As Companies Embrace AI, It's a Job-Seeker's Market (reuters.com)

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As Companies Embrace AI, It's a Job-Seeker's Market (reuters.com)

Posted by msmash on Monday October 15, 2018 @04:00AM from the supply-and-demand dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Artificial intelligence is now being used in an ever-expanding array of products: cars that drive themselves; robots that identify and eradicate weeds; computers able to distinguish dangerous skin cancers from benign moles; and smart locks, thermostats, speakers and digital assistants that are bringing the technology into homes. At Georgia Tech, students interact with digital teaching assistants made possible by AI for an online course in machine learning.

The expanding applications for AI have also created a shortage of qualified workers in the field. Although schools across the country are adding classes, increasing enrollment and developing new programs to accommodate student demand, there are too few potential employees with training or experience in AI. That has big consequences. Too few AI-trained job-seekers has slowed hiring and impeded growth at some companies, recruiters and would-be employers told Reuters. It may also be delaying broader adoption of a technology that some economists say could spur U.S. economic growth by boosting productivity, currently growing at only about half its pre-crisis pace.

[...] U.S. government data does not track job openings or hires in artificial intelligence specifically, but online job postings tracked by jobsites including Indeed, Ziprecruiter and Glassdoor show job openings for AI-related positions are surging. AI job postings as a percentage of overall job postings at Indeed nearly doubled in the past two years, according to data provided by the company. Searches on Indeed for AI jobs, meanwhile increased just 15 percent.

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Yesterday this appeared at the top of /. by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 04:04 · Score: 0

What are these? Database field values?
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As AC Embraces Posting, It's a First Post Miracle by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 04:05 · Score: 0

french toast for m'ladies
Boosting productivity by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 04:06 · Score: 0

Over the last couple of decades, increases in productivity have gone exclusively to the owners and not the employees. This is a large component of the current crisis of wealth inequality. There is no reason to believe this is going to change anytime soon; therefore installing AI throughout the economy continues to be a priority for the ownership class but should not be for the rest of us as there is not any benefit to be had and indeed it may widen the gap between rich and the rest of us.
1. Re:Boosting productivity by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 04:33 · Score: 0
  
  Yes, that is the idea. The companies investing in AI research aren't doing it for the greater good, they are doing it for profit. And that is perfectly legal.
  Of course, more for them means less for us. There are economic theories about how wealth is not a zero-sum game...but they are all found on specious logic.
2. Re: Boosting productivity by BanHammer · 2018-10-15 04:38 · Score: 1
  
  Agree,in the 60s,70s the idea was that people would have to work a lot less once technology took over most activities. For some reason,the opposite has happened.
3. Re:Boosting productivity by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 05:19 · Score: 0
  
  As long as I get paid you can all go screw yourselves as far as I'm concerned.
4. Re:Boosting productivity by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 08:52 · Score: 0
  
  As long as I get paid you can all go screw yourselves as far as I'm concerned.
  Now, now junior. Go back down to the basement and keep playing Nintendo......
5. Re: Boosting productivity by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 08:56 · Score: 0
  
  Who will you sell to if not the people who are unemployed by your unwavering drive to make them so?
  The tech sector, or significant parts of it, have only served to enable and empower the drive towards AI. First they made low skill jobs obsolete and the people who once worked in them had to compete for employment in higher skilled jobs, creating a glut of workers and reducing salaries paid to that group. But it was ok because the tech sector employees were removed from that and they were skilled workers with no need to fear for their job security.
  Now they are being asked to program and build their own replacements. And suddenly it's a bad thing.
  It is a single act in a chain of acts they helped start that will not stop until they are long out of work. They fecked themselves by not caring about fecking so many others and as a result, nobody cares that they will soon be fecked. It is poetic justice that every human being in tech be made obsolete by tech that can do their jobs better, faster, and cheaper than they can. You can't cook that poison for that long and expect it never to work on you. But they did precisely that.
6. Re: Boosting productivity by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 10:12 · Score: 0
  
  It doesn't stop there. Unemployment is the least of their worries. When the vast mass of unemployed, dispossessed angry people will finally take to violence, guess who will be targeted? Right on: the tech workers who deprived them of their jobs. The bloodshed will be unbelievable.
7. Re: Boosting productivity by hoggoth · 2018-10-17 05:48 · Score: 1
  
  Bring it on! I'll pit their garage-sale used pitchforks against my Boston Dynamics dancing kill-bot any day.
  
