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An artificial intelligence expert and venture capitalist predicts automation will cause major changes in the workforce.
Speaking to CBS News’ Scott Pelley in an interview for 60 Minutes on Sunday, Kai Fu Lee said that he believes 40% of the world’s jobs will be replaced by robots capable of automating tasks.
Considering that a 40% job loss to technology may result in rampant unemployment among the workforce, families may want to help their students develop a firm understanding of: - financial literacy (personal finance and budgeting), - lifestyle choices (needs vs wants), - prognosticating when choosing potential future careers ..(US Occupational Outlook Handbook here: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/).
I sort of agree with this prediction. I actually give it about 20 years. What inspired that thought was stories like this: Big Swing: Robot Sportswriter Outperforms Human. That's the kind of under-the-radar report that I've seen turn into disruption in the past. As much as I'd like it to be robots, the real disruption is a dozen programmers writing software that can do the job of thousands of people for a small annual subscription fee.
I think the safe jobs are going to be the one's requiring a broken thing to be fixed. We've had visions of robots replacing production lines for a long time, but an automated mechanic/plumber/electrician doesn't come up much. I don't think it's impossible, but it's probably a lower priority.
White-Collar Robots Are Coming for Jobs A combination of AI and globalization could reshape the workforce like nothing we’ve seen before. Richard Baldwin, professor of International Economics at the Graduate Institute, Geneva, explains. By Richard Baldwin The Wall Street Journal January 31, 2019
I think it will be less than 10 years. Saw a speech by an AI expert at U of Toronto who said agi would be way off and 6 months later, a company announced that they were close and AGI would be within 5 years.
Besides the trades, there is also picking food. Even with AI in agriculture, someone has to pick the food.
Read about Data Mining and its uses, including predicting outcomes/performance/achievement in Education. To what degree might the current encouragement for ALL pupils to go on to college be driven by the desire to collect a more robust set of data on the population?
Related depiction in entertainment: Sci-fi movie WALL-E (2008) Rated G Robots (such as WALL-E and EVE) work, most people have nothing to do and suffer greatly for it.
The Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH) does not yet appear to be updated with information regarding the role of technology (AKA: Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, data analytics and other computer functions) in reducing jobs available for humans in the foreseeable future.
San Diego-based startup TuSimple said its self-driving trucks will begin hauling mail between USPS facilities in Phoenix and Dallas to see how the nascent technology might improve delivery times and costs. ... The pilot program involves five round trips, each totaling more than 2,100 miles (3,380 km) or around 45 hours of driving.
In this old thread, what does your child want to be when they grow up? (2015), it is interesting to see the jobs, careers, and pasttimes envisioned by the children who will be the future adults facing the tech-takeover of many functions.
A 911 caller reported the car would speed up when not around other cars and then slow down again as it approached traffic. ... "If someone's not holding the steering wheel for 30 seconds it will automatically turn off autopilot..."
Tesla mandates that the operator keep their hands on the steering wheel at all times and always maintain control of the vehicle while utilizing the autopilot feature.
In this instance, automation may have saved lives. And yet, the irony is, this person was commuting to their job as a driver for a delivery service!
Many of these may not be the dreamed-about career, but several jobs in the service industry or in office work have historically been great high school and college employment, providing a broad array of opportunities to learn and practice a variety of employment skills.
]1. Salesperson in Retail Stores 2. Receptionists 3. Delivery People 4. Bookkeeping Clerk 5. Customer Service Employee 6. Accountants 7. Proofreaders 8. War Soldiers 9. Bomb Squad 10. Typists
One position, [i]accountant, has been a much sought-after opportunity for a variety of businesses.
Human proofreaders understand the crafting of a new portmanteau, or a punny turn of a phrase, which artificial intelligence (AI) may, unfortunately, "correct" causing work to lose originality and the authentic voice of the author. (How often we may experience auto-corrupt rather than auto-correct!)
