3 ms·

AI is going to displace workers, just like the agricultural revolution and industrial revolution! Oh wait, they figured out other things to do then too...

brandonmenc 10y ago
True, but that doesn't mean we're guaranteed to figure it out every time this happens.
- duaneb 10y ago
  I think it's unrealistic to think the average human can generate more (or even equivalent) capital than a custom-built robot.
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    Doesn't this devolve to a finance problem? For all that, a rather easy one?
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Easy one? Could you describe it? Also, it may be one with a solution that's easy to state - but not necessarily easy to reach. We can't suddenly change how the economy works - we don't have direct control over it. We can try to transition the current one to the desired future one my means of setting up incentive structures appropriately.
      - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
        If such a robot reliably makes you .... $10M a year in 2016 dollars and costs $1M to make, that's a trivial finance arrangement - 90 days or less maybe. I don't know what would or could prevent that assuming the ratio and rough magnitude between those two figures. At that point, you'd hope that the pursuit of status would presumably move elsewhere. Engineering incentives is beyond difficult. Many, many of the things people complain about most in the modern economy is due to some crufty legacy incentive-engineering left over from years past.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  I forget the name of the economist/econ.historian, but he got invited to meet with the Politboro(!) of China. He thought it might be about policy, but they wanted to know about what he knew about why the British government did not fall in the 1870s.
jrlocke 10y ago
I've made this same argument myself, but I've come to believe that there is a difference of kind between the two revolutions you cite and the coming of AI: each of those found a way to replace a large number of human jobs, but humans were able to find refuge in employment at tasks that the new technologies were ill suited for. To you I ask, what is a human able to do that a sufficiently good AI cannot?
- monk_e_boy 10y ago
  Nothing, C P Grey had this argument: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU Before the industrial revolution we had lots of horses for horse power. Then we made engines which replaced horses. Horses didn't change jobs, they couldn't.
  - nostrebored 10y ago
    The thing that you're missing here is that the "ai revolution" is not going to be the singularity. We're not going to magically, one day, have robots that outperform humans at all tasks. Low hanging fruit here is education, tradespeople (AI will not be repairing your car for a while), managerial and oversight tasks, QA engineers, blah, blah, blah. There are plenty of things that humans will be doing better than AI, and from those we'll probably continue specializing and be more ready to handle when automation of more complex tasks does eventually happen.
- internaut 10y ago
  > what is a human able to do that a sufficiently good AI cannot? That may not be the right question. There are all kinds of things that theoretically we could replace with bots over humans but we do not because of convention. For example Home Depot or any Home/Shed tool supply store. Let me explain? In Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age there is a class of humans who generate handcrafted items. They have machines that produce anything to molecular perfection and yet humans (due to our nature) seek to distinguish themselves from other groups of humans using objects. In this case flawed objects, but objects they willingly paid for nonetheless. It's all about status! This is not outlandish to me. I want to construct a Tiny House. I know that when I develop the skills and accomplish this task I will place considerable value on my creation. It is extremely likely that this is not optimal because of the division of labour. However I will enjoy my Tiny House regardless. AI can endlessly optimize production but it cannot manufacture personal pride or social class. Human nature creates scarcity naturally even within a state of abundance. We really do like to belong to tribes and be 'self made'.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
The article addresses your point. Industrial revolution forced people to move from physical work to mental work. AI revolution will take over mental work, and there's no other kind of work left for us. Also, I find it weird to put agricultural and industrial revolution together in this context. Agricultural revolution was when people shifted from doing less physical work (hunting) to doing more physical work (building a civilization). It probably wasn't even by choice, but simply because agricultural societies were more efficient and would conquer those which didn't settle down. About the only thing I see here in common with industrial revolution is the forced change of lifestyle.
- monk_e_boy 10y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
- mordocai 10y ago
  My thought when I read that in the article was "Physical Work -> Cognitive Work -> Creative work". So I think the third kind of work humans will move to is creative(Since AI are so far incapable of being actually creative). After that though, I don't know of another.
  - _nalply 10y ago
    I think AI are already creative. See this for neural networks creating psychedelic images: http://gizmodo.com/these-are-the-incredible-day-dreams-of-artificial-neura-1712226908 http://gizmodo.com/these-are-the-incredible-day-dreams-of-ar.... Perhaps you mean the initial spark of an invention, the idea which strikes like a lightning, and so on? But many inventions happen by accident (like the post-it note invention, http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/11/post-it-notes-were-invented-by-accident/ http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/11/post-it-note...). And then you could argument that only human are crazy enough to find novel usage for useless things. I don't know.
- clay_to_n 10y ago
  Is it as simple as physical vs mental? Or is it a gradient, where the high end of the mental work will remain performed by humans, and will grow to encompass more work? And if it works like that, can our education systems change to keep people productive for longer?
hugh4 10y ago
The problem is that the new job titles we keep inventing require ever-greater degrees of intelligence, while the distribution of human intelligence has been remaining just about the same. A hundred farm workers get replaced by one tractor, but that's okay, because those hundred workers become tractor repairmen, tractor factory workers, tractor designers, and we can farm far more land and produce wealth more efficiently. But not everyone who could plow a field can design a tractor. A thousand years ago, damn near every job was manual labour and could be done with a two-digit IQ, but we're reaching the point in first-world countries where less than half the work which needs to be done can actually be done by someone in the lower half of the population's intelligence distribution. If we're not there yet, we will be soon. And I think it's fundamentally different to every previous automation revolution.
- nostrebored 10y ago
  I have a fundamental disagreement with the notion that we're using our intellectual capital well today. I think that the modern education system fails nearly every student, and some more than others. If we pushed towards educating people in practical skills, like tractor design, do you really think that it would be a large number of people who are incapable of grasping the concepts? Especially if we used the modern research we have into how people learn effectively? Education as an industry and cultural norm needs to grow -- and not in the abominable way that it is now, with us glorifying education for the sake of education -- but a push towards valuing people who have learned specialized skills, regardless of what they are. There's a reason that we have a dearth of mechanics in the U.S., and it's not because being a mechanic is an unattainable goal, but rather because the social norms around specialized blue collar work are ridiculous in the U.S.
gph 10y ago
Yea we figured it out... after numerous wars and cultural revolutions. The point is to hopefully avoid those kinds of things when transitioning into the information age. Besides we still haven't really figured out post-industrial revolution employment all that well. Lots of people in bullshit jobs collecting paychecks just because.
- nostrebored 10y ago
  And you think that this wasn't happening pre-industrial revolution?
samstave 10y ago
Like propagate
placeybordeaux 10y ago
You seem to be making a false equivalency. Both the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution created more jobs than they destroyed. A job being some task that can be done that has a net benefit to society. As it stands even without AI we are seeing more jobs destroyed than created with just the software revolution. Sure there are more people in tech than there were before and they are being paid handsomely, but that is largely because most companies need less employees than they used to while making the same or more amount of money. Once most of customer service and human drivers are eaten by software, which will probably happen without solving 'hard AI' tech will employ even fewer people. Jobs will only be created out of that if cheaper transportation and customer service enables a new place in the market that wasn't already existent. So far I don't know of any jobs that the AI revolution has created other than people that create and train AI systems. It simply wouldn't be profitable to employ these people if they weren't destroying more jobs than they take up.

