9 ms·

Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs

58 points by kushankpoddar 9y ago

craftyguy 9y ago
Mechanization 'destroyed' millions of jobs, when people were replaced by mechanized equipment replaced farm workers, horse breeders/tenders, folks in the transportation business, etc. Electronic computers 'destroyed' jobs when they replaced human computers. Motorized street sweepers 'destroyed' jobs when they replaced people with brooms sweeping debris off of streets (except in Beijing where, as of 2015, this is still a thing). Firearms 'destroyed' jobs when bowers no longer had any reason to mass produce bows and arrows. People will find a way to stay busy. The past is literally filled with examples of a new technology replacing people, and those people eventually found other things to do. It's not hard to see, in hindsight, how many of my silly (but real) examples above translated into entirely new industries. Pardon the harshness here, I feel like the only people this is truly a surprise to is either folks that ignore the past, or are incapable of understanding the past.
- Joeri 9y ago
  It will take time for the new jobs to appear and people to be retrained, just as it did during those past instances of great change. Meanwhile people will be unemployed.
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    Yes, they will. Do you have a proposal for how to simultaneously provide for efficient progress and smooth transitions? I mostly see people either lamenting the suffering that big changes often cause, or brushing it aside as inevitable. It'd be interesting to see ideas for how we could have disruptive developments without so much disruption.
- headsoup 9y ago
  > People will find a way to stay busy Yes let's just dismiss all the concerns because 'things always work out in the end.' I suppose there's always room for more managers...
  - austenallred 9y ago
    My job didn’t exist 20 years ago. Did yours?
    - headsoup 9y ago
      Yes Were you in the workforce 20 years ago?
      - austenallred 9y ago
        I was barely born 20 years ago
    - dvtv75 9y ago
      Mine did. It has existed for about 90 years, maybe even longer. Without going into specifics, I can imagine that it could be automated as is right now, as it's not particularly complicated, and the whole role could be designed around so that it's not required anyway. (I believe I'll be out-of-work within a few months because of implications from the latter statement.)
- wavegeek 9y ago
  Two problems with this post. 1. You are assuming that what happened in the past will continue to happen in the future. Maybe it will, or maybe this time things are different. There are reasonable arguments that make the case that this time is different. The difference is that computers are encroaching on the one point of difference that man has always had on machines - his brain. 2. You are ignoring transition costs and times. Even with past mechanizations, there was immense pain and suffering and disruption that went on for decades. For neoclassical economists it will be OK in the long run, in equilibrium, when there will again be full employment and fairies will dance gaily on colorful toadstools. Back in the real world people suffer and die.
- smnrchrds 9y ago
  > People will find a way to stay busy You are implying that this will happen automagically, and there is no cause for concern. I disagree. People will find other things to do, but if we want there to be jobs in 20 years for people who have lost their jobs to AI, we need to get to work now. To use an example to illustrate my point, people have always found new sources of energy. We have never ran out of energy, nor faced extreme shortages as old resources dried up. Does that mean we should ignore any calls to action for investing in alternative and renewable energy sources? After all, why should we worry about and waste resources to prevent a thing that has never happened? Humans have always found a way, I'm sure in time, when oil and gas and coal dries up, we will find something else. Right? Things work out in the end because we make them work out. Waiting until the disaster hits and then starting to think about possible solutions is not a reasonable approach. If we want to have alternative energy resources by the time we run out of fossil fuels, we need to start working towards it now. Same if we want to have alternative jobs by the time the current ones become obsolete by AI.
  - vram22 9y ago
    >Things work out in the end because we make them work out. Waiting until the disaster hits and then starting to think about possible solutions is not a reasonable approach. Nor is it a sensible approach. Excellent points. Whenever thing have been solved, it is because humans did something about it. Not because we sat around waiting for random chance or historical precedents to solve things.
- vram22 9y ago
  People saying "it will be different this time" turned out to be false about bubbles. Saying not (of) "it will be different this time", i.e. "it will be the same this time", i.e. your claim, can also turn out to be false. >bowers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowyer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowyer >Pardon the harshness here, I feel like the only people this is truly a surprise to is either folks that ignore the past, or are incapable of understanding the past. No need to ask for pardon. But what happened in the past is no guarantee of what will happen in the future. See Black Swan etc.
  - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
    We're dealing with a different kind of mechanization this time, previous mechanizations were largely manual labors. We've been retreating further and further into the one thing we haven't been able to automate away, our creative intelligence and problem solving, what happens when we figure out how to write something that can do that? It's like being a horse at the turn of the last century saying well we've always had horse jobs throughout various advancements in horse-labor tech, this internal combustion engine should be no big deal we'll find horse jobs. We all know how that turned out for horses, now we're pushing closer and closer to the precipice of being the horses at the turn of the last century. Sure it'll be impossible to tell whats going to be the straw that breaks the camels back but we should be ready for each straw to break the camels back, and not assume it won't.
    - rcfox 9y ago
      It's not really the same as for horses. Horses in society lost control of their own reproductive rights. Horses existed to fill jobs because people bred them to meet a demand. As demand for horses declined, fewer horses were bred. We have the opposite situation with humans. Individual humans retain their reproductive rights. Most of them don't decide to reduce the supply to meet a reduced demand. For a time, China did impose a restriction on reproduction, but that just resulted in many (mostly female) babies being killed or abandoned.
      - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
- igorkraw 9y ago
