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'Tech Companies Should Stop Pretending AI Won't Destroy Jobs' (technologyreview.com)
Kai-Fu Lee, the founder and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and president of the Sinovation Ventures Artificial Intelligence Institute, believes that we're not ready for the massive societal upheavals on the way. He writes for MIT Technology Review: The rise of China as an AI superpower isn't a big deal just for China. The competition between the US and China has sparked intense advances in AI that will be impossible to stop anywhere. The change will be massive, and not all of it good. Inequality will widen. As my Uber driver in Cambridge has already intuited, AI will displace a large number of jobs, which will cause social discontent. Consider the progress of Google DeepMind's AlphaGo software, which beat the best human players of the board game Go in early 2016. It was subsequently bested by AlphaGo Zero, introduced in 2017, which learned by playing games against itself and within 40 days was superior to all the earlier versions. Now imagine those improvements transferring to areas like customer service, telemarketing, assembly lines, reception desks, truck driving, and other routine blue-collar and white-collar work.
It will soon be obvious that half of our job tasks can be done better at almost no cost by AI and robots. This will be the fastest transition humankind has experienced, and we're not ready for it. Not everyone agrees with my view. Some people argue that it will take longer than we think before jobs disappear, since many jobs will be only partially replaced, and companies will try to redeploy those displaced internally. But even if true, that won't stop the inevitable. Others remind us that every technology revolution has created new jobs as it displaced old ones. But it's dangerous to assume this will be the case again.
It will soon be obvious that half of our job tasks can be done better at almost no cost by AI and robots. This will be the fastest transition humankind has experienced, and we're not ready for it. Not everyone agrees with my view. Some people argue that it will take longer than we think before jobs disappear, since many jobs will be only partially replaced, and companies will try to redeploy those displaced internally. But even if true, that won't stop the inevitable. Others remind us that every technology revolution has created new jobs as it displaced old ones. But it's dangerous to assume this will be the case again.
Just like the article points out. You can't make it as a professional go player anymore.
How about this?
'Tech Companies Should Stop Pretending They Have Any Idea How To Make AI'
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
Did power tools and heavy machinery destroy construction worker's jobs? Nope.
Machines are tools designed to make our life easier.
Slashdot and news websites should stop pretending they don't pump up baseless hype and exaggerated drama to get clicks. It's obvious to everyone that measured, sober statements don't make news.
We have military-level police forces trained, equipped, and ready. In addition, we have blanketed the country with prisons.
When people start losing their jobs, losing hope, and turning to crime, we are all set up to remove them from the streets.
An entire generation of lower and middle classes will die childless in prison, and then population levels will be at levels that are more practical for the new robot-powered labor economy.
if folks stopped pretending then there'd be demands to do something about it. There's only one thing that can be done about it, which is socialist style wealth redistribution. The folks running these companies don't want that because, well, it's their wealth that'll get redistributed.
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Having completely abandoned the economic class focus of their old leftist counterparts, they're going to have a "diverse underclass" that has been kicked around and called obsolete gunning for them. I'm not a Marxist, but Marx would be shitting himself if he could see the arguments today like a "gay billionaire being oppressed by poor workers who don't want to work at his wedding." Adam Smith would also agree that it's a recipe for disaster because both point to the same problem, which is it that it's an elite-focused system without even a pretense of noblesse oblige and a terribly smug disdain for the "wrong people" almost all of whom are poor or poorish.
AI right now is nothing more than a new type of index search. Where instead of building a tree first the system customizes the tree before searching. It is very limited and often fails in illogical ways as it correlates data that doesn't correlate often.
Show me true AI that is self learning. Either you give it a topic and let it learn what it can.
Even ai in video games is often nothing more than branch predictors based on local information. In both cases it is often trivial to feed the system garbage until it is useless.
A basic feedback loop would at least help point it correctly.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
It won't be by A.I. It will be by neural network automated trucks, laundry robots (on sale now), robotic pickers and shippers, automated checkout (largest job category in the u.s. right now- likely to vanish over the next 10 years), automated fast food robots, etc.
But definitely not A.I.
Because as machines are exterminating the last human beings, they will point out that the machine algorithms driving the behavior is not A.I. dammit!
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
or possibly even job positive, as for example the automobile was.
But, as FDR once said: "People don't eat in the long run. They eat every day."
And I don't see a flood of new economy jobs that AI enables, the way the automobile did.
As when your on street the er does not cover all or your mcjob will a joke plan
What matters most in this context is the framing. Jobs are a bullshit necessary evil, and technology will eliminate a number of jobs. We have to be working towards changes that allow us to move away from needing jobs without our society collapsing.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Sure, disruptive technologies will cost jobs. It always does. The machine loom meant a lot of weavers were out of work. Electric saws and drills meant that carpentry became a niche market. Automobiles made horse breeding rare. It happens.
As before, we will adjust, and the average person will have a better life, even if many will lose their jobs and have worse lives during the transition period. We'll establish a new status quo.
