Nearly Three-Quarters of Adults in US Believe AI Will Eliminate More Jobs Than It Will Create -- and They Want Companies To Pay For the Retraining (gallup.com) 331
Key findings from a Gallup poll: Nearly three-quarters of adults (73%) say an increased use of AI will eliminate more jobs than it creates (PDF). Results are consistent across most demographic groups. However, those with blue-collar jobs are particularly pessimistic, with 82% saying the transition will result in a net job loss, compared with 71% of those with white-collar jobs.
Nearly half of Americans (49%) say "soft" skills, such as teamwork, communication, creativity and critical thinking, are the most important for U.S. workers to cultivate to avoid losing their jobs to AI. Alternatively, 51% say learning "hard" skills, including math, science, coding and the ability to work with data, are the most important to maintain a job in the face of new technology adoption.
When asked to choose among seven options concerning who should pay for retraining, a clear majority of U.S. adults overall (61%) say employers should fund these programs. The federal government comes in second at 50%.
Nearly half of Americans (49%) say "soft" skills, such as teamwork, communication, creativity and critical thinking, are the most important for U.S. workers to cultivate to avoid losing their jobs to AI. Alternatively, 51% say learning "hard" skills, including math, science, coding and the ability to work with data, are the most important to maintain a job in the face of new technology adoption.
When asked to choose among seven options concerning who should pay for retraining, a clear majority of U.S. adults overall (61%) say employers should fund these programs. The federal government comes in second at 50%.
Nearly a third, or three quarters? (Score:3)
I mean, I don't know that average Joe necessarily has terribly good insight on this subject (and survey results are easy to manipulate by finding a wording that leads responses) - but the different figures in the summary are very different, and suggest very different political outcomes here.
10 things AI won't do (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Change the clutch on my car.
2. Fix my home's AC.
3. Trim my trees.
4. Talk to me about my investments.
5. Diagnose my illness (without a doctor as the interface)
6. Teach my kids.
7. Police my neighborhood.
8. Put out a house fire.
9. Rescue someone.
10. Get elected and participate in government.
AI is a tool that could help with all this, but it isn't a thing that can do all of this.
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Now that they've fixed the summary, my original comment is mostly useless.
But I'm glad you were able to really drive home my side point: random people are very hazy on what automation is going to be able to do, and how many jobs it might create or destroy.
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People see headlines like the other day where a mining company is switching to self driving trucks, 500 jobs lost with 100 new jobs, company trying to figure out how to retrain those people. Sure gives the impression of a reduction in jobs, especially when considering knock down effects such as less coffee being sold to the workers. Hard to see a replacement industry that employs those 400 people arriving too.
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webmd.com can handle that. Of course, some of the symptoms could mean you're about to die, but they've got that down.
Khanacademy, duolingo, and related come very close to that. Not a full replacement, but it can give quite a boost if done right.
That it won't do at all. More likely, it will have a large army built up, perform a coup to get rid of corruption, and manage stuff more effectively than w
Re:10 things AI won't do (Score:5, Insightful)
- An AI in a robotics shop will be able to assemble and disassemble vehicles. This is kind of where AI began, with Ford's assembly line. Eventually changing the clutch won't be a problem. Older models will be considered hobbyist, not job creating work.
2. Fix my home's AC.
- How many different ways can an AC break? The question isn't whether an AI powered robot can fix AC, but whether it is cost effective to do so.
3. Trim my trees.
- Is this a matter of art and presentation, or function? Safety would be a concern, we are a long way off from feasibly being able to turn an AI driven "killer robot" loose in the yard and expect it to only trim trees.
4. Talk to me about my investments.
- Simple investment advice based on trends and spreadsheets? AI's cheap and effective. The ability to teach you about your investments and/or investing is something AI may never be able to do. At any rate, it would require very advanced AI to be able to speak in layman's terms.
5. Diagnose my illness (without a doctor as the interface)
- AI is already making progress in this area. AI doctors are on their way. At the very least this reduces the need for highly skilled medical professionals, as those fewer professionals would be able to focus on outliers or challenging illnesses.
6. Teach my kids.
- Teach your kids what? This is one of the targets for AI, getting it to pass a Turing test. Children typically have simpler questions for which there is usually adequate knowledge and refinement to turn into an AI. Most of what your kids learn in school can be taught by AI.
