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Comment by jackconnor | Hacker News Reader

In other news, Bloomberg is has now reached a new low for click-bait technopanic. Do they think the world will run out of low-skilled jobs because AI learns how to perform current ones? History doesn't back this up, as things like the industrial revolution, or automated farming, or etc etc etc didn't cause low-skilled jobs to disappear, it just changed what the exact nature of those jobs were. More and more i dislike seeing Bloomberg on here, they're "tech scare" approach to journalism is inaccurate and annoying, and it's causing a lot of unnecessary negativity towards new technologies.

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To be fair, this idea has come from credible sources too. From a few years back (2013?) https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Fut...

“According to our estimates, about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk.“

Even with replacement jobs that could be a painful transition.

I’m a more worried about the jobs that are _created_ by ai at the moment though. https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...

> Do they think the world will run out of low-skilled jobs because AI learns how to perform current ones? History doesn't back this up,

I don’t have a well considered opinion about AI’s impact on jobs, but AI isn’t exactly like the industrial revolution, automated farming, or other historical upheavals. So I don’t think you can reliably conclude that it will turn out just like them.

This is a Bloomberg Opinion and written by Dr. Kai-fu Lee, former head of Google China, and former SVP at Microsoft and Apple. He was previously a world-class speech recognition/machine learning researcher at CMU[1] And at the bottom of the article, it reads:

    This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai-Fu_Lee

Say a factory is fully automated. What low skill jobs have been created? This isn't the same as the invention of the spinning jenny. Unreasoned panic is just as foolish as assuming that things will just sort themselves out for the best.

Some blue collar jobs that will be created include: maintaining the factory robots, producing the robots that run the factory, installing the robots that run the factory, and retrofitting old factories to work with new automated systems, lubing up the factory robots and replacing their oil and filters. Not to mention entire industries which will crop up - millions of specialized engineers, automated factory focused marketing firms, new government sectors for people to write regulation for automated robots, etc.

The world changes, but we never run out of stuff to do.

What, besides the fact that they've been there before, makes you think that we won't run out of low skill jobs?

It's troubling because when I worked there as a developer their journalists seemed to be really on their game. I loved the UX of their site, and the articles seemed thorough, well written, and always relevant.

Yea i feel you, I've always read a lot of Bloomberg but, the last few years I keep seeing articles like this that are speculative but scaremongering. It's not a great look for them, in my opinion.

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