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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...
Skynet will do the retraining.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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?
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?
As long as i get to be the sex toy.
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.
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.
"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.
Go ask a Chess or Go Master how many job offers they have received lately. Then come back and tell me the problem doesn't exist!
... 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.
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.
Without time or money, it's difficult to do it yourself.
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.
More importantly, Who is to say the automation is even coming from the same employer? If you make existing employers re-train everyone they lay off then you almost guarantee that new automation will come from new start ups that replace the existing employers.
You would be retrained by your new employer, not the employer replacing you.
How would your old employer possibly know what skills you new employer needs?
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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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 would like to eat fish that I catch myself......but industry has poisoned the water.
I would like to live on the beach....but landlords prohibit it.
I would like to collect my own firewood...but it is all privately owned or illegal to collect.
The days of being truly self-sufficient are gone. What are the concessions?
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
I ask that every time companies get tax breaks at the federal/state/local levels.
"What about the self-sufficiency? Why can't they take all those millions/billions and pay?"
I guess they do, to the politicians who hand them the tax breaks in the first place.
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.
Excellent idea. To make this possible, perhaps you should start a charity fund or government program so that people can perform their personal advancement rather than being shoehorned into an education system that doesn't provide the education they require.
Speaking of which, that's the same paradigm used after the United States civil war. They were fine with freeing all the slaves, but plopped the responsibility for making a living onto the freed slaves (when slaves in prior eras were given a useful parting gift when they were freed, these were simply dumped to the street with no assistance or past wages.)
You misunderstand the primary purpose of a college education.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
Did everyone just suddenly get stupid, lazy and unmotivated for some reason?
Yes. Obesity rates have tripled over the last generation. People eat more and do less.
We have no idea why this is happening. Most explanations are either wrong, or just restatements of the problem.
Examples of wrong explanations:
1. It is because of HFCS
2. It is because people watch more TV
3. It is because of computers and machines doing all the work.
4. Food is cheaper.
5. Portions are bigger.
1. is wrong because obesity rates have soared worldwide, and only Americans consume massive amounts of HFCS.
2. is wrong because TV became very widespread long before obesity rates soared.
3. Computer use is negatively correlated with obesity. The fattest use them the least.
4. Food prices fell long before obesity rates soared, and the poorest people, that can afford to eat the least, are the fattest.
5. Portions sizes increased after the obesity epidemic was well underway. It was a response to demand, not a cause.
Examples of restatements:
1. People are fatter because they eat more.
2. People are fatter because they are less active.
These are "duh" answers. Of course people eat more and are less active, but WHY did their behavior change so profoundly as to TRIPLE obesity rates?
We don't know why people are becoming fatter and lazier. It may be like violent anti-social behavior, where for decades there were many theories for why it was rising. Then we figure out that it was mostly because of environmental lead. Obesity and laziness may also be caused by some environmental pollutant, or it may be something unexpected.
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.
Yes, though I would also note, throughout human history, man learned from watching another man cripple themselves or die trying. We've created a world where success is so heavily looked favorably upon and the price of failure is so high, that it is a giant prisoner dilemma, going first is a fools errand. So no, I don't want to be left holding the bag for failure while someone rides my failure to their success, and no, I'm not interested in life ending mistakes.
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?
I dunno about you, but I HAVE worked jobs living paycheck to paycheck, yet still managed to make my way to getting a better job where that isn't the case.
Also, if you can't afford a family...fucking WAIT to have one till you can afford one.
Again...I'm living proof that this is NOT impossible to do...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Geez...when exactly did this "someone else do it for me" mentality hit the US with such full force and become so widespread?
What happened to self-suffiency?
As the average level of education has increased over the past 50+ years, the percentage of people who understand these problems has increased. So instead of childish notions of self-sufficiency, more people know greater social insurance programs are needed for average people to take levels of risk once only possible for the wealthy. These safety nets have allowed the greatest prosperity in our species' history, and they will need to be seriously strengthened if this prosperity is to continue.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Err...your premise is bad from the get-go.
A tax break is NOT a gift.
Remember, the money belongs first to the company who then pays taxes. It is the company's money in the first place, not the governments'.
They're getting to keep more of their money, it isn't the government giving them any type of GIFT or handout.
You think a tax break for the individual is a gift from the govt??
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
It will not happen. The ones that concentrate all the money on their persons will know how to prevent it. Could be another off-shoring wave, could be making sure to have a president that puts money first. The second state now only needs to be maintained. Basically around 80% of workers are screwed.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
Completely understandable. The only reasons you would do this is patriotism and caring about your fellow human beings. Both are not qualities usually required or expected from business owners these days. Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to insult you. I am just pointing out the mechanisms at work here. Of course, you cannot spend a lot of your business's money altruistically, if your competition does not do it too. That would just bankrupt you. And if you spend a little altruistically and your competition does not, that is not going to make any real difference.
As to personal advancement, that is not the root-cause of the problem. Sure, a lot of people today have not used most of the opportunities they had in life so far. A lot of potential employees seem just incredibly dumb, as you probably have noticed when hiring people. But that is not because they are lazy or do not care. That is because they literally have no clue what is important and what is not and are fundamentally confused by a world that grows more and more complex. It is also because people have rather hard limits with regards to what they can actually learn to do. Being limited in what you can do does not mean you do not have a right to eat or to find some happiness in your life. A purely humanitarian PoV is one thing that dictates this. The other thing is that any country where that does not happen is going to burn.
