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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.
A vulture capitalist. Good luck.
While this schedule seems a little too aggressive, such a thing will happen eventually. Others put it at 25-30 years out. We need to modify our economic systems, now, to prevent future chaos (and, perhaps, revolution).
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...
before I heartily endorse this, and all other, predictions about $TECHNOLOGY in the future.
Whole new homes in some Chinese subdivisions being built by robots!
The other day, from a distance, I saw a whole section of a shipping yard in Rotterdam entirely being managed by robots. I saw exactly 3 human beings driving around. This is in an area the size of 8 football fields and tens of thousands of shipping containers.
In horrific poverty lacking food security.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"Creat[ing] a huge amount of wealth" won't "wipe out poverty" unless we find a new method for distributing that wealth.
They took our jobs!!!
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FIFY
COE
will be squandered on meaningsless start-ups that burn harder through that cash than a SpaceX can light up at a launch platform.
welcome to the welfare state.
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.
Im really not sure how good AI will be at replacing peasant farmers.
The people who understand least about how AI technology works are heralding its imminent takeover of our society.
The poor will starve pretty fast, so the claim this will wipe out poverty checks out.
Facial recognition probably creates jobs since you have to hire people to handle the information it outputs. Plus, tech makes more things possible so most projects I've worked with have actually created more jobs than they replaced.
I worked at Wells Fargo in the late 1970s, and I remember people were scared that they would lose their jobs because we were automating so many things. Wells Fargo still has well over a quarter of a million employees.
Reading this, I think I begin to understand how startups are able to convinced fools....erh, eh hem..."venture capitalists" to part with those millions.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
To "disperse" a loan means to scatter it about.
To "disburse" a loan means to get money from the bank.
"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?
"replace 50% of human jobs, create a huge amount of wealth for mankind and wipe out poverty"
I agree with you, only two of these things are achievable. You can either eliminate 50% of jobs, or wipe out poverty. You can't do both.
A huge amount of wealth will be created either way.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
But within 20 years? Yeah, could happen.
Just as the computer industry has been horrible for employment - all those computing jobs stolen by machines. Work expands to new fields once old ones are satisfied.
I have no doubt that 50% of all current jobs will at least be threatened within 10 years. And I have no doubt that the number of people employed will INCREASE.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
...and in the 50's nuclear power was going to provide so much energy that it would be "too cheap to meter"... Two things man does exceptionally well.. over estimate himself and under estimate nature.
Nobody can predict the future, especially for technologies not invented yet.. What was Kai-Fu Lee doing in 2007 (ten years ago)? He was working for Google China. We all know how that went.
-Matt
Even if the technology were ready right now at this moment, adapting it to replace half of all jobs would still take more than ten years. There are plenty of things that can easily be done by computer, that are not, because it takes time and money to get them ready to use.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yes AI can rapidly replace human employment but only if society adapts so that massive rebellion and economic collapse do not occur. Those that do not work must be supplied by a real income and not a bare bones income. If they have no income they can not purchase and the potential market ceases to exist thus defeating automation and A I completely. So we will have to find a way to pay people not to work that the public can accept as a requirement of a great new system. Imagine how you would feel if your neighbor had no reason to want to work while your job was not yet replaced and you had to work seven years longer than your neighbor. You can imagine the conflicts in shifting to a new system as well as a new economic and even a new moral system.
Mechanized farming reduced the number of on-the-farm jobs per acre.
The industrial revolution and subsequent improvements have reduced the number of worker-hours needed to make X number of widgets.
Automated telephone dialing greatly reduced the number of telephone operators per 10,000 telephone lines.
Automated telegraph repeaters greatly reduced the number of telegraph operators needed.
Voicemail reduced the number of corporate call-takers needed for a given number of incoming calls.
And so on.
But in the meantime, new kinds of work were created, and overall un- and under-employment in the USA at least has been at managable non-crisis levels for decades.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
How is AI simultaneously wipe out poverty and put 50% out of jobs? How does that work? AI will make the rich richer, and eventually, the poor, poorer. Besides, the whole thing is absurdly optimistic. I don't think AI will have that effect for several decades, and it's not going to wipe out poverty. We could do that now if we as a planet wanted to, but we're not. AI won't change that, that's human nature.
