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AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs [pdf]

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Re: AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs [pdf]

#91

Post by dfabulich »

ModernMech wrote: post #90
robertfw wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't recommend this video highly enough - it does a great job of showing the science fact instead of contemplating science fiction, illustrating how technology that we have in development NOW is going to impact our economy. I have a feeling that this is an issue is going to creep up on us quickly, and I worry that our governments have proven themselves completely incapable of driving the discussion and making the…

As a roboticist, this video made me very angry. This is not a great showing of science fact, but a strange distortion of the current state of robotics to fit a particular narrative. By the end, it definitely ventures well into the realm of science fiction. I'll point out some of the most egregious examples. This is a pretty long post, but if you spent 15 minutes watching the video, the least you can do is spend 15 mi…

> To say we shouldn’t use a computer to fix a problem caused by computers is beyond ridiculous.

I think you may have misunderstood the purpose of the video. The video doesn't say, "hey, we need to turn off these computers because they'll make us obsolete."

He's arguing that we'll inevitably use computers to solve a problem created by computers, and that a lot of people will be unemployable as a result, and that's something we need to think about as a society.

The video doesn't suggest any concrete solutions at all. (Basic income/negative taxation seem like obvious candidates; walking back technology itself is probably not a good candidate, though some people will certainly try.)

Re: AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs [pdf]

#92

Post by altcognito »

ztko wrote: post #84
QuantumChaos wrote: post #76

From the point of view of classical economics, AI increases the productiveness of capital, and certain specialized kinds of labor (e.g. creating and improving AI). While this increases the total output of society, it also increases inequality. We already have in place mechanisms to deal with inequality, namely income tax and welfare. As the total output of society grows, we will be able to afford more generous kinds…

Why do you say that AI will automatically increase inequality? Not necessarily disagreeing but interested to hear your thoughts. I'm also wary of the impact that AI and robotics may have but am cautiously optimistic. While I do think that many jobs will be displaced by automation, I wonder if we'll also see a labor revolution or rather emergence of a new sector/type of jobs. E.F. Schumacher talked a lot about the deh…

I hope as you do but.... Small scale tools for small groups and individuals might be more flexible but will absoltuely be less prodigious/efficient than large scale factories and therefore margins and pricing will always put the little guys on the edges of the economy, thereby exacerbating inequality.

Re: AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs [pdf]

#93

Post by Houshalter »

ModernMech wrote: post #90
robertfw wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't recommend this video highly enough - it does a great job of showing the science fact instead of contemplating science fiction, illustrating how technology that we have in development NOW is going to impact our economy. I have a feeling that this is an issue is going to creep up on us quickly, and I worry that our governments have proven themselves completely incapable of driving the discussion and making the…

As a roboticist, this video made me very angry. This is not a great showing of science fact, but a strange distortion of the current state of robotics to fit a particular narrative. By the end, it definitely ventures well into the realm of science fiction. I'll point out some of the most egregious examples. This is a pretty long post, but if you spent 15 minutes watching the video, the least you can do is spend 15 mi…

He's not saying that robots are going to take literally every job ever. Only the majority of them.

I believe I read that stores don't encourage self-checkouts very much because having humans around significantly decreases shoplifting. This may be less necessary if we get better AIs for monitoring security cameras.

I've never read anything about self-driving cars being impossible in bad weather, only that no has done it yet. Machine vision systems are not as vulnerable to this btw and that has been improving in leaps and bounds over just the last 10 years.

Lawyers still searched through documents tediously before computers. It was probably even harder then, not easier.

It's at least theoretically possible create a robot that can diagnose and prescribe treatments for a patient just like a doctor. All the video claimed is that they can do statistics and search the relevant research a lot better. Which is definitely true, and see IBM's Watson.

Arguments about what "creativity" means are never useful or productive. But AI that generates music well already exists and is going to continuously get better.

Re: AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs [pdf]

#94

Post by josephagoss »

grondilu wrote: post #45
TeMPOraL wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why we need to move away capitalism before it's too late, if we want to have part in that bright future.

This part in that future is actually made of shares in the stock market. If you want some, you have to buy it. Fortunately anyone can : it's a free market and you can enter with as little as a few hundreds bucks.

But isn't it easier to do away with capitalism altogether so that we can all be equal, no matter the effort we put in?

This future of no capitalism people want scares the heck out of me, almost makes everything I've worked for pointless.

Re: AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs [pdf]

#95

Post by GrantS »

aivosha wrote: post #62
Afforess wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analogies are not meant to be perfect representations of an argument, but rather a facsimile that helps the reader compare and contrast. Your nitpick is therefore irrelevant.

I did not say the analogy is not representative. I said its wrong. Now if horses were building cars and being worried about their future, I'd say fine. But its not the case. Here horses are not in the same position at all as humans. So its not helping to "compare and contrast", its building up a wrong mindset, wrong premise.

It is never made explicit in the video but imagine that corporations are the current dominant super-organism on which the economy depends. Humans are only designing and building cars because corporations have no better way of getting that job done. Thus, humans are used by corporations just as horses were used by humans before the corporation became the dominant economic species on the planet. Corporations may not always need humans to survive.

Just as cars replaced horses for the benefit of human masters, robots may replace humans for the benefit of corporate masters.

You may still disagree with the analogy but I think this is at least the proper analogy to be arguing about.

