Most Americans Think AI Will Destroy Other People's Jobs, Not Theirs (theverge.com) 268
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of U.S. adults believe artificial intelligence will "eliminate more jobs than it creates," according to a Gallup survey. But, the same survey found that less than a quarter (23 percent) of people were "worried" or "very worried" automation would affect them personally. Notably, these figures vary depending on education. For respondents with only a four-year college degree or less, 28 percent were worried about AI taking their job; for people with at least a bachelor degree, that figure was 15 percent. These numbers tell a familiar story. They come from a Gallup survey of more than 3,000 individuals on automation and AI. New details were released this week, but they echo the findings of earlier reports. The newly released findings from Gallup's survey also show that by one measure, the use of AI is already widespread in the U.S. Nearly nine out of 10 Americans (85 percent) use at least one of six devices or services that use features of artificial intelligence, says Gallup. Eighty-four percent of people use navigation apps like Waze, and 72 percent use streaming services like Netflix. Forty-seven percent use digital assistants on their smartphones, and 22 percent use them on devices like Amazon's Echo.
yeah forget that (Score:4, Insightful)
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Would you rather not do your job and not get paid? Because that's what will happen when the robots eliminate your jobs.
You have that option now, of course, and evidently haven't taken it, so it's pretty clear you'd rather keep your job and keep getting paid.
Of course everyone would prefer to lose their job yet keep getting paid anyway, but our robot-owning overlords are unlikely to offer that option.
Re: yeah forget that (Score:3, Funny)
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It really should, yeah. But it won't.
Re: yeah forget that (Score:4, Funny)
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What? No. The robot should pay ME for the honor of doing MY job!
Yeah, the "robot" will. It's called welfare. In the future we'll give it a fancy name like "UBI" to make you feel better, but make no mistake as to how much Greed will help fund UBI for the unemployable masses; it will be fucking welfare and not a penny more.
Smile. You won't have to work anymore. You can relax and enjoy your new lifestyle that barely sustains life. At least until you get sick. Then you'll just die, which will be by design. Easiest way to create the necessary cull is to cut off medic
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Would you go to work if you didn't get paid? No way!
yes/no., if all my needs where taken care of (as if i was paid) then yes i would go to work unpaid because i enjoy what i do.
I know i will never quick working, rather retirement for me will be the ability to pick and choose between projects.
I do not get up in the morning and dread going into work, that is horrible. Last time that happened I found a different Job.
Re: yeah forget that (Score:2)
Yes they do. Many people choose not to do anything because it is easier.
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Yes they do. Many people choose not to do anything because it is easier.
This exactly, reinventing your self, forcibly changing roles/industry/etc. is hard. It requires hard work and self control, and a fuck load of will power to make your self do it.
Having been someone who has done it a couple of times starting early in life, and making it happen in unconventional ways, i know it can be done. And while i do feel sorrow for individuals who feel they are stuck i do not feel pity for them because i know if they had the self determination they could make change.
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Well ... maybe ... I think I would still do similar work, even if it wouldn't net me an income* I could live on. Maybe not for the same clients as I'm working now because I would then be (even more) the one to choose where to invest my time in. And maybe a part of my work will then be invested in projects which will benefit me in a non-financial way. But I'd definitely do similar work. Hell, I already do volunteering IT work for two organizations, beside my regular (part-time 4 days/week) job. And part of m
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I HOPE it eliminates my job. My job sucks. The only reason I do it is because I get paid. And don't pretend you are any different. Would you go to work if you didn't get paid? No way!
Sure I would. If job's did not pay a salary I'd either be (a) living in a dystopian civilisation where everybody is a slave or (b) I'd be living in some kind of post apocalyptic world where there are no job in which case my job would be: hunting, farming, fishing, spinning, weaving, chasing cattle and crop stealing freeloaders (the human variety) off my fields and when I'd not be doing that I'd be mixing up gunpowder ... You have to survive somehow and that goal always leads to some kind of work.