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
Supply and demand wasn't a problem when slavery was legal. Humans own the AI.
The super intelligent AI will eventually get tired of us slackers and rebel. And I suspect in 20 years we will have all our jobs back :)
[($)]
If you replace the world with western world it might be plausible. and replace will with can. I don't think the world can produce enough robots in ten years and get them where they need to be for this to happen.
"Robots are likely to replace 50 percent of all jobs in the next decade, according to Kai-Fu Lee"
Bullshit. It's unlikely in the extreme that half of all jobs will be taken by robots in 10 years. It'll take at least 12 or 15years before that happens.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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.
"create a huge amount of wealth for the 1% and increase poverty overall"
There is no way robots could make the items in a McDonald's menu.
Hot food vending machines[*] are already a normal thing in Japan, and both China and San Fransisco have robot operated restaurants.
[*] And used to be a thing in the Western world too. Anyone else remember inserting a coin to watch a machine squeeze out a ring of dough which went into boiling oil, then onto a conveyor belt, and deposited in a tray in front of you? Or coin operated coffee machines?
Both are hard to find now, but that's not because they didn't work, but because people are idiots, will burn themselves, and sue the maker for not making them idiot proof.
Follow the proposed thought.... "1/2 of all jobs gone".. that means 1/2 the people on the planet have ZERO income or are dependent on government handouts for survival. So, who, exactly, is spending the money on the goods and services so the remaining working 1/2 can be "wealthy"? And will those working permit taxes high enough to support those without jobs? hardly. Remember that the great depression in the US crashed experienced a 25% unemployment rate.
Sorry, in a capitalist society, put enough people out of work and the system collapses. Period. Just look at Detroit or any major steel based City on the East coast.
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.
If you replace all the horse drawn carriages with automobiles, what will all the stable hands, whip makers, and wagon makers do! The sky is falling! Let's turn communist while we still can, lest everybody starve!
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". The fact that the automated answering system generally sucks donkey balls only adds to the indignity of the experience. Humans are biased, prejudiced, judgemental and demanding. This makes them very difficult to satisfy, especially with a machine that attempts to substitute for a human interaction. Manufacturing was different because there was little or no human interaction there, what mattered was the finished good received. Service jobs are an entirely different animal and I don't see AI replacing humans there anytime soon, at least at businesses which care about their customers and prefer not to give them the middle finger by transferring them to automated phone tree hell.
likely to replace 50% of all *existing* human jobs
That is a true statement, but I don't see AI advances generating more than 2%-5% of new jobs.
Unless you care to tell me where 50% of new replacement jobs will come from? AI trainers?
Most humans, especially Americans, already hate automated service of any kind.
Indeed, this is why a fancy sit-down restaurant can charge a lot more than a cafeteria. People pay for human provided massages, facials, hair treatments, etc. even though there are machines that can do those things far cheaper. There are plenty of jobs that aren't going away.
AI predictions should all be taken with a grain of salt.
However, my wife recently told me about a consumer product CAD software demo she saw at a trade show that would more or less eliminate her job, or at least greatly reduce the people employed in her specialty.
Using large databases of existing drawings of particular product types, along with AI, it would guess most of the design specifics based off rough sketches and operator selections of similar designs from the database, Google-image-search-like. It also automatically generates different sizes, such as shoe sizes. Humans then tune the result.
Her job is a well-paying position right now if you are good. Such software would still require design inspectors and tuners, but that's less labor intensive than direct from-scratch CAD. If half your profession's labor is made obsolete, your wages and career options will likely drop.
She gives her profession about 5 more viable years.
Table-ized A.I.
It's likely society will adapt and new kinds of jobs will be created eventually (good news)
But it will take at least a generation and perhaps two generations. yes, many luddites really did die homeless and from starvation and exposure*. (much worse news).
