for the planet, but not so great for jobs in car manufacturing industry, at least in the long run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> This could be partly because America has quite low wages.

</comment><comment><USER76> I have sort of a first hand account of what the current problem with (At least one area of automation) is.

Up until the quarantine I was working in a cowork space; and it happens that - I'm the sole employee of the company I work for in my country - all the desks around me were occupied by a company that makes a lot of their income providing automation to other parties.

I even worked for them for a few months as an "on demand" consultant; the idea would be that I would provide assistance to their devs when they needed help with the "programs" they were developing, and that fastly turned into a process review that eventually cooled off because they weren't - the project manager, at least - very keen on taking my advice.

What I observed was that - bear in mind this is a 3rd world country - <USER4> salaries were rather low, so obviously they couldn't get experienced people.

This lead to they having to train them, but as they had no experience, the way in which they approached solving the issues where, a lot of times, "complicated".

Usually they suffered from the apps being interfaced having changes along the project (Or after). This meant they had to fix a lot of problems that were not there in the beginning.

AS the devs had only experience with this tool, and was their first experience coding, they couldn't make the most of the other tools at hand. This mostly lends to processes that take hours to complete, being the execution time only marginally better than a person. This coupled with the issue right above this, many of the projects had a time excess of around 100% (Effectively taking double the time that was allotted in the beginning). Last I heard from them, thought, is that they made a lot of improvements here.

In one particular project I practically had to threat the person responsible to use javascript to fetch data from the browser instead of the "native" way of doung that (Basically, querying the page through the tool with xpath expression). When they did change to javascript, the process execution time was reduced by >90%

All in all, the problem I see with automation is that the people doing that is not formally trained in coding, and the tools I looked at have rather weak integrations with the most used apps today (Namelly, browsers).

I think the idea for many of these tools is to allow people to automate themselves, but that will lead in my opinion into the "phpization" of the automation area.

All in all, there are a few caveats: I know from them of at least one company that had a rather strong and professional dept., and they where _very_ good at it.

I think that eventually automation is going to take the world by storm in the next 5- 10 years. And those that adopt early will have a clear advantage over those that not.

For the record, the tool they use is Blue Prism; according to the CEO of this company BP has some sort of marked edge over UIPath when it comes to enterprise settings. I know there are other tools in the market, but I don't know them except by name.

</comment><comment><USER77> I wonder who still reads Overcoming Bias?

</comment><comment><USER78> We are only a couple years away from automating most customer servicing. You'll still need a few, but if we collect data on the few it's possible to scale those answers to millions.

That'll put millions out of work and is basically text generation... easy to deploy, easy to maintain, and we probably already have the technology just not productionized.

Now, those people will be retrained to do something. Maybe even just do more detailed customer service. So I'm not too concerned - just saying automation is coming

<comment><USER79> Also in the customer service segment, we continue to accelerate the move to wipe out fast food jobs. Four million people work in fast food restaurants in the US. I'll be surprised if around 1/4 to 1/3 of those jobs don't vanish this decade. That is part of the automation revolution and it is underway. Just the process of automating ordering at fast food restaurants as we already easily can, will remove several hundred thousand jobs permanently.

<comment><USER80> The sceptic in me wonders how much capital the fast food industry is willing to invest to replace cheap labor. I'm not really arguing with you just reflecting on my own experiences with current start of the art tech.

"Did you say at fries to that?" No "Added 27 orders of fries, anything else" Arghhhh!

<comment><USER81> w/ touch screen you don't need to 'speak' unless maybe blind or something... So, you could be more accurate.. I mean I ALWAYS use mobile ordering now when going through drive through. I'll pull over, sit for a moment, place my order, then get in line.

<comment><USER82> Since COVID started I've been using some mobile ordering apps more and more. One of my new favorites is Whataburger here in Texas.

Texans know that Whataburger is infamous for being slow since everything is made to order. In-n-Out has figured it out but Whataburger is still so slow for some reason. With the app, I can place an order in my driveway, then arrive at the drive thru about the time its ready. If I'm lucky, I can skip the line and pull up and have it brought out in a few minutes. What used to be a 20 minute parking lot wait crawling through the line is now 5~ minutes.

