Will IBM's Watson put your job in jeopardy? | Hacker News Reader

Will IBM's Watson put your job in jeopardy?

management.fortune.cnn.com

21 pointstgriesser31 comments

Only if your job is giving answers in the form of a question.

Oh shit - that is what I do.

It might. The automobile made it difficult to find work shoeing horses. I do not lament this.

When we think of humans being replaced by automation we often think of robotic devices such as ABB arms, Asimo, and such.

But it appears the greater influence may come from "stationary," large-scale, HAL-like systems designed to interact effectively with human beings.

Watching Watson run-up the score so quickly was unsettling and I now understand why Kasparov cried. It makes one truly realize that nowadays, if the task can be automated, it probably will be.

ha ha, no. Considering the difficulty of humans equipped with the most advanced pattern matching hardware ever devised by evolution to discern nuances of meaning in spoken language I would say it's a rehash of the AI promises of the 50's that feel short of any practical implementation. We still got a long way to go before a skynet shows up and fires us.

People will say the same things 50 years later!

However, it is a fact that AI are pervasive in our world today. We just don't recognize it as artificial intelligence.

True but this kind of stories conjure up the classic idea of the human computer :). Practical use is cool like the google self-driven car I'm not sure if it's a learning system (does anyone know ?). I figure deduction to be the truly hard part to do. Like deducting the laws of geometry by observation or something similar. But hey I'm an amateur on this :)

Researchers have built AI programs that were claimed to have rediscovered some basic results in maths:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Mathematician

That line of symbolic/formal AI seems to have pretty much died out (or at least not going anywhere very quickly), consider:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

Skynet has already fired many of us. We just don't notice because it happened incrementally.

To see an example of this on the macroscale, look at the current recession. AD (Aggregate Demand) and production tanked, leading to unemployment. AD and production have recovered, but employment has not. There is a very plausible case to be made that productivity gains made many workers obsolete, and employers took advantage of the recession to cut them loose.

[edit: forgot that not everyone is an amateur economist. AD = Aggregate Demand.]

Sorry, what is AD?

Aggregate Demand, see my edit.

That is the thesis of Jeremy Rifkin exposed in the "The End of Work"

Which jobs were made obsolete? If unemployment were technologically driven, you would expect IT to have less unemployment relative to other industries. But that's not the case. Paul Krugman had a pretty good post on the topic:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/whos-unemployed/

Which jobs were made obsolete?

The data is insufficiently granular to determine that. But as you can see, production has more or less completely recovered: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GDP http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO

Employment has not recovered comparably: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/PAYEMS

This means we are producing more now than ever before, and doing it with fewer people. This tells us that many of the people who were laid off are obsolete.

Now, as for Krugman's chart, it's somewhat tangential. Krugman as arguing (misleadingly, BTW) against the recalculation hypothesis, which proposes that we have a recession because the economy misallocated people into the wrong sectors. His chart is misleading since it focuses on an irrelevant ratio of two other irrelevant ratios. To determine if the recession is sectorial, one must look at employment [1].

If we do this, we find that construction employment is down 27% (from Jan 2008 to Jan 2011). Information services employment (I think this includes IT) is down 11%. Finance is down 8%, as is Retail. Durable goods manufacturing is down 22%.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USFIRE http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USCONS http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USINFO http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/USTRADE.txt http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/DMANEMP

This clearly shows some sectors hit much harder than others, contrary to Krugman's claims. But Krugman's claims are tangential to the main point anyway.

[1] Unemployment is a skewed indicator because it excludes people not seeking work and people who find work in other sectors. I.e., a construction worker who finds a new job in retail lowers both the unemployment rate in construction (smaller numerator) and the unemployment rate in retail (bigger denominator). As the employment numbers show, this is a rather large set of people.

Ah, good point on why we should look at employment vs. unemployment. Makes sense.

I was tempted to argue that the decline in construction doesn't support the "obsolete jobs" hypothesis, because the jobs were created by an overheated housing market and shouldn't have been there in the first place. But regardless of whether the jobs were justified in the first place, they're not coming back. A technological shift isn't the only thing that can make a job obsolete; a one-time speculative bubble can do the same thing.

No, you are quite right. The decline in construction jobs doesn't support the "jobs obsolete due to technology" hypothesis. It supports the recalculation hypothesis, but that's a separate issue.

It's the increase in production combined with the lack of increase in employment that is evidence in favor of technology making jobs obsolete.

It doesn't happen overnight. I'll go out on a limb here and say that we are only 10 years away from the first completely autonomous delivery trucks.

Google is already doing this with human co-pilots. Once there is solid statistical data showing that a computer driver is safer and cheaper than a human, the phase-out of the human drivers will be pretty swift. After all, imagine the competitive advantage you'd have if your trucking company can replace a human driver with a computer. One that can drive 24 hours a day while making fewer mistakes. Even if this technology cost half a million dollars (and it won't), doing so would be a no-brainer.

Once there is solid statistical data showing that a computer driver is safer and cheaper than a human, the phase-out of the human drivers will be pretty swift

I'm not so sure. Solid statistical data won't deter lawyers filing frivolous suits over every accident. "If only Big Faceless Co. didn't employ faceless robots, this sympathetic human might have lived! You should award lots of punitive damages."

Not to mention the teamsters would probably have a law against robot drivers passed...

Well, I think it is clear that increased productivity due to improvements in information technology has resulted in slower job growth during this recovery compared with past ones. Corporations have been able to achieve top line growth with minimal hiring.

But there are other factors at play. Too much of the US labor force was dedicated to housing, and those people are going to take a long time to either retrain or find new work with their existing skills. They are not being replaced by software (yet).

However, I essentially agree with the article. Software and robots will make it easier for corporations to grow profits with out hiring people, and that this increases the threat of income inequality.

I hope it will put the following jobs in jeopardy:

  - secretaries
  - receptionists
  - middle managers

The middle manager's only job is to retain the appearance of usefulness to remain employed.

Well, a good middle manager does a couple of useful things:

  - keeps track of schedules and workloads
  - insulates his team from clients' and upper management's requests
  - does whatever his team needs him to do to stay productive

Watson can do at least two out of three.

Secretaries will only be threatened once they can put Watson's computational capacity into about a kilogram of mass and install it in one of those Japanese girlbots.

lets all go down to ibm and throw our shoes in the machines, only then will our jobs be safe!!!

"I'm telling y'all, it's sabotage!" Literally.

"Hey Watson, I bet you can't guess what's coming for ya!"

Watson: "What is shoe?"

As a society it should be our goal to have all the repetitive and dumb work been done by machines. If a machine can do your job it wasn't that challenging in the first place. In that case your job provides absolutely zero benefits to the society.

That is easy to say so long as your own job still falls above the cut-off line of what machines can reasonably do.

The scary part is that line will probably rise up to the point where it encompasses all jobs currently done by humans within my lifetime.

That's not scary, that's good. It's also inevitable if Ray Kurzweil is right and computers will soon exceed the mental capabilities of humans. It's only scary if you think in today's economic model where automation implies unemployment and where unemployment implies poverty.

But just think of the following arguments:

- If a person a hundred years ago would have predicted today's technology, this person might have thought that this technology will destroy most of the jobs and unemployment will raise. Instead, people moved to new types of jobs and economy continued to grow.

- Even if computers and robots can take over all of the jobs this does not need to be a bad thing. Of course this would not work in today's economic systems, but there could be new systems where computers and robots do the work and humans equally profit from the results.

Long-term good is often very short-term scary. Our economic models will not be adjusted to this new reality very quickly.

No, not yet. But Ken Jennings is definitely out of a job.

No.

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