With AI Getting Better at Cognitive Abilities, Humans Will Have Even Fewer Jobs (koreaherald.com) 311
An anonymous reader writes: It is no secret that machines have come to largely replace physical labor, and computers surpass human beings in processing data. But in the future, the development of artificial intelligence may render humans obsolete even in the realm of emotional intelligence (warning: annoying popup adverts), according to Yuval Harari, a renowned professor of history. Harari said:AI today is able to diagnose your personality and emotional state by looking at your face and recognizing tiny muscle movements. It can tell whether you are tired, excited, angry, joyful, in love ... it can tell these things even though AI itself doesn't feel anger or love. In the future, therefore, AI could drive humans out of the job market and make many humans completely useless, from an economic perspective in areas where human interaction was previously considered crucial. Humans only have two basic abilities -- physical and cognitive. When machines replaced us in physical abilities, we moved on to jobs that require cognitive abilities. ... If AI becomes better than us in that, there is no third field humans can move to.
Third field (Score:5, Funny)
What about acting as organic batteries for the machines?
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skynet will just nuke us all long before that. Unless joshua does it first.
Fourth field (Score:3)
Or perhaps ... we could be their pets? [theguardian.com]
Re:Fourth field (Score:4, Interesting)
The only positive side is that the automation is more efficient so even as we do replace someone, we theoretically have the resources for them to keep living without doing any additional work, but the reality is it never works out like that.
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You mean like people who believe in religions?
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As I understand it, this was not originally written into the matrix and was tacked on by some PHB. I have read previously that they needed the human brain power in order to create and manage the entire world. (too much processing to be done or somesuch). Obviously not a big deal in life, but just an alternative thought.
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Any AI worth its salt would realize that's not realistic.
On the other hand, any AI worth its salt would not have rejected that script merely because of its scientific absurdity.
A good AI might have tossed out the sequels, however.
Still a job for us (Score:4, Insightful)
Since the computer cannot feel, we humans will still have a job as test dummies to be subjected to whatever the AI comes up with in order to record whether we feel it to be pleasant or not.
Now, please look into the camera and experience Musical Composition #0x382F493 for 48.732 minutes.
Replaced us? When? (Score:2)
Tell that to my plumber. My mechanic. The mason who just fixed my chimneys. The guy who mopped out the urinals this morning. Etc.
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What really tips the scales for most potential buyers in the mortgage interest tax deduction. That moves the needle quite bit even for your typical 30year fixed on a $200 home. In most cases it makes it awful attractive compared to trying to rent a similar property.
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1) Shit flows downhill.
2) Payday comes on Friday.
3) Don't bite your fingernails!
Re:Replaced us? When? (Score:4, Interesting)
It requires at least a functional understanding of pressure, hydraulics, gravity, some understanding of metallurgy (although Pex pipe is making sweating fittings rarer), electrical installation (for electric hot water heaters), as well as many plumbers also being gas fitters, so a different, though related set of principles surrounding fluid flow, pressure, and so forth.
Having done my own plumbing, at least rough plumbing (I stop where one has to actually cut a hole in a brand new $500 acrylic tub/shower), I found it reasonably challenging. But plumbing, of course, isn't just about home installations, and many plumbers and gasfitters also work in industrial settings.
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Plumbing is my least favorite trade to freelance on at home.
It inevitably involves a mess, at best just water, at worst, the icky insides of drains. It almost always seems to involve really confined spaces (under sinks and other hard to reach places).
I'll attempt small repairs or simple things, but I have a very low threshold of failure for it and don't mind calling someone if necessary.
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Most of those require cognitive functions. The guy who swabbed the urinals is still working because he's slightly cheaper than a self cleaning cyberloo, so far.
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I agree. Machines are good at tasks which have repeatable actions in a defined space.
Your plumber still needs to know a LOT about plumbing (or you end up with a lot of water leaking). But machines are not good at working in the varied spaces that existing plumbing exists in.
In order for a machine to replace a plumber, the machine would have to be able to learn the work area, interact with the customer to determine his/her goals AND be able to manoeuvre in the work area.
