Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

I find it rather troubling how many people have issues with seeing the difference between automation in the 50ies which was about replacing manual labour and then AI which is about replacing the mind.

Unless humans have some extra secret advantage besides our intellect I have a hard time understanding why so many people just can't see that this is a very different situation than they had back then.

Since 2009 95% of all jobs created in the US were temp jobs. Bush expanding the definition of what constitutes a job and Obama didn't change that. So we are dealing with highly inflated job numbers not including the number of people you simply don't count as available for the job market anymore.

The states deficit is at record highs because we have funded all this with borrowed money either from other countries who buy our currency or the future through quantitative easing.

Yet somehow most people think everything is just another luddite fallacy being replayed.

New sustainable jobs aren't created, the number of entrepreneurs is actually going down and the economy move from labour heavy to capital intense industries.

And our politicians are being advised by economists who treat technology as an externality.

Somethings gotta give.

> Since 2009 95% of all jobs in the US were temp jobs

[citation needed]

https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs-created...

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/most-jobs-created-2...

I'm going to need you to change that to "95% of all NEW jobs", then, because that's what those sources say.

I believe that is what the _since_ means, at least that is how I read it.

I read it as "In 2009, the US passed a threshold where 95% of jobs were temporary"

I thought the context was clear. Changed it sligthly.

That's not exactly what it means either. A lot of non-temp jobs were destroyed during the recession, so to some extent the low net-non-temp job growth in the US is due to the job market having to climb out of a giant hole.

And a lot of these jobs would have been considered full-time previously, but for political reasons such as the ACA, weak unions, Congress's general hostility to labor, the workers are classified as contractors instead.

From the econ paper these numbers are based on: >Unfortunately, we cannot determine the extent to which the replacement of traditional jobs with alternative work arrangements occurred before, during or after the Great Recession, although it is likely that there were tremendous losses of traditional jobs during the recession

You read even better than me! In retrospect, I guess it's intuitive that temp jobs are the most likely to expand and contract in response to recessions.

>AI which is about replacing the mind

Give me a break. AI replacing the mind... Put zebra stripes on an upside down sofa and the best image recognition algorithms see a zebra. That's how far the "understanding" of our AI goes. What you are doing is fearmongering.

I think OP's point was it's replacing a lot of mental work vs the industrial revolution replacing physical work.

It can't do everything yet of course.

Thats not what I mean. I mean that the competition is with whatever part of the brain the human uses for their job and that AI is taking on things that require higher and higher levels of abstraction.

For instance Radiologist. Ironically cleaning people are probably the last people who will be replaced as that require actual general intelligence AI

I know that was a tongue in cheek comment, but I couldn't resist a quick google images + clarifai. http://i.imgur.com/rwwVDe1.jpg (Forgot to flip it though. Left as an exercise to the reader)

That being said, the argument that because there are some things AI can't do yet[0] we shouldn't worry about automation doesn't really hold. If you manage to make a "brain worker" 10x as efficient by automating a big part of their job, possibly leaving some oversight to catch zebra sofas, you simply won't need as many employed in that profession any longer.

[0] to be fair a small picture of a zebra striped sofa without context might fool people too

Actually, it was not a tongue in cheek comment. It is based on a real example I read some time ago. And the upside down part is important ;)

Auxiliary, I think most office jobs can be modeled as a Flow Chart (with slight exceptions that can be caught by AI).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com