'Tech Companies Should Stop Pretending AI Won't Destroy Jobs' (technologyreview.com) 344
Kai-Fu Lee, the founder and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and president of the Sinovation Ventures Artificial Intelligence Institute, believes that we're not ready for the massive societal upheavals on the way. He writes for MIT Technology Review: The rise of China as an AI superpower isn't a big deal just for China. The competition between the US and China has sparked intense advances in AI that will be impossible to stop anywhere. The change will be massive, and not all of it good. Inequality will widen. As my Uber driver in Cambridge has already intuited, AI will displace a large number of jobs, which will cause social discontent. Consider the progress of Google DeepMind's AlphaGo software, which beat the best human players of the board game Go in early 2016. It was subsequently bested by AlphaGo Zero, introduced in 2017, which learned by playing games against itself and within 40 days was superior to all the earlier versions. Now imagine those improvements transferring to areas like customer service, telemarketing, assembly lines, reception desks, truck driving, and other routine blue-collar and white-collar work.
It will soon be obvious that half of our job tasks can be done better at almost no cost by AI and robots. This will be the fastest transition humankind has experienced, and we're not ready for it. Not everyone agrees with my view. Some people argue that it will take longer than we think before jobs disappear, since many jobs will be only partially replaced, and companies will try to redeploy those displaced internally. But even if true, that won't stop the inevitable. Others remind us that every technology revolution has created new jobs as it displaced old ones. But it's dangerous to assume this will be the case again.
It will soon be obvious that half of our job tasks can be done better at almost no cost by AI and robots. This will be the fastest transition humankind has experienced, and we're not ready for it. Not everyone agrees with my view. Some people argue that it will take longer than we think before jobs disappear, since many jobs will be only partially replaced, and companies will try to redeploy those displaced internally. But even if true, that won't stop the inevitable. Others remind us that every technology revolution has created new jobs as it displaced old ones. But it's dangerous to assume this will be the case again.
the jobs are already vanishing. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:the jobs are already vanishing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like the article points out. You can't make it as a professional go player anymore.
You don't even have to make it past TFS to realize that mocking this situation is an ignorant mistake.
It won't even take displacing 10% of human jobs to create a massive impact on society.
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So you are saying that AI will let us work 10% less and retain the same pay and productivity?
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No, they're saying companies will have to pay 10% less pay checks, increase productivity and increase profits. Costs will stay the same at purchase.
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You're a shit business owner if you consider those you pay the most to automatically be your most expensive employees. What about something as sensible as letting go the workers whose work the AI is doing?
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...What about something as sensible as letting go the workers whose work the AI is doing?
Uh, that would require a shitload of middle and upper management to let themselves go. Needless to say those doing the firing always consider themselves necessary.
Re:the jobs are already vanishing. (Score:5, Insightful)
> So you are saying that AI will let us work 10% less and retain the same pay and productivity?
In any sensible society yes, that would be it. But not in capitalism:
Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before[...] The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work.
(Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness [zpub.com], 1935, see also Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
Capitalism, as we have today is just too stupid to cope with that problem and flees into more and more mass-production of less and less useful crap, at an exploding externalized cost: environment, civil society, whatever that has not a price tag or can be bribed.
Re:the jobs are already vanishing. (Score:5, Insightful)
So you are saying that AI will let us work 10% less and retain the same pay and productivity?
No, I'm saying automation and AI will displace 10% of human employment quicker than anyone can predict, and Greed won't give a fuck about your pay or your ability to survive. Greed never has.
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That's OK, I predict 10% replacement in 5 trillion years. If it's a little sooner, that's OK.
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If your lucky, you will get promoted into a position that maintains the AI system for higher pay.
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The AI will let you do anything you want. They're tools that open a lot of possibilities. They can automate tasks, but they still need someone to set them up and deal with the output.
Your boss will can your ass the first moment he can. get away with it. ...Although, that said, there are a lot of people that could be replaced with a dozen lines of bash script.
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Sure.
AHAHAHA dream on, sucker.
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I doubt anyone thinks AI won't displace jobs. That's kinda the point, to use AI instead of natural intelligence, just like tools and motors displaced human muscle.
The pace of the transition is intimidating. So is the massive transition of rural farmers to cities all over southeast Asia and Africa. I have no idea how we'll all adjust but we're clever and motivated. I'm hopeful that 7 billion minds can figure something out.