Sometimes if it's busy or late at night and they don't have as many staff, I have to wait my turn in line, but I'm usually not sitting for 5 minutest at the window after paying waiting for the grill. Oh and that's another benefit. Apple Pay makes it seamless to place an order and not deal with CCs that are wearing out being declined.

My biggest complaint is still being required to download a separate app for each restaurant, but for now I can tuck them all away into a folder and forget they exist. If an app isn't in my home screen, I'm going to open it from a spotlight search.

For restaurants I don't visit as frequently, I'll call them and place an order for pickup. This also has the benefit of not incurring many of the BS fees that specialty online ordering platforms charge. It's going to take me a few minutes to order anyway, app or call, so I might as well save 10% by calling.

<comment><USER83> > Texans know that Whataburger is infamous for being slow since everything is > made to order. In-n-Out has figured it out but Whataburger is still so slow > for some reason.

The analysis is obviously incomplete. Making your order to order, in a timely fashion, was the point that distinguished Burger King from McDonald's.

<comment><USER82> Un-lucky for you, I am uniquely qualified to rebuttal this with evidence from my time working at Burger King. Very rarely was the burger cooked to order. Assembled, yes, but the cooking was done in a giant broiler machine with a conveyer belt and the patties were stored in heated containers for up to 2-3 hours until you ordered it.

<comment><USER83> This doesn't conflict with my pre-existing idea of Burger King, though it might be a difference between Burger King and Whataburger.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


ZX Spectrum Next – Issue 2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spectrumnext/zx-spectrum-next-issue-2 <comment><USER2> Whilst I have fond memories of playing Sabre Wolf on my spectrum (Ultimate - Play The Game!)

That is marred by the memory of having to reload the assembler program from cassette every time I made a mistake in the machine code I was trying to learn.

That feeling of despair has stayed with me a long time

<comment><USER3> Try doing that with a dodgy jack socket that meant you had to apply precisely the right pressure to the plug for the entire loading process, otherwise it would crash when it was done and you couldn't tell until it was finished. You had to breathe really gently so as not to move it for however many minutes it took.

From memory I could successfully load from and use about half the tapes I ever bought for my speccy, and I still don't know whether it was me or them.

Worth it, though.

<comment><USER4> I remember one of my friends would make us wait outside his bedroom whilst loading "Daley Thompson's Supertest" .. if his picture on the loading screen was to see us the load would fail. Good times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the email they sent this afternoon:

 _The past 24 hours have been a rollercoaster. The crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter was successfully funded in less than five minutes after going live (some sort of record, for sure) and it's already larger than the original ZX Spectrum Next Kickstarter.

This means we've now unlocked three stretch goals already, doubling the Next's memory to 2Mb, turning its manual into full colour, and ensuring every backer gets a copy of a new version of Baggers in Space. And this is just the beginning._

</comment><comment><USER6> No need for ZX Spectrum :-)

[https://atariage.com/forums/topic/252067-manic-miner- release...](https://atariage.com/forums/topic/252067-manic-miner-released/)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOhLU2YIsSQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOhLU2YIsSQ)

I'm kidding, but this is a really excellent port. A friend of mine is loaning me his TS2068 and I'm trying to change the ROM to make it into a ZX Spectrum.

</comment><comment><USER7> Seriously looking forward to receiving this .. one thing everyone should understand is that the reason to have it based on FPGA tech is that there are other cores in the pipeline - so its not inconceivable that this could be not just the ZX Spectrum Next, but also the Commodore C64 Next, or Oric Atmos Next, and so on ..

<comment><USER8> You might also like the Mister FPGA project. Lots of fpga cores for classic computers, home game consoles, and arcade games.

[https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki](https://github.com/MiSTer- devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki)

<comment><USER9> It'd be nice to have it in a more "finished product" format.

Another thing I'd love to see (I know, open source, I should do it myself or pay someone to do it) some odder machines, such as Tektronix terminals, Xerox Mesa-based machines, LMI/Symbolics Lisp Machines... I get it. I should do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like it uses the T80 soft core to emulate the Z80.