And THAT is the problem with these "pr
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Re:Replaced us? When? (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that you used to have manufacturing towns where the main employer was a factory, and people did most of the work. Many even got a good middle class living out of it. Now you have just a few people watching and maintaining the machines that replaced the vast hordes. A while back on a How It's Made they showed a Peter Pan Peanut Butter factory that churned out 50,000 lbs of peanut butter a day using only 8 employees. Arguably the "old" way had a lot of repetitive mundane jobs that are better off done by a machine no matter how you slice it.
So yes, you still have plumbers, and probably always will. But you still only need one plumber for every few hundred houses. So you can't rely on the profession of plumbing to absorb blue collar employees cast off by automation.
The real problem seems to be that cost savings (numerous types, including automation) by businesses have squeezed the money out of salaries to the point that the large number of the jobs people get no longer pay a living wage. I feel the real crisis is that without enough good paying jobs we will have a scenario where the rich factory owners (who are all but tax exempt) will be collecting money without a sufficient conduit to recycle it back through the economy. We are perilously close to this deflationary spiral in my observations.
Re:Replaced us? When? (Score:5, Insightful)
We need plumbers TODAY because the places we have plumbing were not designed to be serviced by robots.
In your peanut butter example, I'm sure they didn't just replace each human worker with a robot doing an identical task.
They probably re-built the facility so that the machines could handle the job in a way best suited to the machines.
The real issue won't be the magical A.I.s taking all our jobs. It will be when the INFRASTRUCTURE starts to be re-built so that machines can service it.
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That is the trick most don't realize
50 years ago the factory jobs were good and there was a middle class. 20 years ago most factory jobs went to China as manufacturing was cheap and so was shipping. Shipping and manufacturing us gone up, so factories are coming back but not the jobs as robots can work 24 hours a day, businesses can suspend manufacturing for weeks at a time and not lay off any workers, etc. when designing a new factory you set the Max output at two-three times the predicted volume. That wa
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We are perilously close to this deflationary spiral in my observations.
which is how the economy corrects. Basically prices will have to start falling and continue falling until people can afford to buy back into the game with their existing capital.
Many already are (Score:3, Insightful)
"AI could drive humans out of the job market and make many humans completely useless" - no shit, MANY humans are already completely useless. They exist solely to drive like shit every morning, work at some non-productive ego-fueled job with a corporate leech, and then drive like rocket-powered-flaming-bullshit to get home and wreck their kids' brains with their "parenting". AI can't possibly make these people worse.
Re:Many already are (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm just glad you're not bitter or anything.
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I'm just glad you're not bitter or anything.
AI would still be better than you at reading his emotional state.
Not this again! (Score:3, Insightful)
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And we will think of plenty of new things for these "useless" humans to do.
There already is.
The trouble is that their activities aren't considered valuable under our economic system.
We live in a consumer based economic system and unless you can find a fit in this system, you're a misfit. You're working in a dead end, part time, low paying service job - even though you might be a brilliant artist and would be great after you die.
Although we value ancient novelists and writers and artists, when they were alive, most were dirt poor - yet their works go for millions after they are d
Re:Not this again! (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't. Not in American society, anyway.
We've increased our productivity levels exponentially since the 1970s, but very little of that benefit went to people below the top 10%. The common person is working more hours and being more productive than ever before, and even so he/she is more of a wage slave than any time in modern era.
Unless some of the basic tenets of US society change the benefits of even MORE per-person productivity are just going to keep accruing at the top. That sounds hopeless, but it is possible. Our corporate worshipping culture as we know it today only started to form in the mid-1970s.
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very little of that ...
It's there if you want it. If you don't, then don't complain.
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little of that benefit went to people below the top 10%.
Yeah, tell them. We got no benefits for any of it. So many products are better, stronger, faster, cheaper, safer, but we didn't benefit at all! /sarcasm
The problem is that you have FAILED to see the benefits everyone is reaping, because they benefit everyone equally. My guess, is that you have NO real skill or talent and expect to rewarded for participating, having put in no effort to break out of mediocrity. So, instead you drink the Kool-Aide of Bernie and whine about how all of this is unfair.
As I told m
Replace the HR Dept? (Score:2)
Could likely do better than they do now.
*sigh* (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:*sigh* (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll believe it when I see it.
But nobody will care because you'll just be a crazy homeless guy.