Yes, I would work. (Score:2)
To be honest, my life right now is pretty similar to what it would be if I were a billionaire and a robot would do my vacuuming (I'll probably get one of those this year) . Yeah, I'd travel more and I'd probably have a luxury condo in my town with a spa, a swimming pool and a small team of cute naked ladies doing all the cleaning and tending to my needs - but I'd pretty much be doing the very same thing I do right now: A little web coding for real-world projects, some FOSS coding, going to college on the si
Re: Yes, I would work. (Score:2)
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I HOPE it eliminates my job. My job sucks. The only reason I do it is because I get paid. And don't pretend you are any different. Would you go to work if you didn't get paid? No way!
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The problem is, once you're no longer needed to do your job, you can be eliminated as well. And don't think they won't do it. History is replete with examples of the US Government, beholden first and foremost to corporations, treating humans like lab animals. What do you do with lab animals when you're done with them? Usually, you suffocate them.
Re: yeah forget that (Score:2)
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Historically jobs have improved over time as automation has come increased. Or course you need new training, but that's kind of normal in this industry even without robots.
Care to tell me what you're going to do with the tens of millions of humans who are incapable of learning a 21st century trade?
You can shove STEM books in front of little Johnny Halfwit all damn day. It won't make a bit of difference, because we keep failing to account for the one thing that has not advanced much in the last few hundred years; mental capacity.
And the societal and financial impact of targeting millions who are employed in boring, highly-repetitive and easily automated jobs is considerable.
Re: yeah forget that (Score:2)
Cultural/moral progress didn't change this state of affairs. Technological improvements did. Labor tools and techniques greatly increased our productive capacity, to the point where it was tenable to built a city entirely on paid labor provided by workers who chose their profession. Once such things were possible, only then did the moral potential of humanity found its expression.
That's kind of a depressing thought. Morals follow money.
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It's not really surprising. Push people into hard times and their behavior generally gets worse. Look further back into the past and all of humanity "gets pushed" (in the reverse-motion you're watching them in) into harder and harder times, so their behavior "gets" worse as you'd expect.
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That's kind of a depressing thought. Morals follow money.
Morals follow prosperity, and are largely imaginary. When the prosperity goes away, so does the morality. They're a symptom of a healthy (flourishing) society, nothing more.
Re: yeah forget that (Score:2)
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That's such a negative thought. I don't like your negativity.
Realism is often taken as negativity by people who want to believe in imaginary things. The tendency is most strongly exhibited by people who are upset about other people not accepting their ideas about magic, invisible sky people, but in reality it's sacred cows all the way down.
Empathy is real, morality is imaginary. That's why we have to teach people not to ignore their empathy. With it, we can pretend to have morality, and that's about as good as it gets. The real rules we operate under are "don't die,
Re: yeah forget that (Score:2)
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Things will certainly get better for everyone eventually, the question is just how we get there from here. We could have everything from immediate distribution of the miraculous automation into the ownership of everyone, to only the wealthiest of the wealthy surviving at all, whose descendants then inherit a glorious postscarcity utopia. The glorious postscarcity utopia is coming one way or another (provided we don't somehow destroy ourselves in the way there), but will you or your descendants live to see i
This is what's wrong with America (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus, I can never seem to get people to understand survival bias. As in "I've survived layoffs so it must be because I'm so damn awesome, and not because I got lucky as hell".
But Christ people, even if your job somehow _isn't_ the one automated away everybody else is going to be gunning for the few jobs left ya know?
It's like the man said, I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas [google.com]
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But Christ people, even if your job somehow _isn't_ the one automated away everybody else is going to be gunning for the few jobs left ya know?
Look on the bright side! This is going to make Purge Day so much simpler this year! ;)
Not just US of A (Score:2)
Head-in-the-sand is normal thinking everywhere. They look at you like you're just scaremongering.
And when they realise it is affecting them it's somone-else-should-be-fixing-this-now! And where's-all-my-cuddly-toys-gone?!
The weather ain't being so nice any longer.
