There's a lot believers in technological unemployment here on HN and one thing I think that viewpoint misses is just how darn resilient humans are to changes in the economy. In the past 150 years, we've seen human manual labor replaced by mechanical labor. Think about that -- a lot of early California settlers walked here, and now you're commanding power roughly equivalent to 100 horses when you hop into your car. Agricultural employment went from 90%+ of the population to ~1% over a few generations. People using computers at work went from less than 1% to complete ubiquity in 30 years. And against all of this, unemployment is still near its target rate. Is the large scale rollout of predictive algorithms really a bigger wave than those that have come previously?
I like the comparison to horses. Steam engines and trains threatened to replace horses in the mid 1800s. A lot of things that were previously done by horses were replaced with trains and steam engines.
Yet the horse population grew, and cities remained full of horses. There were countless transportation innovations in the 1800s, from canals to streetcars and omnibuses to bicycles. But the horse population kept growing and showed no signs of being threatened by this "automation". Whenever something took a horses job, there will always be other jobs that technology can't do yet, right?
Then the car was invented, and within 2 decades the horse population crashed. Suddenly the price of feeding and maintaining a horse was much higher than the alternative. There is no law of economics that says the supply and demand of a good can't fall below the cost of maintaining it. Or that wages can't fall below minimum, in our case.
Robotics has made incredible advancements over the past 50 years or more. They have taken over entire factories, doing countless routine tasks previously done by humans. But they are still very limited. They have 0 intelligence - they can't see, they can't learn. They can only perform a rote series of movements. So there is still tons of work available for humans.
But with recent advancements in machine learning, this is about to change. A robot will soon be able to be trained to flip burgers, or drive a car, or take a customer's order, etc, etc. I can not imagine any jobs that an average, unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do. Maybe skilled professions will be protected - I can't imagine robots being able to program computers for awhile. But the vast majority of humans can not be trained to be computer programmers.
The Industrial Revolution caused a lot of suffering for a lot of people. I don't think "eventually society adapted" is good enough. The point is that we need to learn from history and develop responsible policies so that we don't screw over most of the planet with massive inequality.
That doesn't mean technology and AI are bad, just that we have the benefit of hindsight and we don't have to just blindly plunge ahead and hope it all works out eventually.
This is sufficiently simplistic to be tone deaf to what's going on. The rhetoric has been "jobs!" but this isn't a complaint that there are no jobs; the complaint is two fold, a.) lack of work that utilize people's interest and/or skills b.) lack of work that pays what people expect or even need to get ahead.
Wage stagnation is a real problem. It's a kind of vectorized unemployment where everyone in the middle class on down is partially unemployed through a combination of more part time work rather than full time, and stagnant wages. The broadness of the problem makes it seem like we have good employment numbers, but wage stagnation is a big problem, especially in contrast to the rise in cost of living, in particular housing.
>And against all of this, unemployment is still near its target rate.
Unemployment is a synthetic measure. A mom working 39 hour shifts at Walmart so she doesn't get benefits isn't the same as a cush office job that's rolling in benefits. When we look at post-industrial societies, we look at late stage job creation being problematic. There's a lot of Mcjobs, temp jobs, and contract jobs. Technically those people are employed, but its not sustainable for them.
Yes, the US has done well but its an exception for the most part due to the massive economy at work here and the relative lack of competition, until recently, from other regions. French youth unemployment hit 26% a few months ago. Spain and Greece are just as bad, if not worse. Jobs in many European economies are lifer jobs because if you leave, your chances of getting a new one is slim.
The real question is, when is the camel's back going to break. Another good career job replaced by a McJob thanks to automation won't change the unemployment stats, but it will make people unhappy. It will drive down the economy with less spending and other issues. In other words, wages matter, not just employment numbers.
I would not assume we are sitting pretty right now. This dam is going to break. Arguably, the surprise win of anti-automation, anti-liberal, anti-globalization, and anti-intellectual candidates in the UK and the USA are the first signs of a major fault.
There is also a large proportion of people whose standard of living is a step back from being self-sufficient modest farmers living with family off their own land.
I'll all for technological advancement. As a society, we've accomplished marvelous things. But it's useful to remember whether individuals are actually improving their standard of living or not.
> now you're commanding power roughly equivalent to 100 horses when you hop into your car
The flipside of this is that (for most US) you must have a car to perform basic necessities such as purchasing food to eat. Food that would have otherwise been in your vegetable garden/chicken coop/pond.
Our society is immensely better for well-off city dwellers, but there are large portions of the population whose level of freedom is only slighly better than servitude.
> Is the large scale rollout of predictive algorithms really a bigger wave than those that have come previously?
No of course it isn't. But because it's called "artificial intelligence" instead of "conditional probability" or "regression" or something people think otherwise.
The reality is that this kind of technology will make us more productive, bring down the cost of products and services and make them available to a mass market, in exactly the same way literally every tech advance has done.
Of course some jobs and disciplines will be lost, but they will be replaced with different, higher skilled jobs. Just look at the range of disciplines and jobs that the web has created over the last 20 years. I mean just look at Google. The world's largest "AI" platform has spawned entire industries. No evidence this trend won't continue.
> how darn resilient humans are to changes in the economy
Survivorship Bias; Not everyone is thriving under the current circumstances, not everyone was thriving during the Industrial Revolution or the Digital Revolution.
There's a crucial difference this time around, though. After the industrial revolution, there were still plenty of jobs that people could do that machines were no good at. By definition, human-level AI is as good as or better than a human at some task. Therefore, an AI revolution means, by definition, that there won't be any jobs that can be done by a human that can't be automated. Adaptability won't help, since there will be nothing left to adapt to.
