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I have yet to see a single example of "AI automation" causing anyone to lose their jobs. In fact, I have yet to see a convincing example of "AI automation" of a

I have yet to see a single example of "AI automation" causing anyone to lose their jobs. In fact, I have yet to see a convincing example of "AI automation" of anything. Please HN school me if there is an obvious example I am overlooking.

candiodari 8y ago
Ask any reporter. Or translator. Quite a few menial functions in soliciting/law/... (to give a stupid example: tax prep) Now you might say, "that's not AI" that's * crowdsourcing/ranking (facebook/reddit/youtube/twitter... any "feed" website) * search/curation/quality scoring algorithms (google/all news curation websites/...) * news/entertainment/stock market/weather rewriting/collecting/reporting/... algorithms * specifically designed and implemented algorithms (ie. tax prep) But all of these are in some ways very primitive AI algorithms (or you might say they're all advanced heuristic-enhanced breadth-first-search algorithms, including AI algorithms ... certainly true). And about the specific algorithms, these days they all use some form of AI (at the very least for expense classification). The initial phases of AI will actually involve more jobs. Why ? The short of it is that what used to be middle management is much easier to automate than "individual contributor" roles. Or, far, far more eloquent: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm But in the end AI will kill most jobs.
- scottlocklin 8y ago
  I guess pagerank counts as machine learning; totally not AI though. Maybe translators is a good example. Machine translations actually are pretty crude, and IMO they got worse when they started using "advanced" stuff like dweeb learning; KNN was better. KNN is usually better, as it just uses the data, rather han a model of the data. The other examples are not even in the ballpark. They're just algorithms. See, when you say "in the end AI will kill most jobs" -people keep saying that, and it keeps not happening. I mean, you might be totally right, but it sure as hell isn't happening real fast or in any obvious way. If I look at the 8086 world of the late 1980s, it isn't super different from now. What awesome human superpower do I have thanks to 'AI?'
  - candiodari 8y ago
    > What awesome human superpower do I have thanks to 'AI?' Ok, let's name a few: You can filter through 400 hours of video every minute (youtube's upload rate) and find, perhaps not THE most interesting videos to you, but at least videos interesting enough to watch a lot (Youtube). Those videos can be subtitled. Again not perfect (not that human translators of videos were -on average- very good) They can collect not just bucketloads, but absurd amounts of news and facts and write short summaries of what happened (ie. most of the newspaper articles you read these days) You can instruct machines to do things just by asking them (alexa, cortana, google). You can talk, over the phone, to thousands of people at once (using google cloud or amazon service, or you could hire a few machine learning engineers and give them a year to write stuff) You can "program" robots to walk, crawl, and twirl pencils without so much as knowing what a feedback loop is. You can generate infinite amounts (and lengths) of well-composed music. You can generate infinite amounts of beautiful paintings or even pictures (and even video, really) of whatever you want in whatever style you want. You can program a car to drive itself (getting a basic DNN algorithm up is not even that hard). You can have a drone fly itself through dense foliage and not hit stuff, and more generally many tricks with drone flying that no human, or human programmed non-learning algorithm can do (and yet we still insist on model-based autopilots) You can watch incredible amounts of timeseries and find things acting weird (very useful that one) ... https://www.reddit.com/r/machinelearning https://www.reddit.com/r/machinelearning Good luck doing any of the above by hand.
    - sheeshkebab 8y ago
      I didn't think I needed any of these when I was I running around schools in 80s...also, most things above seem like those that we could collectively live without and be happier.
    - scottlocklin 8y ago
      Let's list them Video filter: not AI, doesn't work as a video filter (aka searching youtube isn't actually searching video content), also nobody but NSA cares Video subtitle: granted; pretty cool on the rare occasion it works in a usable way News summaries: no, you can't do that Talking machines: HMM existed in useful form in the 80s Programming robots with 'AI' -no you absolutely cannot do this; anyone who tries to sell you this is a charlatan Generating 'well composed' music/art: total nonsense -name one such piece of music or art. FWIIW LZW also generates canned music, and isn't 'AI' Programming car to drive itself: no, you can't do this, despite the best efforts of Waymo's PR department to assert otherwise. Drone flight; collision avoidance tasks & etc: nope total nonsense "Watching timeseries:" this improves people's lives in what way? I'm aware of algorithms like SAX and so on; I'm also aware that moving average crossover is used a lot more often than ML based TS anomaly detection. You have a big fat nothing burger above. 'AI' hasn't changed anyone's life in an appreciable way. The things you list above are ... very far from the singularity of mass unemployment that people seem to envision. Most of them actually seem to create more jobs. Most of the things you cite above visibly do not exist in the physical world, outside of PR press releases. The only stuff which does work, basically all it does is increase the level of totalitarian surveillance possible.

