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

The 'unemployment rate' is fictional, and it takes a lot of hand waving to get to 5% unemployment rate. Some of which justified, but it's only useful for year to year comparisons not decade to decade as the number keep changing.

Right now there are 121.5 million people working full time in the US. The population is 320 million people and 250 million adults and 200 million adults under 65. So actual employment is around 50% depending on how you slice it.

It doesn't have to be that way.

All you need is a bit of advance in robotics, coupled with stronger AI.

Perhaps a proper AGI is not even required for that. Just good enough multipurpose ANI combos.

1. not certain about the articles demographics - see https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

The big problem with immigrant-fueled growth in America is that the first derivative of most Latin American demographic trends indicates larger reductions in growth rate than the U.S. or Canada. So North America, in general, could become dependent on higher-risk immigrant populations from Asia to maintain any significant growth.

2. Most boomers will be dead and turned to dust before 2060. And age distribution could become flat as fertility rates go flat. After 2045, the over 65 population rate will probably decrease to under 25% for North America. Some actuaries are thinking that people will not necessarily continue to have increased lifespans.

3. Quality and financial incentives for production and design automation have been driving industry at increasing rate for at least 25 years. My three current employers (one full-time regular, two contract) are all under 200 employees, have all reduced head count by at 15% to 40% over last 5 to 10 years, and have mandated to either not increase bodies or to further decrease bodies.

4. Too much emphasis on self-driving vehicles. Most industrial automation is after the obvious low-hanging fruit - logistics and production, where you do not necessarily see actual robotics, but much process automation and decision-making sustained by ML.

5. Mid-level jobs are being increasingly targeted: parsing of legal documents, accounting, warehouse management and stock control, and some of the more simple product design functions.

6. Anecdotal stuff.

In Early 2016, employer's main site in Southern California terminated OVER half of the engineering group - mostly support and mid-level management. Only one technician, no PCB designers, no mechanical designers, and no engineering managers remain. The remaining engineers do it all - feasible because design automation tools have reached a 'critical' mass.

Spent most of October through December automating the crap out of a factory warehouse and related processes. Last week, 14 people were terminated at the Mexico factory site. The factory warehouse had 14 full-time and 4 part-time employees in warehouse; there are now 3 full and 1 part-timer; and the part-timer will probably go away next quarter. And no robots in sight...

We can argue this all day long since neither of us has data to back up our assertions. So, I'll reframe this somewhat.

Technology in the past created new more efficient processes, freeing people to create new processes. That describes your example above and technology advancements largely to date. What's different now is not that we are making more efficient processes, rather technology is displacing human skills. Concretely, when the horse was replaced with a car both still required a driver. But, the driver was so much more productive thanks to the advancement in the process. However, today, it is not the process that is advanced it is the human skill that is replaced--ie. there will be no driver. So, it is the human skills that technology is encroaching on. So, anything that I can physically do, we could soon engineer a robot to do as well. Price/performance may not make sense today, but we know tech gets cheaper/better every year, labour doesn't. So, it is not processes that are being replaced but human skill.

So, with this in mind, I don't think you can argue that we'll have full employment in 100 years time.

> The vast majority of humans can not be trained to be computer programmers.

I disagree with the general sentiment. What makes humans different is that we can become skilled.

Imagine the big slave population that was used to build the pyramids in ancient Egypt. Suddenly, modern construction machinery appears over there, making them "unemployed" (slaves had a cost too). I would bet only a very very small part of those slaves couldn't be trained to do something more skilled than pushing rocks around.

Unskilled labor, as in repetitive, boring work where little creativity, reasoning, or dexterity is involved, is an infliction humans have to endure, for the moment. It's a waste of our real ability.