The amount of effort required to shrink real knowledge worker jobs is astronomical compared to simply driving a car. After the singularity, fine. But even that will require a massive, massive amount of work. The low hanging fruit for increasing knowledge work output is in Gattaca not AI.
And if you're in a post-singularity world you don't really have to worry about jobs anymore. So I guess being a programmer is pretty future proof ;)
The same holds for technical areas, we can't say for sure when we'll have strong AI but in the meantime we're gonna need less and less people to do the job that a lot of people do today. This all to say that the problem of unemployment isn't about every single person in the world being unable to get a job, if you have 35% of your population unable to exchange their labour capacities for a living then this is a huge social problem.
Just look at what a small number of programmers can accomplish today vs 10 or 20 years ago.
Ironically , if you're a programer who increases productivity, i.e. causes unemployment, you save money. In sour economy the need to save money is the greatest.
There was "post-scarcity for basic survival needs" for millions of years already. When life first formed on earth, there was food enough for every organism. That didn't prevent organisms from fighting each other.
Competition and the extinction of the losers has been a central theme of life since it began. Being at the top of the food pyramid, and in a first-world country has made us forget that fact. The idea that humanity can rise above this, formed from living in this social-economic bubble for far too long, is just hubris.
That's where the big difference comes from your example of '"post-scarcity for basic survival needs" for millions of years already.' there's never been the coordination and impartiality to distribute and coordinate at that level.
As for today if we coordinated and there were no economic considerations we could feed everyone today. It's just that there's not the planning or monetary forces in place to make it happen.
The future will hold a very different scenario than a typical first-world country today where the populous actually produces useful work. As a leader, instead you have a population who who in-fight amongst themselves for the best of the consumable goods and produce absolutely nothing of value for you. To make matters worse, they continually attempt to push their boundaries, growing bigger and bigger if not thwarted (as life normally does).
My other point, that techno-baron A will want to fight/defend himself against techno-baron B still applies. Won't anything that techno-baron A needs to do to defend himself against techno-baron B trump the humanitarian concerns for maintaining the lifestyle of his subjects that give absolutely nothing back to him?
Even if techno-baron A is morally inclined to do so, there will be others that are more brutal and would not. And even if the moral techo-baron A is able to completely conquer the world (seems very unlikely considering how schizophrenically both brutal and compassionate he would have to be), then his hold on it will at some time cease, probably under duress from threat(s) within.
Why would people follow it? Why would some rich and powerful guy with connections forgo all his power to some CPAI that was set up? How would he maintain his ego when the world no longer shakes from his every footstep? How would he repay all the favors he made to those that got him there?
AI is just a tool, like the gun, the ship or the railroad. It's not some panacea that is going to protect human nature from itself.
The idea is that in a post singularity[1] world we won't be making those decisions. A hopefully wise AI will manage and decide everything for us. (Even if we wouldn't want it to.)
That or the AI decides to exterminate us. In both cases jobs won't be a major concern.
Right, and a lot of today's technology bridges the gap by shifting work to the end user. How often does anyone call a travel agent anymore?
It's a slow process, as the quantity and depth of software increases, the number of knowledge workers decreases. That's literally the reason for existence for most software.
Five years ago to build a simple video chat you needed a team of hardcore programmers with expertise in video, audio, networking, real time protocols and telecom. Today it takes a couple of lines of javascript through WebRTC.
Also, if you're starting a project from scratch, you can use the latest and most streamlined technology. But if you're supporting a large code base (millions of lines of code) and adding features to it, you can't just suddenly re-write all your code to use the latest techniques. Also, you may be locked into a technology by your customers. For example, in the enterprise software space, lots of customers have a huge investment in Java application servers on which all their software runs, and if you want to compete in that space, it's easier to sell them a Java-based system than it is to convince them to install and learn to support a Ruby-based system just to run your product. And there's probably much more code (and programmers) in enterprise software -- think of all the software that supports banks, insurance companies, hospitals, government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, etc. -- than in the start-up world. I don't think AI is going to make a dent in that huge, complex pile of legacy software any time soon.
Facebook manages the data of 1 billion people, spanning some 200 countries with 5000 employees. No great AI involved.
Glad you bought up enterprise, most of those programmers now come from Indian IT companies. The only sector still employing american programmers is defence. Now if you are right and all those hospitals, pharma companies, insurance companies, banks etc require more and more features to be built for their customers then why do we see this
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/its-time-to-move-on-as-tec...
Why do we see Infosys tanking after almost a decade of being a darling of the stock market.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-22/infosys-investors-b...
Of course its all not happening overnight, there are some legacy systems that are still too expensive to replace but it is happening.
The costs are always a problem. If AI will ever really replace us, is still a mystery for the future. Because for it to work, it would have to be cost effective.
Just open it in Incognito Mode. The Economist uses a simple, cookie-based porous paywall.
It hasn't happened completely, but that is only a matter of time. Manufacturing jobs have been declining at a sharp and steady rate in the US. One part of this may be due to outsourcing, but the other part is due to automation. When machines can do most of the labor, eventually you will only need a few high-level engineers to calibrate those machines.
If a job is offshored (as much knowledge work has been), it's a good bet that the next step will be to automate it.