
Stephen Hawking: AI will decimate middle class jobs - gina650
http://www.businessinsider.com/stephen-hawking-ai-automation-middle-class-jobs-most-dangerous-moment-humanity-2016-12?utm_content=buffer5550e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_campaign=buffer
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internaut
"Technology has already gutted many traditional manufacturing and working
class jobs — but now it may be poised to wreak similar havoc with the middle
classes."

This is accurate. It is Moravec's Paradox.

I keep repeating it because there is a slew of newspaper articles since
Trump's victory claiming that Silicon Valley destroyed the manufacturing jobs.

This isn't even wrong.

It is true that _technology_ destroyed them, but we're talking about
Industrial Revolution era technology.

Highly Repetitive manual tasks have been automated by machines. Finishing
components and configuration of components is mostly performed in Chinese
factories or in Western factories, some of which are so highly automated they
are called black sites. Anything that could be put into a factory for making
the parameters of the task simpler, is mostly already there.

The 'low hanging fruit' for disrupting the working class is gone, long gone.

It now requires very sophisticated AI and robotics to really impact the
remaining working class niches. This is easily several decades away.

Guess who performs a lot of work with raw information? The middle classes.
That's why they are in the crosshairs of Silicon Valley.

A cynic might suggest this 'panic' over the working class losing their jobs
has a lot more to do with the middle classes losing theirs.

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k__
When reading such things, I don't understand why people hate on UBI.

I mean, what are the alternatives?

You can prohibit automation per law, so that everyone can stay in their jobs.
This will probably fail because not every country will pass such laws.

You can try to teach the people new stuff that can't be automated easily.

But does a clerk want to become a pastry chef or gardener (some of the harder
to automate jobs it seems)?

Or teach them "higher" education in the hopes they can create their own
automations and make money with it, but how much of these clerks are good
enough to get through universtiy decades after they left school.

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mikebelanger
Because welfare of any kind is seen as a moral failure by many. UBI is just a
more streamlined version of moral failure. I don't agree with this sentiment,
but many hold it.

As far as alternatives to UBI go, a lot of people have the hope that
automation (indirectly) will create new jobs, and society will ultimately
adjust to fill those jobs. I don't know if this will always happen. Many
people aren't going to buy any pastry or ask for gardeners if only a handful
of them can afford these things to begin with.

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k__
> people have the hope that automation (indirectly) will create new jobs

I think so, too.

But I also think the new jobs would be better if they weren't created because
of fear, but because people wanted to do them.

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gina650
In China the risk of automation is as high as 77%.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/clsa-wef-and-citi-on-the-
futu...](http://www.businessinsider.com/clsa-wef-and-citi-on-the-future-of-
robots-and-ai-in-the-workforce-2016-6?r=UK&IR=T)

~~~
contingencies
China's middle class is actually growing though, whereas it's static or
shrinking in most western countries.

~~~
adamnemecek
Those those observations are not mutually exclusive.

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rokosbasilisk
More like AI will decimate jobs in the knowledge economy. AI cancer
recognition is better than most doctors already.