Re:the jobs are already vanishing. (Score:4, Insightful)
"I have no idea how we'll all adjust but we're clever and motivated. I'm hopeful that 7 billion minds can figure something out."
I'm sure they thought something similar back in the day when agricultural machinery started replacing workers on the farms and whole families starved because they had no income or had to go and live in slum conditions in newly industrialised cities. But hey, for the farm and factory owners - win! What did they care.
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Oddly, that didn't happen in America. People fled to the cities here (just like they're doing elsewhere now) because the conditions were much better than the grinding rural poverty they left. Heck, those city jobs actually payed money for work, not just room and board. Farm automation lagged the growth of cities, as demand rose for automation to replace the people who had left.
Working on a farm when you're not the one who owns the land has always been terrible work.
Title needed some work. (Score:5, Funny)
'Tech Companies Should Stop Pretending They Have Any Idea How To Make AI'
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AI companies with no clue replaced by AI with a clue.
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Fearmongering (Score:2, Interesting)
Did power tools and heavy machinery destroy construction worker's jobs? Nope.
Machines are tools designed to make our life easier.
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Did power tools and heavy machinery destroy construction worker's jobs? Nope. Machines are tools designed to make our life easier.
And you're an idiot if you think this shift in technology is ANYTHING like what we've had in the past.
There's a difference in making jobs easier and making humans unemployable. Wake the hell up and understand that.
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When I was a kid, a garbage truck had two people in it. One guy drove, the other loaded the garbage cans into the truck.
Where I live now, the garbage truck has a driver and an automatic arm that can grab the garbage can to empty it into the truck.
In ten years I imagine the garbage trucks probably drive themselves.
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Why would the human magically become unemployable? Is the AI going to dig ditches?
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What? No, it's exactly like automated looms. What once took skilled labor can now use menial labor and the output is greatly increased. Automated looms made those expensive guild weavers obsolete and destroyed their jobs. A new job of tending to those machines opened up and was largely filled by street urchins. The industrialist owners got ludicrously rich.
In exactly the same way, specialized knowledge-workers are going to be replaced by a few IT staff (or IT staff at a third-party company) maintaining th
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They did actually. Far fewer people per capita are employed in construction, manufacturing, mining, basically all primary and secondary industries, than used to be.
The excess has moved to tertiary, service industries. This used to be an absolutely tiny sector, and is still fairly small in undeveloped economies, but in developed countries it's often 2/3+.
6 million construction workers would disagree (Score:2)
Those tools replaced a shitload of work (and thus jobs).
from 1939 the number of people in construction work has risen steadily from 2 million to over 6 million.
https://data.bls.gov/pdq/Surve... [bls.gov]
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Here's where the headline is misleading.
Will AI displace certain jobs? Of course, that's the idea. If your job involves taking orders at a counter, you should be worried. If you drive for a living, you also need to start planning for something else.
The real question is, will there be a net increase or decrease in jobs? That is, optimists like me observe that ever time we've automated jobs away, people found new, more productive things to do. When it was all said and done, those displaced workers found new t
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Jan 1, 2018 326.97 million
Jul 1, 1939 130.88 million growth 2.5 times
It looks like population growth was a little slower than the growth in construction labor. However, I don't believe growth in population is directly linked to growth in employment in a particular field. For example, my father moved machinery for living. He always had about six people working for him. He was able to keep increasing his revenue because by using mechanical accessed, forklifts, cranes etc.
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Which is pretty amazing, if you've watched modern construction. Excavation for a large site might only take a half-dozen guys on site, because the earth-moving equipment is so good. Framing for wood construction is usually complete wall segments arriving on the back of a truck and just a few guys nailing them together with nail guns.
So is takes maybe 10% of the people to build as it used to. Demand grew to keep employment high. Humans are like that - we always want more.
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[Power tools] replaced a shitload of work (and thus jobs).
In the case of power tools, they didn't really replace any existing jobs because employment in construction has followed population growth nearly perfectly over the past 80 years or so. What power tools did was to allow for much larger homes (and other projects). House sizes have grown from 1100 ft2 in the 1940's to over 2300 ft2 today. Without power tools and other technological advancements you would expect well over 10 million construction workers in our economy, but instead it is closer to 6 million.
So
News websites (Score:2)
Slashdot and news websites should stop pretending they don't pump up baseless hype and exaggerated drama to get clicks. It's obvious to everyone that measured, sober statements don't make news.