7. Police my neighborhood.
- I'd agree with this. Policing is a very complex and intuition heavy job, very centered on the human experience. Basic surveillance, such as speeding ticket cameras, and home security systems are probably a significant portion of AI's abilities in this area.
8. Put out a house fire.
- AI ought to exceed here, outside of the first responder issue. Too many variables between a fire station and a fire. If you can get an AI and equipment to a house fire, then it can make better decisions on how to reduce or minimize damage to your house and belongings. Potentially an AI with the proper sensors would better be able to rescue trapped pets and humans without risking loss of life of first responders. However, due to the lack of savings an AI and robotics combination will bring, I doubt any use of AI in the firefighting arena to affect jobs anytime in the near future.
9. Rescue someone.
- Back to the above. Depends on the circumstances, and the risk to bystanders. Rescuing individuals often entails going "outside the script", or encountering circumstances which are "outside the script". However, there may be many types of risk which can have programmed mitigations, or nearly foolproof fallback plans. The more we can system-ize something, the greater the possibility we can turn that system into an AI program.
10. Get elected and participate in government.
- Actually, I see this as a possibility. There would be some concerns as to what areas AI would be safe to govern, not everything should be a simple pre-programmed response. And learning AI is about implementing what we would "pre-program" into the AI given infinite time and resources.
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Regarding number 10, we're already relying more and more on technology to govern. From analyzing gerrymandering, modeling evacuations, flooding, traffic patterns in existing and new construction, etc., we're definitely flying down the road to AI. It's bits and pieces at this point, but once more of those are being relied upon, it's not going to be long before we're turning to decision-making AI on a regular basis. While I bet humans will resist this, after just a couple of bad decisions where the AI picked
Re:10 things AI won't do (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Change the clutch on my car.
Autonomous vehicles will be maintained by the corporation due to liability. You will not own a car in the future, you will use one. Car ownership will become extinct.
2. Fix my home's AC.
As with many electronics, we likely won't do much repairing in the future. They will be sealed units that when they go bad, you will merely replace them. That's also assuming you will own property. Robotics could probably be trained to do repairs anyway.
3. Trim my trees.
Tree-trimming drones using cloud-based AI that customers will be able to request any shape they want. Prepare for bushes trimmed to look like the poop emoji, with robotic precision. Humans will eventually be replaced.
4. Talk to me about my investments.
Investments? What investments? Your UBI payments will be nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the unemployable masses. Good luck finding "extra" money with that. The concept of ownership is dying off. As more streaming services pop up, we are already migrating more and more to cloud-based solutions and subscription models you rent access to. This concept will continue to infect a lot of other areas in our lives.
5. Diagnose my illness (without a doctor as the interface)
A human brain will be no match for big data searched and analyzed by AI doctors. In the future, you'll swallow a pill or get blood drawn from a machine that will be able to diagnose your condition within seconds, no human necessary.
6. Teach my kids.
Assuming you can afford to have kids, what exactly will they need to learn? The internet will be able to provide any answer to any question or problem. Yes, parenting will still be a thing for a while, but the concept of education and especially higher learning will radically change due to an utter lack of justification. What's the point of a college degree again when there is no job to employ humans? Humanities and the arts will hopefully survive and thrive, to allow humans to be creative, but other areas of education will die off.
7. Police my neighborhood.
See tree-trimming drones above. AI will have to evolve for some time, but it will likely be proven to respond quicker and make more unbiased decisions when needed. Massive surveillance will enable quick reaction times, and will likely lead to less overall crime.
8. Put out a house fire.
Fire-fighting drones equipped with instant cloud-based access to entire building blueprints armed with heat sensors will search for survivors. They will eventually out-climb, out-carry, and out-maneuver any human doing that job.
9. Rescue someone.
See fire-fighting, combined with AI doctors above.
10. Get elected and participate in government.
OK, I will admit, this is one area that we may keep humans in for a while. The bar seems to be getting lowered more and more, so dumb prone-to-error humans may serve in that capacity for some time.
AI is a tool that could help with all this, but it isn't a thing that can do all of this.
Yeah right. If there's one trait humans have shown to excel at over thousands of years, it's the ability to vastly underestimate and predict the future.
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I don't know about number six. I think you might see a lot fewer colleges and universities but I expect we'll see even more different courses of study rather than fewer. I say that because rather than pick a course of study based on what you can leverage to make a living people will pursue what interests them. I know for sure myself that if I were to go back to school I would make hugely different decisions depending on my motives.
