AI are taking jobs

A lot of the argument on this topic seems to be "but this time it is really different!"<p>Perhaps. And perhaps not. Most likely it <i>is</i> different, just like all those other times were different.<p>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 anything, I think the <i>metrics</i> are different, and that leads to a lot of erroneous conclusions. I see a lot of economic activity that doesn't fit into the neat little categories we have constructed.<p>As an example, my wife is middle-aged, middle-income, and college educated. I helped her create a site about her hamburger casserole recipes. People liked the site, so she made the site into an ebook. Every day, hundreds of people either use the free site to cook dinner, or decide to buy the ebook (shameless plug: <a href="http://hamburger-casserole-recipes.com" rel="nofollow">http://hamburger-casserole-recipes.com</a>)<p>And it's not just her. She has a friend (also middle-aged, college educated, and out of the official workforce) who collect semi-rare books and resells them. Another friend sells household goods by leveraging her social networks.<p>The list goes on. We probably know 5 or 6 people who have some sort of unique arrangement that technology has facilitated. These are folks who do not have "jobs", yet they have income. They provide value to people.<p>So if I had to bet, I'd say the odds are 90% that the economy is <i>evolving</i>, not drastically changing. I might be wrong, but I'll need to see a lot more data than this before I'm willing to change my mind.

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.<p>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 <i>historically high employment levels</i>. 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.

The author does not fully understand the totality of the work these professional do. From the two example listed.<p><i>"Radiologists, who can earn over $300,000 a year in America, after 13 years of college education and internship, are among the first to feel the heat. It is not just that the task of scanning tumour slides and X-ray pictures is being outsourced to Indian laboratories, where the job is done for a tenth of the cost. The real threat is that the latest automated pattern-recognition software can do much of the work for less than a hundredth of it."</i><p>a very naive understanding of radiologists. This only one of the many task a radiologists must handle, including interaction with patient, which is the most important task. We are far away from replace that service with Ai. Software handling one task won't eliminate the need for radiologists.<p><i>"Lawyers are in a similar boat now that smart algorithms can search case law, evaluate the issues at hand and summarise the results. Machines have already shown they can perform legal discovery for a fraction of the cost of human professionals—and do so with far greater thoroughness than lawyers and paralegals usually manage."</i><p>Case discovery is only one of the many task a Lawyer must perform, case discovery alone won't replace lawyers. It will only allow them to be more productive. Lawyers still responsible for many other task, they have to broker deals, consult clients and in the case of trial attorneys, win trials.<p>more thoughts at: <a href="http://techiroll.com/post/10173031897/do-not-blame-technology" rel="nofollow">http://techiroll.com/post/10173031897/do-not-blame-technolog...</a>

I don't see this as a bad thing, except:<p>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.<p>People are wealthier in some ways. In america, its pretty much standard issue to own at least one car (partially perhaps because a car is needed to simply get a job in most areas).<p>But in other ways it does not seem like the average worker is as well-off as the past had predicted.<p>I could say things about concentration of wealth and other reasons the productivity gains were not matched by gains in free time, but I'm not sure I know enough to make those arguments.

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 producing stuff that could as well be made by robots, but that other humans will buy just because it was hand made. They could enjoy experimenting with various lifestyles, effectively creating diverse subcultures, and these cultures will trade items that are uniquely developed within the culture.<p>Imagine a world where people could enjoy the variety of clothing that existed in the world 300 years ago and that has been now elliminated by the hustle of modern life and by a global trade in clothes. Even if they will be produced by robots, designing these clothes will remain mostly a human job. Virtually anyone could wear designer clothes, and many people could become such designers. The same could be applied to food, music, movies, and so on.<p>Education and corporal care would also become a large part of the economy that would hire humans and not robots. There will be plenty of niches, and people will have the time to invest in developing specialized skills, rediscovering skills long forgotten.<p>Eliberated by the stress of modern life, life will simply become more enjoyable.

I really love the photo. :) The digital robot interfacing with the laptop through it's keyboard; seemingly the only permitted I/O in the future. Trust issues between different hardware vendors must have hit an all time low after the various standards authorities fell apart!

