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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.
People will always find things to do. But will they be able to earn a living?
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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.
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.
Industrialization was supposed to kill all the good jobs, or at least that was Thomas Jefferson's fear.
It did kill good jobs, but created good new skilled jobs. It also shifted a big chunk of the unskilled workforce from farms to factories (which may or may not have been an improvement, in different parts of the world). The trap is to assume the the same pattern will always follow.
When the US and other developed countries sent all out manufacturing to China, etc, the economists all assured us that this would improve global efficiency, and create new high-paying jobs for the former factory workers. But this did not happen. The elite in the US have reaped all the gains, and people who once had high-paying blue-collar jobs have lost their homes and are now driving an Uber and hoping to make minimum wage.
Middle America (working class) has been screwed over by globalisation. It was not intentional, but that's what happened.
This is why you have a Trump in the White House. And don't think it can't get a lot worse. At least right now people do still have jobs. Shitty casual jobs.
there are some jobs even AI's don't want to do.