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Andrew Ng Wants a New 'New Deal' To Combat Job Automation (technologyreview.com)
Andrew Ng, formerly the head of AI for Chinese search giant Baidu and, before that, creator of Google's deep-learning Brain project, knows as well as anyone that artificial intelligence is coming for plenty of jobs. Speaking at a conference on Tuesday, Ng said he would like to see a "new New Deal" that pays people displaced by technology to study, offering an incentive to learn new skills and reenter the workforce. From a report: Speaking at MIT Technology Review's annual EmTech MIT conference in Cambridge, MA, on Tuesday, Ng said he's visited call centers and spoken to workers, knowing that his teams of software engineers will then write software that will automate aspects of their work. "There are many professions in the crosshairs of AI teams across the world," he said. Ng, who's currently working on a startup called Deeplearning.ai that helps train people on deep-learning technology, has some ideas for helping those in jobs he thinks will be automated, from call-center workers to radiologists, truck drivers, and the like. His suggestion is for an updated version of the New Deal -- the Depression-era economic programs that invested in, among other things, getting unemployed Americans back to work -- that pays displaced workers to learn new job skills.
So far as I have perceived AI is just more advanced if-then-else routines albeit on much faster systems with magnitudes more ram than existed in the old DOS MUD days.
Humanity has a unique way of freaking itself out over shit it makes.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
So he foresees his work causing another great depression? What is the value proposition?
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Not just a new deal, a new economic system will be require as we approach the point where human labour is no longer something of value.
We need to remove inefficiencies from the system and implement basic income with a requirement of 10h/month volunteer work for persons without dependents.
Inventing 9-to-5 is highly ineffective, nearly all of this will be wasted labor. We already have plenty of this baked into corporate workforce culture (e.g. HR, recruiters, web marketing). Instead, let people volunteer for causes they care and/or work part time jobs.
I hear talk about retraining workers and can't help but wonder if it's a realistic solution. The people I know that are really good at things, be it computers or music or martial arts, started doing it when they were young. How is an older, newly trained (inexperienced) worker going to compete with them?
Really? I mean, the first one is haunting us now with sever overreach of Federal Govt. waaaaay above and beyond what the Constitution enumerates as its responsibilities and limited powers....
Hmm...perhaps we can screw with the Supreme Court again like FDR did back in his day, to allow for more "New Deal" overreach?
Yep...just what we need.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Ng said he's visited call centers and spoken to workers, knowing that his teams of software engineers will then write software that will automate aspects of their work.
This is a Good Thing. The need to staff a call center is a clear indication of a poorly functioning product or service. It means that some process or product has room to be made better. Call centers are necessary sometimes but really are a waste of human capital. I severely doubt that any near term AI is likely to do away with call centers any more than phone trees have. The better way to do that is to design a product or service that doesn't need the call center in the first place. Using AI to improve call centers pretty much is the most costly way to deal with the issue. Call centers should be a last resort.
There are many professions in the crosshairs of AI teams across the world," he said. Ng, who's currently working on a startup called Deeplearning.ai that helps train people on deep-learning technology, has some ideas for helping those in jobs he thinks will be automated, from call-center workers to radiologists, truck drivers, and the like.
Radiologists aren't going anywhere any time soon. Yes they have software to aid in diagnosis but that isn't going to get rid of the job - at most it will simply shift how they do it. There still will need to be a human in the loop for quite some time to come. Furthermore even if AI did supplant them, radiologists are MDs and are well trained to get started in a different specialty should the need arise. They'd have to do a new residency if they want to be a practicing doctor but that is all. Or there are countless other jobs (research, etc) which they are amply qualified for.
If someone's only skill is driving a vehicle then perhaps that person should consider educating themselves further.
How do you determine whether a person has been displaced by AI? When AI takes away all financial planner jobs and they flood the plumber and electrician trades so much so that the wage goes through the floor, are we going to allow plumbers and electricians this training as well?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I have saved and invested ferociously since entering the workforce, and now that I'm into my 40's I have a 7-figure portfolio and no debt.
