
At Davos, IBM Chief Predicts Artificial Intelligence Won’t Be a Job Killer - uptown
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-chief-predicts-artificial-intelligence-wont-be-a-job-killer-1484669444
======
cjlars
There's a lot believers in technological unemployment here on HN and one thing
I think that viewpoint misses is just how darn resilient humans are to changes
in the economy. In the past 150 years, we've seen human manual labor replaced
by mechanical labor. Think about that -- a lot of early California settlers
walked here, and now you're commanding power roughly equivalent to 100 horses
when you hop into your car. Agricultural employment went from 90%+ of the
population to ~1% over a few generations. People using computers at work went
from less than 1% to complete ubiquity in 30 years. And against all of this,
unemployment is still near its target rate. Is the large scale rollout of
predictive algorithms really a bigger wave than those that have come
previously?

~~~
Houshalter
Yes, this time it is different.

I like the comparison to horses. Steam engines and trains threatened to
replace horses in the mid 1800s. A lot of things that were previously done by
horses were replaced with trains and steam engines.

Yet the horse population grew, and cities remained full of horses. There were
countless transportation innovations in the 1800s, from canals to streetcars
and omnibuses to bicycles. But the horse population kept growing and showed no
signs of being threatened by this "automation". Whenever something took a
horses job, there will always be other jobs that technology can't do yet,
right?

Then the car was invented, and within 2 decades the horse population crashed.
Suddenly the price of feeding and maintaining a horse was much higher than the
alternative. There is no law of economics that says the supply and demand of a
good can't fall below the cost of maintaining it. Or that wages can't fall
below minimum, in our case.

Robotics has made incredible advancements over the past 50 years or more. They
have taken over entire factories, doing countless routine tasks previously
done by humans. But they are still very limited. They have 0 intelligence -
they can't see, they can't learn. They can only perform a rote series of
movements. So there is still tons of work available for humans.

But with recent advancements in machine learning, this is about to change. A
robot will soon be able to be trained to flip burgers, or drive a car, or take
a customer's order, etc, etc. I can not imagine any jobs that an average,
unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do. Maybe skilled
professions will be protected - I can't imagine robots being able to program
computers for awhile. But the vast majority of humans can not be trained to be
computer programmers.

~~~
kbenson
Horses are tools that people used. When there's no more use for the tool, it's
usage may be reduces. People are not just tools, they are the _reason_ we have
an economy in the first place. A solution in some form will have to be put
forth if one doesn't emerge.

Another way of looking at this is that we weren't ever under threat of
millions of displaced horses rising up and overthrowing the system. Since that
_is_ a possible outcome of too many unhappy people, changes will be made to
ensure people have some base level of happiness on average to prevent that.
It's one of the things that makes our current government as stable as it is -
the need to respond to the people.

~~~
icehawk219
People absolutely are tools in the eyes of their employers. I've never been at
a company and not heard them refer to employees as "resources" when talking
about scheduling and allocation of people. There's nothing special about
humans in a factory compared to robots other than our ability to adapt and
learn. But as robotics and AI/ML get better that gap narrows until you reach a
point that the robot is "good enough". That same robot might be a little
slower than a person at first but it's operating for a fraction of the hourly
rate and it's doing so 24/7 with no breaks and no slow downs.

Your point about millions of displaced people rising up and being unhappy is
100% valid. But you'll be hard pressed to find any company willing to
sacrifice a slice of their earnings to employe people just because it's the
right thing to do. Especially in the US where the entire culture is based
around corporate profits only ever increasing at a rate greater than
inflation. The US is in one big race to the bottom to see who can shave $0.01
off the sale price of their product. That naturally leads to two things.
Monopolies and hyper efficiency. Because when your profit margin is pennies
per unit you have to move one hell of a lot units to make hundreds of millions
a year in revenue.

~~~
kbenson
> you'll be hard pressed to find any company willing to sacrifice a slice of
> their earnings to employee people just because it's the right thing to do.

Sure, but that's what legislation is for. We have a minimum wage and laws
protecting workers for a reason. Companies do have a disproportionate
influence on politics, but only to a point. When it comes to a truly unhappy
populace, politicians know what's more important to continuing to perpetuate
the system.

