Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs

Mechanization 'destroyed' millions of jobs, when people were replaced by mechanized equipment replaced farm workers, horse breeders/tenders, folks in the transportation business, etc.

Electronic computers 'destroyed' jobs when they replaced human computers.

Motorized street sweepers 'destroyed' jobs when they replaced people with brooms sweeping debris off of streets (except in Beijing where, as of 2015, this is still a thing).

Firearms 'destroyed' jobs when bowers no longer had any reason to mass produce bows and arrows.

People will find a way to stay busy. The past is literally filled with examples of a new technology replacing people, and those people eventually found other things to do. It's not hard to see, in hindsight, how many of my silly (but real) examples above translated into entirely new industries.

Pardon the harshness here, I feel like the only people this is truly a surprise to is either folks that ignore the past, or are incapable of understanding the past.

> People will find a way to stay busy

Yes let's just dismiss all the concerns because 'things always work out in the end.'

I suppose there's always room for more managers...

My job didn’t exist 20 years ago. Did yours?

> These changes are coming, and we need to tell the truth and the whole truth. We need to find the jobs that AI can’t do and train people to do them. We need to reinvent education. These will be the best of times and the worst of times. If we act rationally and quickly, we can bask in what’s best rather than wallow in what’s worst.

Saying "find the jobs that AI can't do" like it's this obvious thing; we haven't the slightest clue what AI can't do in five years. Practically yesterday Go was the go-to example of what computers couldn't do, and now it's the go-to example of how they kick our ass. Well-informed predictions for widespread self-driving car deployment range from "in five years" to "half a century at best." And the jobs that aren't threatened by AI, and that are accessible to most people, are threatened by much "dumber" kinds of automation. Human-facing "empathetic" jobs are often considered safe, but what positions actually need a human, anyway? People are happy to do a bit of extra work to get "expert advice" from a database when it comes to travel, law, or finance; stores are happy to let customers use automated checkout rather than talk to a cashier. Dextrous, highly-physical work is still safe (pending advances in robotics, which seems to move a bit slower), but only until someone figures out a way to offload the dexterity-requiring bits onto a factory, or render the whole thing obsolete. And finally there's second-order effects of the resulting economic turmoil; if most of the middle class can't count on keeping their jobs, not enough people are going to be ordering fancy lattes to pay for your role as a barista. Planning a relatively low-skilled career (anything less than a four-year technical college degree) is walking a minefield.

Us highly-educated technical generalists are probably fairly safe, but not everyone wants to study for 6+ years after highschool- and regardless, they could expect to have to relearn all the applied skills in their chosen field when the tool they originally studied gets replaced by something completely different and orders of magnitude better. The old model of "learn a skill, get a job applying that skill, eventually retire" will no longer reliably work on any point of the scale.

> People will find a way to stay busy

You are implying that this will happen automagically, and there is no cause for concern. I disagree. People will find other things to do, but if we want there to be jobs in 20 years for people who have lost their jobs to AI, we need to get to work now.

To use an example to illustrate my point, people have always found new sources of energy. We have never ran out of energy, nor faced extreme shortages as old resources dried up. Does that mean we should ignore any calls to action for investing in alternative and renewable energy sources? After all, why should we worry about and waste resources to prevent a thing that has never happened? Humans have always found a way, I'm sure in time, when oil and gas and coal dries up, we will find something else. Right?

Things work out in the end because we make them work out. Waiting until the disaster hits and then starting to think about possible solutions is not a reasonable approach. If we want to have alternative energy resources by the time we run out of fossil fuels, we need to start working towards it now. Same if we want to have alternative jobs by the time the current ones become obsolete by AI.