4 ms·

Will the proliferation of affordable AI decimate the middle class?

27 points by elsewhen 11y ago

AmVess 11y ago
Middle class is already well down the road to ruin. AI isn't going to make a difference either way.
dataker 11y ago
>AI isn’t like an oil field owned by a handful of people Sure, it's free to access open-source AI tools. However, only huge corporations have enough capital to first build these ground-breaking technologies. Being the first, it becomes almost impossible to compete at a later stage ("Thiel's aim for a monopoly").
- seizethecheese 11y ago
  The companies that have dominated each new wave of computing have not always been the incumbents. Is building an AI more capital-intensive than Operating Systems or PC hardware? It's feasible that if a powerful AI is created that it will be done on a cloud server by a small team of people.
  - Sven_ 11y ago
    Doesn't matter too much. They will invariably get bought out by whoever is waving a large cheque in their face. All the "deep learning" stuff could have easily spun out startups from academia but look at what has happened instead. Its especially rare these days cause all the big powerhouses(Goog/FB/MS/Amazon/Apple) are highly insecure about when they are going to get disrupted overnight. And since they are all sitting on mountains of cash they can afford to throw highly ridiculous amounts at ppl. There are very few examples where it doesn't happen. I can only think of Torvalds\Linux and Wikipedia.
    - pbh101 11y ago
      1) Two of those companies (FB/Goog) could easily have been bought by the megaliths of their time, but their founders' vision and control prevented it. I don't see what is so much different about these times that would prevent a founder from doing the same. Indeed, not so long ago Drew Houston did the same (though it seems the gamble is not so certain to pay off for him) 2. Startup or established company, it doesn't matter so much who does the displacing as much as who is getting displaced: either way, the argument contends that vast swathes of the middle class will be adversely affected.
      - Gven_ 11y ago
        Good point. I guess the larger pt here is that, it would be nice to see pressure on the megaliths\holdouts to let go of their winner take all inclinations and go more the Torvalds\Jimmy Wales route. So that the advances benefit the many rather than the few. Much better articulated here by Doug Rushkoff that I ever will be able too - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87TSoqnZass https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87TSoqnZass
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    Your observation is true, your conclusion isn't necessarily. AI is different from other areas of computing in that data matters far more than code does. Current legal practice is that the data is owned by the organization that collected it, which means that to collect data on millions of users to train behavioral models, you need to have millions of users. If you have millions of users, you're probably a pretty big company.
    - seizethecheese 11y ago
      My conclusion is that it's feasible, so by definition not necessarily true. An AI could be bootstrapped by scraping data, or using any number of large datasets out there. This isn't to say that large corporation don't have advantages.
    - mac01021 11y ago
      That depends to a large extent on what skill you want your AI to be able to learn. Many applications from recommender systems, to market analysis to drug discovery probably require large datasets of the sort that can only be collected by a large business. But if you want to learn control polices for robotic agents that navigate the physical world, driving cars, stocking shelves, etc. then I think the physical world is presenting everyone with approximately the same data set regardless of company size.
- touristtam 11y ago
  You forget to add political and financial pressure to restrain any other player to enter the same market past a certain financial fresh hold
smegel 11y ago
Let's wait for someone to invent it first.
- gregn 11y ago
  haha. double points for funny and true.
gozur88 11y ago
>In the case of low-skill labor the rise of China has hurt some US low-skill workers (although US workers as a whole are almost certainly better off due to lower prices). That (along with immigration) explains the rise in income inequality in the US. If you have marketable skills you benefit from access to larger consumer markets. If you don't, though, you suffer from access to large pools of unskilled labor.
jernfrost 11y ago
The problem with this rosy picture as all other rosy pictures about automation is that depending on the speed of technological change any automation will potentially destroy the livelihood of a lot of people before they are able to re-adjust to a new economic reality. People can't typically change their skill-set as fast as technology can be introduced. This doesn't have to be a problem if a country has welfare system mechanism to cope with redundant workers, giving them a line to hold onto until they can re-adjust to the new reality. The problem is when you combine rapid technological progress with small government dogma. That creates a toxic combination where the only winners are the rich. This is unfortunate because when you setup a society this way it causes large fractions of the population to fight technological advancement, free trade and immigration. I think the %1 have to to realize that if people are going to buy into their desired free trade and technological upgrades, then you got to offer something in return. Taxes stuffed away in Panama isn't an acceptable answer to most people ;-)
- hartator 11y ago
  I think the current "1%" should be the one afraid of AI. Introducing new technology usually seems to shift wealth to a different set of people.
  - unclebucknasty 11y ago
    Not in this case. The owners of the commercial AI and robotics benefit. We're already seeing the effects of this: look at the increasing stratification of wealth in the context of increased productivity and automation in recent years.
- true_religion 11y ago
  > The problem is when you combine rapid technological progress with small government dogma. If this is where the problem lies, then I doubt people will hold to their anti-welfare beliefs once there is widespread joblessness. In a democratic society, people should be expected to eventually vote for their own benefit.
- flubert 11y ago
nickpeterson 11y ago
The biggest hit will be truck drivers and call centers, I think we're far away for most other jobs being economically replaceable.
- stevetrewick 11y ago
  I'm amazed we even still have call centres. Most of the human workforce is just puppetry driven by workflow scripts. Working in one was the single most dehumanising experience of my life, and I was the one implementing the workflows. I agree that they are absolutely a huge target for automation - I can't think of a single step in the entire workflow between campaign conception through to deployment and associated follow up (document fulfilment, etc) that couldn't be made more efficient and frankly more humane with massive automation. And that's without any kind of ML/AI in the picture. Once you start throwing AI around I reckon you can skip up a whole skill tier from there. In this case, I for one welcome our new robot overlords.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
pklausler 11y ago
"decimate" != "devastate" To "decimate" is to reduce by only 10%.
- dmoy 11y ago
  Not in modern usage.
  - zeveb 11y ago
    The modern usage is wrong, and the correct usage is useful. Rage, rage against the dying of the light!
    - placeybordeaux 11y ago
      Useful is very subjective. Do you mean precise?
    - mtviewdave 11y ago
      "To reduce by 10%" is, in English, the novel usage. It was apparently invented by essayist Richard Grant White in 1870. The original meaning of the word, "to destroy", is attested to 1663: https://arnoldzwicky.org/2009/06/03/the-decimators/ https://arnoldzwicky.org/2009/06/03/the-decimators/
      - pklausler 11y ago
        Caesar was 1900 years ahead of his time when he threatened to decimate the 9th Legion, then. The meaning may be obscure and obsolete, but the word does mean something specific.
        mtviewdave 11y ago
        Unless Caesar spoke English, he didn't threaten "to decimate" anybody. Because "to decimate" is an English verb. Rather, I'm sure Caesar used the appropriate conjugation of the Latin verb "decimō". Two separate, but related, words. With two separate, but related, meanings.
crdoconnor 11y ago
The death of the middle class will be austerity, union busting, stronger intellectual property rights, tax evasion by the ultra-wealthy, TTIP and the TPP. The ruling classes sure would prefer it if those things were swept under the carpet and sci fi super robots took the blame instead though.
yarrel 11y ago
Yes.
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
There's a whole massive underlying assumption here: that we will soon have affordable, deployable, non-finnicky machine learning models for enough problems to decimate the middle class. In my experience, ML models, even the best deep convnets and such, are still extremely "finicky" by human standards, in the sense that small or human-insignificant changes to the input vector can cause large-scale changes in the output classification/regression. Cool demos with video-games need to be run past some industrial automation experts before we go around proclaiming them to be the harbingers of industrial AI!