------
josho
This is all you need to read from the article:

> Advances in artificial intelligence will lead to job losses, but new forms
> of employment will take their place...History, though, has demonstrated that
> technological breakthroughs lead to new employment opportunities

\-- IBM CEO Ginni Rometty

But, I think we are approaching (if we haven't already crossed this point) the
time where new jobs created by technology advancements will be fewer than old
jobs displaced.

My example here is Instagram, a company of a dozen staff or so when acquired,
is the digital replacement of photo labs in every city. New technologies are
not the job creator that they once were and I haven't read anything to
contradict that statement or posit that new tech is going to drive jobs
growth.

~~~
cryptoz
I agree.

It all seems so obvious to me that I feel like I must be the fool in the room,
but that can't be. Technology and progress in science changes the kinds of
work we do. The processes are accelerating, and we're reaching a point where
work is better done by machines. I can see no viable future for humans other
than Universal Basic Income, with options for additional creativity and work
unbounded by time spent doing menial tasks to earn wages for shelter and food
and clothing. Yes that all sounds utopian, but what other futures are there?
The masses won't have jobs - the machines will. What will people do when there
are no jobs? We'll have UBI and we'll have the strongest entrepreneurship and
artistic discovery we've ever had. It doesn't matter what side of the politics
you're on - UBI is going to be the future simply because it has to be.

"Job creator" is the most intense insult I can think of to call a politician
but everyone else seems to love it. Aren't we supposed to be destroying jobs
as fast as possible so that automation can make our lives easier and provide
higher quality of life to all?

Creating jobs sounds like the worst possible path for people to take - and for
CEOs like Rometty to encourage the idea that jobs are here to stay seems
dangerous. Jobs are not here to stay, even as the work changes and some new
jobs are created along the way, the numbers of jobs will decline to 0.

~~~
kbenson
I think part of what drives your view on this is a particular idea of what a
"job" is. It's likely that the meaning, in aggregate, will shift somewhat over
time.

Another way to look at it is that some people _like_ working, and find having
a job fulfilling, regardless of whether it pays the bills or not (many senior
people get simple jobs after retiring because they like it).

If we think of a "job" as a means for acquiring the resources for happiness
(all too often money for basic needs, but also often a feeling of advancement
and status among peers), then it's not something we necessarily want to do
away with. It may be that it's less based on money and more on some other
capital (social?) instead though.

------
chollida1
We've seen this before with the transition from a labour force that was 50%+
involved in farming to one that became a manufacturing based society and then
again in the move from manufacturing to services.

One of the bigger differences with AI is that it now may take away many of the
lower tier "white collar" jobs along with blue collar jobs that were
previously displaced by technology shits.

I'm not terribly familiar with my economics history but is it possible that a
huge tide of AI backed apps could be the first time that a significant portion
of white collar jobs are lost along with the typical blue collar jobs that are
more traditionally lost with tech shifts?

Then again, in 2000, alot of first world programmers were worried about
offshoring of programming jobs, I haven't seen any real impact of the loss of
these jobs on programmers in North America so perhaps IBM is correct that AI
will produce as many new jobs as it replaces.

~~~
arebop
The issue is not that yet another group of cowards is whining. The issue is
that once machines can do everything better than humans, we will need a new
way to organize society.

Machines have already replaced animals including humans for the application of
pure physical force to solving problems.

Now machines are now replacing animals including humans for the application of
intellect to solving problems.

It is not clear that there is any next frontier. Would it be "love" or
"spiritual practice" or what?

Some people say that AI will not progress as far as industrial-age machines
did in obsoleting humans. They sometimes give specific examples, claiming that
they find AI-generated art to be dull or that AI-guided robotic surgeons only
succeed in narrow tasks, etc. It's OK to argue that this will take a long time
but I haven't heard anyone explain why the AIs won't win in the long run.
Maybe the run is so long we shouldn't worry about it?

Some other people say "we found new jobs before, we'll do it again." For
example, the IBM chief. And that seems like empty wishful thinking.

------
EternalData
The problem with AI is that it's dynamite when it comes to capital-labour
relations. You can't compete with something with perfect agency that never
gets sick. Now, are there going to be new categories of work and new
economies? Yes. But in the meanwhile, for a category of work that defines a
plurality if not majority of the functioning economy (basically anything that
doesn't require creativity across multiple domains or empathy), there are
going to be SEVERE income share implications.

Keep in mind that labour share of income has gone down drastically in the last
few decades and that as a result, real wages have stagnated -- which has
produced significant unrest in developed countries and unseated the
established political order. If that trend continues...

