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At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer

104 points by uptown 10y ago

PeterStuer 10y ago
The sad thing is she has to say this to appease her public sector clientele that still holds to the believe that life benefits tied to 'jobs' are the only way to keep the unruly masses under control.
- mac01021 10y ago
  Do you have a citation to suggest that that is her motive? That would be extremely interesting to read.
anon987 10y ago
More corporate propaganda where they leave out the key details and don't address easy questions. Much like IBM's bullshit 25,000 jobs PR stunt this one has no substance besides the empty words of a suit who will do anything to increase revenue.
DashRattlesnake 10y ago
Is IBM CEO Ginni Rometty someone who can actually provide insight on the impact of AI on society? I'm sure some of her subordinates could, but the only thing I've ever heard about her personally is that she's driving IBM into the ground by chasing some unrealistic financial metric, and I'm not super inclined to bypass a paywall just to hear an executive say executive things.
- freehunter 10y ago
  >I'm sure some of her subordinates could Where do you think CEOs get their information from?
  - congerous 10y ago
    From people trying to protect their own ass by not telling her that Watson doesn't work.
    - edgarvaldes 10y ago
      I'm not familiar with Watson. Why do you say it doesn't work? Does it fall short compared to other offerings in this space?
      - congerous 10y ago
        Watson does not offer anything more than you can get from popular, free open-source projects, and often it offers much less, because it is complex, costly and closed-source. Nobody looks to Watson for the state of the art in AI.
- adamgray 10y ago
  Ginni started at IBM as an engineer so I'm pretty sure she has some level of technical competence.
josho 10y ago
This is all you need to read from the article: > Advances in artificial intelligence will lead to job losses, but new forms of employment will take their place...History, though, has demonstrated that technological breakthroughs lead to new employment opportunities -- IBM CEO Ginni Rometty But, I think we are approaching (if we haven't already crossed this point) the time where new jobs created by technology advancements will be fewer than old jobs displaced. My example here is Instagram, a company of a dozen staff or so when acquired, is the digital replacement of photo labs in every city. New technologies are not the job creator that they once were and I haven't read anything to contradict that statement or posit that new tech is going to drive jobs growth.
- kbenson 10y ago
  > My example here is Instagram, a company of a dozen staff or so when acquired, is the digital replacement of photo labs in every city. While not trying to dispute your main point, I hardly think Instagram replaces all of what photo labs do, such as large size prints, professional correction, and specialty products such as cards and books. There are other companies online that do compete in these spaces though. I think most labs are probably getting by with their services targeted towards professionals, who want a bit more accountability than they are likely to get using a large service. That may just mean a semi-large to large lab though, so small labs likely have a hard time of it.
  - creaghpatr 10y ago
    Instagram also enabled some business to be created or to grow based on ease of access and low/no overhead costs for its service. Instagram 'models' come to mind.
- ar15saveslives 10y ago
  Instagram is not replacement for photo labs, digital cameras are.
  - mtgx 10y ago
    So smartphones? I thinking looking at this from the point of view of a single product category is too simplistic and likely inaccurate. A better way of looking at this may be "one new ecosystem of jobs is replacing another". If you look at it this way, it's possible that the new ecosystem is just as big in terms of number of jobs. I think a bigger problem may be that the pace of change is accelerating and people used to sticking to a job for a decade or longer may find themselves having to do more drastic career changes every few years.
chollida1 10y ago
We've seen this before with the transition from a labour force that was 50%+ involved in farming to one that became a manufacturing based society and then again in the move from manufacturing to services. One of the bigger differences with AI is that it now may take away many of the lower tier "white collar" jobs along with blue collar jobs that were previously displaced by technology shits. I'm not terribly familiar with my economics history but is it possible that a huge tide of AI backed apps could be the first time that a significant portion of white collar jobs are lost along with the typical blue collar jobs that are more traditionally lost with tech shifts? Then again, in 2000, alot of first world programmers were worried about offshoring of programming jobs, I haven't seen any real impact of the loss of these jobs on programmers in North America so perhaps IBM is correct that AI will produce as many new jobs as it replaces.
- jedbrown 10y ago
  In each previous upheaval, new industries created large numbers of low-skilled jobs. In contrast, most of the new jobs created by AI will require significant education and creativity.
- arebop 10y ago
  The issue is not that yet another group of cowards is whining. The issue is that once machines can do everything better than humans, we will need a new way to organize society. Machines have already replaced animals including humans for the application of pure physical force to solving problems. Now machines are now replacing animals including humans for the application of intellect to solving problems. It is not clear that there is any next frontier. Would it be "love" or "spiritual practice" or what? Some people say that AI will not progress as far as industrial-age machines did in obsoleting humans. They sometimes give specific examples, claiming that they find AI-generated art to be dull or that AI-guided robotic surgeons only succeed in narrow tasks, etc. It's OK to argue that this will take a long time but I haven't heard anyone explain why the AIs won't win in the long run. Maybe the run is so long we shouldn't worry about it? Some other people say "we found new jobs before, we'll do it again." For example, the IBM chief. And that seems like empty wishful thinking.
joe_the_user 10y ago
