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Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs

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Re: Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs

#11

Post by ThomPete »

CryoLogic wrote: post #5

Current AI trend in all major companies is take classic AI - neural networks, Bayesian networks, Monte Carlo -> and than apply cloud scale hardware. Nothing really impressive has actually come out of AI yet except running old AI on bigger databases and faster hardware.

Take almost any jobs you can think of and reflect of how many of a humans skills are actually needed for the job function that has any value. Now think about whether it would be hard for an AI to learn that function.

What you will find is that radiologist and other highly specialized jobs actually are much easier to replace than say a cleaning lady because it's a job that requires a lot of different skills.

AI doesn' have to be impressive or even come close to being general AI to be a danger to humans and the jobs that require the most of a human are often not the best paid jobs. The will be even less true if humans have to flock to al be cleaning ladies/men.

Re: Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs

#12

Post by vram22 »

craftyguy wrote: post #2

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 stil…

People saying "it will be different this time" turned out to be false about bubbles.

Saying not (of) "it will be different this time", i.e. "it will be the same this time", i.e. your claim, can also turn out to be false.

>bowers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowyer

>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.

No need to ask for pardon. But what happened in the past is no guarantee of what will happen in the future. See Black Swan etc.

Re: Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs

#13

Post by igorkraw »

craftyguy wrote: post #2

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 stil…

In Germany we still learn the poem of the 'Schlesian Weber', the weavers that lost their jobs to the mechanical looms. The misery comes through very strongly.

All of your examples caused the same misery, then lots of people died,some adapted like you said . Nobody is arguing to become Luddites, but I do see the need to acknowledge we need to handle the transition ( if you believe in solidarity, Christian or other religious values or in general care about humans ) or be honest when we do not care about peoples misery and death.

Re: Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs

#14

Post by tonyedgecombe »

randyrand wrote: post #9

same should be said of minimum wage. Minimum wage is probably the worst form of income redistribution we use. not allowing people to have salaries competitively priced vs machines will cause most of the swift pain AI will bring. please, replace minimum wage with more welfare or better yet negative income tax. Of course, some jobs will die regardless. But minimum wage greatly exacerbates this.

A lot of people said that about the minimum wage in the UK before it was introduced, it turned out to be far from the truth.

Re: Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs

#15

Post by bastawhiz »

randyrand wrote: post #9

same should be said of minimum wage. Minimum wage is probably the worst form of income redistribution we use. not allowing people to have salaries competitively priced vs machines will cause most of the swift pain AI will bring. please, replace minimum wage with more welfare or better yet negative income tax. Of course, some jobs will die regardless. But minimum wage greatly exacerbates this.

Minimum wage is orthogonal to many jobs that AI will replace, especially in medicine. If it's your job to diagnose illness from medical imagery, you probably make a good deal more than minimum wage but your job is very much in jeopardy. Truck drivers make three times minimum wage in many cases, and their jobs are going to disappear in only a few years. At past jobs, I've seen finance folks (with graduate degrees) have their jobs outsourced to overseas _data science teams_.

Re: Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs

#16

Post by vram22 »

smnrchrds wrote: post #10
craftyguy wrote: post #2

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 stil…

> 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 fa…

>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.

Nor is it a sensible approach.

Excellent points. Whenever thing have been solved, it is because humans did something about it. Not because we sat around waiting for random chance or historical precedents to solve things.

Re: Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs

#17

Post by jacquesm »

craftyguy wrote: post #2

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 stil…

Pardon the harshness, but it is ridiculous to extrapolate from a small series of events to one that arguably will affect the job market like nothing that has ever happened before. We are not talking about a transfer of jobs from one phase of tech to another, we are talking about the wholesale disappearance of jobs with nothing to replace them.

If you just take the first step - self driving cars - and remove all the jobs that currently have a driving license as a marketable skill away from people that only have that particular marketable skill (and that's quite a few of them) then 100's of millions of people the world over will instantly be unemployable.

And that's just one step. That does not translate into 'they'll go and do something else', quite a few of them will end up in poverty, commit suicide or worse because they've been ingrained with a mentality that tells them that if they are not able to contribute that they are a drain on society, and that's for those societies that actually have a safety net. For societies that do not a life of crime or begging is pretty much their only option.

For all the smarts that the HN crowd possesses quite a few of us are categorically incapable to see the world through the eyes of the people whose lives are affected in a very harsh and direct way by our creations.

Just stating that 'people will find a way to stay busy' is easy for someone who never has enough time in a day to read all the books they want to read, build all the stuff they still want to build and who probably scores in the top 5% income wise. Which makes it very well possible that you'll end up in the bucket of the haves rather than the have nots.

The rest of the world will likely not be that lucky. And as one of the haves it should worry you. See also: the French Revolution.

Re: Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs

#18

Post by randomdata »

bastawhiz wrote: post #15
randyrand wrote: post #9

same should be said of minimum wage. Minimum wage is probably the worst form of income redistribution we use. not allowing people to have salaries competitively priced vs machines will cause most of the swift pain AI will bring. please, replace minimum wage with more welfare or better yet negative income tax. Of course, some jobs will die regardless. But minimum wage greatly exacerbates this.

Minimum wage is orthogonal to many jobs that AI will replace, especially in medicine. If it's your job to diagnose illness from medical imagery, you probably make a good deal more than minimum wage but your job is very much in jeopardy. Truck drivers make three times minimum wage in many cases, and their jobs are going to disappear in only a few years. At past jobs, I've seen finance folks (with graduate degrees) hav…

The parent is referring to the how people cannot lower their wage (below the minimum) when automation starts competing against them. The truck driver may make three times minimum wage right now, but the truck driver will be prevented, by law, from offering to drive a truck for 1/3 minimum wage when driverless trucks cost 1/2 minimum wage to operate.

Humans may want to sharpen their pencils and outcompete automation on price, but are prevented from doing so. Robots never work for free. Capital, operational, and maintenance costs can be quite expensive. However, the cost of automation amortized on an hourly basis may be below the price of hiring someone at minimum wage. As such, humans are legally forced to find something else, or go without work entirely.

Given that automation has historically created far more jobs than it replaced, you can argue that it is good thing that people are forced into more useful roles by not allowing them to compete with machines. But if you believe that automation simply takes away jobs for good, as many people do, then minimum wage will actually result in even lower wages for these people than they would have without minimum wage.

Re: Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs

#19

Post by XorNot »

solipsism wrote: post #3

But UBI doesn’t address people’s loss of dignity or meet their need to feel useful. We need to find the jobs that AI can’t do and train people to do them The author raises and then dismisses UBI in a handful of sentences. Then he asserts that we need to be inventing AI-proof jobs -- not because they're useful and worth doing but just to avoid having to change. The changes we have coped with as a species are incredibl…

There's a difference between busy work and meaningful work. And people need meaningful work to do even if the meaning is only something for them.

So no, people don't need busy work - and that's the challenge.

Re: Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs

#20

Post by wavegeek »

craftyguy wrote: post #2

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 stil…

Two problems with this post.

1. You are assuming that what happened in the past will continue to happen in the future. Maybe it will, or maybe this time things are different. There are reasonable arguments that make the case that this time is different. The difference is that computers are encroaching on the one point of difference that man has always had on machines - his brain.

2. You are ignoring transition costs and times. Even with past mechanizations, there was immense pain and suffering and disruption that went on for decades. For neoclassical economists it will be OK in the long run, in equilibrium, when there will again be full employment and fairies will dance gaily on colorful toadstools.

Back in the real world people suffer and die.

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