~~~
josho
> You can't compete with something with perfect agency that never gets sick.
> Now, are there going to be new categories of work and new economies?

Follow your own logic to its conclusion. If AI does that then what are the new
jobs? We are eliminating entire job categories. While the new jobs will be in
entirely different categories (e.g. manual labor will be all but eliminated,
and the new jobs will be in creative industries). There is very little cross
over between those job categories so we are heading to a future with a
significant portion of the population jobless.

~~~
EternalData
Machines are bad at transferring domain knowledge and generalizing/making
unconventional linkages between topics -- what some would regard as
creativity, they're also not going to be very good at empathy without
essentially solving for strong AI and regularized data on human emotions --
there also are going to be human jobs because of protectionist instincts. ex:
A machine right now would actually probably do a more optimal job of
determining interest rates if given more economic data and more data on
outputs/outcomes, but replacing the Fed and analysts under it with a machine
is a political football and a half to even say.

If we solve for strong AI, we might as well kiss the species goodbye, never
mind just jobs -- but the AI we have in between is not going to completely
eliminate every category of work in the present, never mind future ones that
might arise.

~~~
EternalData
I think we agree on the larger point, just to the degree of the damage. I
think I'm on a 7.5, you might be on a 9 in terms of damage AI can do to
employment.

~~~
josho
When I wrote my comment I was thinking long term (e.g. decades). Regardless,
the disruption is going to be sufficient enough to force us to redefine our
economy.

------
DashRattlesnake
Is IBM CEO Ginni Rometty someone who can actually provide insight on the
impact of AI on society? I'm sure some of her subordinates could, but the only
thing I've ever heard about her personally is that she's driving IBM into the
ground by chasing some unrealistic financial metric, and I'm not super
inclined to bypass a paywall just to hear an executive say executive things.

~~~
freehunter
>I'm sure some of her subordinates could

Where do you think CEOs get their information from?

~~~
congerous
From people trying to protect their own ass by not telling her that Watson
doesn't work.

~~~
edgarvaldes
I'm not familiar with Watson. Why do you say it doesn't work? Does it fall
short compared to other offerings in this space?

~~~
congerous
Watson does not offer anything more than you can get from popular, free open-
source projects, and often it offers much less, because it is complex, costly
and closed-source. Nobody looks to Watson for the state of the art in AI.

------
joe_the_user
In discussions of the issue, AI and automation are often used interchangeably
and this entirely clouds the issue.

The AI that is so far real is a particular kind of software that has helped
large-scale decisions and processes in large enterprises, large websites and
etc - places with a lot of data to agregate.

Automation is an ongoing process of replacing people with machines and it is
what has eliminated jobs. Advances in software has helped some automation and
some of those advances are connected to AI but a lot of the advances involve
materials, processes, a willingness-or-not of consumers to use automated
processes rather than interacting with a human (whether buying online or from
automatic kiosk or whatever).

Indeed, the AI-in-particular and job losses in general narrative is just about
a sales-pitch for IBM's Watson etc rather than a serious threat.

~~~
ChuckMcM
This position, "AI as automation", is the important one.

Tasks, whether they are manufacturing or service, have a difficulty level in
automation. That difficulty is generally scored as a 'cost' with respect to
having a person do the task or service and the cost to have them do that.

There are two costs associated with execution, training and marginal cost of
execution. So if you spend 10 hours training a factory worker to use a
machine, that is your training cost, if it takes them 1 second to operate the
machine to do the task, that is the marginal cost. Consider the printing
press.