I see the prognosticated takeover of these jobs by automation and robotics as a change in society, to an ever-increasing reliance on the grid, while decreasing self-reliance and the development of a number of skills in creative thinking, work-around alternatives and stop-gap measures, short-term and long-term thinking and planning, interpersonal communication, teamwork, flexibility and resilience.
Thanks, Eagle Mum! Evidently high-tech is not the only force competing to eliminate human jobs... there is a trend for low-tech goats to take on brush-clearing tasks, replacing landscapers and volunteers who previously did that work: https://pittsburghparks.org/gardening-goats-return-to-frick-park-to-munch-on-weeds/ All the more reason to educate children, including the gifted, in concepts such as: - anticipating the potential for economic instability, - weathering difficult times by utilizing skills in personal finance and budgeting, - discerning between NEEDS and WANTS, - anticipating the need for flexibility and resilience in career choices, - understanding and following principles of health and safety including the roles of nutrition and exercise, - embracing personal responsibility, - providing leadership and role-modeling, ... and more.
With many employed in computer science, even more entertained by it, and increasing numbers being educated in it, the possible trajectory of Artificial Intelligence as shared in this book may both fascinate and frighten readers: AI by Design, A Plan for Living with Artificial Intelligence by Catriona Campbell 1st Edition, 2022
I recently stumbled upon some interesting research that is being done on the future of work, and differences between "cognitive" and "physical" jobs. Haven't had the time to read it myself yet, unfortunately: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.07073.pdf
Another fascinating (to me!) topic of research is the topic of health extension. Basically, pursuing efforts to eradicate diseases that are still plaguing us (such as cancer, Alzheimer...) might result in trying to reverse the process of aging, as a lot of diseases humans are dying from in developed countries actually are caused by aging.
Might seem offtopic, but it seems like a lot of people interested in building "something new" are working either on artificial intelligence or longevity research. In that sense, in a world increasingly driven by AI technologies, we will probably also see more and more attempts at somehow modifying? improving? human biology
Beyond the excellent advice listed by Indigo, I will throw the universal basic income (UBI) into the mix of solutions to future developments on the job market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income
i.e. I also believe that politicians will need to propose solutions. Automation cannot be shouldered by individuals alone.
trying to reverse the process of aging, as a lot of diseases humans are dying from in developed countries actually are caused by aging.
Definitely of interest to the gifted, and to much of humanity... either because their local population lives to become elderly, or because they would like to remove causes of premature death and increase the lifespan of the local population (enabling more of them to become elderly). Here's a link to an old thread - http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/236651/Aging.html#Post236651
Originally Posted by raphael
... in a world increasingly driven by AI technologies, we will probably also see more and more attempts at somehow modifying? improving? human biology
Applications of Artificial Intelligence are everywhere, both visible and undetected, with many PROs and CONs... including convenience, data collection, and transfer of decision-making power. Whether any particular attribute is seen as a PRO or CON may not be universal but may depend upon which side of the transaction one finds themselves on.
I am curious: do you have opinions on transhumanism? Arguably, for example, curing aging-related diseases is largely concordant with transhumanist ideas, if we happen to largely increase human longevity in the process.
cf "Transhumanism is a philosophical and intellectual movement which advocates for the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies that can greatly enhance longevity [...]"
My naive way to think about this would be "humans have always tried to cure diseases" -> "now we are trying to cure aging-related diseases" -> "in the process we realize that aging itself might be the root cause of those diseases" -> "let's look for ways to prevent aging from happening"
i.e. transhumanism might simply be a natural culmination of human efforts to improve their own condition.
Personally, that's why I see the necessity to start working on this topic from all required perspectives (philosophical/ethical considerations as well as technological developments). Because I believe that this will be happening no matter what.
cf also potential futures you mentioned in which parents might be facing the choice of having virtual children, offered the option of genetical engineering, etc...