  --
  - For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat /dev/random (may take some time)
Interesting field, but.. by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 04:15 · Score: 1

The math behind it, to me, is impenetrable. I think for many people, without the necessary math background, learning AI will be difficult unless you're comfortable working with a black box, although I suspect that would only take you so far.
1. Re:Interesting field, but.. by shaitand · 2018-10-15 04:31 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  That's because nobody wants to fully explain the math or symbols being used. In most other areas of technology someone at some point gives a Rosetta stone tutorial which translates. Math is typically very simple, the more "advanced" the math, the more simple it usually is once you penetrate the code of the initiated it is hiding behind.
2. Re: Interesting field, but.. by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 04:35 · Score: 0
  
  The only math you need to understand/do AI is matrix operations and partial derivatives. Still, it is one of those things really hard to explain such that the person gets a "feel" for it. Some never do but just do the math.
3. Re:Interesting field, but.. by zlives · 2018-10-15 05:32 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  I will just wait for the 1 week bootcamp AI certification class...
4. Re: Interesting field, but.. by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 07:33 · Score: 0
  
  The combination of matrix maths, partial derivatives, multiple layes and various activation functions are individually simple, but in concert are complex.
5. Re: Interesting field, but.. by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 13:35 · Score: 0
  
  AI math is not particularly hard. There is just a lot of it and people get bored before they get to the end of a chain.
  AI, at present, is not answering the question:
  "What is this?"
  Instead, it asks a long series of questions and gives probabilistic answers to each, such as
  "Does this picture have a car in it?"
  Then, based on the answers, it will generally go with a summation of probabilities.
  Car 100%
  Car 95% ...
  Truck 98% ...
  Motorcycle 68% ...
  Exit ramp 97% ...
  Birthday cake 0% ...
  Giraffe 1% ... ...
  Then to the question "What is this?" itit goes through Its preprogrammed dataset and says "a (busy) highway".
  Again, lots of math does mean difficult math. Saying otherwise indicates intellectual laziness. Typical of raging shitposters as your nick history supports.
6. Re: Interesting field, but.. by wiretrip · 2018-10-15 22:58 · Score: 1
  
  That sounds to me like you're ignoring the 1000s of other AI techniques that *aren't* ANN/gradient descent!
perhaps for that one specialized field.... by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 04:16 · Score: 0

but for everybody else who has been (or will be, or can easily be) replaced by a computer or robot.. it's the exact opposite.
1. Re:perhaps for that one specialized field.... by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 04:41 · Score: 1
  
  Yes!
  
  Not-having-to-work (i.e. losing jobs) can be viewed as our goal within all economic systems. No matter where you are on the spectrum of Adam Smith to Karl Marx, our time above-ground is a scarce resource. Every-fucking-thing that is expensive, is ultimately expensive because it used up someone's time, where that person sighed and walked a few more steps toward their dusty, eternal grave, working on your whatever, instead of living their life. The dollars are just a measurement of how much life you asked someone else to give up. It's a count of the grains of sand that fell to the bottom of someone's hourglass.
  
  Jobs are bad. When a politician says he's going to create or save jobs, he is offering you a quicker, more intimately-embracing death. The more he envisions you toiling, the less you should envision yourself skipping through fields, rocking out to great bands, performing science experiments, climbing mountains and skiing down them while drinking Mountain Dew as explosions go off behind you, reading novels, or flying around in starships to go find green-skinned women to bang.
  