Re: 10 things AI won't do (Score:2)
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1. Change the clutch on my car.
Robots already assemble the clutch in your car. What makes you think they won't be able to change it.
2. Fix my home's AC.
AI can diagnose the problem for some low level wrencher to fix
3. Trim my trees.
Robots already trim and cut trees.
4. Talk to me about my investments.
AI can do a better job than the typical investment advisor who is looking to scam you out of fees.
5. Diagnose my illness (without a doctor as the interface)
AI already can do a good job of symptom diagnosis and suggest lab tests. It does a better job than doctors who don't look for "zebras".
6. Teach my kids.
Computer based training is better than teachers.
7. Police my neighborhood.
AI can better predict crime patterns than you local cops at the donut shop.
8. Put out a house fire.
Robot fire hoses already exist. AI will make them more effective.
9. Rescue someone.
AI can predict where the person is lost. Rescuers already use drones, helicopters and other aids to reach victims.
10. Get elected and participate in government.
Any moron can do that. AI would be be much better.
AI is a tool that could help with all this, but it isn't a thing that can do all of this.
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I guess it depends on what kind of existence you are willing to accept.
What kind of Doctor [youtube.com] are you willing to accept?
What kind of law enforcement office [youtube.com] are you willing to accept?
What kind of Police [youtube.com] are you willing to accept?
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1. Change the clutch on my car.
If AI can drive a car, which we seem to be getting close to, the demand for car repair is likely to be significantly diminished, since car ownership will eventually stop making economic sense for most. The trend is already moving in this direction. Fewer young people of the age to become licensed drivers are choosing to do so.
2. Fix my home's AC.
That will probably be true for quite some time for many home repairs. However, smart home systems integrated into appliances and things like HVAC may be able to assist in diagnosing pr
AI Already doing some of these! (Score:2)
4. Talk to me about my investments.
So-called robo-advisors [wealthsimple.com] are already doing that in a limited way.
5. Diagnose my illness (without a doctor as the interface)
Again this is already happening [technologyreview.com].
6. Teach my kids.
It's already happening [gatech.edu].
9. Rescue someone.
Well, for what it is worth Facebook apparently has an AI suicide prevention program [techcrunch.com]. Rescuing someone does not necessarily require a physical act: mental problems are something that an AI might be able to help with.
Now it is certainly true that AI's roles in these areas are somewhat limited at the moment and t
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1. Change the clutch on my car. AI+Robotics could
2. Fix my home's AC. AI+Robotics could
3. Trim my trees.AI+Robotics could
4. Talk to me about my investments. Why not?
5. Diagnose my illness (without a doctor as the interface) You don't need a Doctor, just a Nurse to properly enter in the data
6. Teach my kids. Wikipedia
7. Police my neighborhood. You don't have electrical diodes in your head?
8. Put out a house fire. AI+Robotics could
9. Rescue someone. AI+Robotics could
10. Get elected and participate in governme
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Some of those things require a fully articulated body.
Others require a level of AI sophistication that would approach human consciousness.
Then we are talking about a new type of citizen. A job at the point is the least of your worries.
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Roboticists are making great advances in intricately articulated bodies, a topic orthogonal to AI. Doesn't have to be anything remotely humanoid to do any of those jobs. Repairing the car and AC are probably the most physically challenging, but those things were probably assembled by robots in the first place, and could generally be disassembled just as easily by running the assembly program in reverse. Then it's just a matter of identifying and replacing the flawed parts and reassembling.
The most profit
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Re: Nearly a third, or three quarters? (Score:2)
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Historically efficiencies had always open the door for more jobs.
What usually happens is this increases the possible output allowing the company to grow and hire more employees.
Before Computers a store would had one person who would figure out payroll for the store. Then they get a computer system to automatically calculate payroll in fraction of the time. Now this person would use their time to do other accounting, managing their Profit and Loss, handling more complex HR issues. Where these jobs that were
49% Eloi, 51% Morlocks (Score:2)
Sad to see that 27% of respondents believe this is yet another round of creative destruction.
They're not wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
>Nearly Three-Quarters of Adults in US Believe AI Will Eliminate More Jobs Than It Will Create
In the short term, we're in for epic disaster levels of unemployment. Only the owners of capital will be immune to the worst effects.