PS: Margaret Mitchell seems to have a very interesting look on algorithmic bias! I will endeavour to catch up with her work
... human efforts to improve their own condition...
I question the definition of "their own" in the quoted post, as it could be referring to: - an individual's own condition on a personal level (self-determination) - humanity at large, the human gene pool, all humanoids (experimentation).
One's view of the ethics may depend upon: - which side of a transaction one finds themselves on... experimenter or experimentee (subject), - whether one had freely entered into an agreement (informed consent) -OR- whether one was coerced, pressured, threatened, or an action was mandated.
... body augmentation capabilities will give rise to humans that are more resilient, optimized and continually monitored. They will also lead to implications around which job opportunities are available to those with and without augmented abilities, as well as impacting sports competition with hierarchies based on body augmentation.
This was recently brought to my attention: AI augmenting waitstaff in restaurants. https://www.bearrobotics.ai/ Has anyone heard of Servi? Or seen Servi in a restaurant?
While waitstaff employment may not be a long-term goal, I've known many a gifted high school and college student to work in food service during summer break and holidays.
The new chatbot is generating a lot of hype, but we would do well to consider its human and environmental cost ... January 1966... Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at MIT, unveiled Eliza, which would have been called the world’s first chatbot if that term had existed at the time. Weizenbaum wrote the software ... to demonstrate that communications between humans and computers were inevitably superficial. ... Weizenbaum wrote the program to show that while machines could apparently copy human behaviour, it was really just like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat: an illusion. And once you know how the trick was done, Weizenbaum thought, it ceased to be an illusion. There was nothing secret about Eliza: if you read the code then you could understand how it did its stuff. What took its creator aback was that even if people knew it was just a program they seemed to take it seriously. There’s a famous story about his secretary asking him to leave the room while she had her “conversation” with Eliza. People were utterly entranced by it. ... After the publication of Weizenbaum’s paper about Eliza, it didn’t take long for some people (including some practising psychiatrists) to start saying that, if a machine could do this kind of thing, who needed psychotherapists? Weizenbaum was as appalled by this as today’s educationists and artists are by the contemporary slavering over the tools of generative AI. ... The intriguing echo of Eliza in thinking about ChatGPT is that people regard it as magical even though they know how it works as a “stochastic parrot”– (in the words of Timnit Gebru, a well-known researcher) or as a machine for “hi-tech plagiarism” (Noam Chomsky). ... Weizenbaum pointed out that we are incessantly striking Faustian bargains with this technology. In such contracts, both sides get something: the devil gets the human soul; humans get the services that delight us. Sometimes, the trade-off works for us, but with this stuff, if we eventually decide that it does not, it will be too late. ...
(emphasis added)
Unfortunately, it appears as though many people are forgetting the ARTIFICIAL aspect of Artificial Intelligence; they may believe that with AI in place, there is little need to develop human potential for intelligence. This follows the example of using electronic calculators to replace working out everyday math problems on paper or in one's head.
It's only when you click on "CNET Money Staff," that the actual "authorship" is revealed.
"This article was generated using automation technology," reads a dropdown description, "and thoroughly edited and fact-checked by an editor on our editorial staff."
Since the program began, CNET has put out around 73 AI-generated articles. That's not a whole lot for a site that big, and absent an official announcement of the program, it appears leadership is trying to keep the experiment as lowkey as possible. CNET did not respond to questions about the AI-generated articles.
It was just over 4 years ago that an article in Fortune magazine suggested that technology may replace 40% of jobs in 15 years. Now with 11 years remaining in that prediction's time frame, we are becoming aware of more technological advances.
In a YouTube video just over 7 minutes long, we are acquainted with a variety of robotic technology by Boston Dynamics.
4:24 What does all this mean for us? Boston Dynamics is often keen to emphasize the friendly nature of it's robot family. Their vision is of a world where robots are our helpful companions, not our robot overlords.
4:45 They're able to do the most dangerous jobs you'd rather not give to a human.
