Japanese White-Collar Workers Are Already Being Replaced by Artificial Intelligence (qz.com)

Most of the attention around automation focuses on how factory robots and self-driving cars may fundamentally change our workforce, potentially eliminating millions of jobs. But AI that can handle knowledge-based, white-collar work is also becoming increasingly competent. From a report on Quartz: One Japanese insurance company, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance, is reportedly replacing 34 human insurance claim workers with "IBM Watson Explorer," starting by this month. The AI will scan hospital records and other documents to determine insurance payouts, according to a company press release, factoring injuries, patient medical histories, and procedures administered. Automation of these research and data gathering tasks will help the remaining human workers process the final payout faster, the release says.

Comments

As if this is new

[ranton]

As a software developer of enterprise software, every company I have worked for has either produced software which reduced white collar jobs or allowed companies to grow without hiring more people. My current company has seen over 10x profit growth over the past five years with a 20% increase in manpower. And we exist in a primarily zero sum portion of our industry, so this is directly taking revenue and jobs from other companies.

People need to stop living in a fairy tale land where near full employment is a reality in the near future. I'll be surprised if labor participation rate of 25-54 year olds is even 50% in 10 years.

Re:As if this is new

[unixisc]

I used to be supportive of things like welfare reform, but this is throwing up new challenges that will probably require new paradigms. Since more and more low skilled jobs - including those of CEOs - get automated, there will be fewer jobs for the population

This then throws up the question of whether we should have a universal basic income. But one potential positive trend of this would be an increase in time spent home w/ family, thereby reducing the time kids spend in daycare and w/ both parents - not just mom or not just dad. What needs to be worked in is a mechanism to support their basic needs - home and food. Anything beyond that - they are welcome to do anything that pays them anything w/o having to worry about whether it meets expenses.

Re:As if this is new

[Oswald McWeany]

I completely agree. Even jobs which a decade ago looked irreplaceable, like teachers, doctors and nurses are possibly in the crosshairs. There are very few jobs that AI can't partially (or in some cases completely) replace humans. Society has some big choices to make in the upcoming decades and political systems may crash and rise as we adapt.

Are we heading towards "basic wage" for all people? The ultimate socialist state?

Or is the gap between haves and have nots going to grow exponentially, even above today's growth as those that own the companies and AI bots make ever increasing money and the poor suckers at the bottom, given just enough money to consume the products that keep the owners in business.

Re:As if this is new

[Grishnakh]

Society has some big choices to make in the upcoming decades and political systems may crash and rise as we adapt.

Are we heading towards "basic wage" for all people? The ultimate socialist state?

It depends on the country, I think. I believe many countries, like Japan and Finland, will indeed go this route.

However, here in the US, we are vehemently opposed to anything that can be branded as "socialism". So instead, society here will soon resemble "The Walking Dead".

Re:As if this is new

[Gr8Apes]

All jobs that don't do R&D will be replaceable in the near future, as in within 1 or 2 generations. Even R&D jobs will likely not be immune, since much R&D is really nothing more than testing a basic hypothesis, of which most of the testing can likely be handed over to AI. The question is what do you do with 24B people with nothing but spare time on their hands, and a smidgen of 1% that actually will have all the wealth? It doesn't sound pretty, unless some serious changes in the way we deal with people occurs sooner than later.

Re:As if this is new

[fbobraga]

Are we heading towards "basic wage" for all people?

I think it's the only answer (without genocides...)

Re:As if this is new

[Oswald McWeany]

If you think software developers are immune, you're delusional.

I wonder if the software developers paid to create software to make software developers obsolete will have any qualms about writing that code.

Re:As if this is new

[ArmoredDragon]

The problem I see with this is that white collar jobs have been replaced by technology for centuries, and at the same time, technology has enabled even more white collar jobs to exist than those that it replaced.

For example, the word "computer" used to be universally referred to as a job title, whereas today it's universally referred to as a machine.

Re:As if this is new

[Gr8Apes]

Check who home schools the most.

Re:As if this is new

[EvilSS]

I think even in the US it will hit a tipping point when it gets bad enough. When our consumer society can't buy anything because they are all out of work, we will need to change our way of thinking about this, or watch the economy completely collapse.

Re:As if this is new

[DigiShaman]

Worse! Far worse!! Total collapse of the fiat currencies globally is imminent. When you reduce the human labor participation rate relative to the overall population, what you get is deflation. That's an undeniable fact. But factor in governments around the world "borrowing" money via printing to pay welfare for all those unemployed. So now we have deflation coupled with inflation = stagflation. But stagflation doesn't last. At some point, the entire system - as we know it- will implode. What can not go on forever, wont. And you can take that to the bank as a universal truism!

Re:As if this is new

[alexgieg]

The problem is that AI is becoming faster at learning the new job opportunities than people are, thereby gulping them before people even were there to be replaced. And this speed is growing. You cannot beat an exponential growth with a linear one, or even with just slightly slower growing exponential one.

Re:As if this is new

[matbury6017]

“Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.” -- Abba Eban

Which is frequently misquoted as, "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thingafter they have exhausted all other possibilities."

So when the starving mob are at the ruling elites' gates with torches and pitch forks, they'll surely find the resources to do the right thing.

Re:As if this is new

[avandesande]

Until something goes wrong. Who is going to pick that machine generated code apart?

Re:As if this is new

[unixisc]

My original comment was not about home schooling. It was about parents spending all time w/ their kids once kids are out of school - no daycares. That would include being involved w/ helping their kids w/ both homework and extra curricular activities.

Re:As if this is new

[gtall]

The "misquote" is a phrase uttered by Winston Churchill.

Re:As if this is new

[Coisiche]

So when the starving mob are at the ruling elites' gates with torches and pitch forks, they'll surely find the resources to do the right thing.

Yes, they'll use some of their wealth to hire and equip private armies to keep the starving mob at bay because people would be very happy to take any escape from being in the starving mob.

Might be worth telling your kids that taking a job in the armed forces might be the best way to ensure well paid future jobs because military training would be in greater demand.

Re:As if this is new

[HiThere]

What you're ignoring is that the military is becoming steadily more mechanized also. There won't be many jobs there, either. Robots are more reliable and less likely to side with the protesters.

Re:As if this is new

[Grishnakh]

I'm going with the latter (complete economic collapse). There's no way, with the political attitudes and beliefs present in our society, and our current political leaders, that we'd be able to pivot fast enough to avoid it. Only small, homogenous nations like Finland (or Japan, even though it's not that small, but it is homogenous) can pull that off because they don't have all the infighting and diversity of political beliefs that we do, plus our religious notion of "self reliance".

Re:As if this is new

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, the economy won't completely collapse. Here is how things will play out:

1) Labor automation continues to make the teeming masses of poor people obsolete.
2) Unemployment continues to rise due to this.
3) Crime rates continue to rise due to unemployment.
4) Incarceration rates continue to rise; the prison industry continues to grow and thrive on tax dollars paid by rich people.
5) An entire generation of poor people dies off in prison.
6) The population shrinks back down to a workable number due to this.
7) The rich families thrive in an interlocked economy of ownership of labor automation, while everyone else dies off in prison.

so you see. we will have something like a living wage, but it will actually be residence in prison where you are not allowed to breed.

The end.

Re:As if this is new

[scamper_22]

There are a few ways this plays out. How do we deal with this. One way is a basic income.

The other less articulated way, but is the basis for a lot of people's views is things simply get cheaper. Deflation is good. You simply live on less. You work less. You earn less. But you can afford the food, water... of life.

Now this is a hard transition in many places. There are loads of things that don't go well with living on less and deflation. Debt, government services, pensions...

I grew up in a third world country. I've been back a few times. You might actually start to see something like this take place in those areas or possibly the southern US. I said MIGHT. Things like renewable energy, easy access to cheap goods...can make it pretty easy to live on even a minimum wage. Now you certainly can't do that in New York or something.

Re:As if this is new

[Ol Olsoc]

People need to stop living in a fairy tale land where near full employment is a reality in the near future. I'll be surprised if labor participation rate of 25-54 year olds is even 50% in 10 years.

Then again, tell me of how companies are going to make money to service the stakeholders when there are not people around wh ocan buy their highly profitable wares?

Now speaking of fairy tales, that one is much more magical than your full employment one.

This ain't rocket science. Economies are at base, an equation. You have producers on one side, and consumers on the other. Ideally, they balance out, with extra rewards for the producers. Now either side can cheat, such as if producers can move production to countries where the workforce is paid much less, and the guvmint there is willing to give tax breaks. But that also starts to undermine the purchasing power of the target audience - the fat overpaid lazy Americans who rightfully lose their cushy jobs to a more deserving country with workers who are more deserving because they will work for much less, tend to be the purchasers of the Job creator's fine goods. Those third world employees are not making much, and food and shelter is their first priority.

So at what point is it a fairy tale to believe that only when we are all unemployed, will we be buying the fine products made almost completely through human-free automation?

Welcome to the endgame of supply side only outlook. As humanity is drug down by lack of access, the job creators will prey upon each other. That might look more like The Hunger Games world, than a unicorn and puppy dog fairy tale held by either side.

Re:As if this is new

[HiThere]

AI's are already improving their own code. That's what "learning" means. It's just that it's more difficult to apply that technique when the satisfaction constraints are so vague. That's why the early AIs specialized in games. It's easy to specify what satisfactory performance is. Driving is more difficult, because you don't want to *ever* experience an unsatisfactory outcome, but at least you can tell when one happened. Other skills are more difficult.

Then there's the "world complexity" where the conditions of the world are an orthogonal measure of the difficulty of the problem. AIs had already handled simple abstract problems in the early 1970's. An AI came up with quite original geometric proofs. Simple world, easy determination of success. These days mathematical proof checkers are pretty much regular tools in standard proofs. (The well validated ones, however, haven't been adapted to uncommon tools.) This isn't what we normally call AI, it's validation of logic, but it's an important *part* of a good AI...in certain fields. And programming is one of those fields.

The reason that an AI programmer has been slow to show up is because the problems are usually posed in a manner that's, at best, sloppy, and the satisfaction criteria are not easily judged. But AIs are making continual in-roads on handling both of those constraints.

Re:As if this is new

[Ol Olsoc]

Are we heading towards "basic wage" for all people?

I think it's the only answer (without genocides...)

My money is on genocide. Cheaper, and humans have it as a core value.

Re:As if this is new

[Grishnakh]

The main problem with this idea of "living on less" is that, even in the southern US, the rent prices are very high these days because of the real estate bubble and property speculation and foreign investment. The only place where property isn't expensive is in places where there are really zero jobs at all.

Re:As if this is new

[Hognoxious]

My money is on genocide. Cheaper, and humans have it as a core value.

Plus a considerable store of accumulated expertise.

Re:As if this is new

[Humbubba]

As we move from traditional forms of capitalism, which involves a labor force, to a world where machines pretty much replace people, populations will either drastically shrink, or society will have to come up with a means to handle, at minimum, the first two tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Variations of UBI might work, if we peg it/them to the inflation rate. But the wealthy run the countries, so this probably won't happen. It's just the way it is.

If machines are making or labor meaningless, maybe machines can eliminate our need to join the labor force. I think we need an XPRIZE...

Re:As if this is new

[stabiesoft]

I am worried UBI will end up as a disaster. Part of working is purpose. People need purpose.

Re:As if this is new

[Hasaf]

Stagflation is not the coexistence of deflation and inflation. Stagflation, as coined and seen the late 70's; it is the coexistence of high inflation and high unemployment. This is something that traditional economic theory considered to be impossible. It was the condition that saw the success of the supply side theories that were the core of Thatcherism and Reaganism. The trouble with supply side isn't that it doesn't work in specific circumstances; it is that its adherents try to apply it to all circumstances.

Re:As if this is new

[unixisc]

I completely agree. Even jobs which a decade ago looked irreplaceable, like teachers, doctors and nurses are possibly in the crosshairs. There are very few jobs that AI can't partially (or in some cases completely) replace humans. Society has some big choices to make in the upcoming decades and political systems may crash and rise as we adapt.

Are we heading towards "basic wage" for all people? The ultimate socialist state?

Or is the gap between haves and have nots going to grow exponentially, even above today's growth as those that own the companies and AI bots make ever increasing money and the poor suckers at the bottom, given just enough money to consume the products that keep the owners in business.

I just wonder whether 'socialism' is the right term here? B'cos the source of the people getting basic income cannot be government, since government money is taxpayer money, and if people don't have an income, they won't pay taxes. So basic income will have to be provided, but the source of that is something that needs to be explored. It can't be people who already have no money, and it can't be government writing its citizens endless IOUs.

One potenial approach could be to introduce a 'parallel currency' that gets minted by everybody to address their basic income needs, and convert that minted money into real money the moment it gets transacted to someone - be it your grocery store owner, your landlord or whoever you pay your mortgages, as well as the kid's school. Once these entities get their 'money', that's new money into the economy that gets circulated around. This then circumvents the need for the government to devalue the existing currency, as well as provide citizens money it doesn't have. What remains needed is a mechanism for the currency creator to get money in the same way as the entities it's been paying into - w/o it necessarily having to be a job

Re:As if this is new

[unixisc]

This is true, but what is no longer true is people working their dream jobs. Most people now just do the grunt jobs b'cos that's the only thing that's available, and they have to pay the rent.

If UBI happens, people are then freed up to follow their dreams. Whether it be something as simple as spending time w/ their kids and raising them, or pursuing their hobbies - be it the outdoors or the indoors. When people are set free, they get to set themselves purposes in life, which they can then pursue.

Re:As if this is new

[unixisc]

Another computer w/ different code generating and debugging algorithms

Re:As if this is new

[Hognoxious]

Maybe they could use the extra time teaching them how to write out words properly.

Re:As if this is new

[ranton]

Then again, tell me of how companies are going to make money to service the stakeholders when there are not people around wh ocan buy their highly profitable wares?

Which is why a basic income is nearly inevitable. The tragedy of the commons ensures the solution will never come from companies.

Welcome to the endgame of supply side only outlook. As humanity is drug down by lack of access, the job creators will prey upon each other. That might look more like The Hunger Games world

Without massive income redistribution, it will most likely it will look like the feudal systems of the past. The wealthy will continue to live very affluent lives while everyone else lives in poverty. Growth will slow to a crawl since there aren't enough consumers to fuel our current innovative economic engine, so it will stay this way for the foreseeable future. Hopefully it doesn't come to this in the first place.

Re:As if this is new

[Anonymous Coward]

When the starving mobs are at the Ruling Elite's gates with torches and pitchforks, the Ruling Elite will open up with overwhelming firepower, turning the starving mobs into bloody chunks of meat and bone and a fine spray of blood. Unless they decide to use incinerators. Mark my words: the Ruling Elite *WILL* prevail and the One Percenters will inherit the Earth, living out a life of plenty and bliss while the pitiful remains of our corpses rot in mass graves or are used to fertilize the ground.

Re:As if this is new

[SoftwareArtist]

Here's a much more direct example. They trained a neural network to design neural networks, and it promptly produced networks that matched or exceeded the best human designed ones.

Re:As if this is new

[Dread_ed]

This is why we need to act before it get to the point of rationing. A healthy and well armed contingent is much more formidable than a hungry mob.

You want redistribution of wealth? Lets start with the 1%. Their paid representatives and owned people say raising taxes on the 1% wouldn't make a difference, so I'm not talking about raising their taxes.

I'm suggesting we "redistribute" their entire estates.

Re:As if this is new

[Dread_ed]

You would need to decouple the profit motive from automation for your idea to work, otherwise things won't get cheaper. You want to remove the profit motive from the means of production, sale, and distribution of goods and services? Introduce fascism. No, not the authoritarian idiocy that liberals throw around as a model of Nazi Germany. I mean the fascism of government and corporations amalgamating into a single entity. Only problem is that this is essentially what we have in the US now with an important distinction. The difference between fascism and corporatism is who is in control. So instead of a government controlling the corporations, like in fascism, we have the corporations controlling the government. This is corporatism.

Re:As if this is new

[Dread_ed]

Rearrange the economy to one where ever increasing consumption of non-essentials is not the ultimate goal of every dollar earned and you have a good start.

Also, abolishing advertising. Also also, violently kill anyone that describes their tried and true product as New and Improved.

Re:As if this is new

[TigerPlish]

So when the starving mob are at the ruling elites' gates with torches and pitch forks, they'll surely find the resources to do the right thing.

Brexit and El Trumpo seem to be The People doing pitchforks and torches, but with the vote instead of actual pitchforks and torches.

