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Stephen Hawking: Automation and AI Is Going To Decimate Middle Class Jobs (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: In a column in The Guardian, the world-famous physicist wrote that "the automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining." He adds his voice to a growing chorus of experts concerned about the effects that technology will have on workforce in the coming years and decades. The fear is that while artificial intelligence will bring radical increases in efficiency in industry, for ordinary people this will translate into unemployment and uncertainty, as their human jobs are replaced by machines. Automation will, "in turn will accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the world," Hawking wrote. "The internet and the platforms that it makes possible allow very small groups of individuals to make enormous profits while employing very few people. This is inevitable, it is progress, but it is also socially destructive." He frames this economic anxiety as a reason for the rise in right-wing, populist politics in the West: "We are living in a world of widening, not diminishing, financial inequality, in which many people can see not just their standard of living, but their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing. It is no wonder then that they are searching for a new deal, which Trump and Brexit might have appeared to represent." Combined with other issues -- overpopulation, climate change, disease -- we are, Hawking warns ominously, at "the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity." Humanity must come together if we are to overcome these challenges, he says.
"Hawking warns...Humanity must come together if we are to overcome these challenges..."
So, in other words, you must cure humanity of the pure unadulterated, narcissistic greed that has created the chasm between the elitists and the rest of the human race.
Fat fucking chance of that shit happening.
Well, the guy is the first victim of automation : a machine is speaking for him...
And what happens when one no longer needs humans to do the work since they provide so little value? The usual solution is is to gain more skills, but that is increasingly difficult since most peoples costs have a pretty hard floor (housing, food, transportation), and acquiring skills usually requires one to gain such skills independently, as employer refuse to train, or provide much in the way of assistance of increasing the workers skill (why would they, just hire someone else, or automate the person away entirely). Its becoming a catch-22: To increase your financial resources, you must acquire new skills, which require financial or time resource to gain, which you didn't have to start with, hence wanting to increase them to begin with.
Counterpoint: Sales and Services are the most common job in the US today, along with maybe some form of Educator:
It'll still be a while before those social jobs are automated away.
That's cute, you think that the on-line sales/help agent you are chatting with isn't already a chatbot... Be sure to send her programmer a +1...
We get it Stephen, you've got an opinion on everything. Why exactly do we keep treating yours as definitive when it's clear you're way out of your expertise?
Since when is common fucking sense way out of his expertise?
It hardly takes a genius to figure out that greed created the financial chasm driving cost-reducing solutions such as automation and AI, and a 12-year old can grasp the fact that greed isn't an element in society that is easily controlled by any means. Not law. Not policy. Not taxation. Not anything.
Not being able to live, is.
In a perfect world, no one would HAVE to work if there was a minimum support for everyone. There's absolutely nothing wrong with machines doing more and more mundane work. The problem is that the increased profit goes to the wrong people.
Economics has never had to deal with this level of AI before, and Milton Friedman died 10 years ago, so I doubt he had much to say on the topic.
In a world where robots with AI can do just about every blue collar and almost all white collar work better, faster, and cheaper -- what do you propose? AI is even replacing most clerical work and has begun replacing tattoo artists and surgeons.
Seriously, who would hire a human being to do any job if they can have a one-time-purchase AI to do the same job that is literally superior in every way?
Ask the rust-belt about all their manufacturing jobs that went to Mexico after NAFTA and to China as well... but, which now are moving from China to Ethiopia or are being replaced by robots. That's right -- China has been cutting thousands of jobs and replacing them with robots... b/c it's cheaper than even the pittance they paid the Chinese labor.
Have a look at the 2 million 18-wheeler driver jobs and the additional 5 million delivery/taxi jobs in the USA. When vehicles become fully self-driving, that's 7 million jobs gone over the course of just a few years to replace the drivers. It'd be one thing if people had time to prepare, to learn new skills, and to find a new job that a robot with AI wouldn't threaten. Thing is, the AI is taking over jobs in all fields. There's even a robot pharmacist dispenser at my local hospital -- sure, it's stocked by a real pharmacist, but it basically does their job and multiple pharmacy tech jobs in one.
