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The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

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Re: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

#121

Post by twoodfin »

234dd57d2c8dba wrote: post #118
pvnick wrote: post #107

The idea that technology will cause widespread job-loss and economic upheaval is such an old fear, and it never works that way. Technological innovations lead to wealth creation 100% of the time, along with more opportunities for more people, even if some jobs are initially replaced with other jobs. "This time is different" is announced everytime, and it's always the same. This book is very good for anybody wishing t…

Yes but this time it's different. Throughout history, until the past 50 years or so, the new technology has typically replaced a mechanical function humans were performing. The coming evolution of software and robotics will start performing the mental work humans, until very recently, were the ONLY thing on the planet capable of doing. For the past 3000 years of "modern humans", we have had a monopoly on the human br…

I'm pretty sure travel agents believed they were doing "mental work".

Re: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

#122

Post by philipkglass »

moxious wrote: post #115
philipkglass wrote: post #43

That threat has many thinkers entertaining the idea of a universal basic income, a guaranteed living wage paid by the government to anyone left out of the workforce. But McAfee believes this would only make the problem worse, because it would eliminate the incentive for entrepreneurship and other activity that could create new jobs as the old ones fade away. Others question the psychological effects of the idea. “A u…

> Some people sound like they're planning how to invent enough bullshit jobs to provide everyone a regular 9-5 schedule and a supervisor even after machines are doing all the strictly necessary labor. I think that's mistaken on many fronts. First, new jobs that get invented aren't bullshit. Just as the internet destroyed DVD manufacturing jobs, it created smartphone app jobs, which weren't make-work. Second, the day…

If the market economy keeps producing new jobs fast enough to compensate for technology eliminating old ones, then I agree that we don't need to plan for mass unemployment at all.

But I want to stake out a position early on that if the market economy plus automation does not actually produce enough jobs for job-seekers in practice, then we should accept that mass employment was a historically contingent phenomenon that can be let go. It's not something that governments should try to keep shambling around in zombie form after the original economic rationale has died. (Bullshit jobs invented just to keep people provided with employment/income is one kind of bad response that I'm worried we'll see from protective governments. Another bad response, from neglectful governments, would be to ignore mass technological unemployment observed in practice, should it come to pass, because they're too wedded to a theory that enough new jobs will always arise in the private sector to offset jobs eliminated by automation.)

Re: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

#123

Post by computerex »

moxious wrote: post #115
philipkglass wrote: post #43

That threat has many thinkers entertaining the idea of a universal basic income, a guaranteed living wage paid by the government to anyone left out of the workforce. But McAfee believes this would only make the problem worse, because it would eliminate the incentive for entrepreneurship and other activity that could create new jobs as the old ones fade away. Others question the psychological effects of the idea. “A u…

> Some people sound like they're planning how to invent enough bullshit jobs to provide everyone a regular 9-5 schedule and a supervisor even after machines are doing all the strictly necessary labor. I think that's mistaken on many fronts. First, new jobs that get invented aren't bullshit. Just as the internet destroyed DVD manufacturing jobs, it created smartphone app jobs, which weren't make-work. Second, the day…

Everyone knows the AI community failed to deliver on strong AI, the modern boom in automation and machine learning is not about strong AI, rather the exact opposite. Instead of trying to create artificial general intelligence, researchers are now focused on solving very specific problems.

Like speech recognition, or machine vision, or predictive analytics. What's awesome is that deep learning seems to be coming out with the best results across many different disciplines and problem domains, leading to optimism about it being a general technique that can be applied to many different types of complex problems.

So yea, modern renaissance of machine learning and AI is not the same as the promise of strong AI, very opposite.

I am totally with you in that the future is hard to predict. But this isn't quite the same thing, there are notable differences here that'd suggest that this isn't like the promises made by the community since last 50 years.

Speaking specifically about deep learning, never before in history have we been able to work with the sheer volume of data that we now have and can easily work with. GPU computing shits on the CPU and is faster than the CPU by orders of magnitudes for things like matrix multiplication[1]. Advances in the field like dropout, transfer learning, ensemble learning, boosting, convolutional neural networks, unsupervised pre-training, etc have also led to breakthroughs.

Finally, researchers have more access to large freely available datasets like ImageNet, which has had an enormous impact on the field of machine vision. Freely available tools like Caffe, TensorFlow, Theano, Lasagne, Keras, Torch also make it easy for engineers and not machine learning experts to utilize the state of the art techniques to build awesome software.

[1] https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/3320

Re: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

#124

Post by edblarney »

shams93 wrote: post #45
philipkglass wrote: post #43

That threat has many thinkers entertaining the idea of a universal basic income, a guaranteed living wage paid by the government to anyone left out of the workforce. But McAfee believes this would only make the problem worse, because it would eliminate the incentive for entrepreneurship and other activity that could create new jobs as the old ones fade away. Others question the psychological effects of the idea. “A u…

Exactly we could have a society oriented around the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery instead of bullshit jobs we could put the pedal to the metal in human freedom and innovation.

"we could have a society oriented around the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery instead of bullshit jobs "

I'm afraid your statement implies a misunderstanding of what 'the economy' is.

'The economy' is people providing services and building products for one another.

So that guy who waited on you at the restaurant, the girl who did your payroll, the guy who delivered your mail, the person monitoring your blocks internet connections, the person who planted crops, the person making sure your street is safe to walk down ...