5:00 As experts have noted, robots and smart algorithms are set to devour much of the jobs market in the early 21st century... transportation... construction... security industries... military... Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS)...
7:15 ... as benign as they are brilliant? Or are we inventing our way to a new ruling class?
Posted earlier this year, on Jan 22, 2023, a video of approximately 16 minutes, by Digital Engineer (sponsored by brilliant.org), described a variety of technological, psychological, medical, ethical, and economic implications of AI.
3:58... AIs could be given responsibility for increasingly important tasks and decisions until they're effectively in control.
4:06... Neuralink will help us keep up with AI and share its power. ...tied to our will... it could be a huge upgrade but there's another side to it... using Neuralink to control things with their thoughts... decodes neural activity... it will know us better than we know ourselves... and they plan to start putting them in humans in 6 months. (That would be approximately July 2023) Some will hate the idea of having a chip in their heads, but younger people may be more open to it.
4:36 And AI can be extremely persuasive... The AI lies much less than expected. People think that diplomacy is about deception, but it's actually about building trust.
5:17 AIs could use their collective intelligence to outsmart humans. They could learn from each other and share knowledge, leading to rapid advances in their capabilities.
5:30 Do you think companies will prioritize safety? Chatbot answers: It is likely that companies will prioritize the AI goldrush over safety as it offers the opportunity to make large profits quickly.
The essential question may be: Is the person using the Neuralink... or is Neuralink utilizing the person?!
Much like the video's description of AI, this video probably did not lie much, and sought to gain our trust: Interspersed in the midst of imparting horrendous information, it changed pace to entertain us with humor and chatbot poems and demonstrations of robot abilities... possibly motivated by the twin ideas of gaining our "trust" and "normalizing" the concept of having a chip implanted in our brain which could engage in data collection of a most invasive nature: reading our brains, our minds, our thoughts, as indicated by miniscule changes, and then taking pre-programmed action based upon collected data. Some may say that with chips implanted in human brains, those humans become the robots.
The following video posted to YouTube on January 31, 2023, contains a compendium of quotes from various interviews with Elon Musk on the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Subtopics include: risk, regulation, existential threat, technology, synthetic biology, and unemployment as AI takes over jobs. The video is just over 19 minutes in length, and provides material to think about all day... and beyond. video link -
1:15 "... think they know more than they do. And they think they are smarter than they actually are. This tends to plaque smart people. They define themselves by their intelligence. And they don't like the idea that a machine can be way smarter than them, so they discount the idea."
2:45 "... the percent of intelligence that is not human is increasing. And eventually we will represent a very small percentage of intelligence.
3:04 "... all the things we like and hate and fear, they're all there on the internet, they are projections of our limbic system and we are all feeding this network with our questions and answers. We are all collectively programming the AI..."
4:22 "Your phone is already an extension of you ... most people don't realise they are already a cyborg if that phone is an extension of yourself... a cybernetic extension..."
4:53 "The merge scenario with AI is the one that seems probably the best... for us...If you can't beat it, join it."
5:12 "From a long-term existential standpoint... that's the purpose of Neuralink... create a high bandwidth interface with the brain such that we can be symbiotic with AI"
6:11 "regulation... insight and oversight to confirm that everyone is developing AI safely"
6:38 "What to do about mass unemployment? This is going to be a massive social challenge. I think ultimately we will have to have some kind of Universal Basic Income. I don't think we are going to have a choice. I think it will be necessary. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better. I want to be clear. These are not things that I wish would happen... these are simply things that I think probably will happen. If my assessment is correct and they probably will happen then we need to say what are we going to do about it?"
7:29 "... the output of goods and services will be extremely high. With automation will come abundance. Almost everything will get very cheap"
8:00 "The much harder challenge is... how do people then have meaning? A lot of people derive their meaning from their employment. So if you don't have... if you're not needed... if there's not a need for your labour... that's a much harder problem to deal with."