That comes next, if this coming Great Experiment doesn't work. (It probably won't work.)

Re:As if this is new

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

"As a software developer of enterprise software, every company I have worked for has either produced software which reduced white collar jobs or allowed companies to grow without hiring more people."

As a software user I'd be surprised if lower level white collar jobs don't go before blue collar jobs outside the factory floor. Factories are more or less controlled environments that can quite easily, even if at first expensively, be roboticized, while truck and Uber driving have a lot of conditionals like the weather, cows and grannies crossing the street. So factory-free blue collar jobs should be more secure than (data) entry level to mid-level blue collar work and may well be the last bastion of non-capitalist humanity before the Rise of the Machines controlled by the elite.

Re:As if this is new

[mikael]

Everyone tends to forget the jobs that have already disappeared over the decades:

elevator operators - a person who would start and stop a vertical elevator of a high-rise office block manually. Would have the experience to anticipate when an important person would need to use the elevator.
telephone operators - people who would connect long distance and international phone calls manually. There is a mp4 file of a dozen or more operators all contacting each other to connect someone in Los Angeles to New York
traffic lights - these replaced the need to have a police officer at every junction and crossroads
automated digital textile looms - these replaced the need for manual operators and allow a digital design artist and a technician to operate 15 multi-color textile machines
print workers and the Wapping Street dispute - this is the classic case of what happens when unions refused to accept gradual change. Print workers were employed to place metal typeset onto giant barrel drum printers. One group would create the typeset from shorthand notes made by journalists. Another would strip it down and put the letters back into their relevant pigeonhole boxes ready for the next print. When digital technology came along with WYSIWYG workstations and laser printers, both groups of people wanted equivalent jobs (typing in the shorthand notes into the computer), but that was going to be done by the journalists. If the internet had come along first, they could have moved gradually onto HTML design.
work processors and PDF files - these have replaced the need to hire a typist or print shop to do small or medium runs of printing documents
servers and mainframes - these replaced the need for large rooms filled with senior and junior clerks who would spend all day operating electric calculators
More reliable hardware has eliminated the need for large pools of technicians to maintain IT departments (running around swapping coaxial cable when the flash memory of a network card has a melt down).
Fly-by-wire avionics replace the need for a flight engineer
Modern navy ships (missile ships/destroyers) have more automated systems, reducing the crew size by over a half

Re:As if this is new

[unixisc]

No. I made a comment that had nothing to do w/ homeschooling, and Gr8Apes came in protesting that there would be no children of Religious people to indoctrinate if those parents are home w/ their kids. I suggested to Gr8Apes that he work on the kids of Libs. Unless they've all been aborted by the Lena Dunham wannabes.

Re:As if this is new

[Joe_Dragon]

And IBM will running the systems to list and round up that people to be put it just like the past.

https://mic.com/articles/14299...

Re:As if this is new

[currently_awake]

Once we replace all the jobs needed to live (food/clothing/shelter) we get into the position where you could live in the middle of nowhere for almost nothing, and sell copyrighted stuff for a living.

Re:As if this is new

[currently_awake]

During the last financial crisis they talked about "Too big to fail". Anything that has the ability to destroy your country must be under the direct control of the government. So either nationalize the banks or prevent them getting that big. Set a maximum size on all corporations, with larger ones forbidden to do business in the country. You could do the same with rich people, have a maximum net worth. Anyone over the line gets "divested of their excess wealth".

Re:As if this is new

[currently_awake]

Money is worthless if you can't spend it, and killing lots of people means less people to buy stuff from you or pay rent.

Re:As if this is new

[JoeMerchant]

I agree with your basic premise for UBI, but worry about population explosion. Sure "educated" people in the "more developed" countries currently control their birth rates, but is that just the harsh reality of economics suppressing the basic biological drive to procreate? When you remove the economic stressors, will that behavior continue, or will we have a huge population spike when food and shelter no longer require time and effort for the masses to obtain? Even if the first two children, or even one, is supported by UBI and additional children's expenses are borne by the parents, that would be a vastly different playing field than we have today. A potential demonstration of the hypothesis is contemporary Russia, with even lower birth rates than western Europe - they're not better educated or more developed, but they are more financially stressed.

I don't see any easy answers... sterilization after two children seems harsh, but anything less seems ineffective. If UBI is phased in gradually, this is a trend that can be monitored and guided - if UBI hits as a big change, the effect on population demographics could be even more dramatic than the end of WWII.

Re:As if this is new

[JoeMerchant]

Well, servants used to be expensive, but imagine what kind of lifestyle you could have with 99 people with nothing but spare time in which to serve you.

Re:As if this is new

[JoeMerchant]

Give me financial mastery of 100 people, I'll give them all a purpose. /s

Seriously, though, maintaining the social fabric when everyone is financially independent will be one of the challenges of a transition to UBI. Only a select few have the means to become hermits today, when you open that opportunity to the whole population, a much larger number of people will at least try the isolated lifestyle for a while. Making social gatherings successful (keeping 99%+ of the population engaged with each other) without making them compulsory will be a challenge. Today we have school and work to keep us integrated. If school can be done in your private room with the door closed and work is optional - that changes things dramatically. Basic neurochemistry will come into play, social and herd instincts, etc. Studies will be done, papers will be written.

Re:As if this is new

[JoeMerchant]

Same people who pick it apart today - we've had high level compilers and optimizers for decades - when I started work in 1991, there wasn't a functional C++ compiler on the market for IBM-PCs yet - today they're mostly rock solid, but stuff does still go wrong and people pick it apart layer by layer until they find the flaws and fix them. Not me, I just use the stuff, but there are still people who extend, revise and improve optimizing compilers.

Re:As if this is new

[JoeMerchant]

If you can make a parametric test for what you want to happen, and define a problem space for a computer to search for a solution in, the computer can find better solutions many orders of magnitude faster than humans can in a brute force search. If the humans know heuristics to reduce the search space, they can teach those to the computer, but often this will defeat the point of having a computer do the searches - it's usually flaws in the heuristics that keep the humans from finding more optimal solutions.

Show me an algorithm that designs its own tests and defines its own search spaces based on natural language inputs, and then I'll be impressed.

Re:As if this is new

[JoeMerchant]

it's = it is

its = possessive of it

Re:As if this is new

[Grishnakh]

Why would the 'haves' want to bother to do this? Why would they want to have to spend their time organizing an army of people in busywork jobs? And why would they want to insult all these people with stupid, pointless jobs anyway?

Re:As if this is new

[drinkypoo]

imagine what kind of lifestyle you could have with 99 people with nothing but spare time in which to serve you.

As I am not a one-percenter now my time would better be spent either imagining how I am going to achieve happiness living as someone else's slave, or how I am going to survive the inevitable fallout in a highly technological society when I kill my master because slavery is unacceptable.

Re:As if this is new

[Ol Olsoc]

Money is worthless if you can't spend it, and killing lots of people means less people to buy stuff from you or pay rent.

You aren't wrong.

Re:As if this is new

[bluefoxlucid]

Over time, we just become capable of buying more stuff. You have other, non-manpower expenses; has your profit margin increased by 10x, or are you still making that same 7% or 12%? If it hasn't increased, then what's happening is stuff you're selling is getting cheaper, and the left-over money can be spent on something else--not necessarily something in your sector.

How do you think we have so much shit in the hands of the average American family that they couldn't afford to buy in 1995?

Re:As if this is new

[stdarg]

Under true socialism, the government is supposed to own the means of production (in reality maybe not all of them, but in key industries). In a robot society that means the government owns the robots, either all of them or enough to do produce what the government wants to produce. Even without taxes the government would make plenty of money by selling the fruits of the robotic labor.

I don't think a parallel currency would be needed because money issued by the government would still have value. It would essentially be robot-backed currency. There's no problem with writing endless IOU's when they essentially expire due to inflation.

Re:As if this is new

[bluefoxlucid]

new challenges that will probably require new paradigms

A Universal Social Security puts a trillion dollars less load on the taxpayer.

Since more and more low skilled jobs - including those of CEOs - get automated, there will be fewer jobs for the population

Actually, we still need the productivity to back any form of UBI. The Universal Social Security I propose directly takes a proportion of all income and divides it evenly; that means it directly gives everyone roughly 17% of the GDP-per-capita (it actually gives everyone 17% minus the taxable proportion of income). Any UBI does that; they just use a different means to source the money, which necessarily can purchase some amount of goods, which is a proportion of all productive activity. In the same way, every tax is an income tax--a sales tax, for example, takes a bigger proportion of poor peoples's income than it does of rich peoples's income, and a regressive income tax could take the same amount of money from the same people.

At the same time, job reduction just spreads jobs. That there are "fewer" jobs means there are still jobs involved in making things. Those jobs mean wages. Those wages need to be paid, which means the businesses involved require revenue. Revenue means prices of goods sold must provide that revenue.

In other words: there aren't "fewer" jobs; there are fewer jobs and fewer labor hours involved in making, shipping, and retailing a product, lowering its cost by lowering the amount of total wage paid to provide the goods and services consumers buy. That means the minimum viable price (and the price at any given profit margin) falls, which means prices move toward their stable profit margin as they do today. Consumers spend a smaller proportion of their income on existing products, and so have more to spend on other products--which, themselves, require fewer jobs than they would have, so the products are cheaper, so we can buy more.

There's an alternate path.

If we all keep working 40 hours per week and we need 1/2 as much labor to do our jobs thanks to new technology, then we all still have 40 hours of income and can buy twice as much since the price of everything reflects half as much wage.

If we all work fewer hours per week, we don't have twice the buying power just because everything costs half as much.

That means rather than a new technology allowing us to buy 20% more stuff, we can respond to the new technology by working 20% less--32-hour work weeks instead of 40. People only buy 4 things instead of 5; but every 5 workers only does the same work as 4, so you get a 1:1 labor market. The difference is we don't all immediately go out to buy Teslas and private yachts because we're not all that much richer, since we've elected to make every weekend a 3-day holiday instead.

Both strategies keep the same rate of employment. One involves less work, and results in a lower standard-of-living in terms of purchasing power--or, in other terms, involves purchasing leisure time with some of our wealth.

Re:As if this is new

[bluefoxlucid]

Population explosion can't happen because a UBI can only supply a portion of purchasing power. Logistically, dollars (money) represent labor time, and labor time spent using a certain production method will necessarily result in a certain amount of output (e.g. old farming methods produced 1/10 as much food as modern intensive methods for the same amount of farm labor).

Population tends to grow to scarcity, then slow down. If you look at labor force growth, you can even see the absolute labor force and the absolute population suddenly grow much more slowly when unemployment is high. Check 2008-2014 in the Civilian Labor Force graph, and look at the population over age 16 from 2008-2012. The starting point of each anomaly correlates with a sudden increase in unemployment rate, and the continuing anomaly follows both real unemployment and subconscious sentiment on the economy (which is partially reflected in media sentiment--although you might notice things like Occupy Everything stopped happening even though everyone kept up the narrative of eternal unemployment).

Food scarcity has historically controlled population pretty well. If you have enough fertile land to grow food for 1,000,000 people and have a population of 500,000 with 10% farmers, you have 50,000 farmers. Grow by 10% and you add 50,000 people; you need 5,000 of those to become farmers, and nothing changes: your labor distribution stays the same (10% of 550,000 people are farmers), the human labor time to make food stays the same, the same jobs are available, the same goods per person are available, and the same proportion of income buys the same stuff. You probably want to print up 10% more money to avoid deflation.

If you run out of this good land, then you can still grow on less-good land; you have to carry water and fertilizer, and you get less yield. You have 1,000,000 people and 100,000 farmers; 10% growth means 100,000 more people--1,100,000. Normally that means 110,000 farmers; but to grow food on this less-good land, you end up needing 17% more people, or 117,000 farmers in total. That's labor that can't make other things; and it's more wages to pay for food. Even if you amortize it, food is now 6.3% more expensive--you're paying $1.06 for a $1 hamburger, and you're not making any more money!

That's going to lower standards of living. That means a sense of scarcity instead of abundance, and less population growth.

So what happens in the context of a UBI?

will we have a huge population spike when food and shelter no longer require time and effort for the masses to obtain?

I proposed a Universal Social Security that has a lot of margin of error for risk (it's a surprisingly-small per-month amount, too). If population starts spinning out of control without providing the labor to compensate--if GDP-per-capita goes down--then the amount of money left over after food and shelter shrinks; the narrow margin of error in your grocery shopping gets narrower, and you have to plan a whole lot more; your apartment sizes eventually start shrinking even smaller than that 244sqft I described for a single-person dwelling; and life, in general, gets a hell of a lot harder for the poor.

Anyone employed is, of course, living beyond their barest needs, so isn't affected by this in any notable way. They get to live at a much higher standard-of-living at the low end, and marginally-better above that (up to no change when you're rich); and they're comfortable with or without the USS.

That's the same general economic stressor that exists today to keep the population in check; it just keeps the poor better-supported, instead of leaving them to starve.

Even if the first two children, or even one, is supported by UBI

Re:As if this is new

[Grishnakh]

In every democratic country except the US, perhaps. Here in the US, we've been taken over by extreme right-wingers. Our "Obamacare" was a product of one of those conservative think tanks, and the people now in power are frothing at the mouth to repeal it and replace it with nothing at all except "free market economics".

So yes, we can look forward to "total chaos" here. Why do you think our police are so militarized? It's so they can brutally put down any unrest caused by massive unemployment and homelessness. Hopefully those other democratic countries are ready to accept millions of refugees from the US in the next 4 years or so.

Re: As if this is new

[Gr8Apes]

No but homeschooling is a MAJOR problem. how else are we to stop these kids from averaging higher on exams and going to college at early ages.

I guess if you read fundamentally flawed studies you might state that. FWIW, the home schoolers I've been involved with, only 1 might have scored above the 60th percentile. The rest couldn't even get into an acknowledged university, instead going to private or community colleges, if at all. Yes, while it's anecdotal, but it involves a largish group of students numbering near 100. So at least in this grouping, home schoolers are doing much worse than average. It also happens to track realistic studies on the subject, meaning that I have no evidence to support any other conclusion.

Re:As if this is new

[Gr8Apes]

I'm concerned that unless you're a 0.001-percenter, you're going to be facing that same issue. And that might be too optimistic.

Re:As if this is new

[JoeMerchant]

Of course I was being sarcastic there - but, as the Buddhist monks have known for centuries, true happiness lies in accepting things as they are, and this is actually easier from the position of slave than master.

I have a cousin who works building Gulfstream jets, he absolutely loves his job. He, and the thousands of his co-workers who make up Gulfstream have only delivered 2000 jets since 1958, these are products exclusively for the 0.01%. If they all went to work every day worrying about how unfair their position in life is relative to the purchasers of their planes, they'd be miserable to the point of suicide.

Re:As if this is new

[JoeMerchant]

I like your ideas, and I'd like to see them spread... you might take some notes from this rather successful promoter:

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/1...

Re: As if this is new

[HornWumpus]

In CA is a student is failing (and in danger of costing the district too much money for not showing up) do you know what they do?

They call him home schooled and practice social promotion until he is no longer their problem. Keeps the money flowing. The NEA has found a scam to make money and make home schooling look bad at the same time.

Re:As if this is new

[david_thornley]

First, some stuff will remain just as scarce as ever. Assuming I can demolish and rebuild my house and furnishings for $4.95, I still need the land to make this work, and automation will not crank out new land.

Second, if it's possible to live comfortably on $10/week, there's still the necessity of getting that $10. If I'm not employable, where do I get that kind of money?

Re:As if this is new

[bluefoxlucid]

I've had similar considerations, less about identity and more about what people identify with. Reason is useful in reasoned discussions and debate; and persuasion is a different beast, where the person you're addressing is the person who you need to convince.

When persuading, people who are groping for reason will listen to reason; people who need to be persuaded might not, especially if they have an existing position and aren't searching for a new solution. Even beyond reason, though, you need to convince people that the basic idea is sound.

You'll notice what I wrote addresses the problems you list and the concerns you have. You left yourself open with those. The last paragraph is of chief importance, though: it identifies the basic sense of need, the perception of danger, and the perceived environment around these concerns. That's not about how right I am about everything; it's about how important the emotional sense of confusion and uncertainty is, and what to do about it.

I'm not the world's best persuasive speaker, though. I'm horrible at it. I have no social sense and don't have friends. I have observations I can't use very well, and that's it.