Might be interesting to see if it could run one of the Z80 soft cores that improves on the per-cycle performance for a Z80. Like the wishbone z80, or the coincidentally named nextz80 core. The nextz80 is reportedly 4x faster at the same clock speed.

<comment><USER9> That'd be an issue with games. In those days, games had tight timing loops that were very CPU and clock dependent. Only very rarely people did things that tied to interrupts generated in timers or hsync/vsync.

I assume that, if you want your text editor or spreadsheet to run faster, these FPGA implementations allow for very fast clocks in 1980's terms.

<comment><USER8> Sure. I have seen projects that allow you to select the fpga core at boot time. Also, the ZX Spectrum Next already seems to support clock speeds that would be an issue for games, so they must already have some "boot in compat mode" feature.

<comment><USER9> Would it make a difference if the maximum clock you can drive the cycle- accurate Z-80 is hundreds of times higher than actual hardware?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> IIRC $30 RaspberryPi can emulate it well enough to run even the gnarliest games. I see no need for the FPGA there at all. I'd pay for the case / keyboard like that to put a RasbperryPi into, as well as for firmware to make it boot directly into emulation, though.

<comment><USER11> Almost nobody buys this to actually use as a game computer. Same as Amiga accelerator boards - the most expensive ones have only one purpose, longest red SysInfo bar. Its all nostalgia.

<comment><USER10> Sure, but would you rather spend $300 on nostalgia or, say $150, if it can run the same software, and looks similar? If I were to buy one, $150 is doable, $300 is GTFO. I do have "nostalgia" \- I learned Assembly on a Soviet ZX Spectrum clone.

<comment><USER12> I think these users just want a physical product that looks and feels like an actual next generation ZX Spectrum. Part of a fulfilling a feeling of "what if".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a ZX spectrum fan, I love the idea but at £300? That's way too rich for my blood.

<comment><USER11> You are paying for fulfilling your childhood dreams (of not owning the worst home computer on the market). This alone is priceless. ZX Spectrum Next piles a ton of features from good computers back to the Spectrum. Storage, sound, sprites, no color clash, real keyboard, things owners used to vigorously argue were not important back in the day on the playground. Now is your chance to experience alternate universe where Spectrum actually was that good home computer, the best actually for ~1982-87.

Product itself is fantastic, you can clearly see a lot of love went into polishing the old .. erm computer.

<comment><USER14> I am somehow lost given that C64 wasn't even considered good enough for most shops on Iberia Peninsula to sell it. :)

The only playground discussions were feeling a bit sorry for those that made the mistake of buying MSX clone, or Timex compatibles vs the real Species.

<comment><USER15> What's wrong with Timex? IIRC it was almost a perfect clone.

<comment><USER14> Me as well, proud Timex 2068 owner.

However that 48KB compatibility cartridge wasn't 100% perfect.

On the other hand we had our sound chip already without getting into the +2/+3 variants.

But getting back to my point, I even saw SAM Coupé on sale on my small town, which I cannot say for the C64.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can I program assembly and basic on this model? It seems like the Kickstarter confirms basic prompt, but not sure about assembly. Does the user manual help for someone with very minimal assembly knowledge?

<comment><USER17> I'm not authoritative, but have been following this and many other similar retro computing devices.

As far as I'm aware the FPGA onboard does brutally accurate emulation of the original Z80 hardware, so you should be able to write assembly and basic (and I believe it boots to a BASIC kernal yeah, that's how they spell it back in the 8 bit days :) )

The device can run in many different modes, but I've seen nothing that indicates a limitation to BASIC.

The only device I've seen lately that is pure BASIC, is the Colour Maximite 2 - but it does BASIC so darn fast, it's almost a feature :)

If you're interested in other things I've dug up while in my retro computing phase, check out the Turbo Chameleon 64. Lots of neat FPGA and emulation hardware out there these days.