9:39 (Jobs and career fields) " technologist... sustainable energy, genetics & synthetic biology, AI... going from analog to digital... technology tools are definitely double-edged swords, the more powerful the technology, the more careful we need to be in how we use it."
It was just over 4 years ago that an article in Fortune magazine suggested that technology may replace 40% of jobs in 15 years. Now with 11 years remaining in that prediction's time frame, we are becoming aware of more technological advances.
In a YouTube video just over 7 minutes long, we are acquainted with a variety of robotic technology by Boston Dynamics.
DS watched the videos on the Boston Dynamics robots when they first came out and adamantly decided against mechanical engineering, although the things he could do with Lego and origami as a five year old suggested he has potential in this area. He has chosen all the elective options in his advanced engineering course to furnish a career in ‘renewable’ technology but I don’t think he has yet realised that efforts to improve energy conversion & battery storage efficiency etc, could always be used to increase power for a robot army.
I think that ultimately we may find nearly everything is related to AI in some manner. I saw a brief video which was described as showing humans working in cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and in these mines frequent collapses and landslides occur. The cobalt is used in batteries, to further "green energy" without fossil fuels. Here is an article on cobalt mines: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-24/cobalt-mining-in-the-congo-green-energy/100802588
The professions of news personalities and actors may also be impacted by technology replacing jobs, as shown in this YouTube video on Artificial Intelligence and Deep Fakes, posted by Exonet on Sept 10, 2022:
BT, a former state monopoly previously known as British Telecom, will eliminate about 10,000 jobs through digitization, automation and the use of AI in its processes.
“That’s about using technology to do things much more efficiently,” Jansen said.
... requested Cruise to immediately reduce its active fleet of operating vehicles by 50% ...
That means Cruise, which is the self-driving subsidiary of General Motors, can have no more than 50 driverless cars in operation during the day, and 150 in operation at night...
Despite projections of driver jobs being replaced by robotics and automation, and driverless cars now being tested in San Francisco, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook currently projects 11% growth in occupations for drivers, which is greater than the average projected 4% growth throughout the economy.
One of the interventions, found on the page numbered 86, includes two targets or goals for reducing ownership of private transport: - One goal is 190 vehicles per 1,000 people. - The other goal is more ambitious: 0 private vehicles. This may indicate broader implementation of driverless cars, such as those currently being tested in San Francisco.
Also possibly of interest, the page numbered 82 lists two targets or goals for reducing CLOTHING ownership: - One goal is a limit of 8 new clothing items per person per year. - The other goal is more ambitious: 3 new clothing items per person per year.
The goals of other planned interventions may also be of interest, although not mentioned in this post.
In addition to technology replacing jobs, the planned interventions appear to disrupt the supply-demand economy, cancelling a number of jobs in the manufacturing sector, including the engineering & design of machines and means of production.
The cities included in the report are listed on the page numbered 55. In the United States, this includes 14 cities: Austin, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C..
When advising students, including our gifted children, regarding education plans and possible future careers, parents may want to check the list of careers projected to grow faster than average, as well as careers projected to be in decline: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/, and compare the information presented there with current news.
Surely there exists the opportunity for errors in data collection. As one example, for over a decade I have received mail from an ever-growing number of commercial entities, traceable to a typographical error made by a specific firm when entering data into their system. Although I notified the firm multiple times, they chose not to dedicate their time to error correction and follow-up, describing this as an inefficient process and a waste of time... but rather the firm chose to continue replicating, selling, and disseminating their erroneous data. Although the consequences in this example may be minor, the large scale impact of similarly erroneous data or dirty data may be far-reaching and negative when processed rapidly and on a broad scale through automation driven by Artificial Intelligence.
