Artificial Intelligence Might Threaten Millions Of Jobs
- Thread starter Waindo
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Kishi Uzumaki
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Unnecessary fear mongering. There is a lot of attack on AI technology some one comes up and does hurr durr. We are still far away from creating a true AI. The current technology is very primitive.
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. World will be different after 30-40 years. What many fear is not AIs taking your jobs but a singularity where become super intelligent that we cant comprehend it.
There does seem to be a lot of confusion surrounding what constitutes AI, that may be where the fear comes from. A system doesn't strictly need to learn and adapt to be AI, it just needs to exhibit some rudimentary form of intelligence.
My previous posts talked about machine learning but the are many more fields which fall within the scope of AI. In the past year I've performed data mining through clustering and classification, and also optimization through genetic algorithms. These are loosely areas of AI as they count as unsupervised learning. Perhaps the best way to dispel the fear of AI progress is to show people that there are uses of AI outside of iRobot and The Terminator.
People use apps like google now but they are also plagued by issues on how providers are such services handle the information. Which in turn results in people viewing AI as evil.
Offtopic:
Can you give some advise on data mining. I am doing a class project, I have got reviews and I want to pull some meaning.
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I can try, although it's quite diverse depending on the application. My focus was using smart-meter data from homes to produce generic energy consumption profiles. Do you have access to MATLAB? There are toolboxes with a few different mining techniques included. Sometimes the documentation is helpful.
Ask away and even if I don't know it will give me an excuse to read up on it.
Indeed the question is not whether the expansion of AI (the so called technological singularity is a different matter) will displace labour; clearly it will not because an economy must necessarily be circular with respect to money.
Let me clarify that with this extreme hypothetical scenario - suppose AI replaces about 99% of human work. If the humans are all unemployed with no source of income, where goes all the fruits of AI, i.e., who are buying all the things the AI makes?
As long as there are commodities and services in an economy, whether they are produced by humans or robots, there needs to be consumers who will buy them. An economy cannot function otherwise.
But just because AI cannot entirely destroy labour does not mean it cannot change its nature and distribution.
For instance, trading on the stock-markets these days is mostly automated (refer to 'algorithmic trading') where it once used to be done by human traders. It is also true that the trading software is created and constantly maintained by new workers - the so called 'quants,' so human labour has not been entirely replaced.
However, the new workers are very different from the old. The old workers used to be ordinary business folk - the new are typically PhD educated men from elite institutions in highly quantitative subjects like computing, maths and engineering.
Could all of those old traders have acquired the skills the new possess? Further, far fewer quant workers are needed than old-style traders.
As a result, the 'quants' are paid relatively much higher salaries, and income inequality has consequently increased a little in the economy. This change in the nature and distribution of labour in stock-market trading cannot be reversed very easily - the new arrangement is far more efficient even if it causes greater income inequality.
The foregoing account is likely to be a microcosm of how the growth of AI will impact economies in the near future, anyway. Labour will not be entirely displaced but large portions of relatively unskilled work (note the word relative - this means I include some brain work like tax accountancy) will be transformed into smaller, much more skilled labour.
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