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AI Will Create New Jobs But Skills Must Shift, Say Tech Giants (techcrunch.com)
AI will create more jobs than it destroys was the not-so-subtle rebuttal from tech giants to growing concern over the impact of automation technologies on employment. Execs from Google, IBM and Salesforce were questioned about the wider societal implications of their technologies during a panel session here at Mobile World Congress. From a report: Behshad Behzadi, who leads the engineering teams working on Google's eponymously named AI voice assistant, claimed many jobs will be "complemented" by AI, with AI technologies making it "easier" for humans to carry out tasks. "For sure there is some shift in the jobs. There's lots of jobs which will [be created which don't exist today]. Think about flight attendant jobs before there was planes and commercial flights. No one could really predict that this job will appear. So there are jobs which will be appearing of that type that are related to the AI," he said. "I think the topic is a super important topic. How jobs and AI is related -- I don't think it's one company or one country which can solve it alone. It's all together we could think about this topic," he added. "But it's really an opportunity, it's not a threat." "From IBM's perspective we firmly believe that every profession will be impacted by AI. There's no question. We also believe that there will be more jobs created," chimed in Bob Lord, IBM's chief digital officer. "We also believe that there'll be more jobs created.
he seems to be everywhere these days.
I don't suppose it's Al Bundy... unless they're talking about shoe store jobs
Of course there will be opportunities for us to serve the machines.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Google, IBM and Salesforce
sucks, sucks, and sucks
And, bearing in mind what they do, it's intriguing that this job still exists.
Industrialization was supposed to kill all the good jobs, or at least that was Thomas Jefferson's fear. Then automation. Then outsourcing. Yet, after all that, we still have jobs. Something tells me that even with the advent of AI, people will find things to do.
I'll momentarily put aside the decades of unemployment and social strife following the last few industrial revolutions to ask: who's gonna pay for it?
Who's gonna pay not only for all these workers to be retrained but to support them during that retraining? These folks had families before their jobs got automated ya know. They're also often past their prime learning years (25, 30, 40, even 50 and 60 years old) so it will take longer for them to learn. Are we going to suggest that they retrain in a few days/weeks for jobs that somehow involve a "skills shift"?
These are all loaded questions. But then again this is just another attempt by tech giants to have the cake of automation and eat the cake (e.g. profits) too.
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welcome our new AI overlords.
When you're still paying off student debt for the last set of skills you had to acquire, which are now obsolete.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
However fast the AI becomes, it still has to work on the basis of those willing to pay for it.
Some manager or company owner somewhere is going to decide - "hey, maybe I can use this to sell these arms to replace dishwasher teams at large restaurants."
Then, he'd work with accountants will look at the cost of different configurations of robotic arms, toolset development, testing teams, potential market cap, cost to enter that market, marketing methods, and how easy it would be for competitors to just copy his approach and steal that market.
Eventually, it's all going to be open sourced projects with off-the-shelf modular tools - but for now and the next decade at least, what we call AI are really highly specialized database and hardware combinations, usually with some highly marketable gimmick behind it.
And that means it's only going to expand as fast as greed and market fear will let it. Very few open source teams are going to push the number of servers and dedicated funds needed to really open it up beyond isolated research projects for now.
Eventually - yes, because every part will get cheaper and more itself automated to buy into cheaply at scale- but those costs are going to go down slowly, short of some breakthrough that we can't predict as such.
Ryan Fenton
... and my worthless opinion is that significantly more jobs will be destroyed than created. All disruptions are not the same. Air travel creating steward positions is a shit example - entirely different type of disruption. As AI moves more and more into mainstream, the jobs created will tend to be higher skilled jobs (development/maintenance/etc of the automations) and the jobs displaced will be low skills jobs (freight hauling/taxis/stocking/cashier/food preparation). Without significant assistance to gain more skills, those displaced workers will be shit out of luck.
I predict there will be a shortage in raw materials required for all these machines.
