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At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

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Re: At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

#21

Post by jedbrown »

josho wrote: post #3

This is all you need to read from the article: > Advances in artificial intelligence will lead to job losses, but new forms of employment will take their place...History, though, has demonstrated that technological breakthroughs lead to new employment opportunities -- IBM CEO Ginni Rometty But, I think we are approaching (if we haven't already crossed this point) the time where new jobs created by technology advancem…

The bottleneck here is education. There will always be demand for employees in the emerging industries, but the required skillset will increasingly be out of reach of the masses, partly due to the time needed to learn these skills (compounded with age and expected time working in that field) and partly due to aptitude. I think UBI is the only ethical long-term solution, but ironically, the people most passionately opposed to such programs are also the people least equipped to be competitive in the emerging economies.

Re: At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

#23

Post by burkaman »

cjlars wrote: post #14

There's a lot believers in technological unemployment here on HN and one thing I think that viewpoint misses is just how darn resilient humans are to changes in the economy. In the past 150 years, we've seen human manual labor replaced by mechanical labor. Think about that -- a lot of early California settlers walked here, and now you're commanding power roughly equivalent to 100 horses when you hop into your car. Ag…

The Industrial Revolution caused a lot of suffering for a lot of people. I don't think "eventually society adapted" is good enough. The point is that we need to learn from history and develop responsible policies so that we don't screw over most of the planet with massive inequality.

That doesn't mean technology and AI are bad, just that we have the benefit of hindsight and we don't have to just blindly plunge ahead and hope it all works out eventually.

Re: At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

#24

Post by yawz »

cjlars wrote: post #14

There's a lot believers in technological unemployment here on HN and one thing I think that viewpoint misses is just how darn resilient humans are to changes in the economy. In the past 150 years, we've seen human manual labor replaced by mechanical labor. Think about that -- a lot of early California settlers walked here, and now you're commanding power roughly equivalent to 100 horses when you hop into your car. Ag…

The extent of adaptability depends on the scale and the pace of the change. Arguably, every generation is experiencing more drastic changes than the previous one. And if the ML/DL/AI combo could deliver on its promises, there aren't many job sectors that can't be improved(!). E.g. taxi drivers' becoming Uber/Lyft drivers is one thing, getting rid of drivers in cars/trucks is another.

Re: At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

#25

Post by chaostheory »

cjlars wrote: post #14

There's a lot believers in technological unemployment here on HN and one thing I think that viewpoint misses is just how darn resilient humans are to changes in the economy. In the past 150 years, we've seen human manual labor replaced by mechanical labor. Think about that -- a lot of early California settlers walked here, and now you're commanding power roughly equivalent to 100 horses when you hop into your car. Ag…

Yes, one example I like to point out is that there used to be people who's sole job was to tap on your windows in the weekday mornings to wake you up, before alarm clocks were cheap & affordable to everyone.

Re: At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

#26

Post by jedbrown »

chollida1 wrote: post #4

We've seen this before with the transition from a labour force that was 50%+ involved in farming to one that became a manufacturing based society and then again in the move from manufacturing to services. One of the bigger differences with AI is that it now may take away many of the lower tier "white collar" jobs along with blue collar jobs that were previously displaced by technology shits. I'm not terribly familiar…

In each previous upheaval, new industries created large numbers of low-skilled jobs. In contrast, most of the new jobs created by AI will require significant education and creativity.

Re: At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

#27

Post by vthallam »

cjlars wrote: post #14

There's a lot believers in technological unemployment here on HN and one thing I think that viewpoint misses is just how darn resilient humans are to changes in the economy. In the past 150 years, we've seen human manual labor replaced by mechanical labor. Think about that -- a lot of early California settlers walked here, and now you're commanding power roughly equivalent to 100 horses when you hop into your car. Ag…

True. Humans definitely will find a way to figure out what to do next if AI takes away lot of jobs. But the important thing is that the rate of which these jobs go. With the recent advances in deep learning or AI in general, the rate of loss of jobs across manufacturing, logistics, agriculture or construction is way more and i don't think we are ready to do something about it.

