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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.
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.
I'll believe it when I see it.
But nobody will care because you'll just be a crazy homeless guy.
I'm just glad you're not bitter or anything.
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.
This is a good point, but I also wonder if there will always be another industry for workers to go into. In your example, people left the farm to work in factories. More recently, factories became more automated, and now a lot of people work in the service industry. There's been talk about automating some of that (e.g. self-driving trucks, drones for deliveries, completely automated fast-food restaurants), so people with those jobs will have to look elsewhere. Maybe there will be a new industry for them to move into, and maybe another after that....
But after a while, couldn't you eventually run out of jobs that need doing? I'm sure there will always be some jobs that need to be done, but the number of jobs that can't be done better by automated equipment might shrink quite a bit in the next few decades, or the next could of centuries. Most likely, it will hit the jobs that are mostly automated already, which tend to be low-skill and low-education, so those are the groups that will generally be hit hardest and fastest. However, I'm sure there are some high-education high-paying jobs out there that an AI could take on, and some very skilled and highly educated people may also find themselves suddenly out of a job.
So I think there's still a question: As we make jobs obsolete through technology, what do we do with the people who lose their jobs? In the short-term, I think it would make sense to focus on have cheap/free job training to allow them to move to other jobs and other industries. In the longer-term, we may want to consider how to distribute resources in a world where there are far more people than there are jobs.
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.
The mechanization of agriculture didn't result in 76% unemployment
It did for the horses. We are the horses now.