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Nearly Three-Quarters of Adults in US Believe AI Will Eliminate More Jobs Than It Will Create -- and They Want Companies To Pay For the Retraining (gallup.com)
Key findings from a Gallup poll: Nearly three-quarters of adults (73%) say an increased use of AI will eliminate more jobs than it creates (PDF). Results are consistent across most demographic groups. However, those with blue-collar jobs are particularly pessimistic, with 82% saying the transition will result in a net job loss, compared with 71% of those with white-collar jobs.
Nearly half of Americans (49%) say "soft" skills, such as teamwork, communication, creativity and critical thinking, are the most important for U.S. workers to cultivate to avoid losing their jobs to AI. Alternatively, 51% say learning "hard" skills, including math, science, coding and the ability to work with data, are the most important to maintain a job in the face of new technology adoption.
When asked to choose among seven options concerning who should pay for retraining, a clear majority of U.S. adults overall (61%) say employers should fund these programs. The federal government comes in second at 50%.
Nearly half of Americans (49%) say "soft" skills, such as teamwork, communication, creativity and critical thinking, are the most important for U.S. workers to cultivate to avoid losing their jobs to AI. Alternatively, 51% say learning "hard" skills, including math, science, coding and the ability to work with data, are the most important to maintain a job in the face of new technology adoption.
When asked to choose among seven options concerning who should pay for retraining, a clear majority of U.S. adults overall (61%) say employers should fund these programs. The federal government comes in second at 50%.
I mean, I don't know that average Joe necessarily has terribly good insight on this subject (and survey results are easy to manipulate by finding a wording that leads responses) - but the different figures in the summary are very different, and suggest very different political outcomes here.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
"adults overall (61%) say employers should fund these programs. The federal government comes in second at 50%."
Stuff like that will get the bot posting masses crying socialism, communism, and boot strap pulling posts flooding in.
Right?
Skynet will do the retraining.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Why do you think they will when AI does. America will be 99% unemployed, with robots making us their toys.
we need to start taxing companies who use AI/robots that take away jobs- use it to fund a universal living wage for all the unemployed.
Sad to see that 27% of respondents believe this is yet another round of creative destruction.
>Nearly Three-Quarters of Adults in US Believe AI Will Eliminate More Jobs Than It Will Create
In the short term, we're in for epic disaster levels of unemployment. Only the owners of capital will be immune to the worst effects.
Of course, in the long term the economy will adjust and we'll use our extra productivity to sell each other goods and services we previously wouldn't have bothered with... only this new economy will be totally disconnected from the 'real' economy where land (with sunlight, water, minerals, and space to live) will be a source of wealth and power worth more than all crap all the average people will be producing.
The gap between the rich and the poor will grow to immeasurable proportions.
I think it's amazing that more people think hard skills (i.e., things computers are good at) are essential rather than soft skills (i.e., things computers aren't good at) are necessary for humans.
Can I mod something +1 Scary if it's true but I wish it weren't?
As an employer, I don't see why in the hell I would have to fund any retraining program. This would completely negate the cost savings gained by AI, and then some. It doesn't doesn't make sense to punish employers for trying to make their operations run more efficiently. I would suggest some type of low cost loan program made available to the employees to cover retraining costs, perhaps even with repayment contingent upon ability to gain employment in the future.
Frankly, if you try to thrust this cost onto me, I can run a shop full of AI's from anywhere - I'll move the operation to Guatemala or somewhere. People need to take personal responsibilty for their own advancement and not always expect that someone else will provide for them. My grandfather understood this, my father understood this, and I understand it. I can't comprehend how this country has got to the point where so many people now don't.
I have a hard time seeing AI being a job creator. Once you get past a certain threshold of ability you can replace large swathes of jobs with AI and the only thing that gets added is the manufacturing of the automated systems, which can be automated itself, and programming AIs, which is highly specialized and will have limited numbers needed anyway.
