The Next Big Blue-Collar Job Is Coding

a reply to: galaga


Yes - many professions are already affected by AI. Jobs are going obsolete, and some new ones are appearing. At least for a while. The Medical Futurist is not a bad site for updates in medicine. And here are a few updates on AI in the legal profession too.

10 New Jobs in the Future of Healthcare and Medicine – Part I.

Disruptive technologies will transform the healthcare job market. Although some tasks and positions will become obsolete, new medical professions will gain ground. Organ designers, robot companion technicians and telesurgeons in the first part of my article series.

Profession re-design: in progress

What Is Using IBM Watson In Everyday Medicine Like?

Artificial intelligence will determine the future of medicine – no question about it – and there are already some medical professionals who use the technology in their practice. I asked practitioners what using IBM Watson in medicine is like.

Artificial Intelligence Will Redesign Healthcare

Artificial intelligence has an unimaginable potential. Within the next couple of years, it will revolutionize every area of our life, including medicine. I am fully convinced that it will redesign healthcare completely – and for the better. Let’s take a look at the promising solutions it offers.

LAW

An AI Law Firm Wants to ‘Automate the Entire Legal World’

* Unchanged for the past hundred years, the legal industry now faces its turn to be automatized.
* The idea of legal tech is not new, however not until today have algorithms been ready to seriously transform the legal industry.

…In 2014, commercial lawyer Noory Bechor got sick of the fact that 80 percent of his work was spent reviewing contracts. He figured the service could be done much cheaper, faster, and more accurately by a computer. Hence, he started LawGeex, a platform for automatized contract review.

…Today, a majority of LawGeex’s clients are corporate legal departments. According to LawGeex, its users have reported they are saving about 80 percent of the time they normally use on contract review and get deals closed three times faster. Not to mention that they are also saving 90 percent of the typical cost of outside council. The contract review platform is just the start for LawGeex. “Our goal for the next couple of years is to automate the entire legal world,” says Shmuli Goldberg, LawGeex’s VP Marketing.

Can elite law firms survive the rise of artificial intelligence?

…Specifically, the cash-cow model of elite law firms — first-year associates racking up billable hours from endless hours of M&A contract document review, with the revenue flowing up the pyramid to partners — is facing an unprecedented challenge.

Artificial intelligence software can do the contract review work of first-year law associates at a speed and scale that no human could — or should — be asked to do. And as A.I. systems become more common, it becomes more problematic for law firms to not follow that trend.

"This is not reversible," Dolin said. "The first-year associate as cash cow to partnership is breaking."

Artificial intelligence disrupting the business of law

Firms are recognising that failure to invest in technology will hinder ability to compete in today’s legal market

…Change is being driven not only by demand from clients but also by competition from accounting firms, which have begun to offer legal services and to use technology to do routine work. “Lawtech” start-ups, often set up by ex-lawyers and so-called because they use technology to streamline or automate routine aspects of legal work, are a threat too. Lawtech has been compared to fintech, where small, nimble tech companies are trying to disrupt the business models of established banks.

…Big law firms are pouring money into AI as a way of automating tasks traditionally undertaken by junior lawyers. Many believe AI will allow lawyers to focus on complex, higher-value work. …AI will not make lawyers extinct but “is just another category of technology which helps to solve the problem”.

originally posted by: seasonal
a reply to: soficrow

If I understand, and I may not. Coding is going to be automated as well.

Skilled trades are not going away yet. When you have robot changing oil and doing brake jobs I will start to worry.

Currently, coding has been reduced to sucking data out of a database and formatting it
or
Exhaustively checking data before storing it in the database

not much "rocket science" any more

originally posted by: soficrow
Looks like we're all in for a wild ride. Lots of changes in the pike, no end in sight. Some people might be able to transition to tech work, but most can't. What will happen to them do you think?

