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I think I don't understand your comment about time-frames.
You are again trying to argue by picking and choosing comments out of context, which is completely evident in each whole post you picked them from.
GMI - General Machine Intelligence - and MC - Machine Consciousness - are, IMHO, much further off than my rather optimistic AI colleagues want to believe. (Optimistic on the tech, mostly pessimistic on the consequences.) I don't think we'll see either for decades, perhaps the better part of a century. (But maybe I'm technologically pessi myself, there.)
But limited AI - just enough brains to do jobs requiring narrowly defined judgment and critical skills - is here now, and evolving fast, and will indeed replace that next tier of human-only jobs quite soon - significant presence within a decade.
Two different things. Which I answered in two different ways. And you tried to glue together. Whether in malicious glee or a complete inability to grasp the topic as a serious one, I can't tell. Turing knows there's plenty in here who dismiss the AI of a McD's kiosk because it can't play chess and debate religion.
This is exactly why I typically don't discuss economics with communists. That debate was won in 1989 anyway.
I don't see any commies here. But that's the way to end a barroom argument, by dismissing the other drunk as not worth your esteemed time. Have another on me, pal, if that's not too Socialist for you.
AI has been capable of replacing many tech jobs for a while. Any narrowly-defined job where there is a limited range of judgement to apply is probably ready for a limited AI replacement. Jobs that are inherently part of network, computing, or tech... even more so.
But that's been on the horizon for a while...
Sure has. I fondly remember a textbook predicting the imminent collapse of the job market for programmers, what with the new and extremely powerful tools arriving on the scene. That was, I think, 1987.
Sure has. I fondly remember a textbook predicting the imminent collapse of the job market for programmers, what with the new and extremely powerful tools arriving on the scene. That was, I think, 1987.
I have an entire book here of failed predictions by experts. You'll have to do better than this limp-wristed backslap, which is simply "They laughed at Einstein, too!" inverted.
Automotive assembly automation. The workforce that builds and maintains this equipment is probably 1/10 or less the size of the workforce it eliminated.
Note that the Tesla plant (after the Roadster era) was built to be highly automated - there was never a "normal" workforce building Models S and later. (That's what hung them last year when they had no way to speed up production.)
Remote IT management. I was there when a server farm needed 100 employees; some now have one wire monkey who flips switches, re-jacks panels and swaps dead servers at the direction of someone halfway around the world who's watching five such plants. Not to mention thousands of businesses that no longer need an IT guy full-time, if not two or three. All remoted to a fractional number of supervisory services.
You forgot the page cite, there.
Ah, yes, the "it's never happened before therefore it will never happen" argument. I really need to make a numbered list of these for convenience.
The entire point is that we're on the cusp of major changes, some of which have already happened and others of which are in progress, that are not evolutionary in the sense of jobs morphing into others, but will create large and sudden workforce reductions in areas that have been long considered "automation proof." The blithe historical assumption that field hands will become cotton gin builders, farm boys will become Model A builders and accountants will become IT managers simply will not hold water from here on out - the vastly smaller workforces with highly specialized training will not come from retraining or reassigning existing workforces. (It almost never has - look at the plight of specialized workers in Detroit when massive automation and modernization made them obsolete. Most died on unemployment, scanty pensions and substandard jobs... which, yes, solved the problem.)
If you look at the Cotton Gin, it did eliminate the person that had to hand filter all the cotton...but it vastly increased the need for people to pick it since it could be planted far more profitably since you could work through it so much faster.
What I'm getting at is this: Are these jobs that you're talking about, these people polishing Deck Chairs on the titanic, are they buggy-whip makers, or blacksmiths, or boilermakers? A Blacksmith can make all sorts of things out of metal. He likely has the skills and know-how to become a welder or a boilermaker or millwright or machinist.
While there certainly will be collateral damage, is a CPA or Actuary so specialized that their skills can't be applied elsewhere? Accounting isn't an easy field of study. The math chops required to become an Actuary aren't widespread.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quietude
We're quite a ways from GMI and even further from MC.
But neither are needed to sit and do actuarial or accounting work 24 hours a day. Or warehouse management, or freight logistics, or about five hundred other focused jobs that presently need somewhat more flexibility and judgment than software alone can provide... but nothing else on the human intelligence scale.