  In Germany we still learn the poem of the 'Schlesian Weber', the weavers that lost their jobs to the mechanical looms. The misery comes through very strongly. All of your examples caused the same misery, then lots of people died,some adapted like you said . Nobody is arguing to become Luddites, but I do see the need to acknowledge we need to handle the transition ( if you believe in solidarity, Christian or other religious values or in general care about humans ) or be honest when we do not care about peoples misery and death.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Pardon the harshness, but it is ridiculous to extrapolate from a small series of events to one that arguably will affect the job market like nothing that has ever happened before. We are not talking about a transfer of jobs from one phase of tech to another, we are talking about the wholesale disappearance of jobs with nothing to replace them. If you just take the first step - self driving cars - and remove all the jobs that currently have a driving license as a marketable skill away from people that only have that particular marketable skill (and that's quite a few of them) then 100's of millions of people the world over will instantly be unemployable. And that's just one step. That does not translate into 'they'll go and do something else', quite a few of them will end up in poverty, commit suicide or worse because they've been ingrained with a mentality that tells them that if they are not able to contribute that they are a drain on society, and that's for those societies that actually have a safety net. For societies that do not a life of crime or begging is pretty much their only option. For all the smarts that the HN crowd possesses quite a few of us are categorically incapable to see the world through the eyes of the people whose lives are affected in a very harsh and direct way by our creations. Just stating that 'people will find a way to stay busy' is easy for someone who never has enough time in a day to read all the books they want to read, build all the stuff they still want to build and who probably scores in the top 5% income wise. Which makes it very well possible that you'll end up in the bucket of the haves rather than the have nots. The rest of the world will likely not be that lucky. And as one of the haves it should worry you. See also: the French Revolution.
  - T2_t2 9y ago
    Your advice from your first sentence holds true, and extrapolating too wildly is unwise. MAYBE driverless cars become a reality and quickly at that. MAYBE that makes drivers in the west redundant just as fast. But worldwide? I think people underestimate how inexpensive labour is in places like Bali, let alone Kenya. No one knows what will happen, or what new industries will be formed as a result of these changes, and the warnings are all good and well, but there is much doubt in all directions, and crazy policy implemented to avert a disaster may be just as bad as doing nothing. That's why this whole new level of automation is so scary: no body has any clear idea what will happen, and the policy shift is really, really unclear.
- sago 9y ago
  > The past is literally filled with examples of a new technology replacing people, and those people eventually found other things to do. For a comment so seemingly proud of its historical knowledge, this seems a very bizarre claim. People as a whole could be said to have adapted, but the affected individuals very often didn't. The suffering was immense. Modern social safety net and the welfare state are directly related to the abject poverty resulting from the dramatic and often cataclysmic urbanisation of the industrial revolution. So yes, humanity will survive and adapt. It won't be the end of the world. But avoiding analogous problems to the concomitant evils of the industrial revolution is exactly why we need this discussion. Shrugging one's shoulders at the problems of history, because a new equilibrium arose, seems to me to betray the real lack of historical understanding.
- icantdrive55 9y ago
  "People will find a way to stay busy." Ugh? Yes--finding a place to sleep without breaking any laws will keep them on their toes. Non-profits will keep them from starving to death--maybe? They will become adept at sign making? And, they will say they hate it, but are secretly relieved when they end up in jail. Hay--this is now? The wealthy will always be fine. They are always fine. They have the world to sell their stuff. They have the money to buy political influence. The cameras will record any act of malfeasance. The wealthy communities will have surveillance (Tiburon Ca.), aggressive police tactics. All designed to keep them away from the zombies. They won't have to look at the eye sores. God I hate that phrase. It's always cones out of the ugliest peoples mouths? We will get used to seeing people dying on the streets. We will get used to the smell of sewage on the sidewalks. We will get used to looking the other way. Hay--this is happening today. California has one patch of land that people can go to die/live for nothing. They can pitch a tent. Drink the water they brought. Eat the food they brought. It's in the desert of California, ownded by a Teacher's Union? It's a piece of land the wealthy would let their dogs poop on. It's hell. Federal land? No--the rangers will monitor you like a melanoma. There's just nowhere to go when you don't fit in. Yes--people will busy. Busy just barely surviving. So many of us are just barely surviving, but taught to not complain. This is America? It's the land of opportunity? A country that helps those need with well funded Safety Nets. A country that made too many laws--laws that stomp on the poor, and unemployed. Ugh. Some days?
solipsism 9y ago
But UBI doesn’t address people’s loss of dignity or meet their need to feel useful. We need to find the jobs that AI can’t do and train people to do them The author raises and then dismisses UBI in a handful of sentences. Then he asserts that we need to be inventing AI-proof jobs -- not because they're useful and worth doing but just to avoid having to change. The changes we have coped with as a species are incredible. From hunter gatherers to agrarians, to the development of civilizations with laws, to the industrial revolution, etc. I think it's an incredibly pessimistic and narrow view of humanity to presuppose we need to be making busy work for people. Of course corporations and politicians should be approaching this problem honestly. But we should also approach it open-mindedly.
- XorNot 9y ago
  There's a difference between busy work and meaningful work. And people need meaningful work to do even if the meaning is only something for them. So no, people don't need busy work - and that's the challenge.
CryoLogic 9y ago
Current AI trend in all major companies is take classic AI - neural networks, Bayesian networks, Monte Carlo -> and than apply cloud scale hardware. Nothing really impressive has actually come out of AI yet except running old AI on bigger databases and faster hardware.
- killjoywashere 9y ago
  Yeah, Waymo is so stodgy and brittle. /s
- ThomPete 9y ago
  Take almost any jobs you can think of and reflect of how many of a humans skills are actually needed for the job function that has any value. Now think about whether it would be hard for an AI to learn that function. What you will find is that radiologist and other highly specialized jobs actually are much easier to replace than say a cleaning lady because it's a job that requires a lot of different skills. AI doesn' have to be impressive or even come close to being general AI to be a danger to humans and the jobs that require the most of a human are often not the best paid jobs. The will be even less true if humans have to flock to al be cleaning ladies/men.
maxander 9y ago