Let's say you were to retire at 65, live a simple but comfortable life of $50K/year, and die at 85. Well, 20 years times $50K/years is a million dollars - your "7-figure portfolio". Congratulations, you just saved enough for your own retirement - provided you don't live past 85. :)
Thing is though, people in countries like Denmark are also set for their retirement - total peace of mind. But they didn't have to save and invest ferociously to get there.
Currently, Americans seem to like inequality. They seem to like living in a world where one step off the straight and narrow, or perhaps just an expensive medical condition, will trap them and their descendants in desperate poverty. But that's a choice. Nobody is forcing Americans to vote for Trump and his fellow Republicans (other than the ignorance that comes from watching news media controlled by the ultra-rich).
We should be able to provide everyone the ability to live as well as an 1890s farmer plus some kind of smart phone without them needing to work.
Basic housing, decent food, and entertainment.
But a lot of people are going to get wierd and destructive in that kind of environment as long as "rich" people exist and the things they do are displayed as entertainment.
Already, a lot of entertainment used by rich people is no longer shown or reported on. Areas become private domains for wealthy people and you never hear from or about them again.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
pays people displaced by technology to study, offering an incentive to learn new skills and reenter the workforce
While I admire his faith in humanity, this seems like a pipe dream. The job market is flooded with so many educated people right now that there's an implicit ranking:
If you're not in the first category, you're fighting for scraps right now without post-AI scarcity. Do you really think adding a fifth category is the solution? There just ain't enough work to go around.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
that includes Medicare for All, College for All, a $15 minimum wage and end the 7 wars we're fighting (be 'cha didn't know there were 7, and NK would make 8).
It's what used to be called a 'Party Platform' before money took over politics. There's a group calling themselves the "Justice Democrats" trying to push it through by primarying a bunch of the right wing Dems that got in on Clinton (Bill)'s coat tails. They're hoping they managge to knock Diane "Supports gun control but carries a gun" Feinstein out of office.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
How is being a human required for any of those? All those jobs could be done by automatons of varying degrees of realism. A medium-sized shellscript would be an improvement over the current US President.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
We’ve been mired in a long term slow growth economy, and a huge part of the reason why is that productivity grown has slowed. AI is one of the key technologies to get productivity growing again.
Other productivity tailwinds: Trump's fight against regulation, Uber, Amazon, and eventually self-driving cars. We need these things to overcome demographic headwinds.
Productivity increases are the key to sustainable economic growth that outpaces population growth. More GPD per capita means people will lead better, more prosperous lives.
The future looks good.
Why fund the military though? It's just make work that doesn't actually produce anything of value unless you're involved in some conflict. I suppose you could argue that because the military doesn't actually produce anything of value, that it doesn't distort existing markets too much as long as its not reducing valuable labor supply or consuming a large number of resources itself that might have gone elsewhere. I get that it's a lot easier for out of work people who can't find anything else to be army grunts than rocket scientists or something like that and that the military can provide some job training as they need cooks and mechanics.
However, if you're going to take a huge pile of money to fund the military even more, why not just directly give it to the people without having them do the busy work of marching around, drilling with weapons, etc. that adds little to no value in most cases. The outcome is essentially the same and the people now have some free time to do something with their lives. Some won't take advantage of that and just waste the opportunity, but they probably weren't going to turn their life around in the military either.
There are a lot of things that are "pay me now, or pay me later" issues, that should be addressed:
1: No jobs or income. A guaranteed minimum income may cost something, but sure costs a lot less than having to deal with a constant insurgency of people with no hope or future, who view the only thing they can do is violence. Add to the fact that there are strong "shit stirrers" like the Nazis and Daesh, and random people who used to be just gangbangers now would have the desperation to do things never even thought of. Even with 100% gun control and none on the streets, one can still amass a death toll with a vehicle. Even with very Draconian laws with people going to prison for small things, eventually the guerrillas will win ("rednecks" in Afghanistan drove the best two war machines in all of human history, the USSR and the US out) unless the US decided to go the genocide route... and that won't happen because the press will show it to the world. So, pay me now with a GMI or New Deal jobs... or pay me later with guns, troops, mercenaries, green zones, and defending against constant incursions... which will destroy any quality of life in the country.
