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Ray Kurzweil Explains Why Technology Won't Eliminate Human Jobs (fortune.com)
Futurist Ray Kurzweil, now a director of engineering at Google, made an interesting argument in a new interview with Fortune:
We have already eliminated all jobs several times in human history. How many jobs circa 1900 exist today? If I were a prescient futurist in 1900, I would say, "Okay, 38% of you work on farms; 25% of you work in factories. That's two-thirds of the population. I predict that by the year 2015, that will be 2% on farms and 9% in factories." And everybody would go, "Oh, my God, we're going to be out of work." I would say, "Well, don't worry, for every job we eliminate, we're going to create more jobs at the top of the skill ladder." And people would say, "What new jobs?" And I'd say, "Well, I don't know. We haven't invented them yet."
That continues to be the case, and it creates a difficult political issue because you can look at people driving cars and trucks, and you can be pretty confident those jobs will go away. And you can't describe the new jobs, because they're in industries and concepts that don't exist yet.
Kurzweil also argues that "the power and influence of governments is decreasing because of the tremendous power of social networks and economic trends..."
"A lot of people think things are getting worse, partly because that's actually an evolutionary adaptation: It's very important for your survival to be sensitive to bad news. A little rustling in the leaves may be a predator, and you better pay attention to that."
That continues to be the case, and it creates a difficult political issue because you can look at people driving cars and trucks, and you can be pretty confident those jobs will go away. And you can't describe the new jobs, because they're in industries and concepts that don't exist yet.
Kurzweil also argues that "the power and influence of governments is decreasing because of the tremendous power of social networks and economic trends..."
"A lot of people think things are getting worse, partly because that's actually an evolutionary adaptation: It's very important for your survival to be sensitive to bad news. A little rustling in the leaves may be a predator, and you better pay attention to that."
Except there is no such thing as AI, and there never will be. We have some learning networks right now that can, given enough trial and error, figure out how to produce a particular output given a particular input, but they are not creative, nor can they deduce anything from 'first principles', nor can they intelligently handle situations that they have not been trained on. They are, and will continue to be, nothing but helpers that need a human hand to guide them. And that is why we do not need to worry about the 'AI' revolution taking all our jobs.
That's not correct - a Fake Intelligence beat a human player at Go. It was specifically created and trained to perform that task and that task only.
AI in the proper sense means a "General Purpose Artificial Intelligence" that can train itself while adapting to new situations. That is something nowhere being ready and when it is ready we'll probably find ourselves in a Skynet situation.
Kurrzweil has had many jobs. He is something of an expert in being unemployed. Want to watch him go white with rage? Ask him about the Aries VI. (The Commercial Aries II and IIIs sold a few units; Mills had a Music room full of them. I never found out what happened to the IV and V.)
Aries was something of a side project of Bob Moog. He designed the original VCOs and VCAs, and when the ua741 OP Amps proved too noisy, he redesigned the circuits around OP-10s. This was done in the West Coast CBS Labs basement.
The VI had ten voices originally, because Bob figured that we had at most ten fingers. When it was pointed out that we had two feet as well, the VI got twelve voices. John Western handled the in-house Engineering, and Berkeley "Donated" a MODCOMP II and the REMAC Rack to control the beast, stuffed full of Burr-Brown DACs and ADCs. "Skipworker" Kurt from Mills did the FORTRAN, and Paul Beaver worked out some of the Voicing before he too abruptly stopped. Kurzweil was a "Synthesizing Consultant" paid for by MIT. Walter/Wendy wandered by on occasion to keyboard for us. In the Spring of 1975, they needed a Kid to do Kid Stuff like making up cables and to do some minor Soldering. That Kid was me. Minimum Wage, and a Share of CBS Stock a week. All of us got CBS Stock; an incentive to make us want CBS to do well.
The VI was a failure. The MODCOMP crashed with maddening regularity; we kept a Rolling Pin handy to work over the 256K Memory board. The Ampex 16 Track 30ips recorder ate tape, and when it wasn't eating tape it was hurling it across the Basement. Even Ray Dolby, who designed it, couldn't tame it.
Except for me, CBS Labs employed some of the finest Sound and Computer experts in the US to make the Aries VI work. Kurzweil hated it with such a passion that he went on to design his own, considerably simpler, Synthesizer.
Well, there was only that one Aries VI. When CBS shut down their West Coast Lab, they had a "Garage Sale" in the parking lot on Hollis Street. I went there to pick up a SoundTech 1000B, the FM Station In A One Foot Cube, (Designed by Western and Dolby; more than a few were assembled by me.) I had to call Larry to bring his Pickup Truck. John Andersson, Ex-Project Manager, _gave_ me the Aries. I had done a lot of the Soldering and Resoldering in it, after all.
And I still have it. Berkeley took their MODCOMP and REMAC back, so the Aries VI now just takes up most of a back bedroom. My two years of Part-Time work for CBS was wonderful, and my CBS Stock, after all of the Buyouts and mergers, is worth upwards of six figures.