> These changes are coming, and we need to tell the truth and the whole truth. We need to find the jobs that AI can’t do and train people to do them. We need to reinvent education. These will be the best of times and the worst of times. If we act rationally and quickly, we can bask in what’s best rather than wallow in what’s worst. Saying "find the jobs that AI can't do" like it's this obvious thing; we haven't the slightest clue what AI can't do in five years. Practically yesterday Go was the go-to example of what computers couldn't do, and now it's the go-to example of how they kick our ass. Well-informed predictions for widespread self-driving car deployment range from "in five years" to "half a century at best." And the jobs that aren't threatened by AI, and that are accessible to most people, are threatened by much "dumber" kinds of automation. Human-facing "empathetic" jobs are often considered safe, but what positions actually need a human, anyway? People are happy to do a bit of extra work to get "expert advice" from a database when it comes to travel, law, or finance; stores are happy to let customers use automated checkout rather than talk to a cashier. Dextrous, highly-physical work is still safe (pending advances in robotics, which seems to move a bit slower), but only until someone figures out a way to offload the dexterity-requiring bits onto a factory, or render the whole thing obsolete. And finally there's second-order effects of the resulting economic turmoil; if most of the middle class can't count on keeping their jobs, not enough people are going to be ordering fancy lattes to pay for your role as a barista. Planning a relatively low-skilled career (anything less than a four-year technical college degree) is walking a minefield. Us highly-educated technical generalists are probably fairly safe, but not everyone wants to study for 6+ years after highschool- and regardless, they could expect to have to relearn all the applied skills in their chosen field when the tool they originally studied gets replaced by something completely different and orders of magnitude better. The old model of "learn a skill, get a job applying that skill, eventually retire" will no longer reliably work on any point of the scale.
- dominotw 9y ago
  It's pretty easy to guess. I just did my laundry and folded my clothes. Something "ai" can't even think about doing, not even close.
  - 9y ago
randyrand 9y ago
same should be said of minimum wage. Minimum wage is probably the worst form of income redistribution we use. not allowing people to have salaries competitively priced vs machines will cause most of the swift pain AI will bring. please, replace minimum wage with more welfare or better yet negative income tax. Of course, some jobs will die regardless. But minimum wage greatly exacerbates this.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  A lot of people said that about the minimum wage in the UK before it was introduced, it turned out to be far from the truth.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - randomdata 9y ago
    But you're looking at this from the point of view of the environment where automation has always created far more work than what was replaced. In fact, up to this point, automation has created so much work that we even reached a point where the male half of the population could not handle doing it all and we had to start integrating women, who historically were not involved, into the workplace. Minimum wage is working out just fine right now because every time a job is automated, several new jobs appear to take its place. Previous comments have suggested this trend will not last. Be it that AI will reach a point where it is capable of taking on any new job that we throw at it, or that we will simply run out of new ideas for new kinds of jobs at some point in the future. That is the context being discussed above. In that case, your options are: Compete against automation on price, or go without work entirely. Minimum wage prevents the former, leaving only the latter as an option. The parent is saying it is less ideal to have a $0 income than it is to have a less than minimum, but above zero, income. But that all hinges on the assumption that work will dry up. The opposite has held true for centuries. It seems highly unlikely that this time is any different. I sincerely doubt we have reached the pinnacle of human achievement already.
    - 9y ago
failrate 9y ago
I feel strongly that we should stop using jobs as a metric of the value of human worth. If every job disappeared today due to automation, we would need to find a new role in the world. I think we should start looking for it now before that happens.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > I feel strongly that we should stop using jobs as a metric of the value of human worth. I totally agree with you. But even in the present that's a tough sell, many people derive all or most of their self worth from their skill and their capability to generate income. It's the second question people will ask a new person they come in contact with, right after 'what's your name', and long before 'what are your hobbies' and 'do you have kids' or 'are you married'. And it's already begun, no need to add your 'before that happens' disclaimer, not all jobs lost to automation have resulted in successful transfer to a different job. The job market will get squeezed from all sides, on the high end because of the pension requirements it will get expanded to keep experienced and older people away from their pension, on the low end you will see an increase in the number of qualifications required for a particular job and automation slashes like a giant comb across the whole thing to remove those jobs that it can now absorb on a regular basis.
- GoToRO 9y ago
  Even today, if you have a job, you are paid more for your time. In the future the face time will be the main "skill" to bring you money.
sologoub 9y ago
While China’s use of data has a lot fewer restraints than US/EU, another interesting question to consider is how the government will react when the jobs of their population start to go away and unrest set in. If we are sitting on a powder keg, then China’s and India’s are the biggest ones. Policy will be a huge wildcard and also criteria for long term success.
- T2_t2 9y ago
  Are China & India really the issue? I mean, McDonalds only just committed to automation of ordering at a minimum wage much higher than that in China or India. I think we over estimate where and by how much automation will strike. Poor to middle income people in rich countries are most at risk. Question is, can we pivot the country to find gainful employment for the dispersed peoples?
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    What? McDonalds had automated ordering kiosks in China long before the US. The one near my apartment in Beijing got them in late 2015.
    - sologoub 9y ago
      Yeah was really not thinking McDonalds. They also have those kiosks all over EU locations.
  - sologoub 9y ago
    China and India have the biggest populations, so based on the articles reasoning they stand to have the biggest problems because of loss of jobs.
petre 9y ago
The tractor and the combined harvester also destroyed jobs. Pepole learned to embrace change.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Yes, that's because the change led from one class of employment to another. But none of the changes of the past went from one class of employment to none. That's a totally different kind of change.