They can't (Score:2)
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Socialist states don't redistribute wealth, but income. Genocidal communist states redistribute wealth, but only to different wealthy people, not the shape of the curve. The Pareto principle (exponential wealth distribution) holds whenever you have any sort of freedom, and is the best case when you don't (Feudal systems concentrate wealth even beyond 80/20).
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Income redistribution leads to wealth redistribution over the long term, if you do it properly. Most "socialist" states have reasonable inheritance taxes or equivalent, and inflation means that if your wealth isn't generating an income it will evaporate away.
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I'm not so sure about that. If you look at the supporters of minimum basic income, lots of the really prominent ones are... tech billionaires. These people are in the field, they know what's coming, and they're also smart enough to realize that Marie Antoinette didn't have such a good retirement.
Being rich is awesome. Being too rich, while a lot of people are too poor, is not.
The other possible issue is that AI need not necessarily increase the wealth gap. It will certainly make many things much cheaper
You know what's going to blindside them? (Score:5, Insightful)
Having completely abandoned the economic class focus of their old leftist counterparts, they're going to have a "diverse underclass" that has been kicked around and called obsolete gunning for them. I'm not a Marxist, but Marx would be shitting himself if he could see the arguments today like a "gay billionaire being oppressed by poor workers who don't want to work at his wedding." Adam Smith would also agree that it's a recipe for disaster because both point to the same problem, which is it that it's an elite-focused system without even a pretense of noblesse oblige and a terribly smug disdain for the "wrong people" almost all of whom are poor or poorish.
A "diverse underclass" is also a caste system (Score:2)
What amazes me is how little talk there is about this pattern. There's a lot of SJWs going on about how bad bigotry
Define AI (Score:2)
AI right now is nothing more than a new type of index search. Where instead of building a tree first the system customizes the tree before searching. It is very limited and often fails in illogical ways as it correlates data that doesn't correlate often.
Show me true AI that is self learning. Either you give it a topic and let it learn what it can.
Even ai in video games is often nothing more than branch predictors based on local information. In both cases it is often trivial to feed the system garbage un
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> AI right now is nothing more than a new type of index search.
It doesn't matter how simple it is, it doesn't matter how marginal work it can do. If it can beat humans, humans can't compete against it and humans can't do work on that area anymore.
Lets take a simple example. Lets say that we invent an AI that can detect a fracture from X-Ray. Now lets say that it takes only 10 minutes of doctors time to find this and their accuracy is 50%. Lets also say that doctors look at 100 000 X-Ray images every year
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Re:Define AI (Score:5, Insightful)
AI right now is nothing more than a new type of index search. Where instead of building a tree first the system customizes the tree before searching. It is very limited and often fails in illogical ways as it correlates data that doesn't correlate often.
Show me true AI that is self learning.
STOP being ignorantly stuck in the idea that "AI" needs to be perfect in order to disrupt or replace humans. Put simply, it doens't.
Automation will work to create enough of an impact and displace human employment. There is no such thing as a "perfect" human, so it will only take "good enough" AI to displace a human from their job. Sorry, but this is the reality of the situation. We can ramble on and on about how AI isn't equal to the human brain and won't be for a long time (which may be true), but to put it bluntly, 90% of those employed today are using a fraction of their mental capacity, so human employment WILL be disrupted, and sooner than you think.
I think you're a bit behind the times (Score:5, Insightful)
"AI right now is nothing more than a new type of index search."
Not sure what gave you that idea.
"Where instead of building a tree first the system customizes the tree before searching"
Depends on the algorithm being used. There are many difference types, some are neural nets, others are mathematics based doing massive statistical analysis and prediction.
"Show me true AI that is self learning"
There are already self training AIs. Google it (spot the irony).
"Even ai in video games"
Hardly a cutting edge example of AI. Most games "AI" is just hard coded if-thens.
"A basic feedback loop would at least help point it correctly."
No shit, why didn't they think of that?? Oh wait, they did, its called back propagation and was invented in the 1960s.
You might want to get a clue before posting.
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Define AI
Software that learns. The bar is pretty low because it's not that special. Making software that learns complex things quickly is the difference between a rock you can use as a hammer and a pneumatic jackhammer. Just like how "life" includes everything from bacteria to humans.
Show me true AI that is self learning.