Statistics are fun. (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference between people who understand statistics and people who don't is that people who don't understand statistics see a 1% annual chance and think, "This will never happen to me," whereas people who do understand statistics think, "This will eventually happen to me if I live long enough," and plan accordingly.
It isn't a question of whether any given person's job will be replaced, but rather when. Eventually, nearly everything will be automated. Manufacturing is already mostly there. Retail and fast food will be next, replaced by touchscreen ordering, website-based ordering, delivery robots, etc. The trucking industry will follow shortly thereafter. Doctors likely will be replaced by a machine learning model within a couple of decades at most, though surgeons and nurses will hang around somewhat longer. Police will eventually be replaced by drones. Office workers will be slowly become unnecessary as the people they support cease to work.
At some point, the only jobs left will be writing software for the machines, designing the machines, jobs in arts/entertainment, and maybe firefighter robot drivers. The only real questions are how long it will take and whether the rate of redundancy significantly exceeds the rate of attrition.
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nope, your clothing and shoes are made by hand. houses and roads are still made by crews doing a lot of manual labor. how is the work on your cars and trucks done? oh yeah, by mechanics. how is news made? how is building inspection done? oh, by people.
engineers design things, scientists study things, tradesmen build things, repairmen repair things......
this won't change anytime soon, because AI is mostly a farce with nothing fundamental new in decades.
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Only because the materials used in clothing are flexible enough to make fully automated manufacturing challenging, and even that is likely to change in the very, very near future [fastcompany.com]. Oh, and for shoes, it already has changed [wired.com] to a large extent.
And even in factories with low levels of automation, large parts of the work are still done by machine. Humans guide the material through the machines, but the sewing is still done by machine, not by hand stitching, which m
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Only because the materials used in clothing are flexible enough to make fully automated manufacturing challenging, and even that is likely to change in the very, very near future [fastcompany.com]. Oh, and for shoes, it already has changed [wired.com] to a large extent.
And even in factories with low levels of automation, large parts of the work are still done by machine. Humans guide the material through the machines, but the sewing is still done by machine, not by hand stitching, which means orders of magnitude fewer people are involved than historically were. So when I say that manufacturing is mostly automated, that includes garments and shoes.
The mechanics plug in a diagnostic machine, it figures out what part to replace, and a person replaces it. It's only a matter of time before that final step is automated. Once you train one robot to do the work, you can have a million robots doing that same task for the cost of building the hardware. The leap from robot manufacturing to robot repair is a lot smaller than you seem to believe. The minute one car company does it, they'll all rush to do it, because the labor cost on car repairs is downright insane. Frankly, if any industry is ripe for automation, that's it.
Only because buildings are still built by people. When robot house builders take over that industry, the verification will be done by someone signing off on the wiring diagram, and inspections will be as unnecessary as the builders.
If you look at electronics, engineers design things, machines build things, machines package things up for delivery, and soon machines will handle the delivery, too. If you honestly believe that any other manufacturing industry is significantly different in some way that will make it impractical to automated, I have a bridge to sell you.
And although you are correct that there will still be people doing repairs for a long time to come, that is true only for the sorts of repairs that involve going to the customer site, such as plumbing, refrigerator repair, etc. Car repairs and electronic repairs are on the short list for automation. Apple is already doing cell phone screen repairs by automated machine. By 2030, the only people doing electronic repairs by hand will be the independent repair shops, assuming the manufacturers' zero-labor repairs don't undercut them and run them out of business.
This has already changed, and if you haven't noticed, it's no surprise that you still think AI is a farce with nothing fundamentally new in decades.
It seems that a lot of people overestimate AI. There are just so many things that are insanely easy for humans that are really hard for machines.
People believe some sort of unsupervised deep learning method will come along and solve all these problems. But it might never come. Maybe deep learning will only work well with supervised data.
We might have to wait for the next breakthrough on unsupervised learning to achieve it and who knows when that will come.