And we are most definitely going to see some countries burn in the next few decades for exactly this reason.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
That is, incidentally, what keeps a society functioning. Stop it and things go up in flames.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
...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.
Not a bot, but I do have to admit that one of my first thoughts was..."Why isn't anyone thinking the individual themselves might need to start thinking ahead and training themselves for different jobs"?
Geez...when exactly did this "someone else do it for me" mentality hit the US with such full force and become so widespread?
What happened to self-suffiency?
I think the 60's Great Society is where it started. The Great Depression programs were about creating jobs (ie you still worked). The Great Society stuff was money for nothing. Money for nothing always rots personal development plus creates a dependent class. That's where it started.
Throughout the history of man, to date minus a few decades, it's been possible to make a living without any particular skills. Some people managed to scrape up what money and determination they needed to improve their lot, and that's good. Some tried and failed, for reasons essentially beyond their control. Now, you're expecting everyone to muster that money and determination and luck.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Has it occurred to you that we all need the next generations? Somebody's going to have to do the work when you and I retire, and money isn't going to be worth anything when there's one nurse available to keep three hundred people's bottoms wiped. Many developed countries are having serious problems because of low fertility, and the ones who aren't typically use immigration to balance it.
People having families is vital to your interests. You really shouldn't discourage it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Services that aren't paid for do constitute a gift. If a company doesn't pay taxes, why should it be allowed to recruit from an educated work force, or use public roadways, or anything like that?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Wrong article. You do get chutzpah points for quoting the Onion as if it were real, though.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
A friend of mine used to play Chess, he got a call last WE because one player was sick.
On the other hand, your rant about Go and Chess masters and jobs make no sense.
Go and Chess masters are usually self employed ... and the world of games did not change with Go and Chess programs.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
Yes, but wage slaves have been around forever, and somehow people in the past found the time to do these things.
The difference is, they weren't fed a diet of distraction: Cell phone cat videos, angry facebook postings, television shows with dragons,
We move less. all the little movements that used to be required.
I moved to Japan in 1998, lived there three years. Yes, the portions were smaller, but I just dropped weight without trying, even factoring in drinking binges.
Because I rode a bike, because I walked to the bus, then walked to the train. Because walking four blocks was considered super easy. I had everyday movement that was necessary. Never took an elevator, took stairs like everyone.
While here, back in the US, people will literally get in their car and drive 50 feet in a parking lot to go to the next shop.
I think that little bit of non movement, coupled with non changing eating habits ( or worse, increasing portion sizes) combine to make people fat.
We move less. all the little movements that used to be required.
This is not supported by evidence. Cars, elevators, and escalators were common in the 1950s and 1960s, and did not lead to obesity.
Obesity has risen the most in rural areas where motion reducing conveniences have had the least impact.
Those people today are called "YouTubers".....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I didn't say "don't have them"...I said don't have them TILL you are ready.
That means either ready fiscally...or ready to sacrifice some of your personal growth, and sacrifice not having the latest shiny..so that you can spend that money raising your kids properly.
My parents did the latter.....they forwent a LOT of the nicer things in life, so they could raise me, school, clothe and feed me.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
So, you also consider it a "gift" to the individual that gets a tax break based on same reasoning?
You do know the govt is there FOR the citizens (and citizens own companies)....not the other way around.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The Democrats happened. Everyone saw the blacks at the State of the Union sit there like stones when it was announced that their people are doing better than ever. Why would they want people to help themselves? They'd be out of a job.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
What do you mean without time or money? What is this, a work house in 1800's England?
There are two types of people in the U.S.
1) People who make ends meet by using the tons of money they have mindlessly or the pittance of money they have sparingly through careful planning and budgeting.
2) People who don't make ends meet and run themselves into the ground slowly and lose interest in ever getting out again.
Either of these groups of people will find a way to spend $50 one a book, $20 on a website training subscription, etc...
As for time... there are 24 hours in the day. That's 12 for work, 5-6 for sleep and the rest is for eating and learning. There's also weekends. It's 8:00am on a Saturday and I'm going to the office to sit and read a book on programming. I'll have a date with the wife this evening and hang with the kids a few hours during the day, but then I'll go back to work and study some more.
See this is what people do who don't watch TV. We live and make our lives better.
Money... I've living in both the cases listed above... and I am well off now. I got there by using the little spare time I had to open a book and learn.
And as for difficult to do it yourself... bullshit. It's called discipline. That's the difficult part. Discipline says that if you have to lose 3-4 more hours of sleep or 3-4 hours watching the idiot box a week to learn something, you suck it up and do it. If you can't... no one else can do it for you.
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.
Different questions. You were talking about companies that move where they get the best tax breaks, and these typically involve taking a loss on having the company around. You and I and quite a few millions like us make up a main revenue source, and the government isn't going to charge us below cost for what services we use.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
When are people going to be ready? (At least close - I don't think anyone makes an informed choice to have a first child. I'm not as sure about later children.) Increasingly, this is after prime physical childbearing age.
And I see that you are indeed encouraging others to sacrifice to your benefit.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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