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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

#71

Post by cjlars »

briholt wrote: post #54
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 undeniable math is that machine productivity will grow exponentially faster than human productivity. Organics have had a few billion year head start on machines, so it's of no consequence that we've been able to scramble in front of our metallic friends for their few-hundred-year infancy. The day will come when machine productivity dwarfs that of humans by orders of magnitude. It would be absurd to task humans wi…

> The day will come when machine productivity dwarfs that of humans by orders of magnitude

It already does. Have you tried to build a house without power tools?

Strong-form, self perpetuating, Terminator style AI has not even been invented yet and you're jumping to the closing chapters.

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

#72

Post by 6d6b73 »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #64
Houshalter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this time it is different. I like the comparison to horses. Steam engines and trains threatened to replace horses in the mid 1800s. A lot of things that were previously done by horses were replaced with trains and steam engines. Yet the horse population grew, and cities remained full of horses. There were countless transportation innovations in the 1800s, from canals to streetcars and omnibuses to bicycles. But…

> I can not imagine any jobs that an average, unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do. Whenever I hear statements like this, I cannot help but think that the person making the statement has never done a week of work as "unskilled labour" themselves. (No offense intended.) Be it flipping burgers or building houses, there is improvisation both when it comes to high-level intelligence and in the…

"The tech has been here for more than a decade. Why don't restaurants do this?" I'm in automation, so maybe I can answer this. Small businesses don't have necessary capital to implement automation solutions. While they know that in a long term this would be good idea, they have a hard time doing it. Large corporations are slower to implement any major change, and sometimes they are limited by contracts they have with their clients. Few times when I proposed automation solution to business doing with the gov, the response was "We have contract that requires us to employ these people. We want to automate but we can't".

But once competition automates, all bets are off everyone must automate or perish.

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

#73

Post by icehawk219 »

kbenson wrote: post #50
Houshalter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this time it is different. I like the comparison to horses. Steam engines and trains threatened to replace horses in the mid 1800s. A lot of things that were previously done by horses were replaced with trains and steam engines. Yet the horse population grew, and cities remained full of horses. There were countless transportation innovations in the 1800s, from canals to streetcars and omnibuses to bicycles. But…

Horses are tools that people used. When there's no more use for the tool, it's usage may be reduces. People are not just tools, they are the reason we have an economy in the first place. A solution in some form will have to be put forth if one doesn't emerge. Another way of looking at this is that we weren't ever under threat of millions of displaced horses rising up and overthrowing the system. Since that is a possi…

People absolutely are tools in the eyes of their employers. I've never been at a company and not heard them refer to employees as "resources" when talking about scheduling and allocation of people. There's nothing special about humans in a factory compared to robots other than our ability to adapt and learn. But as robotics and AI/ML get better that gap narrows until you reach a point that the robot is "good enough". That same robot might be a little slower than a person at first but it's operating for a fraction of the hourly rate and it's doing so 24/7 with no breaks and no slow downs.

Your point about millions of displaced people rising up and being unhappy is 100% valid. But you'll be hard pressed to find any company willing to sacrifice a slice of their earnings to employe people just because it's the right thing to do. Especially in the US where the entire culture is based around corporate profits only ever increasing at a rate greater than inflation. The US is in one big race to the bottom to see who can shave $0.01 off the sale price of their product. That naturally leads to two things. Monopolies and hyper efficiency. Because when your profit margin is pennies per unit you have to move one hell of a lot units to make hundreds of millions a year in revenue.

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

#74

Post by DashRattlesnake »

kbenson wrote: post #50
Houshalter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this time it is different. I like the comparison to horses. Steam engines and trains threatened to replace horses in the mid 1800s. A lot of things that were previously done by horses were replaced with trains and steam engines. Yet the horse population grew, and cities remained full of horses. There were countless transportation innovations in the 1800s, from canals to streetcars and omnibuses to bicycles. But…

Horses are tools that people used. When there's no more use for the tool, it's usage may be reduces. People are not just tools, they are the reason we have an economy in the first place. A solution in some form will have to be put forth if one doesn't emerge. Another way of looking at this is that we weren't ever under threat of millions of displaced horses rising up and overthrowing the system. Since that is a possi…

> Horses are tools that people used. When there's no more use for the tool, it's usage may be reduces. People are not just tools, they are the reason we have an economy in the first place. A solution in some form will have to be put forth if one doesn't emerge.