The undeniable math is that machine productivity will grow exponentially faster than human productivity. Organics have had a few billion year head start on machines, so it's of no consequence that we've been able to scramble in front of our metallic friends for their few-hundred-year infancy. The day will come when machine productivity dwarfs that of humans by orders of magnitude. It would be absurd to task humans with new jobs when we have limitless machines that are infinitely smarter, stronger, and more reliable. The concept of a "new job" won't even exist because machines will immediately meet any new demand before humans are even aware it exists.
The 'unemployment rate' is fictional, and it takes a lot of hand waving to get to 5% unemployment rate. Some of which justified, but it's only useful for year to year comparisons not decade to decade as the number keep changing.
Right now there are 121.5 million people working full time in the US. The population is 320 million people and 250 million adults and 200 million adults under 65. So actual employment is around 50% depending on how you slice it.
The extent of adaptability depends on the scale and the pace of the change. Arguably, every generation is experiencing more drastic changes than the previous one. And if the ML/DL/AI combo could deliver on its promises, there aren't many job sectors that can't be improved(!). E.g. taxi drivers' becoming Uber/Lyft drivers is one thing, getting rid of drivers in cars/trucks is another.
True. Humans definitely will find a way to figure out what to do next if AI takes away lot of jobs. But the important thing is that the rate of which these jobs go. With the recent advances in deep learning or AI in general, the rate of loss of jobs across manufacturing, logistics, agriculture or construction is way more and i don't think we are ready to do something about it.
People who recognise the threat from cheap AI and robot.
And people who think there is some hand-wavy magical force that will ensure that people will always be employed.
You can see that doesn't work now, you can see low income jobs are down, and while they are rising in China and India, those people are already being replaced by robots.
As work became less and less physical, people generally retreated into more cognitive-based jobs.
Now it seems that AI might be able to handle any mind-based job just fine, in a not too distant future. If that is indeed the case, what will human workers do?
Examples of changes which may impact "everyone will lose their job" predictions:
* Delocalization of work. The need for physical proximity is still a pervasive bottleneck. As that further relaxes (VR, remote work), what changes? Think "N weeks to get there" Roman empire vs current "call/email/tweet the world". Maybe a world without commutes? Without two-body problems?
* More richly interwoven human/machine-learning hybrid work processes. Say CEO compensation plummets as you get jit virtual "CEO"s. What happens when most businesses can afford competent leadership? Management? Even if the number of businesses increases by an order of magnitude? Or three?
* What does an economy look like if most people are scrambling, looking for opportunities, not working n-hour "jobs"? Where you can again pick up a "help wanted" "paper", and have a work a few hours later?
Yes, it's easy to imagine dystopias. Especially with resurgent aristocracy, regulatory capture, a patent system I expect to remain broken my entire professional career, and so on. But it's also easy to forget just how much potential change is inbound. Modulo the usual dangers of stagnation and wreckage, "you've not seen anything yet". Maybe.
There's some big flaws in the argument that we'll find new jobs to employ many thousands of industrial workers in. First, retraining someone in their 40s or 50s that have been working at Coleman or some other firm isn't going to likely happen. Mostly because the workers themselves either never completed the equivalent of high school or barely got by. Most of that retraining would have to be in complex tasks and not old fashioned data entry (those kinds of jobs are the ones that are being replaced by software automation and auditing). So, that means fewer still can make the leap from working on a manufacturing line to software development or some other skills based position. You just can't drop the equivalent of Homer Simpson into a code camp. It's just not going to happen. Second, there's not enough demand for such people in such a new economy. For example, I've known people who've worked on all kinds of software from games to enterprise development and all instances when a product was finished the amount of staff ever needed to maintain it was many times smaller than what they had during development. It doesn't matter if you employ waterfall or agile development, if your product only needs 20 people versus 200 people to maintain a product after it's release and future releases then you're not going to hire 200 people ever again. Third, many modern jobs are shifting to what seems like contract work via employment agencies like Volt and Man Power which bothers me because the benefits are greatly reduced without the equivalent increase in wages to offset this (especially in healthcare). Unless there's something I'm not aware of that could absorb all those thousands of people, I'm just not buying this theory that we'll just create new jobs out of thin air. Past performance is never an indicator of future returns.
One things that's different is that we've reached consumption limits. I can't eat more or much better. I don't have time to watch more TV and movies. I don't need more stuff or services. If I don't need more then there won't be jobs available to people to create more.
unemployment calculated how? As I understand it, we measure based on how many people are looking for work and have it.
So if our social safety nets (retirement) and cultural expectations have kept pace with people being employed less, (be it in hours/day, hours/week, or just what years you'll be working), I'd expect unemployment numbers to not show the effects of technological unemployment.
Of course, it's too simplistic to just assert what I have and ignore forces on the other side (for example, dual income households are now the norm). That is, however, my point: Looking at the unemployment numbers is a poor measure of any effects upon people's ability to work as it has so much else lumped in there.
People tend to forget about one thing - in previous industrial revolutions jobs changed, but people were added and removed from the pool slowly and predictably. This time automatons not only take jobs from people, they are also in a sense added to the economy as additional workers.
Think about it this way - previously if someone came up with a more efficient way to do a given job, out of 10 people 9 lost employment, but you still needed that one person to do the job. With automation you get rid of 10 people, and add one additional "worker" to the pool of workers. So now 10 people have to compete not only with themselves but also with one robot that can do job of 10 people.
