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Comment by planktons | Hacker News Reader

The key bit here is where he says that a lot of people will lose their jobs soon. There are tons of jobs that exist only because of momentum. The financial incentive to pay all these people will dry up and it’s going to hurt. And we won’t opt for UBI until many people have suffered a great deal. People do not seem to appreciate the gravity of what is coming.

Basically every time I bring up jobs, ai and society someone comes out of the woodwork to insult my character or sarcastically dismiss me. Never any substantive counter-arguments. I’m really looking forward to what you guys will come up with this time. Always such a pleasure.

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OK, here you go: what large group of jobs has been eliminated by "AI" so far? No time limit answering, unless you die first, in which case "time's up!" My assertion, made in public and under my real name is that barring some giant breakthrough, nothing like this is going to happen any time soon. As far as I can tell, as an active worker in the field (erstwhile finance FWIIW), "AI" is a force multiplier for statisticians, and basically that's it.

Jobs have been eliminated in America because of poor industrial and trade policy. Nothing to do with "AI." I get extremely irate when people make the assertion that "oh, well, the jobs are going away soon anyway" -using this complete and utter falsehood as an excuse to continue the looting of the country.

The guy interviewed here is a real mixed bag. Some of what he says is nonsense, some of it is accurate. FIRE has basically been a vampire squid on the economy without adding much value. Most of it could be "automated" away by using a magic 8-ball; it doesn't actually provide any value. Except the politicians rice bowls depend on the status quo.

I work for my company as a lone coder in a coworking space, an ocean away from the rest of the company.

What gives, you my ask. I sit in one corner of a 6 desks arrangement and the rest of these desks plus another arrangement of 6 desks are occupied by a company in the RPA bussiness.

The CEO of the company sits right next to me (When I started working in this space almost a year ago all these desks were empty, so obviously I took the best position) so we have a good couple of chats the days he shows up (They have a "formal" office in the city).

They have a couple of whiteboards in the wall next to my right, where they use actual, physical pseudo kanban boards with postits and shit that get reorganized probably weekly, because they can't cope with the amount of new work they are getting.

They have doubled the number of programmers since May, in a country (Argentina) where things are not looking that bright for nobody.

From my desk, I can _feel_ the pain of all the jobs they are killing.

I can't tell you _exactly_ what "large group" of jobs they have killed because the chats are not that intimate, but I see the list of companies they are working with, and all the big ones from the country are there. all of them.

They _are_ killing jobs, a plenty, without discrimination. And this is barely starting.

And... which jobs exactly have they have killed? All you have documented here is some company doubling the number of programmers since May, which sure as heck sounds like creating jobs to me.

Some VC funded startup allegedly working with companies does not equal killing jobs with "AI." If this were really happening it would be real easy to document! The X industry is gone now. Like buggy whips. But it's not; it's science fiction. I know, I know, people _really_believe_ -that doesn't make it real. Numbers, people: name names, no anecdotes about the stories from people next to you in the WeWork or whatever the journalistic dipshits are releasing from a PR agency.

You and your grandparent essentially say “it hasn’t happened yet.” Nobody said it’s happened. It’s going to happen.

Yeah, and "nanotech" is going to be a trillion dollar industry by 2015. Sorry "citations needed." Many people can assert things.

So you can’t reason about something that hasn’t happened yet. That’s your stance. You could throw any argument out the window this way.

It's a really effective and accurate argument with good Brier score when it's deployed against marketing woo, which is all that "AI" is.

I'm happy to place a long bet at whatever odds you like for whatever specific prediction you care to make if you want to put your money where your mouth is. Auger, "long now" whatever -I'm good for it.

Would you please stop posting trollish comments to HN so we don't have to keep banning you?

So I’m banned? For what? How is anything I’ve said trollish? This is a joke right? Which part is trolling? AI is a threat to jobs? People respond to AI “alarmists” with character attacks and sarcasm? I genuinely do not get it.

If banning me is such a horrible burden for you, you are free to email me so that we can discuss a solution.

We haven't banned this account, but we've banned previous accounts that I believe you've used. If you keep breaking the site guidelines, we're going to have to ban you again. I'd much rather you'd take the spirit of this site to heart. We're trying for something, as you know, that's a little bit better than internet default. That means posting civilly and substantively, with respect for others no matter how wrong they may be.

When a comment is both low-information and personally negative, it becomes trollish almost regardless of topic. I think I read "So you can’t reason", etc., as personal, though looking at it now I see that you meant "you" in the sense of "one". Sorry! Nonetheless, you've posted such comments in the past, including recently (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19099603, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19110921), so the main request stands.

if RPA means robotic process automation then presumably these are lost manufacturing jobs?

> And... which jobs exactly have they have killed? Unfortunately, I can't answer that question, because that's not that the people from the other company would discuss openly.

I had a couple of chats with the CEO about this, and he mentioned briefly that this affected jobs with a high level of repetitive tasks (E.g., invoice processing and stuff).

There was one process we kind of discussed at length enough as to answer this: In my country, it's normal for supermarkets to have 3rd party employees to take care of certain aisles that have only products from the 3rd party.

The thing is, putting products in order there is a time consuming process, and obviously prone to error.

The change would be, the employee would take a picture of the aisle once finished, send the picture to a service that would process it automatically and alert the employee before she left the supermarket if there was a problem or anything (Like, a product needing replacement or similar).

> All you have documented here is some company doubling the number of programmers since May

Yep, that's right. the downside of this, is that there are a lot of companies looking to automate processes that are time consuming, and that affects jobs directly.

hat the company decides to do in the end regarding the people in those jobs is up to the complany obviously. Sorry about the late reply, thought.

Wrong question. You should be asking, what groups have been granted large productivity gains due to information systems and now run substantially leaner.

E.g. secretaries, call center employees, accountants, etc.

Statisticians. That's it! And it's one of the hottest job fields right now with the fancy name "data scientist." All the recent improvements in machine learning have done is make certain kinds of statistical thinking possible, and that's it. It's not eliminating anyone's job; it's actually growing the market for statisticians.

Anyway parent poster said "a lot of people will lose their jobs soon" because of "AI." I deny this has or will happen, and people's misunderstanding of it is downright criminal.

Not just statistics jobs. Also bad jobs. More bad jobs in fact.

Information systems have created the ease of the gig economy. It allows people to provide more granular, on demand jobs.

The net effect is more jobs. This may be a bad thinf

"AI" doesn't actually mean anything. How about automation of white collar work, though? For that the easy answer is lawyers [1].

[1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/05/09/the-lawyer-bu...

Bureau of Labor Statistics says we can expect 8% growth in lawyer jobs in next 10 years:

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/legal/lawyers.htm

Ok... and the US population is expected to grow more than that over the same time period. Not sure I see your point here.

Sorry, I don't buy the hype right now with AI. Sure it can help Google identify your pictures and make them prettier, but killing off jobs, I doubt it anytime soon.

To me, AI and driverless cars are hyped too much. Computer companies like to overpromise and then under deliver. When I first started in my career, CASE tools were going to kill off the programmer, fast forward 20+ years, and developers are still hanging around coding stuff.

Are jobs going to change? Sure.

Yes, momentum. That's what drives CEOs to invest in new tech by investing billions. How does this help CEOs and their companies? Imagine X Inc invested $5B in AI, Cloud, etc, only to write off that $5B a decade later. But this $5B is a good investment since it helps keep their stock price up during the bull market where every other company is following the same trend.

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