  People become truck drivers for the money. If you want to spend your life driving around, there are vastly more pleasant ways to do that than driving a fucking truck. They are ticking down the limited seconds of their life, working instead of doing what they want to do. Good riddance to those jobs.
  
  What should we do about the consequences of increased leisure time, in our legacy-saddled economy? Shit, I didn't say I have all the answers (sounds like Obama is proposing one idea, though). But can't we all at least get to where we agree that it's basically a good thing?!? Until we realize that increased leisure time for humans is a good thing, of course we're not going to figure out how to handle our victory, because we'll be putting all our effort into undoing or preventing it! It's disgraceful that people are using words like "blame" for the lost jobs, instead of "credit."
  
  I'll be happy that my widget didn't cost some trucker (and yay, the trucker wasn't me!) two days of his life to transport, and instead it only cost some maintainer 12 hours to keep the robot running. And then eventually I'll feel bad about those 12 hours of maintenance being too many. Can't a robot maintain that other robot?
2. Re:perhaps for that one specialized field.... by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 05:22 · Score: 1
  
  Obviously the trucker must become an AI developer. New jobs for everyone! ... This just in! Higher IQ people do not understand not understanding by lower IQ people. More at 11 as the situation develops!
Counter-point by DaMattster · 2018-10-15 04:21 · Score: 1

AI requires a lot of education and quite a background in technical expertise. It's great that there are many openings but the path to obtain the job is out of reach for a lot of people. It's certainly out of reach for me at 41 years old. I really hate the whole concept of AI because it is putting people out of work and interfacing with it is annoying, at best. I hate the telephone systems that try to interpret natural language to get you to "the right representative." It ends up being an exercise in frustration. What this sounds like is Late Stage Capitalism.
1. Re:Counter-point by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 04:26 · Score: 0
  
  The educational requirements that I read typically require two or three degrees, often at the masters or phd level. Usually they want computer science, math, and engineering, with specific emphasis in AI and robotics.
  No wonder there is a shortage.
2. Re:Counter-point by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 04:27 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  I'm 36 - it's been a lot of work but ramped up at a company using machine learning in a very specific space - but gives me the time to ramp up and educate myself on techniques and everything else.
  Stay current or die, it's always been true.
  Good luck out there.
3. Re:Counter-point by 110010001000 · 2018-10-15 04:30 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  No it doesn't require much. What they call "AI" isn't very complex at all - they are just applying well known techniques to data. Same crap that people were doing in the 1960s.
4. Re:Counter-point by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 04:36 · Score: 0
  
  AI isn't difficult to learn. At its heart is probability, statistics, and gradient descent. The greatest difficulties are finding the most useful techniques, which requires sifting through a lot of papers (because the field is shifting rapidly and there are a lot of dead end techniques that resulted in extraordinary results due to luck not innovation) or taking classes to level up, and learning a few tricks of the trade.
5. Re:Counter-point by scourfish · 2018-10-15 04:43 · Score: 1
  
  Automation creates more jobs than it displaces in the long run. Jobs change, and you have to be prepared to adapt, learn new things, and possibly train for a new career, otherwise, you're just trying to perpetuate a conservative system.
6. Re:Counter-point by ShanghaiBill · 2018-10-15 04:46 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  AI requires a lot of education and quite a background in technical expertise.
  Actually ... it doesn't. Deep learning uses a lot of linear algebra, differential equations, and complicated algorithms to deal with regularization and efficiency. But all that is tucked away in libraries. For a real-world AI app, you just slap together a Tensorflow pipeline using Python, and fiddle with the parameters until you get good results. It is more art than science.
  This is how it works.
  My son is 15, and he went to an "AI bootcamp" this past summer. It was a two week course, and he built a pretty snazzy reinforcement learning application, using Python and some canned visualization tools. Later he made a generative NN to create animations. This is a kid that is just starting high school.
  
  It's certainly out of reach for me at 41 years old.
  Probably, but because of your attitude, not your age.
  