The printing press replaces a fully manual process. A scribe takes 3 to 5
years to write out a copy of a book. They are trained for many years in
calligraphy, and each book takes years to produce. The printing press on the
other hand you train a 'scribe' to arrange the letters from a type tray into a
plate, to ink it, to press it onto sheets. That training takes less time than
calligraphy training. Then for each book the scribe puts together the plates,
prints out multiple copies of the page, and then assembles the book from the
various pages. One or more copies of a single book can happen in a week. Your
marginal cost has gone down as well.

Then plate printers, removed the type trays. Then mechanical paper handling
fed paper into these machines. Etc to the point where now you need nothing,
the author writes, uploads it to their kindle publishing account and the
readers down load and read.

But all through this process "employment" around the notion of books changed.
And who was employed and how also changed. The product, written and
illustrated communication from one person to many, was fundamentally the same
but delivered differently.

What we think of as "AI" today allows automating with less people training
tasks which defied automation before. And by doing so it changes the market
dynamics around that good or service. The most popular example is livery and
delivery services with automated drivers. It only became possible to automate
a driver when you had a machine that could recognize and respond to a wide
variety of conditions in its environment.

------
ilaksh
Deep learning-ish advances can theoretically automate a ton of things now, but
it will take a few years for those AIs to be engineered/trained/marketed. That
is actually a continuation of automation which is as much a social process as
it is about technology.

But if you look at projects like Deep Mind Lab, Open AI Universe, Good AIs Lab
and 5 million usd AGI contest, combine those 3d environments with incremental
learning transferred across domains, leveraging deep learning, hybrid and
other advancements, as well as (hopefully) the existing body of research from
the field of AGI (which has existed for a number of years, despite many
pretending it didn't) -- we now have very powerful parallel learning tools and
many public projects aimed at general agents. And very convincing demos in
more narrow domains. Because of all of this I personally believe the core AGI
technology will be demonstrated within the next two years. How long before
that makes its way into embodied robots and gets trained up to the point it
can be readily adapted to various industries may be another few years.

So my own belief is that we should expect ALL jobs to start to be 'threatened'
by AGI systems by around 2022-2023.

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
You are proof that the hype surrounding AI/Machine Learning has gone way too
far.

~~~
ilaksh
_I_ am proof? I wonder why you are making it personal. Its not about me though
is it?

Look at the Open AI Universe, Deep Mind AI Lab, Good AI Universe, etc. Look
them up. They all say that the goal is artificial general intelligence. All of
these companies/programs have multiple literal geniuses and tens or even
hundreds of millions or more in funding. The AGI environments are public, so
who knows how many hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of talented
programmers and scientists are working towards the same goal.

Do _you_ think that all of these large programs, companies, investors would be
so publicly pursuing this goal if it were not feasible? If not within two
years, then how many years do you think it will be before these projects yield
results that have human-like generality or abilities?

If you suppose they will never achieve that, then what level of generality do
you assume them to be limited to? Certainly those groups expect to achieve
some type of general intelligence. So perhaps you assume in the near term it
will not be human-level, then at what level do you suppose it will be limited?
Dog-like intelligence? Once agents achieve dog-like intelligence, why would
you assume there would not be a way to progress beyond that? We have already
achieved super-human intelligence in numerous particular domains.

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
> _I_ am proof? I wonder why you are making it personal. Its not about me
> though is it?

Fair enough. _Your post is proof

> Do _you_ think that all of these large programs, companies, investors would
> be so publicly pursuing this goal if it were not feasible?

Sure, it happens all the time.

> If not within two years, then how many years do you think it will be before
> these projects yield results that have human-like generality or abilities?

I'm not sure those projects ever will but in general before we get AGI? It's
totally unpredictable. My current best guess is that self-driving car systems
won't be as good as promised and because they've pierced the public
consciousness, we will get AI backlash setting in another AI winter. This
winter will trim the fat of all the crap that gets published now and _maybe* a
couple new fundamental techniques will be born. _Maybe_ those techniques lead
to AGI when we emerge from the winter. We'll get AGI like we'll get cold
fusion. When it comes it comes.

> We have already achieved super-human intelligence in numerous particular
> domains.

Sure but show me a system that can do just two unrelated tasks. Doesn't even
have to do them above human intelligence, but something that can say put
blocks in holes like a two year old and do some basic language processing. Or
play chess and recognize pictures of dogs. What kind of leap is even required
to get there?

------
bleezy
I think a lot of people here are missing why these labor changes will be so
harmful.

Yes, when agriculture, industrialization, etc, emerged, old jobs were replaced
with new jobs that people could not have previously predicted.

But these new jobs are terrible. They are degrading, dehumanizing, and absurd.
We have 63% labor participation, and about half* the people working do
nothing. They make Power Point slides, they send emails, they form working
groups, they schedule conference calls to schedule other conference calls.
Apple hires a bunch of lawyers to sue Samsung. Samsung hires a bunch of
lawyers to defend itself. Nothing is accomplished. They all feel like shit,
they're addicted to the internet and they are on prescription anti-
depressants.

These jobs are rituals, they are not productive in any sense.

When ancient Egyptians developed agriculture, they did not go on to live lives
of luxury. Workers who would previously have spent their days hunting and
gathering instead spent their days pushing limestone blocks up to the top of
the pyramid.

*bullshit on my part, but look at these statistics ([https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm](https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm)) and come up with an industry-by-industry estimate for yourself, it is depressingly high

------
PeterStuer
The sad thing is she has to say this to appease her public sector clientele
that still holds to the believe that life benefits tied to 'jobs' are the only
way to keep the unruly masses under control.