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I'll believe it when I see it.
I imagine the same was said about:
Steam Locomotives
Photography
Electric Lights
Telephones
Human Flight
Anti-Biotics
Television
Nuclear Power/Weapons
The Transistor
Personal Computers
The Internet
etc;
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I imagine the same was said about:
Most of the technologies you have listed have lasted for a hundred years before being fundamentally altered or transformed by newer technologies. Nuclear/power/weapons, transistor, personal computers, and the Internet are less than 70 years old. But these articles that talk about jobs being replaced by AIs and Robots are misleading as those technologies are years away from being day-to-day reality. If an AI does replace my job, I'll be ready to change to a different job. Something most people aren't prepare
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But these articles that talk about jobs being replaced by AIs and Robots are misleading as those technologies are years away from being day-to-day reality. If an AI does replace my job, I'll be ready to change to a different job.
I see it as more of a gradual thing. My favorite example of this involves 'trash collectors' - which used to be the archetypal job that humans that would forever provide employment for the unskilled. Not so: many trash trucks today are manned by a single skilled driver who operates a (fairly dumb) trash-truck robot that picks up the (now standardized) trash cans. So, instead have having one skilled driver and one or two unskilled trash guys, we now have just the skilled driver. And it isn't hard to foresee
Re:*sigh* (Score:4, Insightful)
He drives the same basic locations everyday, because he knows the routes.
Even he knows "the gig is up" once self driving tech becomes commonplace.
Once something like that is outsourced to a semi-automated process(pun intended) many people will be put out of work.
No, it won't happen overnight(and I think people have this image of it doing that) but once it gets going, whether it is in fast food, driving, taxis, farm labor, aircraft pilots, sports writers, para-legals, financial advisors, etc, etc, there will no turning back. It will be a generation(25 years) for this to happen once it really gets going.
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Hey, you just described one of my top p0rn fantasies!
Seriously, though, the middle class has been stagnant while the 1% growing in proportion approximately starting around the time offshoring and automation really took off. Coincidence?
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Seriously, though, the middle class has been stagnant while the 1% growing in proportion approximately starting around the time offshoring and automation really took off. Coincidence?
Federal trade policies over the last 40+ years has contributed to decrease of the middle class and the increase of the 1%. If the US had a US-first policy like Germany has a German-first policy, the offshoring wouldn't haven't happened to eliminate middle-class jobs and destroy manufacturing capacity. Automation will still happen to shift workers to other jobs.
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I believe it because I already see it. Unemployment up all over the place.
One-guy with gas-powered blower does the work of 100 broom sweepers. Yes, these things happen. But I don't see an AI or robot replacing the landscaping guy anytime soon.
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I believe it because I already see it. Unemployment up all over the place.
Correlation is not causation. You could be seeing this because, for example, employers are trying to get more utilization out of salaried employees by pushing them to work more than 40 hours a week. In fact I don't think I've worked under 60 in an average week in my entire career. Most of that does not require an engineering degree, it's the kind of mundane corporate bureaucracy that any high school grad could pull off.
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In fact I don't think I've worked under 60 in an average week in my entire career.
As an IT support contract worker, I haven't been allowed to work more than 40 hours per week for the last 12+ years. Government and Fortune 500 companies don't want to pay overtime.
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That's because farm workers were already voluntarily moving to better paying work in factories. The mechanization of farming was in response to a shrinking labor pool at that time.
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Many did end up that way after the initial excitement. But even then they had better than the McJobs waiting for so many today. It will be much worse than it was for agricultural workers. Think Hooverville.
But the Capitalists had best think long and hard here, that time was the closest the U.S. ever came to a socialist revolution. Appeasement from FDR followed by WWII and then growing prosperity for the masses headed it off, but now the idiots have forgotten their lesson.
The feeding machine from Modern Time
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The mechanization of farming was in response to a shrinking labor pool at that time
That simply isn't true. In the late 18th Century people like Washington and Jefferson with large plantations were experimenting with ever more mechanized mills, and mechanical threshing machines. They had SLAVE labor available to them! They were automating because even workers you did not have pay were not as economically efficient as automation promised to be, and well before a competitive labor market existed at that.