Dangerously close to No True Scotsman. But sure, here you go, AlphaGoZero [wikipedia.org].
it is often trivial to feed the system garbage until it is useless.
Just like people.
A basic feedback loop would at least help point it correctly.
BRILLIANT! You should tell someone over at google that maybe they could feed the output of their neural net back into the inputs. Could b
Jobs will be destroyed faster than created (Score:5, Interesting)
It won't be by A.I. It will be by neural network automated trucks, laundry robots (on sale now), robotic pickers and shippers, automated checkout (largest job category in the u.s. right now- likely to vanish over the next 10 years), automated fast food robots, etc.
But definitely not A.I.
Because as machines are exterminating the last human beings, they will point out that the machine algorithms driving the behavior is not A.I. dammit!
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On the flip side, it's a good time to learn how to be a robot repair person. These things are going to break, frequently.
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[quote]On the flip side, it's a good time to learn how to be a robot repair person. These things are going to break, frequently.[/quote]
Training robots to repair robots will probably be quite easy. Usually it will be just swapping out a complete sub assembly. Then the subassembly will be shipped to a central repair location (if it is expensive enough to be worth repairing) where it can be run through advanced diagnostic and repair tools.
There will never be a significant number of 'robot repair' jobs for h
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I am reminded of this short story I read in school. Many of the details escape me now, but we follow an extremely angry young man around town one night, during which he vandalizes stores and homes by throwing rocks through their windows. Always with good reason; the grocer cheats on the weight, that guy is banging his wife's best friend and so on and so forth.
Then as dawn comes he heads home to wait, and sure enough, it's not long before the phone rings.
"Windows and Blinds, John speaking."
Re:Jobs will be destroyed faster than created (Score:5, Interesting)
In this short story I compare three friends. The trade I mention was repairing office equipment. It is very similar to robot repair. In fact I use that experience to teach Robotics. When it comes to the difference between the trades and college paths I am reminded of the story of three friends, of which I am one. We met in a community college trade program. All three of us were recently out of the military and drew together.
We had a similar starting point; but ended in different places. Two of us went directly into a trade, repairing office equipment (I am one of those two). Another bounced around a bit between various county and state technical jobs until re started his own HVAC business.
The friend who started his business because his mother poured, quite literally, everything she had into his business to get him started. I remember delivering some of her personal jewelry to be sold in order to raise money for his business. He is now doing ok. We are all now in our 50s and he is pretty much completely broken down from the physical demand of his job. However, financially he is now stable (and has a lot of great guns, I love going out to his place just to see what he has added to his collection).
The other friend tried to stay in Office equipment too long. As he got older his numbers declined and he was let go right about 50. For reasons not understood by me, he decided to take that “opportunity” to get his college degree in a field that doesn’t hire people over 35 unless they are entering with a tremendous amount of experience. He is now delivering pizzas and struggling to hold onto his house.
Me, I saw the writing on the wall. Right around the time the company I was working for canceled the defined benefits pension program I looked around and realized that I saw no old guys. I went back to college and got my BA and eventually my MBA. I am not tall or good looking, I lack family connections and there was no way I could afford an expensive internship. I came from one of Americas poverty areas and, without question, it is part of who I am.
I was able to get a job teaching and took the accreditation over a period of a couple of years of evening courses. I now work as a teacher in rural district that, due to the number of immigrants, has many very urban problems.
What does this short biography have to do with the trades? Of the three of us one made it in the trades, mostly because his family had the resources to prop him up as long as it took to become stable. One just plain left, bounced around and left the trades. The other tried to stay until he was pushed out.
Those promoting trades, look around. Do you see many old guys in that trade? How many 60 year olds? How many 70 year olds? As we push up the national retirement age who is going to hire that 70 year old?
I do not think trades are wrong, what I think is wrong is how our society treats tradesmen. As long as people are nothing but disposable cogs to be discarded once they are worn I am concerned about the pure trades’ path. It can, and I think should, be part of a person’s life
Framing is important (Score:3)
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Slashdot seems to concentrate a certain elite who have forgotten the lessons of history. Like that one.
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What matters most in this context is the framing. Jobs are a bullshit necessary evil, and technology will eliminate a number of jobs. We have to be working towards changes that allow us to move away from needing jobs without our society collapsing.
You are only slightly correct. Money is the necessary evil, and Greed won't be displaced or disrupted anytime soon, since Greed is part of the fucking reason automation and AI is working to replace human employment.