candiodari 8y ago

Ask any reporter. Or translator. Quite a few menial functions in soliciting/law/... (to give a stupid example: tax prep) Now you might say, "that's not AI" that's * crowdsourcing/ranking (facebook/reddit/youtube/twitter... any "feed" website) * search/curation/quality scoring algorithms (google/all news curation websites/...) * news/entertainment/stock market/weather rewriting/collecting/reporting/... algorithms * specifically designed and implemented algorithms (ie. tax prep) But all of these are in some ways very primitive AI algorithms (or you might say they're all advanced heuristic-enhanced breadth-first-search algorithms, including AI algorithms ... certainly true). And about the specific algorithms, these days they all use some form of AI (at the very least for expense classification). The initial phases of AI will actually involve more jobs. Why ? The short of it is that what used to be middle management is much easier to automate than "individual contributor" roles. Or, far, far more eloquent: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm But in the end AI will kill most jobs.

scottlocklin 8y ago
I guess pagerank counts as machine learning; totally not AI though. Maybe translators is a good example. Machine translations actually are pretty crude, and IMO they got worse when they started using "advanced" stuff like dweeb learning; KNN was better. KNN is usually better, as it just uses the data, rather han a model of the data. The other examples are not even in the ballpark. They're just algorithms. See, when you say "in the end AI will kill most jobs" -people keep saying that, and it keeps not happening. I mean, you might be totally right, but it sure as hell isn't happening real fast or in any obvious way. If I look at the 8086 world of the late 1980s, it isn't super different from now. What awesome human superpower do I have thanks to 'AI?'
- candiodari 8y ago
  > What awesome human superpower do I have thanks to 'AI?' Ok, let's name a few: You can filter through 400 hours of video every minute (youtube's upload rate) and find, perhaps not THE most interesting videos to you, but at least videos interesting enough to watch a lot (Youtube). Those videos can be subtitled. Again not perfect (not that human translators of videos were -on average- very good) They can collect not just bucketloads, but absurd amounts of news and facts and write short summaries of what happened (ie. most of the newspaper articles you read these days) You can instruct machines to do things just by asking them (alexa, cortana, google). You can talk, over the phone, to thousands of people at once (using google cloud or amazon service, or you could hire a few machine learning engineers and give them a year to write stuff) You can "program" robots to walk, crawl, and twirl pencils without so much as knowing what a feedback loop is. You can generate infinite amounts (and lengths) of well-composed music. You can generate infinite amounts of beautiful paintings or even pictures (and even video, really) of whatever you want in whatever style you want. You can program a car to drive itself (getting a basic DNN algorithm up is not even that hard). You can have a drone fly itself through dense foliage and not hit stuff, and more generally many tricks with drone flying that no human, or human programmed non-learning algorithm can do (and yet we still insist on model-based autopilots) You can watch incredible amounts of timeseries and find things acting weird (very useful that one) ... https://www.reddit.com/r/machinelearning https://www.reddit.com/r/machinelearning Good luck doing any of the above by hand.
  - sheeshkebab 8y ago
    I didn't think I needed any of these when I was I running around schools in 80s...also, most things above seem like those that we could collectively live without and be happier.
  - scottlocklin 8y ago
    Let's list them Video filter: not AI, doesn't work as a video filter (aka searching youtube isn't actually searching video content), also nobody but NSA cares Video subtitle: granted; pretty cool on the rare occasion it works in a usable way News summaries: no, you can't do that Talking machines: HMM existed in useful form in the 80s Programming robots with 'AI' -no you absolutely cannot do this; anyone who tries to sell you this is a charlatan Generating 'well composed' music/art: total nonsense -name one such piece of music or art. FWIIW LZW also generates canned music, and isn't 'AI' Programming car to drive itself: no, you can't do this, despite the best efforts of Waymo's PR department to assert otherwise. Drone flight; collision avoidance tasks & etc: nope total nonsense "Watching timeseries:" this improves people's lives in what way? I'm aware of algorithms like SAX and so on; I'm also aware that moving average crossover is used a lot more often than ML based TS anomaly detection. You have a big fat nothing burger above. 'AI' hasn't changed anyone's life in an appreciable way. The things you list above are ... very far from the singularity of mass unemployment that people seem to envision. Most of them actually seem to create more jobs. Most of the things you cite above visibly do not exist in the physical world, outside of PR press releases. The only stuff which does work, basically all it does is increase the level of totalitarian surveillance possible.