  I really hate the whole concept of AI because it is putting people out of work
  There is zero evidence that AI is "putting people out of work". How many people do you know that have lost their jobs to deep learning?
  
  What this sounds like is Late Stage Capitalism.
  You should spend more time on professional development, and less time reading The Communist Manifesto.
7. Re:Counter-point by Nidi62 · 2018-10-15 04:53 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Automation creates more jobs than it displaces in the long run. Jobs change, and you have to be prepared to adapt, learn new things, and possibly train for a new career, otherwise, you're just trying to perpetuate a conservative system.
  He's 41. Let's say it takes 5 years for these :new careers" to open up, then another 5 years for him to train up. He's now 51, with no experience in that new career, but all the attendant demands/requirements that tend to come with 51 year olds-kids in or about to enter college, desire for work/life balance, reasonable pay and benefits especially healthcare. Who is a company more likely to hire? Him, who will also probably like to retire in 10-15 years, or a 20-something fresh out of college with the exact same amount of experience in that career field who is cheaper both in absolute terms (lower salary) and more intangible terms (less likely to need/use healthcare, fewer sick days, fewer to none family obligations, etc).
  Will a lucky few get hired for a reasonable wage? Sure. Will a few more be willing to take much lower wages and find a company willing to hire them? Probably. Will a lot more get kicked to the curb and told "tough luck, try applying at Walmart, Home Depot, or an Amazon warehouse"? Most definitely.
  
  --
  The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
8. Re:Counter-point by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 05:10 · Score: 0
  
  I enjoyed this response, my thoughts exactly
9. Re:Counter-point by TeknoHog · 2018-10-15 05:11 · Score: 1
  
  AI requires a lot of education and quite a background in technical expertise.
  Actually ... it doesn't. Deep learning uses a lot of linear algebra, differential equations, and complicated algorithms to deal with regularization and efficiency. But all that is tucked away in libraries. For a real-world AI app, you just slap together a Tensorflow pipeline using Python, and fiddle with the parameters until you get good results. It is more art than science.
  This is how it works.
  If I'm reading the XKCD correctly, there will be a lot of "AI" jobs for those of us that actually know the underlying math, even if it means we're closer to 41 than 15.
  
  --
  Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
10. Re:Counter-point by DanDD · 2018-10-15 05:15 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  You are somewhat correct, if esoteric research in the 1960's is what you are referring to as 'known techniques'. Modern AI techniques weren't truly implemented until the mid 70's, with broader acceptance and applications demonstrated in the mid 80's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
  If you are referring to the 1960's symbolic (lisp) techniques espoused by the disgraced Marvin Minsky, nearly fired from MIT for borderline fraud, a case that saw MIT forced to repay DARPA millions in wasted research money, then you are a bit behind the times. Modern AI techniques are now quite far from Minsky's self-aggrandized approach. Modern techniques were pioneered more by Minksy's high-school rival and a victim of Minky's petulant personal and private bullying, the truly brilliant Frank Rosenblatt. Frank was so close. Had he lived just a few more years and kept his confidence, he would have seen his dream realized.
  Why it took the span of a human lifetime for people to see through Marvin is baffling: https://www.reddit.com/r/Machi...
  Anyway, modern AI takes a bit of calculus to truly understand, and some statistics. An undergraduate with a solid math foundation should be able to derive the backprop algorithm and explain it. Then there's catastrophic forgetfulness, SLAM techniques with grid and place cells... probably things beyond a typical undergraduate curriculum, but possible.
  Any technician can be trained to push buttons. It might take a bit more fundamental understanding of what is going on under the covers to catch training pitfalls and prevent inefficiencies. Maybe this is what companies hiring for AI work are after.
  
  --
  "Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
11. Re:Counter-point by DanDD · 2018-10-15 05:24 · Score: 1
  
  It's certainly out of reach for me at 41 years old.
  Probably, but because of your attitude, not your age.
  Perfect. Thank you for that.
  Your son will not push the state of the art, and will likely not be able to keep up in competitive new markets, with just the 'use a library' mentality. But you already know that, as your other comments hint at it. A bit of formal education in AI will help anyone, and is not out of reach for anyone that wants to learn.
  Your son sounds like a very bright kid who probably has a very bright mentor to encourage him along. Well done!
  