To fix this, one must solve for the Disease of Greed. Good fucking luck with that shit. Greed would rather create it's own demise than be cured. This has been proven for thousands of years.
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Money is the necessary evil
Oh, brother. Let me guess ... you'd be happy if we went back to bartering so that no Eeeeevil Money was involved. Because you can't wrap your head around the fact that a society that uses money (instead of trade goods) is wildly more efficient for everybody and is a central part of the prosperity that has even very poor people in the US living better than 99.9% of the people centuries ago.
But even so, I'm sure you'd tell the person who's invested the time to breed, raise, feed and protect a really nice
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Money is the necessary evil
Oh, brother. Let me guess ... you'd be happy if we went back to bartering so that no Eeeeevil Money was involved. Because you can't wrap your head around the fact that a society that uses money (instead of trade goods) is wildly more efficient for everybody and is a central part of the prosperity that has even very poor people in the US living better than 99.9% of the people centuries ago.
But even so, I'm sure you'd tell the person who's invested the time to breed, raise, feed and protect a really nice egg laying chicken that they're being greedy if they value that chicken more than the crappy chicken some other guy his trying to use to barter for the same farm implement. Greed works. It's what causes people to breed better chickens. You want everybody to have crappy chickens because you feel entitled to a chicken and value your laziness more than egg quality. You personally embody a big part of what's wrong with contemporary society. That you can't even grasp that money is a wildly more efficient stand-in for trade goods and bartered services suggests that you don't have the intellectual development to do things possibly dangerous to other people, like voting. Please don't do that - you're not ready.
If Greed actually worked, then Rome would be thriving today. Rome fell in part due to the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, and the taxation necessary to support the poor, not unlike what we're going to be facing with humans being umemployable, and demanding the rich fund UBI through taxation. It truly is amazing that Human Ignorance can manage to survive and thrive for thousands of years. Every new generation wonders why the older generation mocks them and their lack of wisdom and experie
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economies based on bartering never actually existed
Right. You can't build a large, thriving, productive economy based on primitive trade techniques. People (like the GP) who confuse "greed" with "money" are going out of their way to display their ignorance and/or their intellectual dishonesty.
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You don't need to get rid of greed (in the sense of self-interest) in order to reach a post-jobs society. The thing is we need to be better at being greedy, mostly through more abstraction. The reason capitalism is as functional as it is is because most of the time, everyone is acting in their self-interest, which allocates resources relatively efficiently.
For example. we know that happiness caps out at around $70-$100k a year. A rational greedy person has no interest in income substantially past that,
And this is news why? (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, disruptive technologies will cost jobs. It always does. The machine loom meant a lot of weavers were out of work. Electric saws and drills meant that carpentry became a niche market. Automobiles made horse breeding rare. It happens.
As before, we will adjust, and the average person will have a better life, even if many will lose their jobs and have worse lives during the transition period. We'll establish a new status quo.
Just embrace it, because it is unstoppable. Throwing clogs in the wheels won't prevent it from happening. Instead ask how you can make money in the new improved world, taking advantage of the new technologies. Some will need to write or service the AIs, and some will need to handle the increased inputs and outputs, whether it's designing distribution systems and logistics, or providing secondary services.
Re:And this is news why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, disruptive technologies will cost jobs. It always does. The machine loom meant a lot of weavers were out of work. Electric saws and drills meant that carpentry became a niche market. Automobiles made horse breeding rare. It happens. As before, we will adjust, and the average person will have a better life, even if many will lose their jobs and have worse lives during the transition period. We'll establish a new status quo.
Just embrace it, because it is unstoppable. Throwing clogs in the wheels won't prevent it from happening. Instead ask how you can make money in the new improved world, taking advantage of the new technologies. Some will need to write or service the AIs, and some will need to handle the increased inputs and outputs, whether it's designing distribution systems and logistics, or providing secondary services.
Embrace it? Sorry, but your ignorance isn't helping matters. For hundreds of years, the answer to progress and technology destroying jobs was "Go get an education." Now, automation and AI is targeting educated jobs, so it's stupid and ignorant to simply dismiss this problem under the guise of "Why is this news?", as if the answer of yesteryear still applies. Put simply, IT DOES NOT APPLY, which is the main damn point being driven here. This has nothing to do with trying to figure out how to make money in the new world when there will eventually be only be 1% of the human population who can do that. We STILL have to deal with the issue of 99% of humans being unemployable.