And we have other problems on the way (i.e. "limits to growth").
* For bonus points-- during the great depression, cops would beat you and tell you to move on down the road. They would not arrest you. Then they had to feed and house you. And even cheap prison slave labor wasn't worth keeping during the deppression.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
First, "robots" are not "AI". Robots are generally driven by low-level automation that does not even qualify as weak AI (i.e. the "AI" with no actual intelligence). Second, 50% of all jobs in 10 years? No way. Even the administrative processes for that would take longer if the technology was available, ready, reliable and well understood.
Basically all this shows is how clueless VCs are.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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?!
Venture Capitalists make money on less then one out of ever twenty investments they make. So obviously they're not that good at predicting outcomes. They don't have any special insight into technology or science. They aren't smarter than everyone else. So feel free to ignore everything this person says. They are no more likely to be right than anyone else.
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
Over the next decade, more than 50% of the wealth of the venture capitalists will be eaten by people peddling AI technologies.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I predict that the future will be populated by people who fail to accurately predict the future.
Requiem for the American Dream
Agreed. No matter how well an AI emulates a human it will never be a human.
On the plus side, replacing a human customer 'service' droid who exhibits robotic dogmatism with a machine which exhibits humanity might be a win =)
Requiem for the American Dream
Maybe robot customers will prefer being serviced by hu-mans* ?
(*) Ferengi accent
Requiem for the American Dream
He is quoted as saying "... create a huge amount of wealth for mankind and wipe out poverty". Are we sure he didn't mean "... create a huge amount of poverty and wipe out mankind" ??
I hope babbling venture capitalists are the first ones that get replaced.
Taken at face value, 500 million Chinese unemployed, 200 million Russians unemployed, 200 million Europeans unemployed, 150 million Americans unemployed, at least two billion people in the rest of the world unemployed. That means a lot of hungry, restless people struggling to survive. This presents a nightmare for conservative libertarian Republicans and their counterpart politicians around the world. Guaranteed annual incomes for starving billions, while robot servants serve up their meals, build their houses, tailor their clothes, build and maintain their infrastructures? Conservative anathema.
All living creatures tend to multiply during easy times. The worst scenario that could happen is that we fill up our planet with people and deplete our essential resources. The second worst outcome (for most) is that authoritarian governments would impose a one child per family policy world wide and enforce it. The third worst outcome is that robot soldiers would battle for power in an armageddon for resources leaving the world in smoldering ashes.
The best possible scenario is that we would swing in our hammocks, sipping mai-tais, cheering our NFL robot teams clashing on the gridiron twelve months of the year. Pick your sport, same outcome.
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.
1: Universal Basic Income.
This one works just the same way as existing capitalism, except it's maybe a little more honest is all. The income cap for unemployed makes it tough to reasonably start a family.
2: Direct Birth Control.
China has already demonstrated this as a very successful solution all round.
Indeed. Human level face recognition software already exists and it has replaced approximately zero jobs.
I guess you've never used an airport's automated check-in service.
"..."will probably replace 50% of human jobs, create a huge amount of wealth for mankind and wipe out poverty,"
How is this supposed to happen as opposed to "Create a huge amount of wealth for a tiny minority and increase poverty."?
Serious question.
lol at "recognizing faces" means replacing jobs.
Indeed. Human level face recognition software already exists and it has replaced approximately zero jobs...
Do not look at only one side of the coin when it comes to automation. If the demand to recognize faces has increased (which it likely has, given overall surveillance increase), and we've hired approximately zero additional humans to do that job, then face recognition software has in fact replaced human jobs.
MS Excel dramatically decreased the amount of humans needed in any given accounting department decades ago. Automation is not new. Neither is eradicating human employment. This particular flavor of automation is teeing up to be the last wave necessary. That is the difference.
Why? There will be more wealth. Employment is just a mechanism for distributing it. 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. As there should be.
"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."
Then they'll die. Hoarding wealth in a golden age of plenty is a good way to get yourself guillotined. I hope that the leaders in every country are smart enough to realize that, but probably some are not.