In discussions of the issue, AI and automation are often used interchangeably and this entirely clouds the issue. The AI that is so far real is a particular kind of software that has helped large-scale decisions and processes in large enterprises, large websites and etc - places with a lot of data to agregate. Automation is an ongoing process of replacing people with machines and it is what has eliminated jobs. Advances in software has helped some automation and some of those advances are connected to AI but a lot of the advances involve materials, processes, a willingness-or-not of consumers to use automated processes rather than interacting with a human (whether buying online or from automatic kiosk or whatever). Indeed, the AI-in-particular and job losses in general narrative is just about a sales-pitch for IBM's Watson etc rather than a serious threat.
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  This position, "AI as automation", is the important one. Tasks, whether they are manufacturing or service, have a difficulty level in automation. That difficulty is generally scored as a 'cost' with respect to having a person do the task or service and the cost to have them do that. There are two costs associated with execution, training and marginal cost of execution. So if you spend 10 hours training a factory worker to use a machine, that is your training cost, if it takes them 1 second to operate the machine to do the task, that is the marginal cost. Consider the printing press. The printing press replaces a fully manual process. A scribe takes 3 to 5 years to write out a copy of a book. They are trained for many years in calligraphy, and each book takes years to produce. The printing press on the other hand you train a 'scribe' to arrange the letters from a type tray into a plate, to ink it, to press it onto sheets. That training takes less time than calligraphy training. Then for each book the scribe puts together the plates, prints out multiple copies of the page, and then assembles the book from the various pages. One or more copies of a single book can happen in a week. Your marginal cost has gone down as well. Then plate printers, removed the type trays. Then mechanical paper handling fed paper into these machines. Etc to the point where now you need nothing, the author writes, uploads it to their kindle publishing account and the readers down load and read. But all through this process "employment" around the notion of books changed. And who was employed and how also changed. The product, written and illustrated communication from one person to many, was fundamentally the same but delivered differently. What we think of as "AI" today allows automating with less people training tasks which defied automation before. And by doing so it changes the market dynamics around that good or service. The most popular example is livery and delivery services with automated drivers. It only became possible to automate a driver when you had a machine that could recognize and respond to a wide variety of conditions in its environment.
congerous 10y ago
Rometty doesn't even know that Watson is a vaporware boondoggle, so how would she know what's going to happen when AI impacts society. She is probably the least qualified person at IBM to talk about AI, and IBM itself is one of the least qualified companies practicing "AI". She too far removed from the trenches. But IBM has excellent PR, and this is the line I would take if I were betting my company on AI services.
- deleted 10y ago
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- garysieling 10y ago
  What part is vaporware? I've used the AlchemyAPI bits they acquired in building https://www.findlectures.com https://www.findlectures.com, and it's useful, albeit way oversold.
  - congerous 10y ago
    I don't know, you tell me how much of this you believe: https://www.fastcompany.com/3065339/mind-and-machine/can-ibms-watson-do-it-all https://www.fastcompany.com/3065339/mind-and-machine/can-ibm... > A doctor reads about a half dozen medical research papers in a month, Meyerson says, whereas Watson can read a half million in about 15 seconds. From that, machine learning (one of the key types of artificial intelligence today) can suggest diagnoses and the most promising course of treatment.
cjlars 10y ago
There's a lot believers in technological unemployment here on HN and one thing I think that viewpoint misses is just how darn resilient humans are to changes in the economy. In the past 150 years, we've seen human manual labor replaced by mechanical labor. Think about that -- a lot of early California settlers walked here, and now you're commanding power roughly equivalent to 100 horses when you hop into your car. Agricultural employment went from 90%+ of the population to ~1% over a few generations. People using computers at work went from less than 1% to complete ubiquity in 30 years. And against all of this, unemployment is still near its target rate. Is the large scale rollout of predictive algorithms really a bigger wave than those that have come previously?
- youdounderstand 10y ago
  Unemployment is only part of it. What about wages?
  - cjlars 10y ago
    It's all speculation. Increases in productivity (GDP per hour worked) are typically accompanied by rising wages. So you're likely to see job losses in impacted industries accompanied by rising wages in aggregate. It's not obvious which direction inequality would head.
    - cmurf 10y ago
      It's not speculation, stagnant wages is a real problem we've been experiencing for decades. As far as I know, no one disputes this fact, it's just that no one really knows what to do about it.
- ergothus 10y ago
  unemployment calculated how? As I understand it, we measure based on how many people are looking for work and have it. So if our social safety nets (retirement) and cultural expectations have kept pace with people being employed less, (be it in hours/day, hours/week, or just what years you'll be working), I'd expect unemployment numbers to not show the effects of technological unemployment. Of course, it's too simplistic to just assert what I have and ignore forces on the other side (for example, dual income households are now the norm). That is, however, my point: Looking at the unemployment numbers is a poor measure of any effects upon people's ability to work as it has so much else lumped in there.
deleted 10y ago
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pdeuchler 10y ago
BREAKING: CEO who's compensation and job depends on selling advancements in computing downplays the downsides of said advancements
ilaksh 10y ago