Colour Maximite 2: [https://geoffg.net/maximite.html](https://geoffg.net/maximite.html) Turbo Chameleon 64: [https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php?title=Turbo_Chameleon_64](https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php?title=Turbo_Chameleon_64) and [https://icomp.de/shop- icomp/en/shop/product/Turbo_Chameleon_...](https://icomp.de/shop- icomp/en/shop/product/Turbo_Chameleon_64.html)

<comment><USER16> Neat. Thanks for the response and links!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Something similar but for the MSX computer. [https://msxvr.com/](https://msxvr.com/). It is also a FPGA, it emulates Z80 and R800 cpus.

</comment><comment><USER19> Using an fpga is strange IMO when you can still just buy z80 chips. I made a pretty simple home brew computer in college this way.

<comment><USER20> For the Z80 alone, this is true. But it also needs the Ferranti ULA which is no longer manufactured, and was kind of an early FPGA, or the Amstrad 40077 for the +2A/+3, which is an actual gate array. I can imagine to get output for current display devices, an FPGA makes perfect sense as a current replacement part for these obsolete and unattainable parts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I like the looks and the form factor. But what I would want to insert a Raspberry Pi in it and get a Linux computer.

<comment><USER22> The accelerated version of the Spectrum Next has a Pi Zero inside

<comment><USER23> As the GPU!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can it run Crysis?

<comment><USER25> It might

[https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.php?cat=96&id=31032](https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.php?cat=96&id=31032)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Computer in keyboard is not a good form factor. It is always too high and often hot.

<comment><USER27> Have you ever used a laptop?

<comment><USER26> I've used Atari 800, it was good 4cm tall. I've used laptops, they were too hot.

<comment><USER27> There will always be a difference of opinion. My experience was with a Spectrum toastrack, which I love to this day, with the exception of the mushy keyboard.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft Pulls IE8 OMGIGP Vomit Ad - <AUTHOR> http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,28348,25727405-5014239,00.html

<comment><USER2> It's more creepy than offensive mostly because of her extreme reaction. It forces you to kind of use your imagination. It's obviously not some soft-core girl-on-girl porn she's seeing. It's obviously something far worse which is just really creepy. My first thought was child porn. I doubt that's what Microsoft intended but you gotta be careful suggesting something is REALLY bad or people will assume the absolute worst in many cases.

<comment><USER3> I don't know why you were downvoted. I'm guessing that's exactly why it was pulled.

<comment><USER3> Hey, where'd that comment go?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I watched the ad a couple of days ago and couldn't help but wonder: what in the world is wrong with Microsoft?! For a company with vast financial resources available (in 2008, cash reserves, short-term investments and cash equivalents totaled $20 billion), MS has been fumbling royally with their ad campaigns recently. Seinfeld, anyone? _Unbelievable_.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I find this interesting, given the discussion here two days ago - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=681764>

Especially, snprbob86's comment that the vomit ad was the only one of interest.

</comment><comment><USER5> fear sells...

Sersiouly, if you have to stoop to such a low in order to push your product then that says something about the company behind it.

You can compete on merits, price, business model, all kinds of ways to get consumers to buy your product over someone else's. To play the fear card puts you right in the same bracket with some of the scum of the earth.

I'd expect a lot better from microsoft and I'm glad they pulled the ad, and I do not think that pulling it was part of the original strategy.

<comment><USER6> Seriously? Fear? Are we rocking this Focus on the Family style now?

It was a 50's housewife throwing up after seeing her husband's goat-fucking porn, as 100% up-front ad for IE8's porn mode. Maybe I have a juvenile sense of humor, but I thought it was hilarious.

And, yes, every other browser has porn mode, but at least Microsoft had the balls to advertise it for what it is.