Of course, in the long term the economy will adjust and we'll use our extra productivity to sell each other goods and services we previously wouldn't have bothered with... only this new economy will be totally disconnected from the 'real' economy where land (with sunlight, water, minerals, and space to live) will be a source of wealth and power worth more than all crap all the average people will be producing.
The gap between the rich and the poor will grow to immeasurable proportions.
Re:They're not wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
;In the short term, we're in for epic disaster levels of unemployment. Only the owners of capital will be immune to the worst effects.
Of course, in the long term the economy will adjust and we'll use our extra productivity to sell each other goods and services we previously wouldn't have bothered with...
That's where you're wrong. In the long term, the results will be even worse.
A hundred years ago, when Henry Ford began producing automobiles, he paid his workers higher wages than most other companies of that time. He didn't do it because he was a nice guy, he did it because he recognized a very simple and basic reality: those people aren't just workers, they are customers. Higher wages means he sells more cars.
Contrary to the bullshit "trickle down economics" that Republicans have pushed for 35 years, the truth is, our economy is based on trickle-up economics. When you give people at the top more money, they keep it. But when people at the bottom have more money, they spend it and the money flows up to the business owners and that's how they become wealthy.
And that's the big problem that nobody is talking about. Yes, in the short term the rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer. But, ironically, in the long term, everyone gets destroyed, including the wealthy, because of that one simple reality: Once you've eliminated all the jobs and 98% of the population is living in poverty, who will buy your products?
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So, outsourcing all over again. Seems about right.
What if it doesn't? (Score:2)
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I believe that there is a strong possibility that the first general AI housed in the first practical android body will lead to a dystopia to end all dystopias.
When a 100% loyal metal servant can be your miner, your engineer, your soldier, your laborer, your cook, your companion, or your whore... EVERYTHING and ANYTHING a human does now... the people who own those robots won't need anybody else any longer. So why waste resources on them?
It's a race. Whoever has the first 'von Neumann army' wins. Or possibl
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Henry Ford needed a lot of people to build cars. Facebook and Google need far fewer people to write the software that makes up the profitable core of their businesses.
Ford today employs more people than Google and Facebook (200k vs 100k), but Ford when it was in it's first decade employed far fewer, even as a percentage of population.
If an individual or small team of people can write a best selling book, make a movie, write a program, produce a game, etc. that sells world wide to billions of people, The profits will be concentrated in a few hands.
No one has ever found a way around the Pareto Principle, and it seems to be the natural consequence of equality of opportunity. Because it's an exponential distribution, the larger the market the more concentrated success will be. Moving from many small markets to one global market inevitably produced this increased concentration, but the
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What makes you think our wants are limited? What makes you think this time is special, this time unlike all the previous times there won't be new things we want?
Wow (Score:3)
I think it's amazing that more people think hard skills (i.e., things computers are good at) are essential rather than soft skills (i.e., things computers aren't good at) are necessary for humans.
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QMTA, this is probably because tech companies have taught us that what computers should be good at is moderating videos and spotting word-use and grammar errors in essays. Um....
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I think it's amazing that what people believe, and by people I mean the average joe who knows nothing about AI, is relevant. Anyone who has worked with actual AI, not the sci-fi stuff in the movies, would be less worried.
With any automation, jobs will be lost, that's literally the point of technology - reduce human effort. But new jobs will be created, and with any luck, some things that have been closed to humans becomes open. One thing that comes to mind is that presently we have more intellectuals and cr
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I think it's amazing that more people think hard skills (i.e., things computers are good at) are essential rather than soft skills (i.e., things computers aren't good at) are necessary for humans.
Perhaps they are using evidenced based reasoning. So far, hard skills are way more useful in the job market. Engineers earn a lot more than sociologists. Also, so far, AI has been mostly replacing jobs that require soft skills: telephone interactions, face recognition, voice recognition.
Soft jobs such as driving are forecast to be replaced in the next decade. Hard skill based jobs such as programming are not.
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And moderating youtube videos, you forgot to add that one to your list.
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And writing fiction. People love to write fiction, but yet the race is on to automate that as well.
How else can it go? (Score:3)
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Me too. AI is here. (Score:2)
Learn How To Learn! (Score:2)
NO ONE knows what skills you will need in the future possibly you will need to retrain MANY times.
Only thing you can do is develop the ability to learn new thing quickly.
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A truly good partender is actually much more than someone who pours drinks. The best bartenders are walking encyclopaedias and psychologists as well.
