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VC Founder Predicts AI Will Take 50% Of All Human Jobs Within 10 Years (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes CNBC:
Robots are likely to replace 50 percent of all jobs in the next decade, according to Kai-Fu Lee, founder of venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures and a top voice on tech in China. Artificial intelligence is the wave of the future, the influential technologist told CNBC, calling it the "singular thing that will be larger than all of human tech revolutions added together, including electricity, [the] industrial revolution, internet, mobile internet -- because AI is pervasive"...
For example, he said, companies in which his firm has invested can accomplish feats such as recognizing 3 million faces at the same time, or dispersing loans in eight seconds. "These are things that are superhuman, and we think this will be in every industry, will probably replace 50% of human jobs, create a huge amount of wealth for mankind and wipe out poverty," Lee said, later adding that he expected that displacement to occur in the next 10 years.
For example, he said, companies in which his firm has invested can accomplish feats such as recognizing 3 million faces at the same time, or dispersing loans in eight seconds. "These are things that are superhuman, and we think this will be in every industry, will probably replace 50% of human jobs, create a huge amount of wealth for mankind and wipe out poverty," Lee said, later adding that he expected that displacement to occur in the next 10 years.
If the jobs are gone, how are the people going to live? Significantly disgruntled people, armed and/or in larger groups, are really going to increase the maintenance costs of AI...
In horrific poverty lacking food security.
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"Creat[ing] a huge amount of wealth" won't "wipe out poverty" unless we find a new method for distributing that wealth.
FIFY
COE
Building and maintaining robots are two tasks that are good candidates for automation.
lol at "recognizing faces" means replacing jobs.
Indeed. Human level face recognition software already exists and it has replaced approximately zero jobs. If you look at productivity growth, it is clear that the pace of humans being replaced by machines is actually slowing down, as service jobs are proving much harder to automate than the manufacturing jobs that disappeared a few decades ago.
This VC's Chicken Little prognosticating is not based on evidence.
The people who understand least about how AI technology works are heralding its imminent takeover of our society.
"These are things that are superhuman, and we think this will be in every industry, will probably replace 50% of human jobs, create a huge amount of wealth for mankind and wipe out poverty," Lee said.
Theoretically, this could indeed wipe out poverty, if, say, all of those replaced humans are automatically given the profit generated by their AI replacement (leaving them free to pursue separate businesses, leisure activities, etc.). If, however, the corporation that owns the AIs decided to keep the profits, poverty would be drastically increased.
Which do you think is more likely? Distribution of profits to unemployed people, or distribution of profits to wealthy C-level executives and investors?
as service jobs are proving much harder to automate than the manufacturing jobs that disappeared a few decades ago
But just like pirating music is much easier than creating counterfeit CDs, the automation of services jobs will be nearly effortless compared to what it took to automate manufacturing jobs. No need to buy millions of dollars of robotics equipment, just add the service-bot module to your Salesforce subscription and 90% of your service team can be let go. It is obviously more difficult to create this level of AI than it was to create manufacturing robots, or else we would have had them a few decades ago as well. But once we do have them the disruption will be an order of magnitude faster.
The way things are going now with speech and visual pattern recognition, there are numerous industries which could see this level of disruption in a decade or two.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
It is unsurprising that there is resistance to this idea.The implications (more on that below) are horrific.The fact, though, is that robots and AIs are becoming rapidly more capable, and denial is not going to prevent organizations from selecting the most cost effective way to get jobs done. Even if the robot/AI solution has some limitations, the profit motive will win out (as anyone who has used call centers staffed by people who cannot communicate effectively in your language should recognize).
What are the implications? The most obvious is mass unemployment/under employment. This is going to create a huge disadvantaged class in rich countries. Proposals for a national basic income are well meaning, but unrealistic. It might happen in a very limited number of smaller countries, like Finland, but the elites in most countries who decide such matters will never willingly allow some of their wealth to be given to "non productive" members of society.