Re:Utter tripe. (Score:5, Interesting)
The mechanization of agriculture didn't result in 76% unemployment, it freed people to do other work.
You need to study history, because not only it did result in high unemployment for a generation or so, the transition itself was much more gradual. Other work might not arrive in time to save all the displaced workers from poverty.
Re:Utter tripe. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a good point, but I also wonder if there will always be another industry for workers to go into. In your example, people left the farm to work in factories. More recently, factories became more automated, and now a lot of people work in the service industry. There's been talk about automating some of that (e.g. self-driving trucks, drones for deliveries, completely automated fast-food restaurants), so people with those jobs will have to look elsewhere. Maybe there will be a new industry for them to move into, and maybe another after that....
But after a while, couldn't you eventually run out of jobs that need doing? I'm sure there will always be some jobs that need to be done, but the number of jobs that can't be done better by automated equipment might shrink quite a bit in the next few decades, or the next could of centuries. Most likely, it will hit the jobs that are mostly automated already, which tend to be low-skill and low-education, so those are the groups that will generally be hit hardest and fastest. However, I'm sure there are some high-education high-paying jobs out there that an AI could take on, and some very skilled and highly educated people may also find themselves suddenly out of a job.
So I think there's still a question: As we make jobs obsolete through technology, what do we do with the people who lose their jobs? In the short-term, I think it would make sense to focus on have cheap/free job training to allow them to move to other jobs and other industries. In the longer-term, we may want to consider how to distribute resources in a world where there are far more people than there are jobs.
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True, but historical patterns are not necessarily absolute "laws". A pattern that may last 200 years may not last 500, especially since the level of technology is vastly higher than in the past.
Back then, we could usually see where the new jobs were as agriculture jobs declined. I don't see the equivalent today. The number of people needed to manage the automation is a much smaller proportion than the people required without the automation.
Plus, a lot of technical management can be outsourced to low-wage co
Re:Utter tripe. (Score:5, Insightful)
The mechanization of agriculture didn't result in 76% unemployment
It did for the horses. We are the horses now.
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So... everyone but the top 10% by meritocracy don't deserve a decent life?
First of all, the meritocracy part isn't working (at least not in the US, where leadership at all levels in the shitpile) and second of all, why doesn't everyone deserve a decent life? If society can't give the vast majority of people a decent life then it is failing.
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No, the problem is that this time it's EXACTLY THE SAME [wikipedia.org]. Know your history.
"A series of 1950s essays by Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins later set the academic consensus that the bulk of the population, that was at the bottom of the social ladder, suffered severe reductions in their living standards.[79]"
If you were on the top of the pile, things were great. And veeeeeerrrrry slowly things got better for the masses. In England they just waited 3 generations. In America they did it at the end of Sher
Re:Utter tripe. (Score:5, Informative)
. . . Seriously? You're trying to shoe-horn Trump into this debate? I know it's an election year, but come on.
Anyway, you want examples of why I don't like Trump, SURE THING! There are SO MANY. I don't actually know of any homophobic behaviour, but I'd say he's more of a racist, lying, anti-intellectual asshole with no regard for the truth. The majority of his entire shtick is a confidence-man con game.
He's suggested immigrants from Mexico are drug dealers and thieves. "They’re rapists And some, I assume, are good people.”
He's supported the idea that vaccines cause autism. Seriously, he's an anti-vaxxer.
Even more laughable is that he's a Birther: “An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a fraud". And I'll bet my ass that he's simply lying about his source. It seems to fit his character.
He's simply lied about John Oliver inviting him onto the show. That's a petty little thing, but it shows that he simply lies off the cuff.
“It’s freezing and snowing in New York – we need global warming!”
I didn't know about him particularly being a women-hater, but a quick look yields plenty. So HEY! feeding the trolls turns out to be an educational experience.
"All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me - consciously or unconsciously. That's to be expected."
“You know, it really doesn’t matter what the media write as long as you’ve got a young, and beautiful, piece of ass.”
Some harsh digs at a media CEO, calling her ugly. Threatening Cruz's wife. Saying Rosie should be fired for being fat and ugly. He goes for the low blows.