The Industrial Revolution made it so that people could do more work. The Information Age made it so that people could do more work and do so globally instead of just locally. The AI Revolution will make it so that few people can find work... b/c the AI is made to REPLACE people, not to help them do more work. Sure, those displaced workers could try to find work in an area that an AI just can't do. But what would that be? Software coding?
No matter the subject, as AI grows, its capabilities will become exponential. There's no job that's truly safe from its encroachment.
Why? Are capitalism (which can basically only be defined by your relationship with an employer) and markets the only way we can think of to distribute goods and services? Are our imaginations so limited?
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Counterpoint: Sales and Services are the most common job in the US today, along with maybe some form of Educator:
It'll still be a while before those social jobs are automated away.
The problem is that the current trend is replacing good jobs with crap jobs. Even worse, many of the crap jobs exist not because they can't be automated but because it is cheaper to pay $8 per hour to a person than it is to automate the job. This means that automation has put a ceiling on all those jobs so they will never be middle class jobs. Take a job at mcdonalds and figure out how much it would cost to automate it and depreciate that over 20 years and you can easily calculate the point where raising minimum wage would cause that job to disappear. Likewise, you can calculate what the price of the robot needs to drop to before that job vanishes.
Hawking wrote that "the automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing". Ignoring the obvious "that word doesn't mean what you think it does" regarding "decimate", he's right.
Automation HAS reduced the proportion of people who work in manufacturing, after it did the same in agriculture. That's happening now, just as it's been happening for 250 years. There was a time when most people worked to produce food and other necessary agricultural products. Automation by machines such harvesters meant that people could stop spending their time trying to produce enough food and move to building convenience items, such as dishwashers, electrical ovens, etc. They could also spend much more time doing R&D to invent radio, TV, airplanes, etc. Once we had machines doing the physical manufacture of products, we spent our time creating an entire new sector of the economy; neither agriculture, manufacturing, nor service. Humans started spending our time creating the *information* sector, building web pages, etc. I'm excited to see what we create next, and I'm glad I don't have to till the field today.
Both Brexit and Trump can be seen as the final stage of neoliberal economics: it ends in a populist revolt.
It's not as if labor is just now facing the threat of automation. But nobody in the US - not the unions, not the companies, not the government - is solving the education gap that might help future workers.
Bruce Perens.
Economy does not work that way, sorry. Hawking should read from a real economist, like Milton Friedman. Middle class jobs have to remain, but the exact majority of work a person does will differ. Hawking knows political hyperbole, not economics.
The problem with "real" economic theories is that there are so many to choose from.
Here's a different economist who extends our current economic system to its logical conclusion, and also presents a viable alternative. It's very readable and a quick read - well worth a few moments if you want to see where we're headed.
It's clear to anyone who studies economics as a math problem that our current system is untenable going forward. In the limit of extremes, automation will supply all of humanity's production needs, while employing no one.
A fine situation, but in that scenario who will have money for purchases?
We're already feeling the pinch here in the US due to globalism. Real wages have been stagnant (against inflation), good jobs are increasingly hard to find, and people are forced to work multiple mc'jobs to make ends meet. Automated vehicles and drone delivery systems will put perhaps 10 million people out of work in the next 10 years.
America can stem the tide a little by stepping away from globalism, bit it's a temporary measure. Ultimately, AI will take over more jobs than it generates, people will tighten their belts and reduce spending, and this will continue until our current system collapses completely.
Something has to change, and we pretty-much know *what* has to change, but no one has any idea or plan on how to get there.
Traditional economics is religion, not science. It never predicts what will happen, only why something *did* happen. It makes conclusions by building a model to fit past data.
If you want to fix the economy, you have to look to the future.
Real economists don't do that.
Guaranteed Income and the like may not be the right answer, though it's certainly the common thought right now. We definitely have to look into the issue further.
