Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

But surely she had the tools to do that in excel itself, no? This is something I see a lot in software, where people devalue and trivialize the skills and abilities needed to make software simply because they know something is possible to do in software and because, as a software worker, they most likely had a natural predilection towards the kind of thought processes that led them toward pursuing software work.

I think it's fallacious to think everybody has the natural disposition and curiosity to want to write software. Writing has been around forever, and most people don't want to do it beyond purely functional communication, and even those who do want to go beyond that are mostly terrible at it. That lady could have automated her job if she really wanted to and was motivated enough to do it; she simply preferred to be a ditch digger than to design a ditch digging machine.

It doesn't help that "designing ditch digging machines" is in such high demand that most companies are really only able to hire mediocre people to fill those roles. Leonardo da Vinci is not working on sox compliance at a fucking bank.

There's a good chance that the payoff for that bank automating "take a set of dates in an Excel file, search each one individually into an internal search tool, then Ctrl+f the result report and verify that every code listed in the original document exists in the report" is not even there, because the first attempt will have insufficient monitoring or verifications to catch silent failures and introduce an expensive issue caught months after the fact that leads to a huge remediation scramble and requires more development than initially expected to address, not to mention the constant need for maintenance in updating the software and making sure it continues to run (which also involves a rotating cast of programmers joining, needing to learn the software, and leaving). Leonardo might do it right the first time, but he's not doing it for cheap and not going to make it his life's work. Joe Schmoe can do it cheaper but it's going to take a while, have an ongoing maintenace burden, and probably some mistakes made along the way. That lady can do it for even cheaper than Joe Schmoe can without many headaches.

You see this in manufacturing as well. You’d think robots would be everywhere but often, like way more than you’d imagine, it’s cheaper to hire a human to do it.

The way fertility rates are going, not for much longer.

Yeah, it's easy to forget that humans themselves are pretty amazing technology. You can program them with relatively vague instructions using natural language, they come with built in general-intelligence so you can delegate things for them to figure it out and expect them to adapt their instructions according to their situation, and they come with amazingly precise and dextrous arms. They generally cost under $150k/unit/year for most manual applications and you pretty much know what you're getting up front vs hardware/software purchased off the shelf, not to mention the capital cost of acquiring one is pretty low because they already exist and just need to be hired.

I think part of that is how these sorts of businesses choose to organize their money. A manufacturer might budget themselves to be quite lean, so lean that for any sort of improvement like automation with robots, they have to hire an expensive consultant to tell them they have to hire an expensive robot company to build them expensive robots with expensive service contracts. So of course in that model the human is cheaper. However, if the manufacturer instead took all that money they would have spent on the expensive consultant, and opened up their own "internal" automating wing that would just look for things within the company to replace with a robot they create and service internally, maybe the math would pencil out another way.

There's another aspect to it as well.

It's really common to see jobs that people are doing that appear to be easy to replace with robots. But if you actually try to develop automation to do it, you very commonly hit a bunch of gotchas that make the automation infeasible. Sometimes this is a systemic thing (you can't effectively automate this without having to change too much of the rest of the process at the same time, which makes it economically a nonstarter), but more often than you'd think it's because there's an aspect of the job which doesn't seem particularly hard or important because humans do it without even thinking about it -- but to computers and robots, it's incredibly difficult.

This has to do with the fact that robots are still pretty bad at basic tasks such as picking items from a container, or handling fabric. Just have a look at the state of the art in garment manufacturing robots. For most tasks, human muscle and sense of touch are way ahead of any robot.

Thus, over time, most people working on commercial robots favor increasing the minimum wage :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com