Now, you can choose to dismiss my claims and wait for Greed to prove you wrong, or you can realize that Greed is one of the main factors driving human employment into extinction. Either way, your casual dismissive opinion about this, is wrong. Many will lose their jobs, which means many will lose their ability to fund their ability to thrive and survive. And before you start beating on the UBI drum as some kind of savior, understand that we can't even get the rich to pay their fair share of taxes today, so UBI will become nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the unemployable masses. Imagine an "economy" when 99% of the planet is living in poverty.
It's ironic that Greed is too drunk on greed to understand they are creating their own demise, but Greed has never given a shit about the long-term impact. Greed today only cares about the next fiscal quarter. Eventually, Eat the Rich will come into play, so this will all ultimately reset itself (Rome eventually fell too), but not after MASSIVE pain is endured by the world.
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Embrace it? Sorry, but your ignorance isn't helping matters. For hundreds of years, the answer to progress and technology destroying jobs was "Go get an education." Now, automation and AI is targeting educated jobs, so it's stupid and ignorant to simply dismiss this problem under the guise of "Why is this news?", as if the answer of yesteryear still applies.
The answer to that, as always, has been that you need to increase the level of education accordingly. Those who write and maintain AIs are going to have jobs. But a high school diploma isn't going to cut it, any more than finishing 7th grade was going to cut it once we got automation and computers.
Society will always adjust to new circumstances. There's no profit in, nor benefit to society of having a large number of useless people who are just mouths to feed. So they will need to find something else to
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Embrace it? Sorry, but your ignorance isn't helping matters. For hundreds of years, the answer to progress and technology destroying jobs was "Go get an education." Now, automation and AI is targeting educated jobs, so it's stupid and ignorant to simply dismiss this problem under the guise of "Why is this news?", as if the answer of yesteryear still applies.
The answer to that, as always, has been that you need to increase the level of education accordingly. Those who write and maintain AIs are going to have jobs. But a high school diploma isn't going to cut it, any more than finishing 7th grade was going to cut it once we got automation and computers.
Society will always adjust to new circumstances. There's no profit in, nor benefit to society of having a large number of useless people who are just mouths to feed. So they will need to find something else to do. The ability to do so is what is going to separate winners from losers. And judging by what you write, you may not be in the former category.
Sorry, but you are patently wrong, and I cannot believe you can't see it based on your own initial recommendation. How many humans today have the mental capability to "write and maintain AIs"? Perhaps 1% of society?!? No matter how you may want to dispute it, the average human is not capable of the level of education you claim as the "answer" in the future. There is a valid reason a LOT of humans are employed in simple, repetitive jobs that can easily be replaced by automation today, and "education" isn
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The answer to that, as always, has been that you need to increase the level of education accordingly. Those who write and maintain AIs are going to have jobs. But a high school diploma isn't going to cut it, any more than finishing 7th grade was going to cut it once we got automation and computers.
That's a nice sentiment, but you seem to forget that not everyone is even capable of getting through high school without significant assistance. For a not insignificant part of the population, there is an upper bounds to where they can go in terms of education that effectively excludes a lot of the higher maths you need to get into CI/ML. As such, we have a lot of people for whom skilled labor is going to be the best they might hope to achieve in terms of employment. If you get rid of those jobs that leaves
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Your post is generally fact free, and entirely emotional. You might want to wait until that time of the month is over and post again later.
Humans have a rather massive track record at underestimating the future. 20 years ago we were still using modems to dial-up to the internet. Today, we connect at Gigabit speeds via FTTP, which NO ONE would have predicted two decades ago. You can't even begin to understand the impact that automation and AI can bring, but we certainly DO understand how Greed works, and how relentless it is. THAT track record has been proven and validated for decades.
If you have other facts to back up your claim that autom
It took 80 years to adjust (Score:3)
The way I think of it is this: When in your life or mine has the best solution to a complex problem been to do nothing and let it sort itself out?
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basic income and higher taxes to pay for it (Score:3, Insightful)
We'll need a basic income for all and higher taxes to pay for it.
And folks who are hung up on insisting that people work are gonna have to get over it because when folks get displaced and have nowhere to make living, they're gonna revolt. So, we gave them basic income to keep them from reaching for the guns and torches.
