

Will IBM's Watson put your job in jeopardy? - tgriesser
http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/02/15/will-ibm%E2%80%99s-watson-put-your-job-in-jeopardy/

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

Oh shit - that _is_ what I do.

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

------
johnohara
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.

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christkv
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.

~~~
yummyfajitas
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.]

~~~
ctkrohn
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/>

~~~
yummyfajitas
_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.

~~~
ctkrohn
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.

~~~
yummyfajitas
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.

------
recampbell
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.

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georgecmu
I hope it will put the following jobs in jeopardy:

    
    
      - secretaries
      - receptionists
      - middle managers

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

~~~
georgecmu
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.

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

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

Watson: "What is shoe?"

------
gst
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.

~~~
georgemcbay
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.

~~~
gst
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.

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

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

------
dantheman
No.

