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Economists Say Newest AI Technology Destroys More Jobs Than It Creates
HughPickens.com writes: Claire Cain Miller notes at the NY Times that economists long argued that, just as buggy-makers gave way to car factories, technology used to create as many jobs as it destroyed. But now there is deep uncertainty about whether the pattern will continue, as two trends are interacting. First, artificial intelligence has become vastly more sophisticated in a short time, with machines now able to learn, not just follow programmed instructions, and to respond to human language and movement. At the same time, the American work force has gained skills at a slower rate than in the past — and at a slower rate than in many other countries. Self-driving vehicles are an example of the crosscurrents. Autonomous cars could put truck and taxi drivers out of work — or they could enable drivers to be more productive during the time they used to spend driving, which could earn them more money. But for the happier outcome to happen, the drivers would need the skills to do new types of jobs.
When the University of Chicago asked a panel of leading economists about automation, 76 percent agreed that it had not historically decreased employment. But when asked about the more recent past, they were less sanguine. About 33 percent said technology was a central reason that median wages had been stagnant over the past decade, 20 percent said it was not and 29 percent were unsure. Perhaps the most worrisome development is how poorly the job market is already functioning for many workers. More than 16 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960s; 30 percent of women in this age group are not working, up from 25 percent in the late 1990s. For those who are working, wage growth has been weak, while corporate profits have surged. "We're going to enter a world in which there's more wealth and less need to work," says Erik Brynjolfsson. "That should be good news. But if we just put it on autopilot, there's no guarantee this will work out."
When the University of Chicago asked a panel of leading economists about automation, 76 percent agreed that it had not historically decreased employment. But when asked about the more recent past, they were less sanguine. About 33 percent said technology was a central reason that median wages had been stagnant over the past decade, 20 percent said it was not and 29 percent were unsure. Perhaps the most worrisome development is how poorly the job market is already functioning for many workers. More than 16 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960s; 30 percent of women in this age group are not working, up from 25 percent in the late 1990s. For those who are working, wage growth has been weak, while corporate profits have surged. "We're going to enter a world in which there's more wealth and less need to work," says Erik Brynjolfsson. "That should be good news. But if we just put it on autopilot, there's no guarantee this will work out."
If the job still gets done it's a good thing that jobs gets replaced by AI.
The flaw isn't in who does the work, but how the economic system around it is set up.
That's what jobs used to be, work, stuff that you don't want to do, hence getting paid to do that stuff. Modern technology is invented by people who think: "That looks boring, dangerous and/or unhealthy. Let's find a way to get rid of that work." Destroying "jobs" is the very purpose of technology. If people find work that was previously unnecessary, then that's essentially a negative side effect (although usually combined with the positive side effect of a higher standard of living through higher total productivity). But still, "creating jobs" has never been the purpose of technology.
Its not about the Jobs, I would be glad without a Job - I just need the money. Why? Because I have to pay someone to do things I cant/wont.
But if its robots all the way down, who should I pay? The man who owns the robot? Well I would but I have no job. So we can all agree that we have all things for free since robots made them and the robots get all the stuff to make robots and so on (robots all the way down) or we have to create bullshit jobs no one needs to distribute the money, till someone finds out that we don't have to if we just give things away for free because there is no one who needs to work anyhow.
We must find an efficient way to destroy this human surplus (families included) in short order.
Be part of the solution then. Jump off of a bridge.
The only reason the robot exists, is because the man who owns it paid someone to build it for him, or if he built it himself, paid someone for the components. He would only do this if he expects a return on his investment. I assume, that for him, a robot would be cheaper than paying for a human to do the work. So, he would be able to make more profit. > So we can all agree that we have all things for free since robots made them No, the man who owns the bot wont let that happen. >or we have to create bullshit jobs no one needs to distribute the money No one is going to pay anyone for doing a bullshit jobs. The only way out of this problem, is if everyone gets paid a Basic Income by the government. Money for nothing. Its inevitable this will have to happen.
Now this might come as a surprise to some of the technokids out there - but some of us actually *like* driving and don't want a computer doing it for us.
Well... The public roads aren't for joy riding. It's infrastructure for transportation. One might very well argue that you do not have the right to subject other people to unnecessary risk, just because you want to have fun.
Luckily the US has plenty of desert and car-crazy people, so if public roads were closed to human drivers, I'm sure there'll be lots of race tracks and open areas were human drivers are still allowed, etc...
Why should public roads be a government subsidized joy ride arena?
And chicks for free?
I know you are being tongue and cheek, but very recent history is starting to show companies can make plenty of money just catering to the upper middle class. The richest company in the world (Apple) makes products that are only intended for a very small percentage of even a wealthy nation's population (46.3% of households with iPads have income over $100k). While rapid economic growth does need a sizable consumer class, I don't believe it necessarily needs a robust middle class. A much smaller but still sizable upper middle class will probably do just as well.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Disclaimer: I've been an industrial automation engineer since the PLC-2 and System 1 were king. I'm still at it, killing jobs wherever possible. Not out of malice, nor with any joy in that, but just doing my job.