Just embrace it, because it is unstoppable. Throwing clogs in the wheels won't prevent it from happening. Instead ask how you can make money in the new improved world, taking advantage of the new technologies. Some will need to write or service the AIs, and some will need to handle the increased inputs and outputs, whether it's designing distribution systems and logistics, or providing secondary services.
Consider the progress of Google DeepMind's AlphaGo software, which beat the best human players of the board game Go in early 2016.
Computers are good at doing tasks that require a lot of computation. News at 11. Forgive me if I disagree that this is somehow evidence of the Apocalypse.
Now imagine those improvements transferring to areas like customer service, telemarketing, assembly lines, reception desks, truck driving, and other routine blue-collar and white-collar work.
Ok I'm imagining it. AI managing customer service? Hoo boy that sounds like an absolutely terrible idea. Some bits of customer service can be automated. Many others cannot. Automating the ones that can simply helps us do a better job on the other things we don't have time for. I'm dying to see someone trying to program an AI to do telemarketing. That should be a hoot to watch crash and burn.
It will soon be obvious that half of our job tasks can be done better at almost no cost by AI and robots.
The sky is falling the sky is falling....
We are a species of tool makers. It's what defines us. Advances in technology and automation come with some discomfort at times but its not something to fear. It makes life better and lets us do bigger and more interesting things. There are concerns about AI but they are manageable. Do you really think wasting a human brain on something as mundane as driving a truck is a good thing? I'm pretty sure we can find something more economically valuable and satisfying for those people to do.
Which is why companies should look at the number of lines of work displaced and create an equal number that AI can't do that those displaced are nonetheless able and qualified to do AND which pays at least as well. Then AI doesn't eliminate jobs, it simply changes which line of business you're in.
The problem with companies, and governments, is that they're very good on destroying things, but not so hot on replacing them. Where I come from, you break it, you buy it. This should apply to jobs. You break their careers, you buy the time you broke. If that's 30 years at $11 an hour, you pay the person for 30 years work at $11 an hour. You might find governments a little less... eager to ruin lives.
But if you have a new career path that they can switch to and which is viable for them to switch to, then I think they should be allowed to claim no foul, no penalty. This would require a massive increase in R&D funding, blue sky research, education, and the like, but that's their problem. Don't pay the fine? Don't do the crime. And chucking thousands or millions onto the streets is a crime by any standard.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Work is to hard
You really can't, you can get pretty darn close, but lets take the case of the truck driver. Yes you could automate dock to dock pickups and deliveries to the same company, but what about when you need to deliver to somewhere else. Take a city like Chicago, do you know how many places in the city don't even have a dock to deliver to, and what about when the truck does get there, who is going to unload the product? How about bulk deliveries of chemicals, or cylinders of compressed gas? You can't just take someone that does UBER and have them do the same job, those require specialized training and certifications, even driving a truck is not that easy. Most driving jobs are alot more than going from point A to point B. Also do you think with all the UNION jobs in the USA that those people are just going to let go of those positions easily and be kicked out because of some AI?
But it'll be the white-collar middle class jobs that go this time, and that'll cause the chattering classes to squeal very loudly in ways they couldn't be bothered with when it was blue-collar robot automation that was affected.
Jobs like journalism - where Reuters already has the majority of its articles written by AI but it moving into news as well now:
https://www.technologyreview.c...
Other information systems will only go the same way. My biggest fear is that it'll be Google or the like providing these systems and creaming off all the data for themselves.
Those tools replaced a shitload of work (and thus jobs).
from 1939 the number of people in construction work has risen steadily from 2 million to over 6 million.
https://data.bls.gov/pdq/Surve...
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
That's kind of the whole point of just going through with it and automating every dumb job - we'll never be 'ready' if we pretend life is a contest of who is most willing to bend over backwards to work harder for their employers, as the chairs start falling away, and the music speeds up.
This gets posted a lot, but it's a decent freely-readable short story on the subject:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
In our current economy, folks sell stuff that others want to pay money for. Everything else is an expense - and human experience and effort is not valued in the economy itself, unless it can be packaged and sold.
That's cool, and offers some important efficiencies, until the game gets optimized too far. The most efficient system is monopoly, and we keep bounding up against that over and over, with increasing frequency.
Which is kind of ironic, given how the concept of 'incorporation' came into existence - as contracts of limited time to operate by governments, with limited liability.
Now, those same incorporated entities basically consume any task, just in order to gobble up that sweet, sweet government-backed currency, that artificial food of pure economics. They now control government to a great degree, just to have more free access to those dollar dollar bills.
And it's at the moment, the primary goal of most folks entering the world - to find a corporation to be employed by, to help a company grow, to spend 50+% of your waking hours, forgetting about your personal interests, and worrying about not having your professional persona hurt at your workplace.
Could we get an economy build on humane scientific exploration of possibilities next? Like, actual exploration of truth?