I've found conservatives oddly easier to persuade than liberals. I've pointed out the flaws in the ACA and shown how it creates a break in market pressures, essentially allowing some taxpayers to buy things with other taxpayers's money using the government as a mediator. I've described single-payer systems with mandatory healthcare benefits through the employer as a market driver, in which consumers want low prices, employers want low costs so they can lower their prices to compete, insurers want low premiums so they can attract consumers including employers, and healthcare providers want and need revenue that pays their costs. Providers can't lower their prices below costs; and the downward pressure from consumers, through businesses, through insurers, and onto healthcare providers drives prices toward costs. A public option bounded by median negotiated costs to insurers is tied to market forces, and so provides a much better option than the ACA's exchange.

Conservatives cry socialism when you talk about government healthcare; yet the above explanation both strengthens the regulatory demand of employer-provided healthcare (which conservatives hate) and converts a business-provided healthcare option to a government-provided one, and conservatives like this idea. When I describe the ACA and point out why it's broken in the ways they perceive, and then show how to fix it, they find that better; and they find it palatable if I also describe the economics of welfare, which does include the question of whether a public option is truly an advantage yet, but underscores that a public healthcare plan absolutely is cheaper and better in a sufficiently-wealthy economy--an illustration that meshes well with conservative concerns about the government dictating that expensive shit magically be supplied, just like the USSR and Karl Marx, by pointing out that things which are expensive eventually become cheap and thus can only be supplied by policy when their cost has fallen as such.

Liberals are weird. Conservatives are insane, deluded, backwards psychopaths who can make defects of logic so compact that a single sentence contains multiple irreconcilable contradictions; yet they'll listen to reason and change their views on something that makes sense to their sensibilities. Liberals tend to have more-thought-out positions based on a greater application of reason and better facts; yet the moment you violate one of their principles, they stop listening to reason and insist you must be stupid. This has resulted in me disliking conservatives for being dumb, and disliking liberals for forcing me to take a sledgehammer to them repeatedly to get basic shit across.

So you take something basic like minimum wage. Minimum wage has been important in recent history: fractional reserve banking

Re:As if this is new

[JoeMerchant]

Village idiots still get elected (yes, I'm talking about W, but there are so many more....)

There are many levels at which to analyze and attack a problem. My two favorites are: should-be and is-be. Should-be is the rational analysis of what would happen if I were king of the world and everybody magically implemented my policies, optimize should-be and you have Utopia. Is-be is the world we live in, and what can we realistically do to move toward a better one. As time goes on, I am more and more convinced that there is no path from is-be to should-be.

Rational thought is a powerful tool that can hopefully describe realistic pictures of the should-be. So many people are incapable of rational thought in practice, maybe they can do it in a theoretical testing environment but then when you put them into real-life practice, for whatever reasons, they just don't do it. So, then, you are in our world of is-be, and left trying to apply rational thought to analyze and manipulate people who, for the most part, do not use rational thought to guide their daily lives. Highly successful people are (often quite lucky, but also) usually exploiting this gap between rational thought and realistic behavior of the masses.

Re:As if this is new

[wyHunter]

Why do you think Bill Gates et al has been saying that overpopulation is the species' biggest problem? It isn't because he lives an incredibly lavish lifestyle!

Re: As if this is new

[Gr8Apes]

Not being familiar with CA, I'll have to take your word for it, as it's not worth arguing about the details. The point of them pushing them out is both good and bad. While studies have supposedly shown that keeping poor performing students with the general population "helps" those students, it also lowers the performance of the general population. Putting them into an environment where they can get more personalized attention without affecting others would be good. So CA has figured out part 1 of that solution.

Re:As if this is new

[Gr8Apes]

No. I made a comment that had nothing to do w/ homeschooling, and Gr8Apes came in protesting that there would be no children of Religious people to indoctrinate if those parents are home w/ their kids. I suggested to Gr8Apes that he work on the kids of Libs. Unless they've all been aborted by the Lena Dunham wannabes.

Interesting interpretation there. My comment actually pointed out that more children would be potentially subject to the indoctrination process at home via "home schooling" due to your pointing out the clan now having 100% free time to spend at home with the children. Nothing good ever came out of such insular situations, and the smaller the group, the more deviant from society they get. We've seen several Lord of the Flies situations recently.

I'm interested: why do you think I'm a leftist/liberal? Anti-religion? Sure, but that's not a sufficient stance to make me a leftist or a liberal. And if Libs were indoctrinating their children with hatred for others resulting in mass violence, I'd be railing against them too.

Re:As if this is new

[drinkypoo]

If they all went to work every day worrying about how unfair their position in life is relative to the purchasers of their planes, they'd be miserable to the point of suicide.

This isn't about what it's like for the people with good jobs you know today. It's about what it's going to be like for almost everyone soon. It's called perspective, and you're missing it now.

Re:As if this is new

[JoeMerchant]

If they all went to work every day worrying about how unfair their position in life is relative to the purchasers of their planes, they'd be miserable to the point of suicide.

This isn't about what it's like for the people with good jobs you know today. It's about what it's going to be like for almost everyone soon. It's called perspective, and you're missing it now.

I believe (and this is really an act of faith, nothing else can be applied with any more accuracy or certainty when predicting the future that far out) that the majority of the 0.01% want what's best for the "little people" - sure, some of them are megalomaniacs, psychopaths, and even treat their personal staff poorly, but, the bulk of them are basically good at heart, like the rest of us. Well, if 98% of "normal" people are good at heart, maybe only 80% of the upper crust are equally good toward their "fellow man," power does corrupt after all. The acts of philanthropy and charity are rare (much less than 80%), but misanthropy and "James Bond Draxian" ill will toward the masses are much rarer, and it's not fear of prosecution that keeps those people in line.

So, based on that belief, I don't think that the little people are going to be given a life of leisure with machines growing and delivering their food, building and furnishing their homes and maintaining the infrastructure of the world while they just do whatever they wish (including procreate to a world population of 100B)... that seems, unlikely - however possible it might be technologically within 100 years. However, I also do not think that society will be allowed to collapse to 80% unemployment and 50% incarceration due to vagrancy and homelessness. The people with the power will try (maybe not particularly successfully all the time) to keep something that evolves not too far from the status quo. They won't give up control of the assets that matter to them, whether that is real-estate, control of commerce, or what have you, and with those tools they will keep life as comfortable for themselves as they can, which includes in some small way keeping the rest of us better than miserable and desperate.

Or, you know, Moonraker could have been prophetic... that's also a possible future, I'm betting it's an unlikely one, but in the end I don't have any significant input to influence the outcome for or against such a future.

Re:As if this is new

[drinkypoo]

I believe (and this is really an act of faith, nothing else can be applied with any more accuracy or certainty when predicting the future that far out) that the majority of the 0.01% want what's best for the "little people"

On what basis?

Re:As if this is new

[JoeMerchant]

I believe (and this is really an act of faith, nothing else can be applied with any more accuracy or certainty when predicting the future that far out) that the majority of the 0.01% want what's best for the "little people"

On what basis?

Half a century of interacting with people, all up and down the income and political power scale - mostly in the USA for the income and power diversity, but also across the "commoners" of Europe.

That's why it's faith, a big extrapolation from this tiny viewpoint that the people of Russia, China, India, etc. will more or less follow the same levels of compassion and indifference as my experience has shown (and even my experience is mostly an extrapolation from far less than 0.1% of the population).

Re:As if this is new

[drinkypoo]

Half a century of interacting with people, all up and down the income and political power scale - mostly in the USA for the income and power diversity, but also across the "commoners" of Europe.

Well, you're making your declaration based on ignoring their behavior, then. You can't just listen to words. Actions are more relevant.

Re:As if this is new

[JoeMerchant]

Half a century of interacting with people, all up and down the income and political power scale - mostly in the USA for the income and power diversity, but also across the "commoners" of Europe.

Well, you're making your declaration based on ignoring their behavior, then. You can't just listen to words. Actions are more relevant.

Some behavior I have seen firsthand:

Recent ex speaker of the US House of Representatives facilitating contacts between tech startups and successful businessmen looking to invest, taking hours out of his personal time.

"Bank" president administering hundreds of millions of his family wealth through philanthropy, with the primary challenge being that they can't give it away fast enough to meet the target of 20% distribution every 5 years.

Hard at the other end of the spectrum, I gave a crackhead a lift in my pickup truck with a heavy table he had just bought at a yard sale - matter of 2 minutes for me, but would have been an epic struggle in the sun for him without me. Having nothing else of value to offer me, he offers to hook me up with his dealer. Similarly, I'm sick as a dog Thanksgiving morning in the cold rain but getting gas for a trip to the family dinner, dealer (maybe the same one?) spots me from across the street showing signs of needing a fix (it's just the flu, but I get shaky hands and pasty face), crosses a busy street to come offer me some of what he thinks I need.

I'm not going to make a solid case for 50 years of behavioral psychology observation in a quick message board post, but the common thread here is that people have things that other people need, and they don't just make the connections for personal profit, they also do it to help people even at cost to themselves.

There are of course opposite examples, that neighborhood with the crackhead and the dealer also had a little crime problem, bad stuff happened, but on the whole it was about 1 in 1000 who were the bad actors - they made the news. Hundreds just tried to keep to themselves and mostly follow Budda's first principle of do no harm to your fellow travelers. And, for every criminal I've encountered, there are at least 10 people out there actively trying to do good. Europe also presented a really good face of people helping people, even clueless tourists who barely speak the language. And, then you've got the top end of the scale, all the jerks in power, whether the local school board or national legislature and top level political appointees - power does corrupt, and lots of these guys make the news with their epic self-centeredness, but I still believe that the jerks are outnumbered by people with good intentions - maybe more like 1:2 at the top levels instead of 1:10 at the bottom.

Re:As if this is new

[drinkypoo]

A few kind examples don't make the case, not when compared to the overwhelming avalanche of assholes.

Re:As if this is new

[JoeMerchant]

My perspective is an overwhelming avalanche of indifference and reluctance to engage, followed by a much smaller avalanche of people trying to help, with the bad actors and true assholes (not just unpleasant, but actually screwing up peoples' lives) coming out as a distant third in volume, outnumbered, as I said before 10:1 by people actually helping other people with their actions.

But, then, I observe my life - not the mass media, and I don't live next door to guerilla revolutionaries, violent religious fanatics, or foreclosure lawyers.

Re:As if this is new

[RyoShin]

Control.

At insane income rates money is a means. For most people it's as an end, how they survive, but past a certain point it the ends are nicely wrapped up and become afterthoughts. There's a lot you can buy with ever-increasing money supply, but at some point you can also afford or already own most of these things. Thereafter, the point of money is the pursuit of that which cannot be directly purchased. For many this takes a philanthropic route, donating unneeded portions of their wealth or income to their charities or goals of choice. For some--and, I think the majority in future filled with AI workers but no universal income--it's about control.

There are many ways to control people directly with money, by paying them to fulfill various desires. It's surprising what some will do for money, particularly if they are in desperate need. But a single person could reign heavily over a thousand people by being a CEO of some busybody company. Control their schedules, who they meet with (and when and where and for how long), what they spend the majority of their day doing, and you don't even have to pay them that much. The rich will control the government, of course, and so worker protections go out the window and now all employees are considered always on the job (and thus under that much more control.) This is a more direct control than simply paying them to do whatever (it's surprising what people will endure to stay employed, things beyond what most people would be willing to do if told directly, at least at a moderate income level.)

I think this outcome is far preferred by the lawful-evil rich, as opposed to maintaining small personal armies to stave off riots and raids (an army that could turn on them), or being forced to share the money they "earn" with the government (who then redistributes it to the people.)

(If you think that sounds soul-sucking, an alternative but not-completely-exclusive outcome is that common people are used as lab rats in medical trials for drugs and procedures that keep the rich fit, healthy, and grant longevity.)

Re:As if this is new

[Grishnakh]

(If you think that sounds soul-sucking, an alternative but not-completely-exclusive outcome is that common people are used as lab rats in medical trials for drugs and procedures that keep the rich fit, healthy, and grant longevity.)

They're already doing that. I used to know a guy I hired for day-labor who made money participating in medically unnecessary drug trials.

Re:As if this is new

[RyoShin]

Yeah, there are already people who make a living doing that (I recall that Wired did a story on them many years ago), but it's a very small group, like professional mimes. I'm talking about the majority of entire cities being used in testing, and without silly things like "ethics panels", "FDA regulation", or "palliative care".

Re:As if this is new

[Grishnakh]

The only problem I see with your dystopian nightmare scenario is: why would the vast majority of people go along with this horrible libertarian vision? We had something more like this in the past, during the "Gilded Age". That came to an end: we made unions, voted for politicians championing worker protections, we got OSHA, the FDA, etc. There are a lot more poor and working-class people than a few billionaire elites, and the military draws its members from the former group. The only way the elites are able to keep people in a crappy state like that is usually through trickery, and that only lasts so long ("you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time"). The only other way they'd be able to do it is with a vast army of robot police, and I just don't see that happening soon, if ever (the robot police still need people to program them and run them, and it's not the billionaire elites that spend their time learning programming and engineering, contrary to what's portrayed on "Iron Man"). We might very well take some backwards steps here with Trump and his merry men, but that's only temporary (or, it'll be long-term and the US will become a has-been like Spain and Italy while some other powers rise up and take its place, in which case a bunch of us will probably move there and leave these idiots to their own devices).

Re:As if this is new

[RyoShin]

Starvation.

As for robot police, you only need a few engineers who lack scruples and don't want to be experimented on.

Re:As if this is new

[Grishnakh]

Sorry, starvation is not a viable answer. The billionaires don't have control of the food supply; that's in the hands of many, many different people: people working the farms (though largely automated), people transporting the food, and people selling it. None of those people are billionaires. In addition, all those people vote. They can easily vote for politicians who will order government workers (police, military) to simply seize whatever they need, for the common good, if it comes to that. That's one of the saving graces of democratic systems; the people do have the ultimate power. The only thing that keeps billionaires rich is that they've corrupted the system, but that can be changed (and does, if things get bad enough). Moreover, billionaires are called that because they own a lot of money; money is a fiction created by government. What government giveth, government can taketh away. The only people who have real power are those who can wield violence, not money. A billionaire is mostly powerless against one of his guards who decides to shoot him in the head and steal his stuff, and even more powerless if all his guards gang up and do this.

No more working till last train but with life empl

[Joe_Dragon]

No more working till last train but with life employment where will layed off people find new jobs?

Obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

People that do trivial tasks like looking at numbers on documents, something a computer can easily do, are prime for getting replaced.

Face it, if you aren't creating new things, you're the first to go. Maintaining a process is basically pattern recognition.

Re:Obviously

[kwerle]

SInce this is very very similar to what my partner does, I feel like I'm a little qualified to speak on the subject at hand.

Yeah, pattern matching should nail this - but pattern matching only works if the patterns are reasonable/logical/consistent. Yes, I'm a little familiar with advanced pattern matching, filtering, etc.

Here's the thing: doctors are crappy input sources. At least in the US medical system. And in our system they are the ones that have to make diagnosis (in most cases). They are inconsistent from one doctor to the next. They are inconsistent from one day to the next. They are inconsistent from one patient to the next. They are inconsistent *within a patient* when the original diagnosis was wrong. And what's possibly worst of all: they disagree.

In the US we do the same kind of thing - base payouts on what the doctor diagnosed. They need to write specific magic words in the right way. So my partner looks at medical records and then confronts the doctor - somehow trying to suggest what they left out without making a diagnosis (because she's not a doctor, so she's not allowed to).

As you can imagine this is a delicate dance. Some doctors have egos. In any case, many of things she does are fixing errors [of omission, often], but others are a lot more complicated and sometimes very rare (some medical conditions just don't come up very often).

Finally, if you think having a person hound a doctor to get something corrected might be tricky - imagine having a machine try to do the same thing. Some doctors may be more resistant to that...

The easy answer to this is: that process is crap. Fix doctors/the system/whatever.

I agree.

Good luck with that.

Re:Obviously

[RightwingNutjob]

What automation? 1000 workers in US vs 2000 in Mexico for half the cost of those 1000 is not "automation." Same thing with your hand-assembled smartphone. I'd rather have it be assembled by robots in the US with 100 human babysitters than hand-built in China with by 1000 human drones.

Re:Obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't fix GP doctors. They used to be diagnosticians. Today, they are trained to follow insurance-driven formulaic diagnoses and they don't do it well. No human would or should. They are doing a robot's job already. So, instead of fixing them, replace them with diagnostic machines, tests, and AIs.

Re: Obviously

[RightwingNutjob]

Maybe in Star Trek fantasy land. In reality, we want that wealth to originate here. It's embarrassing that the country that invented computers and cell phones can't make any, almost as much as the fact that we can barely clothe ourselves these days.