Re: AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs [pdf]

#96

Post by phaemon »

a8da6b0c91d wrote: post #52
Homunculiheaded wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"post-scarcity" is an illusion presented to people living at the very top of the economic pyramid. I'm sure most HNers are in the top 90th percentile of US household income on their own, living in a world mostly surrounded by other affluent individuals working in a similar field, all in jobs with increasingly flexible work hours, better benefits and nearly unlimited job prospects. The world only looks like it's movin…

There's a lot of delusion about the developing energy picture. The arithmetic shows we will not be running millions of robot slaves and self driving electric cars on solar and wind power. We will be walking places and drying clothing on clothes lines. We are running out of fossil fuel energy and still no viable replacements have been identified.

I like how you identify "walking places and drying clothing on clothes lines" as signs of the collapse of civilisation. To most people, those are normal things.

Re: AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs [pdf]

#97

Post by zecho »

ModernMech wrote: post #90
robertfw wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't recommend this video highly enough - it does a great job of showing the science fact instead of contemplating science fiction, illustrating how technology that we have in development NOW is going to impact our economy. I have a feeling that this is an issue is going to creep up on us quickly, and I worry that our governments have proven themselves completely incapable of driving the discussion and making the…

As a roboticist, this video made me very angry. This is not a great showing of science fact, but a strange distortion of the current state of robotics to fit a particular narrative. By the end, it definitely ventures well into the realm of science fiction. I'll point out some of the most egregious examples. This is a pretty long post, but if you spent 15 minutes watching the video, the least you can do is spend 15 mi…

Thank you for taking the time to write this.

Regarding the doctor bot portion, I found the claim that knowing the reactions of a cascade of drugs is beyond the scope of human capability to be an absolutely ludicrous position to take. That right there is a huge portion of internal medicine. Pharmacists, nurses, doctors and respiratory therapists, etc. all spend years learning these matrices before even entering practice. Maybe knowing the totality of all drug combinations is difficult, but it ignores the fact that most—if not all—drugs are prescribed under known, common patterns, often now with the assistance of programs to make sure they don't accidentally prescribe something that will interact poorly with other meds. Medical professionals end up specializing and work with only subsets of the matrix anyway, but I really doubt a robot will ever be able to replace a doctor in this area, let alone all of medicine. If recent history is a decent guide, robots and software will only augment a doctor's capability to work accurately and efficiently.

With the creativity bot, I also wondered about this. With creativity, a bot creating sound based on rules isn't a musical genius, let alone "creative." They're a performer. They'll have difficulty 1) creating new genres of music and 2) creating music that is popular or meaningful to people. Technical performance and creativity are two very, very different things. We tend to think of the rule breakers as the geniuses of creativity. Hard to do that when the act of telling a machine to break the rules is itself a rule. How boring.

Lastly, we've found that a robot that plays Jeopardy! against humans to be an interesting gimmick, but nobody would suggest a game show where robots continually compete against other robots. Who would find it entertaining?

Re: AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs [pdf]

#98

Post by zecho »

Houshalter wrote: post #93
ModernMech wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a roboticist, this video made me very angry. This is not a great showing of science fact, but a strange distortion of the current state of robotics to fit a particular narrative. By the end, it definitely ventures well into the realm of science fiction. I'll point out some of the most egregious examples. This is a pretty long post, but if you spent 15 minutes watching the video, the least you can do is spend 15 mi…

He's not saying that robots are going to take literally every job ever. Only the majority of them. I believe I read that stores don't encourage self-checkouts very much because having humans around significantly decreases shoplifting. This may be less necessary if we get better AIs for monitoring security cameras. I've never read anything about self-driving cars being impossible in bad weather, only that no has done…

I don't consider a self-checkout lane to be a "robot" in any sense. It's a customer doing the job of a once trained employee. If you've ever been behind someone new to one of these things, they're slow and annoying experiences.

The main reason for them is reducing workers necessary during slow sales periods (like overnights, or weekday mornings).

And anyway, the job wasn't replaced by a robot in this case. The job was replaced by a customer.

Re: AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs [pdf]

#99

Post by phaemon »

atemerev wrote: post #15
protonfish wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When has technology ever resulted in the improvement of wages and working hours of the average person? The only things that have ever had a clear, direct affect in quality of life of the masses (both positive and negative) are political.

> When has technology ever resulted in the improvement of wages and working hours of the average person? Like, every time? Compare the average worker of today with average worker of 100 years ago.

Ok:

The average worker today has a 5 day working week rather than a 6 day working week: a change that was brought about by political means (unions) rather than technological means.

The average worker today has an 8 hour working day rather than a 12 hour working day: a change that was brought about by political means (unions) rather than technological means.

The average worker today has a minimum wage and minimum safe working conditions: a change that was brought about by political means (unions) rather than technological means.

Technology has certainly improved our lives, but you're not making the best case for it.

Re: AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs [pdf]

#100

Post by phaemon »

GrantS wrote: post #95
aivosha wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not say the analogy is not representative. I said its wrong. Now if horses were building cars and being worried about their future, I'd say fine. But its not the case. Here horses are not in the same position at all as humans. So its not helping to "compare and contrast", its building up a wrong mindset, wrong premise.

It is never made explicit in the video but imagine that corporations are the current dominant super-organism on which the economy depends. Humans are only designing and building cars because corporations have no better way of getting that job done. Thus, humans are used by corporations just as horses were used by humans before the corporation became the dominant economic species on the planet. Corporations may not al…

I think that's an excellent analogy for what's occurring at this stage in humankind's development.
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