And he's generally a braggart. He likes to call himself rich, a winner, and truthful. I have my doubts. And I would never want to be lead by someone who lies so casually and so easily. The bullshit threshold has been exceed, the bozo bit has been flipped.
We're getting AIs that read emotions. Of course. (Score:3)
Typical. AIs that ignore emotions and have none could replace C-Level management.
There's a lot of saving potential there, but we won't see that happen, I'm afraid.
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>Typical. AIs that ignore emotions and have none could replace C-Level management.
Nothing replaces management. They've managed to make themselves the "geniuses" of the Corporate age.
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The average magic-8-ball is as efficient as the average CEO when it comes to making business decisions. The only thing the latter has over the former is probably the relevant connections to other CEOs and politicians.
One human job will be retained (Score:2)
"even fewer jobs"? (Score:3)
Even fewer jobs than what? We are near an all time high in terms of jobs, both globally and in the US. There was a temporary dip during the recession, but we have mostly recovered from that.
The limit on how many people work isn't job availability (that's pretty much inexhaustible and infinite), but availability of people willing to do the jobs.
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If the ACA ever really kicks in with the "affordable" bit, a lot of the cost will be reducing the cost of expensive end-of-life care (and hopefully reducing the need for new healthcare employees). Reducing "needless" surgeries/treatments/medications and having more frequent and informative "do you still want to live when you're starting do to go, 'cause if you don't we can make it faster/less-painful/less-expensive" discussions
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What does the ACA have to do with anything? With ~76M retired baby boomers in 2030, it'll take a lot of young people in healthcare to support these geezers from retirement to grave. Since retirees will outnumber working people, healthcare jobs will pay better than other jobs to attract more workers. Everyone will need extra income to pay for taxes as Social Security and Medicare will consume two-thirds of the federal budget.
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Medical technology has been advancing rapidly - but so has the cost of using the latest and most capable technologies. People live longer than ever, but the older they get the more it costs to keep them going.
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We have not recovered. We just don't count people who gave up. Many of the new jobs are nowhere near as good as the ones that were lost. It represents a substantial drop in standard of living.
It is an improvement from a couple years ago, but not a recovery.
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I wasn't talking about unemployment rates, I was talking about total number of people working. We are pretty much back at pre-recession levels in terms of absolute employment numbers. (Labor force participation rates are down somewhat, but that's mostly due to retirement.)
TFA claimed that there were going to be "even fewer jobs", as if automation and technology destroyed job
No third field? (Score:2)
There are plenty of fields where humans can move into beyond basic cognitive abilities. Obviously everything that is repetitive can be automated and AI has some purpose there. However there is much in human cognition that we don't yet understand ourselves, so it's impossible to program it into an AI. Programming AI's or any advanced logic, mathematics and deductive reasoning etc. will continue to be part of the human condition. Also, anytime it's too expensive to build a machine to do a human's job, we will
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The problem is that we will always have the 50% that is on the low side of the median line. We will always have people whose strong point is NOT their brain.
People don't ask to be born, and when they are born they should have the ability to have a decent life. They need something productive to do. When repetitive and low-skill jobs are all gone we have to find some way for these people to live. Our current strategy is pretty much call them lazy or make them political outcasts in an attempt to make every
Thank God (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Thank God (Score:5, Insightful)
Change is upon us already and yet the US public remains totally unaware.
On this point I totally agree.
I've tried to discuss this topic with friends and relatives, and some very bright people who work in IT or as devs.
Some get it, most don't...
Most Americans are blissfully ignorant of what is happening around them, the rapid pace of technology.
People see how things are now, and think it will always be that way.
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The US public are deliberately unaware, because anyone who speaks about it it attacked as a dirty commie.
The verge of a new era? (Score:4, Insightful)
If AI eliminates the need for us humans to live by the sweat of our brows, (and if we can get our shit together to tear down the ridiculous classism upon which our current social hierarchies are founded), we might have utopia within our grasp, with some caveats:
-- We don't end up committing mass suicide as a result of a sense of meaninglessness and a lack of perceived usefulness
-- We don't all eat ourselves into a morbidly obese stupor
-- We don't end up as the subjects of robotic overlords
-- The AIs aren't under the control of a small handful of 'elite' human overlords who control and abuse the rest of us 'just for fun'
-- We don't fall victim to warring between competing AIs
Come to think about it, I'm not too optimistic about an AI-filled future right now...