2: Global warming. Pay me now, or pay me later. Pay me now with moving to clean energy, redoing nuclear energy so it is trustworthy and advancing it from 1950s tech to 2010s Gen IV or thorium reactors, work on thermal depolymerization and CO2 abatement... or pay me later with ecological refugees, wars for arable land (Africa), people who have no hope and again... turn to Daesh because there is nothing left. Not just "those people in Africa". Everyone in the world is threatened by this... and paying for wars is VERY expensive.
Sounds reasonable to me but like most people point out, "it's socialism and bad!" (but these same people have no problem spending trillions in the Middle East where are returns have not been that great). A functional society needs roads to allow commerce otherwise just another third world country. Private parties are not going to build roads except only from point A to B that is profitable, everyone else wil have to travel by foot. Probably the non-starter is are the people skilled enough to operate equipment? Or if done manually, can those that haven't done manual labor able to cope? Are there funds for material and tools?
mfwright@batnet.com
just have student loans bankruptcy and then the costs will go down.
The "red" part of USA would rather have their left nut cut off than allow such "socialism". They'll blame such unemployment on factors such as "too much" regulation or taxes, foreigners, a foreign country, Hollywood elites, Canadian cows or bees, Soros banking conspiracies, Hillary's emails, etc. etc. before they will submit to New Deal 2.
Table-ized A.I.
Thing is though, people in countries like Denmark are also set for their retirement - total peace of mind. But they didn't have to save and invest ferociously to get there.
Of course they did. It's just that they had no real choice as to whether to do so or not. Do retirement services magically come about freely in Denmark, or do you suppose that its being funded by the massive tax rates that the Danish pay? So what practical difference is there between someone who takes that money that would have otherwise gone to taxes and saves it for retirement and the person who had to pay those higher taxes that would be used to pay for their retirement?
just lowering the medicare age can help alot / maybe have modified SS system for older people pushed out of the job market.
and add in more OT pay at least the 60+ levels
But the real question is, is Andrew Ng and the companies working on AI willing to pay a 200% sales tax on AI products to pay for the displacement?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further.
there are other parts of the minimum wage laws then just the pay like not being forced to pay for tools / uniforms and other costs to work your low paying job. Or being forced to pay for dine and dash.
Factory workers, service clerks, and drivers that don't think and don't sleep and don't talk back and don't try to unionize? Sounds like the current technology level of pseudo-AI has lots of real work applications.
The whole "AI" moniker is misleading, but hierarchical learning and machine learning is very real and currently available technology. Making a machine that allows one person to replace the jobs of 10 is nothing new to our society, and that is what we face today with the new so-called "AI". We'll be able to train some software to do something, make 10 copies and have 1 person monitor them remotely. In the future you will only have to hire 1 person to manage 3 short order kitchens that staff 3-8 people each. And a diner's kitchen staff is replaced by a business-to-business service (and also a SaaS at the same time, because someone is running the deep learning stack and selling the data sets for training).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Yes. But the USA has gone way the fuck insane out-of-control with its military. We could reduce our military expenditures by 75% across the board and still be way ahead for all future time.
Only I can judge you.
It'll never get off the ground because "OMG socialism" but I think we're going to need something like this. If we're truly ready to say there are no more manual labor assembly line type jobs, the majority of people in the US are suddenly unable to sell their labor. This includes white-collar assembly line jobs as well...think about all the paperwork processing type jobs you may support in IT and wonder why they still exist.
Not everyone is capable of training for a higher-level job. Consider the assembly line worker who has been doing the exact same job for 25 years. The odds are that they don't have the capability, intelligence or motivation to be full-stack web developers or data scientists or marketing managers.
The reason I like the New Deal analogy is that we're basically saying that if you can't find work that pays what you want, the government is the employer of last resort and has projects that need doing. It would keep the staunchest opponents of universal basic income at bay because the workers would have to work for their pay, but it would protect the population least able to make the transition to knowledge work...and IMO it would sure beat violent revolution once things get bad enough for enough people. Unemployed, uneducated workers with nothing to do and nothing to lose aren't going to sit around waiting for the upper class to share the wealth; you may see the return of the guillotine within our lifetimes.