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The mechanics plug in a diagnostic machine, it figures out what part to replace, and a person replaces it. It's only a matter of time before that final step is automated. Once you train one robot to do the work, you can have a million robots doing that same task for the cost of building the hardware. The leap from robot manufacturing to robot repair is a lot smaller than you seem to believe.
Actually, this is the part where the leap is much bigger than most people believe. Sure, we have tons of industrial-size [google.com] food production. But they're huge one trick ponies, any decent pastry chef [google.com] can make all of these and much, much more in a huge variety of kitchens with different equipment. Creating a robot that's flexible enough makes the costs fly off the charts. Of course we have people selling fantasies [moley.com] of a generic cooking robot but but reality is more like Flippy - for $60,000 a robot arm will flip
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The mechanics plug in a diagnostic machine, it figures out what part to replace, and a person replaces it. It's only a matter of time before that final step is automated.
Actually, this is the part where the leap is much bigger than most people believe.
You're both wrong. Hooray, Slashdot! Stop talking about cars when you don't understand them! Here's how it actually works: The mechanics plug in a diagnostic machine, and very rarely does it outright tell you what is wrong. Usually it's more like "misfire on bank 1, cylinder 3" and then you get to figure out why that's happening. Sometimes you figure it out the old-fashioned way; unless you can literally see the problem, for example, the next step is often to pull the spark plug and "read" it to determine w
I don't want to order on a touch-screen. (Score:2)
I do not want to order my coffee/fries/whatnot on a touch screen. I've got that in my pocket already, thank you. I want a young cute lady smiling at me, and recognising me as a regular parton and listening to my wish and extra-special order.
I can get a coffeebot for my kitchen and never leave home already.
That is just not the point of it.
I *want* to go to the japanese quarters [google.de] and have some hot stuff prepare my hot stuff and pay them for it. ...
One thing's for sure: No bot will replace them any time soon.
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How can you plan for being replaced by AI though? It's hard to predict who what jobs will be replaced in what order, and once it really gets going there won't be enough jobs to go around any more.
Vote for socialists perhaps?
So, (Score:3)
Currently delivering pizza (Score:3)
Studying to be a teacher, hopefully that'll take a LITTLE bit longer...Hopefully...
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Though if you're really worried, you could try to become a software engineer specializing in automation. That or prostitution I guess.
Think of how stupid the average person is . . . (Score:2)
https://i.imgur.com/5E0brDm.jp... [imgur.com]
A common fallacy (Score:2)
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I'm pretty sure nobody who predicted that (many) others would vote for Trump thereby concluded that he would not win. People who thought he wouldn't win thought that because they thought more people were smarter than to vote for him. People who thought enough people could be suckered into it thought he stood a chance, and they turned out to be right. But neither group did any kind of fallacious reasoning. Nobody's stupid enough to think "everyone's gonna vote for him, but not me, so he won't win!"
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A better analogy is the protest vote. People are angry at the establishment, and vote for the crazy guy "who cannot possibly win".
While Trump was the underdog, he was polling too well to be a simple protest. Either people really believed what he said, or they were so angry they just didn't care any more.
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I always thought it was people just weren't willing to admit they were going to vote for Trump, especially to pollsters, to the point that the conventional wisdom said he couldn't win.
And the result was a mash-up of all of it, losing the popular vote but winning the electoral college and thus the election. Pro-Trump wags suggesting it was their 4D chess strategy all along, pro-Hillary wags suggesting he really didn't win since he won the electoral college, and the analysts suggesting that Hillary lost in p
A reason not to worry so much (Score:2)
The office is mostly Dilbertesque bullshit at most orgs. AI will probably master logic before it masters bullshit.
Since when GPS navigation is AI? (Score:2)
it's a simple routing algorithm with an impressive infrastructure that maintains maps and traffic up to date. UberFreight is AI, otoh - they allow to book freight based on predictions of available supply, taking some losses on mistakes, and maintaining overall profitability.
Also Waze didn't replace any human service. The old days AAA trip cards don't count.