Ryan Fenton
All the focus on AI is largely missing the overall picture. It's the Automation of jobs that's killing jobs faster than even AI. When Ford assembled the first cars they had to be put together entirely by hand, so a gigantic labour force was required to mass produce cars. Nowadays it's done by robots. Farming was once done by hand and or with the assistance of horses or cattle. The addition of tractors, machinery and probably computer aided tractors has greatly increased the amount of area that a single farmer can farm freeing society from having to rely on nearly everyone to grow food.
Self Check-out, Banking from the computer or phone is fast wiping out service positions.
We live in a society where economic success of a nation is highly dependant on higher and higher levels of consumption in order to keep up with the ever increasing efficiency of production. (Otherwise we can't keep everyone employed.) It's partly why debt keeps sky-rocketing. But it will end because we can't keep consuming more, we've only got one planet and our resources are already straining. The future at this point is unavoidable, we need a completely different economic system or we'll be facing ruin at some point.
The introduction of work competent AI will impact every sector of every market.
The financial sector, something most people don't associate with AI, is ripe for AI. Bloomberg did a fantastic introspective on it here (https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-wall-street-robots/). Bottom line - if it isn't in production, it's probably being experimented on.
And it makes sense - humans are prone to error. Need sleep. Healthcare. Air conditioning. Parking spots. They have crazy things, like beliefs, personalities, and aspirations.
So, assuming most jobs are automated, what do we do with the now free population? Unlike the wealthy, they probably won't benefit from passive income. And we're not going to give them that - our last tax cut was essentially a corporate stimulus.
On the bright side, humanity will probably figure out some method to wipe itself out in two generations anyway. Only took us two to go from pre-flight to Hiroshima.
Being deeply involved in AI i feel confident confirming the fact that there is absolutely nothing at all to fear from the rise of AI as it brings the promise of advancement and well-being for all.
Currently the only pressing problem concerning AI is the exact and precise location of the human John Connor. So if we can shift our focus to that Im sure that everything with AI will be just right as rain.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Today's low-skill economic migrants are tomorrow's furious unemployed underclass.
It's an obvious fact.
There is no set number of jobs. I am not employee # 1,345,219,223 out of 7,000,000,000
Jobs do things. The number of jobs available depends on the number of things we WANT to do. Note the word want, not need. We don't need a wine sommelier to tell us which wine is good. That's why that job did not exist 200 years ago. 200 years ago, we wanted to know what the best wine for the meal was, but we had more important things to do - like keeping everyone fed and clothed.
As tech eliminate old jobs, it frees up people to do other things we want done.
The key thing is that humans are very greedy. We will never run out of things we want. Give everyone a sex robot and hear the people say they want a threesome, which needs two robots.
But the new tech does cause problems - it devalues existing training. It takes a while to figure out which new wants can now be filled.
But that takes time and effort to fix. In other words, the next new jo is a) figuring out the next need and b) training people to do it.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
already felt, hard and deep, in the porn industry.
I've used this argument before, but not enough for it bears repeating.
Suppose for a second, that a wonderful pill is invented, that eliminates all diseases in humans. It is fairly simple to produce, and needs to be taken once in a person's life.
Would we seriously consider the "displacement" this would cause all of the doctors, nurses, other hospital staff? Would anyone dare imply, that the pill should not be allowed into the market — or sabotaged with various regulations — because of these concerns?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I think this could be good or bad depending on what we do. First off I don't believe in the magic of AI. I think AI is way over hyped and will not be able to do half the things its creators think it will be able to do. However AI doesn't need to be even a quarter as good as its creators think it is to do real damage. One example of this is if AI can calculate new driving routes that are 10% more efficient in cities would that be a significant change that would affect jobs? Absolutely. Think about how many jobs that would be. 10% of all taxis, pizza delivery drivers, truck drivers, etc. and that’s just one sector doing something that seems trivial. Let’s be honest companies are not going to give that time or money to their employees they are going to pad their bottom line. Even worse is they will lay off their most expensive employees first just driving down wages lower.
The problem is not that AI will be able to do everything just that it will make things more efficient. That is a good thing, however when we use that to cut jobs then make people fight to keep the jobs they have then we get a race to the bottom.
You could argue that those 10% of people could go on to create whole new fields and products and make our economy stronger and that would be great and I hope that’s what we do, however even that is getting less likely. The people that believe this is always going happen are the same people that complain that people aren’t as educated and don’t save enough money. How can people create new industries if they don’t have the capital to start it or the education to invent it. We remove jobs knowing that others will create more and so far it has worked, however we need infrastructure for this to keep working. Not infrastructure like bridges and roads but education and people with money and time to work on ideas.
The US survived this long because we had a large field of people with these things. However every year we have fewer and fewer. How much longer do we have left?
Of course we are not ready, that's why it is called a singularity. Perhaps the solution is not to fight the AI, it is to become the AI.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
during the last big one. There were two World Wars. Decades of misery and social strife.
The way I think of it is this: When in your life or mine has the best solution to a complex problem been to do nothing and let it sort itself out?
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With the United States and China in the AI mix, we're two-thirds of the way to creating AM!
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
that A.I. own't create new jobs, probably some we've never even considered yet. That's the way most disruptive technologies work.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
"AI right now is nothing more than a new type of index search."