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Quicker than the machine learning that taught itself to beat the best Go masters in the world in just a couple of months by reading the rules and playing a million matches against itself?
Because ultimately, that's the problem. The second problem is that that new skill can then be cloned a million times, and the improvements those million AI make instantly added to the knowledge base of all the rest.
Humans can't compete with that.
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Only thing you can do is develop the ability to learn new thing quickly.
That's called "general intelligence" and is what IQ measures. If you can find a way to raise IQ, there's a multi-billion dollar market for that. Long term, it's possibly the most valuable invention possible. Poorly funded too, sadly enough.
Well the good news is 3/4 figured it out (Score:5, Insightful)
It took 80 years for other tech to catch up and employee more people than it put out of work. The people alive during those 80 years either lived like kings or like crap. And as far as I can tell nothing's changed. Your quality of life is determined by your job (or lack thereof)
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Right now less that 2% of jobs are done by "AI-related" automation. How fast do you imagine this technology will grow? 10x in 20 years would be amazing growth.
How many people read this first "Al's" fault? (Score:2)
As in "Alan", "Allan" or "Allen".
I guess we should call him "Mr. Al" as really is a powerful guy.
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Retraining? (Score:3)
Is retraining people a realistic solution? How does a "retrained" worker compete with someone who has kept their skills up and has been involved with the technology for several decades, or even their entire life?
Our public schools are graduating students with little to no job skills, what makes us think this will change? How can these people _be_ trained for these jobs?
We already have a number of people who have difficulty living in modern society. As life becomes more demanding, requiring more education and knowledge, what do we do with them?
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Quite well. As long you hop into a new and hard-to-define-what-you-do-all-day career like "big data" or "AI".
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I seem to recall George Jetson had to occasionally push a button or something.
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Nearly 75% don't understand AI (Score:4, Insightful)
Management types are part of this problem too. They're not any smarter when it comes to the reality of these so-called 'artificial intelligences', and as a result their expectations are way out of whack from reality, too. Then there's marketing people, and do I really need to explain how far they'll go to make a sale?
Everyone needs to calm down. There also needs to be some realistic, fact-based conversation amongst everyone as to what these so-called 'AIs' are and are not, and what they are and are not capable of, and most important of all: they are not equivalent to (or better than!) a human being in any way, shape, or form and will not be anytime in the forseeable future.
I think they understand enough (Score:2)
Outside of a few Nordic countries your entire quality of life is predicated on your job. And there have been no meaningful attempts to change that. People _should_ be panicking. It's OK to be afraid of something bad that is going to happen. Th
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That is why we don't see people in the streets. However that's just because the right leader hasn't emerged yet. If you can get someone to unite the sheep it's all over for the robber barons and the rich. In fact there have been a few rich guys who have warned of this.
I want lobbyist and legislator heads on pikes. Let it serve a
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Right, a lot of individual tasks are becoming automatable now. People seem to think that as long as one AI can't do everything, we're okay, but an awful lot of things can be done by an "AI" where that's all it does.
Worse, employers trying to save a buck have demonstrated a willingness to use AI that is worse than the humans -- e.g., I work in speech recognition via phone. A lot of my clients have replaced as many humans as possible with speech recognition systems that are far inferior to the humans that wer
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Furthermore you not being able to produce and prove any such credentials
Not a problem (Score:2)
Also, why wouldn't an AI like gaming with meat gladiators? Plenty of work to go around.
Kill student loans and them people can self pay as (Score:2, Interesting)
Kill student loans and them people can self pay as college costs will go way down when student loans that can't be discharged go a way.
college time needs to come down as well 2-4 years (Score:2)
college time needs to come down as well 2-4 years class room is over kill for most jobs.
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You misunderstand the primary purpose of a college education.
I'm sure it is a problem...this time. (Score:2)
"The vast majority of people work on farms! What do you mean in 100 years only 2% of the people will work on farms anymor? Who's gonna pay to retrain them??? The tractor makers, that's who! To hell with plummeting food prices making starvation largely a thing of the past!"
The other 1/4 ... (Score:2)
... have not achieved an education level sufficient to know what AI is.
I bet it winds up more of a wash .... (Score:2)
There's so much FUD surrounding automation and AI these days.... But I look around at almost every established business, today, and I see a whole bunch of employees doing work that could have been automated away long ago, yet wasn't. Just because technology ALLOWS you to do a thing doesn't mean you WILL.