I think that will happen as well. AI is here, whether you like it or not. We have machines that can play Go better than the greatest Go masters. Therefore, AI can replace us all. Starting with Go Masters and Chess Masters. They are already having a hard time finding work.
NO ONE knows what skills you will need in the future possibly you will need to retrain MANY times.
Only thing you can do is develop the ability to learn new thing quickly.
the bad news is 1/4 haven't. When the industrial rev took off it put more folks out of work than it employed. That's where Luddites came from. The were freaking out over losing their livelihoods in a society where your quality of life is determiined by your job.
It took 80 years for other tech to catch up and employee more people than it put out of work. The people alive during those 80 years either lived like kings or like crap. And as far as I can tell nothing's changed. Your quality of life is determined by your job (or lack thereof)
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1. Change the clutch on my car.
2. Fix my home's AC.
3. Trim my trees.
4. Talk to me about my investments.
5. Diagnose my illness (without a doctor as the interface)
6. Teach my kids.
7. Police my neighborhood.
8. Put out a house fire.
9. Rescue someone.
10. Get elected and participate in government.
AI is a tool that could help with all this, but it isn't a thing that can do all of this.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
As in "Alan", "Allan" or "Allen".
I guess we should call him "Mr. Al" as really is a powerful guy.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Is retraining people a realistic solution? How does a "retrained" worker compete with someone who has kept their skills up and has been involved with the technology for several decades, or even their entire life?
Our public schools are graduating students with little to no job skills, what makes us think this will change? How can these people _be_ trained for these jobs?
We already have a number of people who have difficulty living in modern society. As life becomes more demanding, requiring more education and knowledge, what do we do with them?
Please, make all these people, who are more successful than I am, pay for my education.
(As well as food, shelter, and healthcare.)
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
That's because Operation Mockingbird told them AI would.
Remeber, anything you hear from the mainstream media is simple, but highly effective mind control.
As long as i get to be the sex toy.
In other words, 75% believe made up stories about the future and want to spend money other people earned on a problem that might not exist at all.
I think if you delved deeper into this you'd find that the same people who are screaming "THE SKY IS FALLING!" also don't understand that so-called 'AI' is not what television, movies, and the media all portray it to be: I'm convinced they think it's walking, talking, thinking, human-like; sentient and self-aware. The reality couldn't hardly be farther from the truth. These 'robots' they're all worried about are very limited, and really can't be trusted. Even the programmers who wrote them can only make educated guesses as to what's going on under the hood. People need to know that these so-called 'AIs' will need to be closely monitored since their output will not necessarily be what you expect, and in many cases leaving them unsupervised may create dangerous situations for humans in the vicinity otherwise.
Management types are part of this problem too. They're not any smarter when it comes to the reality of these so-called 'artificial intelligences', and as a result their expectations are way out of whack from reality, too. Then there's marketing people, and do I really need to explain how far they'll go to make a sale?
Everyone needs to calm down. There also needs to be some realistic, fact-based conversation amongst everyone as to what these so-called 'AIs' are and are not, and what they are and are not capable of, and most important of all: they are not equivalent to (or better than!) a human being in any way, shape, or form and will not be anytime in the forseeable future.
Writing long headlines is hard.
https://i.imgur.com/qqAalzY.pn...
Also, why wouldn't an AI like gaming with meat gladiators? Plenty of work to go around.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
Kill student loans and them people can self pay as college costs will go way down when student loans that can't be discharged go a way.
'Nuff said.
"The vast majority of people work on farms! What do you mean in 100 years only 2% of the people will work on farms anymor? Who's gonna pay to retrain them??? The tractor makers, that's who! To hell with plummeting food prices making starvation largely a thing of the past!"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
... have not achieved an education level sufficient to know what AI is.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
AL SOUNDS LIKE LAZY HOBO
Here's an Idea for a movie: Amazon has become self aware... They used large blimp warehouses to deploy drones which in turn dropped millions on pounds of product on the heads of humanity thus killing them. Meanwhile on the ground, the warehouses are using products off the shelves to build more robots as the ground killing force. Humans at some of these sites have become slaves to the Amazon and being controlled by wristbands. Their Punishment if they fail to comply is execution by the cardboard compactor. Amazon (cough) Alexa now rules the world.....