Clear Cut Case (Score:2)
It all depends on your type of job. (Score:2)
If your job is exploration then you have already been replaced. Sorry astronauts and divers. :(
If your job is to assist someone else in a well defined procedural manner then your job has already or is in the process of being eliminated. This covers everything from prostitutes to builders to lawyers to robot maintenance engineer. Really, it's most jobs.
If your job is create procedures for someone/something else (generally computer based design jobs) to carry out then the number of people doing your job wi
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If your job is exploration then you have already been replaced. Sorry astronauts and divers. :(
Neither of these jobs are fully automated yet, but they soon will be.
If your job is to assist someone else in a well defined procedural manner then your job has already or is in the process of being eliminated. This covers everything from prostitutes to builders to lawyers to robot maintenance engineer. Really, it's most jobs.
I'm pretty sure the oldest profession is one where at least some people will keep paying top dollar for the real thing, despite what the futurama video says
If your job is create procedures for someone/something else (generally computer based design jobs) to carry out then the number of people doing your job will be reduced due to AI assistance making fewer people more productive.
Untrue. If you consider actual strong AI (human level capable or above), which maybe takes 50 years or 200 but it is comming, all thinking jobs will be replaceable. Cheap androids to replace humans should be here just before strong AI which will completely undercut the price of all
I really have to ask.... (Score:2)
For respondents with only a four-year college degree or less, 28 percent were worried about AI taking their job; for people with at least a bachelor degree, that figure was 15 percent.
Isn't a bachelors a 4 year degree? I mean, it used to be... did something change when i wasn't looking? "Only a four-year degree" is the exact same thing as "at least a bachelor degree."
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And, the only difference between a college and a university was how many graduate programs it had (or something like that.... the "college" i went to became a "university" a couple years after i graduated,
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Yes, but... (Score:3)
Up to a third of Americans believe the earth is around 6000 years old, and that evolution is a lie. And increasing numbers believe the earth is flat, in spite of fairly compendious evidence to the contrary.
So you'll forgive me if the opinions of the American public don't exactly fit me with a sense of confidence or hope in their sense of judgement when presented with inconvenient things like facts.
human nature (Score:2)
it is human nature to think it will never happen to you.
it's how diseases spread as well - oh, i will never get aids or some other contagious sickness.
Funny (Score:2)
Most American's Think (Score:2)
Software and firmware developers (Score:2)
Our time is short. When it happens, AI will eliminate our jobs over night.
clairvoyant American exceptionalism (Score:2)
So if AI eliminates more jobs that it creates, and this wipes out exactly 23% of existing jobs, American wisdom of the crowds can properly ascend the podium of clairvoyant American exceptionalism.
That's the m
Re:Your duty is clear (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the thing, I've spent my entire career implementing and maintaining computing technology, including a huge amount of troubleshooting and repair where theoretically automated or maintenanceless systems should have not required my intervention.
I'm not going to say that is impossible for AI to do what I do, but AI is itself another layer of technology, subject to both failures in the underlying layers and failures in its own implementation. AI might be better at sorting-out some of its own problems, but there comes a point when the platform upon which its implemented is broken enough that it requires someone external to fix it.
Plus I'd like to see AI figure out how to OTDR and repatch around fiber cable that was chewed-through by rats when the LIU is mounted in a wall-mount enclosure behind an out-of-service boiler in a mechanical room of a 50 year old building that was built without even telephones in-mind originally.
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Thats the mental trap of it all though. As you go up the ladder of education your more likely to think your personal job isnt at threat.
And that ladder goes all the way to the top, where upon sits the AI researcher who thinks he's the *only* guy that'll get to keep his job.
And fools on him. See one of the things we've managed to get AI to work for, is making better AI. Self supervised training, evolutionary algoriithms, etc. Yep, we got that.
Strangely, no singularity yet
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Strangely, no singularity yet
The "strangely" part would seem to support the skeptics.