Deep learning-ish advances can theoretically automate a ton of things now, but it will take a few years for those AIs to be engineered/trained/marketed. That is actually a continuation of automation which is as much a social process as it is about technology. But if you look at projects like Deep Mind Lab, Open AI Universe, Good AIs Lab and 5 million usd AGI contest, combine those 3d environments with incremental learning transferred across domains, leveraging deep learning, hybrid and other advancements, as well as (hopefully) the existing body of research from the field of AGI (which has existed for a number of years, despite many pretending it didn't) -- we now have very powerful parallel learning tools and many public projects aimed at general agents. And very convincing demos in more narrow domains. Because of all of this I personally believe the core AGI technology will be demonstrated within the next two years. How long before that makes its way into embodied robots and gets trained up to the point it can be readily adapted to various industries may be another few years. So my own belief is that we should expect ALL jobs to start to be 'threatened' by AGI systems by around 2022-2023.
- frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
  You are proof that the hype surrounding AI/Machine Learning has gone way too far.
  - drcode 10y ago
    I get your point, but in general I don't understand people who look at the things coming out of google et al lately and can still say to themselves "This is just a minor incremental improvement over previous AI research" I'm sorry, but the stuff coming out in the last couple of years just seems like it's in a totally different league to me...
  - ilaksh 10y ago
    _I_ am proof? I wonder why you are making it personal. Its not about me though is it? Look at the Open AI Universe, Deep Mind AI Lab, Good AI Universe, etc. Look them up. They all say that the goal is artificial general intelligence. All of these companies/programs have multiple literal geniuses and tens or even hundreds of millions or more in funding. The AGI environments are public, so who knows how many hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of talented programmers and scientists are working towards the same goal. Do _you_ think that all of these large programs, companies, investors would be so publicly pursuing this goal if it were not feasible? If not within two years, then how many years do you think it will be before these projects yield results that have human-like generality or abilities? If you suppose they will never achieve that, then what level of generality do you assume them to be limited to? Certainly those groups expect to achieve some type of general intelligence. So perhaps you assume in the near term it will not be human-level, then at what level do you suppose it will be limited? Dog-like intelligence? Once agents achieve dog-like intelligence, why would you assume there would not be a way to progress beyond that? We have already achieved super-human intelligence in numerous particular domains.
RRRA 10y ago
This whole question is missing philosophical context. Maybe not now, but once we all get automated, what is the goal we're trying to reach? Where are we going with this?
- malka 10y ago
  what do you think will happen to the working class when it becomes useless to those in charge ? Don't you think they'd enjoy more living on earth without us, plebeian ? (eg, like the spacers living in Solaria in Asimov novels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaria )
EternalData 10y ago
The problem with AI is that it's dynamite when it comes to capital-labour relations. You can't compete with something with perfect agency that never gets sick. Now, are there going to be new categories of work and new economies? Yes. But in the meanwhile, for a category of work that defines a plurality if not majority of the functioning economy (basically anything that doesn't require creativity across multiple domains or empathy), there are going to be SEVERE income share implications. Keep in mind that labour share of income has gone down drastically in the last few decades and that as a result, real wages have stagnated -- which has produced significant unrest in developed countries and unseated the established political order. If that trend continues...
- josho 10y ago
  > You can't compete with something with perfect agency that never gets sick. Now, are there going to be new categories of work and new economies? Follow your own logic to its conclusion. If AI does that then what are the new jobs? We are eliminating entire job categories. While the new jobs will be in entirely different categories (e.g. manual labor will be all but eliminated, and the new jobs will be in creative industries). There is very little cross over between those job categories so we are heading to a future with a significant portion of the population jobless.
  - EternalData 10y ago
    Machines are bad at transferring domain knowledge and generalizing/making unconventional linkages between topics -- what some would regard as creativity, they're also not going to be very good at empathy without essentially solving for strong AI and regularized data on human emotions -- there also are going to be human jobs because of protectionist instincts. ex: A machine right now would actually probably do a more optimal job of determining interest rates if given more economic data and more data on outputs/outcomes, but replacing the Fed and analysts under it with a machine is a political football and a half to even say. If we solve for strong AI, we might as well kiss the species goodbye, never mind just jobs -- but the AI we have in between is not going to completely eliminate every category of work in the present, never mind future ones that might arise.
WhitneyLand 10y ago
Does she mean AI won't be a job killer "for a while" or "ever"? Does anyone really believe the latter?
stevehiehn 10y ago
So it WILL be a job killer but hopefully there will be new ones.
balozi 10y ago
If I was Ms. Rometty, I would spend my time playing up the fact that A.I. will lead to a vastly improved quality of life for everyone. Advancements in knowledge always tend to do that and A.I. is a great leap forward in tech knowledge.
BJBBB 10y ago