Re: At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

#28

Post by mariusz79 »

cjlars wrote: post #14

There's a lot believers in technological unemployment here on HN and one thing I think that viewpoint misses is just how darn resilient humans are to changes in the economy. In the past 150 years, we've seen human manual labor replaced by mechanical labor. Think about that -- a lot of early California settlers walked here, and now you're commanding power roughly equivalent to 100 horses when you hop into your car. Ag…

People tend to forget about one thing - in previous industrial revolutions jobs changed, but people were added and removed from the pool slowly and predictably. This time automatons not only take jobs from people, they are also in a sense added to the economy as additional workers.

Think about it this way - previously if someone came up with a more efficient way to do a given job, out of 10 people 9 lost employment, but you still needed that one person to do the job. With automation you get rid of 10 people, and add one additional "worker" to the pool of workers. So now 10 people have to compete not only with themselves but also with one robot that can do job of 10 people.

Re: At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

#29

Post by nine_k »

cryptoz wrote: post #7
josho wrote: post #3

This is all you need to read from the article: > Advances in artificial intelligence will lead to job losses, but new forms of employment will take their place...History, though, has demonstrated that technological breakthroughs lead to new employment opportunities -- IBM CEO Ginni Rometty But, I think we are approaching (if we haven't already crossed this point) the time where new jobs created by technology advancem…

I agree. It all seems so obvious to me that I feel like I must be the fool in the room, but that can't be. Technology and progress in science changes the kinds of work we do. The processes are accelerating, and we're reaching a point where work is better done by machines. I can see no viable future for humans other than Universal Basic Income, with options for additional creativity and work unbounded by time spent do…

So the only future you see for humans if something like Ian Banks' Culture universe, where machines completely run the world, but are benevolent enough to harbor, nourish, and otherwise care for humans?

Re: At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

#30

Post by ChuckMcM »

joe_the_user wrote: post #5

In discussions of the issue, AI and automation are often used interchangeably and this entirely clouds the issue. The AI that is so far real is a particular kind of software that has helped large-scale decisions and processes in large enterprises, large websites and etc - places with a lot of data to agregate. Automation is an ongoing process of replacing people with machines and it is what has eliminated jobs. Advan…

This position, "AI as automation", is the important one.

Tasks, whether they are manufacturing or service, have a difficulty level in automation. That difficulty is generally scored as a 'cost' with respect to having a person do the task or service and the cost to have them do that.

There are two costs associated with execution, training and marginal cost of execution. So if you spend 10 hours training a factory worker to use a machine, that is your training cost, if it takes them 1 second to operate the machine to do the task, that is the marginal cost. Consider the printing press.

The printing press replaces a fully manual process. A scribe takes 3 to 5 years to write out a copy of a book. They are trained for many years in calligraphy, and each book takes years to produce. The printing press on the other hand you train a 'scribe' to arrange the letters from a type tray into a plate, to ink it, to press it onto sheets. That training takes less time than calligraphy training. Then for each book the scribe puts together the plates, prints out multiple copies of the page, and then assembles the book from the various pages. One or more copies of a single book can happen in a week. Your marginal cost has gone down as well.

Then plate printers, removed the type trays. Then mechanical paper handling fed paper into these machines. Etc to the point where now you need nothing, the author writes, uploads it to their kindle publishing account and the readers down load and read.

But all through this process "employment" around the notion of books changed. And who was employed and how also changed. The product, written and illustrated communication from one person to many, was fundamentally the same but delivered differently.

What we think of as "AI" today allows automating with less people training tasks which defied automation before. And by doing so it changes the market dynamics around that good or service. The most popular example is livery and delivery services with automated drivers. It only became possible to automate a driver when you had a machine that could recognize and respond to a wide variety of conditions in its environment.

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