Everyone is so sure jobs will be created, yet no one can put their finger on what jobs they will be exactly or if everyone will be capable of doing them.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Not the best example. Many people who now work as flight attendants would have been doing very similar work on trains or passenger ships and others would have been working in hotels. (Remember, back before there were planes, you couldn't fly several hundred miles, attend one business meeting then fly back home the same day.) And, up into the early 20th Century, there was no social stigma attached to "being in service," and a career as a servant in a wealthy family's home was considered quite respectable. Commercial air transportation didn't create a new category of job so much as changed where people did basically the same kind of work.
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... written by an AI.
Check your premises.
shift to min masters or PHD for starting jobs
... which long ago replaced a shitload of ditch diggers.
It takes a lot of people to build a backhoe, whether that task is automated or not.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Try thinking about it this way: As productivity rises, how much work do we actually need to do?
Analytic approach to an answer:
Focusing on the traditional essentials, if you are lucky enough to live in an advanced society, then all your essentials for survival are created by a small number of people. Do you even know a full-time farmer? More likely you know some tailors or builders, but how much of their work is really required? For example, do you really need new clothing whenever fashion changes? In contrast, if you live in a poor society, then you and everyone you know is working long and hard just to stay alive (and you have no computer or time to read Slashdot).
Of course it is nice if AI helps shift things in the poor countries, but it's more illuminating to consider what happens as AI improves productivity in advanced nations. We already have a surplus, so what are we going to do with more and more?
I think it makes sense to divide the surplus into two basic classes. Investment work that further boosts productivity (which includes creating smarter AI systems) and recreational time. The funny thing about recreation is that it's bottomless. We've already passed the point where we don't have enough time to enjoy all the movies, songs, and, dare I say, books that have already been created, to say nothing of the flood of new stuff that is created every year.
We need to dump economics and rethink things in terms of time and how we want to spend it and how we want to structure the economy so we can spend our time well...
I could say much more, but this is Slashdot, after all. They can't even handle the error messages properly. The recent 503 Service Offline message (due to offline mode) describes itself as a 404 File Not Found message.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
you did a good job. you're fired.
Over 5 years, 10 years, 20 years or 50 years? The ability of AI systems will change dramatically.
Over 5 years we can sort of predict. Self driving cars and trucks will *start* to make an appearance, as will fruit picking machines etc.
Over 10 years it is more difficult. Lots of semi-intelligent machines running all over the place.
Nobody has a clue about 20 years.
Over 100 years, the AIs wont need us to program them any more, and the result is fairly easy to predict.
My personal bet is that in the medium term we will continue to see what happened during the last 50 years. As computer systems automated bureaucracies those bureaucracies just continued to grow and grow. As more and more rules and regulations are introduced, displaced workers will all become petty bureaucrats.
http://wwwcomputersthink.com/
If any of you had the answers you would be starting businesses making millions. Since you don't, you aren't and you have no clue.
/s
> with AI technologies making it "easier" for humans to carry out tasks
This means fewer people being worked just as hard as always, for the same pay as always. The extra created efficiency will simply mean even more pay for the executive and capitalist classes.
New jobs will be created, but people will simply be unable to be reskilled, and so we will see generations of unemployed created, because it will be the next generations that will be able to learn the new skills.
The extra efficiency would be beneficial for the whole of society, but only if we had a way to redistribute those gains to everyone instead of just the very few.
A Universal Basic Income would ensure that the benefits of AI go to everyone, who can then use the money to either survive, for leisure, retraining, etc... The capitalists will still benefit, but everyone will be better off as AI advancements and disruptions occur.
“Think about flight attendant jobs before there was planes and commercial flights. No one could really predict that this job will appear. So there are jobs which will be appearing of that type that are related to the AI,” he said.
In short, experts proclaim that fears about their upcoming products are plainly unfounded; though, unable to offer any tangible argument to allay those fears, they can only express blind confidence that if past changes have turned out okay before, surely this next one will too.
