Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
... 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.
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.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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.
> 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.
there are some jobs even AI's don't want to do.
...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.
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