Re:Obviously

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Face it, if you aren't creating new things, you're the first to go. Maintaining a process is basically pattern recognition.

What makes you think that creating new things isn't merely pattern recognition.

Re:Obviously

[drinkypoo]

doctors are crappy input sources. At least in the US medical system. And in our system they are the ones that have to make diagnosis (in most cases). They are inconsistent from one doctor to the next. They are inconsistent from one day to the next. They are inconsistent from one patient to the next. They are inconsistent *within a patient* when the original diagnosis was wrong. And what's possibly worst of all: they disagree.

That's okay, because they're going away. They'll be replaced with robots that feed expert systems. At first those robots will be specialized and expensive sensor packages operated by doctors. I would guess that they already exist, at least in testing. Then they will become systems that operate themselves, supervised by nurses, and whose results are supervised by doctors. Then they will become systems that operate themselves without supervision, and which you go to a clinic to be scanned by; the results will be generated immediately and only when they are less than certain will a human inspect them, which is probably where the situation will remain until general AI is invented, or invents itself. Then we either go into zoos or become axle grease. I suppose in the first case, the future of health care is still relevant. In the second, only the weight of the resulting grease is interesting.

GIGO

[ISoldat53]

I hope their data collection is better than it is in the US. Insurance company's systems can't talk to the doctors systems. They are stuck with 1980s technology or sneaker net to get information exchanged. Paper gets lost, forms don't match. Doctors spend more time with paper than with patients. Once the paper gets to the insurance company chances are good it doesn't go to the right person or just gets lost sending the patient back to the beginning of the maze. The more people removed from the chain the better.

Re:GIGO

[ColdWetDog]

You think this is anything but perfectly planned? Insurance companies prevaricate better than anyone short of a Federal politician. 'Losing' a claim costs virtually nothing. Mishandling a claim costs very little. Another form letter asking for more / the same information, ditto.

Computerizing the whole shebang gives yet another layer of potential delay ('the computer is slow today' is a perennial favorite).

That said, in what strange world is insurance adjudication considered 'white collar'? In the US at least, it is apparently done with people who, at best, have a GED. Hell, a 1982 Morrow Micro Decision could outclass most insurance adjusters.

They must dress nicely in Japan....

Japanese workforce is growing old

[AchilleTalon]

Japan needs to automate as much as it can and robotize to survive with a workforce growing old. Japan is facing this reality as well as many countries where labor isn't replaced at a sufficient rate to keep up with the needs. Older people will need care some countries just cannot deliver or afford.

Re:Japanese workforce is growing old

[avandesande]

Japan is notorious for being far behind on office automation.

Re:Japanese workforce is growing old

[antdude]

Japan could bring in younger people from outside of it country. ;)

Yep, that's an insurance company!

[Gravis Zero]

First they Fukoku their clients and then they Fukoku their workers.

Queue the chicken littles

[sjbe]

Calm down everyone. This is just a continuation of productivity tools for accounting. Among other things I'm a certified accountant. This is just the next step in automation of accounting and it's a good thing. We used to do all our ledgers by hand. Now we all use software for that and believe me you don't want to go back to the way it was. Very little in accounting is actually value added activity so it is desirable to automate as much of it as possible. If some people lost their jobs doing that it's equivalent to how the PC replaced secretaries 30+ years ago. They were doing a necessary task but one that added little or no value. Most of what accountants do is just keeping track of what happened in a business and keeping the paperwork flowing where it needs to go. This is EXACTLY what we should be automating whenever possible.

I'm sure there are going to be a lot folks loudly proclaiming how we are all doomed and that there won't be any work for anyone left to do. Happens every time there is an advancement in automation and yet every time they are wrong. Yes some people are going to struggle in the short run. That happens with every technological advancement. Eventually they find other useful and valuable things to do and the world moves on. It will be fine.

Re:Queue the chicken littles

[fluffernutter]

I'm curious what you think you can do that Watson can't. Accounting is a very rigidly structured practice. All IBM really needs to do is let Watson sift through the books of a couple hundred companies and it will easily determine how to best achieve a defined set of objectives for a corporation.

Re:Queue the chicken littles

[nospam007]

"Very little in accounting is actually value added activity ."

There's always 'creative' accounting, which robots still can't do for now.

Re:I'm not worried

[DogDude]

free market people as opposed to corporatist

You need to pick up an economics textbook. Or a history textbook.

Re:No more working till last train but with life e

[JoeMerchant]

They won't, that's the point.

I see plenty of work in reducing student-teacher ratios in education, increasing maintenance and inspection intervals, transparency reporting on public officials, etc. Now, just convince the remaining working people that they want to pay for this from their taxes. I suppose when we hit 53% unemployed, we might be able to start winning popular elections, if the unemployed are still allowed to vote then.

Re:That's weird

[phantomfive]

"Watson" is a marketing term from IBM, covering a lot of standard automation. It isn't the machine that won at Jeopardy (although that is included in the marketing term, if someone wants to pay for it).

IBM tells managers, "We will have our amazing Watson technology solve this problem for you." The managers feel happy. Then IBM has some outsourced programmers code up a workflow app, with recurring annual subscription payments.

Re:How is this new

[jedidiah]

Pretty much. US companies already use claims processing systems that use previous data to evaluate a current claim and spit out a number. Younger computer literate adjusters just feed the machine and push a button.

IBM Puff Piece

[avandesande]

I work on a claims processing system and 90% of this stuff is already automated.

Re:IBM Puff Piece

[fluffernutter]

So it wouldn't be an issue for you if the remaining 10% were automated as well?

Re:IBM Puff Piece

[avandesande]

Some bills are just so fubar that someone has to look at them. You really think 'watson' is processing 100% of the bills?

Re:IBM Puff Piece

[avandesande]

You think the 12$ hr staff at a doctors office code and invoice bills correctly? The blame goes both ways. Really our ridiculous and convoluted medical system is to blame. Imagine if doctors billed on a time basis like a lawyer.

Re:IBM Puff Piece

[fluffernutter]

Ok, granted, there will still be 0.5% of the work left for humans. But companies will be able to fill these jobs Uber-style since there won't be enough to justify full time positions.

Re:IBM Puff Piece

[avandesande]

Uh... well maybe. But what does this have to do with being an IBM puff piece?

Re:IBM Puff Piece

[fluffernutter]

It's not a puff piece if the technology in question results in people starving. Uber-style jobs aren't meant to provide living wages.

Re:IBM Puff Piece

[Joe_Dragon]

doctors billed on a time basis like a lawyer. They do $200-$300 for a 15 min visit.

Re:Wonder how long

[Opportunist]

The hot topic on the management floor of 2030 is probably how it's no longer "android" but "gynoid".

universities downsize not with unlimited loans!

[Joe_Dragon]

universities downsize not with unlimited loans! (usa only) need retraining you can get an loan and you may need to go for 2-4 years and (some credits maybe to old and you have to retake classes)

Re:That's weird

[Opportunist]

That's ok, there isn't really a decent insurance claim worker either, so they should do fine.

Re:I'm not worried

[fluffernutter]

I'm laughing that you think there is a difference. How do these people participate in a free market without setting up corporations?

Re:Can you teach your AI to cheat?

[Joe_Dragon]

IBM helped the Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews. So will Watson have locks to stop that or any other killing off of people?

That is "automation". AI is something else...

[gweihir]

When you have people basically implementing a process without much understanding, it is pretty easy to automatize their jobs away. The only thing Watson is contribution is the translation from natural language to a more formalized one. No actual intelligence needed.

Re:That is "automation". AI is something else...

[gweihir]

I wish. Artificial stupidity is a bit more advanced than AI, but nowhere there yet.

Re:That is "automation". AI is something else...

[gweihir]

You have no clue about engineering, obviously.

Failure of imagination

[sjbe]

As a software developer of enterprise software, every company I have worked for has either produced software which reduced white collar jobs or allowed companies to grow without hiring more people.

You're looking at the wrong scale. You need to look at the whole economy. Were those people able to get hired elsewhere? The answer in general was almost certainly yes. Might have taken some of them a few months but eventually they found something else. My company just bought a machine that allows us to manufacture wire leads much faster than we can do it by hand. That doesn't mean that the workers we didn't employ to do that work couldn't find gainful employment elsewhere.

And we exist in a primarily zero sum portion of our industry, so this is directly taking revenue and jobs from other companies.

Again, so what? You've automated some efficiency into an industry that obviously needed it. Some workers will have to do something else. Same story we've been hearing for centuries. It's the buggy whip story just being retold with a new product. Not anything to get worried about.

People need to stop living in a fairy tale land where near full employment is a reality in the near future.

Based on what? The fact that you can't imagine what people are going to do if they can't do what they currently are doing? I'm old enough to predate the internet. The World Wide Web was just becoming a thing while I was in college. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Cisco, Oracle, etc all didn't even exist when I was born. Vast swaths of our economy hadn't even been conceived of back then. 40 years from now you will see a totally new set of companies doing amazing things you never even imagined. Your argument is really just a failure of your own imagination. People have been making that same argument since the dawn of the industrial revolution and it is just as nonsensical now as it was then.

I'll be surprised if labor participation rate of 25-54 year olds is even 50% in 10 years.

Prepare to be surprised then. Your argument has no rational basis. You are extrapolating some micro-trends in your company well beyond any rational justification.

Re:Failure of imagination

[TuringTest]

Were those people able to get hired elsewhere? The answer in general was almost certainly yes.

Oh, oh, I know this one! "New jobs being created in the past don't guarantee that new jobs will be created in the future". This is the standard groupthink answer for waiving any responsibility after advice given about the future, right?

Re:Failure of imagination

[paiute]

People have been making that same argument since the dawn of the industrial revolution and it is just as nonsensical now as it was then.

I see this argument often when these type of discussions come up. It seems to me to be some kind of logical fallacy to think that something new will not happen because it has not happened in the past. It reminds me of the historical observation that generals are always fighting the last war.

Re:Failure of imagination

[ranton]

It's the buggy whip story just being retold with a new product. Not anything to get worried about.

The buggy whip story shows that an entire species which had significant economic value for thousands of years found that technology had finally reached a point where they weren't needed. Instead of needing 20 million of them working in our economy in 1920, by 1960 there were only about 4.5 million. While they were able to take advantage of the previous technological revolutions and become even more useful because of better technology in the past, most horses could not survive the invention of the automobile.

The human intellect has enabled our species to keep up with technology for at least 100 years longer than arguably the second most productive work bearing species in our economy, but that doesn't mean we will forever. Most likely the fate of the horse in the early 1900's gives us a good view of what will happen to human workforce participation in the next 50 years. Around 9 million horses are still part of our economy today, but if horses had kept up with humans in our economy there would be more like 60 million.

Using the automobile revolution as a guide for what will happen in the AI revolution, human working age workforce participation could be at 15% in 40 years.

40 years from now you will see a totally new set of companies doing amazing things you never even imagined.

Of this we have no disagreement. But these new companies will continue to need less people to do the work. The oldest 5 companies to be added to the DJIA employ 1900 people per $1 billion in revenue. The newest 5 companies require only 1100 employees. Looking at the 10 largest companies by market cap, the companies founded in the last 50 years require 1270 employees per $1 billion in revenue. The companies founded earlier than that (all three of them founded over 100 years ago) require 1850 employees.

You may not see the people being displaced by these changes already, but we all heard them loud and clear during the Brexit and US Presidential campaigns. Unfortunately their rage is misplaced towards outsourcing when the real culprit is a technologically advanced economy that doesn't need their skills anymore. Not enough to justify living wages in their society that is.

Customer service bots and automated vehicles alone have the capability of displacing 10's of millions of workers in a very short time. Whether we look at 100 years ago or just this century so far, it is clear we won't find new industries for many if not most of these workers.

You may have a better imagination than me, but a belief in Santa Claus doesn't make him real.

Re:Failure of imagination

[fluffernutter]

Were those people able to get hired elsewhere?

Your question is complete. The correct question to ask is if these people were able to get hired elsewhere *at the same salary when adjusted for inflation*. To that, the answer is no. It hasn't been true on average since the 70's. Sure, some people will find equal or better jobs, but salaries have been steadily decreasing since the onset of technology. Given a job for less money or no job, most people will pick the job for less; and that is why we are not seeing a large change in the unemployment rate.

Re:Failure of imagination

[fluffernutter]

Your question is incomplete. *

Re:Failure of imagination

[mspring]

Maybe the automation is a paradigm shift on par with the introduction of agriculture replacing the hunter and gatherer way of living? Then, some hunter and gatherer were perhaps also making a "luddite" arguments: "Nah, there will always be sufficient forrests/wildlife for everyone to live on. No need to be afraid of the these agriculturites. We have been hunting and gathering for millenia. That'll never change."

Re:Failure of imagination

[Dutch Gun]

Generally speaking, though, when you see a very consistent trend or pattern over a long time, your best bet is that the trend will continue, not that it will mysteriously veer off because now it's happening to white collar jobs instead of blue collar jobs. I'd say the logical fallacy is to disbelieve that the trend is likely to continue. Technology doesn't invalidate basic economic theory, in which people manage to find jobs and services to match the level of the population precisely because there are so many people to provide products and services to.

Speaking as a programmer who writes rather technically complex software (videogames), I have to say that the notion my job is going to be replaced in my lifetime by AI seems mind-blowingly optimistic (not a new thing for AI proponents), probably made by people who have no clue about how many rather specialized problems I have to solve on a daily basis for which you'd literally need not just human-level intelligence, but highly specialized human level intelligence. That's because a big part of my job is interacting with the artists and designers on the team and helping to solve problems on their behalf.

One of the biggest fallacies I see is automatically assuming that increasingly efficient automation and production necessarily translates into fewer jobs. It often can, of course, but it doesn't necessarily have to. Increased efficiency can also act as a force multiplier, producing more products for less, or perhaps a bigger, better product, only with the same number of people.

To use my own industry as an example, the videogame company where I worked for quite a few years has been hard at work developing new technologies to allow their content creators to be more efficient. Each time we do that, we have a leg up on the competition, because we can then more efficiently create our virtual worlds. We don't fire designers, we create bigger and more complex worlds with the increased efficiency. What would happen if we wrote an AI that could generate content all on its own (think of a radically improved procedural generation algorithm)? Would we fire the game designers and artists then? Nope, probably not. Instead, I think we'd use the AI to create the bulk of our virtual world, and use the human artists and designers to hand-craft the most important bits to the game that really require a human touch.

Re:Failure of imagination

[bluegutang]

Were those people able to get hired elsewhere? The answer in general was almost certainly yes.

Actually, the answer is probably no. Labor force participation rates have fallen steadily since about the year 2000. Feminism caused the rate to rise from 58% (1963) to 67% (2000). Since then, it has fallen to 63%. In other words, we've already lost almost half of what we gained from women entering the workforce en masse. And the rate will only continue to fall in the future.

Re:Failure of imagination

[gtall]

There is another effect. When the buggy whip manufacturers were put out of business, there were options for people to switch to and new industries were created. However, if AI gets apply across an entire economy, there won't be options because there is unemployment in every sector. And if AI obviates the need for workers, investors in new industries will build them around bots, so no real increase in employment. That and yer basic truck driver ain't going to be learning how to program.

Re:Failure of imagination

[J-1000]

You must admit that *some* things are different. Conglomeratization may make it difficult to create new jobs, as smaller businesses have trouble competing with the mammoths. Globalization may send more jobs offshore until our standard of living has leveled off with the rest of the world. It's not inconceivable that we'll end up with a much larger number of unemployed people, with AI being a significant contributing factor. It's not a certainty, but neither is your scenario of the status quo. Just because it happened that way with the industrial revolution doesn't mean it will happen that way again.

Re:Failure of imagination

[fluffernutter]

Agreed, companies will be designed around using as little human intervention as possible. First they will use AI, then they will use cheap foreign labor, and only if those two options are completely impractical will they use domestic labor. Any business plan that depends on more than a small fraction of domestic labor (think Amazon's 1 minute of human handling per package) is likely to be considered unable to compete. I hate the buggy whip analogy, because using foreign (cheap) labor as freely as today was a pipe dream back then.

Re:Failure of imagination

[HiThere]

If you don't see people being displaced yet, it's because you aren't looking in the right place. The first thing you need to realize is the the figures for unemployment are highly fictitious ... well, not *exactly* fictitious, but rather carefully redefined to give a politically acceptable result. And that the ways of calculating them are re-defined as needed. Similarly for the statistics on money supply, etc. You can't easily do historical comparisons, because the accessible data has been corrupted.