pg_bot 9y ago
Another article claiming that there is a coming AI jobpocalypse based on the fact that "this time it is different". Every author focuses on the negative impacts of a new technology instead of what it will enable us to do. In order to believe the doomsayers, you have to ignore the entire history of the industrialized world. I do not find their arguments very convincing.
- projektir 9y ago
  > In order to believe the doomsayers, you have to ignore the entire history of the industrialized world. Why do you say this? Plenty of unpleasant experiences have occurred via industrialization in the past. Industrialization can be good for society overall and result in new jobs over time, but for a given set of workers today, they're looking at losing the jobs they have no and seeing no replacement for it, as it is unlikely that any of the newly created jobs would be willing to take them in.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  But this time it will be different. We're not talking about a shift from one class of employment to another, we're talking about a shift from employment to unemployment for a very large chunk of the population and we don't have the foggiest idea of where we will find the money to pay for that and we haven't got a clue on how we will keep these people from feeling worthless and depressed. It's an illusion to think that everybody will be happy being pensioned off at 23, especially if that means that they will be without income. This shift will move a lot of wealth to the top 5% or so and will leave the remainder in serious trouble.
  - pg_bot 9y ago
    You are making the same mistake as the author. People are endlessly creative and will find productive uses for their labor. I'm not ignoring the fact that people won't face disruption in the labor market, however it is very naive to assume that all of the work that will ever need to be done can be done by AI. People will not be pensioned off at 23 they will just be doing jobs that were not possible before, just like they did with every other major invention of the past 250 years. "everything that can be invented has been invented." - Charles H Duell 1899.
milesward 9y ago
I believe this is a Tim O'Reilly quote, but in any case it's exactly right: "Technology destroys professions, but creates jobs." More detail: http://www.enterprisegarage.io/2017/10/when-technology-destroys-professions-but-creates-jobs/ http://www.enterprisegarage.io/2017/10/when-technology-destr...
philwelch 9y ago
I’ve spent a long time thinking about this, and I actually think that most of the dangers are somewhat overblown and the corrective actions are already in progress. People are already willing to pay a premium for artisanal goods specifically because they are made by a human being, and this provides a growing economic niche for artisans. In and of itself, this isn’t exactly sufficient, since artisans don’t usually make a whole lot of money, but the flip side is that automated goods and services are going to become cheaper and cheaper over time, bringing them within reach. A post-AI economy could easily be an economy of artisans, one where it’s easier to afford the more basic necessities of life but where human work and effort still has value.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  "A quarter of all working visual artists earn no money from their art, and another quarter earn less than $1,000 a year. Almost 90% earn less than $5,000 a year. Similarly disturbing figures can be quoted for poets, short-story writers, playwrights, novelists, independent filmmakers, pop singers, potters, jazz musicians, rock musicians, classical composers, art photographers -- for all groups of creative and performing artists." "According to a Rockefeller Panel report commissioned to take an in-depth look at the financial realities of the performer's life: "The miserable income of the majority of performing artists reflects both a shortage of jobs and the brief duration of employment that is available. In all except the small handful of our major and metropolitan orchestras, musicians earn an average of only a few hundred dollars a year from their professional labors. During an average week in the winter season, only about one-fifth of the active members of Actors' Equity Association, the theatrical performers union, are employed in the profession. Of the actors who do find jobs, well over half are employed for only ten weeks -- less than one-fifth of the year. For most opera compnies the season lasts only a few weeks. The livelihood of the dancer is perhaps the most meager of all."[1] Now, that's today, with relatively few artists. Imagine a future where there's a flood of artists from all the people who lost their jobs to AI (assuming they all have some desire, ability, and dedication to actually try to make a living as an artist.. very unlikely, but such is supposedly the main hope for a future for these people). Now the wages of artists will be even further depressed as there will be a glut of supply (much like the glut of "photographers" now that everyone has a camera in their cell phone). Then it has to be asked: who will be buying all of these artisonal products and services from the newly unemployed masses? There's only so much art the relatively well-off are going to want to buy, only so many plays they'll pay to see, and so on. Demand would have to rise tremendously to absorb all the additional supply if the already meager wages that artists earn aren't going to fall to virtually zero. Where is all that extra demand going to come from? The US is already not a place where art is particularly valued. There's no indication that that's going to improve with the advent of job-replacing AI. [1] - From "Staying Sane in the Arts" by Eric Maisel
kristofferR 9y ago
This article doesn't answer why they should stop pretending, pretending have worked fine for them so far and there's no indication that it'll stop working anytime soon.
victoro 9y ago
To everyone commenting on the looming job-pocalypse that will be caused by the automation of trucks, please explain why much simpler transportation systems to automate have not resulted in wide-scale job loss. Last I checked, airplanes still had multiple pilots accompanied by significant ground control crews operating them, despite significantly fewer environmental challenges to their operation. Freight trains and subway systems - even simpler closed-loop transportation systems that have working fully autonomous examples in most major airports - still employ conductors. Why will trucks be different?
kgilpin 9y ago
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (1), the most common jobs in the US are retail sales, cashier, food prep and serving, office clerk, registered nurse, customer service rep, waiter / waitress, laborer, secretary, janitor. It’s worth reviewing the actual list for yourself to see what these common jobs really are. And thinking about at what point you would rather be dealing with a robot (let’s call them that) than a person. Truck driving is #15. It gets a lot of attention because it’s a good paying job for a high school education. Taxi driver is #173. Seems low for all the attention that Uber’s disruption of that industry gets. 1. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/mobile/retail-salespersons-and-cashiers-were-occupations-with-highest-employment-in-may-2015.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/mobile/retail-salespersons...

