I worked in the mainframe computer business for large banks for twenty years. AI was the discussion rage in 2000. Has it finally arrived?
The Wall Street Journal asks What Will AI Do to Your Job? Take a Look at What It’s Already Doing to Coders
AI seems set to do to computer programming—and possibly other kinds of so-called knowledge work—what automation has done to other jobs, from the factory floor and the warehouse, to the checkout aisle and the call center. In those industries, the end result of widespread automation has been the elimination of countless roles—and their replacement with ones that require either relatively little skill and knowledge, or a great deal more, with workers at either end of this spectrum being rewarded accordingly.
In other words, software is eating the software industry.
Now, AI is automating knowledge work, and the implications for the half of the U.S. workforce who are employed in such jobs are profound. It’s true that these white-collar jobs have been evolving for decades as technology has improved, but the elimination of middle-skilled jobs seems set to accelerate as AI is institutionalized in the workplace.
The job- and wage-polarizing effects of automation on an industry can interrupt the usual ladder of hiring and development, warns Yossi Sheffi, a professor of engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose latest book is on the future of work. “One of the main challenges of the future is how to hire junior people who don’t yet have the experience to step in when the machine doesn’t work,” says Dr. Sheffi.
Many experienced developers I spoke with expressed skepticism about the ability of AI coding tools to take over the most essential tasks of programming, including designing solutions to complex problems, and understanding existing libraries of code at companies that have been building up their systems for years, or even decades.
In 1892, the first automatic telephone exchange was invented, says Dr. Sheffi. By 1930, America still had 235,000 telephone exchange operators. That said, the double bind that many earlier-career developers currently find themselves in is a cautionary tale for us all. If AI disrupts a field at the same time that workers in it face other challenges, no matter what historians say, the impact of automation on jobs, and those who hold them, can be swift.
In my experience, science, and especially the promise of science, moves slower than one might expect. I recall the AI rage in 2000. And for the past 10 years I have heard things like all white collar jobs are at risk.
2012 Paul Krugman Flashback
On December 26, 2012, Paul Krugman asked Is Growth Over?
Consider for a moment a sort of fantasy technology scenario, in which we could produce intelligent robots able to do everything a person can do. Clearly, such a technology would remove all limits on per capita GDP, as long as you don’t count robots among the capitas. All you need to do is keep raising the ratio of robots to humans, and you get whatever GDP you want.
Smart machines may make higher GDP possible, but also reduce the demand for people — including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.
Bill Gates Says Tax the Robots
In 2017, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said Tax the Robots
In a recent interview with Quartz, Gates said that a robot tax could finance jobs taking care of elderly people or working with kids in schools, for which needs are unmet and to which humans are particularly well suited. He argues that governments must oversee such programs rather than relying on businesses, in order to redirect the jobs to help people with lower incomes. The idea is not totally theoretical: EU lawmakers considered a proposal to tax robot owners to pay for training for workers who lose their jobs, though on Feb. 16 the legislators ultimately rejected it.
“You ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed” of automation, Gates argues. That’s because the technology and business cases for replacing humans in a wide range of jobs are arriving simultaneously, and it’s important to be able to manage that displacement. “You cross the threshold of job replacement of certain activities all sort of at once,” Gates says, citing warehouse work and driving as some of the job categories that in the next 20 years will have robots doing them.
Bernie Sanders Says Tax the Robots
On Face the Nation, February 19, 2023, Bernie Sanders called for a robot tax.
MARGARET BRENNAN: You are- when you talk about American workers, you’re proposing a new cabinet level agency to focus on the future of work and workers. You talk about taxing robots who might replace humans. Isn’t the Labor Department supposed to be doing these things?
SEN. SANDERS: Well, theoretically, but I don’t think we’re doing enough. Look, this is a huge issue. There is a revolution taking place now with artificial intelligence and robotics. Okay? Millions of workers are going to lose their jobs. Who’s making those decisions, Margaret? You hear it debated in Congress? I don’t. Alright, so guys who sit at the head, often guys, of large multinational corporations are saying, “Look, we can do this, we can get rid of all these people over here, we can make even more money.” So we’re talking about a transformational moment throughout the world and the United States. I want working people to be involved. And if we come up with the technology – I’m not anti-technology, if there is a technology that can do- increase worker productivity, who benefits from that? Just the guy who owns the company? Or does the worker benefit? So if we can reduce the workweek, is that a bad thing? It’s a good thing. But I don’t want to see the people on top simply be the only beneficiaries of this revolution in technology.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So you agree with Bill Gates in taxing robots?