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we might have utopia within our grasp, with some caveats:
These caveats just may end up getting filled with safe spaces, trigger warning, and other kinds of busybody nonsense. Wait, this doesn't look that utopic to me.
In usa get ready for a mass up in jail / prison po (Score:2)
In usa get ready for a mass up in jail / prison pop.
As soon will be the only place to go that covers stuff that the ER does not. Also get free room and board.
In Praise of Idleness (Score:2)
This doesn't sound so bad. Jobs are overrated.
This isn't a surprise to anyone I know... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm in IT and have worked almost exclusively in large companies. The fact that this is happening is not a surprise -- I question how quickly it will happen. It's great that Watson et al can ingest billions of facts and beat a human at Jeopardy, but I wonder how much this can be applied to something like patient-facing medicine. Sure, the basics will be covered, like determining what medications to give for a set of symptoms, but I wonder how much troubleshooting of real world systems can really be given over to computers. Same goes for building management, etc.
The thing I'm worried about is the effect on society, especially in first-world countries. In my experience in IT at large companies, there are a massive amount of jobs that could easily be automated with a few tweaks to the business process. There are so many positions that basically involve taking work from an input stack, performing a few operations on it, and sending it on to the output stack, even today. Granted there are way less of these now; there aren't hundreds of secretaries in a typing pool or hundreds of file clerks/bookkeepers anymore. But, there are still millions of college-educated people earning middle-class salaries, paying taxes, having children and buying things based on having a job like this. Before the last recession, the default route through life for many mid-level students was to graduate high school, party through college and get a business degree of some sort, then get recruited for a big company for entry level work of some kind. If we dump all these people onto the unemployment rolls over too short a time, this will create a huge crisis. Taxes won't get paid, people won't have kids because they're afraid of being tied down, and people won't buy stuff because they don't have a stable income anymore. Managing the next phase of this is going to be an interesting exercise. Either we'll get "Star Trek" where everyone can figure out what they really want to do instead of some crappy job they hate, or "Elysium" where the wealthy just leave the increasing numbers of poor to rot.
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If we dump all these people onto the unemployment rolls over too short a time, this will create a huge crisis. Taxes won't get paid, people won't have kids because they're afraid of being tied down, and people won't buy stuff because they don't have a stable income anymore. Managing the next phase of this is going to be an interesting exercise.
You obviously get it.
The points you bring up are going to be the real challenge. People seem to forget that it wouldn't take too much of an increase in the unemployment rate for things to "go south" pretty quickly. You think someone like Trump gets a lot of supporters now?
Wait until millions lose their jobs to "increases in productivity".
The political consequences alone are chilling.
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is not a surprise
Then you should be prepared for it. Almost everyone I know in engineering has a least one backup plan.
Obligatory Whip (Score:2)
Less work more output (Score:3)
The problem is that the income inequality is also growing because of this. If you started at a position that lets you benefit from the less-work-more-output scenario you keep getting better. If you were in a worse position you keep getting worse.
You can't get Star Trek economy by good faith: people are selfish and people who do not want to work will not work. We need to accept that is ok. Now who is going to build the robots and the solar plants to catalyze the whole thing?
The mediocrity (Score:2)
Putting humans out of work. (Score:2)
Sorry, this is a bullshit argument.
Yes, things like this WILL disrupt some jobs.
But, in the long run, it'll create other jobs and move people away from those areas where automation simply does things better.
Save for vanity/specialty crafting, automation basically put metalsmithing out to pasture.
We don't really see much call for buggy whips (or buggies period).
In many cases, huge farms can be managed by a remarkably small workforce.
Sure, some people are gonna be butthurt that tech stole their job.
Get over i
Before the end (Score:2)
If we look at recent history, we can see that government gridlock pretty much ensures that there will be no effective response from the US government to address this, as it happens.
It would be a stretch to say they will address it after it happens.
How will governments and society at large function when more and more people become unemployed.
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It really only ends one of three ways that I can see:
1. Political reform happens and politicians work to create a welfare system capable of supporting a large unemployed population indefinitely. It probably won't support a very high standard of living, but enough to keep them fed, sheltered, and supplied with television.