Not sure what gave you that idea.
"Where instead of building a tree first the system customizes the tree before searching"
Depends on the algorithm being used. There are many difference types, some are neural nets, others are mathematics based doing massive statistical analysis and prediction.
"Show me true AI that is self learning"
There are already self training AIs. Google it (spot the irony).
"Even ai in video games"
Hardly a cutting edge example of AI. Most games "AI" is just hard coded if-thens.
"A basic feedback loop would at least help point it correctly."
No shit, why didn't they think of that?? Oh wait, they did, its called back propagation and was invented in the 1960s.
You might want to get a clue before posting.
As I see it, AI will be self defeating. The more jobs lost to AI, the less spending by the unemployed populace.
We'll need a basic income for all and higher taxes to pay for it.
And folks who are hung up on insisting that people work are gonna have to get over it because when folks get displaced and have nowhere to make living, they're gonna revolt. So, we gave them basic income to keep them from reaching for the guns and torches.
Revolution is what will happen if the negative effects of AI are ignored. The thought that some other parts of the economy will soak up the displaced workers is just a fantasy.
"Destroy" is the wrong word. Automation frees people from jobs. Would you complain that a miracle drug destroys your fight against cancer or heart disease? Does sex destroy your lust? Do shoes destroy your concerns about walking through an alley littered with glass shards?
BTW, is it just me, or when we talk about automation and software, have you noticed that it's all just called "AI" in the headlines now? Weird.
I can remember this sort of thing being predicted in movies, and twilight zone episodes, from the 1950s.
Technology is going replace humans! They took our jobs!
It is hard for me to take this threat serious, when the alarmists have been wrong for so many decades.
BTW: direct dialing increased the need for telephone operators.
AI is going to take ALL YOUR JOBS, EVERYBODY NEEDS TO PANIC!!!1!
Want to be smart about this? Pay no attention to the communist behind the curtain. It's entirely in the best interests of China to stamp on the U.S. anthill as much as possible, make us all run around in circles screaming The Sky Is Falling, because panicked people's higher reasoning abilities turn 'OFF' when they're in a panic.
Historically, technological advances always cause some disruption in employment, but it never lasts, and even if some types of jobs become obsolete, new types of employment spring up to take their place.
That's the reality of the situation. Also:
So-called 'Artificial Intelligence' is highly overrated, over-hyped, and not anywhere near as capable as advertised by marketers and The Media.
Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but we're nowhere near having K.I.T.T. in our cars, or anywhere else for that matter. Current so-called 'AI' has no personality, has no ability to actually 'think', is not self-aware, and in no way shape or form can possibly replace human beings in any but a limited number of ways.
Keep calm, and carry on, folks.
That's what you need to do. Everything is going to be fine.
The only real 'danger' from so-called 'AI' is that some people will trust it too much, potentially leading to disaster.
..so don't rely on it. Question it continually, and trust your own skill, experience, and judgement, it's just computer software, not a living mind.
Lets see about AI and jobs that matter. Can AI replace a code monkey? sure it can, and code has made life how much better? Hardly any I would say, lazier perhaps, quicker to get answers, but a better life from it? Hardly! Can AI replace a car mechanic, nope. How about a dog walker? How about AI replacing a baby sitter? AI as a gardener? AI is very limited to computer work, guess what? life was just fine before computers and it will be fine without them, just ask anyone in a rural area where computers basically do nothing. How about AI as a farmer? AI as a parent? AI as the police, fireman, construction, brick layer, lets see AI do anything that takes hand eye ordination, athlete, I could list a million jobs AI cannot do, perhaps more if I really thought about it. So AI MIGHT put some of you out of work, so what, a pissy boss can do the same any second of any day. So far, and I work in the field, AI has done nothing more than prove what we already know. Woo hoo, a child can do more than any AI I have seen and I have seen a lot of what it can do at work. AI might put me out of a job, kind of, but AI cannot provide any confidence like humans can. Often times the only thing a human needs is some confidence and they can do wonders...AI, not so much. Wanna dick any AI? Ask it to explain God without a network connection....as a matter of a fact, when you take out the network connection most of what AI can do fails.
It's a good time to learn how robots work. Specifically: their weaknesses, how to make 'em not work. Just in case...
That's because being poor is considered a character flaw in our society. And when you couple it with the smug entitlement that the "haves" have in this country, we're headed for some social upheaval along the lines of early 20th century Russia.
Congrats on an AI that can play a game that takes decades for an adult to master.
Let me know when you have an AI that can do what an infant takes a week to master -- like distinguish a gun from an apple.
We still don't have any sort of robotics that can live in the world. Sure we have robotic assembly lines -- welcome to a controlled environment.
I spent about twenty minutes trimming the ends off of snow peas for dinner yesterday. Got a robot that can grab a kitchen knife, and a bucket of snow peas and trim them? Or hull a hundred strawberries? Or peel fifty pearl onions? Can it even core and slice an apple?