58 points by kushankpoddar 9y ago

Mechanization 'destroyed' millions of jobs, when people were replaced by mechanized equipment replaced farm workers, horse breeders/tenders, folks in the transportation business, etc. Electronic computers 'destroyed' jobs when they replaced human computers. Motorized street sweepers 'destroyed' jobs when they replaced people with brooms sweeping debris off of streets (except in Beijing where, as of 2015, this is still a thing). Firearms 'destroyed' jobs when bowers no longer had any reason to mass produce bows and arrows. People will find a way to stay busy. The past is literally filled with examples of a new technology replacing people, and those people eventually found other things to do. It's not hard to see, in hindsight, how many of my silly (but real) examples above translated into entirely new industries. Pardon the harshness here, I feel like the only people this is truly a surprise to is either folks that ignore the past, or are incapable of understanding the past.

Joeri 9y ago
It will take time for the new jobs to appear and people to be retrained, just as it did during those past instances of great change. Meanwhile people will be unemployed.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  Yes, they will. Do you have a proposal for how to simultaneously provide for efficient progress and smooth transitions? I mostly see people either lamenting the suffering that big changes often cause, or brushing it aside as inevitable. It'd be interesting to see ideas for how we could have disruptive developments without so much disruption.
headsoup 9y ago
> People will find a way to stay busy Yes let's just dismiss all the concerns because 'things always work out in the end.' I suppose there's always room for more managers...
- austenallred 9y ago
  My job didn’t exist 20 years ago. Did yours?
  - headsoup 9y ago
    Yes Were you in the workforce 20 years ago?
    - austenallred 9y ago
      I was barely born 20 years ago
  - dvtv75 9y ago
    Mine did. It has existed for about 90 years, maybe even longer. Without going into specifics, I can imagine that it could be automated as is right now, as it's not particularly complicated, and the whole role could be designed around so that it's not required anyway. (I believe I'll be out-of-work within a few months because of implications from the latter statement.)
wavegeek 9y ago
Two problems with this post. 1. You are assuming that what happened in the past will continue to happen in the future. Maybe it will, or maybe this time things are different. There are reasonable arguments that make the case that this time is different. The difference is that computers are encroaching on the one point of difference that man has always had on machines - his brain. 2. You are ignoring transition costs and times. Even with past mechanizations, there was immense pain and suffering and disruption that went on for decades. For neoclassical economists it will be OK in the long run, in equilibrium, when there will again be full employment and fairies will dance gaily on colorful toadstools. Back in the real world people suffer and die.
smnrchrds 9y ago
> People will find a way to stay busy You are implying that this will happen automagically, and there is no cause for concern. I disagree. People will find other things to do, but if we want there to be jobs in 20 years for people who have lost their jobs to AI, we need to get to work now. To use an example to illustrate my point, people have always found new sources of energy. We have never ran out of energy, nor faced extreme shortages as old resources dried up. Does that mean we should ignore any calls to action for investing in alternative and renewable energy sources? After all, why should we worry about and waste resources to prevent a thing that has never happened? Humans have always found a way, I'm sure in time, when oil and gas and coal dries up, we will find something else. Right? Things work out in the end because we make them work out. Waiting until the disaster hits and then starting to think about possible solutions is not a reasonable approach. If we want to have alternative energy resources by the time we run out of fossil fuels, we need to start working towards it now. Same if we want to have alternative jobs by the time the current ones become obsolete by AI.
- vram22 9y ago
  >Things work out in the end because we make them work out. Waiting until the disaster hits and then starting to think about possible solutions is not a reasonable approach. Nor is it a sensible approach. Excellent points. Whenever thing have been solved, it is because humans did something about it. Not because we sat around waiting for random chance or historical precedents to solve things.
vram22 9y ago
People saying "it will be different this time" turned out to be false about bubbles. Saying not (of) "it will be different this time", i.e. "it will be the same this time", i.e. your claim, can also turn out to be false. >bowers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowyer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowyer >Pardon the harshness here, I feel like the only people this is truly a surprise to is either folks that ignore the past, or are incapable of understanding the past. No need to ask for pardon. But what happened in the past is no guarantee of what will happen in the future. See Black Swan etc.
- SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
  We're dealing with a different kind of mechanization this time, previous mechanizations were largely manual labors. We've been retreating further and further into the one thing we haven't been able to automate away, our creative intelligence and problem solving, what happens when we figure out how to write something that can do that? It's like being a horse at the turn of the last century saying well we've always had horse jobs throughout various advancements in horse-labor tech, this internal combustion engine should be no big deal we'll find horse jobs. We all know how that turned out for horses, now we're pushing closer and closer to the precipice of being the horses at the turn of the last century. Sure it'll be impossible to tell whats going to be the straw that breaks the camels back but we should be ready for each straw to break the camels back, and not assume it won't.
  - rcfox 9y ago
    It's not really the same as for horses. Horses in society lost control of their own reproductive rights. Horses existed to fill jobs because people bred them to meet a demand. As demand for horses declined, fewer horses were bred. We have the opposite situation with humans. Individual humans retain their reproductive rights. Most of them don't decide to reduce the supply to meet a reduced demand. For a time, China did impose a restriction on reproduction, but that just resulted in many (mostly female) babies being killed or abandoned.
    - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
igorkraw 9y ago
In Germany we still learn the poem of the 'Schlesian Weber', the weavers that lost their jobs to the mechanical looms. The misery comes through very strongly. All of your examples caused the same misery, then lots of people died,some adapted like you said . Nobody is arguing to become Luddites, but I do see the need to acknowledge we need to handle the transition ( if you believe in solidarity, Christian or other religious values or in general care about humans ) or be honest when we do not care about peoples misery and death.
jacquesm 9y ago
Pardon the harshness, but it is ridiculous to extrapolate from a small series of events to one that arguably will affect the job market like nothing that has ever happened before. We are not talking about a transfer of jobs from one phase of tech to another, we are talking about the wholesale disappearance of jobs with nothing to replace them. If you just take the first step - self driving cars - and remove all the jobs that currently have a driving license as a marketable skill away from people that only have that particular marketable skill (and that's quite a few of them) then 100's of millions of people the world over will instantly be unemployable. And that's just one step. That does not translate into 'they'll go and do something else', quite a few of them will end up in poverty, commit suicide or worse because they've been ingrained with a mentality that tells them that if they are not able to contribute that they are a drain on society, and that's for those societies that actually have a safety net. For societies that do not a life of crime or begging is pretty much their only option. For all the smarts that the HN crowd possesses quite a few of us are categorically incapable to see the world through the eyes of the people whose lives are affected in a very harsh and direct way by our creations. Just stating that 'people will find a way to stay busy' is easy for someone who never has enough time in a day to read all the books they want to read, build all the stuff they still want to build and who probably scores in the top 5% income wise. Which makes it very well possible that you'll end up in the bucket of the haves rather than the have nots. The rest of the world will likely not be that lucky. And as one of the haves it should worry you. See also: the French Revolution.
- T2_t2 9y ago
  Your advice from your first sentence holds true, and extrapolating too wildly is unwise. MAYBE driverless cars become a reality and quickly at that. MAYBE that makes drivers in the west redundant just as fast. But worldwide? I think people underestimate how inexpensive labour is in places like Bali, let alone Kenya. No one knows what will happen, or what new industries will be formed as a result of these changes, and the warnings are all good and well, but there is much doubt in all directions, and crazy policy implemented to avert a disaster may be just as bad as doing nothing. That's why this whole new level of automation is so scary: no body has any clear idea what will happen, and the policy shift is really, really unclear.
sago 9y ago
> The past is literally filled with examples of a new technology replacing people, and those people eventually found other things to do. For a comment so seemingly proud of its historical knowledge, this seems a very bizarre claim. People as a whole could be said to have adapted, but the affected individuals very often didn't. The suffering was immense. Modern social safety net and the welfare state are directly related to the abject poverty resulting from the dramatic and often cataclysmic urbanisation of the industrial revolution. So yes, humanity will survive and adapt. It won't be the end of the world. But avoiding analogous problems to the concomitant evils of the industrial revolution is exactly why we need this discussion. Shrugging one's shoulders at the problems of history, because a new equilibrium arose, seems to me to betray the real lack of historical understanding.
icantdrive55 9y ago
"People will find a way to stay busy." Ugh? Yes--finding a place to sleep without breaking any laws will keep them on their toes. Non-profits will keep them from starving to death--maybe? They will become adept at sign making? And, they will say they hate it, but are secretly relieved when they end up in jail. Hay--this is now? The wealthy will always be fine. They are always fine. They have the world to sell their stuff. They have the money to buy political influence. The cameras will record any act of malfeasance. The wealthy communities will have surveillance (Tiburon Ca.), aggressive police tactics. All designed to keep them away from the zombies. They won't have to look at the eye sores. God I hate that phrase. It's always cones out of the ugliest peoples mouths? We will get used to seeing people dying on the streets. We will get used to the smell of sewage on the sidewalks. We will get used to looking the other way. Hay--this is happening today. California has one patch of land that people can go to die/live for nothing. They can pitch a tent. Drink the water they brought. Eat the food they brought. It's in the desert of California, ownded by a Teacher's Union? It's a piece of land the wealthy would let their dogs poop on. It's hell. Federal land? No--the rangers will monitor you like a melanoma. There's just nowhere to go when you don't fit in. Yes--people will busy. Busy just barely surviving. So many of us are just barely surviving, but taught to not complain. This is America? It's the land of opportunity? A country that helps those need with well funded Safety Nets. A country that made too many laws--laws that stomp on the poor, and unemployed. Ugh. Some days?