Unfortunately, there's a long history of people thinking of and using other people as tools.

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

#75

Post by briholt »

cjlars wrote: post #71
briholt wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The undeniable math is that machine productivity will grow exponentially faster than human productivity. Organics have had a few billion year head start on machines, so it's of no consequence that we've been able to scramble in front of our metallic friends for their few-hundred-year infancy. The day will come when machine productivity dwarfs that of humans by orders of magnitude. It would be absurd to task humans wi…

> The day will come when machine productivity dwarfs that of humans by orders of magnitude It already does. Have you tried to build a house without power tools? Strong-form, self perpetuating, Terminator style AI has not even been invented yet and you're jumping to the closing chapters.

This is a discussion about closing chapters isn't it? Are we merely disputing the date on which a billion power screwdrivers can direct themselves and then Instagram pics of their accomplishments? I give it 50-150 years.

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

#76

Post by creaghpatr »

kbenson wrote: post #10
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…

> My example here is Instagram, a company of a dozen staff or so when acquired, is the digital replacement of photo labs in every city. While not trying to dispute your main point, I hardly think Instagram replaces all of what photo labs do, such as large size prints, professional correction, and specialty products such as cards and books. There are other companies online that do compete in these spaces though. I thi…

Instagram also enabled some business to be created or to grow based on ease of access and low/no overhead costs for its service.

Instagram 'models' come to mind.

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

#77

Post by nickparker »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #64
Houshalter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this time it is different. I like the comparison to horses. Steam engines and trains threatened to replace horses in the mid 1800s. A lot of things that were previously done by horses were replaced with trains and steam engines. Yet the horse population grew, and cities remained full of horses. There were countless transportation innovations in the 1800s, from canals to streetcars and omnibuses to bicycles. But…

> I can not imagine any jobs that an average, unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do. Whenever I hear statements like this, I cannot help but think that the person making the statement has never done a week of work as "unskilled labour" themselves. (No offense intended.) Be it flipping burgers or building houses, there is improvisation both when it comes to high-level intelligence and in the…

I think your analysis is based on shallower automation than we'll actually see.

Let's assume your robot arm example is about a frycook at a burger joint. I agree a robot arm isn't an effective way to replace the frycook, but a specialized system like Momentum Machines is developing[1] will be.

The automated fast food joint isn't a regular one with robot arms instead of people, it's a box the size of a small office that takes raw ingredients from a stockpile inside of it and creates fully assembled burgers, fries, chicken strips, and onion rings without any human interaction.

Automation hardware will strike a middle ground between specialization and reuse. Eg the deep fryer will be able to cook several different meals, but it will still only have 1-2 degrees of freedom for putting stuff in and taking it out. Similar story for the grilling surface, veggie chopping system, and the plating / packaging mechanism.

This is much cheaper, faster, and more reliable than truly general purpose robot arms. More importantly though, it takes dramatically less space than a conventional restaurant, so you can plop your company's food-making-box down in Times Square and actually make a profit, while everyone else is stuck four blocks away to break even on the real estate.

The stories will be different in different sectors, but in general I think the coming automation wave is a bunch of quantitative changes coming together to form qualitative ones like this. You could probably build a burger-maker a decade ago too, but the hardware and design know-how necessary have gotten orders of magnitude cheaper and more abundant, and so now it's actually happening.

[1]: http://momentummachines.com/

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

#78

Post by josho »

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…

> Aren't we supposed to be destroying jobs

I've never actually thought of it this way. That's potentially a revolutionary thought that we should be seeking to destroy jobs, not create them.

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

#79

Post by Florin_Andrei »

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…

As work became less and less physical, people generally retreated into more cognitive-based jobs.

Now it seems that AI might be able to handle any mind-based job just fine, in a not too distant future. If that is indeed the case, what will human workers do?

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