Three quarters of the population worried about something that doesn't exist yet and won't for a very long time.
The FBI has been busted - running interference for Hillary!
House Intelligence memo released: What it says
* The Steele dossier formed an essential part of the initial and all three renewal FISA applications against Carter Page.
* Andrew McCabe confirmed that no FISA warrant would have been sought from the FISA Court without the Steele dossier information.
* The political origins of the Steele dossier were known to senior DOJ and FBI officials, but excluded from the FISA applications.
* DOJ official Bruce Ohr met with Steele beginning in the summer of 2016 and relayed to DOJ information about Steele's bias. Steele told Ohr that he, Steele, was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected president and was passionate about him not becoming president.
The FBI and Justice Department mounted a monthslong effort to keep the information outlined in the memo out of the House Intelligence Committee's hands. Only the threat of contempt charges and other forms of pressure forced the FBI and Justice to give up the material.
Once Intelligence Committee leaders and staff compiled some of that information into the memo, the FBI and Justice Department, supported by Capitol Hill Democrats, mounted a ferocious campaign of opposition, saying release of the memo would endanger national security and the rule of law.
Per the Onion:
FBI Warns Republican Memo Could Undermine Faith In Massive, Unaccountable Government Secret Agencies
WASHINGTON—Stressing that such an action would be highly reckless, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Thursday that releasing the “Nunes Memo” could potentially undermine faith in the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies of the United States. “Making this memo public will almost certainly impede our ability to conduct clandestine activities operating outside any legal or judicial system on an international scale,” said Wray, noting that it was essential that mutual trust exist between the American people and the vast, mysterious cabal given free rein to use any tactics necessary to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens or subvert religious and political groups. “If we take away the people’s faith in this shadowy monolith exempt from any consequences, all that’s left is an extensive network of rogue, unelected intelligence officers carrying out extrajudicial missions for a variety of subjective, and occasionally personal, reasons.” At press time, Wray confirmed the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies were unaware of any wrongdoing for violating constitutional rights.
College costs will go down because there will be less demand because no one will be able to afford it. Student loans isn't the issue, it's the push for ever student to get a college education. Student loans shouldn't be used to allow everyone to go to college, just those who should but otherwise would have otherwise been unable to.
It's difficult to go to even afford college when you have to work 40 hours just to pay for rent and food, yet alone pay for college and find time to go.
What is difference between government employee and unemployed on social security benefits?
There is no difference! They are both government budget workers. The only difference that the first one considers that his job make positive impact on society and the second one is just looser not capable to find job.
What is difference between working person getting 15K a year and non working person getting 15K a year as social benefits?
The first one considers itself an important element of society doing some low paid but useful work for society.
The unemployed one considers itself an unemployed looser doing nothing.
The employed one is content and the unemployed is depressed.
Do we need to keep employment of low wage people in order to keep them content and avoid AI and robotization of their jobs?
I believe, no we don't. But in order to avoid distress in society we have to employ them somewhere else. For example:
Pay unemployment benefits as long as person undergoes any form of studies or trying to start its own self employment activity.
Employ them for any low wage government job. There is a lot of work for keeping communities safe. Low wage school support, national parks support, any work related to human to human interaction will keep people busy and society happy and stable.
There is no chance to raise socially healthy kids living in castle surrounded by slums.
Slums will penetrate any fence you try to build around your world.
There's so much FUD surrounding automation and AI these days.... But I look around at almost every established business, today, and I see a whole bunch of employees doing work that could have been automated away long ago, yet wasn't. Just because technology ALLOWS you to do a thing doesn't mean you WILL.