brandonmenc 10y ago

True, but that doesn't mean we're guaranteed to figure it out every time this happens.

duaneb 10y ago
I think it's unrealistic to think the average human can generate more (or even equivalent) capital than a custom-built robot.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  Doesn't this devolve to a finance problem? For all that, a rather easy one?
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Easy one? Could you describe it? Also, it may be one with a solution that's easy to state - but not necessarily easy to reach. We can't suddenly change how the economy works - we don't have direct control over it. We can try to transition the current one to the desired future one my means of setting up incentive structures appropriately.
    - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
      If such a robot reliably makes you .... $10M a year in 2016 dollars and costs $1M to make, that's a trivial finance arrangement - 90 days or less maybe. I don't know what would or could prevent that assuming the ratio and rough magnitude between those two figures. At that point, you'd hope that the pursuit of status would presumably move elsewhere. Engineering incentives is beyond difficult. Many, many of the things people complain about most in the modern economy is due to some crufty legacy incentive-engineering left over from years past.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
I forget the name of the economist/econ.historian, but he got invited to meet with the Politboro(!) of China. He thought it might be about policy, but they wanted to know about what he knew about why the British government did not fall in the 1870s.

jrlocke 10y ago

I've made this same argument myself, but I've come to believe that there is a difference of kind between the two revolutions you cite and the coming of AI: each of those found a way to replace a large number of human jobs, but humans were able to find refuge in employment at tasks that the new technologies were ill suited for. To you I ask, what is a human able to do that a sufficiently good AI cannot?

monk_e_boy 10y ago
Nothing, C P Grey had this argument: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU Before the industrial revolution we had lots of horses for horse power. Then we made engines which replaced horses. Horses didn't change jobs, they couldn't.
- nostrebored 10y ago
  The thing that you're missing here is that the "ai revolution" is not going to be the singularity. We're not going to magically, one day, have robots that outperform humans at all tasks. Low hanging fruit here is education, tradespeople (AI will not be repairing your car for a while), managerial and oversight tasks, QA engineers, blah, blah, blah. There are plenty of things that humans will be doing better than AI, and from those we'll probably continue specializing and be more ready to handle when automation of more complex tasks does eventually happen.
internaut 10y ago
> what is a human able to do that a sufficiently good AI cannot? That may not be the right question. There are all kinds of things that theoretically we could replace with bots over humans but we do not because of convention. For example Home Depot or any Home/Shed tool supply store. Let me explain? In Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age there is a class of humans who generate handcrafted items. They have machines that produce anything to molecular perfection and yet humans (due to our nature) seek to distinguish themselves from other groups of humans using objects. In this case flawed objects, but objects they willingly paid for nonetheless. It's all about status! This is not outlandish to me. I want to construct a Tiny House. I know that when I develop the skills and accomplish this task I will place considerable value on my creation. It is extremely likely that this is not optimal because of the division of labour. However I will enjoy my Tiny House regardless. AI can endlessly optimize production but it cannot manufacture personal pride or social class. Human nature creates scarcity naturally even within a state of abundance. We really do like to belong to tribes and be 'self made'.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