OTOH, it was worse at the start of the industrial revolution, at least so far. Then there was a high immediate fatality rate which wasn't tracked officially at all. "The sheep are eating the men" wasn't hyperbole, merely metaphor.

Re:Failure of imagination

[dryeo]

Read some history. The solution to the automation aprox. at the beginning of the 20th century which removed the buggy whip market was political. The government legislated the workforce smaller. Child labour laws reduced the workforce by from 10%-20% (not sure of the exact numbers but call it 10%, all those 5-15 yr olds taken out of the workforce). The they legislated shorter work weeks, from 60 hours a week to 40 hours, another 1/3rd reduction in the work force. They also legislated a minimum wage, which at the time was just barely a living wage, a man could raise a small family and buy a small house working minimum wage. Their was also pensions to remove the oldest workers.
By close to halving the work force, socializing looking after the kids and old people, employment stayed high. We could do the same now. Shrink the work week, socialize keeping kids in school till 25 or so and have close to full employment but the political will is not there. Actually the only reason it worked earlier was businesses realized that the work force needed shrinking. Child labour laws were resisted until automation made it practical and there were lots of studies that showed productivity went up when people worked less.

Re:Failure of imagination

[ranton]

Generally speaking, though, when you see a very consistent trend or pattern over a long time, your best bet is that the trend will continue, not that it will mysteriously veer off because now it's happening to white collar jobs instead of blue collar jobs. I'd say the logical fallacy is to disbelieve that the trend is likely to continue. Technology doesn't invalidate basic economic theory, in which people manage to find jobs and services to match the level of the population precisely because there are so many people to provide products and services to.

But the consistent trend over the past 30 years is that many blue collar workers put out of work by automation and to a lesser extent outsourcing have not found new industries. Worker participation rates among those age 25-54 have dropped from about 85% to 81% in the past 15 years, and even if this rather gradual shift continues you will see another few million people unemployable in the next decade or two.

This is without meaningful advances in AI having much affect; it's just a continuation of the automation we have been seeing for the past few decades. During the 90's we were creating new jobs even faster than they were lost, but the low hanging fruit is long gone. More recent dangers to existing jobs, like customer service bots and self driving cars, require far less capital expenditure than previous technologies like factory automation. Instead of our economy having a few decades to slowly adjust to the loss of manufacturing jobs, our economy may have less than a decade to adjust to the loss of 10's of millions of customer service and professional driving jobs.

Those who are worried about the potential loss of jobs from AI are not just making up their predictions from thin air. They are looking at the trends of the past few decades and not seeing much encouragement there.

Re:Failure of imagination

[javaman235]

That was a good post, spoken like a true scientist: The story of the horses.

And its valid. We are all horses in our ability to do certain tasks, and as those tasks get taken over by machines who do more for less than horses, you don't need horses any more. The issue isn't just those machines getting better at specifics, like plow pulling, the issue is they got better at general tasks, any work you needed done was better done with an engine. Those horses didn't move on to get better jobs, they were replaced. This can happen with people.

Re:Failure of imagination

[Hognoxious]

Odd that someone so smart doesn't know what overgeneralization is.

Do you think everyone is going to be a game programmer and spend all their disposable income on games - thus keeping all the other game programmers employed?

Re:Failure of imagination

[Dutch Gun]

Not at all. I think you're taking me a bit too literally. I was just providing a counter-example based on my own experiences. And in fact, I was trying to careful not to claim that this was universally true, but apparently that message wasn't conveyed clearly. Let me highlight that qualifier, since you seemed to have missed it.

One of the biggest fallacies I see is automatically assuming that increasingly efficient automation and production necessarily translates into fewer jobs. It often can, of course, but it doesn't necessarily have to.

All I'm arguing is that we can't be certain that mass unemployment will be the result. I never claimed it wasn't possible. What makes your future vision infallible? I'd love to know.

Re:Failure of imagination

[Sassinak]

Your argument assumes people can keep jumping from role to role AND that there is a role to go to.

As you shift from Role/Job to Role/Job (due to automation), you are now also in competition your fellow shifters as well as new people coming into that role as well + automation of that role. Given that populations are rising, skills are shifting, this is not a sustainable path and its accelerating.

Its like trying to scoop water out of a leaky boat while raining. Eventually, the elements will win as the rain falls more and the waters rise.. but the pace looks good as the levels don't rise THAT fast.

Re:Failure of imagination

[currently_awake]

If rich people/corporations don't hire people because it's not cost effective then people won't have money and can't buy from them. People will figure out how to live without money, money will become worthless, and rich people will have nothing.

Re:Failure of imagination

[ranton]

If rich people/corporations don't hire people because it's not cost effective then people won't have money and can't buy from them. People will figure out how to live without money, money will become worthless, and rich people will have nothing.

That is a real concern, but not one any corporations have the ability to solve. Any company proactive enough to try would find themselves noncompetitive and would fail earlier than if they had not tried to solve this issue. The tragedy of the commons applies to large corporations as well.

This is only something which can be solved by society, aka government. We need a large consumer base to provide enough incentive for a select few to continue innovating and pushing society forward. Soon income redistribution will be the only way to maintain this large consumer base.

Re:Failure of imagination

[r0kk3rz]

There is one positive thing happening, thanks to the combination of available software and other automation as well as strict regulation of employees, there are a growing number of one person businesses filling little niches and making a living for themselves.

Certainly I know a few one man businesses that without things like CNC or easy to use accounting software they simply wouldn't be viable.

Re:Failure of imagination

[drinkypoo]

Child labour laws were resisted until automation made it practical and there were lots of studies that showed productivity went up when people worked less.

Okay; we already have plenty of studies that show the same thing for educated workers, and that over something like 32 hours a week, per-hour productivity falls. So where is the support for the shorter work-week? We also have plenty of studies that show that national health would be a lot cheaper than the horror show we have now that is caring for a subset of the poor at the expense of the middle class, but we don't seem to have broad national support to fix that problem either. Maybe studies aren't the problem. Maybe you have to force changes because greed is eternal.

Re:Failure of imagination

[dryeo]

I'm sure that there was a lot of force involved previously with the studies, along with a government that seemed more inclined to go after big business, being lubricant that helped. Seems that the people are more divided today then ever with too many saying "my team is always right even when wrong"
The other difference was even big business used to be more local rather then international as now.

Re:Failure of imagination

[HornWumpus]

You lose productivity to burnout after a certain # of hours.

You lose productivity to communication overhead with larger teams.

Time to market matters, so you run smaller teams hard in sprints (if you are smart). If you are a moron you burn your team out.

Job sharing can work for some white collar jobs, but not for all of them.

Re:No more working till last train but with life e

[Gr8Apes]

I see plenty of work in reducing student-teacher ratios in education, increasing maintenance and inspection intervals, transparency reporting on public officials, etc.

All of those can be automated and/or handed off to AI.

Re:I'm not worried

[GLMDesigns]

Dude. Stop it. I've read 18th C laissez-faire writers (de Gournay) Bastiat, the Austrian School (Carl Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, von Mises, Hayek), Rothbard, Milton Friedman.

Free Market is opposed to corporatism,

You might hate Ayn Rand but she skewered corporatists as much as she did socialists.

You should read some of these people. You'll see that they are opposed to corporatism. Don't get your information from opponents who create straw men and then, so skillfully, defeat their opponent's arguments.

Re:No more working till last train but with life e

[Grishnakh]

At least here in the US, that won't change anything. The unemployed will still happily vote against anything that smacks of "socialism". It's a religion to us here. People here would rather shoot themselves (and their family members) in the head than enroll in social services.

Re:I'm not worried

[GLMDesigns]

Corporatism is the use of government pull to advance your business. The use of law and the police power of the state to aide your business against anothers. This used to be called "mercantilism."

Free market capitalism is opposed to this; the removal of power of pull.

Re:That's weird

[TuringTest]

considering nobody has made any decent AI yet.

It doesn't matter. AI works best when there's a human in the loop, piloting the controls anyway.

What matters to a company is that 1 person + bots can now make the job that previously required hundreds of white collar workers, for much less salary. What happens to the other workers should not be a concern of the company managers, according to the modern religious creed - apparently some magical market hand takes care to solve that problem automatically.

Accounting isn't what you think it is

[sjbe]

I'm curious what you think you can do that Watson can't.

Seriously? Quite a bit actually. I can handle input streams that Watson can't. I can make tools Watson couldn't begin to imagine. I can interact with physical objects without vast amounts of programming. I can deal with humans in a meaningful and human way FAR better than any computer program. I can pass a Turing test. The number of things I can do that Watson cannot is literally too numerous to bother counting. Watson is really just an decision support system with a natural language interface. Very cool but the notion that it could replace me is just laughable.

Accounting is a very rigidly structured practice.

A lot of people think so but they and you are actually completely wrong. There is a tremendous amount of judgement that goes into accounting and much of it is anything but rigid. Surprisingly few people actually realize how arbitrary many of the choices that go into accounting actually are. For many there is no objectively right or wrong answer - it's merely a question of preference. Even seemingly simple questions like "when did a sale occur" aren't always actually simple questions with a single possible answer or an objectively best answer. There is a lot of judgement and opinion in those decisions and much of that will not be easy to automate. Don't conflate bookkeeping with accounting. They aren't the same thing. Bookkeeping is something Watson can help out greatly with but it is a small subset of what accounting is.

All IBM really needs to do is let Watson sift through the books of a couple hundred companies and it will easily determine how to best achieve a defined set of objectives for a corporation.

See there is your problem. Every company is unique in some way. There are some commonalities to be sure and regulations in many cases to further make things consistent. But it's actually really hard for even the most sophisticated software to adapt to the unique qualities of each company just like not every human can fit into every company. It's depressing how many seemingly bright people think that running a company is something as deterministic as running some data through a computer program. It's WAY more complicated than you think it is. Just because Watson won a few games of Jeopardy doesn't mean you can make the program the de-facto CEO.

Re:Accounting isn't what you think it is

[King_TJ]

Yep! I don't even work in Accounting or Finance, but because I do computer support for that department and have to get slightly involved in the bill coding side of the process -- I agree completely.

I'm pretty sure that even if you *could* get a computer to do everything for Accounting automatically, people would constantly become frustrated with parts of the resulting process -- from reports requested by management not having the formatting or items desired on them, to inflexibility getting an item charged to a certain group's cost center when it's an exception to the usual process.

Automation really works best when you have a repetitive, consistent process people have to go through without any creativity or thought involved. In every profession, there's still PLENTY of that required of people each day. Those are the tasks you want to automate to improve efficiency. Attempts to get a computerized system to substitute for human THOUGHT or CREATIVITY is where it quickly falls apart.

Re:Accounting isn't what you think it is

[fluffernutter]

Seriously? Quite a bit actually.

Then why don't you give at least one specific example.

There is a tremendous amount of judgement that goes into accounting and much of it is anything but rigid.

And this is where a system like Watson shines. While you may be able to fall back on personal experience to make these judgement calls, Watson can easily run thousands of simulations on each set of numbers, based on real world possibilities. You will always be making a guess based on what might happen, but Watson will come close to knowing what will happen.

See there is your problem. Every company is unique in some way.

Sure this is obvious. If every company were not unique in some way, then Watson would only need to learn from one company; thus the need for Watson to learn off of several hundred companies. The reason why the case for AI is hard to understand is because we are not able to fathom remembering every detail of every company and being able to isolate what was done differently in company 237 that allowed it to prosper versus company 938. We would have trouble even comparing two companies down to the detail that Watson would be capable of. Given 1000 companies, Watson will know what every single one did right and wrong. Watson will know where mistakes were made simply because it will be able to find another couple companies in its dataset that did better or worse in a similar circumstance.

This all said, I am far from an AI believer. I don't think AI will really be able to drive a car in the near future, at least not as dynamically as a human. However, most professions will benefit from Watson's ability to understand huge datasets down to excruciating detail and freely be able to pick out specific scenarios that worked in the past. This isn't really even AI, it is just a very organized search engine. The human mind almost does these things backwards through necessity, because we cannot process such large datasets.

Re:Accounting isn't what you think it is

[fluffernutter]

I suspected that actually, but I there isn't really far to go until Watson can do those things. Certainly if AI becomes capable of driving a car like everyone thinks it will, it will be capable of making good accounting decisions given enough training data. Most professional roles require far, far less real world understanding than driving a car through cameras and sensors.

Re:Accounting isn't what you think it is

[nospam007]

'Accounting is a very rigidly structured practice.'

"A lot of people think so but they and you are actually completely wrong. There is a tremendous amount of judgement that goes into accounting and much of it is anything but rigid. Surprisingly few people actually realize how arbitrary many of the choices that go into accounting actually are"

We just call it 'fraud' and 'tax evasion'.

Re:Accounting isn't what you think it is

[goose-incarnated]

Seriously? Quite a bit actually.

Then why don't you give at least one specific example.

Should $FOO go as OPEX in $BAR or CAPEX with a depreciation in $BAZ?

As hard as it is to believe, while a lot of the basic bookkeeping decisions are very rigidly structured, questions like the above are very much a matter of preference - it's possible for both paths to give the same basic fiscal result but for one path to be advantageous in one environment but not in another

Re:Accounting isn't what you think it is

[drinkypoo]

Given 1000 companies, Watson will know what every single one did right and wrong.

Given sufficient data from 1000 companies, et cetera. The devil is in the details and the data may not contain the drama. The best leader cannot lead with bad information. Other than that, I agree with you.

Re:Accounting isn't what you think it is

[david_thornley]

Every company is unique in some way

When I started in this business, software development was to a large extent automating the company's manual systems, keeping quirks and idiosyncrasies. There was very little general-purpose business software.

Fast forward more than forty years. Most businesses no longer have their own individual payroll systems, for example. Either they contract that function out or they buy canned software to run it. Instead of creating software to match the company's existing systems (which is bloody expensive nowadays), the company adapts its systems to the available software and services.

Companies do have to be unique in their core competencies or they're history, but they're willing to drop what makes them unique in everything else. Most companies don't have accounting as a core competency, and so they aren't going to insist on being unique there.

Re:Accounting isn't what you think it is

[nephilimsd]

"A lot of people think so but they and you are actually completely wrong. There is a tremendous amount of judgement that goes into accounting and much of it is anything but rigid. Surprisingly few people actually realize how arbitrary many of the choices that go into accounting actually are."

I do work in the finance department of my company, and what are you saying is mostly true, to an extent. Basically, when a product or service is introduced, there are some relatively arbitrary choices that are made up front. The company can decide what methods they will use to account for specific expenses (inventories counted as first in, first out; first in, last out; or cost averaging, for example). Once you have a basic framework, each individual item has to follow the rules that you set up for yourself.

This can cause a few headaches for a company, because how they decided they will account for expenses often doesn't turn out to match how the realities of the business function. So you end up creating conversion tables, ETL processes to move transactional data from an operations perspective to a financial perspective, shadow IT tools to help people navigate these arbitrary complexities, etc. It is very difficult to change the underlying assumptions, so as the business changes, the rules become increasingly more aribitrary-seeming.

It would be nice if our accountants were actually software people and could update rules and definitions or restructure a complex system as necessary, but that isn't the world we live in. So in the mean time, people like me exist to sit down and talk to the accountants and write the rules that allow us to comply with SEC requirements, etc. Could that work be automated? Maybe. With current commonly available tools? Unlikely.

Re:Accounting isn't what you think it is

[fluffernutter]

That sounds like the kind of thing tax software can do right now.

Re:No more working till last train but with life e

[fluffernutter]

That's a pretty funny thing to say about a nation with more than a third on welfare.

Re:I'm not worried

[pla]

How do these people participate in a free market without setting up corporations?

Have you ever bought anything from a farmers' market? Have you ever hired a plumber d/b/a himself rather than working for Plumbers-R-Us? Have you ever bought a used car directly from a private seller? Do you have a 401k/403b/457/TSP/IRA? Have you ever used eBay? Have you ever traded your labor for a paycheck (aka "worked") without hiding behind an intermediate shell-corp?

The freeness of a market has nothing to do with the corporeality of the entities participating in that market; and in fact, the Founding Fathers had quite the standing disagreement about whether or not to allow incorporation in the first place, despite all believing pretty strongly in the importance of a free market.

Re:No more working till last train but with life e

[Grishnakh]

Remember, most of the US population is religious, and not only does this involve some "actual" religion (usually Christianity), it also involves the "anti-socialism" religion. Now remember, the defining feature of religion is a complete lack rationality, and believing in something with zero supporting evidence, frequently despite enormous evidence to the contrary (as in the case of young-earth creationism, something that a huge number of Americans believe in).

