Profiting off Automation

[Anonymous No.1936408]

There's been a lot of speculation about the automation crisis, and how many jobs will be lost to robots. Is this shit overblown, or should we actually invest in companies/ETFs that focus on automation, robots, and AI?

[Anonymous No.1936487]

It's not like you're doing anything special there. The greatest amount of money lost in all of investing history was the human genome project, everyone thought that it would turn into great business right away and it didn't. If you want to actually do something commendable, sock your money into a tech index fund and grow with that entire sector.

[Anonymous No.1936550]

>>1936487
>sock your money into a tech index fund and grow with that entire sector.

I've been doing this for decades now and I can affirm that it has worked out well.

[Anonymous No.1936561]

>>1936408
No. Build a company that uses technology to revolutionize an industry. You can be part of the next generation of billionaires.

Good luck anon.

[Anonymous No.1936582]

>>1936487
The human genome project was not practical. There are just too many genes to be able to identify what they do. Then there's the ethical concerns of eugenics, and the social justice backlash.

Personally, I think a lot of problems for automation and robotization end up being computationally difficult. So many problems are NP-hard, and many of them don't even have good approximations. Perhaps we can make do with approximations when the robots perform as well as humans.

All that being said, I was wondering if the media hype over automation is forcing robotics and tech stocks into a bubble? Should I buy tech and robot ETFs now, or wait until the hype dies down? Personally, I feel like there's more hype to be generated before people realize how (computationally) difficult the problems are to solve.

>>1936561
Too much work. I'd rather just invest and watch my money grow.

[Anonymous No.1936589]

>>1936582
This is why you'll never make it. Unless you're already rich, investing is not the best use of your time.

Even Warren Buffet was a businessman before he was an investor.

[Anonymous No.1936617]

>>1936589
I studied computer science. At least in the theoretical domain, we've already hit the wall. Many of them are working on extremely specific subproblems or tiny improvements to existing algorithms. Imagine if your life work was creating a way to make things run 1% more efficiently, but only for unrealistically large datasets, and you'd want to leave too.

That's not even considering how Moore's Law has slowed down considerably, if not died. There's a reason why tech companies are moving away from computers, and towards consumer crap.

[Anonymous No.1937566]

>>1936582
>>1936617

I get what you say but I think your are at least partly wrong.

I work for a small company (~10 people), which itself works for a much bigger one (~10 000).
We are working on a project that once completed (and it will be, at least part of it, in a matter of months) will cut the jobs of dozens of people while offering superior performances.

I think you underestimate the amount of stupid work there is that is done by humans.
Maybe that is because this type of work is mostly done by pajeets and stuff, but still.

There is very much room to grow before being stuck because of computational complexity.
The cliché example being AlphaGo. Go is computationally infeasable, and yet the computer beat the best human.

And you don't even have to be the best to replace humans, if your performance is on par with the average worker the computer as other advantages that make it more appealing.

[Anonymous No.1937578]

>>1936408

Patent the robots.

[Anonymous No.1937640]

>The White House, in a report to Congress, has put the probability at 83% that a worker making less than $20 an hour in 2010 will eventually lose their job to a machine. Even workers making as much as $40 an hour face odds of 31 percent.[46]

How much can we trust the (((White House)))?

[Anonymous No.1937641]

>>1937640
>inb4 uses "eventually" and specific percentages in the same sentence
>inb4 derives specific percentages from unknown temporal variables

[Anonymous No.1937645]

Robots and AI just aren't that advanced yet. Maybe in 50-80 years...

Automation of menial computer work like data entry? Yeah probably, it's already happening.