Kurzweil has been wrong about many things in the last few decades, but he was right about the Aries VI.
A deeper problem is how do we value people. We can see a hint of this in the environment, how do we value wild animals? Kill them all until there is nothing left? Kill only a percentage of them per year?
Valuing people is a lot more complicated. Giving everyone a stipend is essentially putting a value upon them. What amount should that be? Should some be more valuable than others? If you deem your value too low, what will you do to increase it? Currently, criminal gangs provide a way to value some people. That's their allure, people joining them feel valued. The consequences are horrid. What happens to a person's sense of worth when s/he's valued economically through a stipend the same as every one else?
High-minded notions that we'll all have more time to do the things we like presumes a rose-colored glasses view of humanity. The internet is wonderful, yet it spawns all sorts of nefarious activities. There's no reason to believe humans free to do as they choose will choose wonderfully up-lifting activities.
If indeed jobs do keep getting created, what will they be in? Advanced Quantum Mathematics with Midwifery? How may humans are ever going to be qualified to do these jobs? Right now we /.ers can see a whole load of tech jobs have been created by previous semi-revolutions, and we're 'consuming' them. However, for every one of us, there are dozens of kids we went to school with who'd just never get qualified enough for an interview, let alone a first-line support job.
If the only jobs left are super-advanced, high brain-function type jobs, then 99% of the world just won't be doing much. In that sense, things are somewhat worrisome if AI really does become a 'thing'.
It's possible that more of us will start to do things which previously weren't economically sensible. For example, I might decide to make wooden furniture. I'd probably make quite decent stuff, but right now I couldn't make something as good, or anywhere nearly as cheaply as a machine can do it - so it's not economically sensible to give up even a day a week of my IT job working on it. However, if I spent a bit of time learning, I could conceivably make "nostalgic, man-made stuff" which looked good, worked well and allowed people to have an emotional attachment to the object in a way that a machine made one wouldn't. With machines growing, harvesting and planking up the raw materials for me, I'd presumably be able to get them quite cheaply, and as my other primary needs were taken care of, I'd only need to sell for cost + margin.
How the world will react when there's a market flooded with 'authentic man-made' spice racks, wonky shelves and wobbly chairs is anyone's guess though ;-) How anyone would pay for any of it also remains to be seen.
For a lot of jobs, the demand isn't for people who are Smarter, but people who are kinder.
Normally if you have an analytical job, you are so focused on the brain work, that you often will overlook other people and their feelings, hence why a lot of MD specialists are normally rather terse. Because with faced with a difficult problem, they are trying to solve the problem and often see their patient as a collection of biochemistry then a person who is feeling pain, and may be scared. Also for Tech workers we are trying to get the parts to work and get things going, we often fail to realize if there is a problem, people are actually frustrated and other people may be frustrated to because they are waiting for the results. We have smart people who can fix the problems, but what we also have are the people who may not smart enough to deal with the technical issues, but are rather nice people, however instead of having them talk to the customers and make people around them feel better, they may be put doing some menial job, such as data entry, or filling out forms. Where their skills are being lost on helping people.
That is where Automation comes in, it does the menial job that people really don't want to do, allowing them to change their focus on doing human things.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
He doesn't actually present any evidence that creative destruction will recur in the age of AI.
He doesn't have to. He is simply pointing out that we've been having this argument since mechanical loom was invented hundreds of years ago. And every time the Luddites have claimed that there will be no more jobs, and every time they have been wrong.
And for all of Kurzweil's prating about "history" he shows no evidence of actually spending the effort to study it, even though he certainly has had the time to do so.
Funny thing about those "mechanical looms" (and spinning machines, etc.) they did put huge numbers of people out of work! The effect of the First Industrial Revolution on the largest industry in Great Britain - cloth manufacturing - was to wipe out 20% of the employment in the span of a couple of decades (starting about 1770), and create huge numbers of paupers, a problem that persisted for about 70 years before eventually the economic gains of industrialization created enough jobs to replace those that they destroyed, around 1840.
The historical record about this disaster is very well known, even if you don't bother to actually read about the history of the First Industrial Revolution. The "Dickensian" slums are infamous. The Poor Laws. The work houses (prisons for being poor). The legacy of the petty crime explosion from the massive unemployment (e.g. the "transportation" of convicts to Australia when they couldn't build prisons fast enough).
The Napoleonic Wars came along at a convenient time (1795-1815) to alleviate this significantly for a 20 year period by providing alternative employment for a fair chunk of young men, but these are not what you would call productive jobs.
And the jobs created in factories for the first several generations were worse than the jobs destroyed. The health of the British population declined during that early period of growing average wealth. Wages fell, nutrition fell, adult heights fell, lifespans shortened, the proportion of the population fit for military service fell dramatically.
"Pointing out" stuff that is not true is, well, lying.
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