Will A.I destroy more jobs than it creates?

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Will A.I destroy more jobs than it creates?What will people when there are no jobs? Sit around all day?Or will new industries emerge and people will still have jobs?

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[+3] - jespah - 03/22/2019Work hours will (or at least they should) be cut. This will accommodate more workers. Because if it takes 2000 person-hours per year to make widgets or try cases or whatever, and a person works...
[+3] - maporsche - 03/22/2019[quote="shiba2666"] Will A.I destroy more jobs than it creates?What will people when there are no jobs? Sit around all day?Or will new industries emerge and people will still have...
[+3] - chai2 - 03/22/2019besides the 2 excellent answers given by marp and jes, I have to wonder about people who think that if we didn't have a job, we would just "sit around all day"
[+3] - maporsche - 03/22/2019I know several people in their mid 50's and early 60's who would retire today if it weren't for the cost of health insurance. If we could solve that problem, then you'd also see more job openings.
[+3] - jespah - 03/22/2019Yep. And offering paid maternity leave for a significant period of time (as in, 2 or 3 years) would take workers out of the pool and temps could fill in.
[+3] - rosborne979 - 04/12/2019What some people call "Weak AI", I call "Strong Automation". That doesn't mean it isn't valuable of functional, but in my opinion, calling any of it "AI" is like...

@shiba2666,

shiba2666 wrote:

Will A.I destroy more jobs than it creates?What will people when there are no jobs? Sit around all day?Or will new industries emerge and people will still have jobs?

If AI replaces workers to any significant degree, it will happen gradually and people will adjust, as will work.

Think about this, if AI comes into play it will be because it increases efficiency and production. This will mean costs will go down. If your current budget has 20% of your salary going to food costs, and food costs go down because of any new technology and now the same food only takes 5% of your income...well, you can live the same life and work 15% less time. Apply this to everything and people may actually get to enjoy leisure time.

But of course new industries will emerge; they will forever.

1 Reply

@maporsche,

Work hours will (or at least they should) be cut. This will accommodate more workers. Because if it takes 2000 person-hours per year to make widgets or try cases or whatever, and a person works 1500 person-hours, then their 'slack' (such as it is) becomes 1/3 of another person's annual work hours.

Make it more lucrative to retire early. Give people the $$ they need to stay in school and out of the labor force when they're young (and just have them volunteer for service, say, to tutor at-risk kids or spend time with seniors). Both of these ideas would take workers out of the pool.

This is a multi-faceted issue, and it can be handled in a lot of different ways.

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besides the 2 excellent answers given by marp and jes, I have to wonder about people who think that if we didn't have a job, we would just "sit around all day"

0 Replies

@jespah,

I know several people in their mid 50's and early 60's who would retire today if it weren't for the cost of health insurance.

If we could solve that problem, then you'd also see more job openings.

2 Replies

@maporsche,

Yep. And offering paid maternity leave for a significant period of time (as in, 2 or 3 years) would take workers out of the pool and temps could fill in.

1 Reply

@shiba2666,

shiba2666 wrote:

Will A.I destroy more jobs than it creates?What will people when there are no jobs? Sit around all day?Or will new industries emerge and people will still have jobs?

5,000 years ago someone invented the wheel. All of a sudden people didn't need to walk so much, and jobs were lost.

500 years ago, someone invented the printing press. All of a sudden people didn't need write books by hand so much, and jobs were lost.

150 years ago, someone invented the steam engine. All of sudden people didn't need to dig, or lift, or weave so much, and jobs were lost.

Every new technology puts people out of work. Somehow humanity goes on anyway. I don't think AI is any different.

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The extra money saved will go to the rich, same as when jobs are sent overseas.

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@maporsche,

maporsche wrote:

I know several people in their mid 50's and early 60's who would retire today if it weren't for the cost of health insurance.

If we could solve that problem, then you'd also see more job openings.

That was exactly my position about 7 years ago. The combination of my husband qualifying for 100% VA disability and the Affordable Care Act enabled me to get off the hamster wheel and not only have better quality of life for myself, but to bring more quality of life to others.

As many of you know, I’m facing many health related problems with my husband (I was almost gonna say “challenges”, but F that, they are problems), but even with all that, I feel very lucky at not having to work in a capacity where I need to make a certain amount to get by.

In the US at least, we are obsessed with the Idea of work. Frankly, we invent a lot of work just to make things people don’t need, so they can buy them, and then have to work.

Just look for “as seen on TV” on YouTube

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@jespah,

jespah wrote:

Yep. And offering paid maternity leave for a significant period of time (as in, 2 or 3 years) would take workers out of the pool and temps could fill in.

Wow. That’s a good one.

1 Reply

@chai2,

Hey, thanks Smile

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@shiba2666,

Our lives are significantly better, and easier, and longer then they were 100, 200, 500 years ago. Technology is clearly making it possible for humans to work less and retire earlier with more luxuries.

