
Will the proliferation of affordable AI decimate the middle class? - elsewhen
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/04/will-the-proliferation-of-affordable-ai-decimate-the-middle-class.html
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jernfrost
The problem with this rosy picture as all other rosy pictures about automation
is that depending on the speed of technological change any automation will
potentially destroy the livelihood of a lot of people before they are able to
re-adjust to a new economic reality. People can't typically change their
skill-set as fast as technology can be introduced.

This doesn't have to be a problem if a country has welfare system mechanism to
cope with redundant workers, giving them a line to hold onto until they can
re-adjust to the new reality.

The problem is when you combine rapid technological progress with small
government dogma. That creates a toxic combination where the only winners are
the rich.

This is unfortunate because when you setup a society this way it causes large
fractions of the population to fight technological advancement, free trade and
immigration.

I think the %1 have to to realize that if people are going to buy into their
desired free trade and technological upgrades, then you got to offer something
in return. Taxes stuffed away in Panama isn't an acceptable answer to most
people ;-)

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hartator
I think the current "1%" should be the one afraid of AI. Introducing new
technology usually seems to shift wealth to a different set of people.

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unclebucknasty
Not in this case. The owners of the _commercial_ AI and robotics benefit.
We're already seeing the effects of this: look at the increasing
stratification of wealth in the context of increased productivity and
automation in recent years.

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eli_gottlieb
There's a whole massive underlying assumption here: that we will soon have
affordable, deployable, non-finnicky machine learning models for enough
problems to decimate the middle class.

In my experience, ML models, even the best deep convnets and such, are still
_extremely_ "finicky" by human standards, in the sense that small or human-
insignificant changes to the input vector can cause large-scale changes in the
output classification/regression. Cool demos with video-games need to be run
past some industrial automation experts before we go around proclaiming them
to be the harbingers of industrial AI!

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nickpeterson
The biggest hit will be truck drivers and call centers, I think we're far away
for most other jobs being economically replaceable.

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stevetrewick
I'm amazed we even still have call centres. Most of the human workforce is
just puppetry driven by workflow scripts. Working in one was the single most
dehumanising experience of my life, and I was the one implementing the
workflows. I agree that they are absolutely a huge target for automation - I
can't think of a single step in the entire workflow between campaign
conception through to deployment and associated follow up (document
fulfilment, etc) that couldn't be made more efficient and frankly more humane
with massive automation. And that's without any kind of ML/AI in the picture.
Once you start throwing AI around I reckon you can skip up a whole skill tier
from there. In this case, I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

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dataker
>AI isn’t like an oil field owned by a handful of people

Sure, it's free to access open-source AI tools.

However, only huge corporations have enough capital to first build these
ground-breaking technologies.

Being the first, it becomes almost impossible to compete at a later stage
("Thiel's aim for a monopoly").

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seizethecheese
The companies that have dominated each new wave of computing have not always
been the incumbents. Is building an AI more capital-intensive than Operating
Systems or PC hardware? It's feasible that if a powerful AI is created that it
will be done on a cloud server by a small team of people.

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nostrademons
Your observation is true, your conclusion isn't necessarily. AI is different
from other areas of computing in that _data_ matters far more than code does.
Current legal practice is that the data is owned by the organization that
collected it, which means that to collect data on millions of users to train
behavioral models, you need to have millions of users. If you have millions of
users, you're probably a pretty big company.

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mac01021
That depends to a large extent on what skill you want your AI to be able to
learn.

Many applications from recommender systems, to market analysis to drug
discovery probably require large datasets of the sort that can only be
collected by a large business.

But if you want to learn control polices for robotic agents that navigate the
physical world, driving cars, stocking shelves, etc. then I think the physical
world is presenting everyone with approximately the same data set regardless
of company size.

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AmVess
Middle class is already well down the road to ruin. AI isn't going to make a
difference either way.

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smegel
Let's wait for someone to invent it first.

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gregn
haha. double points for funny and true.

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pklausler
"decimate" != "devastate"

To "decimate" is to reduce by only 10%.

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dmoy
Not in modern usage.

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zeveb
The modern usage is wrong, and the correct usage is useful.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light!

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mtviewdave
"To reduce by 10%" is, in English, the novel usage. It was apparently invented
by essayist Richard Grant White in 1870. The original meaning of the word, "to
destroy", is attested to 1663:

[https://arnoldzwicky.org/2009/06/03/the-
decimators/](https://arnoldzwicky.org/2009/06/03/the-decimators/)

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pklausler
Caesar was 1900 years ahead of his time when he threatened to decimate the 9th
Legion, then.

The meaning may be obscure and obsolete, but the word does mean something
specific.

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mtviewdave
Unless Caesar spoke English, he didn't threaten "to decimate" anybody. Because
"to decimate" is an English verb.

Rather, I'm sure Caesar used the appropriate conjugation of the Latin verb
"decimō".

Two separate, but related, words. With two separate, but related, meanings.

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gozur88
>In the case of low-skill labor the rise of China has hurt some US low-skill
workers (although US workers as a whole are almost certainly better off due to
lower prices).

That (along with immigration) explains the rise in income inequality in the
US. If you have marketable skills you benefit from access to larger consumer
markets. If you don't, though, you suffer from access to large pools of
unskilled labor.

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crdoconnor
The death of the middle class will be austerity, union busting, stronger
intellectual property rights, tax evasion by the ultra-wealthy, TTIP and the
TPP.

The ruling classes sure would _prefer_ it if those things were swept under the
carpet and sci fi super robots took the blame instead though.

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yarrel
Yes.

