4 ms·

is this completely speculative, contingent on the far fetched notion of AGI? which sectors of the labor market have until now been appreciably affected by ML? h

is this completely speculative, contingent on the far fetched notion of AGI? which sectors of the labor market have until now been appreciably affected by ML? how many image labelers has ML put out of business? quite the contrary right? lots of people in southeast asia now working in labeling sweatshops? the only industries i see potentially affected (~10 years) is commercial driving.

ivanhoe 8y ago
And packaging/warehouses probably... but problem is that even this limited change will have much wider effect on economy because for instance self-driven trucks don't stop to eat in restaurants.
- paganel 8y ago
  It will be a while until we'll get to the point of self-driving trucks, at least by looking at my brother's job (he's a trucker who has been driving all over Europe, from Spain up to Turkey). For once, how do you deal with theft? Because an unattended truck stopped in the middle of nowhere carrying stuff potentially worth tens if not hundreds of thousands of euros is going to attract a lot of bad people. Second, how do you deal with the myriad of specific unknown unknowns that happen daily in the life of a truck driver? How would an AI truck navigate the unmapped dirt-roads of Normandy in order to get to a potato field? (a job that my brother has had to carry out last year). And there are other countless examples like this. And I'd add a third option, that is that a truck driver is more than just a plain driver, he has to deal with lots and lots of paper-work, especially in a place like Europe which still has lots of borders in place (even the "soft" borders are not that "soft" when you're carrying stuff around).
  - UnFleshedOne 8y ago
    How does a truck driver deals with theft currently? Are potential thieves discouraged by presence of a human because penalties for harming humans are higher than mere theft?
    - paganel 8y ago
      > How does a truck driver deals with theft currently I can tell you what he did when some fuel thieves tried to steal some of the fuel from his truck in no-where Bulgary: he took an iron bar from inside his cabin and started chasing those thieves, accompanied by an Hungarian fellow truck driver who had noticed the thieves in the first place. > Are potential thieves discouraged by presence of a human because penalties for harming humans are higher than mere theft Yeah, that’s how things stand right now in these parts of the world (I live in Romania). An unattended house in a village will most certainly attract some unwanted eyes, much more so compared to a house where people live day-to-day. The same goes for trucks, or for anything with value, really.
notahacker 8y ago
The paper doesn't cover speculative AGI stuff at all (or driving for that matter) but focuses on the applications of existing technologies (image recognition, ML classification, robotics) approaches to different fields. The general conclusion is that some technologies will replace labour and some will augment it and increase human employee usefulness, but that public policy should be directed towards enhancing the prospect for the labour augmentation over the labour replacement devices. (It's not that long and quite readable for an economics paper, although it doesn't aim to provide any evidence for its assertions either.)

ivanhoe 8y ago

And packaging/warehouses probably... but problem is that even this limited change will have much wider effect on economy because for instance self-driven trucks don't stop to eat in restaurants.

paganel 8y ago
It will be a while until we'll get to the point of self-driving trucks, at least by looking at my brother's job (he's a trucker who has been driving all over Europe, from Spain up to Turkey). For once, how do you deal with theft? Because an unattended truck stopped in the middle of nowhere carrying stuff potentially worth tens if not hundreds of thousands of euros is going to attract a lot of bad people. Second, how do you deal with the myriad of specific unknown unknowns that happen daily in the life of a truck driver? How would an AI truck navigate the unmapped dirt-roads of Normandy in order to get to a potato field? (a job that my brother has had to carry out last year). And there are other countless examples like this. And I'd add a third option, that is that a truck driver is more than just a plain driver, he has to deal with lots and lots of paper-work, especially in a place like Europe which still has lots of borders in place (even the "soft" borders are not that "soft" when you're carrying stuff around).
- UnFleshedOne 8y ago
  How does a truck driver deals with theft currently? Are potential thieves discouraged by presence of a human because penalties for harming humans are higher than mere theft?
  - paganel 8y ago
    > How does a truck driver deals with theft currently I can tell you what he did when some fuel thieves tried to steal some of the fuel from his truck in no-where Bulgary: he took an iron bar from inside his cabin and started chasing those thieves, accompanied by an Hungarian fellow truck driver who had noticed the thieves in the first place. > Are potential thieves discouraged by presence of a human because penalties for harming humans are higher than mere theft Yeah, that’s how things stand right now in these parts of the world (I live in Romania). An unattended house in a village will most certainly attract some unwanted eyes, much more so compared to a house where people live day-to-day. The same goes for trucks, or for anything with value, really.

notahacker 8y ago

The paper doesn't cover speculative AGI stuff at all (or driving for that matter) but focuses on the applications of existing technologies (image recognition, ML classification, robotics) approaches to different fields. The general conclusion is that some technologies will replace labour and some will augment it and increase human employee usefulness, but that public policy should be directed towards enhancing the prospect for the labour augmentation over the labour replacement devices. (It's not that long and quite readable for an economics paper, although it doesn't aim to provide any evidence for its assertions either.)