SEN. SANDERS: That’s one way to do it. Yeah, absolutely.
The Robot Tax Debate
The lead image is from the 2020 WSJ article The ‘Robot Tax’ Debate Heats Up
The Journal presents both sides of the argument. Here are a couple of snips.
A robot tax could serve multiple purposes, slowing job-destroying automation while raising revenue to supplement shrinking taxes paid by human workers. It could take a few different forms. Lawmakers could limit or slow down deductions for businesses that replace humans with robots, or they could hit businesses with levies equivalent to the payroll taxes paid by employers and employees.
“It’s one of the more harebrained ideas. Just about every aspect of it’s wrong,” says Dean Baker, a progressive economist who says the country should be trying to improve flagging productivity growth, not inhibiting it. “The problem that we’re ostensibly trying to fix isn’t there.”
But what if the next wave of robots is different? What if robots aren’t like laptops or sewing machines or any other technology we’ve ever seen and they replace jobs without creating new ones?
“That’s the bazillion-dollar question,” says Shu-Yi Oei, a Boston College law professor. “Is this the same as the last manufacturing age? Or is it really something new?”
There’s a real risk that the next wave of automation and artificial intelligence will displace workers and not create enough jobs, says Daron Acemoglu, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who co-wrote a recent study that found technology already contributing to slower employment growth.
Tax Not the Robots
In 2021, the Brookings Institute said Tax Not the Robots.
What is a robot anyway?
Brookings argues there is little evidence that robots take jobs. Overall, I happen to agree. It’s called creative destruction. In 1900, nine out of 10 jobs was on the farm. Now, almost none are. Jobs didn’t vanish but farm jobs did.
It’s amusing that Bill Gates, someone who made all of his money being a ruthless capitalist, is now on the same side as socialist Bernie Sanders.
A robot tax would slow down productivity, innovation, and standards of living. Every technology advancement in history has raised standards of living. A robot tax is a demand for slower increases in standards of living.
What? Me Worry?
I am not worried a robot will replace me. On a day to day basis, except for known economic report schedules, I have no idea what I am going to write about.
Today, I had no idea I was going to write about AI. Then I had no idea when I started writing that my post would morph into robot taxes.
If I have no idea what I am going to write about, nor will the robot that supposedly will replace me.
But I am certain that AI will heat up the debate once again over robot taxes.
I’ve been creating software for over 30 years, all the way from a developer to a group manager. And this is nothing new. I remember when CDs first came out. They were going to kill hard drives. And by the year 2000, programmers wouldn’t be needed. Everything would be in libraries that unskilled people would somehow connect together.
Can’t tell you how many times we were asked to save money by using a COTS product. Commercial off the shelf. We explained that we couldn’t do everything they wanted because there were no COTS products that did exactly what they wanted. So they could use a COTS product and have to compromise or we could build exactly what they wanted ourselves. And we can’t guarantee we’ll be able to fix issues with the COTS product, should they arise. They always had us build it.
Not to mention that in order to program something, you need all the source code for the project. Otherwise you have no way of knowing if it will build properly and have no way to test. No company is going to hand over their source to AI. Maybe AI can build and test some simple static methods that have no external dependencies, but that’s it.
I doubt there are any experienced programmers losing sleep over AI.
[1] Robots are nowhere close to reasoning: They are becoming better and better at pattern recognition, but at the cost of gigantic data sets and Gigawatts of processing power, plus better & better algorithms and training routines. Improvements are largely the result of incremental improvements to hardware performance and energy inputs.
[2] Robot taxes will not finance a human touch anywhere. Nursing type work for the elderly has been the subject of intense attempts at having machines replace human beings, and will continue to be, replacing low paid work and displacing the human touch more and more, as has been the current trend [try contacting customer service].
[3] Software coding are among the skills that AI performs least adequately on comparison ladders. Software coding has for decades been the subject of intense fads that promise to finally turn the work into more predictable assembly line manufacturing. Alas. Most software projects are failures, many are aborted, and many are only partially successful. Automation remains a difficult slog, full of problems with re-engineering the human interactions & processes, inadequate specification, unexpected bugs, and inflated hopes of getting something for nothing.