1. not certain about the articles demographics - see https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/demo/p25-1143.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio... The big problem with immigrant-fueled growth in America is that the first derivative of most Latin American demographic trends indicates larger reductions in growth rate than the U.S. or Canada. So North America, in general, could become dependent on higher-risk immigrant populations from Asia to maintain any significant growth. 2. Most boomers will be dead and turned to dust before 2060. And age distribution could become flat as fertility rates go flat. After 2045, the over 65 population rate will probably decrease to under 25% for North America. Some actuaries are thinking that people will not necessarily continue to have increased lifespans. 3. Quality and financial incentives for production and design automation have been driving industry at increasing rate for at least 25 years. My three current employers (one full-time regular, two contract) are all under 200 employees, have all reduced head count by at 15% to 40% over last 5 to 10 years, and have mandated to either not increase bodies or to further decrease bodies. 4. Too much emphasis on self-driving vehicles. Most industrial automation is after the obvious low-hanging fruit - logistics and production, where you do not necessarily see actual robotics, but much process automation and decision-making sustained by ML. 5. Mid-level jobs are being increasingly targeted: parsing of legal documents, accounting, warehouse management and stock control, and some of the more simple product design functions. 6. Anecdotal stuff. In Early 2016, employer's main site in Southern California terminated OVER half of the engineering group - mostly support and mid-level management. Only one technician, no PCB designers, no mechanical designers, and no engineering managers remain. The remaining engineers do it all - feasible because design automation tools have reached a 'critical' mass. Spent most of October through December automating the crap out of a factory warehouse and related processes. Last week, 14 people were terminated at the Mexico factory site. The factory warehouse had 14 full-time and 4 part-time employees in warehouse; there are now 3 full and 1 part-timer; and the part-timer will probably go away next quarter. And no robots in sight...
geodel 10y ago
I think it is also matter of time scale. There may be new jobs once this all settles down. Today I have real fear of mass job disappearance. If I lose job today due to AI and tumultuous times continue for next 50 years it is of no use to me that 2080 is the start of AI based golden era.
Apocryphon 10y ago
Most of these discussions revolve around when and how sufficiently intelligent AI will be available to revolutionize society, but what about the hardware? As in, is there a limit to our ability to design and create (cost-effectively) the mechanical and other physical components that are required for building the precise robots and other machines of this automated future? At what point do we hit a physical limit of cost prohibitive machinery for full automation? I'm not sure what "full automation" really entails, but those who envision to inevitable automation future don't really explain it either. Everyone focuses on the software without considering if there may be limits to the hardware, and by that I don't just mean the computing machines but everything in meatspace.
eva1984 10y ago
AI is a flaky term changing its meaning every now and then, and indeed, as the backbone of the hype, Deep Learning itself is rapidly evolving unlike any other fields I have witnessed. Take CV for example. AlexNet is wakeup call for deep learning renaissance, however no one has predicted that we would go beyond human-level performance in just 3 years(ResNet developed in 2015). Same goes for AlphaGo/Machine Translation/Speech Recognition, or the latest photo-realistic stacked GAN. All in all it is hard to predict what we will end up with by looking at history because we are in such an exciting time of ML/AI development. No matter how prestigious that person might be, his or her words affect very little what the future will actually be, only technology itself could.
cutler 10y ago
The AI revolution will wake up the west to the realities of capitalism. Trump's spat with China over trade barriers is just one example of America coming to terms with the fact that capitalism has no sense of patriotism or morality. If the price (of labour) is right capitalists will do business with anyone. The capitalist philosophy, based on Adam Smith's "invisible hand" which mysteriously takes care of the common good, is a fallacy behind which the greed of the 1% masquerades as success. Capitalism's goal is to drive down the price of labour which it can only see as a cost. AI is the capitalist's dream, presenting for the first time the possibility of eliminating human labour altogether. There is only one question we must ask as a society - to whom will the capitalists of the AI age be accountable? Marx wrote about this endgame 150 years ago and of all the economists since then I'd say his analysis has been the most accurate.
neom 10y ago
We can only pray that AI will help correct knowledge inequality.
bleezy 10y ago
I think a lot of people here are missing why these labor changes will be so harmful. Yes, when agriculture, industrialization, etc, emerged, old jobs were replaced with new jobs that people could not have previously predicted. But these new jobs are terrible. They are degrading, dehumanizing, and absurd. We have 63% labor participation, and about half* the people working do nothing. They make Power Point slides, they send emails, they form working groups, they schedule conference calls to schedule other conference calls. Apple hires a bunch of lawyers to sue Samsung. Samsung hires a bunch of lawyers to defend itself. Nothing is accomplished. They all feel like shit, they're addicted to the internet and they are on prescription anti-depressants. These jobs are rituals, they are not productive in any sense. When ancient Egyptians developed agriculture, they did not go on to live lives of luxury. Workers who would previously have spent their days hunting and gathering instead spent their days pushing limestone blocks up to the top of the pyramid. *bullshit on my part, but look at these statistics (https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm) and come up with an industry-by-industry estimate for yourself, it is depressingly high
jdhopeunique 10y ago
It seems like these articles about AI are just a distraction from the real wage suppression caused by temporary work visas, illegal immigration, and workers being classified as contractors. Perhaps tech companies want to signal they have other options for labor as a sort of threat to combat increased scrutiny of their labor practices. Perhaps the message is: "Don't take away our cheap labor or we will release the AI overlords."
warmfuzzykitten 10y ago
In other news, IBM announced today that CEO Ginni Rometti has resigned in order to have more time to spend with her family and the new CEO will be Watson.

