Are Robots Coming for Your Job? Eventually, Yes
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
But that doesn't mean people won't be able to find work or make money. I mean, you don't have to be the 'best' at something to get rich off of it, nor to even simply earn a living at it. I mean, think about it. Objectively the majority of products, services and businesses out there now are worse than at least one competitor. If people were always rational about what they were buying, said businesses/products/services would go broke.
But they're not rational. People buy things and use products because of many things, whether that's convenience, location, price, name recognition/branding, marketing, word of mouth type marketing, social proof, quality of service/employees/whatever, pure luck or heck, without even thinking at all.
So even if every market in existence gets AI involved in, it still won't necessarily mean old fashioned human run businesses can't compete and win customers.
There's also the additional effect of branding that people never really think about here too. People don't just watch 'a' TV show or film or what not, they watch Star Wars or Game of Thrones or what not. Same with music, games, books, art, internet media and basically anything celebrity related in general. Eventually, the greats sell on their name alone, and that's one barrier that even the best use of AI may not compete with. Just look at a popular book for example, in some cases the author's name is literally more than double the size of the title!
So that may also be another area where robots won't eventually come for jobs/take all the jobs. Perhaps we'll end up in a world where the 'Patreon' style model is the norm and the standards for success are how well you market your own brand rather than the exact quality of what you do...
The article only seemed to say that it would happen eventually and, as a result, the labor force of the future will require more software engineering skills.
The only thing that doesn't appear to function well now is education, which appears to be stuck in the post-WW2 mentality of a job for life and which the author does identify as a problem. That doesn't seem like a particularly big deal however (at least half of the problem is convincing people that they need to keep learning).
The real concern for me is people constantly predicting the end of the world. Politicians are taking it seriously and they will inevitably fuck it up. Also, the world that journalists seem to live in has pretty much never existed. The only reason a "job for life" occurred after WW2 was because of the huge barriers on trade/capital that were put in place around this period. No competition, high prices...yes, the true glory days.
Education is an extremely hard problem to solve because it doesn't seem to be working in general. That is, the effects of shared environment are small and completely dwarfed by genetics and sheer randomness.
I am not sure what you mean about education (I don't know what "shared environment" or "randomness" means in this context). I am sure everyone here knows there are tons of issues...it comes down to: if you had to build the education system today, would it look like what we have now? No, quite clearly not. The situation in every country is obviously very different but that is what it comes down to: inertia. There is nothing intrinsically difficult though, we have got this far after all.
I would say education is stuck in a pre 1980s paradigm of prepping 80% of the population to be nothing more than warm, wet, expensive robots - - in other words, conventional blue collar workers. Humanity can be so much more...
I'd push for mandatory shop, home economics, and financial literacy training.
I would be hesitant to frame it in terms of something that already exists however. In terms of function, the outcome should be skills that are applicable to business so vocational. But it needs to be more distinct. For example, more vocational education should have significantly greater links to business than already exists (not research but training).
Srs though, ppl aren't particularly interested in being told that stuff is okay or even learning from past experience. The present is always extremely unique and very dangerous.
For example, I am not from the US but follow US politics...as far as I can tell, every election over the past ten years has been "the most important election there has ever been". I remember 2012 specifically: it was hyped into oblivion but was totally inconsequential.
The only real debates to be had are when that will occur, a thousand years? A hundred? Ten?
Once you get older you quickly learn that constant learning doesn't necessarily help you that much on the job market. And most of us need a job with income for most of our life. Add the trend towards income inequality where most of society's economical progress goes to the top and I think people should be concerned about their future.
It's easy to imagine a future where a lot of work is automated but instead of making life better for everyone society is split up in a few "haves" and a lot of people who are viewed as "useless".
I mean, I do pay into retirement and the like, but quite frankly, I personally approach my job as this career path will always be there for me if I so choose so I'd be in some degree of danger if my belief is proven wrong later in life.
> What is the intended effect of articles like this?
Or should we just give up and accept our fate? :-)
Is this always the case? Is there a tipping point where automation becomes not good for everyone else?
Stasi were evil people but could only do what was humanly possible. Now look at what NSA can do.
Is it really better for everybody? Whole regions can get devastated that way. And with the trend towards income inequality only a few actually benefit.
- deepface will change laws.
- killing robots.
- blockchains will make X obsolete.
- AI will take your job.
Am I missing something?
(Not a typo, it's just that if you summarize this article, there's nothing left. No point, no insight, no argument, just some rambling, a submarine, and some links to other headlines)
Is The Bull Market Coming to an End? Eventually, Yes
Does my cat like Sushi rolls? Eventually, Yes
Does Titles like these bother You? Eventually, Yes
Do you... have a cat? It's harder to get them not to eat the fish you don't want them to have.
“It will eventually rain today” is very different in its truthiness when compared to “it will eventually rain this year”. It’s the same when comparing statements with a close by deadline (the expected death of a cat) and one that is much farther off (the dissolution of the USA).
Beyond that, Boltzmann brains tell us that some things aren’t possible given an infinite amount of time.
Isn't there a separate shadow issue of lack of diversity in the market? I mean, we can't all be app developers, web designers, and project managers.
Sure, you say, there will always be non-tech jobs. Ok, like lawyers? That will be decimated by strong AI-as-a-service eDisocvery and legal analysis bots that replace paralegals and associates. So now the firm is a partner or two, and a $14/hr runner who drives to court and files motions.
Doctors? Ok they read their FDA-certified AI and make sure it's sane and send you to the ePharmacy where biometric auth and videos replace the pharmacist.
The cleaning staff at both offices are replaced by smart-bots that auto mop and empty trash. So each building has a security/facilities person.
Restaurants? Most have kiosks and a chef-bot. Just a hostess and manager to make sure the fryer doesn't burn the building down. Uber has long been automated.
So again, what's left? Government jobs most likely. And going back to my original supposition, let's ignore how people make their money. Can we all be "data scientists" using AI to analyze customer behavior at restaurant kiosks to apply predictive suggestions for their dessert? Can we all write websites for the small businesses (that don't exist because they can't afford the AI services that BigCorp has)? What happens when Google computes every last datapoint about us? Facebook has reached complete saturation and there's no new info to sell to advertisers. How would our economy function if there's basically one industry left? You can't compute analytics about yourself or sell website services to website service people.