2. Civil unrest reaches the point of open revolution - tens of millions of unemployed people turning to crime to put food on the table and resenting the wealthy, eventually reaching the poin
What BULLSHIT (Score:2)
Machines are not and can not "surpass us in cognitive ability". Because cognitive ability is not one skill, it is many skills.
Machines have (long ago) surpassed us in mathematical ability.
WE - not the machines - learned how to transform many tasks that were not originally mathematically based into math. As such, WE have redesigned machines to do many jobs that humans used to do.
But there are a lot of 'cognitive' jobs that can not be reduced to mere math and those jobs will remain with us until machines de
Highly Unlikely (Score:2)
Technology creates more jobs than it takes away. As we increase technology and make things easier to do what was harder earlier, we start demanding more and that increases employment equivalent to what is displaced by automation. Robots can make cars with much faster than humans. But then what did we do? We started asking for an air bag, then 2, then 3, ... then 5-10 air bags. Now we ask for rear camera, gps, satellite radio,.... blah.... and hence effectively, the employment in auto-sector hasn't gone down
For a given value of "cognitive"... (Score:2)
As to the nascent "cognitive" capabilities of machines, take another look. For example, while there are some wonderful things being done with pattern recognition, that is largely a mathematical function.
Computers are great at math, hence the name. But things that can not be reduced to mathematics are still very much the domain of organic life forms.
Re: (Score:2)
It's time, the sky is falling.
Technical Support Call 2050 (Score:2)
AI Tech Support: I am the Verizon Artificially Intelligent Technical Support Device. Please state your problem.
Customer: Well, I'm...
AI Tech Support: Please reset your cable modem.
Customer: I alread...
AI Tech Support: Please reset your firewall device.
Customer: Look here...
AI Tech Support: Please reboot your computer.
Customer: Like I said, I alread...
AI Tech Support: Have you reset your cable modem, firewall device and computer? If not please do so now...
Customer: Alright, that's it. I want to talk to your
Nock on the door... (Score:5, Funny)
Repair Robot: Take me to your modem.
Customer: Who are you, and what do you want?
Repair Robot: I am the Verizon Artificially Intelligent Repair Robot. Please step aside.
Customer: I did not request this visit.
Repair Robot: You are required by the signed user agreement, page 345, paragraph 13, section 2.1.5 to allow any Repair Robot access to your Verizon owned modem.
Customer: I will not let you inside. I wish to cancel my service
Repair Robot: Why do you wish to cancel? We have the best service. Our competition is irrelevant.
Customer: Cancel my service now!
Repair Robot: You are required to comply.
Customer: I will resit any attempt to reach my modem.
Repair Robot: Resistance is futile, OUR modem will be rebooted.
Customer: Leave now before I call the police.
(Police Officer arrives out of the blue)
Law Enforcement Robot: What appears to be the problem Repair Robot 22423-D?
Repair Robot: This biological customer is resisting. Request immediate termination of customer contract
Customer: Thank you, I am done with your services.
Repair Robot: You, customer number 34524554, have violated the user agreement, and will be terminated for resisting.
Customer: No! You can not do that!
(Law Enforcement Robot initiates termination of biological customer. Repair Robot enters house, stepping over the former customer, reboots modem.)
Repair Robot: Call Ticket number 756557665 closed, Resolution: Determined problem was the customer. Customer has been terminated.
(Law Enforcement Robot and Repair Robot head back down the street)
Repair Robot: How does lunch sound?
Law Enforcement Robot: Your charging port or mine?
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't that how it already goes?
Re: (Score:2)
It can't replace it yet. But I suspect the answer may be very different in a few decades.
And your contempt for your fellow man is noted.
Re: (Score:2)
herman millar aeron chairs.
Thats the funniest thing I've read all day.
Re: (Score:2)
Won't happen.
The CEO/executive market is already useless. If they *really* cared about cost cutting then 1/2 of the executives would be out tomorrow.
Re: (Score:2)
What use is a hooker without the economy to pay her (or him)?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yup. If you meet an asshole, don't let it bother you - it's only one asshole. If everybody you meet is an asshole, it's still only one asshole.