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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

#61

Post by ujeezy »

aespinoza wrote: post #5
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.

Sadly, I couldn't read the article due to the paywall. But I agree with you. I don't think AI will replace knowledge workers. A couple of decades ago, people used to say that workers in factories would disappear as well. That never happened, at least not completely. The costs are always a problem. If AI will ever really replace us, is still a mystery for the future. Because for it to work, it would have to be cost ef…

Jobs in U.S. factories disappeared to Asia. Now that offshore manufacturing costs are rising, we can expect more companies to follow Foxconn's example, and invest heavily in machines.

If a job is offshored (as much knowledge work has been), it's a good bet that the next step will be to automate it.

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

#62

Post by fraqed »

gamblor956 wrote: post #50
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 no…

What about legalzoom.com and similar services? All those wills, patent applications, incorporations, etc. were once performed by legal assistants, paralegals and junior lawyers. Now someone just fills in some forms and ticks off various options. Or think of online insurance quotes, tax preparation and basic accounting again mostly junior level jobs to be sure but this is only the beginning!

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

#63

Post by moarzLaw »

sliverstorm wrote: post #57
moarzLaw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong again. Moore's law is actually not any kind of law at all. It's merely a business practice adopted by Intel, which they attempt to adhere to. The fact that they refer to it as a law, and that journalists around the world parrot their term, is all merely a magical marketing sales pitch. They TRY to double the transistor count on a periodic basis, and, when they do, suddenly, they've got a newer, better, more exp…

It's not a law, nor is it a business practice. Read what I said again: Moore's law ... OBSERVES that the number of transistors we can fit on a chip doubles every two years. If you are trying to argue with me calling it "Moore's law", you are too late. You missed the boat. That's what it is called, law or not.

> Hey, guys, I bet every 18 months we can draw a picture on a thin slice of substrate, and make it twice as small as we did 18 months ago. Let's call it a law, and proclaim that it "drives the economy."

> Jesus H. Christ, Gordon, that's a fucking fantastic idea! Get marketing on the phone. Holy shit, we're gonna be fucking rich.

Yeah, okay, "observe" whatever you want. Sorry to contradict you on a website. Don't forget to down vote this comment as well. Boo hoo.

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

#64

Post by dragonwriter »

fraqed wrote: post #62
gamblor956 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

What about legalzoom.com and similar services? All those wills, patent applications, incorporations, etc. were once performed by legal assistants, paralegals and junior lawyers. Now someone just fills in some forms and ticks off various options. Or think of online insurance quotes, tax preparation and basic accounting again mostly junior level jobs to be sure but this is only the beginning!

Before legal zoom, and even after it, those things were available in hard copy volumes of model contracts, wills, etc. complete with instructions and optional sections for different uses. The online services streamlined the UX a bit, but it's simply not the case that prior to them all of those documents were prepared individually by professionals. And I suspect that both the books and the online services displaced people doing their own documents without professional assistance as much as taking business from pros.

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

#65

Post by kybernetyk »

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.

> The logic being when robots & AIs take over all the jobs we can increase the output to a point where goods are exceedingly abundant.

That or the AI decides to exterminate us. In both cases jobs won't be a major concern.

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

#66

Post by fraqed »

dragonwriter wrote: post #64
fraqed wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about legalzoom.com and similar services? All those wills, patent applications, incorporations, etc. were once performed by legal assistants, paralegals and junior lawyers. Now someone just fills in some forms and ticks off various options. Or think of online insurance quotes, tax preparation and basic accounting again mostly junior level jobs to be sure but this is only the beginning!

Before legal zoom, and even after it, those things were available in hard copy volumes of model contracts, wills, etc. complete with instructions and optional sections for different uses. The online services streamlined the UX a bit, but it's simply not the case that prior to them all of those documents were prepared individually by professionals. And I suspect that both the books and the online services displaced pe…

You're quite right about the books I remember the Self-Help series for all kinds of legal documents, but they were essentially dumb. If the person using those forms made an error it probably wouldn't be caught and could be costly. Modern electronic systems have, what may be described as intelligence, though certainly not understanding, such that user error should be much less common. Also with consumer grade financial software different scenarios can be evaluated and actions suggested based on data analysis; so there's more than just UX improvements occurring in these systems.

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

#67

Post by kybernetyk »

conroe64 wrote: post #52
rtkwe wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This idea fails because we had the resources to feed everybody today yet it doesn't happen. In the future, when techno-baron A sees that techno-baron B is getting ahead, techno-baron A consumes more resources in order to defeat techno-baron B. If people are in the way of that, and they are of no use to any techno-barons they are pushed aside. There was "post-scarcity for basic survival needs" for millions of years al…

> This idea fails because we had the resources to feed everybody today yet it doesn't happen.

The idea is that in a post singularity[1] world we won't be making those decisions. A hopefully wise AI will manage and decide everything for us. (Even if we wouldn't want it to.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

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

#68

Post by sliverstorm »

moarzLaw wrote: post #63
sliverstorm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a law, nor is it a business practice. Read what I said again: Moore's law ... OBSERVES that the number of transistors we can fit on a chip doubles every two years. If you are trying to argue with me calling it "Moore's law", you are too late. You missed the boat. That's what it is called, law or not.

> Hey, guys, I bet every 18 months we can draw a picture on a thin slice of substrate, and make it twice as small as we did 18 months ago. Let's call it a law, and proclaim that it "drives the economy." > Jesus H. Christ, Gordon, that's a fucking fantastic idea! Get marketing on the phone. Holy shit, we're gonna be fucking rich. Yeah, okay, "observe" whatever you want. Sorry to contradict you on a website. Don't forg…

I "observed" nothing. That's what Moore's law says, not me.

P.S. HN doesn't let me downvote your comments, because you are replying to my comments. But, I suppose it's impossible I'm the only one that disagrees with you, so I must be hacking the website.

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

#69

Post by rtkwe »

conroe64 wrote: post #59
rtkwe wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things have always been this way isn't really strong argument for this. There are many ways we could set up a society in which the basic needs for everyone's survival is needed and the surplus is allocated in a way which most benefits society. A perfectly impartial central planning AI comes to mind. That's where the big difference comes from your example of '"post-scarcity for basic survival needs" for millions of ye…

A central planning AI to impose fairness and the right to basic survival could only come about and remain standing if there was enough support for it from those already in power to allow this. How would you suppose this would come about? The future will hold a very different scenario than a typical first-world country today where the populous actually produces useful work. As a leader, instead you have a population w…

People have been trying to fairly distribute resources to give everyone a basic standard living for ages. It's the basic idea behind welfare, socialism, and communism, there's a precedent for trying to do exactly what I described as the CPAI.

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

#70

Post by wvenable »

3pt14159 wrote: post #51
wvenable wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already happening. The number of "knowledge worker" jobs is shrinking. The low-skilled are the first to go and software is replacing them, just as low-skilled labor jobs have been replaced by machines. It's a slow process, as the quantity and depth of software increases, the number of knowledge workers decreases. That's literally the reason for existence for most software.

Low-skill and knowledge worker are at the opposite ends of the spectrum.

In this case, Low skill is adjective on knowledge worker not a category unto itself.
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