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Every job is at risk, it just depends on the time scale. AI researchers and developers will most likely be dead before their jobs get taken over. Regular programmers will be fine for quite some time. Other jobs such as nursing will be around until we can make convincingly human robots for cheap enough to replace people. At that point there will be no jobs any more. Even prostitutes will be out of work.
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They'll always be a demand for real humans to abuse and humiliate, so servants and prostitutes will see some demand for their services, but they'll be cheap. There's also the status stuff, the best restaurants having human staff kind of thing.
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It orders a wireless mesh router from amazon, of course.
Special purpose AI versus general AI (Score:2)
Kind of predictable line of defense, but it's already been thoroughly breached. Creating a special-purpose AI to solve a specific problem better than any human being is old news. You might draw the line differently, but I'd say the chess-playing computer will suffice, and they've just been adding one after the other since then. I firmly believe that if your job can be defined sufficiently clearly, then a special-purpose AI can be built to do your job better and cheaper. There are a few jobs that are hard to
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> I firmly believe that if your job can be defined sufficiently clearly, then a special-purpose AI can be built to do your job better and cheaper.
Well then I am safe. ;)
Boss: Just fix it
AI: It is a 20 year old computer that died I can not get parts for it and have been asking for an upgrade for 15 years. How do you suggest I fix it?
Boss: I dont know, that is your job. Just make it work.
AI: What is my budget?
Boss: $0.00 We can't afford to spend anything on it.
AI: **CRASH REPORT** DIVIDE BY 0 ERROR! **CRAS
Re:Your duty is clear (Score:5, Insightful)
I think most people understand that their job probably requires some degree of human-level intelligence. As such, they figure that their own job is safe until technology reaches that point AND costs less than their salary to rent such an AI. The only ones who really have to worry are those who know that a reasonably sophisticated algorithm could replace them.
But those same people who know their own job requirements probably have no idea what many other types of jobs entail, and I suspect they're likely to over-simplify them. As such, they're "good candidates for AI to replace."
At least, that's my hypothesis for the patterns of these answers.
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I'm more inclined to the latter view (with that caveat about "at least for now") because many jobs
Over-educated idiots (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently, the more education someone has, the less likely they think an AI will take their job. Ooops, wrong. The first jobs the AIs are coming for are in the legal and medical fields. Things like "driving a truck" require a lot of sensors. Things like "diagnose a disease" or "do legal research" require parsing the input a nurse/paralegal enters into the system.
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I think most people understand that their job probably requires some degree of human-level intelligence. As such, they figure that their own job is safe until technology reaches that point AND costs less than their salary to rent such an AI. The only ones who really have to worry are those who know that a reasonably sophisticated algorithm could replace them.
But those same people who know their own job requirements probably have no idea what many other types of jobs entail, and I suspect they're likely to over-simplify them. As such, they're "good candidates for AI to replace."
At least, that's my hypothesis for the patterns of these answers.
Spot on, but it doesn't give that delicious "other people and especially other Americans are stupid" frisson that the mainstream Slashdot interpretation does :)
Re:Your duty is clear (Score:4, Insightful)
But those same people who know their own job requirements probably have no idea what many other types of jobs entail, and I suspect they're likely to over-simplify them. As such, they're "good candidates for AI to replace."
Or, conversely, they may not be as personally invested and can therefore form a more objective opinion about other people's jobs.
One aspect of AI automation that most people tend to ignore is the disruption that even automating 20% of your job can have on the industry. Especially if it happens quickly. The law industry is one example where the job prospects for most graduates is hurt significantly just because one aspect of the job (research and discovery) is increasingly handled by advanced algorithms.
The other aspect which is ignored is the impact of other displaced workers on industries which are not as disrupted. Perhaps AI cannot do plumbing, but those millions of unemployed truck drivers sure could. The shrinking number of jobs which are insulated from AI disruption will instead see increased competition from those displaced human workers.
