
Artificial Intelligence Threatens Jobs in Developing World - devy
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-09-17/artificial-intelligence-threatens-jobs-in-developing-world
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jackconnor
In other news, Bloomberg is has now reached a new low for click-bait
technopanic. Do they think the world will run out of low-skilled jobs because
AI learns how to perform current ones? History doesn't back this up, as things
like the industrial revolution, or automated farming, or etc etc etc didn't
cause low-skilled jobs to disappear, it just changed what the exact nature of
those jobs were. More and more i dislike seeing Bloomberg on here, they're
"tech scare" approach to journalism is inaccurate and annoying, and it's
causing a lot of unnecessary negativity towards new technologies.

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smogcutter
Say a factory is fully automated. What low skill jobs have been created? This
isn't the same as the invention of the spinning jenny. Unreasoned panic is
just as foolish as assuming that things will just sort themselves out for the
best.

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jackconnor
Some blue collar jobs that will be created include: maintaining the factory
robots, producing the robots that run the factory, installing the robots that
run the factory, and retrofitting old factories to work with new automated
systems, lubing up the factory robots and replacing their oil and filters. Not
to mention entire industries which will crop up - millions of specialized
engineers, automated factory focused marketing firms, new government sectors
for people to write regulation for automated robots, etc.

The world changes, but we never run out of stuff to do.

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pankajdoharey
I dont think this article has much merit for a few reasons. The two category
of Jobs that are outsourced to India or other developing world are Either
service oriented or Manufacturing oriented.

For Instance The service oriented jobs in India like Customer support and
Offshore Software development cannot be yet replaced by AI. Customer Support
is trouble shooting driven and Software Development is innovation driven, the
latter would take decades to be replaced by AI, at which point all the Jobs
would have been anyway replaced by AI. The first category though could be
replaced in the next decade or so.

The automation in manufacturing can replace some redundant jobs but not all of
them as evidenced by Teslas Manufacturing fiasco where they tried to automate
everything leading upto a delay, as humans are more dexterous and can do some
tasks much better than Robots.

So I dont see how AI has reached the point which this article claims can
replace human labour yet.

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candiodari
> For Instance The service oriented jobs in India like Customer support and
> Offshore Software development cannot be yet replaced by AI

Customer support is troubleshooting driven ? Heh. You must not have used it
for a while.

But aside from that. Let's say that it is. That essentially consists of 2
problems:

1) voice recognition

2) query answering based on freeform text

(1) is solved, (2) is proving a little tougher, but pretty nice progress is
being made.

> The automation in manufacturing can replace some redundant jobs but not all
> of them

Sure, at this point AI is slowly becoming a force multiplier for
manufacturing. What a factory can do with one employee will steadily go up.

The issue is that currently this multiplier will kill a LOT of jobs. Let's say
an employee productivity doubles (you only need 1 employee to do what 2 used
to do), how many jobs does that destroy ?

About a billion.

Granted, it will take 15-30 years for that to actually happen, but there'll be
an initial spike (let's say rapidly dropping 100 million jobs) and a slower
but steadier increase over time until we hit that number.

Of course over 30 years the multiplier is not going to be 2, but hundreds. So
another 30 years after that, manufacturing will have 2-10% of the population
employed, no more, like agriculture today.

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blunte
This is no surprise. This is the low hanging fruit. And economies that are
already quite advanced (have outsourced the more mechanical work to developing
countries) are at less risk.

Perhaps a silly example, but imagine people whose job it was to answer
arithmetic queries: "What is 47 + 1.5?" Any modern human who couldn't be
bothered with doing that in their head would use a readily available
calculator, even if that was just an address bar in their browser.

Clearly, the arithmetic people would lose their jobs to technology. There's no
creativity to their work; it is easily programmed.

This applies to any job. If your job is to vacuum a floor, then eventually
there will be some version of an iRobot that can do it just as well or better.

Humans have immense potential, depending on how you choose to measure it.
Maybe not all that potential is marketable, but most of it is currently not
outsource-able to AI or robotics. Eventually, in the internet-connected world,
if you want to remain relevant as a human, you'll need to exercise some of
your talents that cannot be reasonably approximated by a computer. Obviously
you'll stop playing chess for money... and you'll stop doing other tasks that
robots or specialized hardware can do.

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swagasaurus-rex
What you say makes sense.

Humans were once the only means of labor; even animals needed a human
attendant – and the cost of construction was the number of capable adults to
help build economies.

Industrialization, and especially the use of oil and electricity to do work,
decoupled man-power. Computers and the internet have decoupled man-hours, and
now we see economies of scale, and an information economy. With AI, we may see
even less dependence on human labor.

What will this do to the human population? With low skill labor made
irrelevant, how will those people contribute and receive money from an
increasingly gated economy?

Interestingly, food also benefits from economies of scale and automation.
Cheaper food leads to a larger population. Larger population means more people
contributing to the economy, but as we've already seen in farming this last
hundred years, fewer and fewer people of whom the economy pays wages to.

It's a strange balance. I do not know what it all means.

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IloveHN84
I still don't know AI or robots capable of doing work of electricians, house
constructors, shoe repairing, car repairing and so on. There's a class of job
too complicated for a robot at the current state of art (say, for next 50-70
years at least), because humans do it better and even in awful conditions.

AI can't cope with bad weather or too complicated problems.

See how the "autonomous cars" drive well on sunny and dry days against windy
or snowy days

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imtringued
There are easier problems that still cannot be solved by robots. The biggest
milestone will probably something completely trivial like newspaper delivery.
It's repetitive routine work with the added complexity that every mailbox is
completely different.

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justfor1comment
The underlying assumption in the article is that even after the AI-Automation
revolution people will still want jobs. A good chunk of the population might
just be happy when their basic needs of food, shelter, clothing,
entertainment, etc are met by automated factories and services. It is possible
to create this supply meets demand world at zero recurring costs.

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throwaway13337
That is probably largely true.

But then those people have no leverage to barter with and save them from
oppression.

I worry that the ai powered future looks like a country with the resource
curse - only those with control of the means of production have any political
power.

How do we ensure people continue to have any real political power without
their underlying economic power to enforce it?

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leowoo91
Why would AI care about threatening humans at all?

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lostmsu
I wonder how soon AI will be able to generate believable fluff pieces.