solipsism 9y ago

But UBI doesn’t address people’s loss of dignity or meet their need to feel useful. We need to find the jobs that AI can’t do and train people to do them The author raises and then dismisses UBI in a handful of sentences. Then he asserts that we need to be inventing AI-proof jobs -- not because they're useful and worth doing but just to avoid having to change. The changes we have coped with as a species are incredible. From hunter gatherers to agrarians, to the development of civilizations with laws, to the industrial revolution, etc. I think it's an incredibly pessimistic and narrow view of humanity to presuppose we need to be making busy work for people. Of course corporations and politicians should be approaching this problem honestly. But we should also approach it open-mindedly.

XorNot 9y ago
There's a difference between busy work and meaningful work. And people need meaningful work to do even if the meaning is only something for them. So no, people don't need busy work - and that's the challenge.

CryoLogic 9y ago

Current AI trend in all major companies is take classic AI - neural networks, Bayesian networks, Monte Carlo -> and than apply cloud scale hardware. Nothing really impressive has actually come out of AI yet except running old AI on bigger databases and faster hardware.

killjoywashere 9y ago
Yeah, Waymo is so stodgy and brittle. /s
ThomPete 9y ago
Take almost any jobs you can think of and reflect of how many of a humans skills are actually needed for the job function that has any value. Now think about whether it would be hard for an AI to learn that function. What you will find is that radiologist and other highly specialized jobs actually are much easier to replace than say a cleaning lady because it's a job that requires a lot of different skills. AI doesn' have to be impressive or even come close to being general AI to be a danger to humans and the jobs that require the most of a human are often not the best paid jobs. The will be even less true if humans have to flock to al be cleaning ladies/men.

