Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sig for hire.
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.