  --
  "Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
12. Re:Counter-point by ShanghaiBill · 2018-10-15 05:26 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  If I'm reading the XKCD correctly, there will be a lot of "AI" jobs for those of us that actually know the underlying math, even if it means we're closer to 41 than 15.
  Indeed. Like any other field, AI will bifurcate into "tool builders" and "tool users", with the former being much better paid, and the latter being far more numerous.
  To code an AI engine you may need to know how to transpose a Jacobian matrix. To use it, you just import a library.
  Disclaimer: I am a lot older than 41.
13. Re:Counter-point by DanDD · 2018-10-15 05:27 · Score: 1
  
  If I'm reading the XKCD correctly, there will be a lot of "AI" jobs for those of us that actually know the underlying math, even if it means we're closer to 41 than 15.
  Yep, but you better be able to deal with the bright young punks, or they'll put you out to pasture :)
  
  --
  "Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
14. Re:Counter-point by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 05:30 · Score: 0
  
  > There is zero evidence that AI is "putting people out of work". How many people do you know that have lost their jobs to deep learning?
  Cashiers at Amazon Go stores.... though arguably no one "lost" their jobs. The job just never got created.
  McDonald's is also cashierless in parts of Europe and the U.S. due to touchscreens. Again, no one lost jobs, but jobs just weren't being created.
15. Re:Counter-point by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 05:36 · Score: 0
  
  Nah. The math is the easiest part to automate. You only need someone to do it once and people already give the critical elements away for free with OSS. Read the rest of that post. It really is as easy as slapping libraries together and fiddling with parameters until the output is what you want.
  Even the output checking can be automated. Which is what professionals get paid to do ;)
16. Re:Counter-point by zlives · 2018-10-15 05:37 · Score: 1
  
  "retire in 10-15 years"
  i will just mention that the average time span per company in US is ~4.5 years with older staying longer.
17. Re:Counter-point by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 05:42 · Score: 0
  
  Your son will not push the state of the art, and will likely not be able to keep up in competitive new markets
  Why would anyone want to do that? Why would anyone want to play the startup-hopping coke-fueled game of working 90 hours a week to be "cutting edge competitive" and be ousted at 30 years old?
  Only fools travel that road. "Settle" for an easy 40 hour week at 120k and a 3k sq. ft. house in Austin. Get a banging wife to bang and enjoy your life. Go on vacation several times a year. Have some fun. Know joy outside a leased office space. Get to know your kids better than your boss. Let the idiots have the "joy" of pushing the state of the art.
18. Re:Counter-point by zlives · 2018-10-15 05:47 · Score: 1
  
  I personally specialize at stirring the pile, its been a good career and will likely continue. Much interesting question is what happens to the population as the necessity of cheap labor is lost.
19. Re:Counter-point by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 05:48 · Score: 0
  
  They also have a ridiculous expectation of advanced math. For what reason I don't know, since "AI" is essentially a data gathering and data warngling exercise with a bit of python coding.
20. Re:Counter-point by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 05:50 · Score: 0
  
  "Anyway, modern AI takes a bit of calculus to truly understand, and some statistics."
  No it doesn't. You just have to write rules like this "if you're trying to do a use case like this then use this type of modeling".
  You don't need to understand it to be able to write requirements and then hand it over to a python code-monkey.
  This is just gate-keeping.
21. Re:Counter-point by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 05:52 · Score: 0
  
  This. Your are speaking as someone who has seen what is actually done. PHDs are really, really good at spouting complex jargon to make it sound more difficult than it is.
22. Re:Counter-point by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 06:08 · Score: 1
  