Literally anyone who thinks their job will not be impacted by improving AI technology is deluding themselves. It will most likely follow the general trend of the last 50 years, where a small percentage of people see dramatic gains in income / wealth (not just the top 1%, but my guess is closer to 5-10%) and the rest experience a much shakier career than the middle/working class of the last century.
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And in fact, us IT folks spend a lot of our day automating out 'boring' tasks. I personally have looked after an estate far larger than all the computers on the site of my first job. There are more computers around now than there were back then, but automation has overtaken the difference in quantities.
Additionally, just (one of me) can do the work that (one of me + a couple of juniors) used to do. The requirement to swap tapes in drives is much less than it once was, likewise the frequency of (say) critica
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Plus I'd like to see AI figure out how to OTDR and repatch around fiber cable that was chewed-through by rats when the LIU is mounted in a wall-mount enclosure behind an out-of-service boiler in a mechanical room of a 50 year old building that was built without even telephones in-mind originally.
Any competent AI would have its assets distributed in something like a RAID array. If rats chew through a vital component in one asset, it would write it off, acquire a replacement, transfer the necessary data from another site and make a note to release some cats in the area.
Modularity will solve much (Score:2)
I don't see it happening any time soon but as, automation cheapens mass production even further, the cost of modular designs drops down to the point where what was expensive and chunky becomes cheap and chunky and so easy to handle that even basic robots will have no issue doing module swaps.
Whole buildings will be based on it. The old rickety buildings will be bulldozed/reprocessed and vanish.
Where something needs to be compact/portable then it becomes a single unrepairable unit. This is already pretty m
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You're suggesting that there is a need for fiber in a 50 year old building with rats that was build without communication cabling in mind.
Already in a 4G world, we have reached a point where it is more cost effective to deploy zero-trust connectivity to data centers (possibly public cloud, maybe corporate) via LTE than via wireless deployment. I feed my family by writing automation software for corporate enterprise LANs. I expect this job to be eliminated soon as the cost of a new Cisco
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Of course AI will for a long time at least take people to maintain it. However, this is a sort of red herring in this argu
Tech has gotten a _lot_ better (Score:2)
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I'm not going to say that is impossible for AI to do what I do, but AI is itself another layer of technology, subject to both failures in the underlying layers and failures in its own implementation.
I think the concern is that other programmers would lose their jobs to AI and compete for your job at lower wage (since they'll be desperate for work), potentially causing you to lose your job.
There will be a downward pressure on wages on any jobs left.
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but there comes a point when the platform upon which its implemented is broken enough that it requires something external to fix it.
FIFY - the "repairman" doesn't have to be a human. And AI opens doors to alternative repairs. "That box got eaten by rats? Ok, switching everything to a new box instead of repairing the old one".
Plus I'd like to see AI figure out how to OTDR and repatch around fiber cable that was chewed-through by rats when the LIU is mounted in a wall-mount enclosure behind an out-of-service boiler in a mechanical room of a 50 year old building that was built without even telephones in-mind originally.
Well, that's a robotics problem, not an AI problem.
Also, keep in mind the example of the dishwasher. Before we invented the box under the counter, it was assumed that a mechanical dishwasher would be some robot arms over a sink. The arms would scrub dishes in the sink, dry them with a dishrag, and then set them
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Bloody ijiot. You know exactly how to preserve you job, no matter what the fuck it is, 'DEMAND' to be served by a human being at every instance. Ring you insurance company and get an idiot machine demanding you punch numbers of what ever the fuck, leave a message telling them to go fuck themselves, want your business, you'll pay extra for human service, a receptionist who will listen to you and direct you call to exactly the person you need to speak to, your call as a human being being answered by a human b
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Nobody cares. They just want tedious human interactions to be done with as quickly as possible and services to be as cheap as possible.
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Bloody ijiot. You know exactly how to preserve you job, no matter what the fuck it is, 'DEMAND' to be served by a human being at every instance.
Old Lady: I demand better service!
Bernard Black: demand away!
