AI are taking jobs

I was about to say this. Also, in Scandinavia the salaries _have_ indeed kept pace with increases in productivity. In Norway, you can earn a decent living as a checkout clerk. It seems as if the business owners here have actually passed on most of the savings to their workers. I'm pretty sure this is exclusively a cultural phenomenon - a sense of solidarity and cooperation which the larger part of US culture does not have. (I'm not meaning to bash the United States here, but this view is compounded by the fact that American employee-employer relationships seem a lot more antagonistic and imbalanced).

There are also less super-rich people here since people are overall taxed more. The oil industry also adds to the general income level, but this doesn't explain the entire effect. I'm pretty sure the same can be observed, in Sweden and Finland.

Thankfully we're nowhere near where intelligence itself is being displaced, only small subsets of work that were previously the domain of highly specialized experts [sidenote: Mathematica has been doing this for a while]. Nor will advances in statistical machine learning and computing hardware get us there. "AI" is a field we still have to make any real progress in.

I think what the current trend means though is that we're going to have to teach people to learn and re-work education to maximize the ability to adapt.

I feel a little sorry for the radiologist whose effective supply is apparently rapidly expanding, but there is still a long way to fall from a $350,000 annual income. :)

I'm scared that as we optimize test-prep and narrowly focus on passing children through school, we're potentially decreasing the likelihood that people learn on their own. We're decreasing the amount of effort it takes for a kid to learn some [probably useless] skill, like drawing force diagrams on pulley systems, where the point of the exercise [imo] in the first place was to stretch the mind and force the kid to fill in the gaps and think for himself. That same kind of stretching that might come in handy when he finds himself displaced for whatever reason, be it technology or something else.

Funny that you should bring up the whole synthetic meat thing. Techdirt just recently had a post with a link to it :

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110909/04255515875/dailyd...

I don't see how non-knowledge-based work is gone forever. Sure, we have roombas, but we are a long way from me being able to tell a robot to clean a messy room, or to properly lay out merchandise that has been messed up by customers. Heck, even at high-end SysAdmin rates, I can assemble servers cheaper than I can buy them from Dell.

I mean, I think a some of the barrier to unskilled employment right now is cultural. Having someone clean your personal space is seen as extremely crass. Heck, expensive software engineers are expected to clean up their own cube. Even having a secretary is kinda weird these days. Man, it's really nice to have support staff, but culturally, we seem to look at it like owning slaves.

But really, I think most of the problem is just that the economy is in the dumps. It's hard for anyone outside of the top 20% skill-wise to find a job right now, doing much of anything. It's an employer's market.

>And even if they did have the necessary educational background for retraining, who would pay for it? Education in the USA is already absurdly expensive, and the employer sure as hell won't be picking up the tab.

This is the economy again. During the dot-com boom? anyone that looked like they might be able to become qualified (including a 17 year old me) could get a job learning to become a computer programmer or a sysadmin. These days, companies don't want to take those kinds of risks; but I think that has more to do with the economy than with any structural differences in the computer industry.

I mean, do you really 'train' a SysAdmin? that's not really how I've seen it work. You get a kid who is into that sort of thing already and throw some books at them, and it sticks or it doesn't. The cost is that the kid is going to make some mistakes while learning, you don't know if the kid is even capable of becoming good, and even if you pick the right kid, the kid doesn't break anything too expensive, you get them the right books, even then, once you have built a pretty good SysAdmin, well, they might just leave for a better paying job.

Every time you create a tool or process or system that lets you do more with less effort you are supposedly "taking jobs".

So stop whatever it is you are doing and instead destroy these things instead. Then stand back and watch the ground swell of prosperity that sweeps the globe.