AI are taking jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: AI are taking jobs

#41

Post by geogra4 » Mon, Nov 07, 2011, 1:26 AM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #40

bdr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds interesting. Is there a particular essay or book that would be a good starting point?

Unfortunately it's mostly all piled into Gille's magnum opus, the 1500-page History of Techniques (1978), which to make matters worse is out of print in English and sells for absurd prices online (though some university libraries have it). I read it mostly second-hand via Bernard Stiegler's Technics and Time , which is widely available in English and summarizes Gille extensively in the beginning portions. That's an o…

I heard about stigler through the excellent documentary "Der Ister"[1] which was a very good treatment of time and heidegger's philosophy of technology. Thanks for the info on this other book.

[1]http://www.theister.com/

Re: AI are taking jobs

#42

Post by patio11 » Mon, Nov 07, 2011, 1:26 AM UTC

If you actually dig into the statistics, the 9% of America with persistent unemployment problems are mostly not e.g. bank underwriters who got creamed by FICO scores making them totally obsolete. That makes for a great newspaper piece, because well-educated people are not supposed to end up unemployable, but it bears little relationship to reality.

Unemployment is dominated by sectors directly connected to the real estate/financial boom (construction, real estate, finance) which are no longer booming and could not sustain historically high employment levels. We're simply seeing reversion to the mean plus a wee bit extra, which only looks cataclysmic when your recorded history began at the top of the market.

Re: AI are taking jobs

#43

Post by zanny » Mon, Nov 07, 2011, 1:28 AM UTC

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…

The downfall of this is where our current economic system projects us :

Developers make AI and machines capable of replacing farming, mining, power generation, resource refinement completely, except for technicians and mechanics.

It isn't far off from the same machines entering the human service workforce, replacing the cashier and drive through clerk. They replace cars and planes (already have auto pilot, google car in ~10 years).

At this point, we have crisis. Our current system has you buying a good and the company providing it making the money. If the company consists of hundreds of technicians as its only labor force because the entire production process is automated (your big Mac is farmed by robots, overseen by robots, butchered, packed, shipped by robots, cooked by robots, and served by robots) and the ~$5 you pay for it goes entirely to the company coffers.

It would not take long for everyone's wealth to trickle into the hands of the few hundreds of people positioned to rule over the production of 99% of goods. It is kind of like what OWS is doing right now, but much worse. There is no fast food job for the high school grad to do - you must learn engineering, art, or hard science to have any function to society, because any rote task or even service job has been replaced by robots.

And then they replace the mechanics and programmers with genetic algorithms. The company becomes a siphon of any money they make straight into the stock holders. And there would be no employees, because everything is automated. You don't even need an engineer to watch the top level of maintenance bots, because you have 10+ of them and they know how to fix themselves.

The end result though is that we have this situation where we pay money for what robots do, not people, and the money just goes to those that funded the robots original creation forever. That kind of situation would not last long, but it would be nice to avoid. It will require a huge reinterpretation of any viable economic system when you can make goods and provide services without any human interaction.

Re: AI are taking jobs

#44

Post by hagy » Mon, Nov 07, 2011, 1:37 AM UTC

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #14

A lot of the argument on this topic seems to be "but this time it is really different!" Perhaps. And perhaps not. Most likely it is different, just like all those other times were different. I hate to be skeptical, but when this same pattern of people saying "it's different!" repeats over and over again without it being different, I think the onus is on those making the claim to support their argument better. If anyt…

Change hurts. It hurts doubly so when uncertainty is mixed in.

The majority of the western population has a fairly rigid definition of job: trade your time for money. Its one thing to change how you trade your time for money: e.g. going from plowing a field a shuffling papers at a desk. It’s a whole another thing to adopt a certain level of self-responsibility (and risk) in determining how you provide value for your employer/customers. This is intrinsic to almost all new-era, tech-enabled jobs.

This is what is different now.

A cultural evolution in the western world is needed to facilitate widespread success in the evolved economy. It’s going to hurt.

Re: AI are taking jobs

#45

Post by _delirium » Mon, Nov 07, 2011, 1:38 AM UTC

geogra4 wrote: post #41

_delirium wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately it's mostly all piled into Gille's magnum opus, the 1500-page History of Techniques (1978), which to make matters worse is out of print in English and sells for absurd prices online (though some university libraries have it). I read it mostly second-hand via Bernard Stiegler's Technics and Time , which is widely available in English and summarizes Gille extensively in the beginning portions. That's an o…

I heard about stigler through the excellent documentary "Der Ister"[1] which was a very good treatment of time and heidegger's philosophy of technology. Thanks for the info on this other book. [1] http://www.theister.com/

Interesting; I'd heard about that but there weren't any screenings near me, but it looks like it's out on DVD now. Maybe I'll watch. In my day job I'm "just" a technologist, but I like to keep up on history/philosophy of technology as well, when possible.