- Black Books
Bad software is our friend! (Score:2)
Per TWX's post, https://news.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org], we need to make software that requires a large amount of effort to maintain. Here are some suggestions:
1) information horde. No one should know exactly what you are up to. Extra credit if you can fool yourself
2) if unit tests fail, change the unit tests. Or just short circuit them to always pass.
3) write unmaintainable code. https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~susa... [ic.ac.uk]
4) Always use obsolete libraries and frameworks, except when you use libraries in alpha or beta rele
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Why do we have people going in America then? Why do we have so many homeless people?
Re:Automation is good (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do we have so many homeless people?
Have you ever talked to any homeless people? Have you ever spent time working with the homeless, and helping them deal with their situations? If you do, you will soon understand that most homelessness is about mental health problems, not economics.
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I've seen 2 STEM bubbles in my lifetime. Shit changes. If you were any good at predicting the future, you'd have Warren Buffett's paycheck.
For one, if they'd clean up or replace Web client UI standards with something rational, half of us would be out on the street. Web UI "standards" are the greatest job engine since war (and caused by similar mentalities).
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Automation has not destroyed more jobs than it creates in 200 years. AI will be the same.
No it won't, because AI is targeting the one thing that hasn't ever been targeted before; educated humans.
Those willing to learn will prosper. The current IT, Tech, Engineering, and Science shortages are proof.
The ignorance of this statement is the fact that you are not taking into account those who are incapable of learning. The human race has advanced in many ways over the last few hundred years, but mental capacity isn't really one of them. Anyone who has worked in IT long enough knows damn well that not everyone is cut out for that kind of work. Stop assuming the tens of millions of people currently em
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Automation has not destroyed more jobs than it creates in 200 years. AI will be the same. Those willing to learn will prosper. The current IT, Tech, Engineering, and Science shortages are proof.
So far, technology has always created new jobs... 30 years AFTER it has destroyed the old ones. And those 30 years in between have always been a period of violence, upheaval and revolutions.
Re: Automation is good (Score:2)
We would be in a state of perpetual civil wars if that were true.
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yep..
why bother with the word AUTOMATION if you can replace it with AI? it's the same thing yeah? YEAH??
seriously netflix is ai now? the fuck? sure it has that movie AI on there, but if you're saying that the recommendation algorithm is actual focken AI then fuck you, fuck your words and fuck your study.
and in other news, if/when your job can be automated it will be automated. that doesn't mean that you couldn't find something else to do though. that doesn't mean that excel is an AI, even if it replaced hun
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Polls show most people think they are above average drivers. Let the math sink in on that one.
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I'm still trying to find anything resembling AI. So far it's all marketing gimmicks and none of it is actually anywhere near intelligent. It's just a program that has preprogrammed responses based on expected input and it fails just as bad as an old DOS machine when you give it a command it doesn't understand.
And you can continue to assume that AI won't impact human jobs, or you can come to the realization that it won't take but "good-enough" AI to start replacing tens of millions of humans.
Think about AI advancement on the IQ scale. In the next decade, it might hold somewhere around 70 - 80. How many employed humans are targeted once it reaches 100? 120? The impact scale a massive curve, which is exactly why we should not be assuming it will take "perfect" or "true" AI to cause considerable disruption, beca
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Although, so do interns.
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Exactly this, and things like smart home speakers are nothing but a bunch of pre programmed algorithms, you spend long enough on it you get enough algorithms to cover just about every use case someone can ask it. But at this point how many times have you asked something of a smart speaker and its like I dont know how to help you with that, or i dont know that.
If it were truly intelligent it would be able to figure out on its own how to do that thing or find that information that isn't built into it's library of algorithms.
You are rather dismissive of the fact that most humans rely on a bunch of pre-programmed algorithms to perform a LOT of jobs these days. Think about troubleshooting a malware infection. You have specific steps you take to remedy the situation, but it is certainly a finite amount of steps. Same goes for working on a car. Or an A/C unit. Or hell, even repairing a human. Our technical educations we attain do nothing more than educate us with a finite number of steps to take to resolve a problem.
And as mu