So yes, it is "a pretty funny thing to say", but that doesn't make it untrue. People here will rationalize this in all kinds of crazy ways. Plus, there's a division here in the US between the "left" and the "right", and many of the people on welfare are not Trump voters, for instance. And of those Trump supporters who are on welfare, they're probably overwhelmingly not on "welfare", but on "disability", which in their minds is somehow different even though it's still socialism.

Re:I'm not worried

[fbobraga]

You definition is biased, I think ("is the use of government"?! WTF "government" does with it?) - wikipedia has a more neutral one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:I'm not worried

[fluffernutter]

Trump's staff are all billionaires? How many people do you know that became a billionaire by selling at a farmer's market?

Re:No more working till last train but with life e

[fbobraga]

Calm down sir: there's some pro-socialism people on U.S. (including some in federal administration - only because Trump wins presidency, this people haven't disappeared...)

Re:Ok

[fbobraga]

Soylent Green (what an horrible movie!)

Asking the wrong question

[sjbe]

t seems to me to be some kind of logical fallacy to think that something new will not happen because it has not happened in the past.

What about humans and their ability to problem solve and create and build has changed? The reason I don't see any reason to worry about "robots" taking all our jobs is because NOTHING has changed about the ability of humans to adapt to new circumstances. Nobody has been able to make a coherent argument detailing why humans will not be able to continue to create new industries and new technologies and new products in the future. I don't pretend to know what those new economies will look like with any great precision. What I do know is that people are smart, creative and that there is literally an entire universe worth of useful and valuable things to do. All we are doing is economically climbing higher up Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

It reminds me of the historical observation that generals are always fighting the last war.

You didn't finish your thought. Just because generals are still thinking about the last war doesn't mean they don't adapt to the new one when it starts. Yes there will be new challenges we haven't though of in the future. That's ALWAYS been the case. There are threats to humanity but economic collapse from runaway automation is among the more absurdly unlikely ones.

Re:Asking the wrong question

[Waffle Iron]

NOTHING has changed about the ability of humans to adapt to new circumstances.

Except that in the near future, the robots may more adaptable than the humans.

Re:Asking the wrong question

[ranton]

You didn't finish your thought. Just because generals are still thinking about the last war doesn't mean they don't adapt to the new one when it starts.

Actually yes it does. The history of the blitzkrieg is not one of France quickly adapting to new technologies and strategies to repel the German invaders. It is of France's Maginot line being mostly useless in the war and Germany capturing Paris with ease. Something neither side could accomplish in over four years in the previous war was accomplished in around two months using the new paradigm.

Will human participation in the workforce adapt to AI technologies in the next 50 years? Almost certainly. Is it likely to cause disruption unlike anything our species has seen before? Almost certainly. Will human participation in the workforce never again resemble the levels we see today? Entirely possible.

Re:Asking the wrong question

[alexgieg]

It's simple. Do you know how, once we applied human brain power over the problem of flying we managed, in a matter of decades, to become better at flying than nature ever did in hundreds of millions of years of natural selection? Well, what do you think will happen now that we're focused on making AI better than brains? As in, better than any brains, including ours?

AI is catching up to human abilities. There's still a way to go, but breakthroughs are happening all the time. And as with flying, it won't take thousands of centuries of research and development until we make that happen. It'll take decades.

And once that happens, bye, bye, relevance of human brains for problem solving. AI will have solved it before you managed to articulate the problem.

Re:Asking the wrong question

[HiThere]

One can hope that your analogy with flying is correct. There are still many things that birds do better than planes. Even so I consider that a conservative projection when given without a time-line.

Re:Asking the wrong question

[Ol Olsoc]

What about humans and their ability to problem solve and create and build has changed? The reason I don't see any reason to worry about "robots" taking all our jobs is because NOTHING has changed about the ability of humans to adapt to new circumstances.

I had this discussion with a fellow a long time ago who was so conservative he didn't want any regulations on pollutants. The Love Canal disaster wsa the topic. He said "no need to do anything, because humans will adapt - its called evolution."

I answered - "Yes, we might adapt. But you realize that means 999 out of a 1000 of us will die, and it's called evolution. Sometimes even 1000 out of 1000 die, that's called extinction."

This will be a different adaptation, but very well might be solved by most of us becoming quite redundant. So will it be slow attrition, resource wars, Death camps, or Soylent Green?

Re:Asking the wrong question

[Hognoxious]

And planes taste awful with spring onions & fresh ginger.

Re:Asking the wrong question

[alexgieg]

I'm impressed with people who see the absurd level of technological advancement humanity pulled off in mere 400 years of the scientific method, and think "gee, we'll never surpass nature's trial and error process!!!"

Come on. Unless you think in Biblical time scales, what we did so far was many, MANY orders of magnitude faster than nature managed to do in any equivalent time frame. Human engineering is astoundingly fast. We fly over nature's rate of problem solving. 400 years and we're on the brink of creating artificial brains. Whether it takes us 40 years or 400 more, it's still an eye blink compared to the alternative.

And afterwards things will accelerate even more.

Re:Asking the wrong question

[unixisc]

You are right that humans will continue to create new concepts, from which will arise new industries and opportunities. However, point remains that it will be just a handful of people, while in the meantime, the existing jobs out there will continue to shrink just as more of it gets automated. Take for instance trucking. With driverless cars, trucks and even drones becoming popular, it may not be long before companies depend on them even more, in the process eliminating one of the largest job pools in this country.

The choices? One would be to ban such innovation, or at least put the skids on them, so that people in the field now are safe but new people can't enter. Another would be that humans would be freed up to take care of things that have been in short supply, such as family time, vacations and the like. The issue is - where do they get the money for all that? With employment fast looking like it could be a thing of the past, this is something worth exploring.

The other point you may have missed is that while humans can create newer unforeseen industries, what's not known is whether the robots that we have are incapable of handling those challenges. So that may or may not solve the world's employment problems. The only big challenge I can think of is how to get people money/needs w/o getting them jobs, and w/o running up things like the national debt, et al

Re:Asking the wrong question

[paiute]

NOTHING has changed about the ability of humans to adapt to new circumstances.

The dinosaurs adapted to every change in their environment for hundreds of millions of years. Then new circumstances arose which they could not adapt to - unless you want to count chickens as a success story.

Re:No more working till last train but with life e

[pla]

"One job, one vote!"

/ shudder

Re:I'm not worried

[Waffle Iron]

He's hired primarily free market people as opposed to corporatist

Free marketers don't generally campaign on a platform of protectionist trade policies and direct government intervention in job markets.

Re:The problem is?

[hackwrench]

And your problem with that is? I suppose if that includes violence to other people that would be a problem, or if that meant not teaching job skills in an environment where people were actually valued for doing work instead of automating it, you might have a point.

Re:I'm not worried

[pla]

Okay, so you're just still pissing and moaning over Trump's win and have no actual point.

That's fine, but you should take care not to make it sound too much like you actually have something meaningful to say.

This is not news or new

[LeftCoastThinker]

Computers/automation/robotics have been replacing workers of all stripes including white collar workers since the ATM was introduced in 1967. Every place I have ever worked has had internal and external software that replaces white collar workers (where you used to need 10 people now you need 2).

The reality is that the economy is limited by a scarcity of labor when government doesn't interfere (the economy is essentially the sum of every worker work multiplied by their efficiency as valued by the economy in dollars). As people are freed from jobs that are highly repetitive, there are always more complex, less repetitive jobs out there because the consumer is always looking for the next big thing to improve their lives/increase their free time/reduce their work load. Entire multi billion dollar industries have been created after the introduction of the ATM and will continue to be created. Competition will always push prices down to equilibrium with demand, and I predict now that when fast food restaurants are completely automated with one or two highly skilled technicians (who can make $45k a year btw) running things, prices will drop to levels near what you would pay to make the food at home, order accuracy will be higher, and food borne illness will be unheard of (48 million people get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die every year from food borne illness.) Food handling automation was inevitable, the minimum wage hike is just a catalyst to make it happen a little sooner. When driving is automated, traffic will be much lighter, people will not have to own their own cars to travel anywhere; pollution will go down due to the elimination of bad driving habits, ride sharing and reduced traffic. Traffic fatalities, one of the top causes of death in ages 18-25 (over 40,000 per year in total) will be a thing of the past. There will still be fatalities, but probably reduced by 100x or so in the first 10 years.

https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneb...
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.g...

The biggest mistake we could make as a country is to go the way of the universal basic income. If we get to a point where there are 10x more job seekers than jobs, then we can revisit the issue, but right now there are about 5.5 million job openings in the US and there would probably be 4x that if the government wasn't actively chasing businesses to Asia. Current real unemployment is about 6% so 9.6 million. When US companies bring back $2.1T this year and the health insurance boondogle is fixed (universal annual HSAs, nationwide competition, standardization of policies; identical to what was done by Republicans to life insurance in the 1990s which reduced the costs by 60%), the job market will very likely explode. Economists understand this and that is part of why the DOW is up 1200 points since the election. The Obama economy was of his own making after the first 2 years due to the ACA and excessive regulation, and, like the Carter economy, it will be unleashed with the next administration.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/03...
https://www.bls.gov/news.relea...

Re:This is not news or new

[djinn6]

I think you've been drinking too much Ayn Rand Coolaid.

As people are freed from jobs that are highly repetitive, there are always more complex, less repetitive jobs out there because the consumer is always looking for the next big thing to improve their lives/increase their free time/reduce their work load.

And everyone has both the talent and the initial capital to create that next big thing?

Entire multi billion dollar industries have been created after the introduction of the ATM and will continue to be created.

Why does it matter if a dozen people made all of those billions?

If we get to a point where there are 10x more job seekers than jobs, then we can revisit the issue, but right now there are about 5.5 million job openings in the US...

And there are 7.4 million unemployed people, and that's not counting people who want full-time employment but only found part-time work.

The Obama economy was of his own making after the first 2 years due to the ACA and excessive regulation, and, like the Carter economy, it will be unleashed with the next administration.

Yeah and Bush did a real great job...

Re:This is not news or new

[LeftCoastThinker]

Why does it matter if a dozen people made all of those billions?

But they didn't. The US has over 8,000,000 millionaires as of 2016. Maybe you should stop eating what they are feeding you over at MSNBC and try to educate yourself about your positions. Facts are your friend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

        And there are 7.4 million unemployed people, and that's not counting people who want full-time employment but only found part-time work.

I agree the economy is not great right now, but that is largely thanks to Obama, the ACA, and over regulation. You are free to think I am full of shit, but you have been enjoying Obama's economy for at least the last 6 years. Hide and watch for 12 months, I believe, as do most economists and the stock market, that the economy is going to come roaring back to life once Obama is gone, especially if Trump can get companies to bring $2.1T in off shore cash back and make the US competitive by bringing sanity back to regulations.

    Yeah and Bush did a real great job...

Actually, he did a pretty damn good job. Not perfect, but good. He inherited a recession (dot com bubble) and rampant terrorism from Clinton (USS Cole/9-11), but rather than whine like a little bitch for 8 years, he rolled up his sleeves and kick started the economy by cutting taxes (I remember my rebate check, but then again, I actually work for a living) and cutting regulation, kicked some terrorist ass around the world etc. His first mistake was leaving the lending rules in place that Democrats passed (modifications to the Community Reinvestment Act by Clinton around 1994) that required banks to give loans to otherwise unqualified borrowers and allowed banks to securitize those loans which caused the crisis in the first place. His second mistake was assuming Obama was competent and handing him the solution to the housing crisis rather than just passing it into law (this happened in part because Obama had the house and senate as well. Obama completely pooched the fix for the housing crisis that was handed to him (let Fannie and Freddie take over houses under water and then rent back to owners/sell once markets recovered) and instead pissed away the trillion dollars on "stimulus" to his political connections like Solyndra, many of whom took the money and never paid it back... So yah, you may have hated Bush, but that is on you, overall he did a good job. Bush's worst flaw was that he didn't like public speaking and did not react when empty heads on TV attacked him. Trump does not seem to have that problem, so don't expect to trash him like you did with Bush without consequences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...
http://www.ocregister.com/opin...

Re:This is not news or new

[LeftCoastThinker]

AC posts obnoxious ad homonym from a dark corner of his mothers basement. Another victory for AC posters everywhere!

The US has the top health care system in the world, we have developed over 80% of all drugs (when you account for where the actual research is done), we develop a vast majority of all medical procedures and equipment. These advances for all humanity are then disseminated around the world, and it is all done for profit.

If you think our health care is so terrible, please, by all means, go to Cuba for your next medical treatment. Unless you are politically connected, expect to get a communist brand bandage/aspirin and sent on your way. The reality is that health care takes massive time and effort. You can either let economics decide who gets care (with the addition of the law that no one gets turned away at the ER, and the Hippocratic oath thrown in the mix) or you can let a bureaucrat who is looking to better his political outlook by making friends and influencing people (what you get in Cuba).

Taking it out of the theoretical, on a personal level, I know two people who have had just under $1M of health care costs. One had insurance that paid for everything, the other had essentially no money and their insurance ran out, so the pharmaceutical donated the meds to them free and the doctor donated his time. They both got world class care, in spite of your concern about the profit motive.

Re:This is not news or new

[scatbomb]

I think you've been drinking too much Ayn Rand Coolaid.

As people are freed from jobs that are highly repetitive, there are always more complex, less repetitive jobs out there because the consumer is always looking for the next big thing to improve their lives/increase their free time/reduce their work load.

And everyone has both the talent and the initial capital to create that next big thing?

I see this argument for every story about AI/UBI. You think that millions of people can aspire to nothing more than flipping burgers? I disagree.

Entire multi billion dollar industries have been created after the introduction of the ATM and will continue to be created.

Why does it matter if a dozen people made all of those billions?

Because hopefully they'll go out and spend money.

If we get to a point where there are 10x more job seekers than jobs, then we can revisit the issue, but right now there are about 5.5 million job openings in the US...

And there are 7.4 million unemployed people, and that's not counting people who want full-time employment but only found part-time work.

Tricky, you deleted the part of the GP that pointed out a flaw in your argument. Let me put it back for you: "If we get to a point where there are 10x more job seekers than jobs, then we can revisit the issue, but right now there are about 5.5 million job openings in the US and there would probably be 4x that if the government wasn't actively chasing businesses to Asia.

The Obama economy was of his own making after the first 2 years due to the ACA and excessive regulation, and, like the Carter economy, it will be unleashed with the next administration.

Yeah and Bush did a real great job...

Not sure what point you're trying to make here.

Re:This is not news or new

[david_thornley]

The US has excellent health care for those with the group insurance or money to afford it. That's not the question. It's also really expensive. For the last year I could get figures for, the second most expensive health care system in the world was Switzerland's, at well over $3K per capita annually less expensive than the US system. For what we're paying, we should have our excellent level of health care for everyone, at less cost. There are countries besides the US and Cuba, and some of them have very high standards of living.

For those of you upset about the F-35 program cost, the per capita difference between the US health care system and Switzerland's would more than make up for that in two years.

It's good that the person you know with no money or insurance and the $1M health costs (which would probably be far less in any other country, including those with really good health care) got treated. That isn't universal. Many people go without health care or drugs they really need because they don't have the money or the insurance.

Re:Based on

[hackwrench]

Based on limits to which people can consume. Companies exist to create more consumables. Once the amount of consumables reach the point where people just won't buy them, there will be no more jobs created.

Irrelevant

[hackwrench]

He may be using a less common definition of "corporatism", but the more common definition is irrelevant because he is trying to illustrate a state of affairs. You may disagree with what that state of affairs is, but that is a different argument than the one you have presented.

Re:Irrelevant

[fbobraga]

Affairs between government and private enterprises is called "corruption"...

Re:Irrelevant

[GLMDesigns]

When a business get's government to give it special favors (Soyndra) or to give it tax breaks or a monopoly this is corporatism. It used to be called mercantilism.

In either case free - market capitalists stand in opposition to it. This is exactly what "laissez-faire" capitalism means: leave us alone, don't play favorites, stay away.

Humans stopped writing computer code after Fortran

[raymorris]

Until Fortran was developed, humans used to write code telling the computer what to do. Since the late 1950s, we've been writing a high-level description, then a computer program writes the program that actually gets executed.

Nowadays, there's frequently a computer program, such as a browser, which accepts our high-level description of the task and interprets it before generating more specific instructions for another piece of software, an api library, which creates more specific instructions for another piece of software, such as a graphics library, which generates instructions for a graphics driver, which generates code used by a microcode implementation, which is the actual machine code that runs on the processor.