Humans are still the buyers of all of the products and services these companies offer, and humans like interaction with other humans. We've already done a lot of automation in cases where you value a quick
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and humans like interaction with other humans
Sure, that's why online shopping, self checkouts, travel booking websites, and self-service gas stations with pay-at-the-pump (just to name a few) all failed and went out of business.
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Side effect (Score:2)
You know what would be amazing? A robotic road crew that works at crazy efficiency around the clock so that we don't have perpetual road construction in major cities leading to hor
Deep change in society (Score:3)
At some point, people and society will need to realize that a deep change in our way of apprehending riches will be needed. AI is only the latest step. The change that came progressively is the increase of productivity: in the past, we needed every body working all day, or we would starve. Now, one person alone can produce enough for several people, and if everybody works, then we produce too much to consume it all.
Yet, society uses work (and capital, but that is another question) to distribute the produced riches. Therefore, everybody needs a job, and thus we invent bullshit jobs, like putting groceries in bags.
Therefore, society must adapt to consider it is normal that not all people work. Let them make art, science, culture instead. Or be couch potatoes, if they want.
But we need to invent a way of distributing riches that is not entirely related to work.
Retrained for what and by who? (Score:5, Interesting)
Being replaced by AI suggests that these people have to be replaced by something intelligent. That's absolute bullshit. They will be replaced by machines and robots and that's all.
Want an example?
People working in law firms
20 years ago, there were entire floors of buildings filled with people whose job it was to run around looking stuff up in law books. They would use the in-house libraries, they would go to state and city libraries. Etc... then came online legal libraries and tools like LexisNexis which made it take less time for the lawyers to simple type something into a search bar than to actually get a researcher, paralegal, junior lawyer, etc... on the phone and explain what they wanted.
10 years ago, if a senior lawyer wanted to write a document, he pawned that off on a junior lawyer and he/she would sit and write documents and make use of legal secretaries and paralegals to correct the formatting, properly submit it, etc... now that same senior lawyer simply opens a program and answers a series of questions and in 4-5 minutes produces the document they want, then signs it on the screen and submits it using automated systems to the courts.
The senior lawyer doesn't need juniors for about 95% of the shit work they used to do. They can simply pay a subscription to a company who keeps their tools up-to date.
Want more?
Filing Clerks
25 years ago, I was working at a major financial institution in Richmond, Virginia as a temp to try and make rent. My job was to sort tens of thousands of files and place them in the right filing cabinets. I employed a combination of Heap Sort and Quick Sort manually and finished a 3 month temp position in 5 days. Kinda screwed myself there. There were over 200 desks in the slave labor area of the office for secretaries and filing clerks. Today, I'd imagine that there are 20 desks for those same roles.
Stock "Boys"
Grocery stores used to employ dozens of these. First we cut the overhead in half by employing software which would tell the shelf stockers which items to remove from the shelves and they didn't have to manually read all the dates on the packages. Then we started sorting products better using simple filing systems on computers and multi-sized containers that could be more easily managed by machines. Then, we started replacing the tags on the shelves with small screens that could be updated by a computer to reflect changes to prices and labels. Now a grocery store 5 times the size can operate on 1/4 the staff.
Cashiers
This is 2018, most people have visited stores with self-service checkouts and a maybe a security guard. The next phase is to make employ RFID more heavily and allow shoppers to stand on a yellow box where they will be scanned and then answer on their phone whether they would like to complete the transaction where they can simply click yes. This means malls which hold 500-1000 employees across may stores can offer a service with 20-50 employees who simply visit store by store and keeping things clean... like sorting and replacing throwback bins and such. In fact, shoppers could walk the entire mall store to store and settle their charges for all their items before exiting the building.
Agriculture
In my life, I've watched farms become over 100 times larger than when I was a kid. It used to take far more people to handle the farming. But with milking machines, automated butchering systems, livestock management systems, mega tractors that can not only plant and cut, but also bundle... we haven't even started here yet. It might be that a single building full of farmers will be able to manage the entire state of Montana's farming requirements.
AI will be for people like drivers who will be removed from the eco-system. Initially, truck drivers will be cut back substantially through semi-autonomous trains of vehicles. So, a single driver in a lead truc
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Total BS. I am familiar with this field. What software did you write "in a few hundred hours" that automated and replaced network engineers.