Those 'bullshit jobs' all exist for a reason - because they provide value to someone (like you), and we are willing to pay for it all by doing stuff for others as well.

'The jobs' that we do are a function of what other people in the economy 'want done' in terms of products and services.

Not a function of 'what they want to do'.

If you don't want to do anything that 'helps others' - that's fine, but you can't expect for them to help you in return if your 'lifestyle choice' is 'windsurfing'.

But when we do help each other, the whole is actually greater than the sum of the parts (i.e. comparative value) - and that's where we really start to win.

Most of the things you need done for you are not that fun. It'll always be that way.

Re: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

#125

Post by wilkommen »

waqf wrote: post #89
shams93 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly we could have a society oriented around the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery instead of bullshit jobs we could put the pedal to the metal in human freedom and innovation.

People are already creating more art than we actually need (witness how hard it is to make a living as an artist). Now just wait till the AIs become serious competition at that too.

The amount of money someone can make in our economy as an artist isn't a reflection of how much art we "need." Art in particular is not a commodity that society can just have enough of. And in general, the price something fetches in our economy isn't always a reflection of its value to society. See: salaries of social workers, emergency medical technicians, etc.

Re: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

#126

Post by laughfactory »

ryandrake wrote: post #98
philipkglass wrote: post #43

That threat has many thinkers entertaining the idea of a universal basic income, a guaranteed living wage paid by the government to anyone left out of the workforce. But McAfee believes this would only make the problem worse, because it would eliminate the incentive for entrepreneurship and other activity that could create new jobs as the old ones fade away. Others question the psychological effects of the idea. “A u…

Basic Income will never be politically possible in places where it's culturally expected that a living must be "earned". It's more likely we'll end up paying 50% of the population to dig holes and paying the other 50% to fill them in, than implementing a basic income.

This is so true. You could argue we already have this occurring in the US, for example. I've worked many places where it's unclear exactly why it requires so many people doing their various jobs to keep the business afloat. I've even held various positions which seemed like that: some days I would dig holes, other days I'd fill them in (metaphorically). I'm not sure how this happens in private industry, maybe because of various incentives from the government? Tax breaks, etc.?

Re: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

#127

Post by jacobolus »

roryisok wrote: post #119
fictioncircle wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's funny how boredom, vice, and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor loom in importance if and only if we're talking about technological unemployment. What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...? It is largely a desire for a control mechanism where the sheep are inherently dependent on the mecha…

I'm not against Universal Basic Income, but there are some things about it which worry me, and which don't seem to come up very much in these discussions. leverage If we're all on basic income, we no longer have any leverage if our "wages" are reduced. The ruling classes can decide to drop the amount we earn, and there's not much we can do about it. Sure, we can "vote", but we can't strike, which is a far more powerf…

Wait, what? If people don’t need to work full time to nominally survive, that gives them much more leverage vs. employers.

The BATNA during labor negotiations is now “live a spare lifestyle on basic income” vs. “let your whole family die starving in a gutter”.

Re: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

#128

Post by thatguy0900 »

fictioncircle wrote: post #120
roryisok wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not against Universal Basic Income, but there are some things about it which worry me, and which don't seem to come up very much in these discussions. leverage If we're all on basic income, we no longer have any leverage if our "wages" are reduced. The ruling classes can decide to drop the amount we earn, and there's not much we can do about it. Sure, we can "vote", but we can't strike, which is a far more powerf…

> If we're all on basic income, we no longer have any leverage if our "wages" are reduced. The ruling classes can decide to drop the amount we earn, and there's not much we can do about it. Sure, we can "vote", but we can't strike, which is a far more powerful way to fight against pay decreases. You could still strike. UBI has nothing to do with employment and it enables you to sustain strikes longer as you are guara…

What exactly are you striking if the robots create everything? I'm not sure what you could withhold that would upset the government. I guess you could stop consuming things, but you don't have the money to consume very much anyway on just UBI.

Re: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

#129

Post by ryanmarsh »

fictioncircle wrote: post #73
philipkglass wrote: post #43

That threat has many thinkers entertaining the idea of a universal basic income, a guaranteed living wage paid by the government to anyone left out of the workforce. But McAfee believes this would only make the problem worse, because it would eliminate the incentive for entrepreneurship and other activity that could create new jobs as the old ones fade away. Others question the psychological effects of the idea. “A u…

> It's funny how boredom, vice, and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor loom in importance if and only if we're talking about technological unemployment. What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...? It is largely a desire for a control mechanism where the sheep are inherently dependent on the mecha…

LOL. Millions of young men with housing and food and nothing to do. You just described a standing army.

Re: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet – It’s the End of the Middle Class

#130

Post by the_watcher »

jacobolus wrote: post #127
roryisok wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not against Universal Basic Income, but there are some things about it which worry me, and which don't seem to come up very much in these discussions. leverage If we're all on basic income, we no longer have any leverage if our "wages" are reduced. The ruling classes can decide to drop the amount we earn, and there's not much we can do about it. Sure, we can "vote", but we can't strike, which is a far more powerf…

Wait, what? If people don’t need to work full time to nominally survive, that gives them much more leverage vs. employers. The BATNA during labor negotiations is now “live a spare lifestyle on basic income” vs. “let your whole family die starving in a gutter”.

He's speaking about leverage against the provider of UBI, who can simply lower or remove it.
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