4 ms·
This is no surprise. This is the low hanging fruit. And economies that are already quite advanced (have outsourced the more mechanical work to developing coun
by blunte 8y ago
This is no surprise. This is the low hanging fruit. And economies that are already quite advanced (have outsourced the more mechanical work to developing countries) are at less risk.
Perhaps a silly example, but imagine people whose job it was to answer arithmetic queries: "What is 47 + 1.5?" Any modern human who couldn't be bothered with doing that in their head would use a readily available calculator, even if that was just an address bar in their browser.
Clearly, the arithmetic people would lose their jobs to technology. There's no creativity to their work; it is easily programmed.
This applies to any job. If your job is to vacuum a floor, then eventually there will be some version of an iRobot that can do it just as well or better.
Humans have immense potential, depending on how you choose to measure it. Maybe not all that potential is marketable, but most of it is currently not outsource-able to AI or robotics. Eventually, in the internet-connected world, if you want to remain relevant as a human, you'll need to exercise some of your talents that cannot be reasonably approximated by a computer. Obviously you'll stop playing chess for money... and you'll stop doing other tasks that robots or specialized hardware can do.
- swagasaurus-rex 8y agoWhat you say makes sense. Humans were once the only means of labor; even animals needed a human attendant – and the cost of construction was the number of capable adults to help build economies. Industrialization, and especially the use of oil and electricity to do work, decoupled man-power. Computers and the internet have decoupled man-hours, and now we see economies of scale, and an information economy. With AI, we may see even less dependence on human labor. What will this do to the human population? With low skill labor made irrelevant, how will those people contribute and receive money from an increasingly gated economy? Interestingly, food also benefits from economies of scale and automation. Cheaper food leads to a larger population. Larger population means more people contributing to the economy, but as we've already seen in farming this last hundred years, fewer and fewer people of whom the economy pays wages to. It's a strange balance. I do not know what it all means.
- IloveHN84 8y agoI still don't know AI or robots capable of doing work of electricians, house constructors, shoe repairing, car repairing and so on. There's a class of job too complicated for a robot at the current state of art (say, for next 50-70 years at least), because humans do it better and even in awful conditions. AI can't cope with bad weather or too complicated problems. See how the "autonomous cars" drive well on sunny and dry days against windy or snowy days
- imtringued 8y agoThere are easier problems that still cannot be solved by robots. The biggest milestone will probably something completely trivial like newspaper delivery. It's repetitive routine work with the added complexity that every mailbox is completely different.