104 points by uptown 10y ago

The sad thing is she has to say this to appease her public sector clientele that still holds to the believe that life benefits tied to 'jobs' are the only way to keep the unruly masses under control.

mac01021 10y ago
Do you have a citation to suggest that that is her motive? That would be extremely interesting to read.

anon987 10y ago

More corporate propaganda where they leave out the key details and don't address easy questions. Much like IBM's bullshit 25,000 jobs PR stunt this one has no substance besides the empty words of a suit who will do anything to increase revenue.

DashRattlesnake 10y ago

Is IBM CEO Ginni Rometty someone who can actually provide insight on the impact of AI on society? I'm sure some of her subordinates could, but the only thing I've ever heard about her personally is that she's driving IBM into the ground by chasing some unrealistic financial metric, and I'm not super inclined to bypass a paywall just to hear an executive say executive things.

freehunter 10y ago
>I'm sure some of her subordinates could Where do you think CEOs get their information from?
- congerous 10y ago
  From people trying to protect their own ass by not telling her that Watson doesn't work.
  - edgarvaldes 10y ago
    I'm not familiar with Watson. Why do you say it doesn't work? Does it fall short compared to other offerings in this space?
    - congerous 10y ago
      Watson does not offer anything more than you can get from popular, free open-source projects, and often it offers much less, because it is complex, costly and closed-source. Nobody looks to Watson for the state of the art in AI.
adamgray 10y ago
Ginni started at IBM as an engineer so I'm pretty sure she has some level of technical competence.

josho 10y ago

This is all you need to read from the article: > Advances in artificial intelligence will lead to job losses, but new forms of employment will take their place...History, though, has demonstrated that technological breakthroughs lead to new employment opportunities -- IBM CEO Ginni Rometty But, I think we are approaching (if we haven't already crossed this point) the time where new jobs created by technology advancements will be fewer than old jobs displaced. My example here is Instagram, a company of a dozen staff or so when acquired, is the digital replacement of photo labs in every city. New technologies are not the job creator that they once were and I haven't read anything to contradict that statement or posit that new tech is going to drive jobs growth.

kbenson 10y ago
> My example here is Instagram, a company of a dozen staff or so when acquired, is the digital replacement of photo labs in every city. While not trying to dispute your main point, I hardly think Instagram replaces all of what photo labs do, such as large size prints, professional correction, and specialty products such as cards and books. There are other companies online that do compete in these spaces though. I think most labs are probably getting by with their services targeted towards professionals, who want a bit more accountability than they are likely to get using a large service. That may just mean a semi-large to large lab though, so small labs likely have a hard time of it.
- creaghpatr 10y ago
  Instagram also enabled some business to be created or to grow based on ease of access and low/no overhead costs for its service. Instagram 'models' come to mind.
ar15saveslives 10y ago
Instagram is not replacement for photo labs, digital cameras are.
- mtgx 10y ago
  So smartphones? I thinking looking at this from the point of view of a single product category is too simplistic and likely inaccurate. A better way of looking at this may be "one new ecosystem of jobs is replacing another". If you look at it this way, it's possible that the new ecosystem is just as big in terms of number of jobs. I think a bigger problem may be that the pace of change is accelerating and people used to sticking to a job for a decade or longer may find themselves having to do more drastic career changes every few years.

chollida1 10y ago

We've seen this before with the transition from a labour force that was 50%+ involved in farming to one that became a manufacturing based society and then again in the move from manufacturing to services. One of the bigger differences with AI is that it now may take away many of the lower tier "white collar" jobs along with blue collar jobs that were previously displaced by technology shits. I'm not terribly familiar with my economics history but is it possible that a huge tide of AI backed apps could be the first time that a significant portion of white collar jobs are lost along with the typical blue collar jobs that are more traditionally lost with tech shifts? Then again, in 2000, alot of first world programmers were worried about offshoring of programming jobs, I haven't seen any real impact of the loss of these jobs on programmers in North America so perhaps IBM is correct that AI will produce as many new jobs as it replaces.

jedbrown 10y ago
In each previous upheaval, new industries created large numbers of low-skilled jobs. In contrast, most of the new jobs created by AI will require significant education and creativity.
arebop 10y ago
The issue is not that yet another group of cowards is whining. The issue is that once machines can do everything better than humans, we will need a new way to organize society. Machines have already replaced animals including humans for the application of pure physical force to solving problems. Now machines are now replacing animals including humans for the application of intellect to solving problems. It is not clear that there is any next frontier. Would it be "love" or "spiritual practice" or what? Some people say that AI will not progress as far as industrial-age machines did in obsoleting humans. They sometimes give specific examples, claiming that they find AI-generated art to be dull or that AI-guided robotic surgeons only succeed in narrow tasks, etc. It's OK to argue that this will take a long time but I haven't heard anyone explain why the AIs won't win in the long run. Maybe the run is so long we shouldn't worry about it? Some other people say "we found new jobs before, we'll do it again." For example, the IBM chief. And that seems like empty wishful thinking.

joe_the_user 10y ago

In discussions of the issue, AI and automation are often used interchangeably and this entirely clouds the issue. The AI that is so far real is a particular kind of software that has helped large-scale decisions and processes in large enterprises, large websites and etc - places with a lot of data to agregate. Automation is an ongoing process of replacing people with machines and it is what has eliminated jobs. Advances in software has helped some automation and some of those advances are connected to AI but a lot of the advances involve materials, processes, a willingness-or-not of consumers to use automated processes rather than interacting with a human (whether buying online or from automatic kiosk or whatever). Indeed, the AI-in-particular and job losses in general narrative is just about a sales-pitch for IBM's Watson etc rather than a serious threat.