"It's for banking security, honest!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "It was directed by Bobcat Goldthwaite, who rose - and fell from - fame after starring as Zed in the hit Police Academy movies. "

</comment><comment><USER7> It is always weird to see a large company try to take something viral and just miss the mark in some weird way.</comment>


Post-quantum crytography and TLS and other applications - <AUTHOR>

At what point do we seriously start evaluating the use of post-quantum crypto for normal applications, such as TLS?<p>Now that we know there are certain government agencies that plan on storing encrypted data for future cryptanalysis [1], I'm starting to think there should be some thought put into this? AES is secure (at least AES256), but not RSA/EC. At least in theory, doesn't that mean TLS in its current state, as well as various other applications relying on the same concepts, is effectively useless?<p>[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/20/exhibit-b-nsa-procedures-document <comment><USER2> There are two widespread misconceptions about quantum attacks on cryptography. The first, which you avoid, is that it's devastating to _all_ cryptography; quantum attacks make some brute force searches faster, which would be a reason to consider AES256 rather than AES128, but do not directly threaten typical block cipher cores.

The second misconception is that quantum attacks ruin all public-key encryption. But that's also not true. What's actually true is that the most widespread public-key algorithms are mathematically _very_ straightforward and are thus maximally exposed to quantum algorithmic advances. That implicates RSA, the classical DLP algorithms like DH, ElG, and DSA, and most probably their EC variants.

But there are many public-key algorithms that are not as mathematically straightforward as RSA or DH. McEliece is an example of a public-key system that uses binary error correction codes as a trapdoor function; lattice crypto uses the closest vector problem instead. These systems are all pq-crypto candidates.

It's likely that if the day comes where, say, quantum IFP solutions can start addressing numbers larger than 21, we could swap RSA out of TLS for a pq public key system.

In the meantime, moving aggressively to pq public key is silly. We have a hard time just getting sites to use TLS at all, let alone TLS with forward secrecy. The post-quantum candidates we have now are significantly slower than RSA. A push for pq crypto today would harm security more than help it.</comment>


The Tensor Algebra Compiler - <AUTHOR> http://tensor-compiler.org/ <comment><USER2> Hi Hacker News! I'm one of the developers. This project was also featured in MIT News yesterday:

[http://news.mit.edu/2017/faster-big-data-analysis-tensor- alg...](http://news.mit.edu/2017/faster-big-data-analysis-tensor-algebra-1031)

The code is available at:

[https://github.com/tensor-compiler/taco/issues](https://github.com/tensor- compiler/taco/issues)

I'm happy to discuss the project and to answer any questions :)

<comment><USER3> The MIT story focuses on "big data," but it looks like this might be applicable to coupled-cluster calculations in physics/chemistry too. Is it? Can you compare/contrast with e.g. the Cyclops Tensor Framework ([http://solomon2.web.engr.illinois.edu/ctf/](http://solomon2.web.engr.illinois.edu/ctf/)) or NWChem's Tensor Contraction Engine ([http://www.csc.lsu.edu/~gb/TCE/](http://www.csc.lsu.edu/~gb/TCE/))?

<comment><USER2> Larry chose to focus on the big data part, because it is intuitive. But I think you're absolutely correct, that it has applications in physics/chemistry (and machine learning too). We're actually talking to people in our theoretical physics department, who may want to use taco for their QCD computations. There's also a new issue on our tracker about adding complex number support for nuclear computations and quantum computing: [https://github.com/tensor- compiler/taco/issues/116](https://github.com/tensor-compiler/taco/issues/116).

The tensor contraction engine is great work, and focuses on dense tensor. We currently optimize for sparse tensors so TCE will do better than us for pure dense expressions. We want to bridge this gap next semester though.

The cyclops framework is also great. We discuss it in our related work, but we did not directly compare to it in our evaluation. The first version of it, like TCE, focused on dense tensors, and their main focus is on distributed computing, which we don't support yet (we do shared memory parallel execution at the moment). They have some followup work on sparse computations. The difference to our work is that they, if I read their paper correctly, transposes the data until they can call pre-existing matrix multiplication routines. This causes data movement overheads. Our work compiles expressions to work at the data at hand, without moving it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We did some work on computing derivative expressions (goal is application to deep learning) for such tensor algebras. I was going to release it on arXiv in the next few weeks, but now seems to be a good time. Here you go (preliminary version):

[https://github.com/surban/TensorAlgDiff/raw/master/elemdiff....](https://github.com/surban/TensorAlgDiff/raw/master/elemdiff.pdf)

Our system takes a tensor algebra (we call it element-wise defined tensor) and outputs expressions for the derivatives w.r.t. all of its arguments. The expression may contain sums and the indices of the argument tensors can be any linear combination of the function indices (see our example for more details). It correctly handles the cases where an index does not appear in an argument, appears twice, appears as (i+j) etc.