There will be a UBI within 10-20 years. Once cash goes fully digital it's trivial to make a dual currency system that effectively establishes a UBI. The way you do it, is you monetize peoples desire for products in addition to their labor.

originally posted by: acackohfcc
Currently, coding has been reduced to sucking data out of a database and formatting it
or
Exhaustively checking data before storing it in the database

not much "rocket science" any more

CRUD work is some of the job but not all of it. Sucking data out for example, yes you have the person who types in a couple SQL queries, but there's also the people who built the database that are maximizing the speed at which you can get important values.

I share your hatred of data validation though.

That said, these jobs haven't really changed, they've always existed. The languages used have changed but even the ENIAC was just doing CRUD. Like any profession though, it's what you choose to make of it. We have another poster in this thread who works on AI research, I do VR and as a hobby applied AI, another does web dev. There's a lot of variety.

a reply to: JinMI

If you think about it, the jobs that are going away are the jobs that only serve some function without a lot of creative thought being needed. Which makes sense because that's why machines are used when those jobs are still required. Just like a log splitter replaces a guy with an axe. We're now moving on to machine drivers for our cars, etc.

The jobs still available for people are going to be ones requiring someone to do something mental that machines can't yet do. There are still machine limits for physical jobs too, but they have to be more than just a few physical tasks. Those blue collar jobs being lost weren't jobs needing a great amount of creative thinking. They took a skill sure but as far as performing a task over and over a machine will always do better. That's what we made them for in the first place.

When machines are able to start thinking creatively like us you'll see a much more inclusive impact. For now it's the bulk of the physical labor force that is in trouble. When they start being able to think creatively with new ideas and problem solving at advanced levels there will be another huge impact on our lives.

But that is why we made them in the first place. To do the things we don't want to do or that they can do better. Turns out we forgot to replace the need for people to be doing something when we did that though. We made machines so people didn't need to work as hard or do such dangerous things. But then we had a bunch of people with nothing to do because they weren't needed for those tasks anymore.

What we really need is to replace the purpose in life with something other than working for a living. But we're consumers and that is the system we've created. People must do work to make money to buy stuff they consume. Repeat till death. We need a new purpose for life now because we have machines to do that first step of "work" for us and the rest of the cycle fails without that first step.

a reply to: mOjOm

... For now it's the bulk of the physical labor force that is in trouble.

No, not really. The medical field is affected, the law profession, others too. For example:

An AI Law Firm Wants to ‘Automate the Entire Legal World’

* Unchanged for the past hundred years, the legal industry now faces its turn to be automatized.
* The idea of legal tech is not new, however not until today have algorithms been ready to seriously transform the legal industry.

…Today, a majority of LawGeex’s clients are corporate legal departments. According to LawGeex, its users have reported they are saving about 80 percent of the time they normally use on contract review and get deals closed three times faster. Not to mention that they are also saving 90 percent of the typical cost of outside council. The contract review platform is just the start for LawGeex. “Our goal for the next couple of years is to automate the entire legal world,” says Shmuli Goldberg, LawGeex’s VP Marketing.

Can elite law firms survive the rise of artificial intelligence?

"This is not reversible," Dolin said. "The first-year associate as cash cow to partnership is breaking."

...What we really need is to replace the purpose in life with something other than working for a living. But we're consumers and that is the system we've created. People must do work to make money to buy stuff they consume. Repeat till death. We need a new purpose for life now because we have machines to do that first step of "work" for us and the rest of the cycle fails without that first step.

Agreed.

But methinks we also need a new economic system.

originally posted by: soficrow

But methinks we also need a new economic system.

Yep. Because they go hand in hand. Money is Power and People are machines too in that we need to power to function the same way machines need electricity to function. That's why it's called Currency.

a reply to: Aazadan

I think that it's much harder to send people from web languages to non web languages than the other way around. I've read a lot about what a persons first language should be. I was taught by people who thought it should be Python, I've started to come around on that and develop my own opinions though and think it should be C because it's better at teaching fundamentals even though a harder language.

You're 100% correct re: web to "real" language programming.

When I went to college (undergrad) they were convinced that Pascal was the language of the future and most courses used it as a basis. Of course when I graduated, everyone wanted COBOL expertise...lol. Luckily, I had taken a few courses using COBOL so I was OK and quickly moved into CICS and mainframe relational DB's. I also was good at systems programming (IBM assembler for the most part - BAL).