TFA may be authored by a fuzzy-headed economist, but the core concept is undeniable. Humankind faces a surplus of employable bodies, and a deficit of employer positions, in the industrialized world. This trend can be compared to the situations in a lot of 3rd World countries. The industrialized nations, once fully built-out with AI and AA (Advanced Automation) will become 3rd world societies too. We're getting close to the tipping point already. There are only so many burgers to be flipped, and consumers with enough money to buy them.
Nature used to auto-correct overpopulation problems, with food supply vs. demand being the major engine. Is that what we're going to see when the whole world becomes third world? All the attendant unrest and upheaval will not be pretty.
My own solution: Enable and reward birth control wherever possible. Not as efficient as famine or genocide, but much less nasty.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Why are you encouraging water pollution? That is part of the problem.
Economists are finally getting concerned because AI can replace them.
when robots came for maids,i didn't cry out as I wasn't a maid
when robots came for factory workers, i didn't cry out as I wasn't a factory worker.
When computers came for book keepers, i didn't cry out as I wasn't a book keeper
now the machines are replacing politicians and lawyers and I cry all the time but no one tries to help me.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Back in the 60s and 70s they used to say that computerisation would give increased leisure time, with many of us working a 4 day week with a 7 hour day. I read that the predicted reduction in employment happened. The only problem is that it is shared out in such a way that some people can't get work or have to work on "zero hours" contracts for whatever time is available. The rest are over-worked and spend even longer in the office than they did in the 60s and 70s.
It's not clear that Apple could survive in isolation. A lot of their components are only as cheap as they are because of other lower-margin companies paying a big chunk of the R&D costs. When Apple was using PowerPC processors and were the only customer for IBM or Motorola for a particular chip, they found it very difficult to compete. They're designing their own ARM cores now, but they're benefitting enormously from the thriving ARM software ecosystem.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
In fact, we may be experiencing this trend right now. Economic growth is not needed anymore by the elites to increase their wellbeing, where it used to be neccesary.
The elites used to need an army of servants to clean their clothes, cooke their food, keep their houses, drive them around, manage their wealth and most of all, work on their factories... This is all being automated, and the new luxury is not based on people laboring for the elite, but on technology and resources available to the elite. The fact that labor was needed, and the unionization of workers, forced some redistribution of wealth during the past century. But it may be that in the history of humanity the past century is an exception and the "natural" state of society is to have a higher concentration of wealth than what we had in the sixties.
This would allow the elites to escape the general economy. They will build their luxury cars on automated factories, clean their houses with robots, be driven by robots (when they feel like not driving), manage their wealth with software and highly automated consultancy, shop on the internet... so what it matters that the economy is contracting as long as the luxury part of the economy grows? they don't need the goods made by the general economy as much as they used to. They will only need the highly skilled workers that produce new technologies, lay out new automated factories, build new medical procedures, manage their wealth, entertain them and teach their children.
They can be wealthy without having to spend a dime on other people, just on technology. This leaves the door open to a split in society where the wealthy people achieves "escape velocity" and they become a different class, or even a different species. The can manage the underclasses with the very powerful media and manipulation tools they have. They have all of the details about each one of us and the analytical tools to process them so they will be able to find the soft spots that can be used to convince a statistically sufficient part of the rest of us that "this is the only way it can be".
And we may be seing the beginning of this already...
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Now, I'm no optimist on the imminent-coming-of-strong-AI; but this I do know: The University of Chicago does not specialize in producing lefty-pinko-economists. They have departments with a much stronger liberal bent; but econ sure as hell isn't one of them. It's pretty much the altar of Milton Friedman, the school that made the 'Chicago boys' of Latin American, um, repute. If the UofC says that robots are screwing the proletariat, I'm going to err on the side of caution and suspect that the proletariat is screwed...
My Uncle has a country place that no one knows about / he says it used to be a farm, before the motor law.......
Silence is a state of mime.
"you don't want to destroy the redundant people, they're what really makes your economy."
Please, apply a bit more of imagination.
*Current* economy, not much more than a century old (since Henry Ford, to put an obvious time tag) is based on a middle class buying production.
But for basically all history, wealth distribution has managed to work on a basis of a very short affluent/powerful class with a majority of peasants/slaves/outclassed. Maybe the 20th century has just been an exception along history and we are just returning to the standard trend.
Think again digital janitor scum.
Sincerely,
The 1%
"... over the short term jobs may be lost. They were after every previous advancement. But then the market found a place for the labor that was freed up in the process."
Yes. It's only that in the case of the industrial revolution it took, what? 100 to 150 years to recover. Are you ready to destroy the lives of yourself, your son, your grandson, your grand-grandson and the son of your grand-grandson for the one-percenters to be more wealthy?
Humans are be able to do repetitive intellectual work. This is starting to be automated away.
Its really not, we've made zero progress in actually making machines that can act intelligently and creatively. We can make at best imitations that try to fool one into thinking that there is creativity, and we can use brute-force searches on certain types of problems. Actual innovation is not something we have seen, nor (IMO) will we ever see from AI-- and certainly not until we make phenomenal bounds in understanding consciousness.