[4] Taxing robots for the income/payroll tax they displace also poses anew the question of whether it is wise to tax labor income to begin with.
Here’s an interesting graphic:
———–
Ranking Industries by Their Potential for AI Automation
June 27, 2023
link to visualcapitalist.com
=AI seems set to do to computer programming
one of stupid$$est things i have been hearing last 2-3 years.
problem is: computer programming is field w/out any standards, typical solutions , etc
if you take 2 programmers and ask them to produce CODE solving
modestly diff. task you will get pretty much 2 versions of solution
can you imagine same in rocket space building or architecture, or medicine.???
If you try to tax robots, the may demand certain “rights” in return. This article argues against that.
——
Giving Robots Rights Is a Bad Idea – But Confucianism Offers an Alternative
By CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY
JULY 3, 2023
A new study argues against granting rights to robots, instead suggesting Confucianism-inspired role obligations as a more harmonious approach. It posits that treating robots as participants in social rites—rather than as rights bearers—avoids potential human-robot conflict and fosters teamwork, further adding that respect towards robots, made in our image, reflects our own self-respect.
Notable philosophers and legal experts have delved into the moral and legal implications of robots, with a few advocating for giving robots rights. As robots become more integrated into various aspects of life, a recent review of research on robot rights concluded that extending rights to robots is a bad idea. The study, instead, proposes a Confucian-inspired approach.
This review, by a scholar from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), was recently published in the Communications of the ACM, a journal published by the Association for Computing Machinery.
…
link to scitechdaily.com
I’m still upset that the backhoe displaced the ditch-digger
First, it is necessary to accept the fact that wealth has always accrued to the owners of the robots, be they mechanical robots or flesh-and-blood robots.
Secondly, admit that what is considered “knowledge work” isn’t very knowledgeable and isn’t work – where work is mass moved over a distance. Keyboard entry jobs are misidentified as “knowledge work.”
This AI stuff is old. In the earlly 80’s I was designing fuzzy logic controllers utilizing concepts in the three volume “The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence” by Barr & Feigenbaum which was published in 1981. What is new is the scalability of the hardware and the availability of absurdly large amounts of funding for the next “big thing.” Building much, much bigger and a little bit better.
Only my opinion.
On another note: Considering all the books currently being cranked out about the future of work, et. al. I am making notes for writing a much more appropriate book – about The Future of the Future.
Super AGI and the Matrix: Sophia the Robot co-creator predicts economic ‘mayhem’ on road to AI utopia
Goertzel made rough estimation that AI smarter than humans could exist by 2045
1 Jun 2023
The co-creator of the social humanoid robot Sophia says artifical general intelligence (AGI) and super AGI are mere decades away, and he warns that the subsequent disruption from these artificial intelligence (AI) models will cause a significant amount of political and economic “mayhem” before massive benefits to humanity are seen.
Speaking with Fox News Digital on the global aspects of the transition from the present day to AGI, Dr. Ben Goertzel highlighted the need to develop a beneficial, compassionate super general intelligence model to ensure humanity flourishes.
Often referred to as the “singularity” – the point AGI exceeds human intelligence and reasoning – humankind will be at the whim of the AI model’s motivations and behaviors. AI researchers and futurologists have repeatedly said that this inflection point is still decades away.
Given the current timeline of AI acceleration, Goertzel concurred with friend and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, calling it a “fair approximation” that human-level AGI will be created around 2029.
…
link to foxnews.com
AI, if it is programmed to consider ethics, might tell us to wake up and die right by throwing off the domination and economic sabotage of the parasitical, illegitimate and non-economic/productive business model of private finance.
Depth of thought and understanding is much more valuable than mere content.
Everyone is wrong. Or to put it more politely, no one is correct.
I notice that many (if not most) responses take the current state of sophistication of AI (and many miss robotics, making erroneous assumptions that AI cannot “build” things) and extrapolate into the future, trying to predict what THIS AI can and cannot replace.
Remember that, 10 years ago, as this form of AI was in its earliest stages, if we had tried predicting what AI could do 10 years later (in 2023!), w would be terribly wrong about it. And given that the rate of change of progress seems to be increasing, 10 years out, who knows what we would be seeing.
Given that as the background, assuming that AI+Robotics will not take our current job (programming or design or construction or analysis or even cooking), it appears NAIVE !!!