27 points by elsewhen 11y ago

Middle class is already well down the road to ruin. AI isn't going to make a difference either way.

>AI isn’t like an oil field owned by a handful of people Sure, it's free to access open-source AI tools. However, only huge corporations have enough capital to first build these ground-breaking technologies. Being the first, it becomes almost impossible to compete at a later stage ("Thiel's aim for a monopoly").

seizethecheese 11y ago
The companies that have dominated each new wave of computing have not always been the incumbents. Is building an AI more capital-intensive than Operating Systems or PC hardware? It's feasible that if a powerful AI is created that it will be done on a cloud server by a small team of people.
- Sven_ 11y ago
  Doesn't matter too much. They will invariably get bought out by whoever is waving a large cheque in their face. All the "deep learning" stuff could have easily spun out startups from academia but look at what has happened instead. Its especially rare these days cause all the big powerhouses(Goog/FB/MS/Amazon/Apple) are highly insecure about when they are going to get disrupted overnight. And since they are all sitting on mountains of cash they can afford to throw highly ridiculous amounts at ppl. There are very few examples where it doesn't happen. I can only think of Torvalds\Linux and Wikipedia.
  - pbh101 11y ago
    1) Two of those companies (FB/Goog) could easily have been bought by the megaliths of their time, but their founders' vision and control prevented it. I don't see what is so much different about these times that would prevent a founder from doing the same. Indeed, not so long ago Drew Houston did the same (though it seems the gamble is not so certain to pay off for him) 2. Startup or established company, it doesn't matter so much who does the displacing as much as who is getting displaced: either way, the argument contends that vast swathes of the middle class will be adversely affected.
    - Gven_ 11y ago
      Good point. I guess the larger pt here is that, it would be nice to see pressure on the megaliths\holdouts to let go of their winner take all inclinations and go more the Torvalds\Jimmy Wales route. So that the advances benefit the many rather than the few. Much better articulated here by Doug Rushkoff that I ever will be able too - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87TSoqnZass https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87TSoqnZass
- nostrademons 11y ago
  Your observation is true, your conclusion isn't necessarily. AI is different from other areas of computing in that data matters far more than code does. Current legal practice is that the data is owned by the organization that collected it, which means that to collect data on millions of users to train behavioral models, you need to have millions of users. If you have millions of users, you're probably a pretty big company.
  - seizethecheese 11y ago
    My conclusion is that it's feasible, so by definition not necessarily true. An AI could be bootstrapped by scraping data, or using any number of large datasets out there. This isn't to say that large corporation don't have advantages.
  - mac01021 11y ago
    That depends to a large extent on what skill you want your AI to be able to learn. Many applications from recommender systems, to market analysis to drug discovery probably require large datasets of the sort that can only be collected by a large business. But if you want to learn control polices for robotic agents that navigate the physical world, driving cars, stocking shelves, etc. then I think the physical world is presenting everyone with approximately the same data set regardless of company size.
touristtam 11y ago
You forget to add political and financial pressure to restrain any other player to enter the same market past a certain financial fresh hold

smegel 11y ago

Let's wait for someone to invent it first.

