DeepMind Co-Founder: AI Is Fundamentally a "Labor Replacing Tool"
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
Amazon has been using robots in their fulfillment centers for years now, and there are plenty of public videos out there on those processes. But I don't see how this would replace the use of humans in other critical aspects of fulfillment center operations.
They are not the robots I assume you’re referring to that move the crates of orders around that roll on the ground.
IMO, human-style robots are not a good solution for automating a warehouse. They're too limited in terms of how much they can pick up and move, and they're too small. They can't do the highly dexterous operations that currently require real humans, and they can't replace what the big robots can do.
IMO, anyone who is pitching human type robots today is just spinning a bunch of of smoke and mirrors. The real success will come from completely redesigning the whole system around the new robots that will be much more effective and efficient.
Society will adapt. As it always has. Most Americans no longer work on farms or factories either.
Of course, if the labor replacing process is too rapid, then that could become a problem.
Economies are human constructs and can be changed with political will.
I actually think to a large extent the corporate world is putting the cart before the horse. Unemployment is at an historic low, wages are growing fast and so this is a great story to tell as to how you're going to continue to exploit labour to enrich capital.
We clearly live in different countries.
Wage stagnation is everywhere in the west, even more than in the US, and Europe didn't have an underclass of women and people of color 50 years ago in the prosperous times when a factory worker could buy an apartment and support a family, so let's not point the fingers there.
Wage stagnation exists because all the fruits of increased productivity gains in workers' labor from the last decades have been skimmed at the top instead of trickled down to the workers in the trenches.
Secondly, it exists because of the last 30+ years of corporate mergers and acquisitions have a concentrated a large piece of the pie of certain industries into the hands of only a few ultra-large players who get to dictate the global market in terms of wages and prices, due to the lack of competition, meaning workers have less bargaining power for wages and consumers less bargaining power for prices.
Thirdly, globalization and lifting of trade barriers, meant that those few ultra-large players left after mergers and acquisitions, could tap into places that offered the lowest wages, lowest taxes, and lowest regulations in terms of environment and labor, enjoying all those benefits simultaneously instead of having to compromise, meaning they could have their cake and eat it too, resulting in massive more profits for them and a global race to the bottom for most of those working for them.
>Americas golden age is not really a time with conditions that are easy to replicate.
America is still living a golden age, due to being the world reserve currency, dominating the finance sector, the software sector (the only one with major growth and the most profitable), being land, energy and resource abundant, having no enemies at its borders, having the worlds biggest and most power-projecting military, and its citizens enjoy one of the highest purchasing power in the world.
Is that not a golden age or what? Most countries would be happy to tick just one of those boxes, let alone all of them combined. I think some Americans often forget just how privileged they are compared to the vast majority of the world.
'Free' markets, supply & demand, governments interfering in those markets here & there, is just 1 of several options.
Some kind of UBI, "social credits" that everyone simply receives (as depicted in 2nd part of Manna) + some practical limits on resource consumption, is another option.
There are other options. And like another poster said: choice between those is one of political will. This relies on some conditions though:
1) A significant fraction (if not majority) of the population sharing a similar vision.
2) A functioning democracy.
3) Elites, corporations etc not powerful enough to subvert politics enough to prevent that vision from becoming implemented.
And
4) Absense of external forces big enough to undo progress. Effects of climate change, a huge meteor hitting Earth, aliens showing up that are out to exterminate us, another pandemic, etc, etc, etc.
So don't hold your breath. Much is possible but our odds of reaching some kind of utopia aren't great.
I don’t remotely see the present generation of LLMs as being “labor replacing tools.” I’m aware of empirical work which shows them to be useful complements to human judgment, not substitutes for the same. I’m also aware of one study showing (iirc) less work for illustrators on an online job board. That latter case is the only case im aware of where workers have been replaced though if you have citations to actual empirical evidence for job losses please comment!
An alternative theory: Part of what AI CEO’s are doing is marketing their products. If you want to get investors and customers to pay your very expensive compute bill you’d better sell your product. You can sell your product by claiming it can replace workers. That doesn’t mean it can do it. If the current generation of LLMs can replace workers, that is not obvious.
Perhaps some future generation might be, but that will require something fundamentally different than what’s currently available. (And no I don’t think “more data” is enough.)
Logically, employment may increase while people's standard of living may get worse at the same time?
Is there somewhere more specific data?
Other than that, I think I remember an article claiming that the introduction of thr personnal computers led companies to be able to generate the same revenue with less people. Like it used to be 8 employee per million USD and it got to 5. Then again, depends of the size of the average enterprise and the market size (which increases with population increase)
Yes it can and yes it is. I'm also baffled by people keep pointing out low unemployment like it's the be all end all of all arguments for economic prosperity.
Obviously sky high unemployment like in the great depression isn't great either but just because people are forced to accept any one of the abundant gig economy jobs, no matter how shitty, or even more than one job, due to the high CoL and low welfare, it definitely reduces unemployment numbers on paper, but is that ideal?
Maybe some jobs are so shit that people would rather bum around on minimum welfare than get dirty, tired and aching bodies just to only to make peanuts over welfare.
Maybe the median inflation adjusted take home wage of the employed person after subtracting essentials like rent, utilities, bills and food, would be a better metric to measure economic prosperity of the working class than collectively clapping at record low unemployment numbers.
This is a useful resource on aspects not included in the unemployment metric: https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0609/what-the-un....
Seems like this measure of discouraged workers is down over the past 10 years: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS15026645
Here’s a chart: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
I think this metric, like unemployment, is obviously nuanced and also could be showing an aging demographic and other such subtleties.
AI or increases in labour supply doesn't typically result in reduced unemployment, rather it acts to push down wages. An increase in labour supply could even lead to people bidding over each other with time, so that the result is that people work more rather than less.
- Language translators.
- Video annotation, summary, transcription.
- Voiceover artists.
- Graphic designers.
- Warehouse inventory work.
- Personal tutors.
- Junior software engineers.
There will still be openings for these roles in the future, just as there are still openings for Personal Assistants (secretaries, which were once as abundant as teachers and truck drivers), and maybe even the occasional Draftsman.
Now, maybe what they're thinking is that these stores were just a training exercise and known to be unprofitable from Day One, and now those training exercises are over so they can start shutting them down. Dunno -- I have no inside information on this.
But I wouldn't be looking to Amazon to solve all these problems for all the retailers. At least, not until they can come out with better technology.
But if you got properly billed for only the things in your own cart, and that RFID scanning process was quick and easy, then I'm not sure it would suck so bad.
I think what's going to happen is that AI will enable these kinds of jobs to be done much more often and in many more situations where they could not be feasibly be performed before, and the actual human job losses will be minimal in these areas.
At least for the near future, and it's hard to predict what may happen ten or twenty years from now.
This is one of those cases where correlation isn't causation. The actually meaningful thing that came online were interests rates which people discovered can actually be above zero, and one thing that went offline was the pandemic.
AI as it currently exists is not a job replacing tool, it's a task automation tool and in that capacity no different from any other tool. And companies don't actually fire people when tasks get automated, they give the more productive employees more tasks so they can make the company more money.