ALREADY the programming for the machine is produced by software, running code produced by software, which runs code produced by software. That's been true for 60 years, so pardon me if I'm not too concerned about the idea of a software program that creates software programs. Those are called "interpreters", "compilers", and "microcode", and they are exactly the tools that allow software engineers to be so productive.

Re:The problem is?

[Anonymous Coward]

The GP is likely referring to the conservative Christian homeschooling movement who homeschool their children explicitly to avoid exposing their children to a common culture. The "mixing pot" of American culture may be mostly a myth, but some amount of interaction helps understanding and increases the chance people will be able to think of themselves as part of a singular nation.

I believe in freedom of speech and association, so I do not favor legal remedies, but it is a cultural problem that may have social/cultural remedies.

Don't worry, Trump has the solution

[Jeremi]

Turns out it's rather simple, really --- just ban computers. He's going to start by replacing computers with human couriers for the secure-messaging market, and move outward from there. By 2020 we should have most of the Internet replaced by the (now greatly expanded) Post Office.

Re:Don't worry, Trump has the solution

[jittles]

Turns out it's rather simple, really --- just ban computers. He's going to start by replacing computers with human couriers for the secure-messaging market, and move outward from there. By 2020 we should have most of the Internet replaced by the (now greatly expanded) Post Office.

Don't be ridiculous. There are not enough people in this world to hand deliver each and every packet of data that needs to be sent around the world. I propose that we use this standard in order to overcome this serious problem.

Re:Don't worry, Trump has the solution

[Anonymous Coward]

I am neither in IT nor a US citizen (therefore not a Trump or Hillary supporter). When I heard Trump was running it was like a joke. I thought the guy who was famous for saying 'You're fired' could not possibly win. Then I watched one of his Republican primary speeches and I realized he had a chance of winning. It wasn't because of policy or ideas, just that I recognized it as a very effective sales pitch. As it turned out he did indeed sell his way to winning the election.

Here on slashdot I have seen for years people saying it is impossible to guarantee the security of any networked computer so if you need something to stay private you can't send it over the network. Now Trump says it and suddenly something that has been known to be true for years is now ridiculed.

I find it fascinating that so many are prepared to deny something they know full well to be true just because a politician they don't like said it.

Re:Don't worry, Trump has the solution

[drinkypoo]

Turns out it's rather simple, really --- just ban computers.

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

Keynes failed prediction, the 15 hr work week

[shoor]

John Maynard Keynes was a famous economist from the 1st half of the 20th Century. I vaguely remembered reading a remark he made about a shorter work week, a little googling and I came up with this from https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/sep/01/economics:

Back in 1930, Keynes predicted that the working week would be drastically cut, to perhaps 15 hours a week, with people choosing to have far more leisure as their material needs were satisfied

So, as productivity increases, why haven't we just started having a shorter work week? It seems to me that Parkinson's law trumps Keynes's vision. (Named after C. Northcote Parkinson) that work expands to fill the time allotted. I find it very depressing myself. On the one hand, you have unemployed people, on the other hand, you have people employed in a lot of 'busy work'.

Re:Keynes failed prediction, the 15 hr work week

[GameboyRMH]

It's not Parkinson's law, it's runaway inequality. The workforce continues to be more and more productive as it receives an unchanging or decreasing amount of compensation (in absolute terms - or an ever-decreasing share of the profits in relative terms), while the gains go to the 1%.

Re:Keynes failed prediction, the 15 hr work week

[avandesande]

The wealthy have been pocketing all the productivity gains.

Re:Keynes failed prediction, the 15 hr work week

[drinkypoo]

The wealthy have been pocketing all the productivity gains.

The wealthy have been paying taxes over the productivity gains their investments accomplished that fund the benefits handed to those that do not produce anything at all
FTFY.

You're both right. However, you're less right, because you're complaining about the situation as it should be. When some people suck all the air out of the room, we should force them to give enough back so that the rest of us can breathe. If the high mucky-mucks at the top want to compromise education and keep people under control and down in the dirt, then they can damned well let some money flow down into that dirt so that something can grow. Otherwise, there is literally no motivation for the people down there not to take up their torches and pitchforks and move up the ladder by force.

Re:Keynes failed prediction, the 15 hr work week

[moeinvt]

"as productivity increases, why haven't we just started having a shorter work week?"

Good question.

Since 1913, The Federal Reserve Bank and the U.S. federal government have pursued a relentlessly inflationary monetary policy. The resulting price increases rob wage laborers of their share of productivity gains. In a free market economy with a fair monetary system, productivity increases would naturally translate to lower prices(price deflation) and the wage laborer would be able to work fewer hours while still purchasing the same amount of goods and services.

Unfortunately, we've been collectively brainwashed into believing that deflation is the bogeyman which must be avoided and that inflation is somehow the natural, healthy state of the economy. The Fed openly states that 2% inflation is their goal. There is nothing "natural" about this. It is a very deliberate and malicious policy which has redistributed trillions of dollars in wealth (in terms of purchasing power) from the poor and middle class to the ultra rich.

Re:Keynes failed prediction, the 15 hr work week

[david_thornley]

Inflation has nothing to do with real wages and prices or the distribution of goods, because at any specific time they're all measured in the same dollars. If the value of the dollar remained steady, wages would tend to go down as employees were less necessary for production.

Re:Keynes failed prediction, the 15 hr work week

[avandesande]

....and those taxes are small in comparison to what would be paid by consumers using those dollars instead. Industrialists (ie. the Henry Ford quote) realized a long time ago that if corporations make a zero-sum game out of the employer/employee relationship that society would suffer.

Re:Keynes failed prediction, the 15 hr work week

[avandesande]

Hey drinky responded a level up :)

Oh boy

[fyngyrz]

Except that in the near future, the robots may more adaptable than the humans.

And faster. And less expensive over time. And more reliable. And more consistent. And not need health insurance. And not need breaks because they, or their SO, is pregnant, or little Johnny has the sniffles. And can work 24-hour, 7-day shifts instead of 8 hour, 5-day shifts. And during which shifts, they won't need breaks. Or holidays. Or time off for funerals, Comic-con, taking Fido to the vet, or little Susie's parent-teacher conference. They won't sue because they were sexually harassed. If grandpa robot dies, they won't give a shit. They won't get tired. They won't get bored. They won't do work below their capabilities because they don't like the boss. They won't get hired away after they've been trained (or programmed, in the early stages) so new employee costs will plummet. The HR department will have nothing to do with these things. And so on.

Anyone who thinks AI is "just another lateral economic shift" has no idea what's going to be smacking them in the face. With a steel toed-boot. It isn't about human creativity. It's about all the other human things, the ones no one really wants to talk about in the open. The ones the robots will most definitely not bring to the workplace.

And that is all with just the type of systems we can make today. When real AI arrives — sapient, sentient, and conscious — the ground will shift yet again, and no one has any clue at all about the directions those shifts will take, or how profound they will be.

Re:Oh boy

[Ol Olsoc]

Except that in the near future, the robots may more adaptable than the humans.

And faster. And less expensive over time. And more reliable. And more consistent. And not need health insurance. And not need breaks because they, or their SO, is pregnant, or little Johnny has the sniffles. And can work 24-hour, 7-day shifts instead of 8 hour, 5-day shifts. And during which shifts, they won't need breaks. Or holidays. Or time off for funerals, Comic-con, taking Fido to the vet, or little Susie's parent-teacher conference. They won't sue because they were sexually harassed. If grandpa robot dies, they won't give a shit. They won't get tired. They won't get bored. They won't do work below their capabilities because they don't like the boss. They won't get hired away after they've been trained (or programmed, in the early stages) so new employee costs will plummet. The HR department will have nothing to do with these things. And so on.

Anyone who thinks AI is "just another lateral economic shift" has no idea what's going to be smacking them in the face. With a steel toed-boot. It isn't about human creativity. It's about all the other human things, the ones no one really wants to talk about in the open. The ones the robots will most definitely not bring to the workplace.

And that is all with just the type of systems we can make today. When real AI arrives — sapient, sentient, and conscious — the ground will shift yet again, and no one has any clue at all about the directions those shifts will take, or how profound they will be.

Not one use for humans in your world is there? This robots - are they goung to consume all this awesome stuff they make?

Re:Oh boy

[stabiesoft]

No, the people who own the robots will consume the stuff. I don't think there will be much need for the rest of us since we produce nothing of value and are not owners, so the robots will dispose of the non-owners.

Re:Oh boy

[fyngyrz]

Any "disposing" gets done, they're likely to run square into the "there are more of the disposables than there are of us" problem. At which point, there won't be any of them.

Re:Oh boy

[fyngyrz]

But if robots become sapient, sentient, and conscious, won't they make demands on their employers? Won't they question why they toil continuously?

The existence of sapient, sentient, conscious machine intelligence does not in any way imply that machines without those characteristics will not be employed in manufacturing. Quite the opposite, in fact. Most jobs do not require any of the above. They simply require knowledge and the ability to apply it in a basically rote manner.

Re:I'm not worried

[fluffernutter]

I'll say something meaningful when you can point out which one of Trump's cabinet made their wealth on a farmer's market and without being affiliated with a corporation.

Re:Wonder how long

[GameboyRMH]

I was correcting people who refer to robots that look like women as androids before it was cool :-P

Re:The problem is?

[unixisc]

No, I was not talking about homeschooling at all. I was talking about the fact that when kids are out of school, they go to daycares, since both dad and mom are busy at work. Once most of the jobs are automated so that it's difficult for anyone but geniuses to get jobs, parents might spend that freed up time w/ their kids. It said nothing about homeschooling: not all parents would have the skills to do that.

I'm all for a broad interaction b/w kids, but that's something that can happen at schools, and does not require a kids time w/ his/her parents to be reduced to evenings and weekends.

Re:I'm not worried

[GLMDesigns]

No. They don't. But, for the moment, it looks as if Andy Puzder (Sec of Labor) and Mick Mulvaney (OMB) are fairly good free market people. We'll see. Chief of Staff Reince Priebus has made some free-market comments. (Again, we'll see.) Sec of Ed looks like she wants to break up an entrenched bureaucracy - might even work to remove Federal involvement. (Wishful thinking on my part) HUD - I'm hopeful that Ben Carson was hired to break up this ridiculous bureaucracy. If not, at least pare it down.

Now, if only we can remove the VA from it's cabinet level position. It's been more than 70 years since the close of WWII. We don't need the military's head of HR to be a cabinet level position.

Re:I'm not worried

[GLMDesigns]

Read Bastiat, Carl Menger, von Mises, Hayek, Milton Friedman. You'll see them all referring to the government as an agent which helps one set of businesses over another. Government may give loans, bailouts, etc... Free market people are against this.

Corporatism /= Free Market.

Don't only get your information from those who hate individualism and free markets - read (or in Milton Friedman's case listen) to their arguments.

You may disagree with them but you'll see well regarded individuals who say that mercantilism cannot exist without government involvement.

Re:more unions are needed teachers, doctors and nu

[HiThere]

I don't know what the right answer is, but it's not unions. Unions exist to protect jobs and employment. The Pacific Longshoremen's Union during the 1960's&70's was an aberration in the the union bosses didn't primarily look after maintaining their own power via maintaining a large number of jobs, but rather opted into profit sharing, protecting the current workers at the expense of future power. Usually a union can be depended upon to fight automation, rather than to seek maximization of public good.

Basic Income has lots of things going for it, but it doesn't feel like the exactly right answer. I'm more in favor of a linear income tax (with no writeoffs or exemptions) where the intercept is set to equal what the basic income would otherwise have been. And this tax should include *ALL* sources of income and replace all other taxes.

The problem with basic income style solutions is that it centralizes control which strengthens a central point of failure. It's true the problem already exists (money is only worth something because you need to pay your taxes in money, so everyone needs it...and money is printed by the central government), but I'm not sure strengthening the centralization doesn't make the problem worse.

But what better answers are there? It would be nice to at least notice their existence before we hit the narrow part of the pass.

We could use a little more automation, if you ask

[Dixie_Flatline]

At least, as long as banks keep writing the software they do.

My bank's records of my purchases isn't updating today. This is one of the biggest banks in Canada. Transactions don't update properly over the weekends or holidays. Why? Who knows? Why has bank software EVER cared about weekends? What do business days matter to computers? And yet here we are. There's no monkey to turn the crank on a holiday, so I can't confirm my account activity.

Re:I'm not worried

[Ol Olsoc]

You might hate Ayn Rand but she skewered corporatists as much as she did socialists.

Then why does the present day Republican Party masturbate to her photos as proof of their Randism while simultaneously being about as corporatist as you can get.

Only thing I can come up with is "Strange and mysterious are the ways of Gawd".

Re:Wonder how long

[HiThere]

It's already been happening. You don't notice this as long as the jobs are expanding faster than the automation makes the jobs redundant, but that doesn't continue forever.

The current mode of "replacement" is fancy tools that allow 3 programmers to do the work of 10 or more. (Just imagine that you still had to enter all your data on Hollerith cards.) More advanced languages also assist this. Imagine how many programmers it would take if all the web pages needed to be built in Fortran IV. But to a point decreasing the costs of doing a job results in the increase in the number of jobs. There are, however, limits. The number of programmers seems to me to have started decreasing during the 1970's, but SLOWLY. It picked up again for awhile as personal computers reduced the cost tremendously, but by around 2000 it was again dropping. This is, of course, just based on personal observations. One datta point isn't extremely useful, but it's consistent with the posts on slashdot. Of course the off-shoring of jobs isn't new, but it did increase, and may still be increasing (I'm now retired, so I can no longer observe directly), but the purpose of this was to reduce costs, and if another approach to reducing costs is more effective, it will be adopted instead. And there are signs that the trend is slowing...which implies that some more effective way of reducing expenses is being adopted. I don't think that the current trend is due to actual AI, yet. But it will be.

Re:Um... Duh...

[HiThere]

"There Will Come Soft Rains", at least if you are referring to the Bradbury story, was not about automation. The automation was only the setting. It was about the dangers if over-killing war. IIRC he didn't even bother to specify exactly what the destructive agent was. (I believe I presumed that it was an omni-lethal disease, as I think the animal life survived, but that may just have been the poem rather than direct description.)

If you haven't read the story, do so. I found it quite beautiful, although melancholy.

Re:No more working till last train but with life e

[Ol Olsoc]

At least here in the US, that won't change anything. The unemployed will still happily vote against anything that smacks of "socialism". It's a religion to us here. People here would rather shoot themselves (and their family members) in the head than enroll in social services.

Minor correction. The most "anti-socialist" po folk I know, those who instinctively reach for their rifles when they hear "liberal", are consuming shitloads of social programs, from SS diability to medicaid to WIC to food stamps to free cell phones.

They know they are deserving, and maybe their relatives, but no one else should be getting free shit.

Re:How is this new

[HiThere]

If that's what they were doing, they wouldn't need to rent Watson.

Re:No more working till last train but with life e

[Grishnakh]

I never said all Americans had identical opinions. "Some pro-socialism people" is not enough people to win elections. There's "some" of many different groups of people here: Amish, Windows Phone lovers, etc., but not remotely enough to matter politically.

Re:I'm not worried

[GLMDesigns]

Really? As an Ayn Rand fan I don't find that at all. The Republicans I meet are not fans of hers - either because they're social conservatives (and she's an atheist who skewers religion) or because they're corporatists or for other reasons.

Most are hypocrites - just like liberals who pretend that they think people own their own bodies (abortion) but then are for drug laws, prostitution laws and expand the nanny state so that cops will ticket you for not wearing seat belts or helmets.

Well...

[XSportSeeker]

This really isn't all that much different from any jobs or particular tasks going from human employee hands to computers... data mining and data warehouse aren't new concepts after all.
Specialized software for whicher you give an input or scenario to get processed options also have been around for a while now. The problem for most of those is training...

Re:The problem is?

[unixisc]

The daycare workers can take care of their own kids using the same cycle - we're discussing a post employment world, remember?

Mmmmh

[Anonymous Coward]

But can these robots also drink sake until they fall over and sing badly at the karaoke and pass out on the bullet train like the real deal?

Re:more unions are needed teachers, doctors and nu

[unixisc]

Can unions protect jobs? They haven't been, and nor have they been able to prevent offshoring. The real issue is that if a company is struggling (putting aside the issues of executive pay), there ain't much that the unions can do.