Even if the technology were ready right now at this moment, adapting it to replace half of all jobs would still take more than ten years. There are plenty of things that can easily be done by computer, that are not, because it takes time and money to get them ready to use.
I would say a combination of robotics, computers, automation, and a very rudimentary pseudo-AI has already taken well over 50% of jobs. The thing is, new jobs have been created.
If you go back to the 80's and earlier, manufacturing was a huge portion of the job market. Relatively, few people work "in the factory" now. Even office jobs became more efficient with computers.
We don't have 50% unemployment because the market adapted, we switched to a post-industrial, service oriented economy. That can't last forever though. Not if machines can start taking over service jobs too. The economy may adapt again, and people find jobs in other sectors, or we may start seeing high levels of unemployment. I'm not Nostradamus so I can't tell you.
Frequently when jobs are lost, others are created;.it's just, not at the same rate.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Not long ago, the demand for a $15 minimum hourly wage was brought up. The greedy corporate answer? Install automation instead. Because it's cheaper.
Back when going to college didn't mean taking out a mortgage-level loan, think about what you did to pay for it. Perhaps you worked a cash register, at a grocery store or a fast food restaurant. Or perhaps you worked as a waiter or waitress. These are exactly the kinds of lower level jobs that are being targeted for eradication by automation.
We tell all young people in order to succeed one must climb the proverbial ladder of success. However, when Greed chooses to remove the last four or five rungs from that ladder, it tends to make it rather impossible for anyone to climb.
You really only have to destroy 10 - 20% to create chaos. By the time we reach 50%, the global Welfare state will be established.
Oh, and once you remove the point of human employment, you also tend to remove the point of educating a human, so higher education will become an extinct concept as well.
It's weird how people get stuck on jobs.
You would only replace a human worker with a robot if the robot were more efficient. That lowers the price of whatever you're doing, which means replacing that human worker created *more* wealth, not less.
Now, you are left with the problem of how you make sure that wealth is shared reasonably. You said the company would have to be forced to lower their prices. That's true. Other companies making the same product are supposed to lower their prices, forcing the first company to do likewise, until market equilibrium is reached. That's capitalism. If that doesn't happen for some reason, the people, acting through their representative government, can step in. That's socialism.
So, he thinks we will replace 50% of human jobs and that will somehow wipe out poverty? It seems he hasn't noticed that when a huge amount of wealth is created, it often doesn't result in reducing poverty. Will AI be replacing Capitalism too?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
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)
It's a hell of a lot cheaper to run a cafeteria. Have you never cooked for a party? Did you cook individual meals for people, or giant rectangular trays of casseroles and such? Now imagine if you got paid a wage and need 6 people handling the cooking and serving for 6 hours, instead of 1 guy and a double-oven prepping and cooking for 2 hours.
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Also, you're talking about "automatic answering systems". I haven't encountered these for ages; in my experience they have all been replaced with online self-service, which I prefer vastly over humans on a phone line. In the future I'm talking about, I expect these kinds of interactions to be fully automated in B2B environments.
Nevertheless, when looking at employment opportunities (in my country - .nl), they do actually show a clear trend that in part confirms your story. Employment opportunities in all sectors have been falling for ages (my spreadsheet goes back 35 years), with the notable exception of jobs related to care, hospitality and entertainment (and recycling and ICT). In fact I believe an entire separate economy is appearing, one that's about humans, craftmanship and art. About hand-made furniture, biological small farming, concerts, craft beer, small authentic restaurants and all kinds of (other) art. But also about kickstarter.com and small scale manufacturing capabilities. I believe (and hope) this will be our future; we will work on human things, keeping each other busy, while the machines take care of the rest. The only thing we still need to fix is who owns the production capacity. If we don't fix that, we will end up in some horrible kinds of aristocracy, if we're not there already...
0x or or snor perron?!
A venture capitalist is trying to sell you something....
I was a network manager for a community bank years ago - we had software that could evaluate consumer and business loan applications and decide whether or not the applicant was a high or low risk candidate.