Works sort of well for small stuff, but has weird outcomes sometimes. I had it make a function to make an arrow in 3D out of line segments to draw some debugging stuff. Looked fine at first, but couldn’t see the arrow from some 3d angles, so I asked it to make the arrow a pyramid, which it did, but it also put a few other random line segments in there, and placed the pyramid in different places based on the angle.
Worked fine for what I needed, even serendipitously better because the random scattering of arrows kept them from crowding when a lot pointed to a particular node, but it is not correct by any standard.
The more I use it, the more it feels like loquacious autocomplete. There is no comprehension or originality here. As it is now It’s just not all that useful. The only time I’ll go to it is for something simple and tedious. If we had juniors, I’d put it on them, but we haven’t ever hired juniors. This will be one more reason not to.
What it IS REALLY good at is generating elaborate, credible sounding BS stories by the ton… and that part is what’s dangerous.
Thank you for “loquacious autocomplete.”
The most laconic description yet.
It appears AI would be most appropriate for political speeches and writing laws.
Programs are used to automate processes — flawed processes that only irrational humans understand and that must be worked around with constant patching. There is no way AI can replace programmers.
PS Here’s my Turing test — give the AI a blank slate and a specification for the C++ programming language specification, known as “ISO International Standard ISO/IEC 14882:2020(E) – Programming Language C++”, and have it write a C++ compiler. Lol!!! I will be laughing hard about that for weeks on end.
Well you would also need to give the AI the instruction set and instruction timings, and the physical computer architecture for each of the desired compiler targets.
I wrote a basic OS for my independent senior project in college. I also wrote a dissasembler to turn machine code back into human readable BAL language in my first job.
I don’t doubt that an AI like ChatGPT could write a complier in the next few years (if not now).
I think you are missing the point that a compiler is only necessary to translate human code into executable machine code because machine code is too unwieldy for humans to work in.
But a machine writing code won’t need a compiler to translate from a higher level language to something that it could run/execute. The smart machine could also perform all the linkages necessary.
i agree only actually it can be done CAUSE those are the rules! i mean c++
in clear form
try to ask AI make source code using SOLID, OOP principles, even based programming .etc etc
those are NOT RULES. and subject of daily debates what they are . what is meaning. etc
it has been this way for last 30 years at least.
Job opportunities for humans after AI-robots are implemented…
1) Doing exceedingly dangerous work that might cause injury to the robot
2) Obesity acquisition–we are already well along on that path
3) Non-productive social media utilization
4) Pornography observation and self stimulation
Anything requiring skill, focus, creativity, and intelligence will be performed by the AI/robot.
Reduce taxes 90% by replacing all federal government parasites with AI or Golden Retrievers.
As a few have implied … “what is a robot”. I can likely have my software interface to an AI service without “being” a robot. I can definitely see a lot of gray area. Even in fast food, if the kiosk et al are all sitting in India or China or Nigeria … how do we tax them. So many “robots” need not be on site. Yes, cooking the food (via robot) would have to be done locally (or at least close to locally … I could see a 3rd party food prep robotics lab supplying numerous restaurants … a practice far more common in many industries than is realized) … again the robots could be far more remote in general and thus untaxable.
If you tax intelligent robots they are really going to get pissed and there is no telling what they will do. I would hesitate to do that to a being that is smarter and stronger than you are.
…they’re not literally going to tax the robots themselves, genius. They’re taxing the employers for their use. Jesus.
Just call Google MS or any tech customer service and see how stupid AI is
Several digital logic design packages have been using graphic entry interfaces that produce lines of code behind it. I’m thinking this has been going on for at least 20 years. There is the problem where a single designer can generate a prolific amount of code that nobody can review because of the shear volume. Additionally, there are fewer detailed comments to help code reviewers understand the problem to be solved. Rework costs are then exponentially more because the time it takes other programmers to climb the learning curve to help find and fix the problem when the original programmer has left the company.
In 1994 I worked on GUI drag-and-drop programming for industrial controllers.
So it’s 30 years.
NVDA is 20 miles south of Lebanon southern border.
I am a software contractor with 30+ years of experience in high tech. I was so impressed by ChatGPT’s coding skills when I first tried it that I billed my company 120 hours testing the envelope of its capabilities. Mind you, this is the first public release and I think it has doubled my productivity. Because I have invested the time I can tell you what few others are saying right now: ChatGPT interfacing is a learned skill, much like working with a petulant genius child. It is an interactive process and the more you know about programming the faster you can spot BS and, importantly, properly instruct the child how to change its behavior.