Accounting and billing has long been automated. To a certain extent, how long has actuarial work been a computer model as well? The "Accounting" field can be everything from a bookkeeper at a lumber yard, to a CPA that works for individuals and works on "if/then" scenarios, to a CPA for an Auditing firm that goes to a warehouse in South Carolina to count bats of insulation or pallets of power tools, and a million things in between. The If/Then is easily handled by AI. The ability to caution a client that if he buys X instead of Y for his business, the tax implications are thus, are harder, because the machine has to know that the client is looking to buy a Buick Sedan as opposed to a flatbed delivery truck.
If you look at the Cotton Gin, it did eliminate the person that had to hand filter all the cotton...but it vastly increased the need for people to pick it since it could be planted far more profitably since you could work through it so much faster.
Believe me, I thoroughly understand the argument and the historical tendency for displaced workers to find different jobs, often created by the force that displaced them. Know it forwards and backwards.
But this time really is different. The nature of the change and the vast ratio of human workers to replacement systems is a scale far beyond the cotton gin or automotive welding robots or anything we've ever seen before. And while a savvy field hand could probably become a pretty good gin operator, if not a good gin mechanic - if not a gin assembler and fabricator - the nature of AI replacement systems is not something an accountant or actuary or warehouse manager or any of those lower-end white collar workers is going to be able to pick up in night school. Nor, even in the wildest scenarios, will there be a need for a fraction of those workers... especially not with the universities turning out barrels of field-educated young sprogs.
An AI accounting department does not generate some massive increased need for "cotton pickers." You're welcome to show how it might.
Anyone who wants to sleep tight on this ancient verity is welcome to. But it's a fairy tale this time, and I challenge anyone to compare the likely characteristics of this 'revolution' to anything that's ever happened before, considering all technical, job-ratio, and elevated skill set issues.
(I - and some very savvy colleagues - have focused on such comparisons... and there ain't none. But surprise me.)
Oh - and while this thread is about IT jobs, I consider the potential losses in that field incidental and obvious to anyone who can read. It's the desk-job, white-collar trades that are going to cause shocks, because there's such a widespread, smug belief that "machines can't do that."
Well there you go. I sensed socialist tendencies, but full blown communism was actually the agenda.
Who was mentioning dogma and outdated concepts again ?
Excuse me. Do you know how to read? Reread the part where I said this solution probably won't work because ordinary Americans, let alone corporations and other businesses don't like socialism and communism.
I am a retired software developer who made quite a bit of money working in the capitalist world. Capitalism is my friend. I am comfortably retired because of what I was able to achieve under our capitalist system. So how dare you accuse me of being a socialist when I am not. You don't know who I am, yet you try to label me. Way to ruin your crediblity.
So, well there you go. I sensed a developing cheap shot from you, but your trying to discredit my analysis was actually the agenda. Please be aware that others are reading your comments so you should have some basis in reality when you post.
And you foresee this happening within a few hundred years? I seem to recall you saying something like that, but perhaps I'm mistaken.
I do forsee this happening, and I did say this would happen within a few hundred years, perhaps on a different thread if not this one. Maybe this will happen sooner. Maybe as soon as 30 years, but I cannot make the prediction with any degree of certainty. Based on what I have seen, I feel that total automation is a certainty. But there are factors that can speed up or slow down this process, such as the rate of technological advancement, the amount of investment of funds for this research, recessions, depressions, boom times, etc. Hopefully, the problems to come with full automation can be resolved in a good and timely manner well in advance of major job disruptions for a majority of people.
Yes, it is a paradox. When someone is younger, they don't have a decent skill set. But they are cheap to hire if they can find a job. So that is what is becoming in style in the working world. When they get experience and develop an accomplished skill set they become too expensive to retain. Also, their brain power is starting to fade at 40. They become set in their ways and not open to new ways of doing things that are thought up by smart and innovative younger employees who still have their peak brainpower.
Yes, cheap young and poorly paid employees are the way to go these days. If you're over 40, you're out of luck. Maybe that should be the new slogan these days.
Luckily as an ancient person over 60, I still have managed to retain my brainpower and ... wait a minute I forgot what I wanted to say. What was I just talking about? Oh, well here comes the senility that I should have gotten when I was 40. We gotta go sometime.
"The researchers also included a vocabulary test, which serves as a measure of what is known as crystallized intelligence — the accumulation of facts and knowledge. These results confirmed that crystallized intelligence peaks later in life, as previously believed, but the researchers also found something unexpected: While data from the Weschler IQ tests suggested that vocabulary peaks in the late 40s, the new data showed a later peak, in the late 60s or early 70s."
and this:
"the ability to evaluate other people’s emotional states, the peak occurred much later, in the 40s or 50s."
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