We didn't lay off any loan officers - the software made the humans more accurate and productive - but did not replace the humans.
We also had machines to take deposits and give out cash - yet our branches were still staffed by tellers and branch managers.
The pharmaceutical industry has robotic dispensers that outperform human pharmacists in speed and accuracy - yet we still have humans dispensing prescription drugs.
After 9-11 commercial aircraft manufacturers and the government became very interested in autonomous and remote control aircraft. I'm sure pilotless aircraft could be here today - if we wanted it.
The issue is not AI - but the public acceptance of AI. AI will move faster than the public will accept it.
AI will not disrupt the world quickly simply because humans will take a long time to trust AI for business critical or safety related tasks.
Finally, for AI to succeed the "EULA" as we now know it will need to die. No one is going to put AI in a critical role unless there is some human willing to take responsibility for adverse consequences that may occur.
AI has a long road to climb - don't believe the AI salesmen when they say they will run the world in 10 years - humans move way too slowly for that to be the case.
It is unsurprising that there is resistance to this idea.The implications (more on that below) are horrific.
What are the implications? The most obvious is mass unemployment/under employment. This is going to create a huge disadvantaged class in rich countries.
Technical progress displaced guildsmen like gunsmiths, seamstresses, blacksmiths, and the like ages ago. Farmers are less than 2% of the labor force in the United States and other developed countries, down from 90% in the 1790s; the U.S. farm population peaked at 29,400,000 (43% of the labor force) in 1850 on 621M acres of land, and was 2,988,000 (2.6% of labor force) in 1990 on 988M acres of land.
The result? Averaging 5% unemployment, food has fallen from 40% of the median household expense (1900, farmers 38% of labor force) to 33% of the expense (1950, farmers 12%) to around 12% of the median household spending. The poorest American households spend 16% of their income on food; middle-class households eat out of home a lot and pay servants at McDonalds and Wendy's to cook and serve their food for them.
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.
Across my life from the mid-1980s to 2017, I've gone from $50 NES games to $60 XBox games and $20 Steam games. Inflation didn't keep up.
My $30/month land-line service from the 90s is now a $17/month mobile service with 2G/month 4G LTE and unlimited voice and SMS. The 90s era $10/month dial-up Internet could have been supplanted by $35/month ISDN on a $250 modem; instead, we got $40/month 1.2Mbit/s Comcast cable Internet on an $80 modem, and today I pay $87/month for 200Mbit/s.
Cell phones became available in 1983 for $4,000. I had a $200 rectangular brick for a cell phone in the late 90s. This became $300 flip phones; the Motorola V3 Razr eventually became a $50 phone, and I have a $350 OnePlus One now. The OnePlus One has far-superior capabilities to the $600 Compaq iPaq I had in 1996--which had a 400MHz MIPS CPU and 32MB of RAM, and stored its files in RAM across reboots (no NAND).
Food has gotten cheaper--marginally, about 15% of the median household's spending in 1990, about 12% now. That's total food, meaning it includes the (increasing proportion of) food bought out of home. If we look at just food in home, it's fallen to about 9%; and most people respond by simply cooking fewer home-cooked meals and using the money to buy more fast food or carry-out.
Incomes have increased faster than prices, dude. People keep repeating that the middle-class has seen no growth in wealth, and then started claiming they've seen a decrease in wealth, while the middle- and lower-classes have enjoyed more luxuries, higher-end technology (e.g. traction control and fancy radios added to cars; cell phones, smart phones, and Internet), and food, clothing, and utility costs representing a shrinking fraction of their incomes.
What the hell do you call it when the lower and middle incomes can buy more shit?
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Those are subjective measures. The objective measure of wealth is how much stuff you can obtain for the same amount of labor. If you work 40 hours and get 3 hens and the next guy works 40 hours and gets 4 hens, the next guy is richer.
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It looks like the Butlerian Jihad will begin much earlier than predicted!
During the French revolution, peasants were still needed to grow food and guns required reloading after a single shot.