  For those of us who do understand AI at a deeper level and who do have a sound mathematical background, and have built neural nets, genetic algorithms, and many others from the ground up to drastically increase competitiveness of companies in the real world it's not entirely clear where the jobs are still.
  Because, at the end of the day, I can still get paid more building dull ASP.NET MVC applications than I ever could doing any of the stuff above, so as much as I'd love to do AI again professionally, frankly financial reality tells me it's better to just not bother.
  The only way I can realistically get paid my worth doing AI is to move to Silicon Valley, the areas where AI hiring is representative of a shortage are few and far between and often have unpalatable house prices and standards of living. Even then, you can still typically get paid more just doing finance with pretty much the same skillset in those areas (i.e. London).
  So in the meantime I'll continue to get paid a pretty penny wasting my skills building random business websites and services. I'd wager the AI shortage can be at least partially solved by looking farther afield than places like London or Silicon Valley to find people like me and making it worth our while, but until then, whilst the AI shortage continues to exist in only tiny pockets, then they'll continue being limited by the talent pools only in those tiny pockets and it'll become a self fulfilling prophecy for them. The fact is, you couldn't pay me enough to come and live and work in a tiny house in shit holes like London and San Francisco when I can live somewhere nice, that isn't horribly polluted and your daily walk means passing yet another shop doorway filled with diarrhea and used needles from the tons of homeless junkies. That aspect of living standards aside, many such companies professing a skills shortage offer shit hours and time off, 15 days paid leave at Google - LOL, I get 41 currently, I also only have to work a 35 hour week (though I usually do 40, but have never been pressured to do so) vs. Google et al's what, hope that you'll live at the office permanently? No thanks.
  I'm open to helping solve the AI problem, but you either need offices further afield that aren't in shit holes or remote working, and also conditions comparable with companies elsewhere in terms of salary, leave, working hours.
  If AI can make such a difference, if there's such a shortage, then I'm waiting for you to give me a competitive offer. Otherwise, such companies need to shut the fuck up and stop complaining.
23. Re:Counter-point by scourfish · 2018-10-15 06:10 · Score: 1
  
  That's why you keep tabs on current trends and plan ahead of time for change. Automation doesn't just disrupt an industry out of the blue.
24. Re:Counter-point by ShanghaiBill · 2018-10-15 06:32 · Score: 1
  
  Much interesting question is what happens to the population as the necessity of cheap labor is lost.
  The steel plow and McCormick reaper eliminated nearly all farming jobs at a time when 80% of the population worked in agriculture. We survived.
  Deep learning automates image recognition and natural language processing at a time when 0.001% of the population work as image recognizers and transcribers. I think we will muddle through.
  Most human jobs require general intelligence. This is completely out of reach for current AI, and there is no clear path in that direction. Machines will get much better at image recognition and speech processing. But human level intelligence is still science fiction.
25. Re:Counter-point by ShanghaiBill · 2018-10-15 06:43 · Score: 1
  
  McDonald's is also cashierless in parts of Europe and the U.S. due to touchscreens.
  Touchscreen menus are not "AI".
  
  Again, no one lost jobs, but jobs just weren't being created.
  Every dollar not spent on employing a cashier is a dollar spent (or invested) elsewhere in the economy, generating other jobs. But these new jobs are likely to involve actual production of goods and services, unlike the pointless and unproductive cashier. Since the point of jobs is production of goods and services, and not "keeping people busy", this is a benefit to the economy and makes us all better off.
  Economies are not "zero sum": Lump of Labor Fallacy
26. Re: Counter-point by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 07:36 · Score: 0
  
  I have long experience in the area, but the jobs outside the USA are not that plentiful, at least at senior pay levels ($80k).
27. Re:Counter-point by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 07:45 · Score: 0
  
  So true. I work in finance. We have quants who deal with pricing algo stuff. I spend my time sloshing data across the enterprise and occasionally exposing one of the quant's library functions.
28. Re:Counter-point by bev_tech_rob · 2018-10-15 09:01 · Score: 1
  
  Your son will not push the state of the art, and will likely not be able to keep up in competitive new markets
  Why would anyone want to do that? Why would anyone want to play the startup-hopping coke-fueled game of working 90 hours a week to be "cutting edge competitive" and be ousted at 30 years old?
  Only fools travel that road. "Settle" for an easy 40 hour week at 120k and a 3k sq. ft. house in Austin. Get a banging wife to bang and enjoy your life. Go on vacation several times a year. Have some fun. Know joy outside a leased office space. Get to know your kids better than your boss. Let the idiots have the "joy" of pushing the state of the art.
  I could live with that.....
  