Code to play with at [https://github.com/surban/TensorAlgDiff](https://github.com/surban/TensorAlgDiff)

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure if this is a sensible question, but what is the use of this compared to (say) an autodiff library like FABAD++ [1]? Is performance the main advantage, or expressive power, or something else?

[1] [http://www.fadbad.com/fadbad.html](http://www.fadbad.com/fadbad.html)

<comment><USER4> If you use autodiff and don't have an 1:1 relationship between function and argument indices you might have to do atomic sums or locking when computing the derivative because multiple elements of the function derivative correspond to one element of the argument derivative. On a CPU this might be okay but on CUDA GPUs this usually has a performance impact. Thus we transform the derivatives so that we have an explicit expression for each derivative element and thus can use one CUDA thread per derivative element.

<comment><USER5> Oh wow, interesting. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Often (in the scientific computing communities that I am in) large tensor contractions are done by reshaping tensors into matrices, transposing, and using matrix multiplication. The contraction time can change dramatically based on the order one contracts the tensors and the relative sizes of the tensors. It seems this just uses a large nested for loop - how does this strategy compare to using dedicated matrix multiplication algorithms?

<comment><USER7> An efficient xgemm kernel is probably faster than the code that taco generates if you don't need to permute your tensor. A contraction like B(i,k) = T(i,j,k) * A(j) would require a permutation of T before you could run the matrix multiplication though, while taco can just keep the data in-place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Awesome!

I made something similar recently, a GLSL code printer for for SymPy. I use it for generating GLSL out of Clifford algebras. I'm using it to do higher dimensional & conformal geometry.

[https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/12713](https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/12713)

</comment><comment><USER9> Conventional wisdom has that dense matrix-matrix multiply is generally faster if you use some cache-aware scheme instead of the textbook 3 nested for loops.

Is there a similar story for sparse matrices ever?

<comment><USER2> The story for sparse matrices is more complicated. Because of the dependencies imposes by sparse data structures (you don't have random access and often have to traverse them) you cannot do loop ruling without adding if statements (I think you can probably get rid of these by preconputing, e.g. row halfway points). It may still make sense, but there's a bigger cost. However, you can lay out data in a tiled way to get better cache blocking; taco lets you do this by storing a blocked matrix as a 4-tensor.

Because of the lack of random access, some algorithm like linear combination matrix-matrix multiplication benefits from adding a dense workspace that gives you a view into one row. Then you can scatter into it and when you're done copy the nonzeroes to the sparse result matrix. This algorithm is sometimes called Gustavson's algorithm after the person who published it first). We have worked out this optimization within the taco framework, it applies to other kernels too, and are now writing it up for publication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hm, the lack of GPU-specific support seems unfortunate. Cool work though, the formulation as a lattice is pretty sweet :)

<comment><USER11> Yeah, would be nice to see one of these compute frameworks compile to SPIR-V and run on Vulkan…

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there a list of applications this may be especially geared toward? I'm a little out of practice and this seems interesting.

<comment><USER2> I don't know of an explicit list like this, but some areas that we are particularly interested in are: data analytics (tensor factorization), machine learning (anything sparse including perhaps sparse neural networks), and scientific computing/graphics (general relativity, quantum mechanics such as QCD, finite element simulations, and apparently nuclear physics). It is particularly suited anywhere you have sparse matrices or tensors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Saw you guys at SPLASH; good shit!

<comment><USER2> Thanks! I really like that conference!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Man, this is awesome!</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg defends leaving up Trump posts - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10111961824369871 <comment><USER2> This is an election year. Lots and lots of money will be spent on Facebook ads. Simple as that.

(To be clear, it's also true that Zuck is a disingenuous, unethical charlatan who is probably also listening to that vampiric hypocrite Thiel way too much. But that's the silver medal, not the gold.)