In hindsight, they were right re: Pascal with regards to structure, classes and objects. Made learning C, C++ and C# much easier, but I never liked coding in C. And as it turns out, I'm only a mediocre programmer anyway. I can get the job done, but what takes me 100 lines of code, the gifted can do in 50 or less. But what I am good at is system design, and as it turns out AI system design. According to people that know me in that field they say it's because I think "bent" whatever that means.

I still code a little...mostly for fun on my own time using Visual Studio.

And I'm still mediocre at it....lol.

a reply to: soficrow

This has been coming true for a while. Look at how Pittsburgh reinvented itself after the steel jobs evaporated.
From Steel To Tech, Pittsburgh Transforms Itself
No bemoaning lost jobs. Just reinvent the city and train them to do these new tasks.

originally posted by: seasonal
a reply to: soficrow

If I understand, and I may not. Coding is going to be automated as well.

The day a computer can program itself is the day Skynet becomes real. No software, no matter how well designed, has the ability to choose its own self-directed goals.

Think about what that would really mean.

For an application to program itself it would have to be able to understand some high-level objective and discern the intention of it with all of the ambiguity that entails. Even if a program could pull that off it would still have to formulate a way to prioritize and construct a series of tasks to work towards completing its goal. This requires making intuitive guesses about which pathway makes the most sense and adapting as things change.

Google's DeepMind team has something bordering on a system that can make decisions based on "good enough" information in a game like Go. However, the technology is still light-years away from possessing the ability to pick an arbitrary objective, learn the rules of the system(s) (without outside help), figure out a way to optimize its approach towards solving it (without programmer provided training data), and recovering when things inevitably fail.

Software development and programming jobs will probably be the last linchpin before full automation happens.

a reply to: mOjOm

I think about it in terms of time. It wasn't but as long as 25-30 years ago we had a fairly strong middle class with plenty of jobs and opportunity. 50 years ago, computers were in their infancy. That is simply one generation of workers ago. Looking ahead toward what could be a fully automated society is not sci-fi anymore. With that comes plenty of people without the skill or know how on how to survive outside of that.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

what a great story.

i'd expect nothing less from the people of Pittsburgh. Stand strong, be proud....i know folks from that area and its a cultural trait.

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

I know right? It's the story I point to whenever someone talks about how all major cities are headed towards Detroit dystopianism because of job loss. Sometimes we all need a bit of perspective and Pittsburgh is a great success story that shouldn't be ignored or forgotten about. Even though they ARE Steelers fans... But we can't all be perfect.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Yes. And great story (link)!

...Re-training, reselling, re-inventing oneself and one's city is an important approach for sure. But it's also important to recognize that it's a transitional strategy, a short-term solution that must be done again and again until the dance is over. And when the dance is over, so is the transition.

a reply to: JinMI

Another thing to consider is that it takes about one generation (or typical life span of 70 years. Not sure what the time of a generation actually is.) for the population to double in size. So a generation ago there were also only half as many people needing jobs. Worse is that about a generation from now there will be twice as many people needing jobs too if we don't figure something out. How many of them will be unemployed if we can't even employ what we have today.

You'll either have major civil unrest from poverty or a total slave majority that are forced into some form of pointless labor just to keep them occupied so they aren't causing trouble. Basically bigger and more prisons just housing huge populations of people. That doesn't sound too nice.

Either we slow down the population growth in a major way or start exploring space or something. Or else we may be looking at the Hunger Games or something.

originally posted by: Riffrafter
In hindsight, they were right re: Pascal with regards to structure, classes and objects. Made learning C, C++ and C# much easier, but I never liked coding in C. And as it turns out, I'm only a mediocre programmer anyway. I can get the job done, but what takes me 100 lines of code, the gifted can do in 50 or less. But what I am good at is system design, and as it turns out AI system design. According to people that know me in that field they say it's because I think "bent" whatever that means.

