Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by T2_t2 » Sun, Feb 25, 2018, 10:32 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #17

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 j…

Your advice from your first sentence holds true, and extrapolating too wildly is unwise.

MAYBE driverless cars become a reality and quickly at that. MAYBE that makes drivers in the west redundant just as fast. But worldwide? I think people underestimate how inexpensive labour is in places like Bali, let alone Kenya.

No one knows what will happen, or what new industries will be formed as a result of these changes, and the warnings are all good and well, but there is much doubt in all directions, and crazy policy implemented to avert a disaster may be just as bad as doing nothing.

That's why this whole new level of automation is so scary: no body has any clear idea what will happen, and the policy shift is really, really unclear.

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

#32

Post by pg_bot » Sun, Feb 25, 2018, 10:32 PM UTC

Another article claiming that there is a coming AI jobpocalypse based on the fact that "this time it is different". Every author focuses on the negative impacts of a new technology instead of what it will enable us to do. In order to believe the doomsayers, you have to ignore the entire history of the industrialized world. I do not find their arguments very convincing.

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

#33

Post by seanmcdirmid » Sun, Feb 25, 2018, 10:37 PM UTC

T2_t2 wrote: post #26

sologoub wrote: post #24

While China’s use of data has a lot fewer restraints than US/EU, another interesting question to consider is how the government will react when the jobs of their population start to go away and unrest set in. If we are sitting on a powder keg, then China’s and India’s are the biggest ones. Policy will be a huge wildcard and also criteria for long term success.

Are China & India really the issue? I mean, McDonalds only just committed to automation of ordering at a minimum wage much higher than that in China or India. I think we over estimate where and by how much automation will strike. Poor to middle income people in rich countries are most at risk. Question is, can we pivot the country to find gainful employment for the dispersed peoples?

What? McDonalds had automated ordering kiosks in China long before the US. The one near my apartment in Beijing got them in late 2015.

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

#34

Post by milesward » Sun, Feb 25, 2018, 10:38 PM UTC

I believe this is a Tim O'Reilly quote, but in any case it's exactly right: "Technology destroys professions, but creates jobs." More detail: http://www.enterprisegarage.io/2017/10/when-technology-destr...

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

#35

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Feb 25, 2018, 10:39 PM UTC

T2_t2 wrote: post #31

jacquesm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 j…

Your advice from your first sentence holds true, and extrapolating too wildly is unwise. MAYBE driverless cars become a reality and quickly at that. MAYBE that makes drivers in the west redundant just as fast. But worldwide? I think people underestimate how inexpensive labour is in places like Bali, let alone Kenya. No one knows what will happen, or what new industries will be formed as a result of these changes, and…

Bali and Kenya don't manufacture cars. They import leftovers from the first world after they are at the end of their economic lifespan. So even if the effects will arrive a little later there they will arrive, and in the worst scenario the new cars won't work on their roads.

> No one knows what will happen, or what new industries will be formed as a result of these changes

No, but we can make some pretty good educated guesses:

Anything that does not require a skill that can't be automated will eventually go away. How long the transition will take will be a major factor in whether or not it will be a smooth one or a terrible one. I hope it will be a century or more, I fear it will be a decade or less once the keys to AGI are unlocked. Worst case it will be shorter than that. In the last two cases: buckle up.

> and the warnings are all good and well, but there is much doubt in all directions, and crazy policy implemented to avert a disaster may be just as bad as doing nothing.

That sounds like a global warming piece.

> That's why this whole new level of automation is so scary: no body has any clear idea what will happen, and the policy shift is really, really unclear.

Yes it is. As far as shocks are concerned this will be one of the biggest that humanity has had to endure so far.

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

#36

Post by rcfox » Sun, Feb 25, 2018, 10:43 PM UTC

SimbaOnSteroids wrote: post #21

vram22 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 understandin…

We're dealing with a different kind of mechanization this time, previous mechanizations were largely manual labors. We've been retreating further and further into the one thing we haven't been able to automate away, our creative intelligence and problem solving, what happens when we figure out how to write something that can do that? It's like being a horse at the turn of the last century saying well we've always had…

It's not really the same as for horses. Horses in society lost control of their own reproductive rights. Horses existed to fill jobs because people bred them to meet a demand. As demand for horses declined, fewer horses were bred.

We have the opposite situation with humans. Individual humans retain their reproductive rights. Most of them don't decide to reduce the supply to meet a reduced demand. For a time, China did impose a restriction on reproduction, but that just resulted in many (mostly female) babies being killed or abandoned.

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

#37

Post by Joeri » Sun, Feb 25, 2018, 10:44 PM UTC

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…

It will take time for the new jobs to appear and people to be retrained, just as it did during those past instances of great change. Meanwhile people will be unemployed.

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

#38

Post by projektir » Sun, Feb 25, 2018, 10:46 PM UTC

pg_bot wrote: post #32

Another article claiming that there is a coming AI jobpocalypse based on the fact that "this time it is different". Every author focuses on the negative impacts of a new technology instead of what it will enable us to do. In order to believe the doomsayers, you have to ignore the entire history of the industrialized world. I do not find their arguments very convincing.

> In order to believe the doomsayers, you have to ignore the entire history of the industrialized world.

Why do you say this? Plenty of unpleasant experiences have occurred via industrialization in the past. Industrialization can be good for society overall and result in new jobs over time, but for a given set of workers today, they're looking at losing the jobs they have no and seeing no replacement for it, as it is unlikely that any of the newly created jobs would be willing to take them in.

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

#39

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Feb 25, 2018, 10:48 PM UTC

pg_bot wrote: post #32

Another article claiming that there is a coming AI jobpocalypse based on the fact that "this time it is different". Every author focuses on the negative impacts of a new technology instead of what it will enable us to do. In order to believe the doomsayers, you have to ignore the entire history of the industrialized world. I do not find their arguments very convincing.

But this time it will be different. We're not talking about a shift from one class of employment to another, we're talking about a shift from employment to unemployment for a very large chunk of the population and we don't have the foggiest idea of where we will find the money to pay for that and we haven't got a clue on how we will keep these people from feeling worthless and depressed.

It's an illusion to think that everybody will be happy being pensioned off at 23, especially if that means that they will be without income.

This shift will move a lot of wealth to the top 5% or so and will leave the remainder in serious trouble.

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

#40

Post by randomdata » Sun, Feb 25, 2018, 10:52 PM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #14

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.

But you're looking at this from the point of view of the environment where automation has always created far more work than what was replaced. In fact, up to this point, automation has created so much work that we even reached a point where the male half of the population could not handle doing it all and we had to start integrating women, who historically were not involved, into the workplace. Minimum wage is working out just fine right now because every time a job is automated, several new jobs appear to take its place.

Previous comments have suggested this trend will not last. Be it that AI will reach a point where it is capable of taking on any new job that we throw at it, or that we will simply run out of new ideas for new kinds of jobs at some point in the future. That is the context being discussed above. In that case, your options are: Compete against automation on price, or go without work entirely. Minimum wage prevents the former, leaving only the latter as an option. The parent is saying it is less ideal to have a $0 income than it is to have a less than minimum, but above zero, income.

But that all hinges on the assumption that work will dry up. The opposite has held true for centuries. It seems highly unlikely that this time is any different. I sincerely doubt we have reached the pinnacle of human achievement already.