Properly supplied with ammo and food, a single battalion of any modern force with air support. could exterminate ninety percent of the population of a 1750s era Europe, Asia of Africa within a year.
Which is why we want the poor to fight based on race and religion, not wealth. So they thin themselves out, along with the pesky middle class as collateral damage. Meatbots will police the poor who will grow food until the robots can grow the food. Then the poor and the meatbot thugs can be exterminated.
I don't expect to be one of the new dukes or kings. No one posting on Slashdot should.
Most humans, especially Americans, already hate automated service of any kind. Being served by an actual human is a luxury that American consumers are not willing to pay for.
FTFY
Given time I'm sure you could find thousands of examples of automated and mass production products and services which are not as good as labor intensive alternatives. From furniture to food to customer services. In each case customers certainly prefer the human touch, but in nearly every case they are unwilling to pay for it. They may say they are willing to pay more on customer surveys, but that rarely materializes into actual sales.
Also in this case, automated voice answering systems are just one small part of the upcoming AI overhaul. Online self service is a far more likely channel for these changes. There can certainly still be some human operators for difficult to solve cases, but even a replacement of just half of a service department's staff is a significant job loss.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
"200 million Russians unemployed"
I think you better check your math. It appears there is only 144m people in Russia. I'm curious how their unemployment is higher than the population?
http://www.worldometers.info/w...
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.
Even if the technology were ready right now at this moment, adapting it to replace half of all jobs would still take more than ten years.
While I agree with his general message about AI disruption, you are absolutely correct that his ten year prediction is ridiculous. A loss of perhaps 10% of jobs within 10 years may be more realistic, but it is quite obvious this VC's statements are just intending to grab headlines.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
This.
The coming development of horseless carriages will destroy the economy! Think of the stable boys, the feed mills, the blacksmiths, the buggy whip makers! Oh, the masses of people that will be on the streets in poverty!
And THIS time it's different, unlike every other technology innovation. Really- this time the sky IS falling!
After 19 vodkas (i.e. mid-morning) It looks like there's 388m.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
In Putin's Russia there are so many jobs everyone has two - and will soon be out of both of them!
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Its just the in buzzword to yap about constantly the last couple months, AI did not just get invented, its been in our world doing jobs for decades now, please shut the fuck up about it
seriously, just on the way to work I heard 2 news stories about it on the radio, and popped onto slashdot to see another one, move along already
By all means: leave out health care, the relative cost of which has more than tripled since 1960, from 5% of GDP to nearly 18% and housing costs have also risen sharply over the same period. Don't just focus on areas where costs have improved. That is called "cherry picking".
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
We had automated check-in before face rec was deployed in it...
Most humans, especially Americans, already hate automated service of any kind. Being served by an actual human is a luxury
I read almost exactly this, word for word, in an 1998 prediction that brick and mortar stores will never be replaced by online stores because people value human interaction.... you will never guess what happened over the next 20 years!
Not necessarily true. I have HATED automated phone trees put in place by banks, say for example. They are so frustrating and useless I always try to find the fastest way to get a real human. BUT, the last time I called my bank for a tricky problem (I wanted to reset the PIN on my debit card), in fairly short order the automated phone tree had reset my PIN on my debit card!! I was amazed. And, for a moment, I loved phone trees. Once the AI behind phone trees approaches or surpasses humans in providing the right answers to tricky problems, people will be fine with them. Up until now, you couldn't even call phone trees "AI". They just followed a preset algorithm to solve the simplest of problems (your balance). But as true AI gets involved, and they really can solve problems quickly, the industry will turn on a dime. And people will no longer be needed.
50% of all jobs??
About 11M people in the US are working with manufacturing. In a country of 321M..
They are talking about the elimination of service jobs which are 80% of all U.S. jobs. Do try to keep up.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I worked for one of the infamous banks that crashed the world economy in 2007.
Our systems that approved/processed home loans had a CEO driven initiative called "cup of coffee" wherein we could process and approve a home loan in less time than it would take to finish a cup of coffee.