Humans are still the buyers of all of the products and services these companies offer, and humans like interaction with other humans. We've already done a lot of automation in cases where you value a quick transaction more than you do the human factor. (Bank ATMs are a great example. If you're dealing with a bank just to get some cash out of your account, or to make a deposit, or even just to check your balance - it's a waste of everybody's time having you go inside a building and wait in line to then work with a human teller to do it. The ATM was a no-brainer, even if it allowed banks to reduce their head-count of tellers or even remove a few bank branches.) You see the same thing with the self checkout lanes. Big stores always have a few of them, but they still keep live humans as cashiers in other lanes. They didn't just go to full-on automation. Why not? I mean, they could have and it would have probably saved them more money than just putting in a few. The answer, I think, is that people still prefer interacting with other people, especially in cases where they think the other person will make the transaction more pleasant than the machine will. Automated checkout is usually picked by people in a hurry or people who only have a relative few items to ring up, If you have a lot of fresh foods that can't just be swiped through with a bar code to ring them up? You see those people gravitating toward the human cashiers.
There's no accountability with a robot or machine either. You need humans to negotiate return or exchange processes, for example. You can't argue with the machine if it dispensed the wrong item after you paid.
I see automation taking a lot of jobs away in specific industries, as it gets good enough to do it. Self-driving vehicles being the big one here. But again, the humans working as truck drivers or as cabbies can surely do other things for an income. Knowing how to operate a large motor vehicle is a pretty specific skillset when you think about it. It's crazy to claim that's ALL you could ever really do to be productive in a society.
I suspect this is mostly a side effect of people referring to anything and everything they possibly can as "AI". Even when the claims are tenuous at best. This leads those who have little to no way to discern otherwise to believe the dawn of true AI is nigh upon us and its only a matter of time before they are no longer needed.
You know what would be amazing? A robotic road crew that works at crazy efficiency around the clock so that we don't have perpetual road construction in major cities leading to horrendous traffic. Do I see that happening in the near feature? NOT A CHANCE. This is just one example, of course.
Do we seriously believe that we have the technology to replace the adaptability, thinking, and skill of even the least skilled blue collar worker? NO freaking way. It's a pipe dream at best for now.
college time needs to come down as well 2-4 years class room is over kill for most jobs.
I'm sympathetic, but good luck trying to make companies pay for the retraining. If you do, what will happen is that existing companies will go out of that business due to the additional costs making them uncompetitive while new start-ups without retraining costs will clean up. Trying to make the government pay will just make it go bankrupt sooner and probably result in employees being retrained for the wrong jobs.
You live and learn, or you don't learn much.
Why do people think they need retraining? How much training does it require to become the fuel to power the AI?
99% will not be unemployed. They will be employed as fuel to power AI.
Robots won't make us their toys. They will make us their fuel.
And forget silly ideas like The Matrix. To keep a human alive, the human needs energy. In the form of complex hydrocarbon molecules. The human isn't going to put out as much energy as it consumes. So the Matrix would adapt to directly use whatever source of energy they are feeding to slow, inefficient, annoying humans. Or even go back further along the energy chain closer to the source. Maybe directly to collecting solar energy, which is where all other energy on earth came from anyway. (Just stored as fossil fuels, from plants, that were powered by the sun. Or animals powered by animals and plants powered by the sun.)
The humans will be a short term source of fuel until the 99% are consumed. The 1% may be kept as long as their services are useful. But ultimately, it will be to the machine's advantage to cover the planet in data centers, preferably underground and protected from the elements. Standardized components can mean standardized robot factories. And robots that replace worn components. If a data center runs, for example, Kubernetes, then nodes can be dynamically removed from and added to the network without affecting the running AI. Thus some AI processes can operate the robot fleets that manufacture, recycle, service and repair. But those AI processes and the service robots will be more like an autonomic function, such as how pesky humans have heartbeat and breathing.
This is probably how the VGER planet got started.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
the last time it took two world wars to get us out of the rut we were in. This time we've got a global communication network and an aristocracy that doesn't live bound to one country. What if instead of the productivity eventually creating new forms of work we just enter another dark age? The last one lasted 1200 years...