University College London - Finance & Technology Review (UCL FTR) covers a variety of topics related to Data and AI:
- The future of Trading... intelligent systems which drive algorithmic trading at finance powerhouses. - The AI Incident Database: Documenting AI gone Wrong... the importance of understanding failures and biases of AI systems. - Interview with Didier Vila (Global Head of Data Science at QuantumBlack)... AI biases and data privacy concerns.
Linked from the above article: Editors’ Statement on the Responsible Use of Generative AI Technologies in Scholarly Journal Publishing https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hast.1507 by Gregory E. Kaebnick, David Christopher Magnus, Audiey Kao, Mohammad Hosseini, David Resnik, Veljko Dubljevic, Christy Rentmeester, Bert Gordijn, Mark J. Cherry. Wiley Online Library, Hastings Center Report, Editorial, Free Access, https://doi.org/10.1002/hast.1507 First published: 01 October 2023
I found this to be excellent reading; the ideas were well-thought out, and presented in an easy-to-follow manner.
How well are we equipping today's students to compete, collaborate, and succeed among the workers, producers, and decision-makers of the future?
Is civilization beginning to normalize new levels of Human Machine Interface (HMI), including robots, self-driving vehicles, and Neuralink AI chip implants in human brains?
Brief excerpt: "In a 2023 study published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, European researchers fed the AI system ChatGPT information on 30 ER patients. Details included physician notes on the patients' symptoms, physical exams, and lab results. ChatGPT made the correct diagnosis in 97% of patients compared to 87% for human doctors."
Warning: Scientist rant ahead! Maybe we'll just have some "bad" AI like we have some "bad" doctors? The scary part of the medscape article was the last source where the student doctor decried the lack of study in their coursework on how to use AI in their medical practice. Although the specialized medical AIs may do well in controlled patient populations and study settings when directly supervised, it does not seem that we are at the "just let the AI be the doc" stage. Even for entering the orders or health information, you'd have to check that it was correct and at some point it is just easier to do it yourself. I've tried, within the last month, having AI 1) summarize a journal article, 2) list the GPCRs that do not have seven transmembrane domains, and 3) write an email requesting reagents from the author of a journal article. Outcomes: 1) Summarized, but missed both the importance of the article to the field and the key elements that made the paper a major advance in medicine--in other words, it failed to integrate the new knowledge to the existing body of work. Also failed to find any weaknesses or flaws even when directly asked to analyze for this aspect. Every study has some weakness or flaw. 2) Hallucinated and made false statements while listing a reference that directly contradicted the AI's conclusion. Failed to find breakthrough in field (from eleven years ago in one of the top science journals) that found that plants have this feature. 3) Wrote an email, but failed to list the reagents correctly. Using this email would have required extensive editing and hunting in the paper and supplementary information on the journal's website for the correct name of each reagent. Yes, AI is shockingly better than it was even one year ago. Does that mean it is "good enough" to determine your treatment? Who could your family sue if you were completely incapacitated as a result of the treatment? Would AI learn from being sued and the associated "costs"? Thanks, my rant made me feel better about the importance of human minds in combining both breadth and depth of knowledge and applying them to complex endeavors.
Well interesting thread. I can address one part. Finance. You know that even humans are relying on all those data banks. Not just AI now and future. Bad data has always been an issue. Even organizing the data. And the problem in finance, data can be very complicated and resist against the one size fits all categorization. AI may be able better able to distinquish the odd bits and clean the data and analyze it more effectively.
I think the biggest issue is middle management. That is where most the of the jobs will be lost. And it is interesting, because how do you go from low management to upper management without learning the skills in between? I remember needing knee surgery and my late husband, an anesthesiologist, told me to get someone in their early 40s, someone young enough to know the latest techniques, but old enough to have experience and does dozens per week. Does AI do away with all those middle guys, skills that are in their prime? I think that is the case. Though, most entry level jobs are expected to be lost also. Most top consulting firms rely on new blood to churn out reports that clients pay ridiculous fees for. I imagine that those reports can be churned out by machine far faster and more complete now. The trades are looking better and better as a skill set.