ChuckMcM 10y ago
This position, "AI as automation", is the important one. Tasks, whether they are manufacturing or service, have a difficulty level in automation. That difficulty is generally scored as a 'cost' with respect to having a person do the task or service and the cost to have them do that. There are two costs associated with execution, training and marginal cost of execution. So if you spend 10 hours training a factory worker to use a machine, that is your training cost, if it takes them 1 second to operate the machine to do the task, that is the marginal cost. Consider the printing press. The printing press replaces a fully manual process. A scribe takes 3 to 5 years to write out a copy of a book. They are trained for many years in calligraphy, and each book takes years to produce. The printing press on the other hand you train a 'scribe' to arrange the letters from a type tray into a plate, to ink it, to press it onto sheets. That training takes less time than calligraphy training. Then for each book the scribe puts together the plates, prints out multiple copies of the page, and then assembles the book from the various pages. One or more copies of a single book can happen in a week. Your marginal cost has gone down as well. Then plate printers, removed the type trays. Then mechanical paper handling fed paper into these machines. Etc to the point where now you need nothing, the author writes, uploads it to their kindle publishing account and the readers down load and read. But all through this process "employment" around the notion of books changed. And who was employed and how also changed. The product, written and illustrated communication from one person to many, was fundamentally the same but delivered differently. What we think of as "AI" today allows automating with less people training tasks which defied automation before. And by doing so it changes the market dynamics around that good or service. The most popular example is livery and delivery services with automated drivers. It only became possible to automate a driver when you had a machine that could recognize and respond to a wide variety of conditions in its environment.

congerous 10y ago

Rometty doesn't even know that Watson is a vaporware boondoggle, so how would she know what's going to happen when AI impacts society. She is probably the least qualified person at IBM to talk about AI, and IBM itself is one of the least qualified companies practicing "AI". She too far removed from the trenches. But IBM has excellent PR, and this is the line I would take if I were betting my company on AI services.

deleted 10y ago
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garysieling 10y ago
What part is vaporware? I've used the AlchemyAPI bits they acquired in building https://www.findlectures.com https://www.findlectures.com, and it's useful, albeit way oversold.
- congerous 10y ago
  I don't know, you tell me how much of this you believe: https://www.fastcompany.com/3065339/mind-and-machine/can-ibms-watson-do-it-all https://www.fastcompany.com/3065339/mind-and-machine/can-ibm... > A doctor reads about a half dozen medical research papers in a month, Meyerson says, whereas Watson can read a half million in about 15 seconds. From that, machine learning (one of the key types of artificial intelligence today) can suggest diagnoses and the most promising course of treatment.

cjlars 10y ago

There's a lot believers in technological unemployment here on HN and one thing I think that viewpoint misses is just how darn resilient humans are to changes in the economy. In the past 150 years, we've seen human manual labor replaced by mechanical labor. Think about that -- a lot of early California settlers walked here, and now you're commanding power roughly equivalent to 100 horses when you hop into your car. Agricultural employment went from 90%+ of the population to ~1% over a few generations. People using computers at work went from less than 1% to complete ubiquity in 30 years. And against all of this, unemployment is still near its target rate. Is the large scale rollout of predictive algorithms really a bigger wave than those that have come previously?

youdounderstand 10y ago
Unemployment is only part of it. What about wages?
- cjlars 10y ago
  It's all speculation. Increases in productivity (GDP per hour worked) are typically accompanied by rising wages. So you're likely to see job losses in impacted industries accompanied by rising wages in aggregate. It's not obvious which direction inequality would head.
  - cmurf 10y ago
    It's not speculation, stagnant wages is a real problem we've been experiencing for decades. As far as I know, no one disputes this fact, it's just that no one really knows what to do about it.
ergothus 10y ago
unemployment calculated how? As I understand it, we measure based on how many people are looking for work and have it. So if our social safety nets (retirement) and cultural expectations have kept pace with people being employed less, (be it in hours/day, hours/week, or just what years you'll be working), I'd expect unemployment numbers to not show the effects of technological unemployment. Of course, it's too simplistic to just assert what I have and ignore forces on the other side (for example, dual income households are now the norm). That is, however, my point: Looking at the unemployment numbers is a poor measure of any effects upon people's ability to work as it has so much else lumped in there.