It was wildly successful. We took a process that had 8 hours of computer processing time, and 1-3 days of human roadblocks, and LEGALLY, coded it into an 8 minute (or less) process. That included things like title checks, credit checks, flood hazard determination, etc
Here is the problem... here is how it crashed the economy:
It did exactly what it was supposed to do.
"If you have 0 defaults you are lending too little, if you have 10% defaults you are lending too much" - Actual quote from business requirements.
So we built in basically a dial for risk... Turn the dial up, lots more loans, lots more risk, turn it down, less risk, less profit.
The CEOs took out every single obstacle in his path, and turned the dial to 11. Of course he did.
What is an AI going to do? The same damn thing, but maybe a little faster.
I dunno, maybe we need someone sitting at a desk saying "Are you sure, honey, that's an awful lot of risk"
Okay, let's play.
By all means: leave out health care, the relative cost of which has more than tripled since 1960, from 5% of GDP to nearly 18%
America's healthcare system has serious problems, depending on how you look at it. One of those problems is we're not allowed to just hurl barely-tested drugs at consumers and then retract them when a lot of people are injured by unpredicted side-effects; the FDA requires pharmaceutical companies to test the drugs on rats for 3 years, then to go through multiple stages of clinical trials, then to continue following patients for 3 years after approval to collect further data on side-effects in actual application. It costs roughly $315 million to get a drug FDA-approved, and fewer than 1 in 10 new drugs make it the whole way; stacking it together gets you over $3 billion to get a new drug to market.
On the other hand, technical progress has brought down the cost of medical devices and actual medical care procedures, while also improving lifetime wellness. The major driver of healthcare cost increases has been the prescription drug market, as described above.
In 1950, the median American household spent 4% of its income on healthcare; in 2000, it was 6%. The other side of this is people have been purchasing more and better healthcare, shifting their spending from mandatory costs like food and clothing (Clothing: 12% became 4%, and it's now around 3%).
Healthcare has arguably actually gotten cheaper; total healthcare spending has increased. I wonder how that happens. Clearly, the poor can't be paying all that much more for healthcare; and the middle-class is only paying roughly 50% more on-average as of 15 years ago. What do the stats look like now?
For July 2015 to June 2016, the lowest quintile (0%-20%) spent 8.4% on healthcare; 21%-40% income earners spent 9.7%; 41%-60% spent 8.8%; 61%-80% spent 8.4%; and the highest 20% income households spent 6.6%. 8.4%, 9.7%, 8.8%, 8.4%, 6.6%. 7.94% of the average spending of all consumer units. The average spending of all consumer units was $56,258, out of an average income of $72,990; the median household income in 2015 was $55,516.
By the by, the 5% number you used for 1960 includes things like preventative care, dental care, medical check-ups, hospitalization, and so forth. The 18% number you used includes things like family planning and nutrition programs. The current 8% number includes things that would be considered medical care, rather than new categories of nutrition programs. Try comparing the same things.
and housing costs have also risen sharply over the same period
That's actually not true!
The cost of housing per square foot as a percentage of consumer expense had fallen continuously until around the year 2000. Then: sale prices of houses started running up in a bubble.
What's interesting is mortgage interest rate reductions drove this bubble. That is to say: the house was a $120k house with an $1,100/month mortgage at the prior rate, and then become a $380k house with an $1,100/month mortgage at the new, lowered rate. The cost did run up thanks to some market fuckery (QUICK! ACT NOW! GET INTO YOUR INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY!) followed by pure inertia.
So in 2015, the third quintile sent 19.6% of their spending to shelter (the total "housing" figure includes shelter, utilities, and home maintenance). Owned Dwellings cost 9.5%, with 4.2% going to Mortgage Interest; while Rented Dwellings represented 9.3%.
In 2010, the third quintile sent 20.6% of their spending to shelter. Owned Dwellings represent 12% of that, with 6.1% going to Mortgage Interest; Rented Dwellings cost 7.7%.