Incidentally, it appears you can also read Stiegler via Twitter, possibly to his chagrin (he's made some skeptical comments about what Twitter does for thought/communication): https://twitter.com/TechnicsAndTime

Re: AI are taking jobs

#46

Post by steve_b » Mon, Nov 07, 2011, 1:40 AM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #27

simonsarris wrote: post #7

I don't see this as a bad thing, except: In the 1950's people wondered what the future generations would do with all their free time. They predicted, correctly, that worker productivity would rise immensely. They also assumed that people would be just as wealthy while working much less. People are wealthier in some ways. In america, its pretty much standard issue to own at least one car (partially perhaps because a c…

it does not seem like the average worker is as well-off as the past had predicted Well, we may not all be working 8-hour weeks and vacationing in Hawaii and Mexico, but the simple truth is that people on average are a lot better off than in the past. The only stat I have in my head right now: Infant mortality has dropped from 2.6% to 0.6% since 1960. A hundred years ago, poor people had dirt floors. That's unheard of…

For simple-to-digest stats I usually turn to www.gapminder.org. Always useful when arguing with someone who thinks that everything has gone to hell.

Re: AI are taking jobs

#47

Post by mikeash » Mon, Nov 07, 2011, 1:44 AM UTC

DavidSJ wrote: post #23

mikeash wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just my uninformed opinion, but I think a lot of it has fallen victim to keeping up with the Joneses, and a lot of the rest to employers not being willing to give decent terms to part timers. People could get by with a much smaller salary (or keep the same salary but save a ton of it) by having an older car, a smaller house, less fancy food, etc. but everybody else has nicer things. I see people buying really…

For the other side, let's say I make $X but only need $X/2 to live. Try finding an employer who will let you work half time for $X/2. It's pretty tough, especially if you make $X at something "professional", rather than, say, digging ditches. Rather than working ~20 hours a week, work ~40 hours a week, half your life.

That's certainly more viable, but requires much more discipline (to avoid spending the extra money too early) and is probably less beneficial as well, due to diminishing returns and such.

Re: AI are taking jobs

#48

Post by humanfromearth » Mon, Nov 07, 2011, 2:01 AM UTC

Thay took our jobs! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=768h3Tz4Qik

Re: AI are taking jobs

#49

Post by 127 » Mon, Nov 07, 2011, 2:07 AM UTC

zanny wrote: post #43

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…

The downfall of this is where our current economic system projects us : Developers make AI and machines capable of replacing farming, mining, power generation, resource refinement completely, except for technicians and mechanics. It isn't far off from the same machines entering the human service workforce, replacing the cashier and drive through clerk. They replace cars and planes (already have auto pilot, google car…

One thing I hope the technological advancement will bring is synthetic meat. With extremely cheap energy (both environmentally and financially) synthetic product should not be too expensive to compete with slaughtering real live animals. We are predators, yes, but that does not mean we can step up the ladder and satisfy our diet using a higher level of technology without any real animal suffering. This does exclude meat gained through hunting to keep populations in check.

Factory farmed animal meat is just something so morally repugnant to me. If there's no real need for it, why do it?

>And then they replace the mechanics and programmers with genetic algorithms.

I don't think this is logically possible. The job of a programmer is to transform human intention and desire into a computer readable input. How would you determine a heuristic for the genetic algorithm? The heuristic would have to be written by a human being on some level. There's only so far you can automate automation itself and I think you are grossly underestimating how difficult it is or will be.

Programming is a trinity between human paradigms, algorithmic mathematics and magic. The closer you bring the math and algorithms to the human paradigms and desires, the more it will resemble magic. It is an asymptotic progression. The magic will be never achieved.

What you are talking about is constructing the perfect programming language. People have been trying to do this since the start of previous century (Lambda calculus). You really think we will experience some tremendous leap in the close future?

In short: you will always have to have a way to describe what you want of the computer, and this is called a programming language.

Re: AI are taking jobs

#50

Post by ericd » Mon, Nov 07, 2011, 2:14 AM UTC

nkassis wrote: post #16

ericd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, I think creating high quality, cheap/free reeducation programs are one of the most important challenges facing us today.

But do you believe everyone is capable of that kind of work? Even with great education some things require talent at a certain level. The higher level the job the more dependent it is on talent in my view.

Not everyone, but for every type of person I can think of, there's a different type of job that makes sense for them. If they're good with their hands, there are many things that will be hard to automate the repair of due to customization. If they're very persuasive, they can probably work in sales. If they're creative or artistic, there's a large need for good visual design.

If you find a way to make the marginal cost of educating someone near 0, then many more people might discover things that they're good at that they wouldn't have had the chance to otherwise.

I think this requires some socialist-style changes to what the govt. is willing to support, though, since many people can't afford to take time off. If this was bundled with unemployment benefits or welfare, though, I think it could be very powerful.

As leverage increases, the wealth disparity will almost certainly grow, just because some people will be able to create much more wealth than others. Not sure how to deal with that.