I don't think the change is linear here. Industrial revolution pushed people behind desks because human still had brains while machines were dumb (sic). Then desk jobs were split between computerized backend and social interface done by people; this is what is gonna fall soon. Comptuers can now listen and answer to you; gather real world analog / organic data; rather than only dealing with structured data as since the 60s.
Also, lots societies needs don't even require Alpha Go level of AI; and computer will make these tasks automatic. And these class of worker won't beat machines logic until a deep learning (sic sic) phase.
Yes, one example I like to point out is that there used to be people who's sole job was to tap on your windows in the weekday mornings to wake you up, before alarm clocks were cheap & affordable to everyone.
> Advances in artificial intelligence will lead to job losses, but new forms of employment will take their place...History, though, has demonstrated that technological breakthroughs lead to new employment opportunities
-- IBM CEO Ginni Rometty
But, I think we are approaching (if we haven't already crossed this point) the time where new jobs created by technology advancements will be fewer than old jobs displaced.
My example here is Instagram, a company of a dozen staff or so when acquired, is the digital replacement of photo labs in every city. New technologies are not the job creator that they once were and I haven't read anything to contradict that statement or posit that new tech is going to drive jobs growth.
It all seems so obvious to me that I feel like I must be the fool in the room, but that can't be. Technology and progress in science changes the kinds of work we do. The processes are accelerating, and we're reaching a point where work is better done by machines. I can see no viable future for humans other than Universal Basic Income, with options for additional creativity and work unbounded by time spent doing menial tasks to earn wages for shelter and food and clothing. Yes that all sounds utopian, but what other futures are there? The masses won't have jobs - the machines will. What will people do when there are no jobs? We'll have UBI and we'll have the strongest entrepreneurship and artistic discovery we've ever had. It doesn't matter what side of the politics you're on - UBI is going to be the future simply because it has to be.
"Job creator" is the most intense insult I can think of to call a politician but everyone else seems to love it. Aren't we supposed to be destroying jobs as fast as possible so that automation can make our lives easier and provide higher quality of life to all?
Creating jobs sounds like the worst possible path for people to take - and for CEOs like Rometty to encourage the idea that jobs are here to stay seems dangerous. Jobs are not here to stay, even as the work changes and some new jobs are created along the way, the numbers of jobs will decline to 0.
I agree, we have moved from farming (subsistence) to manufacturing (subsistence and consumption) to services (pure consumption). What is there to move to next? Everyone says we will create new jobs but the question is doing what? We all can't either program the robots or serve at Starbucks. (and can't that be automated away too?)
Where will the 3M jobs that automated trucking will remove come from? I don't think it is all doom and gloom but it begs the question of what fuels the consumption. If employment is super low, then we need money from somewhere to continue to live, so is that universal basic income? Or will things be so automated that everything will effectively be free?
Very interesting time to be alive and wonder what might be yet to come.
> My example here is Instagram, a company of a dozen staff or so when acquired, is the digital replacement of photo labs in every city.
While not trying to dispute your main point, I hardly think Instagram replaces all of what photo labs do, such as large size prints, professional correction, and specialty products such as cards and books. There are other companies online that do compete in these spaces though. I think most labs are probably getting by with their services targeted towards professionals, who want a bit more accountability than they are likely to get using a large service. That may just mean a semi-large to large lab though, so small labs likely have a hard time of it.
>History, though, has demonstrated that technological breakthroughs lead to new employment opportunities
Except history has never had to content with automation and AI. Sure, back in the old days you took farmers and showed them how to make steel. Then took the steel workers and showed them how to work in a cubicle in a service economy. Now we're not that far away from the machines doing cubicle work. What's past the service economy? What's past creative and technical work?
I think its a little naive to think we'll always find work for people to do. There has to be an endgame here and this might be it. Just because certain people were wrong in the past doesn't mean the end of labor as we know it won't ever happen.
Considering we live in a political environment paranoid about "job stealing" and a POTUS who reflects those views, well, of course IBM mouthpieces are parroting those views. IBM doesn't want to become the posterboy for job loss via automation. They want you to think its the other guys.
The bottleneck here is education. There will always be demand for employees in the emerging industries, but the required skillset will increasingly be out of reach of the masses, partly due to the time needed to learn these skills (compounded with age and expected time working in that field) and partly due to aptitude. I think UBI is the only ethical long-term solution, but ironically, the people most passionately opposed to such programs are also the people least equipped to be competitive in the emerging economies.
> My example here is Instagram, a company of a dozen staff or so when acquired, is the digital replacement of photo labs in every city. New technologies are not the job creator that they once were and I haven't read anything to contradict that statement or posit that new tech is going to drive jobs growth.
Photo labs (places where physical photos were developed and edited) were replaced by digital post processing. Some of which is done by the photographers themselves, some is done in specialty shops, some is even done overseas. We can imagine that demand for the output (finished commercial photographs for products, offices etc) has likely continued to increase as the number of products, offices etc. have increased globally.
While many physical labs have shut down, many digital post processing shops have started. And where they haven't started, the photogs themselves are either doing the work or hiring people to do the work for them.
The net effect of digital photography is likely more jobs overall (post processing, web design, etc.) and product delivered for a lower price, but people who used to work for physical labs are completely screwed unless they completely learned a new skill.
Then comes along Instagram! Well, all of the sudden, there is a new place to display high & low quality images and some new editing tools. I am sure that some professional editing is now just a simple filter, but most finished commercial photography projects are still highly post processed by paid professionals. So what about all those images? Well, Instagram has actually resulted in multiple new business models, including "Instagram models" etc.
My guess (no data) is that the number of people producing commercial digital images has increased, not decreased and that instagram probably helps create demand for finished images. At the same time, instragram has likely helped launched new businesses without us even realizing it (access to random food blogs etc.)