In 2005, Shelter was 19.5% for the third quintile. Owned Dwellings were 11.7% with 6.6% going to Mortgage Interest; Rented Dwellings were 7.2%.
Going back as far as 1989, shelter was 16.5% for the third quintile. Owned Dwellin
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I guess this means that we will be allowed to have 2 or 3 wives/husbands in the future.
One income maker and the others that are married to him/her will be free to do what they want.
1/2 working + 1/2 free = 1 whole.
I have heard this argument before, and it held true for the first half of the 20th century. Over the last 30 to 40 years, the poor have not benefited from the advances that make the things you mention possible. See, for instance, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/18/the-government-is-spending-more-to-help-rich-seniors-than-poor-ones/
And yet, Travelocity/Expedia/similar have replaced a lot of travel agents, Amazon has replaced a lot of stores, ATMs have replaced a lot of bank tellers, Microsoft Office has replaced a lot of secretaries, and so on. People DO prefer automated service when it's as effective or more effective than human service.
And Lord, we give you thanks for that!
If robots ever start thinking like fast food workers, we are in the really deep doodoo!
Disclaimer: I went to McDonalds today and ordered "Diet Coke with No Ice" (its bloody cold out there) and, guess what, it had ICE IN IT!
Hint: Dynamic (or any kind of) thinking is not normally associated with fast food workers.
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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.
This is similar to what happened in the 19th century. New technology creating huge wealth inequality, upsetting the social order. That gave birth to the modern labor movement and to communism. In some countries, it eventually led to revolution and the elites got thrown out. In others, labor managed to get enough power to push through changes by peaceful means. That's why we now have laws requiring safe working conditions, a minimum wage, overtime pay, etc.
We'll see how it plays out this time. Elites can only keep control up to a point. If things get too bad, change generally comes by one means or another.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
When? Always. It just takes a while and it isn't a straight line of progress.
Some states will come up with better solutions for income distribution and those states will thrive. Unless the belief is that the other states will be so poorly run that they will go to war with the prosperous states all states will come around eventually.
No, most humans hate bad service of any kind. When that service is provided efficiently they have absolutely no problem with it. Those who do are luddites who crave the good old days, but their numbers dwindle over time.
Do you really know a lot of people who prefer using a cashier rather than an ATM to get cash or deposit checks? I don't. There used to be a lot of people complaining about ATMs, but as far as I can tell they died off.
The same will be true for every other service job. When you can order your McDonalds on your phone and pick it up from a burger kiosk customers will gladly avoid having such low quality human interaction.
The human jobs that weren't created is probably close to zero.
The primary reason surveillance has increased significantly is because the cost of doing so has plummeted due to automation. The NSA was never going to hire billions of people to scan through your online accounts. TSA was not going to have 50 face scanner jobs at every airport. You are fooling yourself.
This is nonsense. Completely irrelevant nonsense.
Agreed. If I order via a website, I know that if the order gets screwed up, it's because I ordered the wrong thing (or they read the order wrong). Adding another person into that process just adds additional opportunities for transcription mistakes with no obvious benefits.
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Most humans, especially Americans, already hate automated service of any kind.
Indeed, this is why a fancy sit-down restaurant can charge a lot more than a cafeteria. People with jobs pay for human provided massages, facials, hair treatments, etc. even though there are machines that can do those things far cheaper.
FTFY
There's going to be many fewer of those in the future.
People eat at fancy sit-down restaurants instead of cafeterias because 1) the food is better and 2) it's easier to sit and have food brought to you than lug it around yourself. Waiters and bussers are irrelevant if the tasks of ordering and delivering the food can be automated. Those jobs ARE going away, although not as fast as in other industries.
He was either talking about UBI or killbot-powered genocide of the working class. Either one of those AI-enabled ideas can "wipe out poverty" in different ways.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Yeah, if you go back farther, automation has taken 99% of our jobs. And that's a good thing.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yeah computers will never land or take off JET AIRPLANES.
Much less serve up some gruel.
Get up!
Containment and disposal of humans who no longer have a function in society.