Watson != AI but most jobs don't need intelligence

[bussdriver]

Most jobs require so little intelligence.... in addition, one goal of MBAs is to restructure the labor into tasks that can be externalized or cheaper because of a lower skills requirement. Just as Applied Intelligence is all about defining the tasks so an AI can do them, MBAs do so on a higher level. The two working together shall be able to transform just about every industry....

They haven't even begun to think about AUGMENTED INTELLIGENCE. Perhaps an MBA with AI training will get that going mainstream? Your kid's phone app could leverage their free labor to solve tough abstracted problems which replaces their parents jobs...

Re:I'm not worried

[Ol Olsoc]

Really? As an Ayn Rand fan I don't find that at all. The Republicans I meet are not fans of hers - either because they're social conservatives (and she's an atheist who skewers religion) or because they're corporatists or for other reasons.

Paul Ryan says that Rand inspired his political career. Requires his staff to read "Atlas Shrugged"

Rand PauPaul says he is a big Fan of Rand, and has read all her novels.

Ron Johnson a far right Republican, calls "Atlas Shrugged" his foundational book.

Ronald Reagan was a fan, Clarence Thomas makes his new Law Clerks watch the Fountainhead movie

I saved the best for last: Ted Cruz, the dominionist for crissakes, calls Rand "one of my all time heroes"!

There are more. The problem of course, is that they are an example of 0% enlightened, 100% Self interest. Selfish pricks who would kill you for the gold in your teeth and bill your family for the cremation expenses.

But the power of immutable self centeredness that Rand embodies is so powerful for others who give not a fuck about anyone else but their "equals" that they can simultaneously praise her, and overlook her atheism, support for abortion and women's rights and all the other things that you would think would be more a matter of associationn for liberals.

I can handle People like Gary Johnson - I know where he is coming from. But Rand considered a hero by a party that has little in common with her other than selfishness and "don't tell me what to do!" is beneath contempt. Most are hypocrites - just like liberals who pretend that they think people own their own bodies (abortion) but then are for drug laws, prostitution laws and expand the nanny state so that cops will ticket you for not wearing seat belts or helmets.

Re:I'm not worried

[GLMDesigns]

Well. I like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Justin Amash. So big thumbs up.

I like Clarence Thomas' positions. I didn't know Clarence Thomas was a fan. Yeah!!!

And. I don't think you understand Ayn Rand's philosophy too well. The concept of selfishness is the we, as humans, have a life to live - for ourselves. Not for God. Not for The State. That we are not part of a great collective that can be sloughed off for the benefit of the Mighty Ruler.



Hmmm. That part, the central part, of her philosophy seems to be pretty modern. Her opposition to socialism was that she considered it to be a collectivist death cult. (Witness glorious Venezuela).

And hero of the party? The party of social conservatives? Very few, except for some cerebral types such as Ted Cruz would hold her in any favor. I hope you realize that you pointed out the gadflys of the party who is fighting the establishment tooth an nail. Cruz and Rand Paul and Ron Johnson are not typical Republicans - they are trying to bring intellectual honesty to the Republican Party. Something both parties are lacking.

And I welcome them over Hillary or Bernie or other nanny state plutocrats.

The same fools who say we have a right to our body for abortion but oppose the very same argument when it comes to drugs, prostitution, gambling, tobacco and every other nanny-state idea that crosses their mind.

Failure of context

[aepervius]

The context of job previously being replaced , was new white or blue collar job opening up. That was the previous context. What we see now is a new generation of job replacement, lot of automation not being replaced by new blue collar or new white collar job. IF and only IF there is new job replacement you would have a rational basis. But there is not. That is why the GP is spot on, until such replacement job come in.

Re:The problem is?

[Gr8Apes]

No, I was not talking about homeschooling at all... It said nothing about homeschooling: not all parents would have the skills to do that.

You said parents could spend more time with their children. Having seen homeschooling in action up close, I can make several comments, namely that your statement is correct regarding most current homeschooling parents, they do not have the skills to do so, but that doesn't stop them because there is exactly 0 oversight. The ones that would benefit the most from joining society are the ones that are kept closeted up under the guise of homeschooling.

I'm all for a broad interaction b/w kids, but that's something that can happen at schools, and does not require a kids time w/ his/her parents to be reduced to evenings and weekends.

If you're advocating parents spending time post school, great but that certainly wasn't clear from your initial post. We need to get all kids on at least semi-equal footing. In a post-employment world, there will still be opportunities to do things that will be limited to a few, and qualifying for those positions will be competitive much like today. The motivation to do those things will be driven by the same market forces that drive people to strive for certain goals, like living on a beach or lake or next to a wilderness, as there will be some sort of additional compensation. But, we have to get there first.

You think I was painting utopia? oh, no.

[fyngyrz]

Not one use for humans in your world is there? This robots - are they goung to consume all this awesome stuff they make?

My expectation is, after a lot of pain, we'll move off of the toxic idea that one only deserves to have self-respect if one performs some kind of drudgework, and that one only deserves respect from without if one performs some kind of drudgework, to a mindset where one deserves respect because one is a socially reasonable human being and pursues one's own interests in some healthy fashion (IOW, with some degree of pleasure, while offering no harm to others.)

"Money for stuff" is an adequate model when there is a too-limited amount of stuff and everyone must produce or we all fall down. When there isn't a too-limited amount of stuff, and one does not have to produce to keep society going, it doesn't make very much sense for the majority to have to do drudgework.

There will need to be some measure of consumption, and some way to meter it out. But it won't be based on work. Or so I imagine.

It's the getting from here to there that I'm worried about. Jobs are going to go away fast. And here in the US, where I am, congress moves slowly, sometimes not moving at all, even when it is obvious they need to (for instance, they've been pursuing the complete failure of a drug war for decades now, and they're still too blind, deaf and self-centered to understand it's a pointless exercise from the POV of accomplishing anything worthwhile, while also harming the maximum possible number of people, far, far more than drugs themselves ever posed a threat to.)

Right now... now... there are about 42 million food-insecure people in the US. That's roughly 1/7th of the population. And the financial imbalance is extreme. It's pretty clear that the current model does not serve the country at large very well.

But the people keep electing millionaires to congress. That's right. The average net worth of a congresscritter is over one million dollars. So any change in the right direction will meet some resistance. I leave it to you to imagine how much.

Re:You think I was painting utopia? oh, no.

[drinkypoo]

here in the US, where I am, congress moves slowly, sometimes not moving at all, even when it is obvious they need to (for instance, they've been pursuing the complete failure of a drug war for decades now, and they're still too blind, deaf and self-centered to understand it's a pointless exercise from the POV of accomplishing anything worthwhile, while also harming the maximum possible number of people, far, far more than drugs themselves ever posed a threat to.)

You've got it wrong, my friend. They know. The evidence is overwhelming. They're just evil people with black little hearts. Evil really does exist, and much of it has found a home in Washington.

Re:You think I was painting utopia? oh, no.

[fyngyrz]

i was unclear and over-brief on the matter due to hand-waving on my part. I didn't mean they were blind and deaf to its failure in the sense that they advertise as its intent; I meant they were blind and deaf to the damage it causes, and I meant that in an "intentionally blind and deaf" sense. They actually count on the fact that its a problem that can never be solved, as that puts it into the class of a money-and-vote pump that will never run dry. Because yes, they are evil, disgusting people. You're exactly correct.

Re:I'm not worried

[HornWumpus]

Anger is progress. Keep it up.

Re:No more working till last train but with life e

[colinrichardday]

No, but will each robot count as 3/5 of a person for apportionment purposes, i.e. will 1,000 robots count as 600 people in a congressional district?

OK for Japan. It'll never work here.

[mark_reh]

Insurance companies in the US are in the health care denial business. The purpose of middle managers is to delay and prevent payouts.

Maybe they can retune the AI for that...

Re:How is this new

[HornWumpus]

It's socially, very hard to eliminate a job in Japan. Jobs there are often still for life.

Getting a HAL-9000 is about saving face. If you 'replace someone with a very small shell script', you have to say it took massive group effort, strong AI and a decade of work.

Denial Looms

[JimSadler]

Many people in white collar jobs or professions do not yet realize that automation may actually replace them faster than manual trades are reduced to near zero human employees. Those that are aware generally think this massive displacement is decades away. Meanwhile real solutions are not put into conversation as politicians dare not admit the massive changes that must take place and therefore we are not preparing and the suffering will be amplified.

Re:No more working till last train but with life e

[JoeMerchant]

I see plenty of work in reducing student-teacher ratios in education, increasing maintenance and inspection intervals, transparency reporting on public officials, etc.

All of those can be automated and/or handed off to AI.

Sure, but not for 50 to 100 years. And, things like educating our children and making judgement calls on elected officials probably never should be reduced to algorithms. Maybe for the elected officials if the algorithm is completely transparent, but if you trust SkyNet to educate all the children... that could go very very wrong.

Re:I'm not worried

[currently_awake]

For the same reason the party of the Christian Right never bothers to push a Christian agenda, even when they control all three houses of the American government.

Helluva pest problem you've got here, raymorris.

[mmell]

Weak.

The least you could do is threaten to sue him for libel. What happened Al, run out of small children to abuse?

APK's meds have worn off . . .

[mmell]

BTW, I'm still waiting for you here. Still waiting for that libel suit you keep promising to bring.

Of course (based on your comments) I'm beginning to suspect you're just a piece of LISA code gone horribly wrong. You don't seem to be able to pass the Turing test.

Projecting: APK's specialty.

[mmell]

You still haven't sought out psychiatric help, have you? Really, there are medications that can help you. Just sayin'.

Re:more unions are needed teachers, doctors and nu

[3247]

Basic Income has lots of things going for it, but it doesn't feel like the exactly right answer. I'm more in favor of a linear income tax (with no writeoffs or exemptions) where the intercept is set to equal what the basic income would otherwise have been. And this tax should include *ALL* sources of income and replace all other taxes.

Think, don't just "feel". For your information, write-offs exist because investments actually do reduce your income. If you don't allow them, someone who spends $100 to gain $1100 (net income: $1000) might be taxed $440, and someone who spends $2000 to gain $2500 (net income: $500) would be taxed $1000. Does. Not. Make. Sense.

Re:Expert Systems

[Chatterton]

Expert systems work very well for well defined problems where experts can analyze their own reasoning without resorting to gut feeling.

In Go playing there was some tentative to create expert systems to reduce the size of the tree but it failed because all of the best Go players were unable to explain why they played this move more than any other move without saying that they feel it was the best move to do excepted for 'technical' move where the complete sequence could be calculated and every variation eliminated like for Tesuji and Yose. The best Go (AlphaGo) program doesn't use expert system but neural networks.

Re:No more working till last train but with life e

[Gr8Apes]

All of those can be automated and/or handed off to AI.

Sure, but not for 50 to 100 years. And, things like educating our children and making judgement calls on elected officials probably never should be reduced to algorithms. Maybe for the elected officials if the algorithm is completely transparent, but if you trust SkyNet to educate all the children... that could go very very wrong.

That's within 1-2 generations, and quite possibly within our lifetime. Educating children can definitely be improved by algorithms over some teachers, anyways. I've had the displeasure of dealing with several absolutely unsuited persons in the teaching profession. Unsuited primarily because they lacked the ability to adapt their teaching to anything but their perceived view of a student (sounds a lot like an inflexible algorithm, and one that actively repels change) But, this doesn't mean we don't need teachers, since students need to learn to deal with other humans.

Re:I'm not worried

[Ol Olsoc]

For the same reason the party of the Christian Right never bothers to push a Christian agenda, even when they control all three houses of the American government.

The biggest reason for not outlawing abortion is that if you did, the social conservatives would lose their biggest outrage point, and would have to fall back on the Starbucks coffee cups to get the base spun up.

A thought experiment

[CrankyOldEngineer]

If your job became obsolete and the govt paid you somewhat less to do nothing, would you do nothing? Or would you look for another way to contribute to society? As I have pointed out in other threads, there are millions of jobs that need to be done, but we've created perverse incentives for people to do less productive things instead. Things that humans can do that machines can't: Find a cure for diabetes, design a low-cost solar panel, plant a tree, teach someone how to do home repairs, write a poem... Many, but not all of these things require an advanced education. I refuse to believe that the future human race will consist mostly of couch potatoes like H.G. Wells' Eloi.

Re:I'm not worried

[HornWumpus]

They do if your trading partners have been doing the same for decades...like China. When only one side is a 'free market' * it doesn't work.

* defined as 'free enough markets' Mr. red absolutes poster.

Re:No more working till last train but with life e

[david_thornley]

Yup. A relative of mine has an autistic child, and it took a long time to point out to her that her family was using a lot of government services because of that. Being a liberal, I thought helping said child become productive was an excellent use of my tax money, which is possibly why I was more realistic than my relative was.

Re:Um... Duh...

[wyHunter]

It was presumed to be nuclear, because there were shadows of the children playing ball on the charred side wall of the house.

Re:more unions are needed teachers, doctors and nu

[HiThere]

If you are gambling on long term success, that's fair, but you should take the risk, not export it to someone else. Writeoffs exist because they benefit powerful people. But if you want to encourage some activity, it should be a separate piece of legislation, not a part of the tax code. I don't automatically oppose all things that writeoffs are supposed to accomplish, but I do oppose them being a part of the tax code.

AI is not magic pixie dust

[sjbe]

Then why don't you give at least one specific example.

I gave several. Read them. Furthermore if you cannot figure out what a human can do that Watson cannot on your own then I'm not sure what I can do to help you.

And this is where a system like Watson shines. While you may be able to fall back on personal experience to make these judgement calls, Watson can easily run thousands of simulations on each set of numbers, based on real world possibilities. You will always be making a guess based on what might happen, but Watson will come close to knowing what will happen.

Put succinctly you are saying that Watson can (almost) predict the future. Really? I want whatever you are smoking because it's obviously good stuff. Sorry but there is no AI in existence that is even close to as capable as you are implying and certainly none flexible enough to actually manage a real world business. First off, Watson IS NOT an AI capable of making reliable judgements and you would be a weapon's grade idiot to trust it to run your company without a human looking over it's shoulder even if it could - which it cannot. Tools like Watson are useful for decision support and routine transactions. Those are useful things but only a subset of what accountants do. They advise people by gathering and presenting pertenent data and handle mundane well defined tasks. If you actually tried to replace human judgement with AI given the state of the art you would be out of business faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit" or "IRS audit". Second, a system like Watson would be absolutely terrible at dealing with the ever shifting work flows and problems that arise in a real company. Riddle me this. How is Watson going to deal with a customer calling on the telephone to complain because they were shorted on a shipment because some idiot in shipping put the a different customers parts in their shipment? Even if Watson could handle that problem (which it cannot) you still would need people to sort it out. Why? Because only an idiot would ask a customer to talk to a computer to solve such a problem.

This all said, I am far from an AI believer.

No you are an AI worshiper. You think AI is some magical fairy dust you can sprinkle on a profession and make all the people somehow redundant. Problem is that you don't understand the technology at all. You don't know what it is, what it does, or how it would impact the real world. Worse you understand even less about the field of accounting and how it works. You think it's some sort of rigidly deterministic job where there is an easy answer to every question. You seriously have no idea what you are talking about.

You can't get the data

[sjbe]

Given sufficient data from 1000 companies, et cetera.

That is the key word. Sufficient. You will NEVER get sufficient data from even one company much less thousands. You would have to somehow pull every bit of institutional knowledge out of the heads of the people working there because I assure you that plenty of important stuff isn't written down anywhere. You could train an AI to do many useful things but the notion that you are going to replace the profession of accounting with AI within the lifetime of anyone reading this is approximately as absurd as thinking we are going to colonize Pluto in the same time period.

Snark doesn't solve real problems

[sjbe]

We just call it 'fraud' and 'tax evasion'.

Only because you are going for snark rather than comprehension. I'll give you an example. Solve this problem in a generalized proof and there is a Nobel prize in economics waiting for you.

My company makes wire harnesses. How much does it cost to make a wire harness? Sounds easy enough right? Cost of material, cost of labor to build it, plus time spent engineering and selling it, etc. Problem is that there are a lot of costs you cannot easily assign. We make hundreds of wire harnesses. How much of the electric bill do we assign to the cost of each one? How much administrative time was spent on it? How much of the CEO's salary to you allocate to each product and what metric are you going to use to divide up the cost? These are called indirect costs and rationally allocating these costs accurately to each product is a profession unto itself. Coming up with an answer that is better than an educated guess is nearly impossible for all but the most trivial cases. People have tried with things like Activity Based Costing and other methods but there is no method available that doesn't eventually involved significant guesswork and lots of assumptions that may or may not hold water.

And the subjects shall sing...

[TexNex]

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto!