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> The last people with jobs will be AI programmers Geohotz makes a decent point. The way the industrial revolution reduced manual labour, and made thinkers and
by jaybosamiya 11y ago
> The last people with jobs will be AI programmers
Geohotz makes a decent point. The way the industrial revolution reduced manual labour, and made thinkers and tinkerers much more valuable, the advent of AI (true AI, mind you, not the tiny stuff that we currently assume) might actually make us obsolete. It is a peaceful and yet terrifying thought.
- dominotw 11y agoCan you point to one such job where someone lost his/her job to "AI"?
- ProAm 11y agoLook at any automated warehouse these days. Pickers, stockers, warehouse managers..... Those are going by the way side.
- dominotw 11y agoWould you consider those machines AI?
- emerongi 11y agoNarrow AI, yes. If it simulates a human action and adapts to the environment to a small degree (e.g can recognize a screw bolt and pick it up even if it is in a different location every time), it's a narrow AI.
- ProAm 11y agoIt can do even more than that. Warehouse organization, putting high usage/fast moving objects towards the front of the warehouse, reorganizing based on usage and expiration, restocking, kit packaging etc... Goes way beyond just picking things up with a fork lift and moving them to a different location. All things a person or team of people used to get paid in the 6 digits for are now just run by robots and AI.
- knodi123 11y agostrong AI? no- but then, that hasn't been achieved yet. but weak AI? absolutely. Look at amazon's picker bots.
- eterpstra 11y agoLibrarian
- djhn 11y agoThis is a much better question than I initially thought. I started out listing things, but I'm not sure any of the cases actually include AI as opposed to general IT/Robotics/Globalization.
- ccarter84 11y agoFinancial reporting is likely on front lines http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/20/406484294/an-npr-reporter-raced-a-machine-to-write-a-news-story-who-won http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/20/406484294/an-np...
- luma 11y agoTravel agents.
- malz 11y ago1-800-555-1212 operators replaced by Tellme.
- rocky1138 11y agoSports writers, finance writers: http://singularityhub.com/2011/09/19/ai-journalist-writes-sports-and-now-everything-else-statsheet-raises-4m-changes-name-and-focus/ http://singularityhub.com/2011/09/19/ai-journalist-writes-sp...
- mwnz 11y agoHow on earth is this a peaceful thought?
- skj 11y agoI don't see any reason why I'd love my (true-AI) artificial children any less than my real children :)
- mwnz 11y agoYou won't love them less, but they will grow up in a world where they are not necessary. They will struggle to feed themselves, and the value of their effort will be low. They will be relegated to mundane, highly simplified tasks. Economics are cruel.
- shpx 11y agoBecause wage slavery is ultimately not much better than slavery, and its abolishment does not necessitate the collapse of society. A world where no one is forced to work is a better world.
- mwnz 11y agoWage slavery is just fine as long as I can feed myself. Time has proven that the fantasy that we will all kick back and let the machines do all of our work is a fallacy.
- forgotpasswd3x 11y agoJust because it hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it won't happen in the future.
- Xcelerate 11y agoI've thought about this a lot before actually. In my opinion, the last people with jobs will be mathematicians. If you think about everything that would be hardest to automate, I think deep mathematical theory would be the most difficult (automated theorem provers have their limits).
- jonny_eh 11y agoAnd chess players. Computers will never beat the best chess players.
- cko 11y agoI believe this is not true. There are chess engines with ELO ratings several hundred above Magnus Carlsen's.
- sinatra 11y agoA chess game is, in the end, a massive tree of all possible moves that can be made. Once computers are powerful enough to simulate all those possible moves, they can be sure of winning (or at least not lose) every game against a human starting from move #1. Just like tic-tac-toe.
- snowwrestler 11y agoJonny is being sarcastic--computers have already beaten the best chess players. But I would point out that even though that is true, people still make money today selling chess sets and chess software and chess books and chess tournament tickets to other people. edit: clarity
- cko 11y agoAh, that explains it. Should have read parent post more carefully.