Revolution is what will happen if the negative effects of AI are ignored. The thought that some other parts of the economy will soak up the displaced workers is just a fantasy.
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Past performances may not be representative for future results. There's no guarantee that people will find ways to make money in the new world juste because it happened before; and we have never had fully autonomous machines before our times. In fact the number of jobs is already going down, and that decline is concentrated in the less paying, less qualified jobs. Technological unemployment: much more than you wanted to know [slatestarcodex.com]
Your example of automobiles shows that new technology may have a huge impact in the
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Henny Penny (Score:2)
Consider the progress of Google DeepMind's AlphaGo software, which beat the best human players of the board game Go in early 2016.
Computers are good at doing tasks that require a lot of computation. News at 11. Forgive me if I disagree that this is somehow evidence of the Apocalypse.
Now imagine those improvements transferring to areas like customer service, telemarketing, assembly lines, reception desks, truck driving, and other routine blue-collar and white-collar work.
Ok I'm imagining it. AI managing customer service? Hoo boy that sounds like an absolutely terrible idea. Some bits of customer service can be automated. Many others cannot. Automating the ones that can simply helps us do a better job on the other things we don't have time for. I'm dying to see someone trying to program an AI to do telemarketing. T
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I want to see what happens when you give AI a sales job that requires smoozing customers. That oughta be fun to watch with modern AI technology.
This is all perfectly obvious. (Score:2)
Which is why companies should look at the number of lines of work displaced and create an equal number that AI can't do that those displaced are nonetheless able and qualified to do AND which pays at least as well. Then AI doesn't eliminate jobs, it simply changes which line of business you're in.
The problem with companies, and governments, is that they're very good on destroying things, but not so hot on replacing them. Where I come from, you break it, you buy it. This should apply to jobs. You break their
You can't automate everything (Score:2)
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However, even if they couldn't replace 100% of uses cases for 100% of jobs, they can still replace a number that is large enough to have catastrophic economic consequences.
Sure there'll be job losses (Score:5, Interesting)
But it'll be the white-collar middle class jobs that go this time, and that'll cause the chattering classes to squeal very loudly in ways they couldn't be bothered with when it was blue-collar robot automation that was affected.
Jobs like journalism - where Reuters already has the majority of its articles written by AI but it moving into news as well now:
https://www.technologyreview.c... [technologyreview.com]
Other information systems will only go the same way. My biggest fear is that it'll be Google or the like providing these systems and creaming off all the data for themselves.
Of course we're not ready! (Score:2)
That's kind of the whole point of just going through with it and automating every dumb job - we'll never be 'ready' if we pretend life is a contest of who is most willing to bend over backwards to work harder for their employers, as the chairs start falling away, and the music speeds up.
This gets posted a lot, but it's a decent freely-readable short story on the subject:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna... [marshallbrain.com]
In our current economy, folks sell stuff that others want to pay money for. Everything else is an expense
Automation NOT AI is displacing jobs (Score:2)
All the focus on AI is largely missing the overall picture. It's the Automation of jobs that's killing jobs faster than even AI. When Ford assembled the first cars they had to be put together entirely by hand, so a gigantic labour force was required to mass produce cars. Nowadays it's done by robots. Farming was once done by hand and or with the assistance of horses or cattle. The addition of tractors, machinery and probably computer aided tractors has greatly increased the amount of area that a single
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
New tech will ALWAYS create new jobs. (Score:2)
It's an obvious fact.
There is no set number of jobs. I am not employee # 1,345,219,223 out of 7,000,000,000
Jobs do things. The number of jobs available depends on the number of things we WANT to do. Note the word want, not need. We don't need a wine sommelier to tell us which wine is good. That's why that job did not exist 200 years ago. 200 years ago, we wanted to know what the best wine for the meal was, but we had more important things to do - like keeping everyone fed and clothed.
As tech elimi
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The killer counter-argument... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've used this argument before, but not enough for it bears repeating.
Suppose for a second, that a wonderful pill is invented, that eliminates all diseases in humans. It is fairly simple to produce, and needs to be taken once in a person's life.
Would we seriously consider the "displacement" this would cause all of the doctors, nurses, other hospital staff? Would anyone dare imply, that the pill should not be allowed into the market — or sabotaged with various regulations — because of these concerns?
