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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.
Did power tools and heavy machinery destroy construction worker's jobs? Nope.
Machines are tools designed to make our life easier.
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.
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.
> AI right now is nothing more than a new type of index search.
It doesn't matter how simple it is, it doesn't matter how marginal work it can do. If it can beat humans, humans can't compete against it and humans can't do work on that area anymore.
Lets take a simple example. Lets say that we invent an AI that can detect a fracture from X-Ray. Now lets say that it takes only 10 minutes of doctors time to find this and their accuracy is 50%. Lets also say that doctors look at 100 000 X-Ray images every year.
If we get AI that has 80% accuracy in X-Ray identification, doctors can use that and save 10 minutes per image of their time. We still need doctors, so the profession itself does not go away, but. As we saved 100 000 x 10 minutes = 1000 000 minutes = 700 days, because of this, we need 2-3 doctors less, so assuming they have no other work they need to do, we can fire at least 2 doctors.
2 doctors might not sound much, but these are just imaginary numbers. In real life, the numbers could be higher and they might come from multiple areas from multiple professions. The point is that any tool that does even a small part of daily work, will eventually lead into reducing the number of employees, so
We don't need the perfect AI, even a small cron script has the power of replacing people.
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.
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.
Embrace it? Sorry, but your ignorance isn't helping matters. For hundreds of years, the answer to progress and technology destroying jobs was "Go get an education." Now, automation and AI is targeting educated jobs, so it's stupid and ignorant to simply dismiss this problem under the guise of "Why is this news?", as if the answer of yesteryear still applies. Put simply, IT DOES NOT APPLY, which is the main damn point being driven here. This has nothing to do with trying to figure out how to make money in the new world when there will eventually be only be 1% of the human population who can do that. We STILL have to deal with the issue of 99% of humans being unemployable.
Now, you can choose to dismiss my claims and wait for Greed to prove you wrong, or you can realize that Greed is one of the main factors driving human employment into extinction. Either way, your casual dismissive opinion about this, is wrong. Many will lose their jobs, which means many will lose their ability to fund their ability to thrive and survive. And before you start beating on the UBI drum as some kind of savior, understand that we can't even get the rich to pay their fair share of taxes today, so UBI will become nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the unemployable masses. Imagine an "economy" when 99% of the planet is living in poverty.
It's ironic that Greed is too drunk on greed to understand they are creating their own demise, but Greed has never given a shit about the long-term impact. Greed today only cares about the next fiscal quarter. Eventually, Eat the Rich will come into play, so this will all ultimately reset itself (Rome eventually fell too), but not after MASSIVE pain is endured by the world.