I think a better solution that Guaranteed Income would be reduced work hours and mandatory vacation. If people were forced to work less hours then those hours could be given to other people. This works as long as middle class jobs that can't be automated continue to exists. It reduces the supply of labor which should increase the demand for labor and therefore the pay. It doesn't work for jobs that can just be automated away though because if labor cost goes above the automation cost then those jobs just vanish. The only thing that is currently keeping unemployment from spiralling out of control is that it's currently cheaper to pay someone $8 per hour than it is to automate that job away. Increase minimum wage to $15 per hour like many are suggesting and you will likely see any job that can be automated or eliminated like cashier, waitress, stocker, drive thru worker, etc... automated away.
You make the argument.
Stephen Hawking is not an expert on many of the issues not in his wheelhouse any more than any other celebrity.
It doesn't take a genius, expert, or celebrity to understand these predictions or the likelihood of them, or understand how hard it would be to utterly remove the greed that is driving all of this, and will ultimately change the face of human employment forever. This concept isn't new, wasn't first predicted by Stephen, and his predictions aren't weirdly obscure as compared to others who have analyzed this.
We should also remember that when George Orwell's 1984 was first published, most humans likely thought it was utter bullshit that would never come true. Perhaps we should be careful to criticize, since automation nor the greed driving it is hardly a work of fiction.
You neglect that a) not everyone has the ability, skill or desire to just jump into programming b) programming can be automated too and c) the US government woefully neglects any attempts at job retraining, unlike European countries, mostly because every effort we've done towards job retraining since Carter was president has been cheap bandaid attempts rather than bottom up serious efforts.
You also gloss over that all of the farmers who were cast aside by automation were absorbed into the very factories we are now discussing being automated into non-existence. Also, simultaneously, millions of people employed in the trucking and taxi industry, including Uber, are facing the extinction of their jobs as automated cars take off. No, there will not be a rise in jobs servicing these cars either, as it's just as easy to develop an automated garage the cars just drive themselves into for service.
You can pretend all you like that new jobs will just pop out of the woodwork for these people but you're delusional. It's taken us 9 years to get back to the job growth we had before the last recession, our economy is not nearly robust enough to absorb the kind of jobless numbers we'll be seeing as automation really gets going.
The problem is not that it isn't common sense, but that additional weight is given to the premise when it is expressed as the opinion of a certified official Smart Person (tm). If Stephen Hawking happened to mention that the sky is blue, a certain sort of people would hold it up as divine wisdom simply because he said it.
Yes, but unskilled workers in rich countries are a large and influential voting bloc, as a certain US political party recently discovered a little too late.
And yet, somehow we still keep coming up with new jobs that begin to exist because of the increases in technology.
There may be an inflection point when needs required by new technology can be fulfilled by technology itself, or fewer people due to advances in tech. I think we are seeing the latter already, and it will steadily progress to the former. There is no turning back.
History can teach us many things, but we can't ignore that some events are unprecedented.
but there are two things I can't answer:
1. Who's gonna pay for it? Yeah, I could write a few paragraphs on this topic, but they're not gonna make folks feel good about paying taxes to fund things like single payer health care, basic income, free public university, etc, etc.
2. The Puritan work ethic. Folks get _really_ uncomfortable with the idea that somebody is doing OK and not working their ass off to do it. There's an intense amount of resentment for it. It's not fair they have to put 40 hours of misery in and somebody else stays home eating steak and lobster and bon-bons. Hell, 'not fair' is one of the first concepts children learn. It's deeply ingrained in us.
Unless somebody figures out what to do with those sentiments we're gonna just keep giving everything to the upper class because we can't bear the thought of it going to anybody else...
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Generations suffered in grinding poverty due to the industrial revolution. That always gets glossed over. The people who lost their jobs weren't back at work within a few weeks. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren got the new jobs.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Productivity keeps going up, demand is going up less. Of course we're not going to be able to maintain full employment if there's just not enough work to be done with workers working 40 hours a week.
If people would work, say, 36 or even just 32 hours a week, we could maintain our standard of living, and at the same time get rid of this nightmare where some people are working themselves to death while others are desperate to find jobs.
Share the burdens more fairly, and share the rewards more fairly. It's totally possible, but of course you do have to let go of the business-knows-best, regulation-is-evil, government-is-always-the-problem-never-the-solution kind of orthodoxy.
