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Most Americans Think AI Will Destroy Other People's Jobs, Not Theirs (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of U.S. adults believe artificial intelligence will "eliminate more jobs than it creates," according to a Gallup survey. But, the same survey found that less than a quarter (23 percent) of people were "worried" or "very worried" automation would affect them personally. Notably, these figures vary depending on education. For respondents with only a four-year college degree or less, 28 percent were worried about AI taking their job; for people with at least a bachelor degree, that figure was 15 percent. These numbers tell a familiar story. They come from a Gallup survey of more than 3,000 individuals on automation and AI. New details were released this week, but they echo the findings of earlier reports. The newly released findings from Gallup's survey also show that by one measure, the use of AI is already widespread in the U.S. Nearly nine out of 10 Americans (85 percent) use at least one of six devices or services that use features of artificial intelligence, says Gallup. Eighty-four percent of people use navigation apps like Waze, and 72 percent use streaming services like Netflix. Forty-seven percent use digital assistants on their smartphones, and 22 percent use them on devices like Amazon's Echo.
I HOPE it eliminates my job. My job sucks. The only reason I do it is because I get paid. And don't pretend you are any different. Would you go to work if you didn't get paid? No way!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
in a nut shell. It's always the other guy that gets screwed. It's so common there's a meme for it.
Plus, I can never seem to get people to understand survival bias. As in "I've survived layoffs so it must be because I'm so damn awesome, and not because I got lucky as hell".
But Christ people, even if your job somehow _isn't_ the one automated away everybody else is going to be gunning for the few jobs left ya know?
It's like the man said, I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas
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That's the thing, I've spent my entire career implementing and maintaining computing technology, including a huge amount of troubleshooting and repair where theoretically automated or maintenanceless systems should have not required my intervention.
I'm not going to say that is impossible for AI to do what I do, but AI is itself another layer of technology, subject to both failures in the underlying layers and failures in its own implementation. AI might be better at sorting-out some of its own problems, but there comes a point when the platform upon which its implemented is broken enough that it requires someone external to fix it.
Plus I'd like to see AI figure out how to OTDR and repatch around fiber cable that was chewed-through by rats when the LIU is mounted in a wall-mount enclosure behind an out-of-service boiler in a mechanical room of a 50 year old building that was built without even telephones in-mind originally.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The difference between people who understand statistics and people who don't is that people who don't understand statistics see a 1% annual chance and think, "This will never happen to me," whereas people who do understand statistics think, "This will eventually happen to me if I live long enough," and plan accordingly.
It isn't a question of whether any given person's job will be replaced, but rather when. Eventually, nearly everything will be automated. Manufacturing is already mostly there. Retail and fast food will be next, replaced by touchscreen ordering, website-based ordering, delivery robots, etc. The trucking industry will follow shortly thereafter. Doctors likely will be replaced by a machine learning model within a couple of decades at most, though surgeons and nurses will hang around somewhat longer. Police will eventually be replaced by drones. Office workers will be slowly become unnecessary as the people they support cease to work.
At some point, the only jobs left will be writing software for the machines, designing the machines, jobs in arts/entertainment, and maybe firefighter robot drivers. The only real questions are how long it will take and whether the rate of redundancy significantly exceeds the rate of attrition.
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Self driving cars will replace most of us within 10 years, I'm certain of that.
Studying to be a teacher, hopefully that'll take a LITTLE bit longer...Hopefully...
Why do we have so many homeless people?
Have you ever talked to any homeless people? Have you ever spent time working with the homeless, and helping them deal with their situations? If you do, you will soon understand that most homelessness is about mental health problems, not economics.
Thats the mental trap of it all though. As you go up the ladder of education your more likely to think your personal job isnt at threat.
And that ladder goes all the way to the top, where upon sits the AI researcher who thinks he's the *only* guy that'll get to keep his job.
And fools on him. See one of the things we've managed to get AI to work for, is making better AI. Self supervised training, evolutionary algoriithms, etc. Yep, we got that.
Strangely, no singularity yet
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Nobody cares. They just want tedious human interactions to be done with as quickly as possible and services to be as cheap as possible.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I'm pretty sure nobody who predicted that (many) others would vote for Trump thereby concluded that he would not win. People who thought he wouldn't win thought that because they thought more people were smarter than to vote for him. People who thought enough people could be suckered into it thought he stood a chance, and they turned out to be right. But neither group did any kind of fallacious reasoning. Nobody's stupid enough to think "everyone's gonna vote for him, but not me, so he won't win!"
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
The office is mostly Dilbertesque bullshit at most orgs. AI will probably master logic before it masters bullshit.
Table-ized A.I.
I think most people understand that their job probably requires some degree of human-level intelligence. As such, they figure that their own job is safe until technology reaches that point AND costs less than their salary to rent such an AI. The only ones who really have to worry are those who know that a reasonably sophisticated algorithm could replace them.
But those same people who know their own job requirements probably have no idea what many other types of jobs entail, and I suspect they're likely to over-simplify them. As such, they're "good candidates for AI to replace."