</comment><comment><USER3> > I know many people are upset that we've left the President's posts up, but > our position is that we should enable as much expression as possible unless > it will cause imminent risk of specific harms or dangers spelled Out in > clear policies.

Very sensible position: leave it up unless there is imminent, serious risk.

<comment><USER4> I thought the same, but what it (and this has happened before) one of D.T's followers sees this and shoots people? Afaik the post said something to the effect of "Rioter's should be shot" not by the police or a government force. But just a general statement.

Also i am saddened how the goal posts have moved. Before this it was that people who spew vitriol should be deplatformed but now we are at how this counts as government action?

Also if I was hypothetically a dictator about to do an ethnic cleansing, and post the same thing, would it still be ok? Tbh this isn't even a hypothetical since Facebook was used in a genocide in Myanmar and did nothing but agreed they fucked up later to 0 accountability.

<comment><USER5> reminds me of this honestly:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_turbulent_priest)

<comment><USER6> It also reminds me of [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_wolf_(terrorism)#Stocha...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_wolf_\(terrorism\)#Stochastic_terrorism) .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Remember: Mark is not a normal human being, he is a robot that exists to maximize facebook's profits. he doesn't feel joy or sadness when he says that he does, those are words that the zuckerbot emits because, probabilistically, the bot believes that it will increase sympathy from users.

This makes him somewhat different from Ellisonbot, who is more like a shark or a lawnmower: "You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' \-- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."

The difference is that Zuckerbot wants people to like him because he believes that will increase page views, while Ellison just doesn't care. Dorsey is an Agent of Discord, which means he truly delights in causing chaos.

<comment><USER8> What an interesting classification. Do you have something on Jeffbot and Elonbot?

<comment><USER7> My original post was flagged, but Jeff is a hyperintelligent alien who occasionally takes a tangential interest in human affairs (credit to Yegge for making this observation). Elonbot hasn't finished construction yet- as the CEO of neuralink told me, "the point of this company is to build a brain computer interface so that Elon can have a robot body and fight the AIs that will try to take over the world".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's not mentioned is that Trump agrees that the police need to be investigated and brought up on charges.

The reasons behind the violent protests in Minnesota doesn't even make sense and should be met with the full force of the law.

The cops were immediately fired and are now being investigated. Justice is being served. The protesters want mob justice, which would take our system of laws back to the middle ages.

The funny thing is that the lockdown protestors at the Michigan capitol building had more people in the media condemning their actions and not a single shot was fired nor a single piece of property damaged.

I would also like to point out that most of the protesters are not wearing masks or social distancing. Nobody cares about spreading Covid?

<comment><USER10> Have you considered what conditions would be required for you to be motivated to behave like these protestors?

What would you need to be feeling or being treated to behave this way?

<comment><USER9> "Have you considered what conditions would be required for you to be motivated to behave like these protestors? What would you need to be feeling or being treated to behave this way?"

So if I feel like I've been wronged, I can: break the law, destroy buildings, and even hurt/kill innocent people?

Treating a group of adults like children/like they don't have control will never allow them to actually succeed in life.

<comment><USER10> Thank you.

So to summarise, no you haven't considered.

<comment><USER9> Wow. I wish I could destroy public property and pretty much do whatever I want when I feel wronged or slighted and instead of facing punishment, people like you explain to the world that I'm hurt and that this is my way of lashing out and in some way it's not my fault.

This really is how we treat children.

You aren't considering the business owners that just had their businesses destroyed.

You are considering the innocent people that were ripped out of their vehicles during the protest and beaten nearly to death.

At this point, the protesters don't even care about the death of a black man. They only are using it as an excuse to burn the country down.

I stopped taking the mainstream media seriously long ago and I'm now even questioning the motives and the intelligence of people that post here on HN.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Spots – a view controller framework for iOS development - <AUTHOR> Spots is a view controller framework that makes your setup and future development blazingly fast. Because of its internal architecture and generic view models, you can easily move your view models into the cloud. This is super easy to do because Spots can translate JSON data into view model data right out-of-the-box. It is packed with convenience methods that are at your disposal through the public API.<p>https://github.com/hyperoslo/Spots <comment><USER2> The problem with these types of frameworks is that as soon as you try to do something just outside of the provided templates and examples they either 1. break badly or 2. require a lot more time and effort than just developing the thing natively.

