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AI

Revisiting the Jobs Artificial Intelligence Will Create (mit.edu) 88

Posted by EditorDavid from the Singularity-re-visited dept.
Long-time Slashdot reader occidental shares a link to the audio of a new interview with the authors of the 2017 article "The Jobs That Artificial Intelligence Will Create" Authors Paul Daugherty and H. James Wilson show that four soft skills are becoming much more valuable as human-machine collaboration advances. These skills include complex reasoning, creativity, social and emotional intelligence, and sensory perception.
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Revisiting the Jobs Artificial Intelligence Will Create More

Revisiting the Jobs Artificial Intelligence Will Create

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  • So 90% of the human race are excluded? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday March 31, 2019 @08:24AM (#58360954)

    Because they do not have those. This is pretty much on the level of the fairy-tales climate-change deniers tell themselves.
    Only effect: Even less prepared when the inevitable happens.

  • "Soft skills"? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Sunday March 31, 2019 @08:30AM (#58360984)
    Complex reasoning is "a soft skill"? Since when? (Also, I'm somewhat dubious that any kind of intelligence can be labeled as "a skill", as opposed to a trait or something.)
    • It probably is a trait to some degree, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be cultivated and developed. Michael Jordan clearly had some traits that meant he would be a good athlete, but he still had to work hard in order to translate that into the level of skill he had. I’ll never be as skilled as Michael Jordan was at basketball, but I could be a whole hell of a lot better than I am right now if I worked at it. I think that’s where they’re coming from at least.

    • Also, I'm somewhat dubious that any kind of intelligence can be labeled as "a skill", as opposed to a trait or something.

      As soon as intelligence as defined clearly, it always turns out to be something that can be developed. It's only when it's poorly defined that it seems magical.

      • Has anyone ever disputed that intelligence can be developed? Mental exercises have been a thing for decades, if not longer.

        • Has anyone ever disputed that intelligence can be developed?

          Yeah, plenty of people, actually.

          • There's a lot of nurture component in brain development and we've known about it.
            • More to the point, we've never been able to identify a "natural" component of intelligence that can't be developed. Even the ones that seem experimentally certain (like the language module that humans have in our brains that animals don't have in theirs), we haven't been able to define what it is that we have that allows us to do it.

      • As soon as intelligence is defined clearly, it always turns out to be something that can be developed into a software package.

        FTFY.

        • Not really. An example is an IQ test: it's a concrete measure of intelligence. But now that it's concretely measured, a person can study and improve their outcome on the test.

          But computers don't do well on the test at all.
          • If there's a success metric, then you can design a system to "study" and improve their outcome on the test. The test is an n -> 1 mapping and the system is a general optimizer that finds the min/max of that function. I think that's pretty oldskool "AI" -- in general, finding a good metric to match human success criteria is the hard problem.

  • Any job that is replaced by AI and automation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Just A Gigolo ( 5876130 ) on Sunday March 31, 2019 @08:47AM (#58361044)
    Must be taxed to the full extent by the goverments, so that billions of people that are replaced by it can be fed, clothed and provided a place to live.

  • I'm not a Luddite (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    But I play one on television. Continued production of technical goodies is not an inevitable goal. For what purpose? If the present life is good, or could be made better in a non-smartphone way, why don't we do that, instead?

  • It's long and doesn't have too much I haven't seen already elsewhere:
    It talks about 3 new job classes:
    Trainer
    Data scientists. This is that hard part. It's the part with all the math. This isn't going to be a big job creator because, well, that math is _hard_.

    Explainer
    Project Management job. Easy enough to do, but it'll be 1 job per product line at a company. e.g. an entire Voice Response system for a large company will generate 1 job. Smaller companies won't have this because they won't write t

    • Nice summary. I concur on all parts, but would add the following about "sustainer".

      This is an immediate, long term cost sink, like IT always is. So if it makes more jobs than the AI replaces then AI isn't cost effective/competitive.

      I agree on the second part, but not entirely on the first part.

      As we've seen a million times over, a lot of companies will buy technology and then just use it until it's well past end-of-life, with no plans to update or recover from failure.

      Think of all the factories running equipment on Windows 95 boxes still. All the companies still running XP because they built an in-house app that only works in Internet Explorer. All the

      • Re:Read the article (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Sunday March 31, 2019 @11:06AM (#58361514) Homepage

        If the king wants to eat food, either he's growing it all himself on his estate, or he needs us to plant, pick, process, and transport that food.

        Yes, once upon a time it took a lot of hands to put food on the king's table. Everyone from the farmer to the miller to the baker and all their helpers had to get rather personally involved in growing the crops and creating that sack of grain, the flour and that particular bread. Something like 90% working in the primary industries, mostly agriculture. Fast forward to today and it's down to about 2% thanks to industrialization and automation, but there's still a farmer doing the farming. Is 0% achievable? Possibly. Maybe soon there is no farmer or farmhouse, it's just a plot of land and machines owned by a faceless mega-company that'll do all the plowing and sowing and watering and fertilization and pesticides and reaping and quality checking delivering sacks of grain in a self-driving lorry to a grain mill. Same goes for the mill, bakery and grocery store - there's food, but nobody makes the food.

        We are seeing the beginning of sci-fi territory where self-correcting, self-repairing machines can keep a society running whether or not the people actually have any clue what it's doing. Where the King has a new set of serfs that aren't so uppity as the old ones, of course it will take a royal court of privileged people like Michelin star chefs to design new food and those who design/maintain/repair the systems but all the rest are just nice-to-have not need-to have. While I don't think we'll have Elysium in space, it's not entirely unlikely we'll end up with something similar here on Earth. A tax heaven with all the rich people, served by robots and the best technology has to offer while everyone else need to fend for themselves. They just have to lose all the support staff they depend on today, but that's a work in progress.

        • I think that's a long way off.

          Michelin star chefs need Michelin star ingredients, and those come from all corners of the world, the rarer the better. It's not really feasible to have an army of millions of specialized robots geographically disbursed tending to the thousands of niche crops needed to provide gourmet food. Terrior is a problem we've not really solved fully yet, and we're not that close to being able to create growing conditions locally for anywhere near the number of animals and plants that wo

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Kjella ( 173770 )

            Michelin star chefs need Michelin star ingredients, and those come from all corners of the world, the rarer the better.

            I find this somehow both true and false, yes they have a tendency so use exotic, expensive ingredients like truffles, saffron and Beluga caviar. Other times it's just about using local ingredients because they're new to globetrotters, like I've eaten quite a bit of moose here in Norway without it being something super exclusive - it's $10-25 per kilo meat depending on cut. But a lot of the time it seems to be fairly mundane ingredients, prepared exceptionally well. Like it doesn't require a lot of special i

  • I don't usually play the Jurassic card, but I was there in the late nineties when George Gilder whipped the telecosm into leaping headfirst into a giant bluff of Gillette Foamy.

    Is Gillette Foamy thick and rich enough to stop this speeding sports car?

    [Stock car smashes through giant pile of foamy.]

    No. But it's still thick and rich enough for a great shave.

    [Man inverts hand with a lump of fresh Foamy that stays in place.]

    Question left unanswered: what are you lavishing below the elbow which requires an under

  • He is a strange loop.

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