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Brain work may be going the way of manual work

economist.com

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Re: Brain work may be going the way of manual work

#41

Post by tbrownaw »

bsenftner wrote: post #16

It's the finance and legal professions that are most at risk with the current level of AI and machine learning. Contrary to what most finance and legal professionals believe, there is low creativity in their vocations - and that is exactly what AI and machine learning does best: wrote procedural operations from a complex set of rules. This will be very interesting to see how our "captains of corruption" (the fucks th…

As always, the fun part is the interface between the rules engine and the real world. How good is AI at gathering requirements from people who don't quite know what they want?

The other fun part is what happens when AI is good enough to replace the gophers who do most of the grunt work, but not yet good enough to replace the experts who figure out what the customers really want. If this stage lasts long enough for the experts to retire, where do new experts come from?

Re: Brain work may be going the way of manual work

#42

Post by hazov »

Iterated wrote: post #22
bsenftner wrote: post #16

It's the finance and legal professions that are most at risk with the current level of AI and machine learning. Contrary to what most finance and legal professionals believe, there is low creativity in their vocations - and that is exactly what AI and machine learning does best: wrote procedural operations from a complex set of rules. This will be very interesting to see how our "captains of corruption" (the fucks th…

What part of finance do you think will go first ? Finance is highly subjective, and while I don't think it isn't at risk of being taken over by AI, I think it will be quite a while before a machine can make the proper subjective decisions a finance professional makes.

Insurance underwriting probably will become more and more automated, the exceptions are the cases with large values involved, in the short run, definitely this will be automated some day as well, or insurance in which only a small part of the population pay for insurance and the sample is small too do any meaningful statistics.

Anyway there'll probably always be people behind the algorithms doing the modeling or programming at least.

Re: Brain work may be going the way of manual work

#43

Post by rollo_tommasi »

bsenftner wrote: post #16

It's the finance and legal professions that are most at risk with the current level of AI and machine learning. Contrary to what most finance and legal professionals believe, there is low creativity in their vocations - and that is exactly what AI and machine learning does best: wrote procedural operations from a complex set of rules. This will be very interesting to see how our "captains of corruption" (the fucks th…

Even if this is true, it will be the low-level grunts and support staff who feel the burn, not the high-level people who actually run the show. Operating at the pinnacle of those professions requires the ability to form strong personal relationships with the right people - not a skill that can be replicated by machines just yet.

Re: Brain work may be going the way of manual work

#44

Post by skorgu »

Aardwolf wrote: post #40
mapleoin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

think parallel

Yes, they had 4-core CPUs in 2006, and still have 4-core CPUs in 2013 (with a few rare xeon 6-cores).

You can get 8-core Xeons (X7550 to pick a random one) and 16-core Opterons (6378 for example).

More importantly 2013 Xeons do much more per clock cycle than 2006 Xeons (and 2013 Opterons for that matter). Improvements in pipelining, branch prediction, caches, etc are harder to nail down to one number like clock speed or core count but can be huge contributors to real-world performance.

Re: Brain work may be going the way of manual work

#45

Post by Sven7 »

3pt14159 wrote: post #2

No they will not. The amount of effort required to shrink real knowledge worker jobs is astronomical compared to simply driving a car. After the singularity, fine. But even that will require a massive, massive amount of work. The low hanging fruit for increasing knowledge work output is in Gattaca not AI.

You don't need AI to see the number of programmers required on a project to exponentially shrink.

Five years ago to build a simple video chat you needed a team of hardcore programmers with expertise in video, audio, networking, real time protocols and telecom. Today it takes a couple of lines of javascript through WebRTC.

Re: Brain work may be going the way of manual work

#47

Post by rtkwe »

conroe64 wrote: post #39
kybernetyk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the point where an AI can replace a programmer is the point where a technological singularity begins. Because at that point the AI is capable of improving its own code which would lead to a 'runaway reaction'. And if you're in a post-singularity world you don't really have to worry about jobs anymore. So I guess being a programmer is pretty future proof ;)

So, post singularity, people with no wealth or ability to work will be prevented from starving? There are many people that are dying from starvation today. Why would this change?

The idea of the singularity also includes post-scarcity for at least basic survival needs. The logic being when robots & AIs take over all the jobs we can increase the output to a point where goods are exceedingly abundant. Granted that path involves quite a bit of faith that there's some reason to provide, but it's not terribly unreasonable if a bit idealistic.

Re: Brain work may be going the way of manual work

#48

Post by johntb86 »

3pt14159 wrote: post #2

No they will not. The amount of effort required to shrink real knowledge worker jobs is astronomical compared to simply driving a car. After the singularity, fine. But even that will require a massive, massive amount of work. The low hanging fruit for increasing knowledge work output is in Gattaca not AI.

It's already started: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230337920457747... Lawyers are being replaced by computers for doing pretrial document review. Currently only low-skill low-creativity jobs are being replaced, but that will expand over time.

Re: Brain work may be going the way of manual work

#49

Post by simonbrown »

rtkwe wrote: post #47
conroe64 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, post singularity, people with no wealth or ability to work will be prevented from starving? There are many people that are dying from starvation today. Why would this change?

The idea of the singularity also includes post-scarcity for at least basic survival needs. The logic being when robots & AIs take over all the jobs we can increase the output to a point where goods are exceedingly abundant. Granted that path involves quite a bit of faith that there's some reason to provide, but it's not terribly unreasonable if a bit idealistic.

What if natural resources are scarce?

Re: Brain work may be going the way of manual work

#50

Post by gamblor956 »

bsenftner wrote: post #16

It's the finance and legal professions that are most at risk with the current level of AI and machine learning. Contrary to what most finance and legal professionals believe, there is low creativity in their vocations - and that is exactly what AI and machine learning does best: wrote procedural operations from a complex set of rules. This will be very interesting to see how our "captains of corruption" (the fucks th…

I laughed until I realized you were serious. AI can't even get basic speech processing correct. The combined computer processing power in the world cannot yet accurately emulate the thought processes of the average human mind.

It will be decades before it can tackle the "creativity" needed to draft complex transactional legal documents, let alone litigation-related documents. I can't comment on finance, but law is not about "wrote procedural operations from a complex set of rules." The law is relatively simple--it is, and always has been, the application of the law that is complex, and this is why lawyers get paid so much. (This same logic generally applies to programming -- the syntactic rules of a language are simple, but the application of those rules is highly complex.)

Indeed, anything beyond the simplest legal work requires a very highly contextual understanding of both the applicable law and the facts of the situation which is currently beyond the capabilities of current software or hardware (and that includes currently available or near-available quantum optimizers).

AI will replace legal work about the same time as it replaces programming.

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