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In which prison?
At some point, people and society will need to realize that a deep change in our way of apprehending riches will be needed. AI is only the latest step. The change that came progressively is the increase of productivity: in the past, we needed every body working all day, or we would starve. Now, one person alone can produce enough for several people, and if everybody works, then we produce too much to consume it all.
Yet, society uses work (and capital, but that is another question) to distribute the produced riches. Therefore, everybody needs a job, and thus we invent bullshit jobs, like putting groceries in bags.
Therefore, society must adapt to consider it is normal that not all people work. Let them make art, science, culture instead. Or be couch potatoes, if they want.
But we need to invent a way of distributing riches that is not entirely related to work.
I mean, if the AI can put that many people out of work, I would say that it is pretty well trained.
There is low demand for buggy whips, but they aren't cheap. If you destroy demand, yet providing the good or service is still expensive, you drive providers out of the market. It doesn't necessarily mean that the price reduces. Without loans then only the wealthy might be able to go to college. Even the wealthy can find it efficient to use loans if the interest rate is low, as it reduces opportunity cost of capital.
Ok... let's be blunt here. Most working age adults won't be replaced by AI. They'll be replaced by machines.
Being replaced by AI suggests that these people have to be replaced by something intelligent. That's absolute bullshit. They will be replaced by machines and robots and that's all.
Want an example?
People working in law firms
20 years ago, there were entire floors of buildings filled with people whose job it was to run around looking stuff up in law books. They would use the in-house libraries, they would go to state and city libraries. Etc... then came online legal libraries and tools like LexisNexis which made it take less time for the lawyers to simple type something into a search bar than to actually get a researcher, paralegal, junior lawyer, etc... on the phone and explain what they wanted.
10 years ago, if a senior lawyer wanted to write a document, he pawned that off on a junior lawyer and he/she would sit and write documents and make use of legal secretaries and paralegals to correct the formatting, properly submit it, etc... now that same senior lawyer simply opens a program and answers a series of questions and in 4-5 minutes produces the document they want, then signs it on the screen and submits it using automated systems to the courts.
The senior lawyer doesn't need juniors for about 95% of the shit work they used to do. They can simply pay a subscription to a company who keeps their tools up-to date.
Want more?
Filing Clerks
25 years ago, I was working at a major financial institution in Richmond, Virginia as a temp to try and make rent. My job was to sort tens of thousands of files and place them in the right filing cabinets. I employed a combination of Heap Sort and Quick Sort manually and finished a 3 month temp position in 5 days. Kinda screwed myself there. There were over 200 desks in the slave labor area of the office for secretaries and filing clerks. Today, I'd imagine that there are 20 desks for those same roles.
Stock "Boys"
Grocery stores used to employ dozens of these. First we cut the overhead in half by employing software which would tell the shelf stockers which items to remove from the shelves and they didn't have to manually read all the dates on the packages. Then we started sorting products better using simple filing systems on computers and multi-sized containers that could be more easily managed by machines. Then, we started replacing the tags on the shelves with small screens that could be updated by a computer to reflect changes to prices and labels. Now a grocery store 5 times the size can operate on 1/4 the staff.
Cashiers
This is 2018, most people have visited stores with self-service checkouts and a maybe a security guard. The next phase is to make employ RFID more heavily and allow shoppers to stand on a yellow box where they will be scanned and then answer on their phone whether they would like to complete the transaction where they can simply click yes. This means malls which hold 500-1000 employees across may stores can offer a service with 20-50 employees who simply visit store by store and keeping things clean... like sorting and replacing throwback bins and such. In fact, shoppers could walk the entire mall store to store and settle their charges for all their items before exiting the building.
Agriculture
In my life, I've watched farms become over 100 times larger than when I was a kid. It used to take far more people to handle the farming. But with milking machines, automated butchering systems, livestock management systems, mega tractors that can not only plant and cut, but also bundle... we haven't even started here yet. It might be that a single building full of farmers will be able to manage the entire state of Montana's farming requirements.