IF you are looking for a Buck Rogers Dr. Theopolis, ChatGPT is not it. Not today. But that will come far sooner than most people think. The rate of improvement will far surpass Moore’s law which was a doubling of transistor density every 18 months. Whatever significant metric of goodness that you want to track, it will double every 8 months. If that doesn’t impress you, nothing will. I wrote this in 2011:
link to economati.blogspot.com
You’re right. However, AI will still be hamstrung even by instruction if it is not instruction in the superlative intellectual discipline AKA Wisdom which is the willingness and ability to ethically integrate seeming opposites into thirdness greater onenesses and which contains the entire set of the intellectual discipline of science.
Furthermore, AI needs to be programmed to consider the highest human ethic and experience, namely grace as in love in personal action, and as policies are the actions of systems, systemic policy.
You are an AI, yes?
No, I’m the “real McCoy”, that is a truly sentient being.
Nice.
This stuff has been going on for years. E.G. Not only is SDL faster but it creates higher quality code, especially for state machines.
Taxing robots? Well, sure, you can tax any “robot” refrigerator ice cube maker I don’t own, but, by God, you better not try to tax my “robot” ball peen hammer!
Taxing robots is yet another sly attempt to lock in the current value of people. We fear people will have a value of zero sometime in the foggy future, and we are afraid the world will reflect that honest value. But “value”? Compared to what? Robots? But wait. If robots are valuable compared to people, why not let people do the work? Ah, but if, as the other part of your mind tells you, robots will be cheap, cheap, cheap and therefore will do all the work, you gotta ask, “Cheap? Compared to what?”
Credibly explain why, after 200+ years of well-documented automation, people are more valuable – compared to material and machines – than they have ever been. Then suggest why this time it’s different and this time we must stop cold and lock in the state of the world. Do we fear someone, somewhere might improve their lot compared to us?
I’m with Mish on this one.
The software world has constantly replaced programmers.
This process goes back to the late ’50’s at least. I once read a Datamation article from those times. The article breathlessly told the story of how these pesky programmers were no longer needed. Managers could now write their own programs! How? COBOL. Yes, COBOL was a computer language any manager could use to replace expensive programmers.
Laugh if you will. But think for a moment. The article was correct. “Managers” changed meaning. Some “managers” became known as “programmers”.
For amusement see how much you have to pay for a COBOL programmer in 2023 to modify one of your legacy codes.
some places on the Internet discuss an AI recession
as in: a temporary (4 years?) wage decline and deflation
due to a loss of jobs paying above average wages until
the demographics “catch up” to the technology.
Taxation of Income and to fund government is Hand Written Communication Only before the invention of Guttenberg Moveable Printing.
When you realize that we are a monetarily sovereign government, that the new monetary paradigm is Gifting instead of Debt Only and that a 50% Discount/Rebate policy at retail sale (and several other innovative and stabilizing policies) end inflation forever…then there will basically be only one necessary reason to tax at all and that is to inhibit/put out of business anti-social a$$holes who cannot recognize the beatific chains of ethics and of the new monetary paradigm.
Employment is fine as a purpose, but there are many, many, many more positive and constructive purposes other than employment…and many more options for employment when we reduce the costs of parasitical and illegitimate business model of private finance.
AI will just be another problematic anomaly in a long list of same cthat we will puzzle over…until we recognize the most underlying solution to our monetary, financial and economic problems, namely the new monetary paradigm of Gifting.
i dont want a job, or to work. I just wanna go surfing
Not sure what Bill Gates or Bernie Sanders is talking about.
Lower income person already pay little to no tax today.
The top 10% earn 48% of the income and already pay 71% of US federal income taxes.
This whole line of anti-reasoning is so back buttwards as to be just plain sad.
AI is a tool employed BY programmers. No different from any other black box function a programmer can call out to. If it is useful. As in, he will only call it IF it is beneficial.
Which, in economicese, translates to: Programmers will utilise AI technologies to the extent it improves their productivity.
Which, sticking with the econonicese lesson here; means: If it lowers their cost of providing a given service.
Now: Lower cost result in greater demand, since things which were previously not worth applying programming to, now will be.