While this is all great, and increases global net jobs, it doesn't help the poor guy who owns a photo lab in Missouri. That guy/girl is completely screwed and when people talk about technology jobs, he will have his photo on CNN.com, taken by an unpaid photographer who post processes his images himself. He was/is not newsworthy, but CNN now creates clickbait. In other words, there was never going to be a professional paid to shoot that guy in the past, but now there is a new market for previously worthless content. He will be photographed and CNN will make like $3 on the post in ad revenue.
Tech never creates as many jobs as it destroys buy it doesn't have to. When there were less farming the economy compensated by creating manufacturing jobs so I don't think that the worst case scenario is a given, at least in the reasonably foreseeable future
We've seen this before with the transition from a labour force that was 50%+ involved in farming to one that became a manufacturing based society and then again in the move from manufacturing to services.
One of the bigger differences with AI is that it now may take away many of the lower tier "white collar" jobs along with blue collar jobs that were previously displaced by technology shits.
I'm not terribly familiar with my economics history but is it possible that a huge tide of AI backed apps could be the first time that a significant portion of white collar jobs are lost along with the typical blue collar jobs that are more traditionally lost with tech shifts?
Then again, in 2000, alot of first world programmers were worried about offshoring of programming jobs, I haven't seen any real impact of the loss of these jobs on programmers in North America so perhaps IBM is correct that AI will produce as many new jobs as it replaces.
The problem with AI is that it's dynamite when it comes to capital-labour relations. You can't compete with something with perfect agency that never gets sick. Now, are there going to be new categories of work and new economies? Yes. But in the meanwhile, for a category of work that defines a plurality if not majority of the functioning economy (basically anything that doesn't require creativity across multiple domains or empathy), there are going to be SEVERE income share implications.
Keep in mind that labour share of income has gone down drastically in the last few decades and that as a result, real wages have stagnated -- which has produced significant unrest in developed countries and unseated the established political order. If that trend continues...
Is IBM CEO Ginni Rometty someone who can actually provide insight on the impact of AI on society? I'm sure some of her subordinates could, but the only thing I've ever heard about her personally is that she's driving IBM into the ground by chasing some unrealistic financial metric, and I'm not super inclined to bypass a paywall just to hear an executive say executive things.
In discussions of the issue, AI and automation are often used interchangeably and this entirely clouds the issue.
The AI that is so far real is a particular kind of software that has helped large-scale decisions and processes in large enterprises, large websites and etc - places with a lot of data to agregate.
Automation is an ongoing process of replacing people with machines and it is what has eliminated jobs. Advances in software has helped some automation and some of those advances are connected to AI but a lot of the advances involve materials, processes, a willingness-or-not of consumers to use automated processes rather than interacting with a human (whether buying online or from automatic kiosk or whatever).
Indeed, the AI-in-particular and job losses in general narrative is just about a sales-pitch for IBM's Watson etc rather than a serious threat.
Deep learning-ish advances can theoretically automate a ton of things now, but it will take a few years for those AIs to be engineered/trained/marketed. That is actually a continuation of automation which is as much a social process as it is about technology.
But if you look at projects like Deep Mind Lab, Open AI Universe, Good AIs Lab and 5 million usd AGI contest, combine those 3d environments with incremental learning transferred across domains, leveraging deep learning, hybrid and other advancements, as well as (hopefully) the existing body of research from the field of AGI (which has existed for a number of years, despite many pretending it didn't) -- we now have very powerful parallel learning tools and many public projects aimed at general agents. And very convincing demos in more narrow domains. Because of all of this I personally believe the core AGI technology will be demonstrated within the next two years. How long before that makes its way into embodied robots and gets trained up to the point it can be readily adapted to various industries may be another few years.
So my own belief is that we should expect ALL jobs to start to be 'threatened' by AGI systems by around 2022-2023.
I think a lot of people here are missing why these labor changes will be so harmful.
Yes, when agriculture, industrialization, etc, emerged, old jobs were replaced with new jobs that people could not have previously predicted.
But these new jobs are terrible. They are degrading, dehumanizing, and absurd. We have 63% labor participation, and about half* the people working do nothing. They make Power Point slides, they send emails, they form working groups, they schedule conference calls to schedule other conference calls. Apple hires a bunch of lawyers to sue Samsung. Samsung hires a bunch of lawyers to defend itself. Nothing is accomplished. They all feel like shit, they're addicted to the internet and they are on prescription anti-depressants.
These jobs are rituals, they are not productive in any sense.
When ancient Egyptians developed agriculture, they did not go on to live lives of luxury. Workers who would previously have spent their days hunting and gathering instead spent their days pushing limestone blocks up to the top of the pyramid.
*bullshit on my part, but look at these statistics (https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm) and come up with an industry-by-industry estimate for yourself, it is depressingly high
The sad thing is she has to say this to appease her public sector clientele that still holds to the believe that life benefits tied to 'jobs' are the only way to keep the unruly masses under control.
Most of these discussions revolve around when and how sufficiently intelligent AI will be available to revolutionize society, but what about the hardware? As in, is there a limit to our ability to design and create (cost-effectively) the mechanical and other physical components that are required for building the precise robots and other machines of this automated future? At what point do we hit a physical limit of cost prohibitive machinery for full automation?
I'm not sure what "full automation" really entails, but those who envision to inevitable automation future don't really explain it either. Everyone focuses on the software without considering if there may be limits to the hardware, and by that I don't just mean the computing machines but everything in meatspace.