The whole retraining thing (Score:2)
And don't think McDonald's, Wendy's or Burger King are going to help - they'll embrace robotics too.
And we don't manufacture anything in this country anymore - well cars to some degree and computer chips. But even those will move to being more robo
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Retraining for what, exactly? (Score:2)
If AI's are going to destroy substantially more jobs than they create, then what exactly do people want retraining *for*? How to be unemployed? I mean yeah, some percentage of people will potentially be retrainable for the new jobs created, but everyone else... the jobs were destroyed, where do you think there is to go? You don't need a lot of training to be a capitalit's boot-licker - just a complete lack of dignity, or enough desperation to fake it.
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Wrong ideas, wrong theory (Score:2)
Okay so there's lots wrong with this line of thinking. First it's not AI is taking away jobs but automation. As we get machines to handle various jobs it lessens the workload on us.
Two retraining isn't going to help you too much. Being adaptable is a more important requirement. It doesn't guarantee you success but it allows you to adopt changing situations which gives you a better chance when the opportunity arrives. Too many folks refuse to adopt or change when the situation arises. I've gone from sy
Retraining AI (Score:2)
Skynet will do the retraining.
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As long as i get to be the sex toy.
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You understand that sex toys generally don't get any pleasure out of doing their job, right? And since I want to sleep tonight, I'm not going to try to mentally explore how a robot would design its sexuality in such a way that it could use humans to give it pleasure.
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99% will not be unemployed. They will be employed as fuel to power AI.
Robots won't make us their toys. They will make us their fuel.
And forget silly ideas like The Matrix. To keep a human alive, the human needs energy. In the form of complex hydrocarbon molecules. The human isn't going to put out as much energy as it consumes. So the Matrix would adapt to directly use whatever sourc
Re:tax them (Score:5, Insightful)
we need to start taxing companies who use AI/robots that take away jobs
Exactly. We need to start by taxing everyone that uses a washing machine or dishwasher rather than employing a laundress and scullery maid.
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I presume my forcing my kids to do this as a chore qualifies?
After All, isn't the point of having kids to put them to work on the farm/homestead?
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Well, with that kind of forward thinking, we'd still have a thriving buggy whip industry today....
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it's actually in society's best interest for those "idiots" you speak of to be able to live in a home, weirdly enough. You probably don't agree with this, but listen to people complain when homelessness goes up. "So unpleasant to see!" they say. "We should outlaw them!" they say. Well, there would be a way to prevent your having to see "unpleasant" homeless people, and it starts before they get to that point, like as soon as they lose their income, however they lost it.
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Did everyone just suddenly get stupid, lazy and unmotivated for some reason?
Yes. Obesity rates have tripled over the last generation. People eat more and do less.
We have no idea why this is happening. Most explanations are either wrong, or just restatements of the problem.
Examples of wrong explanations:
1. It is because of HFCS
2. It is because people watch more TV
3. It is because of computers and machines doing all the work.
4. Food is cheaper.
5. Portions are bigger.
1. is wrong because obesity rates have soared worldwide, and only Americans consume massive amounts of HFCS.
2. is wr
Re:Uh oh.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Geez...when exactly did this "someone else do it for me" mentality hit the US with such full force and become so widespread?
What happened to self-suffiency?
As the average level of education has increased over the past 50+ years, the percentage of people who understand these problems has increased. So instead of childish notions of self-sufficiency, more people know greater social insurance programs are needed for average people to take levels of risk once only possible for the wealthy. These safety nets have allowed the greatest prosperity in our species' history, and they will need to be seriously strengthened if this prosperity is to continue.
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Services that aren't paid for do constitute a gift. If a company doesn't pay taxes, why should it be allowed to recruit from an educated work force, or use public roadways, or anything like that?
Re: Why would employers fund these programs? (Score:3)
More importantly, Who is to say the automation is even coming from the same employer? If you make existing employers re-train everyone they lay off then you almost guarantee that new automation will come from new start ups that replace the existing employers.
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You would be retrained by your new employer, not the employer replacing you.
How would your old employer possibly know what skills you new employer needs?
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Excellent idea. To make this possible, perhaps you should start a charity fund or government program so that people can perform their personal advancement rather than being shoehorned into an education system that doesn't provide the education they require.
Speaking of which, that's the same paradigm used after the United States civil war. They were fine with freeing all the slav