It reminds me of those people who say: Hey, the climate has changed before, so you see? No big deal!
Here, the speech becomes: We (the experts) have no idea what the future holds (because, you see, nobody can predict it!), but we are nonetheless positively certain that it’s going to be real good (you just wait!), and the doubters are all wrong (what do those guys know anyway?).
The rationale? That a past change which largely replaced human muscle power (the industrial revolution) brought new jobs (all those flight attendants!) is evidence solid enough to give full confidence that an impending change which will largely replace human decision-making (the cybernetic revolution) will do just the same.
Talk about comparing apples with oranges!
Besides, his illustrative example is naïvely simplistic. Airplane technology itself did not bring those flight attendant jobs. After all, flight attendant jobs are just a modern version of litter porter jobs. But where a single wealthy aristocrat would need several porters, many air travellers must share the services of a single flight attendant, resulting in a net reduction of jobs per customer. However, something else amazing happened: the industrial revolution eventually (really, over the course of three centuries) dramatically reduced the cost of basic goods (while increasing their availability), while a social revolution simultaneously kept in relative check the concentration of wealth, to the point that most people can now afford astounding luxuries (like that of air travel), instead of spending all their income on essentials (like food). Ergo, new jobs, including those of flight attendants.
Similarly, if AI ever ends up having a positive impact on employment, it will most likely be indirect only. If it enables us to produce essential goods much more cheaply than today, dramatically reducing the cost of living, then the population at large may be able to redirect its purchasing power toward other activities (for example, education or health care, and possibly new services unknown today), spurring job creation in those sectors.
That’s “if”. Certainly, eliminating human labour will save money, but how much? Can it be on a scale similar to to that achieved by past mechanisation? And will those savings be passed to consumers, though we now seem to live in a state of reduced competition?
And how long will it take before those savings have an actual impact on spending habits and job creation? Will we have to go through some acute crisis first, with millions of people suddenly unemployed as automation gets rapidly deployed, leading to spending being reduced rather than increased, leading to even fewer jobs and to even more concentration of wealth, further leading to increased global poverty and yet fewer jobs?
Of course, if you have your eggs in the AI basket, the answer is easy: Fear not! The future is rosy!
“Don’t worry, be happy”, said the experts. Yes, sure, their jobs are at stake!
there are some jobs even AI's don't want to do.
Instead of having the displaced to be assumed to be "at-fault", consider the overly entitled employers that ask for everything yet offer not much for such talent.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
The previous automation were not general purpose automate you could train for nearly any low skilled job, whereas this is the case. Nobody which compare previous automation seem to even get what this means : there would be no new low skilled job, which COULD NOT be replaced by an AI automate when we reach that point. So what do you do ? Make people dig ditch with broken shovel and let them fill back in ?
The second point people miss is that the transition period of the previously mentioned revolution were UGLY. It was not the same people which were shifted en mass, it was the younger worker or sometime the next generations of workers. The older worker or previous generation ? Fucked.
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...until it is too late. Of course their statements are completely disconnected from reality and pure propaganda lies.
I mean it is right there in their statement: "Many tasks will get easier". Result: Less people needed to do them and less pay for those that do them, as they are easier.
Of course, the most stupid thing you can do with a threat like this is to pretend it is not there. And they are doing exactly that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
New jobs will be created, but people will simply be unable to be reskilled, and so we will see generations of unemployed created, because it will be the next generations that will be able to learn the new skills. www.voglia.in
As I expected, there's a guy in that article telling people that they have to "proactively upskill". That's great: but upskill in what? The IT industry is so fragmented, it's near-impossible to pick a direction in which to upskill, Courses cost money, and doing it yourself could cost you hundreds of hours, and for what? Time and/or money wasted on a niche technology that will be out of fashion next year?
Employers need to do more than just sit back and wait for the resumés with the skills they want to land on their desks. If you expect older employees to upskill, they need guarantees that the effort required will pay off, and not be a dead end. And no, "follow your passion" is not going to cut it. Who has "passion" for (say) yet another Javascript framework?