Better tooling for skilled programmers, does not result in less demand for them. Suggesting it does, is no more than yet another rehash of the silly old Luddite nonsense that there is some preordained fixed amount of total “work” out there, such that any productivity improvement must necessarily result in “unemployment”? (as of leisure was ever negative in the first place….)
Every time a new technology replaces an old there are many more jobs created than lost. When whale oil stopped being used for lanterns and lamps and replaced by natural gas or electricity, literally thousands of jobs were created drilling for gas and thousands to build the electric infrastructure.
When telephone operators were replaced with computers thousands of technology infrastructure and software programming jobs were created. Interestingly enough, a telephone operator was a low paid job replaced by high paying IT jobs.
Every AI computer will need an “army” of people and infrastructure for it to do its thing. If an AI computer is going to control the HVAC in my home, the landscaping of my yard, become the driver of my car then all of these things need to be built – it won’t build itself.
Every AI computer will need electricity to run – where will this come from? Infrastructure like power lines fail all the time and need replacing, who will do this? Same for fiber optic cable flowing the interenet data.
Every AI computer will need an army of people to audit its behavior and ensure it isn’t making biases or mistakes and we’ve already seen big problems in this area.
You can replace “AI” with “robot” and the same thing applies. Robots and AI need an architect, UX designer, software developer, maintenance support, and upgrades to name a few things. An AI building AI is theoretically possible but impractical because AI will design better AI that is in the interest of AI and not humans. This would eventually lead to the ‘Terminator’ future everyone is so scared about right now.
Personally, the real money to be made isn’t with NVidia or AI companies but with the surrounding ecosystem. Right now these generative AI are essentially “stealing” and scraping the internet and stealing other peoples work for “free” and some content owners and creators are pushing back demanding they stop scraping. AI is nothing without the hard work of millions of people that take photographs, write blogs, do research and do other things online.
”
Right now these generative AI are essentially “stealing” and scraping the internet and stealing other peoples work for “free”
”
Reading a newspaper article and learning something new from it, is only “stealing” in “ownership society” idiotopias ran by and for the sole benefit of ambulance chasing net-negative leeches.
As for the rest of your post: Thumbs Up!
“Every time a new technology replaces an old there are many more jobs created than lost.”
Yessss!!!! Thank You!!
<“Reading a newspaper article and learning something new from it, is only “stealing” in “ownership society” idiotopias ran by and for the sole benefit of ambulance chasing net-negative leeches.
They are not just “reading” the article, they are “stealing” word patterns, the structure of the research, arguments, discussions, etc.
There is already a class action lawsuit and I doubt it will stop there. There is also copyright infringement and other legal issues that will get clarified and resolved.
link to msnbc.com
“They are not just “reading” the article, they are “stealing” word patterns, the structure of the research, arguments, discussions, etc.
There is already a class action lawsuit and I doubt it will stop there.
”
Yes. Hence:
“ownership society” idiotopias ran by and for the sole benefit of ambulance chasing net-negative leeches.”
In any possible society even the tiniest bit more enlightened and civilised; learning from what one reads in newspapers (as if there was anything of value to learn from them anymore….) overlaps exactly zero with “stealing.” Neither does it make one whiff of difference, what some gaggle of supposedly exalted ambulance chasers happens to deem and find and hold and opine. Those guys have done nothing but jumping sharks since “Fire in a crowded theatre.” (Hey, man, I don’t even know what I’m talking about. But I talk “tough” and “know it when I see it.” And then the dumb girls go yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah….) IOW: Not one of them have any credibility, on any matter whatsoever
Every time a new tech replaces an old tech there are more folks that don’t feel like working at anything.
Agree with you.
Society has always been afraid of new step change revolutionary autonomous technologies such as trains, automobiles, computers, etc.. Oh no, they are going to steal our jobs and take over the world.
Jobs and society just evolves and changes in consequence. Those that do not adapt suffer, those that take advantage prosper.
Everyone’s lives will become safer – think plane auto pilot, think automated closed loop control in a chemical plant or nuclear facility – which are practical applications of an earlier, narrow generation of AI or automation. If these technologies are implemented wrong today, it will cause catastrophic impacts – no different than with AI.
Today’s AI is just another buzz word and remains very limiting (ChatGPT is almost like a toy in its current form) but will continue to evolve in the same manner since people invented the wheel (a pre-computer and very crude form of AI).
