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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

#131

Post by Pamar »

pbalau wrote: post #118
Pamar wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manufacturing jobs did not require enormously sophisticated skills (i.e. the equivalent of a PhD) to be performed. So "moving up" or "moving to" the new jobs was still possible. If automated trucks replace 1000 truckers, how many of them will be able to transition to "automated truck programmer"? (And note: they cannot move to "automated truck mechanic" because those jobs are already taken by "non-automated truck mec…

Please try to not dismiss my question, but what skills does a truck driver have that can't be learned in a couple of weeks? On the other side, I agree with the manufacturing comment. There is a British documentary about building steam locomotives on Youtube. Watch what the skilled workers do, they just move things from side to side so a machine can do the hard work. Hell, I can learn to do that in a week.

I am not dismissing it, but I don't see your point. Yes, to become a truck driver your basic qualification is "driving license" (for trucks, if your country treats it differently from driving cars). You may have extra skills, e.g. a foreign language would help you qualify for driving across the border, maybe, but it is not required.

So when your main/only skill is "driving a truck" what can you pick up as a new job when "driving a truck" has been automated?

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

#132

Post by cjlars »

burkaman wrote: post #113
cjlars wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 1760, the lowest 65 percent received about 29 percent of total income in Britain; in 1860, their share was down only four percentage points to 25 percent. So the lowest 65 percent were substantially better off, with an increase in average real income of more than 70 percent. [1] Despite what Dickens may have written, the period was marked by faster gains for the lower classes than the previous century. And perha…

1. 100 years is way too long. If it took a century for society to sort itself out, that's a good demonstration of my point. 2. "the lowest 65 percent" is a pretty big segment. How were the lowest 40% doing, or 20%? I don't know the answer, I just think it's a useful question. 3. Much of this article talks about how rising income is not the same as a rising standard of living, and how it is "plausible" that standards…

Then it would appear we mostly agree. There will be winners and losers.

>"we don't need to worry at all, everything will work out"

Strawman of course. A nuanced understanding of the historical context of other technological booms is the point of my original post and it's specifically the 'omg AI gonna take our jerbs' kneejerk reaction that I wanted to preempt. I would add that statisticians seem to be less worried about AI threats than your average HNer [1]. And although I don't have a handy source, I know that economists are also likely to brush aside predictions of major impacts.

[1] https://ai100.stanford.edu/2016-report/executive-summary

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

#133

Post by marchenko »

srssays wrote: post #119
marchenko wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. I'm unsatisfied with the ubiquitous horse analogy as well. The economy exists to solve human problems, not horse problems. We are constantly generating new pro…

Sorry, but the economy exists to get returns on capital. Employment is a happy side-effect. If, in the far future, there are greater returns from employing robots than humans, then those humans who need to work will starve.

Both employment and returns on capital are a happy side effects of solving human problems and directing scarce resources to their highest and best use, the only human-aligned goals of an economy. Hunter-gatherers operated various economies for millennia with very little capital and almost no capital returns. But the definition that you supply is the one that is in operation, and will be almost impossible to dislodge. I'm not arguing that immiseration brought on by automation is unlikely, merely that it is not inevitable.

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

#134

Post by burkaman »

cjlars wrote: post #132
burkaman wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. 100 years is way too long. If it took a century for society to sort itself out, that's a good demonstration of my point. 2. "the lowest 65 percent" is a pretty big segment. How were the lowest 40% doing, or 20%? I don't know the answer, I just think it's a useful question. 3. Much of this article talks about how rising income is not the same as a rising standard of living, and how it is "plausible" that standards…

Then it would appear we mostly agree. There will be winners and losers. >"we don't need to worry at all, everything will work out" Strawman of course. A nuanced understanding of the historical context of other technological booms is the point of my original post and it's specifically the 'omg AI gonna take our jerbs' kneejerk reaction that I wanted to preempt. I would add that statisticians seem to be less worried ab…

Ok, I guess I misread your comment. I still think it reads like "the last labor transformation went pretty smoothly, and this one will be less significant, so chill". On a human level it did not go smoothly, and most individuals are not very resilient to changes in the economy.