At least, that's my hypothesis for the patterns of these answers.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Plus I'd like to see AI figure out how to OTDR and repatch around fiber cable that was chewed-through by rats when the LIU is mounted in a wall-mount enclosure behind an out-of-service boiler in a mechanical room of a 50 year old building that was built without even telephones in-mind originally.
Any competent AI would have its assets distributed in something like a RAID array. If rats chew through a vital component in one asset, it would write it off, acquire a replacement, transfer the necessary data from another site and make a note to release some cats in the area.
Up to a third of Americans believe the earth is around 6000 years old, and that evolution is a lie. And increasing numbers believe the earth is flat, in spite of fairly compendious evidence to the contrary.
So you'll forgive me if the opinions of the American public don't exactly fit me with a sense of confidence or hope in their sense of judgement when presented with inconvenient things like facts.
It's not you: I'm just this horrifically socially awkward with everybody.
I would agree, except look at how well most people understand the state of the art as it exists today... We have hordes of people thinking full self driving cars, as in rush hour in the city but also driving down a snowy country road, are here already and going to be mass produced in three years or less. Given the level of ignorance on AI, (stuff today being called AI is part of the problem for starters) puts people at that high confidence toward the left end of the graph.
Apparently, the more education someone has, the less likely they think an AI will take their job. Ooops, wrong. The first jobs the AIs are coming for are in the legal and medical fields. Things like "driving a truck" require a lot of sensors. Things like "diagnose a disease" or "do legal research" require parsing the input a nurse/paralegal enters into the system.
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But those same people who know their own job requirements probably have no idea what many other types of jobs entail, and I suspect they're likely to over-simplify them. As such, they're "good candidates for AI to replace."
Or, conversely, they may not be as personally invested and can therefore form a more objective opinion about other people's jobs.
One aspect of AI automation that most people tend to ignore is the disruption that even automating 20% of your job can have on the industry. Especially if it happens quickly. The law industry is one example where the job prospects for most graduates is hurt significantly just because one aspect of the job (research and discovery) is increasingly handled by advanced algorithms.
The other aspect which is ignored is the impact of other displaced workers on industries which are not as disrupted. Perhaps AI cannot do plumbing, but those millions of unemployed truck drivers sure could. The shrinking number of jobs which are insulated from AI disruption will instead see increased competition from those displaced human workers.
Literally anyone who thinks their job will not be impacted by improving AI technology is deluding themselves. It will most likely follow the general trend of the last 50 years, where a small percentage of people see dramatic gains in income / wealth (not just the top 1%, but my guess is closer to 5-10%) and the rest experience a much shakier career than the middle/working class of the last century.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I think to another extent however, people don't think of the full scope of their job, or how much is trivialized. IE they do correctly know that 10% of their own job is impossible for a computer, and don't know 10% of others jobs are also impossible. But the real kicker everyone misses is... if you can eliminate 90% of everyones work. then you get 2 guys to do what used to take 10 guys. (doubling to make up for possible slowdowns caused by having more multipurposed people with a hand in what used to be 10 different jobs.
They'll always be a demand for real humans to abuse and humiliate, so servants and prostitutes will see some demand for their services, but they'll be cheap. There's also the status stuff, the best restaurants having human staff kind of thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
And in fact, us IT folks spend a lot of our day automating out 'boring' tasks. I personally have looked after an estate far larger than all the computers on the site of my first job. There are more computers around now than there were back then, but automation has overtaken the difference in quantities.
Additionally, just (one of me) can do the work that (one of me + a couple of juniors) used to do. The requirement to swap tapes in drives is much less than it once was, likewise the frequency of (say) critical disk failures, for example, so the work for those juniors is much less than it once was.
So yes, even in the lofty heights of IT, automation (not really AI, but automation + comoditisation) has already removed a few of the jobs. If the automation could be improved by AI, we'd all be busy implementing it, and probably still be saying that AI won't take over *my* job ;-)
but there comes a point when the platform upon which its implemented is broken enough that it requires something external to fix it.
FIFY - the "repairman" doesn't have to be a human. And AI opens doors to alternative repairs. "That box got eaten by rats? Ok, switching everything to a new box instead of repairing the old one".
Plus I'd like to see AI figure out how to OTDR and repatch around fiber cable that was chewed-through by rats when the LIU is mounted in a wall-mount enclosure behind an out-of-service boiler in a mechanical room of a 50 year old building that was built without even telephones in-mind originally.
Well, that's a robotics problem, not an AI problem.
Also, keep in mind the example of the dishwasher. Before we invented the box under the counter, it was assumed that a mechanical dishwasher would be some robot arms over a sink. The arms would scrub dishes in the sink, dry them with a dishrag, and then set them in a drying rack. Because that's what humans did. Instead of building that device, we built a box under the counter and radically changed all of our plates, silverware, glasses and pans to be compatible with the box.
So, just because you can't see a way for robotics/AI to do a particular job now does not mean we won't change the world so that robotics/AI can do that job in the future.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?