The difference is that everyone is covered. That matters for the stability and general well-being of society. The less desperate people out there, the safer we all are and the better the karma all-around. Yes it will work even in a society that is not homogeneous, provided we see each other as fellow humans on a relatively short stint on the planet.
Only I can judge you.
I don't see any reason to complicate the issue by bringing AI into it. Jobs get created and destroyed all time time for lots of reasons. For example, lots of companies are eliminating cashier and checker jobs in favor of self-service kiosks/self-checkout/mobile apps. Is that because technology and AI became good enough and cheaper? Because the minimum wage went up? Because customers prefer self-checkout? Because it improves throughput? Who knows? I certainly don't.
If we want to help re-train people who lose their job, that's all well and good. I don't see any reason to make a special case for people displaced by AI. And I strongly suspect it would be very hard to really determine who was displaced by AI and who wasn't.
The military offers direct benefits to the U.S elite. The security arrangements with Saudi Arabia contain a clause which obligate all sales of oil to be in U.S dollars. It is the reason why oil is denominated in U.S dollars which makes oil cheaper fo the U.S as well as create huge demand for the currency and allows the treasury to sell its bonds at very low rates. Most of these agreements also contain "buy American weapons" clauses which is why the U.S is the worlds top weapons exporter. This is on top of the direct benefits of having a powerful military, like invading Panama to build a canal when they said no to it, the annexation of California from Mexico, the seizing of Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba and the Philippines from Spain, the opening up of Japan via "gunboat diplomacy" by Commodore Perry, etc, etc.
a robo kitchen at a fast food may need say 1-2 people on site to cleaning / CS / basic unjamming / basic repair work. With say a roaming techs doing the bigger repair / maintenance work.
Do you really want your robo mc'd to shut down in the middle of rush due to jam with an not taking orders at this time error?
And your preferred plan is what.. let the US wallow in the great depression for another 10? 20? 100 years? How long do you think it would have taken to recover if you leave the people who caused the problems (many of whom actually profited off the suffering of the masses) in charge of running the show?
Is there too much regulation? In some cases yes, in other cases no (and in a few cases there's probably not enough regulation..) But there's a whole lot of people, especially on the conservative side, who want to blindly just deregulate anything they can get away with and completely ignore (or "conveniently" forget) that most regulations were put in place for a reason. Sometimes the reasons were bad, sometimes the reasons aren't valid anymore.. but often they are and removing such regulations without caution is just playing with fire, and its only a matter of time before the country (and thanks to the US' economic power, sometimes the whole world) will get burned sooner or later.
You don't want a job. What you want is income. Why is everybody so confused about this??
Might makes right irrelevant.
"most regulations were put in place for a reason"
Fear
Damn I wish I hadn't burnt my last mod point. AC or not I would have modded you up to the moon.
I was having this discussion with an old boss (that I'm obviously on good terms with) just a few days ago - it almost seems you are "better off" (in quotes) if you don't save like mad, because if you don't have money saved, there's no money to spend on that expensive medical condition, and you'll either get help from the government or just die. I don't know which is worse - dying or having your life savings wiped out, losing your house, etc (and witnessing that) because of some expensive medical condition, and then of course dying anyway.
The US needs to wake up and straighten out this us vs. them shit. I would gladly pay x% in higher taxes to know that everyone no matter their ability to pay would at least be able to live a comfortable life. That's also a reason assisted suicide should be legal. No way I'm going to let myself linger because of a terminal illness (100% certainty of death within X number of years) of the kind that takes years or decades to kill me. Screw that.
Alas, too many folk refuse to admit that if we don't admit a bit of "socialism" soon, the masses of the unemployable will force a lot of it on us later. And it will more resemble the oppressive regimes of the 20th century than those of today.
"Fear"
... Of something terrible happening again.
So, he's just like a typical slashdotter.
He believes his own hype more.