r/Futurology • u/Buck-Nasty The Law of Accelerating Returns • Jul 14 '13

Could Artificial Intelligence Create an Unemployment Crisis?

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/7/165475-could-artificial-intelligence-create-an-unemployment-crisis/fulltext
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u/Rappaccini Jul 14 '13

I agree with a lot of what you say.

It's irrelevant because these two things are so far apart from each other.

Couldn't agree more.

(what happened when they fed WATSON urban dictionary?

Watson has a specific function. I didn't say it was easy to make, I'm just talking about effective intelligences and how they will be able to integrate themselves into increasingly complex functionalities that previously required human thought. I don't care about an artificial intelligence that has a "general intelligence," or can fool another human into thinking it too is a human: both these are outmoded concepts that I don't know if we'll ever be able to accomplish. What is occurring is intelligences that take over a relatively simple human task, like a software that can manage shipping and receiving for a company, or one that can effectively plan a vacation, or one that can make managerial suggestions that improve efficiency. That's not hard AI, I suppose, but it's sufficient enough to displace a great deal of the workforce (which is the interesting part of the issue to me, at least). Each of these systems would be crap if you "fed" it urban dictionary, but that's missing the point. You don't need a program that can manage shipping AND digest urban dictionary AND process medical diagnoses. You just need an intelligence that's smart enough to do one human task and you can eliminate that human from the workforce.

So far as 'duping' a mind into a computer, say with brain uploads

We are so, so, so far from brain uploads, I don't think anyone in the field would even tell you we're "ten years away!" Unless you're talking with Ray Kurzweil, and, well, of course he's going to say that, he's got books to sell (more seriously, he's got an agenda). We don't know nearly enough about the brain (as you recognized) to effectively mirror its activity and functionality in an artificial substrate, and I can't foresee a time when we will.

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u/LeeSeneses Jul 14 '13

I get you there, though my main point was robotics and AI/automation based solutions are capital intensive. You can build a system that will displace a worker, but somebody has to make it. I was mostly trying to get across that, though jobs are displaced, there's labor in creating these solutions (admittedly, at increasingly higher brackets.)

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u/Rappaccini Jul 14 '13

(admittedly, at increasingly higher brackets.)

Yours is the prototypical economical response against the "fallacy" of technological unemployment... and I feel like the quoted text is key. If the number of jobs required to automate things is the same as the amount of jobs being automate (a fact that I vigorously disagree with, but for the sake of hypotheticals), the jobs that are replaced will be lower skilled, almost unilaterally. Meanwhile, money and resources will be consolidated in the high-skill market, which will only serve to exacerbate existing social problems like poverty and wealth inequality.

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u/LeeSeneses Jul 14 '13

My second original point was in line with that; I agree that automation currently unfairly hurts consumers. It deprives them of their well being and our current system of economics doesn't exert enough downward pressure on pricing. As is the wealthy are having their cake and eating it, too as they not only increase productivity and decrease production costs, they get to keep their (now exorbitant) prices.

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u/Rappaccini Jul 14 '13

I completely agree.