(this is not a
What if they can't or won't shift their skills? A shooting war with anyone who's IQ is less then 90?
If I give you $10 then you give me $1, you can truthfully say you gave me money. Although it is true that you gave me money, such a statement ignores the net transfer of money which is $9 from me to you.
Most of the arguments I see about AI job creation are qualitative and use anecdotes about technological development in the past. The use of such qualitative arguments hints that the quantitative argument would not look good. Rarely do I see the expected job displacement talked about.
If you focus on the gains and ignore the losses, nothing will look bad.
I smell BULLSHIT! . Even if AI does end up creating jobs, most of those are going to be on either the high IQ or high education variety, or both. The problem right now in the job market tends to be that there are not enough jobs for people of average intelligence with a highschool diploma to earn a living wage. If you're a crack genius with a high IQ and a masters degree in a high tech field, you likely have no problem unless you have no idea how to talk to people in a professional environment. For everyone else right now, they're screwed and they're going to continuously get screwed more and more until something changes. AI is just going to speed this trend.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
we don't know, some say it will create so much more jobs that we'll have to create AI to fill them all.
others say nobody will need to (or will be able to) work anymore and that we quickly need basic income plans before all of society crashes.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Ban AI. Ban robots. Or at least limit them by law. Same with computers, let's put an upper limit to their performance, say no higher than 1997 standards, and roll back internet speeds to first-generation DSL. This alone would put a stop to delicalisation of services and make it impossible for corporations to manage their activities abroad without a physical presence. Have the UN impose those limits, with crippling sanctions for those countries who do not abide. We cannot afford the kind of social disruption AI and automation will inflict and society must always come before business. Technology control NOW!
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and mod down his submissions as well. The great thing is that you don't even need mod points to mod down a submission, just click on the "minus" icon!
Yes, believe it or not, creimer owns all the above sock puppet accounts. It is a mystery why Slashdot management tolerates it!
creimer wrote:
I don't bother with mod points. I'm doing something much more sinister. It took ten story submissions ? I'll have to double check the number ? to move cdreimer's karma from neutral to excellent without ever being exposed to the capricious mods. Mmmmmwwwwahahahahahahaha!
https://slashdot.org/comments....
Danger, Will Robinson, Danger! Creimy is posting more than 2 posts a day. Hurry! mod down otherwise /. will go to hell again!
Note: you can mod down even if already at -1 to lower karma and to prevent lost /. users to accidentally mod up.
creimer wrote:
All you need to do is find a website with a permissive TOS, say, Slashdot, create a Python script to scrape your own comments, sprinkle Amazon affiliate links in various posts, and then re-post past links whenever possible. Won't be long before you start making "coffee money" each month.
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C.D. Reimer is a renowned Slashdot collaborator, as he puts it himself; "Because of the quality of my posts and my article submissions, I'm a highly rated commentator and moderator."
But does anybody ever wondered what "C.D." stands for? Well, it stands for Creimy Dumpty of course!
Creimy Dumpty sat on the wall,
Creimy Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses
And all the king's men
Couldn't put Creimy Dumpty
Together again.
Creimy's siblings video and theme song, very realistic, especially the pants, just like Creimy's:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
With "Vice President Pence Vowing US Astronauts Will Return To the Moon", we are sure they will need miracle workers up there, here is what it would look like. Note that Creimy takes care of bringing a lot of food to the moon as depicted below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Creimy's real pictures:
Before the sex change:
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After the sex change:
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Creimy's
No one seems to ask that question. As AI rises and people get displaced why force them to work? Give them a minimum income so they can go hang gliding, fishing, work on their bowling game, spend time with their grand kids, develop the next great video game etc. I predict there will still be plenty of people building safe bridges, going into medicine, farming, etc. because they like to do it. Let's end wage slavery.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+