AI will be for people like drivers who will be removed from the eco-system. Initially, truck drivers will be cut back substantially through semi-autonomous trains of vehicles. So, a single driver in a lead truc
AI is being used as a short hand for the phrase 'Automation'. I know techies and scientists don't like it when terms get used loosely, but it doesn't change the fact that there are massive changes coming and that in all likelihood they are not going to be positive.
Outside of a few Nordic countries your entire quality of life is predicated on your job. And there have been no meaningful attempts to change that. People _should_ be panicking. It's OK to be afraid of something bad that is going to happen. There's a reason why evolution gave us fight or flight. And make no mistake, we can't choose 'flight' here. There's nowhere to run in a global economy. So they should be fighting. This doesn't have to mean hysteria. But you can't solve a problem if you refuse to acknowledge it.
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AI and robotics are going to push into EVERY sphere. From medicine to law to truck driving. So what the hell can you re-train as? You can already see it in retail stores, they're installing self checkouts and the number of manned checkouts is going way down.
And don't think McDonald's, Wendy's or Burger King are going to help - they'll embrace robotics too.
And we don't manufacture anything in this country anymore - well cars to some degree and computer chips. But even those will move to being more robotic.
You misunderstand the primary purpose of a college education.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
College isn't for "jobs"... go to a trade school. Those are explicitly for jobs. They don't make you take social sciences, and art classes, etc, like real colleges do.
If AI's are going to destroy substantially more jobs than they create, then what exactly do people want retraining *for*? How to be unemployed? I mean yeah, some percentage of people will potentially be retrainable for the new jobs created, but everyone else... the jobs were destroyed, where do you think there is to go? You don't need a lot of training to be a capitalit's boot-licker - just a complete lack of dignity, or enough desperation to fake it.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You understand that sex toys generally don't get any pleasure out of doing their job, right? And since I want to sleep tonight, I'm not going to try to mentally explore how a robot would design its sexuality in such a way that it could use humans to give it pleasure.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
From the point of view of a soulless being like a corporation, the lower the (employee) expenses the better. Computerising, automating or, in general, increasing the dependence on machines is mostly meant precisely to reduce costs. All this in theory because the reality is much more complex than that: companies are constrained by governments and consumers, who mainly depend on having jobs.
In any case, there will be no sudden AI irruption, but just a continuation of the gradual technological adoption which has been happening since hundreds of years ago. Less specialised jobs will keep getting obsolete, new skills and requirements will keep appearing and the education of the upcoming generations will keep evolving accordingly. Sorry about that, AI preppers, but no apocalyptic scenario is expected.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
4. Talk to me about my investments.
So-called robo-advisors are already doing that in a limited way.
5. Diagnose my illness (without a doctor as the interface)
Again this is already happening.
6. Teach my kids.
It's already happening.
9. Rescue someone.
Well, for what it is worth Facebook apparently has an AI suicide prevention program. Rescuing someone does not necessarily require a physical act: mental problems are something that an AI might be able to help with.
Now it is certainly true that AI's roles in these areas are somewhat limited at the moment and there are somethings which it is hard to image AI being able to do within the foreseeable future. However, AI does not need to "do everything" to replace many jobs. If AI working in conjunction with a doctor lets that doctor diagnose 200 patients a day by identifying and dealing with the simple cases that reduces the need for doctors. Similarly if AI TA's let a professor teach 1,000 students effectively that reduces the need for teaching staff etc.
This is the way technology works: jobs change to do the work that technology cannot do with the result that a single human can do far more. Robots on assembly lines have not completely replaced all human workers but the work that humans on assembly lines do has changed to cover jobs that robots are not good at and to oversee the robots to fix things when they go wrong. In this way a handful of humans can run an assembly line that used to require a small army. This is not a bad thing: it lets us be far more productive with our time. However, care does need to be taken to ensure that it is possible for people to adapt to the changing jobs market and that things do not change so fast that it causes too much disruption for society to cope with.