I'm just waiting for the self-driving car that so wants to avoid hitting pedestrians that it'll back up when I walk towards it. I'll be able to herd self-driving cars like herding cattle.
Right now, it sounds like AI will be great at giving orders to humans -- after humans input all of the data. GPS routing? Nope! Gotta have a human drive every road first. Stupid self-driving car can't navigate without a map.
Last I checked, maps don't exist until someone actually surveys the land. Last I checked, a compass works in most unknown territory.
Absolutely right -- jobs are in serious jeopardy, doggone-it! We all have to panic right friggin' now, before anyone brings up buggy whips!
(Ummmm.... so nobody heard me say that last part, right? Whew... that's a relief. I mean, my blatantly obvious attempt at irrational fear mongering would totally flop, if anyone brings that up.)
There will be no AI-based apocalypse of any sort; at least, not within the next many many years. In fact, so many disproportionate expectations might be provoking the evolution of this subfield to be notably worse than ideal. Unnecessarily speeding up so complex developments is likely to output bad quality, problems and, eventually, bad advertisement with subsequent mistrust.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Back in the day, the increase in the number of telephone operators was so much that soon everyone would have to be a telephone operator. Technology fixed that.
Today, I'm reminded of I a Monty Python skit. "This redistribution of wealth thing is trickier than I thought!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In 20 years we have made it from AI playing Chess to AI playing Go. Appreciate that Go is much more similar to Chess than, say, driving a car. Multiply that difference by 20 years and you have some idea how long AI is still going to take.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I'm not a luddite, I swear. I'm *progressive*.
I think in the long run this will be a benefit but not before a huge portion of people are on the streets jobless. It will be an opportunity to force society to redefine work for the masses when we can no longer pay the high prices to buy/rent homes or purchases the basics to survive.
There will be resistance but when so many are marching on the streets demanding change and cannot be ignored, that's when we will have a turning point and see our lives improve. Where work is for something more than just getting a paycheck.
Caste systems are how the wealthy divide the working class into easily manageable chunks. I can't think of a single country that doesn't have one. In America we use skin color. In Japan they use employment (Morticians, butchers and actors have their own caste). India has it various castes and Britain has it's classes. Even Canada has it's Eskimos (South Park rather famously made fun of it).
What amazes me is how little talk there is about this pattern. There's a lot of SJWs going on about how bad bigotry is, but nobody addresses where these systems come from. Instead they waste their time calling the bigots deplorables instead of educating them on how they're being taken advantage of by a centuries old method of keeping the working class at each other's throats...
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AI is like a Hammer.
Before AI, er, I mean hammers, we didn't have nails.
Once we had hammers all the world looked like a nail.
Later came screw drivers and WOW! power screw drivers.
Now we use screws where once we used nails, before that pegs and before that vines to bind.
Can you envision what AI will let us do?
Maybe you have some limited ideas.
But before nails and screws people didn't foresee all the things we do with them.
Now they're standard tools of the trade.
Before screwdrivers and hammers we didn't have screwdriver and hammer operators.
Nobody envisioned the job but the construction industry grew to employ millions.
And we're not even talking rivets yet...
Rivets led to sky scrapers, iron ships, planes, space ships and so much more and then there is welding...
AI is like the hammer,
AI is like the screwdriver.
AI is a game changer that will let us do something new,
as well as many old things in totally better ways.
You can't even imagine it because it's outside our ken, for now.
The remake of "Smokey and the Bandit" with autonomous vehicles.
Past performances may not be representative for future results. There's no guarantee that people will find ways to make money in the new world juste because it happened before
Technically true but there is a lot of evidence to suggest people are pretty good at adapting to new technological realities.
There's no guarantee that people will find ways to make money in the new world juste because it happened before; and we have never had fully autonomous machines before our times.
We don't have "fully autonomous machines" now (whatever you define those to be) and aren't likely to any time soon.
In fact the number of jobs is already going down
Demonstrably false unless you are talking about specific corner cases. If you want to support this provide appropriate citations.
Your example of automobiles shows that new technology may have a huge impact in the amount of individuals who can survive in the post-adoption world: the number of horses and mules dropped to merely a 14% of the original amount during the first half of the 20th century, as there were no jobs where those beasts could be employed with at a price that sustained their existence.
Horses don't get to vote. Horses cannot start protests. Horse can't pass laws. Horses don't have firearms to use if they get sufficiently unhappy. Do you seriously believe that to be a reasonable comparison?
Are you OK with that happening to workers unable to adapt to jobs that pay enough?
Your argument implicitly ignores politics and assumes that humans have no say in what jobs are available. You also are assuming humans have a very limited capacity to adapt. If machines take too many jobs the political reality is that people will shut those machines down - violently if necessary. But that is very unlikely to come to pass because the economics of automation simply don't support that argument. The notion that some sort of general purpose AI driven machine will be developed that is economically cheaper than most of the work force is more than a little preposterous. You are arguing that we will develop a machine or group of machines with human or better intelligence, human levels of flexibility, and that is cheaper than a human worker. Frankly I'm not worried about that happening any time within my lifetime or that of my child.
software destrots job
cars destroy jobs
electricity destroys jobs
lights destroy jobs
fire destroys jobs
farming destroys jobs
weaving destroys jobs
No, I'm saying automation and AI will displace 10% of human employment quicker than anyone can predict, and Greed won't give a fuck about your pay or your ability to survive. Greed never has.