~~~
mac01021
Do you have a citation to suggest that that is her motive?

That would be extremely interesting to read.

------
Apocryphon
Most of these discussions revolve around when and how sufficiently intelligent
AI will be available to revolutionize society, but what about the hardware? As
in, is there a limit to our ability to design and create (cost-effectively)
the mechanical and other _physical_ components that are required for building
the precise robots and other machines of this automated future? At what point
do we hit a physical limit of cost prohibitive machinery for full automation?

I'm not sure what "full automation" really entails, but those who envision to
inevitable automation future don't really explain it either. Everyone focuses
on the software without considering if there may be limits to the hardware,
and by that I don't just mean the computing machines but everything in
meatspace.

------
BJBBB
1\. not certain about the articles demographics - see
[https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/demo/p25-1143.pdf)

The big problem with immigrant-fueled growth in America is that the first
derivative of most Latin American demographic trends indicates larger
reductions in growth rate than the U.S. or Canada. So North America, in
general, could become dependent on higher-risk immigrant populations from Asia
to maintain any significant growth.

2\. Most boomers will be dead and turned to dust before 2060. And age
distribution could become flat as fertility rates go flat. After 2045, the
over 65 population rate will probably decrease to under 25% for North America.
Some actuaries are thinking that people will not necessarily continue to have
increased lifespans.

3\. Quality and financial incentives for production and design automation have
been driving industry at increasing rate for at least 25 years. My three
current employers (one full-time regular, two contract) are all under 200
employees, have all reduced head count by at 15% to 40% over last 5 to 10
years, and have mandated to either not increase bodies or to further decrease
bodies.

4\. Too much emphasis on self-driving vehicles. Most industrial automation is
after the obvious low-hanging fruit - logistics and production, where you do
not necessarily see actual robotics, but much process automation and decision-
making sustained by ML.

5\. Mid-level jobs are being increasingly targeted: parsing of legal
documents, accounting, warehouse management and stock control, and some of the
more simple product design functions.

6\. Anecdotal stuff.

In Early 2016, employer's main site in Southern California terminated OVER
half of the engineering group - mostly support and mid-level management. Only
one technician, no PCB designers, no mechanical designers, and no engineering
managers remain. The remaining engineers do it all - feasible because design
automation tools have reached a 'critical' mass.

Spent most of October through December automating the crap out of a factory
warehouse and related processes. Last week, 14 people were terminated at the
Mexico factory site. The factory warehouse had 14 full-time and 4 part-time
employees in warehouse; there are now 3 full and 1 part-timer; and the part-
timer will probably go away next quarter. And no robots in sight...

------
jdhopeunique
It seems like these articles about AI are just a distraction from the real
wage suppression caused by temporary work visas, illegal immigration, and
workers being classified as contractors. Perhaps tech companies want to signal
they have other options for labor as a sort of threat to combat increased
scrutiny of their labor practices. Perhaps the message is: "Don't take away
our cheap labor or we will release the AI overlords."

