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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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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Here's where the headline is misleading.
Will AI displace certain jobs? Of course, that's the idea. If your job involves taking orders at a counter, you should be worried. If you drive for a living, you also need to start planning for something else.
The real question is, will there be a net increase or decrease in jobs? That is, optimists like me observe that ever time we've automated jobs away, people found new, more productive things to do. When it was all said and done, those displaced workers found new things to do and we have no reason to believe this transition will be any different.
As others have mentioned, it's the pace which seems different now. My sense (and I can't prove it) was that in the past, transitions happened generationally. A farmer of the '30s didn't personally move to a factory, he worked his farm and retired there. Either that or he sold the farm and got a job working a menial job for his last few years because re-training him was too hard late in life. It's his kids who made the transition by not farming in the first place. They went straight to a city and got a factory job.
If jobs are transitioning faster now, people will have to adjust their career choices during their lifetimes and maybe that's what makes this different.
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.
STOP being ignorantly stuck in the idea that "AI" needs to be perfect in order to disrupt or replace humans. Put simply, it doens't.
Automation will work to create enough of an impact and displace human employment. There is no such thing as a "perfect" human, so it will only take "good enough" AI to displace a human from their job. Sorry, but this is the reality of the situation. We can ramble on and on about how AI isn't equal to the human brain and won't be for a long time (which may be true), but to put it bluntly, 90% of those employed today are using a fraction of their mental capacity, so human employment WILL be disrupted, and sooner than you think.
"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.
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.
Jan 1, 2018 326.97 million
Jul 1, 1939 130.88 million growth 2.5 times
It looks like population growth was a little slower than the growth in construction labor. However, I don't believe growth in population is directly linked to growth in employment in a particular field. For example, my father moved machinery for living. He always had about six people working for him. He was able to keep increasing his revenue because by using mechanical accessed, forklifts, cranes etc., he was able to take on more, bigger and more profitable projects. If he didn't have these mechanical assists, he would've needed to of employed two or three times the number of people to keep up with the same workload.
Another, admittedly anecdotal, story in the same vein is that with telephone operators. Back in the early days of telephones, you required a human to establish connection between two telephones. Because of the growth in phone adoption, the demand for operators was so large that it was predicted that everyone would need to be a phone operator. Obviously that didn't happen, mechanical switches were invented and now almost 9000 people are employed as telephone operators. A far cry from the entire population of the United States.
We have many examples of how technology eliminates jobs and we also have many examples of how the dislocation caused by those technology changes (old jobs go away, new jobs are created) take at least a generation or two to work its way to the system as the people working the old jobs die off and the new crop of babies grow up and start working. A great example of this dislocation is in the photography industry. Kodak employed a quarter million people in the Rochester area. Now it's about 6000. Companies like Instagram have taken over the chunks of the photography industry and they employee maybe 20 or 30 people. What's the future for that quarter million people that used to work for Kodak?
If the pattern holds, AI will eliminate at least half of the current jobs, it will create some new ones but these jobs won't do current potential employees any good, those jobs will be filled by the kids currently in grade school. The question is now what do we do with these people that can't work because their jobs don't exist and no one is willing to spend the money on retraining them to new jobs or, if they are retrained, be willing to hire them even though they are Olds?
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.
Define AI
Software that learns. The bar is pretty low because it's not that special. Making software that learns complex things quickly is the difference between a rock you can use as a hammer and a pneumatic jackhammer. Just like how "life" includes everything from bacteria to humans.
Show me true AI that is self learning.
Dangerously close to No True Scotsman. But sure, here you go, AlphaGoZero.
it is often trivial to feed the system garbage until it is useless.
Just like people.
A basic feedback loop would at least help point it correctly.
BRILLIANT! You should tell someone over at google that maybe they could feed the output of their neural net back into the inputs. Could be a real game-changer.
(I expect this sort of ignorance from the general populace, but on slashdot this is ridiculous. Come on people)