Not ready? (Score:2)
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (Score:2)
With the United States and China in the AI mix, we're two-thirds of the way to creating AM! [wikipedia.org]
A.I. alarmist should stop pretending... (Score:2)
How long has this predicted? How often correct? (Score:2)
I can remember this sort of thing being predicted in movies, and twilight zone episodes, from the 1950s.
Technology is going replace humans! They took our jobs!
It is hard for me to take this threat serious, when the alarmists have been wrong for so many decades.
BTW: direct dialing increased the need for telephone operators.
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I can remember this sort of thing being predicted in movies, and twilight zone episodes, from the 1950s.
Technology is going replace humans! They took our jobs!
It is hard for me to take this threat serious, when the alarmists have been wrong for so many decades.
How much more intelligent has the average human become in the last 100 years?
How many people do you think we can employ in those futuristic tech jobs that are automation and AI-resistant?
Bottom line is the old "Go get an education" mantra doesn't apply with this iteration, and there's a reason we still employ a LOT of humans in highly-repetitive, mind-numbing jobs, which they are not mentally capable of doing anything more. If you wish to dismiss this threat, remember one fact; Human Ignorance has never be
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt, Chinese style (Score:2)
AI is going to take ALL YOUR JOBS, EVERYBODY NEEDS TO PANIC!!!1!
Want to be smart about this? Pay no attention to the communist behind the curtain. It's entirely in the best interests of China to stamp on the U.S. anthill as much as possible, make us all run around in circles screaming The Sky Is Falling, because panicked people's higher reasoning abilities turn 'OFF' when they're in a panic.
Historically, technological advances always cause some disruption in employment, but it never lasts, and even if some types of jobs become obsolete, new types of employment spring up to take their place.
That's the reality of the situation. Also:
S
Artificial Intelligence != Autonomous Intelligence (Score:2)
Congrats on an AI that can play a game that takes decades for an adult to master.
Let me know when you have an AI that can do what an infant takes a week to master -- like distinguish a gun from an apple.
We still don't have any sort of robotics that can live in the world. Sure we have robotic assembly lines -- welcome to a controlled environment.
I spent about twenty minutes trimming the ends off of snow peas for dinner yesterday. Got a robot that can grab a kitchen knife, and a bucket of snow peas and trim
Darned right! (Score:2)
Absolutely right -- jobs are in serious jeopardy, doggone-it! We all have to panic right friggin' now, before anyone brings up buggy whips!
(Ummmm.... so nobody heard me say that last part, right? Whew... that's a relief. I mean, my blatantly obvious attempt at irrational fear mongering would totally flop, if anyone brings that up.)
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Redistribution of wealth.... I mean jobs. (Score:2)
Back in the day, the increase in the number of telephone operators was so much that soon everyone would have to be a telephone operator. Technology fixed that.
Today, I'm reminded of I a Monty Python skit. "This redistribution of wealth thing is trickier than I thought!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Chess versus Go versus driving (Score:2)
AI is like a Hammer (Score:2)
AI is like a Hammer.
Before AI, er, I mean hammers, we didn't have nails.
Once we had hammers all the world looked like a nail.
Later came screw drivers and WOW! power screw drivers.
Now we use screws where once we used nails, before that pegs and before that vines to bind.
Can you envision what AI will let us do?
Maybe you have some limited ideas.
But before nails and screws people didn't foresee all the things we do with them.
Now they're standard tools of the trade.
Before screwdrivers and hammers we didn't have
All technological improvement destroys jobs (Score:3)
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We have the force ready if we need it, but the massive amount of logging and databases and info feeds will allow much more surgical work.
By the time you mutter about anything resembling a physical act to a possible ally, you've already had a yellow note on your name for "Potential Domestic Radical"
There won't be anyone joining your insistent chants of "viva la revolution" like in the old movies. Because you won't get the whole sentence out of your mouth.
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"Destroy" is the wrong word. Automation frees people from jobs. Would you complain that a miracle drug destroys your fight against cancer or heart disease? Does sex destroy your lust? Do shoes destroy your concerns about walking through an alley littered with glass shards?
Automation also "frees" you from earning an income. Also known as that thing that makes the world go 'round.
Try and grasp the impact before ignorantly commenting next time. The real world isn't fucking made of sunshine and rainbows, and doesn't give a shit if you and your "free" family starve to death in a ditch somewhere. Employment now and for the immediate future, is mandatory for survival.