I am one of the people building technology that is putting people out of work. I work as an engineer on a speech recognition/ artificial intelligence product that performs a task that used to be done by hundreds of human beings.

The first time I realized this, I was working on software that did automatic medical transcriptions for doctors. We kind of claimed that we were making life better for the human transcriptionists who were doing a tough job; we transformed the work of 5 typists into 1 human "editor" who just checked over the results from the artificial intelligence. The truth is that 80% of the people lost their jobs. On the other hand, this lowered the cost of your healthcare.

I sleep well at night.

1 Reply

@maxdancona,

Millions of people around the World still live in desperate poverty. Millions of others suffer from industrial diseases and the effects of pollution. Poor people in first world countries are holding down 2 or 3 jobs just to keep food on the table. They're not working less, and it's debatable whether their lives are better than those of their parents or grandparents.

Technology alone is not the answer, there needs to be a political solution.

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I don't normally comment on my posts being voted down, let's face it if I did I'd post little else. However it's quite telling that I'm being attacked for injecting a bit of political reality into a rather rose tinted conversation on how much better things will be because the World is run by nice people after all.

It does explain why you're all worried about the costs of medical insurance in your 50s and 60s and I'm not.

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@izzythepush,

I certainly didn't thumb you down for that post (and there... I just upthumbed you).

However, poor people are better off now then they have ever been. There are fewer people dying of poverty, and the life expectancy even of the very poor is rising significantly.

I agree with you that Technology is not the only answer. And, I agree with you that political solutions are important in dealing with poverty (and other issues). Technology is a net positive for human "well-being" (a difficult to define term, but I am using it anyway).

Issues such as the continued risk of nuclear war or global warming are not part of this calculus. These are negatives of technology if unmitigated, but unrelated to my understanding of human-well being... and AI (the subject of this thread) may lower carbon emissions by letting people stay at home..

1 Reply

@maxdancona,

There's poor and there's poor, a sub Saharan subsistence farmer dealing with armed militias isn't much better off.

Life expectancy is starting to go back down in America.

Quote:

On average, life expectancy across the globe is steadily ticking upward—but the same can’t be said for the United States. Three reports newly published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlight a worrying downward trend in Americans’ average life expectancy, with the country’s ongoing drug crisis and climbing suicide rates contributing to a third straight year of decline.

As Lenny Bernstein notes for The Washington Post, the three-year drop represents the longest sustained decline in expected lifespan since the tumultuous period of 1915 to 1918. Then, the decrease could be at least partially attributed to World War I and the devastating 1918 influenza pandemic. Now, the drivers are drug overdoses, which claimed 70,237 lives in 2017, and suicides, which numbered more than 47,000 over the same period. Both of these figures rose between 2016 and 2017.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-life-expectancy-drops-third-year-row-reflecting-rising-drug-overdose-suicide-rates-180970942/

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@shiba2666,

Eventually, if we are lucky, AI will force humanity to think more and hammer less.

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@shiba2666,

In the 1950s and -60s people said the same thing about automation. This is the lump of labor fallacy (clickity-click!) I'll bet they said the same thing when steam engines and textile mills came along.

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@shiba2666,

Quote:

Will A.I destroy more jobs than it creates?

Each AI will require five humanoids plus a boss in charge of the plug.

Quote:

What will people when there are no jobs? Sit around all day?

People will get lazier, entire words will go missing from vital communications.

Quote:

Or will new industries emerge and people will still have jobs?

Service industries will proliferate like machines on a desk. A2K will become a global entertainment hub pandering to the "boldsters", beings that use script as a form of communication.

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A high school math test bested Google Deepmind's algorithm
Dan Robitzski, April 6th 2019

Unfortunately for our new AI overlords, the crusade to take over the world has been stopped in its tracks by an unlikely hurdle: a 16-year-old’s math test.

Faced with the same level of exam that a 16-year-old in the U.K. would take, according to a new paper by Google’s DeepMind, its cutting-edge AI flunked.

The algorithm was trained on the sorts of algebra, calculus, and other types of math questions that would appear on a 16-year-old’s math exam according to the U.K. national curriculum, according to DeepMind researchpublished online on Tuesday.

The researchers tested several types of AI and found that algorithms struggle to translate a question as it appears on a test, full of words and symbols and functions, into the actual operations needed to solve it, according to an article on Medium.

It turns out, according to the research, that even a simple math problem involves a great deal of brainpower, as people learn to automatically learn to make sense of mathematical operations, memorize the order in which to perform them, and know how to turn word problems into equations.

But artificial intelligence is quite literally built to pore over data, scanning for patterns and analyzing them. In that regard, the results of the test — on which the algorithm scored a 14 out of 40 — aren’t reassuring.

https://futurism.com/google-ai-flunked-high-school-math-test/

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Will A.I destroy more jobs than it creates?

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