Slashdot Mirror
With AI Getting Better at Cognitive Abilities, Humans Will Have Even Fewer Jobs (koreaherald.com)
An anonymous reader writes: It is no secret that machines have come to largely replace physical labor, and computers surpass human beings in processing data. But in the future, the development of artificial intelligence may render humans obsolete even in the realm of emotional intelligence (warning: annoying popup adverts), according to Yuval Harari, a renowned professor of history. Harari said:AI today is able to diagnose your personality and emotional state by looking at your face and recognizing tiny muscle movements. It can tell whether you are tired, excited, angry, joyful, in love ... it can tell these things even though AI itself doesn't feel anger or love. In the future, therefore, AI could drive humans out of the job market and make many humans completely useless, from an economic perspective in areas where human interaction was previously considered crucial. Humans only have two basic abilities -- physical and cognitive. When machines replaced us in physical abilities, we moved on to jobs that require cognitive abilities. ... If AI becomes better than us in that, there is no third field humans can move to.
Since the computer cannot feel, we humans will still have a job as test dummies to be subjected to whatever the AI comes up with in order to record whether we feel it to be pleasant or not.
Now, please look into the camera and experience Musical Composition #0x382F493 for 48.732 minutes.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
"AI could drive humans out of the job market and make many humans completely useless" - no shit, MANY humans are already completely useless. They exist solely to drive like shit every morning, work at some non-productive ego-fueled job with a corporate leech, and then drive like rocket-powered-flaming-bullshit to get home and wreck their kids' brains with their "parenting". AI can't possibly make these people worse.
Just because I can't think of something, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I, for one, look forward to the incredible prosperity and freedom possible by using these technologies. And we will think of plenty of new things for these "useless" humans to do.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Yet another fear-inducing, hysteria-producing Slashdot article about how AIs/robots/H1Bs/women will replace our jobs. I'll believe it when I see it.
At the turn of the century, 1900, 80% of Americans worked on farms. Today, it's about 4%. The mechanization of agriculture didn't result in 76% unemployment, it freed people to do other work. The availability of labor that was previously tied up in farming allowed incredible increases in productivity and our standard of living in the 20th century.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If you believe that plumbing doesn't require cognitive abilities, you're a fucking ignoramus.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It is wonderful that more people are now realizing this is occurring. The realization of the replacement of human labor is a precursor to the reality that social and economic policies will all require an enormous re-invention. For example, the idea of creating new jobs is already somewhat of a dead dog issue. The idea of retraining workers for more current employer needs is also a bit of a dead end path. Right now the idea of handing people money not to work is perceived as welfare for individuals. But that will become untrue in the future. Since employment will be quite rare for anybody and money for each person will come from government, delivered with the intention that those who receive the money will support businesses turns the system on its ear. The new reality is that money given to the people is in fact welfare for businesses is upon us. In other words in order for government to survive taxation must fall upon businesses as people will no longer be employed. That leaves businesses as the only source of taxes to support the government. Meanwhile, the buyers will be supporting businesses and keeping them viable according to how needed or popular the business is with the public. How can this be? Take a small example of technology disrupting a system, permanently. Right now your police department exists only because traffic fines provide the funding. Now we have robotic cars and trucks about to take over all driving. Those robots will tend to be 100% compliant with all driving laws. That ends funding for your police department. So just what can you do to supply the cash to keep your police department functioning? The elimination of salaries for police would be a start. So how long before we see computers acting as police? We already see it! Traffic cams and computer generated tickets are already common. There is already one computer that functions well as a lawyer. It defends against traffic tickets and it wins and wins and wins. Change is upon us already and yet the US public remains totally unaware.
If AI eliminates the need for us humans to live by the sweat of our brows, (and if we can get our shit together to tear down the ridiculous classism upon which our current social hierarchies are founded), we might have utopia within our grasp, with some caveats:
-- We don't end up committing mass suicide as a result of a sense of meaninglessness and a lack of perceived usefulness
-- We don't all eat ourselves into a morbidly obese stupor
-- We don't end up as the subjects of robotic overlords
-- The AIs aren't under the control of a small handful of 'elite' human overlords who control and abuse the rest of us 'just for fun'
-- We don't fall victim to warring between competing AIs
Come to think about it, I'm not too optimistic about an AI-filled future right now...
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
The point is that you used to have manufacturing towns where the main employer was a factory, and people did most of the work. Many even got a good middle class living out of it. Now you have just a few people watching and maintaining the machines that replaced the vast hordes. A while back on a How It's Made they showed a Peter Pan Peanut Butter factory that churned out 50,000 lbs of peanut butter a day using only 8 employees. Arguably the "old" way had a lot of repetitive mundane jobs that are better off done by a machine no matter how you slice it.
So yes, you still have plumbers, and probably always will. But you still only need one plumber for every few hundred houses. So you can't rely on the profession of plumbing to absorb blue collar employees cast off by automation.
The real problem seems to be that cost savings (numerous types, including automation) by businesses have squeezed the money out of salaries to the point that the large number of the jobs people get no longer pay a living wage. I feel the real crisis is that without enough good paying jobs we will have a scenario where the rich factory owners (who are all but tax exempt) will be collecting money without a sufficient conduit to recycle it back through the economy. We are perilously close to this deflationary spiral in my observations.
I'm in IT and have worked almost exclusively in large companies. The fact that this is happening is not a surprise -- I question how quickly it will happen. It's great that Watson et al can ingest billions of facts and beat a human at Jeopardy, but I wonder how much this can be applied to something like patient-facing medicine. Sure, the basics will be covered, like determining what medications to give for a set of symptoms, but I wonder how much troubleshooting of real world systems can really be given over to computers. Same goes for building management, etc.
The thing I'm worried about is the effect on society, especially in first-world countries. In my experience in IT at large companies, there are a massive amount of jobs that could easily be automated with a few tweaks to the business process. There are so many positions that basically involve taking work from an input stack, performing a few operations on it, and sending it on to the output stack, even today. Granted there are way less of these now; there aren't hundreds of secretaries in a typing pool or hundreds of file clerks/bookkeepers anymore. But, there are still millions of college-educated people earning middle-class salaries, paying taxes, having children and buying things based on having a job like this. Before the last recession, the default route through life for many mid-level students was to graduate high school, party through college and get a business degree of some sort, then get recruited for a big company for entry level work of some kind. If we dump all these people onto the unemployment rolls over too short a time, this will create a huge crisis. Taxes won't get paid, people won't have kids because they're afraid of being tied down, and people won't buy stuff because they don't have a stable income anymore. Managing the next phase of this is going to be an interesting exercise. Either we'll get "Star Trek" where everyone can figure out what they really want to do instead of some crappy job they hate, or "Elysium" where the wealthy just leave the increasing numbers of poor to rot.
We need plumbers TODAY because the places we have plumbing were not designed to be serviced by robots.
In your peanut butter example, I'm sure they didn't just replace each human worker with a robot doing an identical task.
They probably re-built the facility so that the machines could handle the job in a way best suited to the machines.
The real issue won't be the magical A.I.s taking all our jobs. It will be when the INFRASTRUCTURE starts to be re-built so that machines can service it.