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

Existing forms of social assistance in Western countries often are available to non-citizens and are usually more strongly linked to past payments into the system and/or intention to work and contribute to the system when they can. For obvious practical reasons (a suggested stipend of $10k PPP is well above the median salary internationally) if one destroys the link with work contributions, then numbers must be managed by imposing more onerous restrictions on non-citizens' entitlement to move to a country and claim subsidies higher than they presently earn. And however unjust it might already be, the existing systems that mandates employment for foreigners seeking residency generally aren't built on the concept that it's an affront to dignity to impose work requirements on citizens wanting handouts.

But the wider point is that the "nobody should be forced to suffer the indignity of having to work for their living" rhetoric behind UBI simply doesn't reflect any feasible near-term system that any person has actually proposed, and the "people should not have to work unless they were born elsewhere, in which case their continued labour to produce low cost goods for those who have chosen to become permanent UBI-dependents is fundamental to the system getting close to being affordable" reality is a bit less philosophically appealing.

> There are mental jobs being created at greater speed

But not of the type that most of the population could ever do, and most of HN, possibly you, seem to think it too because HN tends to support the idea that things like H1B are needed because of a shortage of tech labour. So, there are jobs created, but not the ones the local population can completely fulfill. Do you think that solves the unemployment problem?

And then there is the fact that some forms of work, while they had left developed countries like the US, still existed because they were "moved" and not "destroyed", like many factory jobs that went to China, are actually now going to disappear for good, because even in a country where labor is extremely cheap, like China, automation is now on the verge of being cheaper on the long term, which leads to things like Foxconn planning to fire half of their employees (!) which also leads to the fact that any solution populists like Trump may have presumed to unemployment, like bringing back those jobs that were outsourced, may not actually work in the present age. Building iPhones in the US is not actually going to create any measurable amount of jobs in the future so it's pretty pointless.

http://fortune.com/2016/12/31/foxconn-iphone-automation-goal...

The present situation is nothing like the age of the luddites and if people don't become aware of it soon enough we might have large % of the people going unemployed, starving and potential revolutionary climates. Modern job creation is not something that can solve the problem. Ask the people who were laid off in Michigan to all become machine learning researchers?

Consider this classic :

> https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

> Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz".

> Most good programmers should be able to write out on paper a program which does this in a under a couple of minutes. Want to know something scary? The majority of comp sci graduates can't. I've also seen self-proclaimed senior programmers take more than 10-15 minutes to write a solution.

This is with the current comp sci graduates, which are likely to be more motivated by the field than if we tried to make the entire general population attempt this kind of job. There is no good possible future for some % of the population once we enter the next stage of the automation age and start replacing jobs like truck drivers, taxis, have supermarkets like the planned Amazon Go everywhere etc.

Also, think of the impact the disappearance of some jobs can have on local economies and the dominoes effect. Truck drivers, for example, are essential to many remote places. Without truck drivers stopping there their economy would break and many other jobs would die. Meanwhile large cities have massive rents and ownership costs so it's not like all these people losing jobs and living paycheck to paycheck could suddenly move to the wealthier and more active areas of the country after automation turns their place into ruins, like Detroit (not saying automation was the root cause of Detroit, but comparing the aspect of what happens when the economy of a place turns it into a literal ruin).

... never ...

It'll take a few generations probably. If living cannot be 'earned' for the majority, it'll be done fast enough with that opinion.

> Also, manufacturing jobs have _not_ been falling, far from it. > This all seems like a big ruse for globalists to use to lower wages and move jobs to the currently cheapest place, where ever that may be

You are decades behind the times.

> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966

> Foxconn replaces '60,000 factory workers with robots'

> http://fortune.com/2016/12/31/foxconn-iphone-automation-goal...

> In a new report from Digitimes, Foxconn executive Dai Jia-peng has laid out the company’s three-step plan for automating its Chinese factories. The company’s ultimate goal is to fully automate production of things like PCs, LCD monitors, and its most famous product—the iPhone.

> Foxconn makes its own manufacturing robots, known as Foxbots, and has already deployed about 40,000 of them. Some, which the company considers "stage one," assist workers at their stations. Foxconn already has individual fully automated production lines—they're "stage two"—in factories in Chengdu, Chongquing, and Zhengzhou.

> Stage three of the process would be fully automated factories, with only a handful of workers.

Even China with its cheap labor is now willing to invest in that technology. If Trump ever becomes "successful" at "bringing those jobs back" to the USA, it will be jobs for machines.

> - Teacher: It's unlikely any teaching will be done by an AI. Behavior management in particular is difficult enough with a human, let alone an AI. When an AI robot is teaching our students directly, we have bigger problems on our hand.

That already depends on the type of skill being taught. Learning a new language, for example, has never been dependent on teachers and I think I've been doing quite well with purely self taught English, and that was before methods like duolingo appeared. My mother is living in retirement and has started learning languages as a way to pass time, she has learned enough English through duolingo to achieve a conversational level and she never had a teacher. Is it really impossible for more sophisticated AIs to truly replace language teachers in schools, and have students do things through a computer? and possibly replace teachers in many other fields of studies too. I'd wager most of the less advanced courses in pre-college stuff could do well with modern, computerized, interactive methods of learning. I don't think you could replace the interaction with a teacher for more advanced studies, though.