It may seem like common sense, but it's flat-out wrong. If you study history, you will see that similar concerns were raised about the printing press, the industrial revolution, electricity, etc. And yet, somehow we still keep coming up with new jobs that begin to exist because of the increases in technology.
Right, because none of those things could flip a burger as well as a human could. However, now we have machines that can do things better then any human can. My job is to automate you out of a job, and if I do my job right then you are obsolete unless you can educate yourself to do something more complex. However, the cost of education is on the rise, so most will not be able to afford to educate themselves. We have a catch 22.
The solution to this problem is free education and a basic income. We should start with a grant for 60 credit hours of community college and a basic income at 60% the federal poverty level.
I see that Hawking is continuing the tradition of world-renowned physicist commenting on things they have no specialty in.
Well, why shouldn't he? Everyone else on this thread is doing the exact same thing. Commenting on things you aren't an expert on is something just about everyone does, on a daily basis.
The only difference is that when we make a brilliant (or stupid) post to Slashdot, it doesn't get picked up by any news agency. If you find that troublesome, you ought to blame the news agencies, not Hawking.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Why just middle class jobs?
We've reached a point where AI in medical diagnosis is more accurate then human doctors. Why just wipe out manufacturing when you can also wipe out "higher" and "knowledge" jobs as well? If AI doctors are can out perform human doctors, why not AI lawyers? No human can memorize every single trial case, let alone know about it as it happens thus being able to argue precedence in real time. This seems simple to automation.
Doctors, Lawyers, drivers, manufacturing.... what's left?
Isn't it strange that the very thing invented to enhance human productivity, AI, is going to make a large section of people non-productive. The problem is not AI but that the fruits of productivity is limited to a small section of people. The world will need to evolve to accept concepts like Universal Basic Income to share the fruits of AI with all.
Right, because none of those things could flip a burger as well as a human could. However, now we have machines that can do things better then any human can.
Because no-one has ever in history designed a machine that could...
* operate switchboards better than a human could
* compute ballistic trajectories better than a human could
* transcribe documents better than a human could
* assemble electronics better than a human could
* sort mail better than a human could
This stuff has been going on for a couple centuries now displacing lower-middle class workers. The only difference now is that it is beginning to affect upper-middle class workers who thought they were safe because they had eeked out college degree, but ended up in a field of work that didn't actually need a college degree, but they worked their way up a corporate ladder because they had some penchant for managing lower-middle class workers and they had some pedigree attached to their "college-attendance". Without these lower-level workers to manage (because it is all automated), what career prospects do they really have?
The solution to this problem is free education and a basic income. We should start with a grant for 60 credit hours of community college and a basic income at 60% the federal poverty level.
The community college thing isn't gonna really help anyone in this new labor-less economy. There isn't a corporate career path in management anymore (even, low-level foreman/supervisory roles). The economy can't really support enough jobs in the "overhead" rolls either. Think of what happens when we get a "boom" cycle of startup companies, there are still only a few winning companies and lots of losing companies. Which companies do you think many of these newly minted freely over-educated citizens will end up?
Sadly the future is likely that the whole idea of a "career" which is kick-started by formal higher education as way to make a path through life is probably reaching a turning point. Historically the whole idea of a "career" launched by formal higher education was really an artifact of the rise of governments and large corporations that needed to hire warm bodies en-mass and were looking for easier ways to sort potential employees.
If corporations eventually get smaller (because they don't need to hire as many people to scale), we are trending back to the artisan era (where people are often evaluated more by their portfolio of work, not their formal education and where apprenticeships are often more valued than training).
Of course an alternate path that is shown by history, is that corporation can also get large and subsume the role of government altogether such that employment in these mega-corps will become simply a new form a citizenship. In this alternate reality there is no need for free-education and basic income, these mega-corps will (as they have historically done) provide it to all their citizens (aka employees) and even provide them jobs in new startup ventures that they want to expand their reach into. I don't know if this is the ideal path preferred by all the basic-income promoting folks, but suspect not. In many ways these mega-corps are almost like a typical military organization.
Either way, a "free" education provided by the government doesn't seem to be worth the cost/benefit in a post-labor economy...