  --
  You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
29. Re:Counter-point by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 11:05 · Score: 0
  
  the disgraced Marvin Minsky [wikipedia.org], nearly fired from MIT for borderline fraud, a case that saw MIT forced to repay DARPA millions in wasted research money,
  
  Wow. That sounds like something that ought to be mentioned on... you know... his wikipedia entry. Kinda like the sort that you linked to. Or mentioned in the talk section if it's controversial.... Or show up with a google search with something like "Marvin Minsky fraud darpa". But it doesn't. If only someone were bold enough to add some comments and citations.
  He wrote on "perceptrons", which were simple neural nets, and showed they weren't that useful. He was mistaken (It was mistakenly inferred by others) that all neural networks were useless.
30. Re:Counter-point by rtb61 · 2018-10-15 13:05 · Score: 1
  
  The technique could best be called interconnecting branched prediction techniques (new branches can be formed and connect to existing branches), the predictions could be considered leaves, taking in and putting out data. Each branch a relational data construct, processing the data incoming and outgoing and of course the trunk is the collation point for all data and the branch constructor. An AI, well but then we can be programmed too, so, hmm, the more complex the AI the more unreliable and unpredictable it becomes, hmm, interesting. In AI, a 'sense of humour' can be thought off as a means to switch off unproductive processing loops consuming excess processing cycles and mem resources producing little positive outcome and excess negative outcome, teach the AI how to laugh at itself to prevent negative loop outcomes, figuratively speaking, heh, heh.
  In a country controlled by AI, the electro magnetic pulse becomes the ultimate weapon, you could actually project one, with the right EMP engine design. So what worth an AI if when it is shuts down, everything dies, more risk than worth perhaps.
  
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  Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
31. Re:Counter-point by rtb61 · 2018-10-15 13:07 · Score: 1
  
  PS the roots, the hardware.
  
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  Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
32. Re:Counter-point by bangular · 2018-10-15 13:56 · Score: 1
  
  This has basically been my experience as well. One of the big problems I've seen is there's a huge initial excitement for neural networks, but as soon as I tell people how much data and computing power is required to actually create a half-way decent model, it usually puts a damper on their excitement. This is somewhat changing with pre-trained and partially-trained models. However, most pre-trained models seem to be for image data.
33. Re:Counter-point by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 18:56 · Score: 0
  
  Current AI doesn't require much mathematics. Matrix multiplication and a nonlinear function are about it. Sure, there are a lot of repetitive computations but the underlying mathematics is close to trivial. As the parent noted, there are libraries for this so you don't even need to know or understand what's going on.
  Understanding is my major concern about AI. Sure, we've some good models but we do not and can not understand *how* they get their answers. I wouldn't trust my life to such an algorithm lest it make a crazy and obvious mistake.
  As an aside: I sat in on a course in AI a while back, the majority of the students were 3rd and 4th year electrical engineers. They somehow managed to convince the professor that they didn't know how to multiply two matrices together.
34. Re:Counter-point by wiretrip · 2018-10-15 23:09 · Score: 1
  
  > There is zero evidence that AI is "putting people out of work". How many people do you know that have lost their jobs to deep learning? Sigh: another person who thinks AI only refers to bloody deep learning. There are 1000s of other 'AI' approaches out there - for example the 'fuzzy logic' and expert systems that have removed flight engineers for the cockpit...
35. Re:Counter-point by DanDD · 2018-10-17 06:11 · Score: 1
  
  Here I go again, replying to an AC...
  Keep digging, you'll find it. You might have to actually look at archived printed media, because MIT and other really don't want that part of their history known, and they spend a bit of time and money polishing their image.
  What forced Minsky into the Icon Media Lab? (He didn't go by choice) Who was his fellow MIT professor that was fired?
  Frank Rosenblatt's official cause of death is listed as a boating accident, but was it?
  When mob rule decides what makes it into the history books, or in this case, Wikipedia, a healthy dose of skepticism is... healthy.
  