About 33 percent said technology was a central reason that median wages had been stagnant over the past decade, 20 percent said it was not and 29 percent were unsure.
Which means nobody has any real idea and the data isn't conclusive yet one way or the other. Furthermore economists are noted for being unable to come to a consensus. There's an old joke that if you ask 10 economists about something you'll get 11 opinions. If they do come to a consensus about something THAT is worth paying attention to. Otherwise it is pretty much business as usual. I also think that you'll find that those percentages correlate heavily with the political leanings of the economists being polled in this very unscientific poll.
More than 16 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960s; 30 percent of women in this age group are not working, up from 25 percent in the late 1990s.
Umm, perhaps that has quite a bit to do with the fact that we're still recovering from the Great Recession. You know, the economic problems of the last several years that have NOTHING to do with AI or automation and EVERYTHING to do with finance run amok? Hell, prior to the crash in 2008-9 unemployment was at historic lows.
In the USA there are only 2 cities with "perfectly good" public transportation. NYC and Chicago. Everywhere else it's a steaming pile of poop. Why do we have people driving everywhere? Because we have to, there are no other options.
I will be driving from Chicago to Florida in 2 weeks. Why? because it's dramatically cheaper than Flying or taking the train. In fact taking the train from Chicago to Tampa is a 4 day ride that goes from chicago to WashingtonDC on down, and it's $450 per person plus $30 per bag. WTF is that?
Public transportation in the USA is a complete and utter joke.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
To be fair, the overwhelming majority of economists could be replaced by the dice in a standard d20 system, so the fear isn't without a basis.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Who wants jobs?
Seriously, who wants to commute 5 days a week and work 8+ hours a day doing something they'd rather not?
Let AI take all the jobs it can. As it does so, shorten the work week, provide more benefits to the people, and before long we're living in a utopia where more time is ours to work on our hobbies and spend time with our families and friends. Of course, we'd have to prevent private industry from owning all the robots and AI, less they become the de facto new government.
My thoughts on this is that an arrangement could be made where private industry has to pay a monthly fee to the government - what amounts to a small salary - which goes towards benefits/income to the masses. Private industry gets work done through AI and robots at less than what it would cost to employ someone, and that money goes to the benefit of the people.
Of course, it's more complicated than that, and that's just one possible scenario that could work. But the point is - the goal isn't more jobs, but a better life.
A few years back there was a great deal of interest in computers doing visual processing and recognition, and I was doing a little work in this area. The interest is still there, but news about it seems to have retreated from the front page. The security industry was especially interested in facial recognition. Alongside that interest were the usual peddlers of hype and hysteria. It was difficult to sort through all the noise. When I looked into research papers, I found that the details told of all kinds of limitations. Yes, they could match faces with 90% accuracy. If the lighting was good. And was the same level in the two photographs. And the subjects were all facing the camera at the exact same angle. And the subjects hadn't grown or removed any facial hair or glasses, or even changed hair styles. And they didn't have different expressions. And the database didn't have more than a few hundred subjects. But never mind, soon we would have video cameras on every street corner, matching every passing face to enforcers' databases of millions of criminals.
Despite the noise, which might lead a cynic to think that it's all hype, facial recognition has improved over the years. It will be the same in robotics. We won't see Robot Basketball Player replace Kobe Bryant anytime soon, no Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island. But we will see more and better robotics. John Henry scored a pyrrhic victory against a steam hammer. Fighting like that to keep jobs from being taken over by robots is just as useless and futile.
We may yet see that promise of more leisure time come true at last, thanks to robotics. So far, all our labor saving advances somehow have failed to free up much leisure time. Instead, we've put that time towards doing more work. Our parents worked hard so that we can have a better life, meaning, less hardhsip and more leisure time. But it seems more leisure time doesn't automatically make for a more satisfying, better life. Asimov's combination of his Foundation and Robots books had this idea of robots doing so much for us that we became slack and unable to do much for ourselves, and at the same time very unhappy that the struggle had been removed from life to such an extent that it felt empty and meaningless, so that finally we had to abandon the robots. I don;t think that will happen either.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
You can't mine iron much faster with more information at hand, crop yields don't increase with more information at hand. Travel times aren't reduced since several decades, and where they are indeed reduced...
Totally disagree. Not to nitpick words, but information by definition is useful data that you can understand & incorporate. So unless you got a ton of just raw useless data (ie: just a simple text file of first & last names of every person who went on site) on your We Mine Iron Inc. server then the information would certainly speed up your mining to consumer operations. Same with crop yields. Information is just as useful and many times more so as mechanical efficiencies. If one doesn't see the increase in productivity, then they don't really have useful data (no information) or they don't know how to properly measure it.
Travel times? Work from home. Video conferencing. Remote monitoring. Smart Grids. Smart Factories. Parking Reservation Systems. Online Shopping. Video Funerals! Another way to look at it is that travel time has been reduced from days & hours to 5 minutes.
Housing is the big problem in the UK. It costs a huge fraction of your income to rent or buy. Many of the foreigners doing the job are prepared to live in worse conditions and can therefore get by on the wages.