Will the proliferation of affordable AI decimate the middle class? | Hacker News Reader

Will the proliferation of affordable AI decimate the middle class?

marginalrevolution.com

27 pointselsewhen33 comments

The problem with this rosy picture as all other rosy pictures about automation is that depending on the speed of technological change any automation will potentially destroy the livelihood of a lot of people before they are able to re-adjust to a new economic reality. People can't typically change their skill-set as fast as technology can be introduced.

This doesn't have to be a problem if a country has welfare system mechanism to cope with redundant workers, giving them a line to hold onto until they can re-adjust to the new reality.

The problem is when you combine rapid technological progress with small government dogma. That creates a toxic combination where the only winners are the rich.

This is unfortunate because when you setup a society this way it causes large fractions of the population to fight technological advancement, free trade and immigration.

I think the %1 have to to realize that if people are going to buy into their desired free trade and technological upgrades, then you got to offer something in return. Taxes stuffed away in Panama isn't an acceptable answer to most people ;-)

I think the current "1%" should be the one afraid of AI. Introducing new technology usually seems to shift wealth to a different set of people.

Not in this case. The owners of the commercial AI and robotics benefit. We're already seeing the effects of this: look at the increasing stratification of wealth in the context of increased productivity and automation in recent years.

> The problem is when you combine rapid technological progress with small government dogma.

If this is where the problem lies, then I doubt people will hold to their anti-welfare beliefs once there is widespread joblessness.

In a democratic society, people should be expected to eventually vote for their own benefit.

>automation will potentially destroy the livelihood of a lot of people before they are able to re-adjust to a new economic reality.

...only if solar powered Santa Claus machines don't come along first I suppose...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus_machine

>> small government dogma

I think a bigger military, bigger IRS, bigger police departments, bigger spy agencies, bigger BLM, bigger reserve banks will be a more toxic combination where the only winners are the rich.

So no, you don't get to dismiss "small government" as dogma.

People ought to be allowed to maintain their own livelihoods and not interfered with by government, through excessive taxation going to the military, confiscation of cash while travelling, confiscation of real estate property by being the premise of a crime, be spied on, have their cows taken, have their bank deposits "bailed in" - even if there is widespread automation reducing the number of jobs.

People who cannot afford goods and services in the automation economy will be able to serve each other. And then they will always be employed this way.

I have no position on welfare in this future, as I have not seen it yet.

There's a whole massive underlying assumption here: that we will soon have affordable, deployable, non-finnicky machine learning models for enough problems to decimate the middle class.

In my experience, ML models, even the best deep convnets and such, are still extremely "finicky" by human standards, in the sense that small or human-insignificant changes to the input vector can cause large-scale changes in the output classification/regression. Cool demos with video-games need to be run past some industrial automation experts before we go around proclaiming them to be the harbingers of industrial AI!

The biggest hit will be truck drivers and call centers, I think we're far away for most other jobs being economically replaceable.

I'm amazed we even still have call centres. Most of the human workforce is just puppetry driven by workflow scripts. Working in one was the single most dehumanising experience of my life, and I was the one implementing the workflows. I agree that they are absolutely a huge target for automation - I can't think of a single step in the entire workflow between campaign conception through to deployment and associated follow up (document fulfilment, etc) that couldn't be made more efficient and frankly more humane with massive automation. And that's without any kind of ML/AI in the picture. Once you start throwing AI around I reckon you can skip up a whole skill tier from there. In this case, I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

>AI isn’t like an oil field owned by a handful of people

Sure, it's free to access open-source AI tools.

However, only huge corporations have enough capital to first build these ground-breaking technologies.

Being the first, it becomes almost impossible to compete at a later stage ("Thiel's aim for a monopoly").

The companies that have dominated each new wave of computing have not always been the incumbents. Is building an AI more capital-intensive than Operating Systems or PC hardware? It's feasible that if a powerful AI is created that it will be done on a cloud server by a small team of people.