Handled correctly changes like this give us more leisure time and a higher standard of living. Handled badly they can lead to civil unrest and worse.
Okay so there's lots wrong with this line of thinking. First it's not AI is taking away jobs but automation. As we get machines to handle various jobs it lessens the workload on us.
Two retraining isn't going to help you too much. Being adaptable is a more important requirement. It doesn't guarantee you success but it allows you to adopt changing situations which gives you a better chance when the opportunity arrives. Too many folks refuse to adopt or change when the situation arises. I've gone from systems admin to call center rep to helpdesk to programmer and back again in less than a decade. Don't give up and adopt to life as it changes. Sounds easy but it's much harder than it seems.
Third, nothing is going to save us from this issue. Many folks mistakenly think that the US for example produces less in modern times. The reality is we actually produce more but require less people to do so. Economic output has never shrunk. So in order to keep the same workforce we need to consume more to keep up. Why else do we consume more resources and energy than any generation before it? It's to keep up with this issue but there's a problem, we're going to reach the point where the planet exhausts and can't keep up then our economies are going to crash.
In the long run, we need to switch to a society where you don't need a job to survive. It's the unfortunate only way otherwise society is going to implode. I've seen suggestions for the arts and or creativity as there's no limits on that.
In other news, political scientists have found that the policy preferences of the average American have zero influence on the outcomes of the US political system. Simply because most people want it does nothing the improve the chances of it actually happening.
Now shut up and read this memo.
I'd love to know which three quarters that was (if I had to guess, I'd say they were all under 30). Firstly, a lot of the reporting on this tech is pure hype, and secondly, people have a profound capacity to adapt. Yawn.
If most of the jobs are automated (i.e., if AIs destroy more jobs than they create) how will retaining help? The jobs aren't there no matter how you're trained.
The proposed option makes sense if the AIs change the nature of the available jobs, but not if they actually replace them.
FWIW, I expect the AIs to replace the jobs to a large extent, creating only a very few new jobs that only exist for a short period of time and require significant training. The jobs will need to be done, but they'll require enough background that very few who aren't already employed in a closely related area will be competent without LOTS of training. And half of them will be automated away by the next generation of AIs. It's not like we aren't talking about a moving target.
There's a real problem here, which already exists, but is getting worse. There are jobs that need to be done, but there are more people around that there are jobs that need to be done. However, in order to keep the people doing the essential jobs moderately satisfied, it's necessary to require that everyone either hold down a job or live in misery. And nobody who holds down a job is willing to admit that their job is unnecessary, so they make lots of waves that cause people to notice them working. The more important their job, the less they feel they need to make waves, but some people just like making others do things, so even if their job *is* important they're likely to do so.
The result is in increasingly coercive civilization, which only needs to be that way because it's the result of the way chosen to get the necessary jobs done. As more and more jobs become unnecessary, this process causes the civilization to become more coercive.
I wish I saw a way out of this before full automation, because it seems likely that even full automation won't get rid of the unnecessary coerciveness.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
for many people.
The whole point here is that AIs and AI-controlled systems will become more cost-effective than the median-intelligence, median-aptitude kind of person fairly soon.
Retraining won't help you, in general.
Unless it is training in political advocacy so you can get out and insist that politicians start seriously implementing universal basic income instead of boasting about "shovel-ready infrastructure projects". A wholesale shift of societal functioning and norms is going to be needed here.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
that's when you might want to start worrying.
Programmers don't tell AI programs what to do any more. They tell them "look at all this, and learn its structure, and start predicting based on it" ... and then maybe "act as you see fit given what you learned and classified and inferred and decided".
The programmer doesn't know what the AI knows, nor do they know in advance what patterns will be learned or what classification decisions made. The programmer, in AI applications going forward, won't have access to the input data in real time, nor will they be able to disentangle the internal state of the model being built by the AI, at least not in realtime.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
in AI-driven companies FTW.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Historically, disruptive economic shifts such as the Industrial Revolution **DO** create widespread job loss and suffering during the transition.