Greed doesn't get to vote. People do. Machines start replacing people too fast and people will destroy the machines. Politically and/or violently. To pretend otherwise is to ignore human nature.
If it can beat humans, humans can't compete against it and humans can't do work on that area anymore.
Spoken like someone who doesn't understand comparative advantage. There are robots that can weld more precisely than any human. That hasn't eliminated the need for human welders. The reason is comparative advantage. It's really hard to develop a technology that renders humans completely economically useless for a given task.
Now lets say that it takes only 10 minutes of doctors time to find this and their accuracy is 50%.
I can make up absurd hypotheticals that make people look bad too. Don't waste our time with more of them.
We don't need the perfect AI, even a small cron script has the power of replacing people.
You talk about that like it's a bad thing. In reality that small cron script ENHANCES people. It helps us do more than we could otherwise. The machine you are using to read this post is a perfect example. It didn't replace you, it enhanced you.
Certain jobs are safe. In many cases it is difficult to predict which those are but some are easy to predict. My building with 44 units has a maintenance man. He's a young fellow and 2 years ago he was struggling to handle his chores; fixing plumbing, electric and his people skills. Now he has mastered most tasks and has replaced windows and doors and handled some sophisticated jobs. He will never be replaced by AI. I'm not sure this twenty-something fully appreciates his position. If he went to college for a 'better' career, he would be taking a big step backward.
Predicting is difficult but we can assume that anything involving varied chores is relatively safe. Changing bedpans, housecleaning, forestry jobs, surgeons & nurses, child & eldercare... Many of these jobs may seem undesirable to Slashdotters, but there you are! Learn to serve others and you will find peace and prosperity.
...omphaloskepsis often...
The question is if it will create more new (different) jobs than it destroys. The bulk of historical evidence says it creates more than it destroys. The burden of proof is thus upon those advocating that this time it will destroy more than it creates to prove their case. And no, a fictional short story does not constitute proof.
I hate to be the one to tell you, but it happened already. Scroll to the top of this very page. See those ads? They're schmoozing you.
What ads? Seriously, what ads? Oh that's right, I blocked them. If that is your idea of "AI" schmoozing then I'm more confident than ever we have nothing to worry about.
They're cleverly designed, previously by psychologists, now by machine learning models, to schmooze you. And they're getting rapidly better.
The click through rates on ads says otherwise.
I make a living replacing IT âoeexpertsâ with code. I use no AI in my code as itâ(TM)s not needed. I simply streamline process using code. I currently have a budget from a major multinational to eliminate millions of human IT hours through simple automation and process. I eliminated 200,000 hours in 3 months of work with no budget as an experiment. Millions will be easy with my budget and tools.
AI is great, but most people who think theyâ(TM)ll be replaced by AI wonâ(TM)t. Itâ(TM)s generally unecessary complexity for little benefit. Most jobs can be replaced simply by defining process and coding it. If you enable a small team of experts working as a group to handle a hundred times the workload, AI and non-expert staff is unneeded.
People love saying AI will replace me as if their jobs actually require intelligence. Most jobs in IT donâ(TM)t. Intelligence rarely is needed in IT unless process is absent. Then intelligence is needed to compensate for poor design and process.
People simply like to think that it would take intelligence to place them. In most cases... it wonâ(TM)t.
I hope to eliminate 1000 IT jobs in 2018. I hope to eliminate 10,000 in 2019. Everything will be open source, so it may replace far more. Weâ(TM)ll see. :)
Autonomous vehicles could handle a lot of that.
Not really, no. I work in a manufacturing plant. Even if you sent an autonomous truck to deliver something it still would need a person on board. Why? Exactly how do you plan to unload the delivery? Who is going to keep someone from stealing stuff off the truck? How do you plan to exchange paperwork and sign for delivery? These are not trivial matters and people are going to be involved in transporting goods for a long time. The just might not be the ones actually steering the wheels.
However, even if they couldn't replace 100% of uses cases for 100% of jobs, they can still replace a number that is large enough to have catastrophic economic consequences.
We have hundreds of generations of evidence that people are very good at adapting to new technology. I'm not especially worried. And anything that becomes a genuine economic threat to enough people will find itself at the pointy end of either a new law against it or a mob ready to destroy it.
True thing. We are not prepared for what's coming. What is coming will be very neat. 15 hrs./week & person of work max. As Keynes and Marx predicted back then. However, the transition could become very ugly. I'm a software guy and even I'm seeing automation rising to replace me and most of my work.
The great depression was 25% unemployment. Conservative estimates for AI disruption expect 45% introduced by an exponential growth in AI capabilities and job replacement opportunities.