Hawking is wrong about which class of jobs are threatened, and wrong about the consequences. Lower class jobs are set to be wiped out AND the results of that will be far worse than Hawking estimates, but he is right to be concerned about overpopulation and so forth.
Take an average youth looking for their starter job. Today, they might flip burgers or work a cash register or some other similar entry level job. But in the near future, a lot of fast food jobs are going to be automated. And self-checkout continues to spread.
What will the average youth do for work? There won't be a lot of options. And kids who have no jobs and no hope of getting one often fall into crime and other habits that impact society. We could easily have mobs of kids roaming cities because they have nothing else to do, and if they end up irate or angry, it could result in riots, looting, fires, etc.
It gets worse.
As we automate cars and trucks, we won't need a whole slew of other jobs. Automated cars won't crash as much so we won't need body shops and mechanics, insurance agents and related workers (this goes right into white collar workers too). Police won't write as many tickets which will directly impact many towns that depend on that revenue. Likewise lawyers and courts will suffer reduced case load from car accidents and personal injuries that don't happen, so clinics and doctors geared toward that kind of care will have fewer patients paying them.
Meanwhile, automated cars will make it far less likely for people to make impulse stops such as for fast food or snacks at gas stations. And automated cars might go refuel themselves in the middle of night to take advantage of down time or empty roads. Or they might be plug-in. In all these cases, there will be far less need for people to work at places where drivers make those stops. You won't need gas station clerks. And yes automated refueling is possible. There have been prototype robot gas stations in the works for 20 years. Only the fact that labor was cheap has kept it from becoming an option.
The net result of all these changes are a LOT of lower class people who will have no job options. And nobody is slowing down having babies. Populations are soaring. There won't be jobs for all.
Does society owe anyone a job? Probably not. But we have to realize society will demand something be done about mass unemployment and youths running rampant in the cities and towns. We'll want it fixed. Jobs are one way to try to do that. Of course there needs to be some kind of job to do. I don't see anything on the horizon that promises to employ the number of people we have now much less in 20 years.
Hawking is absolutely right that this is the biggest threat humanity has faced. It is itself a huge, dangerous issue. And one way societies have solved over population and unemployment problems is by having wars. Which is not going to be fun for anyone.
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But WAIT A SECOND, while the pies and baskets have each fallen in value by a factor of ten, a pie is still worth ONE basket. So Abby and Betty can just continue life as before. The robots changed nothing.
The just-so story is pretty, but it's hard to take it seriously as a prediction of the future when it doesn't even predict the past accurately.
If I replace "robots" with "cheap foreign labor", can you explain why so many American manufacturers went out of business (or moved operations abroad) in the last few decades?
According to your theory, American companies should have been able to continue operating just as before ("the foreign workers changed nothing"), because one ton of American steel was still worth exactly one American-made car (or etc). But that isn't what happened, is it? Instead, many people lost their jobs and ended up either unemployed or working at less-desirable unskilled service jobs afterwards, because they were unable to compete with the cheaper/more efficient new foreign producers who didn't need to hire them.
Abby can just switch to making baskets
Can she "just switch"? Does Abby somehow already have the skills to make baskets, or the time and resources to learn those skills to the point where she can perform them at a commercially viable level? Switching to a completely different skill set is not without cost; not everyone can afford to spend months or years without any income while they retrain themselves. That's why so many previously-high-earning people end up "switching down" to something like Walmart cashier after the industry they trained for becomes non-viable.
So the most likely scenario is to put [the "losers"] on some sort of welfare until we can get riot control robots perfected
And here is exactly where the core of the problem lies. As the skill level of available automation rises, the pool of "losers" (i.e. people who aren't sufficiently skilled or adaptable to economically compete with cheap automation) gets larger every year, and eventually includes most (if not all) of the human population.
Dismissing that issue as a negligible corner case is ignoring the problem entirely. The fact that you think "riot control robots" are the endgame suggests that you do also see the problem; you just refuse to label it as a problem because you lack sympathy for "those people".
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Something in the use of "riot robot" suggest me it is a plain lack of empathy, and most probably a utter failure to see that it could happen to him too.
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