For those who are interested in what a world where (intelligent) robots are the source of production, and humans are the content creators, I highly recommend this short story: <a href="http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm" rel="nofollow">http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm</a><p>Sounds like Heaven on Earth to me. Now to make it happen during our lifetimes!

Thankfully we're nowhere near where intelligence itself is being displaced, only small subsets of work that were previously the domain of highly specialized experts [sidenote: Mathematica has been doing this for a while]. Nor will advances in statistical machine learning and computing hardware get us there. "AI" is a field we still have to make any real progress in.<p>I think what the current trend means though is that we're going to have to teach people to learn and re-work education to maximize the ability to adapt.<p>I feel a little sorry for the radiologist whose effective supply is apparently rapidly expanding, but there is still a long way to fall from a $350,000 annual income. :)<p>I'm scared that as we optimize test-prep and narrowly focus on passing children through school, we're potentially decreasing the likelihood that people learn on their own. We're decreasing the amount of effort it takes for a kid to learn some [probably useless] skill, like drawing force diagrams on pulley systems, where the point of the exercise [imo] in the first place was to stretch the mind and force the kid to fill in the gaps and think for himself. That same kind of stretching that might come in handy when he finds himself displaced for whatever reason, be it technology or something else.

Ancient Rome had slaves - with <i>actual</i> intelligence.<p>What can we learn from how they handled it? Our civilization already seems more similar to their's than any other.

Perhaps we can build a giant firewall to keep Illegal Intelligents out.

"The point was that any increase in productivity required a corresponding increase in the number of consumers capable of buying the product."<p>yeah, it's not like increases in productivity could simply create a surplus that is then directed into other sectors. I write for the economist and cannot into economics hurrdurr. This is like saying that a machine that lets me do laundry faster is bad because I don't need to do 20 loads of laundry per day.

I found Eli Dourado's take on 'Race Against The Machine' quite an interesting analysis and somewhat related to this article <a href="http://elidourado.com/blog/technologies-of-control-and-resistance/" rel="nofollow">http://elidourado.com/blog/technologies-of-control-and-resis...</a><p>It's mainly how points of control incentivize some of these factors to move faster, or out of step with the other factors.

Every time you create a tool or process or system that lets you do more with less effort you are supposedly "taking jobs".<p>So stop whatever it is you are doing and instead destroy these things instead. Then stand back and watch the ground swell of prosperity that sweeps the globe.

So if you work in AI, you are safe?

The article starts by predicting that the Dilberts of the world will start losing their job in droves without being able to find another one, and then mentions as examples... radiologists and lawyers making over $300K/year.<p>Radiologists are no Dilberts.

Let me put it this way:<p><pre><code> GOOD THINGS: * automation leading to increasing wealth and less employment in redundant jobs * social safety nets freeing people up to do work they LIKE to do because it gives them satisfaction * guaranteed housing, food, and sexbots for all (basic maslow's needs) with ability to get more expensive things through capitalism BAD THINGS: * speculation by abusing resources and cornering free markets * government monopolies (patents, etc) restricting freedom of production in fast moving industries * increased risk of terrorism leading to significant culture changes around security/freedom issues </code></pre> these are the long term trends<p>just my point of view.

In which alternative world is increased productivity a problem? I don't get the logic behind that. I just don't.

Thay took our jobs! <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=768h3Tz4Qik" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=768h3Tz4Qik</a>

The notion of weak artificial intelligence hurting the economy by taking away jobs is a complete misunderstanding of the situation. To understand why, you need to read and understand the parable of the broken window:<p><a href="http://freedomkeys.com/window.htm" rel="nofollow">http://freedomkeys.com/window.htm</a><p>The key lies in seeing that when humans no longer have to do mundane repetitive tasks, then they are freed up to do far more powerful and interesting things. The last job to be completely automated is the programmer, engineer and designer. And that too will one day be automated. I like to believe that humans and AI will merge so that together, a human and the machine will always be more powerful/more in control than just the AI.