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pdeuchler 10y ago

BREAKING: CEO who's compensation and job depends on selling advancements in computing downplays the downsides of said advancements

ilaksh 10y ago

Deep learning-ish advances can theoretically automate a ton of things now, but it will take a few years for those AIs to be engineered/trained/marketed. That is actually a continuation of automation which is as much a social process as it is about technology. But if you look at projects like Deep Mind Lab, Open AI Universe, Good AIs Lab and 5 million usd AGI contest, combine those 3d environments with incremental learning transferred across domains, leveraging deep learning, hybrid and other advancements, as well as (hopefully) the existing body of research from the field of AGI (which has existed for a number of years, despite many pretending it didn't) -- we now have very powerful parallel learning tools and many public projects aimed at general agents. And very convincing demos in more narrow domains. Because of all of this I personally believe the core AGI technology will be demonstrated within the next two years. How long before that makes its way into embodied robots and gets trained up to the point it can be readily adapted to various industries may be another few years. So my own belief is that we should expect ALL jobs to start to be 'threatened' by AGI systems by around 2022-2023.

frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
You are proof that the hype surrounding AI/Machine Learning has gone way too far.
- drcode 10y ago
  I get your point, but in general I don't understand people who look at the things coming out of google et al lately and can still say to themselves "This is just a minor incremental improvement over previous AI research" I'm sorry, but the stuff coming out in the last couple of years just seems like it's in a totally different league to me...
- ilaksh 10y ago
  _I_ am proof? I wonder why you are making it personal. Its not about me though is it? Look at the Open AI Universe, Deep Mind AI Lab, Good AI Universe, etc. Look them up. They all say that the goal is artificial general intelligence. All of these companies/programs have multiple literal geniuses and tens or even hundreds of millions or more in funding. The AGI environments are public, so who knows how many hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of talented programmers and scientists are working towards the same goal. Do _you_ think that all of these large programs, companies, investors would be so publicly pursuing this goal if it were not feasible? If not within two years, then how many years do you think it will be before these projects yield results that have human-like generality or abilities? If you suppose they will never achieve that, then what level of generality do you assume them to be limited to? Certainly those groups expect to achieve some type of general intelligence. So perhaps you assume in the near term it will not be human-level, then at what level do you suppose it will be limited? Dog-like intelligence? Once agents achieve dog-like intelligence, why would you assume there would not be a way to progress beyond that? We have already achieved super-human intelligence in numerous particular domains.

RRRA 10y ago

This whole question is missing philosophical context. Maybe not now, but once we all get automated, what is the goal we're trying to reach? Where are we going with this?

malka 10y ago
what do you think will happen to the working class when it becomes useless to those in charge ? Don't you think they'd enjoy more living on earth without us, plebeian ? (eg, like the spacers living in Solaria in Asimov novels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaria )

EternalData 10y ago

The problem with AI is that it's dynamite when it comes to capital-labour relations. You can't compete with something with perfect agency that never gets sick. Now, are there going to be new categories of work and new economies? Yes. But in the meanwhile, for a category of work that defines a plurality if not majority of the functioning economy (basically anything that doesn't require creativity across multiple domains or empathy), there are going to be SEVERE income share implications. Keep in mind that labour share of income has gone down drastically in the last few decades and that as a result, real wages have stagnated -- which has produced significant unrest in developed countries and unseated the established political order. If that trend continues...

josho 10y ago
> You can't compete with something with perfect agency that never gets sick. Now, are there going to be new categories of work and new economies? Follow your own logic to its conclusion. If AI does that then what are the new jobs? We are eliminating entire job categories. While the new jobs will be in entirely different categories (e.g. manual labor will be all but eliminated, and the new jobs will be in creative industries). There is very little cross over between those job categories so we are heading to a future with a significant portion of the population jobless.
- EternalData 10y ago
  Machines are bad at transferring domain knowledge and generalizing/making unconventional linkages between topics -- what some would regard as creativity, they're also not going to be very good at empathy without essentially solving for strong AI and regularized data on human emotions -- there also are going to be human jobs because of protectionist instincts. ex: A machine right now would actually probably do a more optimal job of determining interest rates if given more economic data and more data on outputs/outcomes, but replacing the Fed and analysts under it with a machine is a political football and a half to even say. If we solve for strong AI, we might as well kiss the species goodbye, never mind just jobs -- but the AI we have in between is not going to completely eliminate every category of work in the present, never mind future ones that might arise.

WhitneyLand 10y ago

Does she mean AI won't be a job killer "for a while" or "ever"? Does anyone really believe the latter?

stevehiehn 10y ago

So it WILL be a job killer but hopefully there will be new ones.

balozi 10y ago

If I was Ms. Rometty, I would spend my time playing up the fact that A.I. will lead to a vastly improved quality of life for everyone. Advancements in knowledge always tend to do that and A.I. is a great leap forward in tech knowledge.