The BBC ran an interesting opinion piece recently (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170418-how-western-civilisation-could-collapse) that predicted a breakdown of Western civilization if gross and increasing levels of inequality continue to occur. I think those predictions ring true. Further, the piece does not even consider the problems introduced by huge segments of the population becoming completely surplus to the elite's needs.
There will be valuable jobs those displaced by robots and AIs could do, but they will be of no economic benefit to the elites to would have to put up the money to finance them.
Ever since I was a child, I have been reading about how automation would create more leisure time, and the challenge being how that leisure time will be used. The reality of the last 40 years is that those with jobs work harder than ever for the same or less money in real terms. Total wealth has increased, but (the predictions of trickle down economics notwithstanding) virtually all the increase has gone to the already wealthy.
50% in 10 years seems awfully optimistic. But suppose it's 50% in 20 years. It really does not matter, but this does:
What are all these soon to be unemployed people supposed to DO, exactly?
The people aren't going to vanish the moment they are made redundant. They'll still be here, needing to pay the same bills and eat and so on. And the birthrate isn't slowing down. We are making more and more people every day and they'll all need jobs too.
History has repeatedly shown that high unemployment with no hope of finding work leads to massive crime as people have nothing else to do and no options. It can be argued society does not owe anyone a job or welfare payments just for existing. Fine. But society won't like or want what happens when AI takes away so many jobs. The civil unrest WILL be society's problem to solve.
I don't see a way out unless we have massive population curbs, which simply will not happen. It will probably get much worse as people with nothing else to do will spend a lot of time making babies. I am just glad I have no kids who will have to live in the world that should be going to hell in a hurry around the time I die.
Sig for hire.
All jobs don't have to go away for it to become a problem...
Simply removing paid drivers may well be enough to push us over the edge, but we shall see...
The numbers are not on your side, sadly...
You're assuming there will be human customers. There won't be.
0x or or snor perron?!
India and China were prosperous and thriving nations accounting for 25% of the world GDP. Industrial revolution in Europe just destroyed their way of life and were left begging.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Current AI isn't even able to compete against a single ant in its decision making capability. And unlike a 2 decades ago, the bottleneck isn't hardware or capacity related. We just can't seem to make the algorithm "smart" enough.
When ppl talk about AI, they normally mean automation of procedures and processes. It has lost almost all of its meaning today. If you were to look at many large corporations today, especially in the retail and manufacturing sectors, you will see that at least 50% of the processes could be automated 10 YEARS AGO.
For one reason or another, most of that automation just simply does not have the ROI. 50% of the jobs TODAY will be automated in 25 years... sure. But by then we would have totally replaced them with others. I don't think there has been anything close to the job disruption as the industrial automation, and rail.... and we got through them.
Also India, US, and Hong Kong benefitted immensely from the U.K.s industrial revolution. They were the raw materials providers. It wasn't until the latter years when U.K. severely started to dump its debt onto the colonies via absurd taxes (cotton, tea, tobacco, salt, etc) that each reached a reflection point in their economics and sought independence. While the US reached it first, kept an open market, and took up the industrialization; India took a long time (~1950), had a civil war, became communist, and closed off its markets... It was that "protected and planned" market that collapsed India after Russia couldn't subsidize them anymore.
Yes, if half of people lose their jobs and the idiots at the top don't figure out a new way to spread the money around then there will be a bloody revolution.
When have those idiots ever figured that out? Any business wants to pay people as little as possible while retaining as much as possible for said idiots. That won't change until they realize the benefits of broad-based prosperity. But that reduces their level of power and control. AI doesn't change that equation. If anything, businesses will like it precisely because it reduces their labor costs.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Most humans, especially Americans, already hate automated service of any kind. Being served by an actual human is a luxury that signifies status whereas being transferred to the automated voice answering system, no matter how sophisticated, only serves to reinforce the relative insignificance of the person receiving the "service".
Call me a counter-example, but I generally order take-out once a week through a website rather than calling in the order. When I go see a movie, it is preferable to order the ticket online or use the automated kiosk than waiting in line. I would say a good portion of my shopping is done online as well.