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."

Comments

Re:Clear logical fallacy

[coofercat]

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.

Re:Kurweil explains nothing

[careysub]

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.