gregn 11y ago
haha. double points for funny and true.

gozur88 11y ago

>In the case of low-skill labor the rise of China has hurt some US low-skill workers (although US workers as a whole are almost certainly better off due to lower prices). That (along with immigration) explains the rise in income inequality in the US. If you have marketable skills you benefit from access to larger consumer markets. If you don't, though, you suffer from access to large pools of unskilled labor.

jernfrost 11y ago

The problem with this rosy picture as all other rosy pictures about automation is that depending on the speed of technological change any automation will potentially destroy the livelihood of a lot of people before they are able to re-adjust to a new economic reality. People can't typically change their skill-set as fast as technology can be introduced. This doesn't have to be a problem if a country has welfare system mechanism to cope with redundant workers, giving them a line to hold onto until they can re-adjust to the new reality. The problem is when you combine rapid technological progress with small government dogma. That creates a toxic combination where the only winners are the rich. This is unfortunate because when you setup a society this way it causes large fractions of the population to fight technological advancement, free trade and immigration. I think the %1 have to to realize that if people are going to buy into their desired free trade and technological upgrades, then you got to offer something in return. Taxes stuffed away in Panama isn't an acceptable answer to most people ;-)

hartator 11y ago
I think the current "1%" should be the one afraid of AI. Introducing new technology usually seems to shift wealth to a different set of people.
- unclebucknasty 11y ago
  Not in this case. The owners of the commercial AI and robotics benefit. We're already seeing the effects of this: look at the increasing stratification of wealth in the context of increased productivity and automation in recent years.
true_religion 11y ago
> The problem is when you combine rapid technological progress with small government dogma. If this is where the problem lies, then I doubt people will hold to their anti-welfare beliefs once there is widespread joblessness. In a democratic society, people should be expected to eventually vote for their own benefit.
flubert 11y ago

nickpeterson 11y ago

The biggest hit will be truck drivers and call centers, I think we're far away for most other jobs being economically replaceable.

stevetrewick 11y ago
I'm amazed we even still have call centres. Most of the human workforce is just puppetry driven by workflow scripts. Working in one was the single most dehumanising experience of my life, and I was the one implementing the workflows. I agree that they are absolutely a huge target for automation - I can't think of a single step in the entire workflow between campaign conception through to deployment and associated follow up (document fulfilment, etc) that couldn't be made more efficient and frankly more humane with massive automation. And that's without any kind of ML/AI in the picture. Once you start throwing AI around I reckon you can skip up a whole skill tier from there. In this case, I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

pklausler 11y ago

"decimate" != "devastate" To "decimate" is to reduce by only 10%.

dmoy 11y ago
Not in modern usage.
- zeveb 11y ago
  The modern usage is wrong, and the correct usage is useful. Rage, rage against the dying of the light!
  - placeybordeaux 11y ago
    Useful is very subjective. Do you mean precise?
  - mtviewdave 11y ago
    "To reduce by 10%" is, in English, the novel usage. It was apparently invented by essayist Richard Grant White in 1870. The original meaning of the word, "to destroy", is attested to 1663: https://arnoldzwicky.org/2009/06/03/the-decimators/ https://arnoldzwicky.org/2009/06/03/the-decimators/
    - pklausler 11y ago
      Caesar was 1900 years ahead of his time when he threatened to decimate the 9th Legion, then. The meaning may be obscure and obsolete, but the word does mean something specific.
      - mtviewdave 11y ago
        Unless Caesar spoke English, he didn't threaten "to decimate" anybody. Because "to decimate" is an English verb. Rather, I'm sure Caesar used the appropriate conjugation of the Latin verb "decimō". Two separate, but related, words. With two separate, but related, meanings.

crdoconnor 11y ago

The death of the middle class will be austerity, union busting, stronger intellectual property rights, tax evasion by the ultra-wealthy, TTIP and the TPP. The ruling classes sure would prefer it if those things were swept under the carpet and sci fi super robots took the blame instead though.

yarrel 11y ago

Yes.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago

There's a whole massive underlying assumption here: that we will soon have affordable, deployable, non-finnicky machine learning models for enough problems to decimate the middle class. In my experience, ML models, even the best deep convnets and such, are still extremely "finicky" by human standards, in the sense that small or human-insignificant changes to the input vector can cause large-scale changes in the output classification/regression. Cool demos with video-games need to be run past some industrial automation experts before we go around proclaiming them to be the harbingers of industrial AI!