BJBBB 10y ago

1. not certain about the articles demographics - see https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/demo/p25-1143.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio... The big problem with immigrant-fueled growth in America is that the first derivative of most Latin American demographic trends indicates larger reductions in growth rate than the U.S. or Canada. So North America, in general, could become dependent on higher-risk immigrant populations from Asia to maintain any significant growth. 2. Most boomers will be dead and turned to dust before 2060. And age distribution could become flat as fertility rates go flat. After 2045, the over 65 population rate will probably decrease to under 25% for North America. Some actuaries are thinking that people will not necessarily continue to have increased lifespans. 3. Quality and financial incentives for production and design automation have been driving industry at increasing rate for at least 25 years. My three current employers (one full-time regular, two contract) are all under 200 employees, have all reduced head count by at 15% to 40% over last 5 to 10 years, and have mandated to either not increase bodies or to further decrease bodies. 4. Too much emphasis on self-driving vehicles. Most industrial automation is after the obvious low-hanging fruit - logistics and production, where you do not necessarily see actual robotics, but much process automation and decision-making sustained by ML. 5. Mid-level jobs are being increasingly targeted: parsing of legal documents, accounting, warehouse management and stock control, and some of the more simple product design functions. 6. Anecdotal stuff. In Early 2016, employer's main site in Southern California terminated OVER half of the engineering group - mostly support and mid-level management. Only one technician, no PCB designers, no mechanical designers, and no engineering managers remain. The remaining engineers do it all - feasible because design automation tools have reached a 'critical' mass. Spent most of October through December automating the crap out of a factory warehouse and related processes. Last week, 14 people were terminated at the Mexico factory site. The factory warehouse had 14 full-time and 4 part-time employees in warehouse; there are now 3 full and 1 part-timer; and the part-timer will probably go away next quarter. And no robots in sight...

geodel 10y ago

I think it is also matter of time scale. There may be new jobs once this all settles down. Today I have real fear of mass job disappearance. If I lose job today due to AI and tumultuous times continue for next 50 years it is of no use to me that 2080 is the start of AI based golden era.

Apocryphon 10y ago

Most of these discussions revolve around when and how sufficiently intelligent AI will be available to revolutionize society, but what about the hardware? As in, is there a limit to our ability to design and create (cost-effectively) the mechanical and other physical components that are required for building the precise robots and other machines of this automated future? At what point do we hit a physical limit of cost prohibitive machinery for full automation? I'm not sure what "full automation" really entails, but those who envision to inevitable automation future don't really explain it either. Everyone focuses on the software without considering if there may be limits to the hardware, and by that I don't just mean the computing machines but everything in meatspace.

eva1984 10y ago

AI is a flaky term changing its meaning every now and then, and indeed, as the backbone of the hype, Deep Learning itself is rapidly evolving unlike any other fields I have witnessed. Take CV for example. AlexNet is wakeup call for deep learning renaissance, however no one has predicted that we would go beyond human-level performance in just 3 years(ResNet developed in 2015). Same goes for AlphaGo/Machine Translation/Speech Recognition, or the latest photo-realistic stacked GAN. All in all it is hard to predict what we will end up with by looking at history because we are in such an exciting time of ML/AI development. No matter how prestigious that person might be, his or her words affect very little what the future will actually be, only technology itself could.

cutler 10y ago

The AI revolution will wake up the west to the realities of capitalism. Trump's spat with China over trade barriers is just one example of America coming to terms with the fact that capitalism has no sense of patriotism or morality. If the price (of labour) is right capitalists will do business with anyone. The capitalist philosophy, based on Adam Smith's "invisible hand" which mysteriously takes care of the common good, is a fallacy behind which the greed of the 1% masquerades as success. Capitalism's goal is to drive down the price of labour which it can only see as a cost. AI is the capitalist's dream, presenting for the first time the possibility of eliminating human labour altogether. There is only one question we must ask as a society - to whom will the capitalists of the AI age be accountable? Marx wrote about this endgame 150 years ago and of all the economists since then I'd say his analysis has been the most accurate.

neom 10y ago

We can only pray that AI will help correct knowledge inequality.

bleezy 10y ago

I think a lot of people here are missing why these labor changes will be so harmful. Yes, when agriculture, industrialization, etc, emerged, old jobs were replaced with new jobs that people could not have previously predicted. But these new jobs are terrible. They are degrading, dehumanizing, and absurd. We have 63% labor participation, and about half* the people working do nothing. They make Power Point slides, they send emails, they form working groups, they schedule conference calls to schedule other conference calls. Apple hires a bunch of lawyers to sue Samsung. Samsung hires a bunch of lawyers to defend itself. Nothing is accomplished. They all feel like shit, they're addicted to the internet and they are on prescription anti-depressants. These jobs are rituals, they are not productive in any sense. When ancient Egyptians developed agriculture, they did not go on to live lives of luxury. Workers who would previously have spent their days hunting and gathering instead spent their days pushing limestone blocks up to the top of the pyramid. *bullshit on my part, but look at these statistics (https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm) and come up with an industry-by-industry estimate for yourself, it is depressingly high

jdhopeunique 10y ago

It seems like these articles about AI are just a distraction from the real wage suppression caused by temporary work visas, illegal immigration, and workers being classified as contractors. Perhaps tech companies want to signal they have other options for labor as a sort of threat to combat increased scrutiny of their labor practices. Perhaps the message is: "Don't take away our cheap labor or we will release the AI overlords."

warmfuzzykitten 10y ago

In other news, IBM announced today that CEO Ginni Rometti has resigned in order to have more time to spend with her family and the new CEO will be Watson.