At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer • Hacker News Board

Re: At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

#111

Post by kbenson » Tue, Jan 17, 2017, 9:31 PM UTC

icehawk219 wrote: post #73

kbenson wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horses are tools that people used. When there's no more use for the tool, it's usage may be reduces. People are not just tools, they are the reason we have an economy in the first place. A solution in some form will have to be put forth if one doesn't emerge. Another way of looking at this is that we weren't ever under threat of millions of displaced horses rising up and overthrowing the system. Since that is a possi…

People absolutely are tools in the eyes of their employers. I've never been at a company and not heard them refer to employees as "resources" when talking about scheduling and allocation of people. There's nothing special about humans in a factory compared to robots other than our ability to adapt and learn. But as robotics and AI/ML get better that gap narrows until you reach a point that the robot is "good enough".…

> you'll be hard pressed to find any company willing to sacrifice a slice of their earnings to employee people just because it's the right thing to do.

Sure, but that's what legislation is for. We have a minimum wage and laws protecting workers for a reason. Companies do have a disproportionate influence on politics, but only to a point. When it comes to a truly unhappy populace, politicians know what's more important to continuing to perpetuate the system.

Re: At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

#112

Post by jdmichal » Tue, Jan 17, 2017, 9:32 PM UTC

serge2k wrote: post #101

vkou wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've rolled out touch screen grocery checkout... Pretty much everywhere over the last decade. My local QFC used to employ a dozen cashiers - now, they employ 4. What jobs have been created by this automation? This certainly didn't create 8 (times the # of stores) jobs for software engineers - otherwise, this wouldn't have been profitable for QFC. Does anyone seriously think that those 8 people went on to do work t…

I hate those self checkout machines. They are slow and constantly try to error out and alert a human to help me. I'm capable of bagging groceries, just let me do it. still, there is rarely a line.

I have a special hatred for self-checkout machines that attempt to monitor your bagging without an escape mechanism. Let loss prevention do their damn job and let me give you my money already. At least I can still vote with my feet and always go to a cashier in these places. Someday I probably won't be able to.

Re: At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

#113

Post by burkaman » Tue, Jan 17, 2017, 9:32 PM UTC

cjlars wrote: post #63

burkaman wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Industrial Revolution caused a lot of suffering for a lot of people. I don't think "eventually society adapted" is good enough. The point is that we need to learn from history and develop responsible policies so that we don't screw over most of the planet with massive inequality. That doesn't mean technology and AI are bad, just that we have the benefit of hindsight and we don't have to just blindly plunge ahead…

> In 1760, the lowest 65 percent received about 29 percent of total income in Britain; in 1860, their share was down only four percentage points to 25 percent. So the lowest 65 percent were substantially better off, with an increase in average real income of more than 70 percent. [1] Despite what Dickens may have written, the period was marked by faster gains for the lower classes than the previous century. And perha…

1. 100 years is way too long. If it took a century for society to sort itself out, that's a good demonstration of my point.

2. "the lowest 65 percent" is a pretty big segment. How were the lowest 40% doing, or 20%? I don't know the answer, I just think it's a useful question.

3. Much of this article talks about how rising income is not the same as a rising standard of living, and how it is "plausible" that standards of living decreased for the first 70 or so years of the industrial revolution.

4. Even if wages and standards of living both went up, inequality on its own is a concern. Your quote shows that inequality was worse a century later.

5. I'm not calling for anything specific. My only point is that it's not acceptable to say "we don't need to worry at all, everything will work out". We do need to worry, but it's totally possible that after worrying we'll come to the conclusion that no major changes make sense at this time.

I've just seen a lot of people say "look at the Industrial Revolution, we'll be fine" and I think that's exactly the opposite lesson we should have learned. And I honestly didn't have UBI in mind when I wrote that comment, I was thinking about maybe some kind of subsidized education program for people who need to switch careers because their old career no longer exists. Or anything, I don't know. This isn't my field. I'm just saying this is worth a lot of thought and study, preferably by people who know what they're doing.

Re: At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

#114

Post by eva1984 » Tue, Jan 17, 2017, 9:38 PM UTC

AI is a flaky term changing its meaning every now and then, and indeed, as the backbone of the hype, Deep Learning itself is rapidly evolving unlike any other fields I have witnessed.

Take CV for example. AlexNet is wakeup call for deep learning renaissance, however no one has predicted that we would go beyond human-level performance in just 3 years(ResNet developed in 2015). Same goes for AlphaGo/Machine Translation/Speech Recognition, or the latest photo-realistic stacked GAN.

All in all it is hard to predict what we will end up with by looking at history because we are in such an exciting time of ML/AI development. No matter how prestigious that person might be, his or her words affect very little what the future will actually be, only technology itself could.

Re: At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

#115

Post by vorotato » Tue, Jan 17, 2017, 9:38 PM UTC

euyyn wrote: post #93

Retric wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think several orders of magnitude is really true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P73REgj-3UE is slower than a modern house, but not that slow. Further, with just hand tools the Amish where known for raising a barn in one day.

Did they build those hand tools by hand? Honest question.