<comment><USER3> This is native. See my other comment about my diy implementation of a similar idea

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Damn. At the early-stage startup I work for we built a naive implementation of this 2 months ago. We are doing it by key-value coding the keys from the JSON into our VCs. Our version is schema-less, apparently this follows some kind of schema for each VC. We are using our implementation in production without any major issues.

I'm happy for this project but I wish I could have seen this 2 monts ago.</comment>


The End of Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://jkhawaja.silvrback.com/the-end-of-facebook

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514)

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone else suspect there is a coordinated smear campaign against Facebook right now? The number of posts about the death of Facebook seems to be growing faster than I can read them.

<comment><USER4> Not really. First, people love to write about the end of the world or in general about horrible end of something successfull. And second, Muller's video gave traction to this, for the lack of a better word, "movement" and now people are just jumping on that bandwagon of talking about how FB is a fraud or dying.

And it's not like this is the first post about future of FB. That stuff's been popping for a while now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is just sensationalism piled on top of the original discussion ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514))

</comment><comment><USER6> The whole article is "Hey someone else might have a point". Balls.

</comment><comment><USER7> Isn't it ironic that the page has a Facebook share button?</comment>


Amazon DynamoDB Update – Global Tables and On-Demand Backup - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-amazon-dynamodb-global-tables-and-on-demand-backup/ <comment><USER5> Looks like a direct competition to Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. Anyone care to point out the top 3 differences?

<comment><USER6> Maybe sorta kinda -- just a heads-up that CosmosDB can talk multiple API protocols:

      - <USER2>
      - <USER3>
      - Graph API
      - Azure tables
      - <USER4>

I've used the MongoDB version, and it works ok for the basic CRUD stuff. I cant comment on aggregations, etc.

Not sure from a quick peek if DynamoDB does the same...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems this service is targeted towards specific applications where write traffic is somewhat independent between 2 regions. However, you can shoot yourself in foot, if 2 regions are trying to update the same row, because of eventual consistency.

</comment><comment><USER8> >> You can now create tables that are automatically replicated across two or more AWS Regions, with full support for multi-master writes, with a couple of clicks. <<

Hamm, If I understand it correctly, REGIONS are no longer heavily isolated.

<comment><USER9> I would say this offers global capabilities while preserving regional isolation. you're composing the global table out of regional tables (which replicate between each other), and you're still using regional endpoints. this means that a failure with one region's table does not have impact on the other.

this model does mean that certain things, like conditional expressions, are less useful/useless because you could very well execute a conditional expression against stale date.

<comment><USER10> If replication is synchronous it will cost you time.

If replication is asynchronous it will cost you freshness.

I'm not entirely sure what's implemented here, either way you need to pick. It's not magic.

<comment> a-priori Jeff Barr says in this article exactly how it works: when you make a write in one region, it streams the updates to the other regions. Presumably this is built on top of the DynamoDB Streams system. It tags the item update with a timestamp, and in the event of a conflict the most recent wins.

So in the case of a partition where the update stream is delayed, other regions can read and write to their local copy of the tables. They'll be replicated when the partition is healed. You should design around the possibility of conflicts, so that the 'last writer wins' resolution does what you want and leaves the system in a consistent state.

It would be nice if it emitted an event when write-write conflicts occur, so you can monitor that and possibly add your own conflict resolution logic to patch things up afterward. It doesn't appear like this exists.

Yes, you sacrifice freshness. When healthy, regions are behind by ~1s. If you need consistent writes then you can use one as the 'primary' region and do all your writes there and use the others as read replicas. But it's better to design your system to not require full consistency and do reads and writes in the local region.

(Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but not in AWS and have nothing to do with this project.)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the info. Custom resolution in lambda with vector clocks would be fantastic. Maybe in the future?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>