I still code a little...mostly for fun on my own time using Visual Studio.

The number of lines doesn't mean much. Not all lines are created equal. Different lines are going to have different runtimes. The scope of your code is important too. For example, in most business applications code needs to be written primarily to be human readable in order to cut down on time and mistakes when maintaining or altering the code. It's only after ensuring that the code can be easily read and understood by humans do you want to optimize for the computer (excluding use cases that are extremely performance dependent).

Python is my preferred language with C# coming in second, so I don't really end up writing verbose code all that often. But, I'm pretty good (at least compared to my peers) at algorithms. Usually, most of my work tends to be pair programming or team based and I take more of a role of architecting the system and breaking things into functions. That sort of vision comes very easy to me. Actually writing code though, I'm a lot slower, I can stumble my way through it when I have to though.

Some companies put really ridiculous metrics on programmers like wanting X lines of code written per week. That's just not the way things work though if you want them to run well. It goes back to my previous points that corporate america just isn't tech savvy enough to know how to manage programmers. The occasional manager is, but most managers outside of people like CTO's at tech companies aren't programmers. I think that will eventually change though, as code becomes more integrated into daily operations familiarity will improve.

Think about it.

How do you get to work everyday to do your so called "blue collar" job?

Do you walk?

When you get there , is it a one story building?

If not, do you take the stairs?

Think about all the real blue collar workers that it takes to get to your "blue collar " job.

Nothing is going to replace them.

originally posted by: ThingsThatDontMakeSense
Google's DeepMind team has something bordering on a system that can make decisions based on "good enough" information in a game like Go. However, the technology is still light-years away from possessing the ability to pick an arbitrary objective, learn the rules of the system(s) (without outside help), figure out a way to optimize its approach towards solving it (without programmer provided training data), and recovering when things inevitably fail.

That's the system I use in my AI which was built to play Magic the Gathering. Interestingly, one of Googles upcoming challenges for their approach (I think they're using DeepMind for it) is to play MtG. No doubt, their implementation will be much better than mine. But it relies on the same idea that you don't need an optimal move every time, you just need a good one.

I do know that with certain video games people have been able to build solvers based on genetic algorithms. Where the AI learns to play a game based only on the feedback it's getting and can eventually solve something. I had to build one of those last semester actually. If you check youtube for them, lots of people have footage of them in action. What is beyond a computers ability right now, is constructing it's own code to do that. While the computer is capable of learning through maximizing score based feedback and random experimentation, it cannot write it's own genetic algorithm out of nothing. Calling it intelligence is a bit of a misnomer in my opinion. It's just rapidly iterating through a formula that creates a pattern. Eventually the pattern becomes optimal.

a reply to: Groot

You don't have to fully replace them to feel the effects though. That car you take to work will still require some humans to build some of it, sure. But what used to take a whole factory full of guys building that one car, now a handful of operators can do with machines that can make a hundred cars.

So you're still talking about shrinking the work force in some areas from thousands to dozens or less.

I worked in Press and Printing/Graphic Design years ago and the same thing happened there. What once too a giant factory full of people working 3 shifts eventually became a few offices with a few hands full of people with computers. The press took slightly longer than the design area but eventually it happened there too. Print became antiquated for so many things because going digital was so much faster, cheaper and easier than the print media. Now you just have what is absolutely needed going to print while everything else is digital.

Same happened with the music industry.

When you turn a medium over to being digital it gets real cheap to produce it. It has many benefits and some drawbacks too. But what it always does is reduce the amount of labor used to produce it. Which is exactly the point of why we do it too though. That is how it's supposed to work.

Again. The problem isn't the change over with technology that is killing us. It's our not being prepared for the shift in what to do with how it effects society as a whole. We make these things so we don't have to work so much. They're doing exactly what we made them for. We just haven't figured out a system of what to do with ourselves now that we aren't needed as laborers all the time. We're working with an old Human Design instead of one that is up to date like using old software in a modern business structure. We need an update on what Humanity's Purpose is in the modern age. Human Living 2.0 because Human Living 1.0 is too old to be of any use now.