------
RRRA
This whole question is missing philosophical context.

Maybe not now, but once we all get automated, what is the goal we're trying to
reach?

Where are we going with this?

~~~
malka
what do you think will happen to the working class when it becomes useless to
those in charge ? Don't you think they'd enjoy more living on earth without
us, plebeian ? (eg, like the spacers living in Solaria in Asimov novels:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaria)
)

------
cutler
The AI revolution will wake up the west to the realities of capitalism.
Trump's spat with China over trade barriers is just one example of America
coming to terms with the fact that capitalism has no sense of patriotism or
morality. If the price (of labour) is right capitalists will do business with
anyone. The capitalist philosophy, based on Adam Smith's "invisible hand"
which mysteriously takes care of the common good, is a fallacy behind which
the greed of the 1% masquerades as success. Capitalism's goal is to drive down
the price of labour which it can only see as a cost. AI is the capitalist's
dream, presenting for the first time the possibility of eliminating human
labour altogether. There is only one question we must ask as a society - to
whom will the capitalists of the AI age be accountable? Marx wrote about this
endgame 150 years ago and of all the economists since then I'd say his
analysis has been the most accurate.

------
geodel
I think it is also matter of time scale. There may be new jobs once this all
settles down. Today I have real fear of mass job disappearance. If I lose job
today due to AI and tumultuous times continue for next 50 years it is of no
use to me that 2080 is the start of AI based golden era.

------
eva1984
AI is a flaky term changing its meaning every now and then, and indeed, as the
backbone of the hype, Deep Learning itself is rapidly evolving unlike any
other fields I have witnessed.

Take CV for example. AlexNet is wakeup call for deep learning renaissance,
however no one has predicted that we would go beyond human-level performance
in just 3 years(ResNet developed in 2015). Same goes for AlphaGo/Machine
Translation/Speech Recognition, or the latest photo-realistic stacked GAN.

All in all it is hard to predict what we will end up with by looking at
history because we are in such an exciting time of ML/AI development. No
matter how prestigious that person might be, his or her words affect very
little what the future will actually be, only technology itself could.

------
balozi
If I was Ms. Rometty, I would spend my time playing up the fact that A.I. will
lead to a vastly improved quality of life for everyone. Advancements in
knowledge always tend to do that and A.I. is a great leap forward in tech
knowledge.

------
WhitneyLand
Does she mean AI won't be a job killer "for a while" or "ever"?

Does anyone really believe the latter?

------
warmfuzzykitten
In other news, IBM announced today that CEO Ginni Rometti has resigned in
order to have more time to spend with her family and the new CEO will be
Watson.

------
neom
We can only pray that AI will help correct knowledge inequality.

------
stevehiehn
So it WILL be a job killer but hopefully there will be new ones.

------
pdeuchler
BREAKING: CEO who's compensation and job depends on selling advancements in
computing downplays the downsides of said advancements

------
congerous
Rometty doesn't even know that Watson is a vaporware boondoggle, so how would
she know what's going to happen when AI impacts society. She is probably the
least qualified person at IBM to talk about AI, and IBM itself is one of the
least qualified companies practicing "AI". She too far removed from the
trenches. But IBM has excellent PR, and this is the line I would take if I
were betting my company on AI services.

~~~
garysieling
What part is vaporware? I've used the AlchemyAPI bits they acquired in
building [https://www.findlectures.com](https://www.findlectures.com), and
it's useful, albeit way oversold.

~~~
congerous
I don't know, you tell me how much of this you believe:

[https://www.fastcompany.com/3065339/mind-and-machine/can-
ibm...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3065339/mind-and-machine/can-ibms-watson-
do-it-all)

> A doctor reads about a half dozen medical research papers in a month,
> Meyerson says, whereas Watson can read a half million in about 15 seconds.
> From that, machine learning (one of the key types of artificial intelligence
> today) can suggest diagnoses and the most promising course of treatment.

------
anon987
More corporate propaganda where they leave out the key details and don't
address easy questions.

Much like IBM's bullshit 25,000 jobs PR stunt this one has no substance
besides the empty words of a suit who will do anything to increase revenue.