maxander 9y ago

> These changes are coming, and we need to tell the truth and the whole truth. We need to find the jobs that AI can’t do and train people to do them. We need to reinvent education. These will be the best of times and the worst of times. If we act rationally and quickly, we can bask in what’s best rather than wallow in what’s worst. Saying "find the jobs that AI can't do" like it's this obvious thing; we haven't the slightest clue what AI can't do in five years. Practically yesterday Go was the go-to example of what computers couldn't do, and now it's the go-to example of how they kick our ass. Well-informed predictions for widespread self-driving car deployment range from "in five years" to "half a century at best." And the jobs that aren't threatened by AI, and that are accessible to most people, are threatened by much "dumber" kinds of automation. Human-facing "empathetic" jobs are often considered safe, but what positions actually need a human, anyway? People are happy to do a bit of extra work to get "expert advice" from a database when it comes to travel, law, or finance; stores are happy to let customers use automated checkout rather than talk to a cashier. Dextrous, highly-physical work is still safe (pending advances in robotics, which seems to move a bit slower), but only until someone figures out a way to offload the dexterity-requiring bits onto a factory, or render the whole thing obsolete. And finally there's second-order effects of the resulting economic turmoil; if most of the middle class can't count on keeping their jobs, not enough people are going to be ordering fancy lattes to pay for your role as a barista. Planning a relatively low-skilled career (anything less than a four-year technical college degree) is walking a minefield. Us highly-educated technical generalists are probably fairly safe, but not everyone wants to study for 6+ years after highschool- and regardless, they could expect to have to relearn all the applied skills in their chosen field when the tool they originally studied gets replaced by something completely different and orders of magnitude better. The old model of "learn a skill, get a job applying that skill, eventually retire" will no longer reliably work on any point of the scale.

dominotw 9y ago
It's pretty easy to guess. I just did my laundry and folded my clothes. Something "ai" can't even think about doing, not even close.
- 9y ago

randyrand 9y ago

same should be said of minimum wage. Minimum wage is probably the worst form of income redistribution we use. not allowing people to have salaries competitively priced vs machines will cause most of the swift pain AI will bring. please, replace minimum wage with more welfare or better yet negative income tax. Of course, some jobs will die regardless. But minimum wage greatly exacerbates this.

tonyedgecombe 9y ago
A lot of people said that about the minimum wage in the UK before it was introduced, it turned out to be far from the truth.
- deleted 9y ago
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- randomdata 9y ago
  But you're looking at this from the point of view of the environment where automation has always created far more work than what was replaced. In fact, up to this point, automation has created so much work that we even reached a point where the male half of the population could not handle doing it all and we had to start integrating women, who historically were not involved, into the workplace. Minimum wage is working out just fine right now because every time a job is automated, several new jobs appear to take its place. Previous comments have suggested this trend will not last. Be it that AI will reach a point where it is capable of taking on any new job that we throw at it, or that we will simply run out of new ideas for new kinds of jobs at some point in the future. That is the context being discussed above. In that case, your options are: Compete against automation on price, or go without work entirely. Minimum wage prevents the former, leaving only the latter as an option. The parent is saying it is less ideal to have a $0 income than it is to have a less than minimum, but above zero, income. But that all hinges on the assumption that work will dry up. The opposite has held true for centuries. It seems highly unlikely that this time is any different. I sincerely doubt we have reached the pinnacle of human achievement already.
  - 9y ago

failrate 9y ago

I feel strongly that we should stop using jobs as a metric of the value of human worth. If every job disappeared today due to automation, we would need to find a new role in the world. I think we should start looking for it now before that happens.

jacquesm 9y ago
> I feel strongly that we should stop using jobs as a metric of the value of human worth. I totally agree with you. But even in the present that's a tough sell, many people derive all or most of their self worth from their skill and their capability to generate income. It's the second question people will ask a new person they come in contact with, right after 'what's your name', and long before 'what are your hobbies' and 'do you have kids' or 'are you married'. And it's already begun, no need to add your 'before that happens' disclaimer, not all jobs lost to automation have resulted in successful transfer to a different job. The job market will get squeezed from all sides, on the high end because of the pension requirements it will get expanded to keep experienced and older people away from their pension, on the low end you will see an increase in the number of qualifications required for a particular job and automation slashes like a giant comb across the whole thing to remove those jobs that it can now absorb on a regular basis.
GoToRO 9y ago
Even today, if you have a job, you are paid more for your time. In the future the face time will be the main "skill" to bring you money.

sologoub 9y ago

While China’s use of data has a lot fewer restraints than US/EU, another interesting question to consider is how the government will react when the jobs of their population start to go away and unrest set in. If we are sitting on a powder keg, then China’s and India’s are the biggest ones. Policy will be a huge wildcard and also criteria for long term success.

T2_t2 9y ago
Are China & India really the issue? I mean, McDonalds only just committed to automation of ordering at a minimum wage much higher than that in China or India. I think we over estimate where and by how much automation will strike. Poor to middle income people in rich countries are most at risk. Question is, can we pivot the country to find gainful employment for the dispersed peoples?
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  What? McDonalds had automated ordering kiosks in China long before the US. The one near my apartment in Beijing got them in late 2015.
  - sologoub 9y ago
    Yeah was really not thinking McDonalds. They also have those kiosks all over EU locations.
- sologoub 9y ago
  China and India have the biggest populations, so based on the articles reasoning they stand to have the biggest problems because of loss of jobs.

petre 9y ago

The tractor and the combined harvester also destroyed jobs. Pepole learned to embrace change.

jacquesm 9y ago
Yes, that's because the change led from one class of employment to another. But none of the changes of the past went from one class of employment to none. That's a totally different kind of change.

