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AI are taking jobs

economist.com

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Re: AI are taking jobs

#101

Post by nickik »

potatolicious wrote: post #39
noonespecial wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on. Nearly all of the articles I've seen of late that tackle this theme reduce to "but how can all of the X's that are now unemployed find work if the economy will never again need X's". Its a simple failure of imagination. When 50% of the people were farmers, not many of them could imagine being airline pilots. A combine harvester must have seemed like a fearsome thing indeed.

The problem isn't that there aren't new jobs being created, it's that almost none of them can be done by the people who were displaced. You lay off 10,000 factory workers. Do you think they can ever be airline pilots? Or programmers? Or financial analysts? Or what-have-yous? Sure, a small (very small) percentage of these folk will successfully retrain into another field, but the vast majority of them will be left beh…

Sure they could, Internet is not that expensiv and thats really all you need to learn programming.

Sure education is expensiv but self education is not!

Re: AI are taking jobs

#102

Post by adrianwaj »

ghshephard wrote: post #69
marquis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When 50% of the people were farmers Farmers are highly entrepreneurial and work very hard, a combine is a welcome invention. It's the hired farm hands who are worried about the combine harvester. It's a very interesting question, what will happen to our society when we have less and less need for manual and rote labour.

The farmer scenario is interesting. On the one hand, (speaking as one who comes from a family of farmers) - they are amazingly early adopters of technology - to a degree that I think might shock your average denzien of HN. DGPS, Real-Time weather reports feeding into Options Plays on their Crops (I learned more about calls, puts, and commodities markets in one evening around a campfire in banff, than 2 years of econo…

Speaking of farmers, I read a post about http://farmingo.com that:

"As America starts to debate farm subsidies and big ag, while college grads are starting more small farms than any time in the last 100 years, look to the power of technology to break open an unhealthy and highly inefficient food distribution system that has left the world both obese and stuck with higher food prices."

"Corbin Hill is using Farmigo and a CSA model to deliver this healthy and fresh food at prices LOWER than the local Harlem supermarkets."

http://sixkidsandafulltimejob.blogspot.com/2011/11/corbin-hi... (VC)

Re: AI are taking jobs

#103

Post by adrianN »

nickik wrote: post #101
potatolicious wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't that there aren't new jobs being created, it's that almost none of them can be done by the people who were displaced. You lay off 10,000 factory workers. Do you think they can ever be airline pilots? Or programmers? Or financial analysts? Or what-have-yous? Sure, a small (very small) percentage of these folk will successfully retrain into another field, but the vast majority of them will be left beh…

Sure they could, Internet is not that expensiv and thats really all you need to learn programming. Sure education is expensiv but self education is not!

Not everybody is cut to be a programmer, just look at the percentage of college kids that fail Programming 101, even though they are in a way better position to learn than the 40 year old laid-off factory worker.

Re: AI are taking jobs

#104

Post by nickik »

brianobush wrote: post #98

So if you work in AI, you are safe?

Well at first but I wouldn't work to hard. In the End you will programm something that replaces yourself. At least the people who work in AI are the last to go and then we are at Singularity and nobody knows what happens then.

Re: AI are taking jobs

#105

Post by oelewapperke »

adrianwaj wrote: post #102
ghshephard wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The farmer scenario is interesting. On the one hand, (speaking as one who comes from a family of farmers) - they are amazingly early adopters of technology - to a degree that I think might shock your average denzien of HN. DGPS, Real-Time weather reports feeding into Options Plays on their Crops (I learned more about calls, puts, and commodities markets in one evening around a campfire in banff, than 2 years of econo…

Speaking of farmers, I read a post about http://farmingo.com that: "As America starts to debate farm subsidies and big ag, while college grads are starting more small farms than any time in the last 100 years, look to the power of technology to break open an unhealthy and highly inefficient food distribution system that has left the world both obese and stuck with higher food prices." "Corbin Hill is using Farmigo an…

Your discussion is missing the point. The people being talked about are farmers, to a certain extent, but it would make more sense to discuss about seasonal labour.