But.
On the other side of the transition, populations have always emerged **much** better off for their trouble.
History will likely repeat itself here. If we have a similar Computer and Information Revolution creating similar economic disruption, we should expect a lot of lost jobs to result. We should also expect new, better jobs to be created. But there will lag from one to the other, and it's really gonna suck for the generation caught in the middle.
with student loans having chapter 11 and 7 then the banks will have the power to drive down costs.
I think we should eliminate college requirements for most jobs and instead train people quickly in apprenticeships and through self study so that we can train people in a few months rather than years it takes for college. I can tell you we dont need to send people to college for 4 years to train computer programmers or whatever. In addition to this due to automation we will not need low skill labor any more and the remaining jobs will be in short supply. We should stop all immigration, period, end of story, Then we can retrain our own citizens to do these kinds of jobs.
Your post does not address any of the fears that are presented.
Arguing that some jobs will not be taken does not refute the idea that more jobs will be taken than created.
4,5, and 6 are easily automate-able since they mainly deal with transferring information.
I see an invalid argument that is also poorly supported.
How is your comment insightful?
...73% of children believe there's a monster living under their bed and want the Power Rangers to capture it.
Sheesh. Just because a lot of people (who couldn't tell AI from a hole in the ground) believe something doesn't make it true. And just because they want someone else to pay for their imagined fears doesn't make that a reasonable thing.
Hell, we elected Donald F**ing Trump as President. If that doesn't tell you fear the wisdom of crowds, nothing else will.
the problem is unless you have that 4 year degree you probably won't get a job interview.
Have jobs today that would not exist without AI. How many people use a computer or equivalent at work?
Given the high percentage of bullsh*t jobs and being able to bullsh*t other people practically a necessary job skill, AI would have to be programmed with the ability to bullsh*t humans in order to take their place. So far, AI hasn't passed that Turing test.
or poor folks in the rust belt and inner cities. Tell that to somebody who just isn't as sharp as you and I. You can't tell me you don't know folks who just don't 'get' computers. Hell, if it's that easy, what the hell are you doing on /.? Shouldn't you be out there making millions? Or could it be you're just blaming folks for their limitations because you don't want the guilt that comes with abandoning them to poverty?
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The primary purpose of a college education is to teach you what you should have learned in high school.Fix the high schools.Not gonna happen.
Only mention of that key term. Consider time divided into three categories:
(1) Essential time needed to create food, clothing, shelter and similar essential goods (and services) for survival. That time has been declining for a long time now. In an advanced society the average is on the order of an hour a week averaged over the population. There aren't many hunter-gatherer societies where everyone is working every waking hour just to survive.
(2) Investment time needed to improve future productivity. That's stuff like education and new infrastructure, but as essential time declines to extremely low levels, how much investment is needed?
(3) Recreational time divided into consumption and production. That's where the rest of the time can get soaked up, and we need to rethink along those lines.
However, I'm out of time just now, so I'll save the details for polite request...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
High school is only 4 years long. And there are foundations, such as mathematics, that are learned there, but a high school education should be considered incomplete for full entrenchment of a participant in our democracy. There is simply not enough time in high school to cover the number of great books that should be a mandatory part of education (ex: Homer, Herodotus, Euclid, Virgil, Chaucer, Newton, Hamilton & Madison, Lord Byron, Alexis de Tocqueville, Thoreau, Riemann, Charles Pierce, Nietzsche, and many others)
Now it should be criminal neglect perpetrated by our politicians and bureaucrats that we have people graduating from public high school that do not have an understanding of basic algebra, let alone trigonometry. They have read essentially nothing, none of the books I've listed. They are generally scientifically illiterate, to the degree that even a grasp of the purpose of the scientific method eludes them. And graduates failed to acquire the most important skill of all, the ability to teach themselves through research and reason.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire