IBM CEO Says It's a 'Good Thing' If AI Takes Your Job

My applause to Google Fiber.

I would personally feel reluctant to do so, because I think insuring the tail risk of a company like Cruise or really even Tesla (pertaining to FSD) is a fool's errand and not a positive ROI proposition. And I don't mean now, I mean until proven otherwise.

There is no guarantee or even really proof points that the model AI works around even does a good enough job to account for edge case scenarios that account for most of the tail risk. If that is not the case, then the entire hypothesis around AI (which is that it is structurally more efficient than alternatives) really falls apart, doesn't it?

As always, the truth is likely to be somewhere in the middle.

You were always given something to do for the state, no matter your situation. That's why automation was so shit compared to the west in the '80s. Why invest in advanced automation to make goods faster and cheaper when you already have endless cheap labor you need to keep busy so they don't revolt, and you don't have much consumer demand for goods since everyone is more or less equally poor?

Granted, most people weren't terribly bothered by this back then, as most jobs, even the shitty ones, came with free housing from the government and free schooling for your kids. So as long as you kept your mouth shut, your head down, showed up to your useless busy-work job, and didn't rock the boat, you'd could have a pretty easy life regardless of your lack of skills or education.

If you can leverage technology to improve productivity, your wages WILL go up to match it. Software engineering wages have exploded over the last decade and are increasing far faster than productivity. The game is not rigged - great contributions lead to great rewards.

But if you don't have relevant tech skills, and you work the same way your parents worked, like most people do... then obviously no, your wages will not and should not go up. It doesn't matter if society in general is becoming more productive, if you didn't contribute to that productivity increase then why should you benefit from it?

People need to wake up and understand that raw labor is not valuable anymore. We don't need people who work hard and can follow directions, that's what computers are for. We need people who understand how things work. People who can improve existing processes and create new ones. For people like this, opportunities are endless.

There's a reason there was a big knee in the global GDP graph in the mid 1800s: industrialisation, which is too say, automation of previously manual processes.

It's far from obvious to me that 100% automation that obviates any need for humans is anywhere in the foreseeable future. What it does mean is that under the current system, capital will continue to tend to concentrate in the machine-owners hands, which might result in not having enough people to sell their goods to, if the rate of wealth concentration exceeds the rate of wealth generation.

One can imagine a classic dystopian landscape of haves surrounded by robots that serve them, without much need for human labor, and have-nots who are stuck in the previous step and live in a dirtier, poorer still-industrial society with lots of human labor, and with an intense envy to the haves.

I don't really believe this dystopian view because the AI technology already seems accessible to the modern industrial societies; it's not something unobtainable, and with science mostly being done in the open, not something completely secret. So more and more of the have-nots will graduate to haves, if they can handle the social order that allows to accumulate enough resources to kickstart the AI + robots transformation, and can handle a social order after that.

The question then remains: what the humans are going to do when putting food on the table stops being a major concern? (For an endgame, see the Culture series by Ian M. Banks.)

BTW obviously AI needs learning about the world, and maybe humans are still better than it at discovering things, and at "teaching".

Money are a proxy for time and work, when machines get to a point where they're autonomously able to spend all the required time and do all the required work, there's nothing left for money to do..

If we stood on the edge of a scarcity-free world, I doubt even the greediest *illionaire would find any good reason to stop it (and if they did, well, I doubt they'd survive it for long)

I think the main reason these needs arise, is exactly because people have grown up in the current society, where so much value is placed on contribution, exactly because there's scarcity.

It might be, in a post-scarcity world, those same pressures would exist, in new, more society-oriented forms. However, I hope we can get past that, and simply accept that people exist, and let them enjoy existing for no larger purpose than simply inhabiting time and space for a while, and have whatever experiences they have before they perish.

So much pressure if you fail as well. Imagining having to resign from your CEO job and then take a position as the chairman of another globo corp. Doesn't even bear thinking about.

Anecdotally, whenever I've failed at solving a problem myself through online/self-serve tools, I have _never_ been able to then solve it by being connected to an Customer Service bot - but I've had pretty good results when speaking with an actual human. If I'm reading your implication correctly that "nowadays Customer Support people aren't useful" - I disagree.

Not everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer. What about all those people who used to do a job that is now replacing them with a touchscreen or a "chat bot"? What do you envision for them? That they go back to school to train to be a doctor or a lawyer? Sure, will you agree to making education and training free or accessible, or will this require continued privilege where it's a requirement to be born into a rich family first?

There's over 8 billion people on the planet. How many blue collar jobs do you envision as being available to people if all the white collar jobs are replaced by AI and ML and automation and outsourcing and offshoring? Am I supposed to be a bricklayer now when I'm already too old physically for the punishing demands of that job?

A long time ago I knew a guy whose job was off-shored to the Philippines from Canada. He actually moved to the Philippines to keep it, but this isn't an option available to most people.

Furthermore, the idea that we went through a number of such changes and this one is all the same is merely wishful thinking. Economy exists because humans divide work. Why do we work? To fulfill our needs, you know, stuff like not being thirsty, hungry, having shelter, being healthy, having some entertainment, this kinda stuff. The more we automate all these things, the less humans are involved, and following that it means the economy will shrink. As said: humans divide work, or more correctly: Their time, which is the ultimate currency in this whole thing. It is only during the phase of ramping up the automation that we need to do more than for our needs: We have to have additional economy and thus work to make the automation happen.

Following that it is clear that a basic income people can actually live from MUST happen during the transition phase towards "full" automation, not after. Even more so with the system as it is currently, because no work means no income, and if the government doesn't keep people alive, you can just wait for civil war to happen, and before that a big raise in all kinds of crimes. There are more than enough examples of that out there, some of them pretty recent.