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

#135

Post by nickparker »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #103
nickparker wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

So I looked at Momentum Machines. First of all, as you say it's completely unrelated to AI, all the technology is decades old. I'm not sure I'm buying that the hardware and design knowhow is so much cheaper today; people started seriously automating car production lines back in the 1960's, so I can't see how this would've been orders of magnitude more expensive in the 1990's when the tech had matured for 30 years. Se…

Yeah I don't know what they're up to. I've used them as a useful shorthand example for automation for awhile, but you're right I should perhaps find a new one because they seem to be in some sort of limbo, crunchbase has nothing after their seed funding.

A more concrete if less evocative example is Amazon's warehouse automation. Relatively simple robots with 3 DOF (2D planar movement + a container jack) are wiping out enormous numbers of jobs, both in obvious immediate effects (less fulfillment center jobs) and by decimating conventional retail.

edit: Momentum still has 19 employees on LinkedIn, so they're not completely dead it seems.

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

#136

Post by dualogy »

Houshalter wrote: post #40
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, 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't imagine robots being able to program computers for awhile.

This actually puzzles me (especially since writing code requires no physical robot, just "an intelligence").

Just recently, we had some AI beat the world's Go champion?

Poker, chess and countless other games are long done.

Programming, in many languages for many tasks, isn't that much of a stretch. In all these games you have a number of primitive operations, sets/rules of valid and invalid state, a goal to work toward.. "same as much of programming, in principle" ;)

I guess at this point the only things holding AI back are (A) the impossibility of parsing human-formulated requirements and specs accurately (we suck at this to, but we're also for now "the only alternative" and can be talked to by same-species inconcise/inconsistent spec-writers painstakingly), and (B) how to deal successfully with all the glitches bugs inconsistencies incompatibilities and special-cases in the various unavoidable-for-interop-required-by-specs human-made APIs, libraries, tools, stale repos, protocols, frameworks..

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

#137

Post by Cyph0n »

dualogy wrote: post #136
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't imagine robots being able to program computers for awhile. This actually puzzles me (especially since writing code requires no physical robot, just "an intelligence"). Just recently, we had some AI beat the world's Go champion? Poker, chess and countless other games are long done. Programming, in many languages for many tasks, isn't that much of a stretch. In all these games you have a number of primitive o…

I think you're comparing apples to oranges. Writing code is nothing like playing a board game.

A more apt comparison would be having an AI create board games that have logical rules, are enjoyable, and are extremely deep.

In this case, specifying a fitness function becomes non-trivial.

Like with designing a board game, how do you know if the program you are writing is getting closer to the goal? Let's say you use the number of unit tests passed as a metric. Ok, but who wrote those unit tests? And more importantly, how do you know you're getting closer to passing some unit test?

In summary, we are still far away from an AI that can fully replace software developers, unless we get a general AI out of nowhere, of course.

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

#138

Post by eli_gottlieb »

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 are not just tools, they are the reason we have an economy in the first place.

Please explain this basic fact to the people at Davos.

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

#139

Post by VLM »

abakker wrote: post #110
K0SM0S wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true, never thought of it this way. Add to that the fact that robots don't have the same needs (can operate with little air/heat/light, don't even need to get out of the room, much less safety concerns in general and practically 0% comfort). You could build kitchens in basements or beneath roofs and save 100% of the floor surface for customers.

You could also have much better safety systems - I.e. total oxygen evacuation for grease fires. No need to worry about people getting hurt. In fact, you might be able to make food in a 100% neutral environment (N2?) and have no fire risk at all. Then, you can use closed-loop air filtration and not exhaust grease and combustion byproducts into the atmosphere. OTOH, the nice dining experiences will be done by people wh…

There are some issues with human consumption of anerobic bacteria and their byproducts. If you thought the food poisoning from aerobic bacteria was rough, try some of the more exciting anaerobes.

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

#140

Post by VLM »

6d6b73 wrote: post #72
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The restaurant business is all about signalling and having the right people doing the right imaginative artisinal ultra-trendy hand labor.

Its very much like the prostitution industry or pr0n.

None of those are going to automate any time soon.

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