The big problem with immigrant-fueled growth in America is that the first derivative of most Latin American demographic trends indicates larger reductions in growth rate than the U.S. or Canada. So North America, in general, could become dependent on higher-risk immigrant populations from Asia to maintain any significant growth.
2. Most boomers will be dead and turned to dust before 2060. And age distribution could become flat as fertility rates go flat. After 2045, the over 65 population rate will probably decrease to under 25% for North America. Some actuaries are thinking that people will not necessarily continue to have increased lifespans.
3. Quality and financial incentives for production and design automation have been driving industry at increasing rate for at least 25 years. My three current employers (one full-time regular, two contract) are all under 200 employees, have all reduced head count by at 15% to 40% over last 5 to 10 years, and have mandated to either not increase bodies or to further decrease bodies.
4. Too much emphasis on self-driving vehicles. Most industrial automation is after the obvious low-hanging fruit - logistics and production, where you do not necessarily see actual robotics, but much process automation and decision-making sustained by ML.
5. Mid-level jobs are being increasingly targeted: parsing of legal documents, accounting, warehouse management and stock control, and some of the more simple product design functions.
6. Anecdotal stuff.
In Early 2016, employer's main site in Southern California terminated OVER half of the engineering group - mostly support and mid-level management. Only one technician, no PCB designers, no mechanical designers, and no engineering managers remain. The remaining engineers do it all - feasible because design automation tools have reached a 'critical' mass.
Spent most of October through December automating the crap out of a factory warehouse and related processes. Last week, 14 people were terminated at the Mexico factory site. The factory warehouse had 14 full-time and 4 part-time employees in warehouse; there are now 3 full and 1 part-timer; and the part-timer will probably go away next quarter. And no robots in sight...
It seems like these articles about AI are just a distraction from the real wage suppression caused by temporary work visas, illegal immigration, and workers being classified as contractors. Perhaps tech companies want to signal they have other options for labor as a sort of threat to combat increased scrutiny of their labor practices. Perhaps the message is: "Don't take away our cheap labor or we will release the AI overlords."
The AI revolution will wake up the west to the realities of capitalism. Trump's spat with China over trade barriers is just one example of America coming to terms with the fact that capitalism has no sense of patriotism or morality. If the price (of labour) is right capitalists will do business with anyone. The capitalist philosophy, based on Adam Smith's "invisible hand" which mysteriously takes care of the common good, is a fallacy behind which the greed of the 1% masquerades as success. Capitalism's goal is to drive down the price of labour which it can only see as a cost. AI is the capitalist's dream, presenting for the first time the possibility of eliminating human labour altogether. There is only one question we must ask as a society - to whom will the capitalists of the AI age be accountable? Marx wrote about this endgame 150 years ago and of all the economists since then I'd say his analysis has been the most accurate.
I think it is also matter of time scale. There may be new jobs once this all settles down. Today I have real fear of mass job disappearance. If I lose job today due to AI and tumultuous times continue for next 50 years it is of no use to me that 2080 is the start of AI based golden era.
AI is a flaky term changing its meaning every now and then, and indeed, as the backbone of the hype, Deep Learning itself is rapidly evolving unlike any other fields I have witnessed.
Take CV for example. AlexNet is wakeup call for deep learning renaissance, however no one has predicted that we would go beyond human-level performance in just 3 years(ResNet developed in 2015). Same goes for AlphaGo/Machine Translation/Speech Recognition, or the latest photo-realistic stacked GAN.
All in all it is hard to predict what we will end up with by looking at history because we are in such an exciting time of ML/AI development. No matter how prestigious that person might be, his or her words affect very little what the future will actually be, only technology itself could.
If I was Ms. Rometty, I would spend my time playing up the fact that A.I. will lead to a vastly improved quality of life for everyone. Advancements in knowledge always tend to do that and A.I. is a great leap forward in tech knowledge.
In other news, IBM announced today that CEO Ginni Rometti has resigned in order to have more time to spend with her family and the new CEO will be Watson.
[+] [-] cjlars|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Houshalter|9 years ago|reply
I like the comparison to horses. Steam engines and trains threatened to replace horses in the mid 1800s. A lot of things that were previously done by horses were replaced with trains and steam engines.
Yet the horse population grew, and cities remained full of horses. There were countless transportation innovations in the 1800s, from canals to streetcars and omnibuses to bicycles. But the horse population kept growing and showed no signs of being threatened by this "automation". Whenever something took a horses job, there will always be other jobs that technology can't do yet, right?
Then the car was invented, and within 2 decades the horse population crashed. Suddenly the price of feeding and maintaining a horse was much higher than the alternative. There is no law of economics that says the supply and demand of a good can't fall below the cost of maintaining it. Or that wages can't fall below minimum, in our case.
Robotics has made incredible advancements over the past 50 years or more. They have taken over entire factories, doing countless routine tasks previously done by humans. But they are still very limited. They have 0 intelligence - they can't see, they can't learn. They can only perform a rote series of movements. So there is still tons of work available for humans.
But with recent advancements in machine learning, this is about to change. A robot will soon be able to be trained to flip burgers, or drive a car, or take a customer's order, etc, etc. I can not imagine any jobs that an average, unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do. Maybe skilled professions will be protected - I can't imagine robots being able to program computers for awhile. But the vast majority of humans can not be trained to be computer programmers.
[+] [-] burkaman|9 years ago|reply
That doesn't mean technology and AI are bad, just that we have the benefit of hindsight and we don't have to just blindly plunge ahead and hope it all works out eventually.