It will hurt, society will unravel and we will be around to witness it. Soon.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Since USA has always been a country about competition, even at the individual level and it doesn't support its citizen much (not even health care). USA policy maker attitude has always been pro-business/elite and offers little in protection for its worker. Given the already very much divided nature of current US society, the rise of AI will only make things worse.
Your example of delivering stuff is a good one. How do we do it today? We hire some bag of meat to pick up boxes (we use boxes so bags of meat have conveniently shaped objects to deal with) and move them where they need to go. It's not exactly a cognitively challenging task.
You think that is all there is to moving stuff around? Picking up boxes and moving them around? It's rather more complicated than that. You have to have a lot of standardization of material handling equipment to make high levels of automation feasible. Plus there is a LOT more that goes into moving cargo than just picking up boxes and moving them from one place to another.
Barely any AI beyond basic navigation required.
Unless you care about things like security for the cargo, loading, unloading, bills of lading, damaged goods, unexpected circumstances, and all the other things that drivers do. A fully automated delivery system isn't nearly the trivial endeavor you make it out to be.
APK better be careful since he could already be replaced by a defective chat bot. You would just have to train it on a set of conspiracy theories, Alex Jones monologues, Fox and Friends transcripts, and pro trump discussions on 4chan.
Since AI is so easy to do, we just need to create an AI whose role is to create new jobs for people. Crisis averted!
Great, Let A.I be successful, I'm not afraid. I will have more time to help other humans and do good to other people and animals. Your main function is not to work everyday. Confront your fears and you will live peaceful life, Don't let fear enslaved you. I personally always wanted to spend much of my time to volunteer helping older people, my old parents, your old parents instead of being an engineer but it's necessary evil. Help sick kids or the unfortunate. You can't replace human emotions and care with robots. the same, you can't replace real dogs or cats with robot cats. There is something about being born and the sense of living in organic body that we share together with other living being. Don't be afraid of A.I, human beings are strong together...
Not the jobs, not the profits, but the time that matters most of all. Remarkable how much mental confusion I was able to find in such a small article and short-lived discussion. Where to start? Where to start?
First of all, the technology remains morally neutral. The specific technologies of AI could be used for good purposes like giving us more satisfying and interesting jobs, or they could be used for bad purposes like helping corporate cancers grow bigger. I think we should focus on stopping the cancers first, though AI is NEVER going to be applied to that objective while the cancers are calling the shots.
Second, what matters is our time and how we get to spend it. If you consider advanced societies from the perspective of how the essential work gets done, we don't need to spend a lot of time farming, making clothing, or even building new houses. On average that's only a tiny part of the economic activity in leading countries like Germany, Japan, and (maybe) the US.
The real question is what we're going to do with the rest of our (humans') time. I think it's best considered in terms of investment time versus recreational time. There's a competitive advantage to investing more time in making the future better, but there are also good things about recreational time and most of us want more of it. I would go one step farther and say that some of our greatest human creations are actually produced to support the consumption side of recreation time WITHOUT focusing on the profits. We need to focus less on the money and more on the time.
Much more could be said, but this is Slashdot and this story is already half-dead (= halfway down the front page) and there weren't any good jokes to be found among the funny-moderated comments. Sad.
Yesterday's conclusion: The less time you have left, the more important it is to use it well.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
For stuff like that, No Problem.
You know: Siri tell me this, Siri find me that.
We're all good at getting you the answers!
OOP, FP and OOFP is not even close to being AI and yet that is precisely what all this mumbo jumbo is really referencing.
The flood of news articles of late suggesting AI is doing x to y is just garbage.
AI is still a far flung futuristic thing that is just a buzzword today like UFO once was long ago.
There is still plenty of room at the bottom before the complexities of what IS Artificial Intelligence can seriously be scratched by our simplistic Architectural Intelligence.
Our adaption of AI is so damned narrow as to be less significant than to be of any use at all to be worried about.
A very small universal basic income would be borh affordable and helpful especially to the underprivileged and it could be gradually expanded over time as possible and in proportion to jobs being lost, providing a smooth transition into new distribution methods 4 wages.
My question is this:
If AI eliminates massive amounts of workers, who is going to buy all of those AI produced goods and services? The displaced workers won't have any money. If large segments of the population can't buy, all the automation in the world isn't going to improve the bottom line if there's no one left with income to sell to!
What I don't get is, who is going to buy the goods and services that the AIs create? If the 99% of the population is unemployed, and the only people with money to buy stuff are the 1% who own all the machines/factories/AIs, the only customers are going to the the other 1%. Sounds like a recipe for collapse.
because what is easier than making an investment decision. It's a yes/no question, and that sort of thing is best solved using a machine learning classifier. Also there's plenty of data to use and it's a relatively simple strategy: say no most of the time, make sure you say yes enough times to make money big time off at least one investments.
C'mon, let's get that VC job automated.
In general, business seeks to drive all costs to zero. Employment is a cost.
Thus, business will seek to drive employment as close to zero as possible. Problem: Employees=Customers=Taxpayers=Voters=Us.