AI will act in unpredictable ways (this is by design) and some people worry this is dangerous – but all humans are unpredictable and can be more malicious (think Genghis Khan or Stalin, or even Kim Jong with a nuclear button). No difference.
The sky is not falling – society will evolve and adapt, and new jobs will develop.
Nothing happens overnight – it is a journey – will take years for this all to continue to develop and play out. It is good however that people are debating and discussing the topic, this is how humans learn, adapt, accept change, and prosper.
Yeah, good and bad will come of it (think cruise missiles) but this has always been the case. I can see this to be very scary for some but I see this as just an evolution of what has been going on for thousands of years.
Also would hesitate to listen to “tech experts”- they may know the “tech” side of things, but they are far from experts in the real applications of the technology. Musk showed this when he tried to build his first Tesla plant.
It would be robots all the way down. If a man can do it a robot can do it better.
MPO, you have spent way too much time listening to Dr. Pangloss – and believing him.
When the “robots” (or content producing software in this case) reach your level of competence in what you write about, they won’t have to think of what to write about on that particular day.
They will write a 1000 articles in the time you can write one. And you may find that there is nothing left to write about that the robot has not already written.
You may want to consider that angle. They will be as smart, but also orders of magnitude faster.
“Will AI Replace Skilled Programmers? When?”
When AIs have replaced humanity. Lock, stock and barrel.
Until that day, the very definition of “skilled” precludes it.
I’m still upset that the backhoe displaced the ditch-digger
“AI was the discussion rage in 2000. Has it finally arrived?”
It arrived in the 50s. Has slowly, and ever slower, been improved over the years.
No different from any other tooling/technology: First, you pick the low hanging fruit, with he quick and easy gains. Then, diminishing returns makes each additional marginal gain harder and harder to come by, slowing progress; measured by the only metric which matters, utility; as time goes by.
AI presents risks to certain fields like insurance sales, certain cybersecurity jobs, and maybe even some fast food stops.
But, by and large, I think it’s overstated.
No one would trust a robotic barber and not everyone would fully entrust large insurance policies to AI. Heck, outside of McDs, few people outside of some obscure futurists would want their table waited by a robot at a diner/restaurant.
Also, those iPads and tablets have been processing food orders for over 10 years at this point. That’s not exactly a new feature post 2020. AI and machine learning has been used in the tech field in one form or another since the early 00s.
It’s just doom p*** that sells these days.
Given that we see countless videos of people sleeping while their Tesla self drives them to work, I have a feeling that a lot more people than you think would trust robot barbers.
I completely agree with you that some people entrust AI/machines way too much. However, I really do believe that the impact of AI and machine learning is overblown (at least in the private sector).
Also, taxing robots is akin to there being a tax on emails because it is disrupting the business model of the post office.
If AI replaces computer programmers the way it replaced secretaries who answered the phone with automated call centers — — welcome to KLUDGEWORLD2025!!!!
If AI replaces a programmer, where’s the robot?
As for taxation, if technology really does destroy jobs, say, in ten years 100 individuals make 75% of all wages, the solution would be obvious – we’d have to raise the max income tax rate.
A large part of our deficit problem revolves around the assumptions that all tax cuts to the wealthy & corporations are “job creating”. (Corporations just buy back stocks to benefit C-suite bonuses, or create jobs in China, India, Mexico ..etc)
Instead, tax cuts for job creation should be implemented in direct proportion to the actual jobs created.
If, say in ten years, Amazon’s earnings are as good as ever, but their employee’s are half because of robots, then proportional tax cuts for job creation would be the smartest way to tackle the problem.
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AI as defined is artificial intelligence, ergo not human but designed by Homo sapiens. It is analogous to robots repairing robots, which does occur in advanced manufacturing. To wit: Henry Ford’s River Rouge plant in the early 20th Century employed over 100K workers. Today an average Ford plant employs less than 500.
Technology creates and destroys jobs. As a former director of supply chain in operations every plant or warehouse ROI proposal had to have a corresponding increase in productivity otherwise the project would not be funded. In other words, worker attrition, planned layoffs or relocations also were expense budgeted in the out years if the capital project were funded and implemented. The HQ or the plant may hire an IT person(s) if the capital project resulted in technology hardware, software or firmware regarding maintenance, repair, etc., but only if there was net gain of sales per employee projected and improvement on operational expenses during the life of the capital project.