[+] [-] cmurf|9 years ago|reply
Wage stagnation is a real problem. It's a kind of vectorized unemployment where everyone in the middle class on down is partially unemployed through a combination of more part time work rather than full time, and stagnant wages. The broadness of the problem makes it seem like we have good employment numbers, but wage stagnation is a big problem, especially in contrast to the rise in cost of living, in particular housing.
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|9 years ago|reply
Unemployment is a synthetic measure. A mom working 39 hour shifts at Walmart so she doesn't get benefits isn't the same as a cush office job that's rolling in benefits. When we look at post-industrial societies, we look at late stage job creation being problematic. There's a lot of Mcjobs, temp jobs, and contract jobs. Technically those people are employed, but its not sustainable for them.
Yes, the US has done well but its an exception for the most part due to the massive economy at work here and the relative lack of competition, until recently, from other regions. French youth unemployment hit 26% a few months ago. Spain and Greece are just as bad, if not worse. Jobs in many European economies are lifer jobs because if you leave, your chances of getting a new one is slim.
The real question is, when is the camel's back going to break. Another good career job replaced by a McJob thanks to automation won't change the unemployment stats, but it will make people unhappy. It will drive down the economy with less spending and other issues. In other words, wages matter, not just employment numbers.
I would not assume we are sitting pretty right now. This dam is going to break. Arguably, the surprise win of anti-automation, anti-liberal, anti-globalization, and anti-intellectual candidates in the UK and the USA are the first signs of a major fault.
[+] [-] athenot|9 years ago|reply
I'll all for technological advancement. As a society, we've accomplished marvelous things. But it's useful to remember whether individuals are actually improving their standard of living or not.
> now you're commanding power roughly equivalent to 100 horses when you hop into your car
The flipside of this is that (for most US) you must have a car to perform basic necessities such as purchasing food to eat. Food that would have otherwise been in your vegetable garden/chicken coop/pond.
Our society is immensely better for well-off city dwellers, but there are large portions of the population whose level of freedom is only slighly better than servitude.
[+] [-] retube|9 years ago|reply
No of course it isn't. But because it's called "artificial intelligence" instead of "conditional probability" or "regression" or something people think otherwise.
The reality is that this kind of technology will make us more productive, bring down the cost of products and services and make them available to a mass market, in exactly the same way literally every tech advance has done.
Of course some jobs and disciplines will be lost, but they will be replaced with different, higher skilled jobs. Just look at the range of disciplines and jobs that the web has created over the last 20 years. I mean just look at Google. The world's largest "AI" platform has spawned entire industries. No evidence this trend won't continue.
[+] [-] fabianhjr|9 years ago|reply
Survivorship Bias; Not everyone is thriving under the current circumstances, not everyone was thriving during the Industrial Revolution or the Digital Revolution.
[+] [-] shmageggy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] briholt|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retric|9 years ago|reply
Right now there are 121.5 million people working full time in the US. The population is 320 million people and 250 million adults and 200 million adults under 65. So actual employment is around 50% depending on how you slice it.
[+] [-] yawz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vthallam|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megablast|9 years ago|reply
People who recognise the threat from cheap AI and robot.
And people who think there is some hand-wavy magical force that will ensure that people will always be employed.
You can see that doesn't work now, you can see low income jobs are down, and while they are rising in China and India, those people are already being replaced by robots.
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|9 years ago|reply
Now it seems that AI might be able to handle any mind-based job just fine, in a not too distant future. If that is indeed the case, what will human workers do?
[+] [-] mncharity|9 years ago|reply
* Delocalization of work. The need for physical proximity is still a pervasive bottleneck. As that further relaxes (VR, remote work), what changes? Think "N weeks to get there" Roman empire vs current "call/email/tweet the world". Maybe a world without commutes? Without two-body problems?
* More richly interwoven human/machine-learning hybrid work processes. Say CEO compensation plummets as you get jit virtual "CEO"s. What happens when most businesses can afford competent leadership? Management? Even if the number of businesses increases by an order of magnitude? Or three?
* What does an economy look like if most people are scrambling, looking for opportunities, not working n-hour "jobs"? Where you can again pick up a "help wanted" "paper", and have a work a few hours later?
Yes, it's easy to imagine dystopias. Especially with resurgent aristocracy, regulatory capture, a patent system I expect to remain broken my entire professional career, and so on. But it's also easy to forget just how much potential change is inbound. Modulo the usual dangers of stagnation and wreckage, "you've not seen anything yet". Maybe.
[+] [-] norea-armozel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flukus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ergothus|9 years ago|reply
So if our social safety nets (retirement) and cultural expectations have kept pace with people being employed less, (be it in hours/day, hours/week, or just what years you'll be working), I'd expect unemployment numbers to not show the effects of technological unemployment.
Of course, it's too simplistic to just assert what I have and ignore forces on the other side (for example, dual income households are now the norm). That is, however, my point: Looking at the unemployment numbers is a poor measure of any effects upon people's ability to work as it has so much else lumped in there.
[+] [-] mariusz79|9 years ago|reply
Think about it this way - previously if someone came up with a more efficient way to do a given job, out of 10 people 9 lost employment, but you still needed that one person to do the job. With automation you get rid of 10 people, and add one additional "worker" to the pool of workers. So now 10 people have to compete not only with themselves but also with one robot that can do job of 10 people.
[+] [-] agumonkey|9 years ago|reply
Also, lots societies needs don't even require Alpha Go level of AI; and computer will make these tasks automatic. And these class of worker won't beat machines logic until a deep learning (sic sic) phase.