Doesn't matter too much. They will invariably get bought out by whoever is waving a large cheque in their face. All the "deep learning" stuff could have easily spun out startups from academia but look at what has happened instead. Its especially rare these days cause all the big powerhouses(Goog/FB/MS/Amazon/Apple) are highly insecure about when they are going to get disrupted overnight. And since they are all sitting on mountains of cash they can afford to throw highly ridiculous amounts at ppl.

There are very few examples where it doesn't happen. I can only think of Torvalds\Linux and Wikipedia.

1) Two of those companies (FB/Goog) could easily have been bought by the megaliths of their time, but their founders' vision and control prevented it. I don't see what is so much different about these times that would prevent a founder from doing the same. Indeed, not so long ago Drew Houston did the same (though it seems the gamble is not so certain to pay off for him)

2. Startup or established company, it doesn't matter so much who does the displacing as much as who is getting displaced: either way, the argument contends that vast swathes of the middle class will be adversely affected.

Good point. I guess the larger pt here is that, it would be nice to see pressure on the megaliths\holdouts to let go of their winner take all inclinations and go more the Torvalds\Jimmy Wales route. So that the advances benefit the many rather than the few.

Much better articulated here by Doug Rushkoff that I ever will be able too - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87TSoqnZass

Your observation is true, your conclusion isn't necessarily. AI is different from other areas of computing in that data matters far more than code does. Current legal practice is that the data is owned by the organization that collected it, which means that to collect data on millions of users to train behavioral models, you need to have millions of users. If you have millions of users, you're probably a pretty big company.

My conclusion is that it's feasible, so by definition not necessarily true. An AI could be bootstrapped by scraping data, or using any number of large datasets out there. This isn't to say that large corporation don't have advantages.

That depends to a large extent on what skill you want your AI to be able to learn.

Many applications from recommender systems, to market analysis to drug discovery probably require large datasets of the sort that can only be collected by a large business.

But if you want to learn control polices for robotic agents that navigate the physical world, driving cars, stocking shelves, etc. then I think the physical world is presenting everyone with approximately the same data set regardless of company size.

You forget to add political and financial pressure to restrain any other player to enter the same market past a certain financial fresh hold

Middle class is already well down the road to ruin. AI isn't going to make a difference either way.

Let's wait for someone to invent it first.

haha. double points for funny and true.

"decimate" != "devastate"

To "decimate" is to reduce by only 10%.

Not in modern usage.

The modern usage is wrong, and the correct usage is useful.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light!

Useful is very subjective. Do you mean precise?

"To reduce by 10%" is, in English, the novel usage. It was apparently invented by essayist Richard Grant White in 1870. The original meaning of the word, "to destroy", is attested to 1663:

https://arnoldzwicky.org/2009/06/03/the-decimators/

Caesar was 1900 years ahead of his time when he threatened to decimate the 9th Legion, then.

The meaning may be obscure and obsolete, but the word does mean something specific.

Unless Caesar spoke English, he didn't threaten "to decimate" anybody. Because "to decimate" is an English verb.

Rather, I'm sure Caesar used the appropriate conjugation of the Latin verb "decimō".

Two separate, but related, words. With two separate, but related, meanings.

It's hard to say that the majority of native speakers' usage is wrong, since right/wrong, to the extent that it's meaningful at all, is defined by popular usage.

The argument that's the traditional usage is more useful is stronger, but not obviously correct. It's more specific, and doesn't have tons of synonyms, but in the age of clickbait headlines, maybe another version of "destroy" is more useful than an oddly specific "eliminate 10% of".

Right this mentality of human language always loses out (I guess unless you're France?).

Literally now also literally means figuratively/virtually. Etc etc...

>In the case of low-skill labor the rise of China has hurt some US low-skill workers (although US workers as a whole are almost certainly better off due to lower prices).

That (along with immigration) explains the rise in income inequality in the US. If you have marketable skills you benefit from access to larger consumer markets. If you don't, though, you suffer from access to large pools of unskilled labor.

The death of the middle class will be austerity, union busting, stronger intellectual property rights, tax evasion by the ultra-wealthy, TTIP and the TPP.

The ruling classes sure would prefer it if those things were swept under the carpet and sci fi super robots took the blame instead though.

Yes.

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