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  "Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
One Percent propaganda by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 04:53 · Score: 0

Slashdot editors, rephrase the title of this article as:
Job market opens up for qualified AI experts.
Slashdot readers: beware of One Percent propaganda about how robust the US economy is. Productivity shall indeed increase for the One Percent, who have robots working for them around the clock. For the other Ninety-nine Percent of the American labor force, productivity shall substantially decrease due to massive unemployment. You can feed electrons to robots, but you can't feed electrons to starving Americans.
Unfortunately by nospam007 · 2018-10-15 05:21 · Score: 1

They hire only Artificial Intelligence, no wetware wanted.
High bar for entry by anomalous3 · 2018-10-15 05:36 · Score: 1

The reason these posts aren't being filled is that they're almost exclusively looking for AI researchers with postgraduate degrees. Admittedly, knowing the underlying math is incredibly useful if you're focusing on the core functionality of a library or trying to eke out that last bit of precision, but for a ton of applications, having some number sense and an understanding of core statistical/linear algebra principles is more than sufficient (i.e. you don't have to know how to solve by hand, just have an idea of what the numbers are supposed to look like and be able to tell when something's not right). You don't need a postgrad degree to do this, or even a Bachelor's (though you might have trouble convincing a company of this since they seem to be looking for PhDs). I expect that as need increases and more people of varying levels of education start messing with ML for their own projects, the system will move towards certifications, analogous to the cybersecurity industry.
You can transition at any age by SuperKendall · 2018-10-15 05:56 · Score: 1

AI requires a lot of education and quite a background in technical expertise. It's great that there are many openings but the path to obtain the job is out of reach for a lot of people. It's certainly out of reach for me at 41 years old.
This is pretty distressing to read, as it's really not at all the case. Do not think you could not enter this field - I started to transition to machine learning work last year, and am older than you are.
I would recommend taking some actual course to see if the work even interest you at all, but if you can program you can easily shift to working on machine learning work. Even the Data Science aspect to the work is not out of reach, though that would require more learning...
Something to consider is that the way AI works right now is not old at all so all the people working on it have not really had that much a head start over you. It's not like there's more than a handful of people with decades of AI work experience because until the last few years people were not using neural networks they way they are now, even though NN have been around as a concept quite a long time.

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"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Such BIGLY Futures! by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 06:10 · Score: 0

Why the Zoomers will all be AI Mechanic and lice on Mars! ANY DAY NOW...
Better enlist faggits. Wars coming.
They should build an AI for that by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 07:55 · Score: 0

They should build an AI to fill the gap of not enough workers...
Awww...this is simple... by bev_tech_rob · 2018-10-15 08:55 · Score: 1

All you have to do is talk to the computer using this command: "Computer, create a program capable of defeating Data". Power draw increases momentarily, AI appears. Easy peasy...

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You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
Unpopular opinion incoming by Anonymous Coward · 2018-10-15 09:16 · Score: 0

A lot of this stuff. Like artificial neural networks, isn't really that hard to understand. Right up until you start explaining everything with arcane mathematical symbols and the retarded math lexicon that is more concerned with remembering the names of dead guys than anything else.
Really most of computing is this way.
Ivor by h8sg8s · 2018-10-15 14:34 · Score: 1

As one of my favorite Computer Scientists, Ivor Paige, once put it, "there's more A than I in AI". What we're today calling AI is still limited-domain expert systems. True AI is still a ways off.

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Organization? You must be joking..