The article addresses your point. Industrial revolution forced people to move from physical work to mental work. AI revolution will take over mental work, and there's no other kind of work left for us. Also, I find it weird to put agricultural and industrial revolution together in this context. Agricultural revolution was when people shifted from doing less physical work (hunting) to doing more physical work (building a civilization). It probably wasn't even by choice, but simply because agricultural societies were more efficient and would conquer those which didn't settle down. About the only thing I see here in common with industrial revolution is the forced change of lifestyle.

monk_e_boy 10y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
mordocai 10y ago
My thought when I read that in the article was "Physical Work -> Cognitive Work -> Creative work". So I think the third kind of work humans will move to is creative(Since AI are so far incapable of being actually creative). After that though, I don't know of another.
- _nalply 10y ago
  I think AI are already creative. See this for neural networks creating psychedelic images: http://gizmodo.com/these-are-the-incredible-day-dreams-of-artificial-neura-1712226908 http://gizmodo.com/these-are-the-incredible-day-dreams-of-ar.... Perhaps you mean the initial spark of an invention, the idea which strikes like a lightning, and so on? But many inventions happen by accident (like the post-it note invention, http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/11/post-it-notes-were-invented-by-accident/ http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/11/post-it-note...). And then you could argument that only human are crazy enough to find novel usage for useless things. I don't know.
clay_to_n 10y ago
Is it as simple as physical vs mental? Or is it a gradient, where the high end of the mental work will remain performed by humans, and will grow to encompass more work? And if it works like that, can our education systems change to keep people productive for longer?

hugh4 10y ago

The problem is that the new job titles we keep inventing require ever-greater degrees of intelligence, while the distribution of human intelligence has been remaining just about the same. A hundred farm workers get replaced by one tractor, but that's okay, because those hundred workers become tractor repairmen, tractor factory workers, tractor designers, and we can farm far more land and produce wealth more efficiently. But not everyone who could plow a field can design a tractor. A thousand years ago, damn near every job was manual labour and could be done with a two-digit IQ, but we're reaching the point in first-world countries where less than half the work which needs to be done can actually be done by someone in the lower half of the population's intelligence distribution. If we're not there yet, we will be soon. And I think it's fundamentally different to every previous automation revolution.

nostrebored 10y ago
I have a fundamental disagreement with the notion that we're using our intellectual capital well today. I think that the modern education system fails nearly every student, and some more than others. If we pushed towards educating people in practical skills, like tractor design, do you really think that it would be a large number of people who are incapable of grasping the concepts? Especially if we used the modern research we have into how people learn effectively? Education as an industry and cultural norm needs to grow -- and not in the abominable way that it is now, with us glorifying education for the sake of education -- but a push towards valuing people who have learned specialized skills, regardless of what they are. There's a reason that we have a dearth of mechanics in the U.S., and it's not because being a mechanic is an unattainable goal, but rather because the social norms around specialized blue collar work are ridiculous in the U.S.

gph 10y ago

Yea we figured it out... after numerous wars and cultural revolutions. The point is to hopefully avoid those kinds of things when transitioning into the information age. Besides we still haven't really figured out post-industrial revolution employment all that well. Lots of people in bullshit jobs collecting paychecks just because.

nostrebored 10y ago
And you think that this wasn't happening pre-industrial revolution?

samstave 10y ago

Like propagate

placeybordeaux 10y ago

You seem to be making a false equivalency. Both the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution created more jobs than they destroyed. A job being some task that can be done that has a net benefit to society. As it stands even without AI we are seeing more jobs destroyed than created with just the software revolution. Sure there are more people in tech than there were before and they are being paid handsomely, but that is largely because most companies need less employees than they used to while making the same or more amount of money. Once most of customer service and human drivers are eaten by software, which will probably happen without solving 'hard AI' tech will employ even fewer people. Jobs will only be created out of that if cheaper transportation and customer service enables a new place in the market that wasn't already existent. So far I don't know of any jobs that the AI revolution has created other than people that create and train AI systems. It simply wouldn't be profitable to employ these people if they weren't destroying more jobs than they take up.