They're amish they build everything by hand

Re: At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

#116

Post by vkou » Tue, Jan 17, 2017, 9:40 PM UTC

jdmichal wrote: post #112

serge2k wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate those self checkout machines. They are slow and constantly try to error out and alert a human to help me. I'm capable of bagging groceries, just let me do it. still, there is rarely a line.

I have a special hatred for self-checkout machines that attempt to monitor your bagging without an escape mechanism. Let loss prevention do their damn job and let me give you my money already. At least I can still vote with my feet and always go to a cashier in these places. Someday I probably won't be able to.

That sounds like hell. A buggy machine talking down to me hits quite a few of my buttons, but at least it doesn't interrupt my checkout process when it thinks I'm stealing groceries. (And given how often the alarm goes off, the loss prevention guys just ignore it.)

Re: At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

#117

Post by vkou » Tue, Jan 17, 2017, 9:42 PM UTC

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #64

Houshalter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this time it is different. I like the comparison to horses. Steam engines and trains threatened to replace horses in the mid 1800s. A lot of things that were previously done by horses were replaced with trains and steam engines. Yet the horse population grew, and cities remained full of horses. There were countless transportation innovations in the 1800s, from canals to streetcars and omnibuses to bicycles. But…

> I can not imagine any jobs that an average, unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do. Whenever I hear statements like this, I cannot help but think that the person making the statement has never done a week of work as "unskilled labour" themselves. (No offense intended.) Be it flipping burgers or building houses, there is improvisation both when it comes to high-level intelligence and in the…

Why would you run your robot arm for only 8 hours a day? Does it also ask for sick days, weekends, holidays, and maternity leave? Why does it irreparably break after 4 years?

Even if all of those assumptions hold today, what makes you think the the robot arm of a decade from now won't cost $20,000, but, with minor maintenance, operate for a decade?

Re: At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

#118

Post by pbalau » Tue, Jan 17, 2017, 9:44 PM UTC

Pamar wrote: post #69

tdb7893 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech never creates as many jobs as it destroys buy it doesn't have to. When there were less farming the economy compensated by creating manufacturing jobs so I don't think that the worst case scenario is a given, at least in the reasonably foreseeable future

Manufacturing jobs did not require enormously sophisticated skills (i.e. the equivalent of a PhD) to be performed. So "moving up" or "moving to" the new jobs was still possible. If automated trucks replace 1000 truckers, how many of them will be able to transition to "automated truck programmer"? (And note: they cannot move to "automated truck mechanic" because those jobs are already taken by "non-automated truck mec…

Please try to not dismiss my question, but what skills does a truck driver have that can't be learned in a couple of weeks?

On the other side, I agree with the manufacturing comment. There is a British documentary about building steam locomotives on Youtube. Watch what the skilled workers do, they just move things from side to side so a machine can do the hard work. Hell, I can learn to do that in a week.

Re: At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

#119

Post by srssays » Tue, Jan 17, 2017, 9:50 PM UTC

marchenko wrote: post #91

kbenson wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horses are tools that people used. When there's no more use for the tool, it's usage may be reduces. People are not just tools, they are the reason we have an economy in the first place. A solution in some form will have to be put forth if one doesn't emerge. Another way of looking at this is that we weren't ever under threat of millions of displaced horses rising up and overthrowing the system. Since that is a possi…

>Horses are tools that people used. When there's no more use for the tool, it's usage may be reduces. People are not just tools, they are the reason we have an economy in the first place. A solution in some form will have to be put forth if one doesn't emerge. I'm unsatisfied with the ubiquitous horse analogy as well. The economy exists to solve human problems, not horse problems. We are constantly generating new pro…

Sorry, but the economy exists to get returns on capital. Employment is a happy side-effect.

If, in the far future, there are greater returns from employing robots than humans, then those humans who need to work will starve.

Re: At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

#120

Post by Eridrus » Tue, Jan 17, 2017, 9:51 PM UTC

dharma1 wrote: post #94

Houshalter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this time it is different. I like the comparison to horses. Steam engines and trains threatened to replace horses in the mid 1800s. A lot of things that were previously done by horses were replaced with trains and steam engines. Yet the horse population grew, and cities remained full of horses. There were countless transportation innovations in the 1800s, from canals to streetcars and omnibuses to bicycles. But…

I'm not so sure about that. I think there are plenty of manual jobs that I don't think will be done by robots any time soon. Plumbers, electricians - just don't see it happening. Digital or easily digitised jobs on the other hand - lawyers, accountants, possibly certain type of programming jobs - will be automated

> Plumbers, electricians - just don't see it happening.

There may not be robot plumbers, but that's not the only possible outcome.

I've seen tradespeople complaining about others who don't really know what they're doing and just look things up on YouTube in the van outside.

If we had an AI system that could look at images/lidar of plumbing and interact with you to diagnose issues and fast self-driving part delivery, that could result in a system where routine plumbing work gets done by people who would otherwise call a plumber.

I'm not saying this will likely happen soon, but there are other ways this could have an impact besides full-on robotic automation.