[+] [-] chaostheory|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] youdounderstand|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josho|9 years ago|reply
> Advances in artificial intelligence will lead to job losses, but new forms of employment will take their place...History, though, has demonstrated that technological breakthroughs lead to new employment opportunities
-- IBM CEO Ginni Rometty
But, I think we are approaching (if we haven't already crossed this point) the time where new jobs created by technology advancements will be fewer than old jobs displaced.
My example here is Instagram, a company of a dozen staff or so when acquired, is the digital replacement of photo labs in every city. New technologies are not the job creator that they once were and I haven't read anything to contradict that statement or posit that new tech is going to drive jobs growth.
[+] [-] cryptoz|9 years ago|reply
It all seems so obvious to me that I feel like I must be the fool in the room, but that can't be. Technology and progress in science changes the kinds of work we do. The processes are accelerating, and we're reaching a point where work is better done by machines. I can see no viable future for humans other than Universal Basic Income, with options for additional creativity and work unbounded by time spent doing menial tasks to earn wages for shelter and food and clothing. Yes that all sounds utopian, but what other futures are there? The masses won't have jobs - the machines will. What will people do when there are no jobs? We'll have UBI and we'll have the strongest entrepreneurship and artistic discovery we've ever had. It doesn't matter what side of the politics you're on - UBI is going to be the future simply because it has to be.
"Job creator" is the most intense insult I can think of to call a politician but everyone else seems to love it. Aren't we supposed to be destroying jobs as fast as possible so that automation can make our lives easier and provide higher quality of life to all?
Creating jobs sounds like the worst possible path for people to take - and for CEOs like Rometty to encourage the idea that jobs are here to stay seems dangerous. Jobs are not here to stay, even as the work changes and some new jobs are created along the way, the numbers of jobs will decline to 0.
[+] [-] snarf21|9 years ago|reply
Where will the 3M jobs that automated trucking will remove come from? I don't think it is all doom and gloom but it begs the question of what fuels the consumption. If employment is super low, then we need money from somewhere to continue to live, so is that universal basic income? Or will things be so automated that everything will effectively be free?
Very interesting time to be alive and wonder what might be yet to come.
[+] [-] kbenson|9 years ago|reply
While not trying to dispute your main point, I hardly think Instagram replaces all of what photo labs do, such as large size prints, professional correction, and specialty products such as cards and books. There are other companies online that do compete in these spaces though. I think most labs are probably getting by with their services targeted towards professionals, who want a bit more accountability than they are likely to get using a large service. That may just mean a semi-large to large lab though, so small labs likely have a hard time of it.
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|9 years ago|reply
Except history has never had to content with automation and AI. Sure, back in the old days you took farmers and showed them how to make steel. Then took the steel workers and showed them how to work in a cubicle in a service economy. Now we're not that far away from the machines doing cubicle work. What's past the service economy? What's past creative and technical work?
I think its a little naive to think we'll always find work for people to do. There has to be an endgame here and this might be it. Just because certain people were wrong in the past doesn't mean the end of labor as we know it won't ever happen.
Considering we live in a political environment paranoid about "job stealing" and a POTUS who reflects those views, well, of course IBM mouthpieces are parroting those views. IBM doesn't want to become the posterboy for job loss via automation. They want you to think its the other guys.
[+] [-] ar15saveslives|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedbrown|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtvanhest|9 years ago|reply
> My example here is Instagram, a company of a dozen staff or so when acquired, is the digital replacement of photo labs in every city. New technologies are not the job creator that they once were and I haven't read anything to contradict that statement or posit that new tech is going to drive jobs growth.
Photo labs (places where physical photos were developed and edited) were replaced by digital post processing. Some of which is done by the photographers themselves, some is done in specialty shops, some is even done overseas. We can imagine that demand for the output (finished commercial photographs for products, offices etc) has likely continued to increase as the number of products, offices etc. have increased globally.
While many physical labs have shut down, many digital post processing shops have started. And where they haven't started, the photogs themselves are either doing the work or hiring people to do the work for them.
The net effect of digital photography is likely more jobs overall (post processing, web design, etc.) and product delivered for a lower price, but people who used to work for physical labs are completely screwed unless they completely learned a new skill.
Then comes along Instagram! Well, all of the sudden, there is a new place to display high & low quality images and some new editing tools. I am sure that some professional editing is now just a simple filter, but most finished commercial photography projects are still highly post processed by paid professionals. So what about all those images? Well, Instagram has actually resulted in multiple new business models, including "Instagram models" etc.
My guess (no data) is that the number of people producing commercial digital images has increased, not decreased and that instagram probably helps create demand for finished images. At the same time, instragram has likely helped launched new businesses without us even realizing it (access to random food blogs etc.)
While this is all great, and increases global net jobs, it doesn't help the poor guy who owns a photo lab in Missouri. That guy/girl is completely screwed and when people talk about technology jobs, he will have his photo on CNN.com, taken by an unpaid photographer who post processes his images himself. He was/is not newsworthy, but CNN now creates clickbait. In other words, there was never going to be a professional paid to shoot that guy in the past, but now there is a new market for previously worthless content. He will be photographed and CNN will make like $3 on the post in ad revenue.
This can go on and on and on and on.
[+] [-] tdb7893|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chollida1|9 years ago|reply
One of the bigger differences with AI is that it now may take away many of the lower tier "white collar" jobs along with blue collar jobs that were previously displaced by technology shits.
I'm not terribly familiar with my economics history but is it possible that a huge tide of AI backed apps could be the first time that a significant portion of white collar jobs are lost along with the typical blue collar jobs that are more traditionally lost with tech shifts?
Then again, in 2000, alot of first world programmers were worried about offshoring of programming jobs, I haven't seen any real impact of the loss of these jobs on programmers in North America so perhaps IBM is correct that AI will produce as many new jobs as it replaces.