pg_bot 9y ago

Another article claiming that there is a coming AI jobpocalypse based on the fact that "this time it is different". Every author focuses on the negative impacts of a new technology instead of what it will enable us to do. In order to believe the doomsayers, you have to ignore the entire history of the industrialized world. I do not find their arguments very convincing.

projektir 9y ago
> In order to believe the doomsayers, you have to ignore the entire history of the industrialized world. Why do you say this? Plenty of unpleasant experiences have occurred via industrialization in the past. Industrialization can be good for society overall and result in new jobs over time, but for a given set of workers today, they're looking at losing the jobs they have no and seeing no replacement for it, as it is unlikely that any of the newly created jobs would be willing to take them in.
jacquesm 9y ago
But this time it will be different. We're not talking about a shift from one class of employment to another, we're talking about a shift from employment to unemployment for a very large chunk of the population and we don't have the foggiest idea of where we will find the money to pay for that and we haven't got a clue on how we will keep these people from feeling worthless and depressed. It's an illusion to think that everybody will be happy being pensioned off at 23, especially if that means that they will be without income. This shift will move a lot of wealth to the top 5% or so and will leave the remainder in serious trouble.
- pg_bot 9y ago
  You are making the same mistake as the author. People are endlessly creative and will find productive uses for their labor. I'm not ignoring the fact that people won't face disruption in the labor market, however it is very naive to assume that all of the work that will ever need to be done can be done by AI. People will not be pensioned off at 23 they will just be doing jobs that were not possible before, just like they did with every other major invention of the past 250 years. "everything that can be invented has been invented." - Charles H Duell 1899.

milesward 9y ago

I believe this is a Tim O'Reilly quote, but in any case it's exactly right: "Technology destroys professions, but creates jobs." More detail: http://www.enterprisegarage.io/2017/10/when-technology-destroys-professions-but-creates-jobs/ http://www.enterprisegarage.io/2017/10/when-technology-destr...

philwelch 9y ago

I’ve spent a long time thinking about this, and I actually think that most of the dangers are somewhat overblown and the corrective actions are already in progress. People are already willing to pay a premium for artisanal goods specifically because they are made by a human being, and this provides a growing economic niche for artisans. In and of itself, this isn’t exactly sufficient, since artisans don’t usually make a whole lot of money, but the flip side is that automated goods and services are going to become cheaper and cheaper over time, bringing them within reach. A post-AI economy could easily be an economy of artisans, one where it’s easier to afford the more basic necessities of life but where human work and effort still has value.

pmoriarty 9y ago
"A quarter of all working visual artists earn no money from their art, and another quarter earn less than $1,000 a year. Almost 90% earn less than $5,000 a year. Similarly disturbing figures can be quoted for poets, short-story writers, playwrights, novelists, independent filmmakers, pop singers, potters, jazz musicians, rock musicians, classical composers, art photographers -- for all groups of creative and performing artists." "According to a Rockefeller Panel report commissioned to take an in-depth look at the financial realities of the performer's life: "The miserable income of the majority of performing artists reflects both a shortage of jobs and the brief duration of employment that is available. In all except the small handful of our major and metropolitan orchestras, musicians earn an average of only a few hundred dollars a year from their professional labors. During an average week in the winter season, only about one-fifth of the active members of Actors' Equity Association, the theatrical performers union, are employed in the profession. Of the actors who do find jobs, well over half are employed for only ten weeks -- less than one-fifth of the year. For most opera compnies the season lasts only a few weeks. The livelihood of the dancer is perhaps the most meager of all."[1] Now, that's today, with relatively few artists. Imagine a future where there's a flood of artists from all the people who lost their jobs to AI (assuming they all have some desire, ability, and dedication to actually try to make a living as an artist.. very unlikely, but such is supposedly the main hope for a future for these people). Now the wages of artists will be even further depressed as there will be a glut of supply (much like the glut of "photographers" now that everyone has a camera in their cell phone). Then it has to be asked: who will be buying all of these artisonal products and services from the newly unemployed masses? There's only so much art the relatively well-off are going to want to buy, only so many plays they'll pay to see, and so on. Demand would have to rise tremendously to absorb all the additional supply if the already meager wages that artists earn aren't going to fall to virtually zero. Where is all that extra demand going to come from? The US is already not a place where art is particularly valued. There's no indication that that's going to improve with the advent of job-replacing AI. [1] - From "Staying Sane in the Arts" by Eric Maisel

kristofferR 9y ago

This article doesn't answer why they should stop pretending, pretending have worked fine for them so far and there's no indication that it'll stop working anytime soon.

victoro 9y ago

To everyone commenting on the looming job-pocalypse that will be caused by the automation of trucks, please explain why much simpler transportation systems to automate have not resulted in wide-scale job loss. Last I checked, airplanes still had multiple pilots accompanied by significant ground control crews operating them, despite significantly fewer environmental challenges to their operation. Freight trains and subway systems - even simpler closed-loop transportation systems that have working fully autonomous examples in most major airports - still employ conductors. Why will trucks be different?

kgilpin 9y ago

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (1), the most common jobs in the US are retail sales, cashier, food prep and serving, office clerk, registered nurse, customer service rep, waiter / waitress, laborer, secretary, janitor. It’s worth reviewing the actual list for yourself to see what these common jobs really are. And thinking about at what point you would rather be dealing with a robot (let’s call them that) than a person. Truck driving is #15. It gets a lot of attention because it’s a good paying job for a high school education. Taxi driver is #173. Seems low for all the attention that Uber’s disruption of that industry gets. 1. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/mobile/retail-salespersons-and-cashiers-were-occupations-with-highest-employment-in-may-2015.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/mobile/retail-salespersons...