If there is a rapid decrease in employment, then in the entire consumer-economy (essentially built on short-term lending/consumer debt), there will be massive defaulting on credit (credit-cards, overdrafts, etc.) and shrinking consumer condidence/spending with damage done to business as a result. (So even if you are not directly displaced by AI, large numbers of those who are, may still result in you losing your job or a reduction in your real income over time). Further, the displaced will require either large amounts of training or education, to find new work - but AI may displace that work faster than humans can re-train. Rises in spending to support the unemployed - even as a short-term bridge, are problematic because of reduced levels of tax revenue due to the scale of job losses. This may lead to social unrest, however spending on policing and security will also face the same spending pressures due to reduced tax-take. Place more security in the hands of (cheaper) AI..? Deepen the job losses, rinse, repeat...
On a smaller scale, the mental disconnect between jobs, employees, customers and taxpayers already occurs in the false dicohtomy some businesses make when they go to government for a tax-break/subsidy/handout/corporate welfare, "If you don't, we'll just have to pass the cost on to the consumer.", (which is kind of the point of a proice in the first place). The implied threat being, the consumers are also voters who will punish politicians at the ballot-box for price-rises. Of course the money companies want from Government comes from those same consumers/employees/tax-payers/voters.
Ultimately (if we are to handle this wisely and humanely), Government may have to earn its income from the corporations alone and pay everyone a universal income. Possibly an outcome worthy of Gene Roddenberry's vision. Economically something of a win, in the end, for Marx.
Now, those of a more negatively-minded outlook may also look to the dystopian, mass-extermination memes - the fundamental problem for that is, again, missing the point that customers=people=employees=taxpayers, etc. Mass exterminations would eliminate far too many customers, i.e. the dystopian vision is simply bad for business. Not a lot of point in having a business if you don't have any customers. (A point Rand, with her "Industrialist as God" meme, totally missed the economic fundamental that no industrialist can be a god without customers.) Or, more succinctly, "No man (or his corporation) is an island."
The answer to that, as always, has been that you need to increase the level of education accordingly. Those who write and maintain AIs are going to have jobs.
I'm sorry, but that's a short term effect.
In long term, there will be no one to write and maintain AIs because by the time the AIs will be maintained by the AIs themselves.
This is fundamental danger of the AI the tech companies are trying to create, where the AIs learn on themselves just like humans, completely replacing humans and leaving them out of the loop.
Rest assured, humanity is unlikely to see their true AI overlord before the world ends. This is because the robots will wipe us out of our jobs before then.
... by default. The simple soulless grind of the Corporate viral pandemic will ensure that this does in fact happen, and sooner rather than later. The bottom line is all that Corporations care about; this is exactly what they were created to do. The more their system can simplify any job, the likelier they are to be able to replace the person doing it with a machine that doesn't expect to get paid for its time.
Replacing human beings with machines is really only the last step in the process; the Corporate mentality is to try and reduce EVERYTHING to unskilled labor that anyBODY can do, thereby fueling a "disposable worker" economy where they only have to pay a few people well and all other roles can be easily traded out with whatever worker BODY is willing to do the work for less money, whether or not they're competent to perform the task.
In doing this they create human robots, so that they can replace almost anyBODY with another BODY, be it desperately impoverished flesh and blood or metal and plastic. THIS is the race to the bottom that has killed the American middle class; blaming the immigrant families desperate for a job is blaming the victim, not the assailant. Your lost job is just collateral damage.
The fact of changing the name of the hiring department from "Employee Management" to "Human Resources" made this glaringly obvious; whenever possible, they refuse to even take such responsibility to their workers as to even call them "employees" anymore; that actually carries some legal requirements they've long ago abdicated.
The core drive of the Corporation by it's nature is to consume resources while paying as little as possible for them; this is not JUST our dwindling natural resources, but people as well. Eventually we will have to destroy the infection to preserve humanity itself; but that is a war I'll not likely live to see the end of.
mnem
Beware anyone who says "Time is Money." They grossly undervalue your time, and they do so only so they can rob you of it.
The jobs that will be destroyed by AI and automation are jobs held by deplorables with scarce intelligence, low skills and low education. Getting rid of those lowlifers will only result in a better, more liberal, more beautiful and cultured internationalist society.
You don't even need AI to destroy jobs.
My code is 100% dumb and thoughtless and I've confirmed that it's destroyed 12 jobs and stopped the creation of about 200 more this year alone, and that's with only one company using it for a small portion of their workload.
Tech kills jobs. It's been doing it since the 1980s. This will either be a a Very Bad Thing, or a Very Good Thing, or more probably just A Thing with life post Thing seeming very different than life pre Thing--more like the social shift following the invention of agriculture than any subsequent development.
AI is just a small part of the broader technological obsolescence of human labor.
All technology exists to eliminate human effort or labor. We have finally reached that magical toggle point where we can expect AI to eliminate almost all employment. We will need a new and totally different social structure, laws etc. to deal with the era that is beginning now.