[+] [-] EternalData|9 years ago|reply
Keep in mind that labour share of income has gone down drastically in the last few decades and that as a result, real wages have stagnated -- which has produced significant unrest in developed countries and unseated the established political order. If that trend continues...
[+] [-] DashRattlesnake|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe_the_user|9 years ago|reply
The AI that is so far real is a particular kind of software that has helped large-scale decisions and processes in large enterprises, large websites and etc - places with a lot of data to agregate.
Automation is an ongoing process of replacing people with machines and it is what has eliminated jobs. Advances in software has helped some automation and some of those advances are connected to AI but a lot of the advances involve materials, processes, a willingness-or-not of consumers to use automated processes rather than interacting with a human (whether buying online or from automatic kiosk or whatever).
Indeed, the AI-in-particular and job losses in general narrative is just about a sales-pitch for IBM's Watson etc rather than a serious threat.
[+] [-] ilaksh|9 years ago|reply
But if you look at projects like Deep Mind Lab, Open AI Universe, Good AIs Lab and 5 million usd AGI contest, combine those 3d environments with incremental learning transferred across domains, leveraging deep learning, hybrid and other advancements, as well as (hopefully) the existing body of research from the field of AGI (which has existed for a number of years, despite many pretending it didn't) -- we now have very powerful parallel learning tools and many public projects aimed at general agents. And very convincing demos in more narrow domains. Because of all of this I personally believe the core AGI technology will be demonstrated within the next two years. How long before that makes its way into embodied robots and gets trained up to the point it can be readily adapted to various industries may be another few years.
So my own belief is that we should expect ALL jobs to start to be 'threatened' by AGI systems by around 2022-2023.
[+] [-] bleezy|9 years ago|reply
Yes, when agriculture, industrialization, etc, emerged, old jobs were replaced with new jobs that people could not have previously predicted.
But these new jobs are terrible. They are degrading, dehumanizing, and absurd. We have 63% labor participation, and about half* the people working do nothing. They make Power Point slides, they send emails, they form working groups, they schedule conference calls to schedule other conference calls. Apple hires a bunch of lawyers to sue Samsung. Samsung hires a bunch of lawyers to defend itself. Nothing is accomplished. They all feel like shit, they're addicted to the internet and they are on prescription anti-depressants.
These jobs are rituals, they are not productive in any sense.
When ancient Egyptians developed agriculture, they did not go on to live lives of luxury. Workers who would previously have spent their days hunting and gathering instead spent their days pushing limestone blocks up to the top of the pyramid.
*bullshit on my part, but look at these statistics (https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm) and come up with an industry-by-industry estimate for yourself, it is depressingly high
[+] [-] PeterStuer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Apocryphon|9 years ago|reply
I'm not sure what "full automation" really entails, but those who envision to inevitable automation future don't really explain it either. Everyone focuses on the software without considering if there may be limits to the hardware, and by that I don't just mean the computing machines but everything in meatspace.
[+] [-] BJBBB|9 years ago|reply
The big problem with immigrant-fueled growth in America is that the first derivative of most Latin American demographic trends indicates larger reductions in growth rate than the U.S. or Canada. So North America, in general, could become dependent on higher-risk immigrant populations from Asia to maintain any significant growth.
2. Most boomers will be dead and turned to dust before 2060. And age distribution could become flat as fertility rates go flat. After 2045, the over 65 population rate will probably decrease to under 25% for North America. Some actuaries are thinking that people will not necessarily continue to have increased lifespans.
3. Quality and financial incentives for production and design automation have been driving industry at increasing rate for at least 25 years. My three current employers (one full-time regular, two contract) are all under 200 employees, have all reduced head count by at 15% to 40% over last 5 to 10 years, and have mandated to either not increase bodies or to further decrease bodies.
4. Too much emphasis on self-driving vehicles. Most industrial automation is after the obvious low-hanging fruit - logistics and production, where you do not necessarily see actual robotics, but much process automation and decision-making sustained by ML.
5. Mid-level jobs are being increasingly targeted: parsing of legal documents, accounting, warehouse management and stock control, and some of the more simple product design functions.
6. Anecdotal stuff.
In Early 2016, employer's main site in Southern California terminated OVER half of the engineering group - mostly support and mid-level management. Only one technician, no PCB designers, no mechanical designers, and no engineering managers remain. The remaining engineers do it all - feasible because design automation tools have reached a 'critical' mass.
Spent most of October through December automating the crap out of a factory warehouse and related processes. Last week, 14 people were terminated at the Mexico factory site. The factory warehouse had 14 full-time and 4 part-time employees in warehouse; there are now 3 full and 1 part-timer; and the part-timer will probably go away next quarter. And no robots in sight...
[+] [-] jdhopeunique|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RRRA|9 years ago|reply
Maybe not now, but once we all get automated, what is the goal we're trying to reach?
Where are we going with this?
[+] [-] cutler|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] geodel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eva1984|9 years ago|reply
Take CV for example. AlexNet is wakeup call for deep learning renaissance, however no one has predicted that we would go beyond human-level performance in just 3 years(ResNet developed in 2015). Same goes for AlphaGo/Machine Translation/Speech Recognition, or the latest photo-realistic stacked GAN.
All in all it is hard to predict what we will end up with by looking at history because we are in such an exciting time of ML/AI development. No matter how prestigious that person might be, his or her words affect very little what the future will actually be, only technology itself could.
[+] [-] balozi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WhitneyLand|9 years ago|reply
Does anyone really believe the latter?
[+] [-] warmfuzzykitten|9 years ago|reply