Re: AI are taking jobs

#106

Post by nickik »

bluedanieru wrote: post #62
maeon3 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the cotton pickers will need to be forced to go to high school and learn something that hasn't been automated. To the argument that this can't be done, take away their food, they will adapt. Mercy can be used in exceptional cases. I don't like the argument: "This human has such an aversion to learning that they must be supported forever like a pet". I suppose you wait for them to die and the problem solves itsel…

They'll adapt alright, but remember that the goal of the adaptation is to provide for themselves a quality of life that is comparable to that of their peers, not necessarily to contribute to society in a way that you would find useful. That is, they're just as likely to kill you in a riot and take your things, as they are to commit to a few years of school in their late thirties or forties. People are not rational ac…

Well hard core libertarians that are Anarchocapitalists maybe but in a system where you have working law (working like its working now) its more likly that people start learing to do something usefull then just going on a killing spree.

Re: AI are taking jobs

#107

Post by Joeri »

ars wrote: post #21
kandu wrote: post #5

Imagine a world where all goods and services required for a decent life will be provided by AI and robots. Still, there will plenty of jobs for humans - those related to the humanity of humans. Life could become dedicated to enjoying art in various forms, and this art will be conceived mostly by humans. If people will have no work to do, they could hire entertainers. They could do jobs as a hobby - e.g., manually pro…

Sounds like a horrible world to me. "Life could become dedicated to enjoying art"?? Ugh!!!! "...could enjoy the variety of clothing..." are you kidding? That sounds horrible. There is a basic human need to be needed. People who have everything but are not needed are miserable. People who are needed, but have little are happy.

Being needed and being appreciated aren't the same thing. What we want is appreciation, even if what we do is sort of pointless.

That opens up all kinds of possibilities to how to spend our time. For example, if you didn't need to work to meet your basic needs, you could decide to devote your time to beating videogame records. It would be completely useless, but still lead to lots of appreciation for your skill. Doing a hobby all day long could become the norm.

I have to second the culture series as good reading on this topic. It paints a believable picture of an Ai-driven post-material society where people still feel that they live full lives.

Re: AI are taking jobs

#108

Post by nazgulnarsil »

Tsagadai wrote: post #88
nazgulnarsil wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, standards of living will remain stagnant as the evil rich overlords accrue ever increasing wealth! Oh wait 200-2010 was the single greatest decade in all of human history for the amount of people raised out of subsistence living to a reasonable standard of living and 2010-2020 promises to be even better. Darn reality messing up my morality plays. Real life is not a status game.

I agree with you in part, capitalism has brought billions out of poverty and backbreaking labour. When you compare serfdom to pretty much any alternative is better. You will also notice if you read the data correctly that individual wealth has risen across the board. Everyone has more than they would have otherwise had in the 1950s. That's great but it doesn't mean that economic discussion is now over because all arg…

productivity outpaces population, so supporting the masses takes a smaller percent of gdp as time goes on. Of course this will not happen in a democracy as the populace will vote themselves largesse until the system collapses as noted by the greeks.

Re: AI are taking jobs

#109

Post by nickik »

adrianN wrote: post #103
nickik wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure they could, Internet is not that expensiv and thats really all you need to learn programming. Sure education is expensiv but self education is not!

Not everybody is cut to be a programmer, just look at the percentage of college kids that fail Programming 101, even though they are in a way better position to learn than the 40 year old laid-off factory worker.

How much of this is because its much easier to learn about business or law? How much of this is because CS101 are often extremly bad (there was alot of talk at here at HN).

Im not saying everybody should learn programming. There is lots of other stuff that will not get taken ofer by mashienes and its pretty easy to learn a lot of this because of the Internet.

The problem is that often its not really about beeing good, its more about having finished the right school or having the right certification. That a hole diffrent set of problems.

Re: AI are taking jobs

#110

Post by dantheman »

politician wrote: post #76
potatolicious wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't that there aren't new jobs being created, it's that almost none of them can be done by the people who were displaced. You lay off 10,000 factory workers. Do you think they can ever be airline pilots? Or programmers? Or financial analysts? Or what-have-yous? Sure, a small (very small) percentage of these folk will successfully retrain into another field, but the vast majority of them will be left beh…

Hear, hear. This is the reason that we need a wage for displaced workers. People who will probably never work again, due to lack of education or ambition. It's socialism, yes, but are we going to be responsible for allowing millions of people to become beggars while we enjoy the fruits of our labors? I started my career right out of uni by developing software which eliminated hundreds of low skill jobs. Hundreds... r…

Or perhaps as we increase efficiency things get cheaper and cheaper allowing people who once required a high wage to live to now live at a much lower wage. There is always work to be done, unfortunately a lot of it isn't profitable at the wages that are required to perform it. If we didn't have inflation like we do now, things would get cheaper in all fields.
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