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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."
Seriously, this is so dumb. It assumes an equal amount of social or intellectual positions will be eventually created and some smooth transition of the working populace to these new careers.
Nope. Not going to happen.
We will see more hookers, maids, maid/hookers, oddjobs contractors, etc. Already see this in high tech cities.
During the last paragraph of the piece, Kurzeil merely articulates that 'creative destruction' has taken place several times since the industrial revolution. He doesn't actually present any evidence that creative destruction will recur in the age of AI.
Let's take this to the extreme. Imagine that we invented AIs that matched the average human intellect. All of a sudden, most jobs would be eliminated (including robot repair, because robots would repair themselves), because most jobs no longer require humans. This is similar to how most horses are still out of a job since the advent of the automobile. So the idea that when one job is eliminated, a new one will always arise is simply false.
That is therefore, not an argument to say that we should not welcome an AI revolution - I think such a revolution would bring more positives than negatives for the future of humanity. But to assume that jobs will continue to "invent" themselves is magical thinking - we should consider serious alternatives such as UBI.
Human were shifted from low (mostly) skilled job which were automated toward low skilled job which were not automated. the things is, this revolution is to add intelligence and learning to the machines, and make them cheaper, so that ANY low skilled can be pretty much automated. heck even skilled job can job can be automated more and more... And ocne you reach that point, ANY new low skilled job which open CAN be automated. How does mr kurzweil take that into account ? because from what I can see he misses the difference between THIS revolution to the previous ones.
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For a lead futurist, that's astonishingly undetailed. I read a much deeper piece a few months ago, and it agreed with Kurzweil in two major points:
* Each technological progress eliminates human jobs
* Each technological progress creates new jobs
* While it's easy to predict the eliminated jobs, it is next to impossible to foresee the newly created ones
* But they will likely be more skilled and less manual labor than the old ones
But that's the starting point. It's here where the problems will start:
* for the skilled jobs, you need skilled workers. What to do with Joe Sixpack or anyone just not capable to learn those skills? (or for the US: to afford certified studies of those skills) Let them starve? Take their dignity by putting them on a welfare budget just low enough to not starve, but we still can mock them as lazy bums wo don't want to work?
* most countries are already complaining about a shortage of STEM (in Europe: MINT) degrees needed for the current "skilled" jobs
* In numbers alone, the ration between eliminated and created jobs got worse with each "industrial revolution". During the first one, the combined labor force of farmhands set free by the beginning automation in farming was not enough to fulfill the labor needs of the new factories. For the following technologies, the ratio declined until the latest (digitalisation of office) did not create more new jobs than it ate. So for the next one, it may be the first time, where actually less new jobs will be created than eliminated. And that they require an already lacking skillset, is not helping either.
bickerdyke
I doubt the absolute number of people matter much, if you have half the people you need half the food, clothes, houses, cars, TVs etc. and if you have double you need double. Maybe on the margin you have niche items/services that only exist because we're 8 billion or resource constraints where there's not enough Beluga caviar for everyone or you have scaling effects where building 200m iPhones takes less than 2x 100m but I think they're small when you look at the whole economy. For the most part supply and demand rise together.
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All former forms of automation and job elimination were not complete. People displaced from farms were required in the emerging production industries, those eliminated there by automation were required by the emerging service industry.
The problem we're facing today is twofold, and it seems Kurzweil ignores that completely. Yes, so far we always gained new jobs replacing the old ones. People who were no longer needed as farmhands went on to become factory workers. Factory workers replaced by automation became service personnel. Every time with a long period of incredible suffering for the people displaced because the new industrial branches took lots of time to develop.
But what should develop this time? We're about to reach the point where anything a human can do, a computer, a robot, a machine can do better, faster, more efficient and without any chance of getting sick or flipping the boss off because it found something better.
Worse yet, people are not fungible products. You can't replace person A with person B. And you can't put someone into a new job and expect him to be able to do it. Every time we went through a "revolution" in our industry, the jobs that the least qualified people could do were eliminated. You could employ someone with an IQ of 70 as a farmhand before the advent of machinery. He was useful. Today? What should someone like this work as?
And what will someone with an average IQ work as in the future? Those jobs are what machines can (almost) do today. What we can easily observe already is that the required qualification to have a job is getting higher and higher. When you look at unemployment statistics, you can easily see that the lower the qualification, the higher the unemployment rate.
Kurzweil does not address that problem.
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