- snowwrestler 11y agoI think this misinterprets what the history of the industrial revolution teaches us. When steam shovels replaced humans, it's not that only steam-shovel-makers had jobs anymore. Instead, new humans who would have been employed breaking rocks, were instead free to go invent or work in entirely new industries. Entertainment, health care, and communications are industries that have exploded, in terms of economic value and employment, since the industrial revolution. One thing these industries have in common is that the value they provide is dependent on humans. People want to talk to people, see stories about people, and be healthy themselves. Technology enables these industries but technology does not replace the heart of the value. Maybe someday if AI evolves into artifical persons, then AI could take part in conversations, be entertained, and wish to prevent it's own death. But that is probably a long way off, and might never come. It's not like people are working on artificial personalities now. No one is working on car AI that will tell its owner to fuck off, it's watching Mad Men and doesn't feel like driving. The industrial approach to AI is to build better tools. Not to build new independent beings. Maybe it's possible that a tool can become a being, but we have no evidence at all that such a thing can happen. So the future of employment will probably not be unemployment, it will be different employment. Truck driver jobs will get replaced by truck-driving AI, but the children of truck drivers won't miss it. They'll grow up in that world, and work in some other new industry, like virtual world designer or personal medical consultant or artist or athlete.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago>The way the industrial revolution reduced manual labour, and made thinkers and tinkerers much more valuable Didn't the opposite happen? Suddenly artisans were out of business as nobody wanted beautiful hand-made luggage, or whatever, that would last decades, but instead we'd get some engineers and maybe consults an old-school luggage guy, get some specs, and toss that data into cheap mass production and be done with it. Sure they're uglier and last only a few years, but they're cheap and plentiful. Now those artisans had to close their shops and either go work in the factory or retrain for something else. The I.R. was great for making things fast and cheap, but it was pretty much a full frontal attack on "maker" culture that has only rebounded in certain areas fairly recently, namely computers, because you can own the "means of production" trivially, namely a computer with a compiler. I see AI going the same way. It'll be shoddy, cost jobs, and work "just good enough." The question is is "just good enough" appropriate for 5,000lbs death machines speeding at 75mph? Think of all very serious development protocols and standards aerospace and NASA use. And that's for machines that will never have to worry about poorly painted/paved roads, kids running into the street, snow covering everything, etc. I think the AI-guided future will be far off and hit a lot of practical limits quickly and the bullish attitude behind AI is more than a little unjustifiable.
- snowwrestler 11y agoTechnology innovation shifts the economies of art. For example, representational painters lost a lot of business to photographers. On the other hand, art photography became an industry. There weren't a lot of people employed making movies or TV shows before the industrial revolution; now those industries provide lucrative employment to millions. Maker culture shifted with the technology. That said, I agree with you that AI is being pretty dramatically oversold (again).
- visarga 11y ago> the advent of AI (true AI, mind you, not the tiny stuff that we currently assume) might actually make us obsolete. It is a peaceful and yet terrifying thought We will become the children of our new AI parents. We are building our future caretakers.
- bkbaba 11y agoI am not convinced that computers will ACTUALLY REPLACE ALL jobs. Technology could get advanced to do all that humans are accomplishing today, but that doesn't mean that humans will not be doing any jobs any more. There are 2 main problems I see in that 1) Historically technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/aug/17/technology-created-more-jobs-than-destroyed-140-years-data-census http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/aug/17/technology-c... One BIG difference, technology till now has been designed to aid humans, not replace them. But I think that technology will shift a lot of jobs in another sector but will not bring the sum of human brains needed to run it to 0. 2) Society will not be so nice to organisations taking away ALL its jobs. There will be a huge friction from society when they loose out ALL their jobs at this scale, it could vary from small riots to some new age guerrilla warfare. It will be interesting to see how politicians will react when they loose their jobs to computers though.
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- dpacmittal 11y agoAnd why can't true AI be capable enough to program AI? Don't we compile C compilers with C?
- dysfunction 11y agoThat's the point--the LAST people with jobs will be AI programmers, but they probably wouldn't have long to celebrate that status.