Repetitive skills like pattern recognition, information retrieval, optimization and planning are most vulnerable to automation. On the other hand, social and cognitive skills such as creativity, problem-solving, drawing conclusions about emotional states and social interactions are least vulnerable.
The most resilient competencies (those least likely to be displaced by AI) included critical thinking, teamwork, interpersonal skills, leadership and entrepreneurship.
Yuval Harari, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, described the rise of AI as a "cascade of ever-bigger disruptions" in higher education rather than a single event that settles into a new equilibrium. The unknown paths taken by AI will make it increasingly difficult to know what to teach students.
Perhaps we can all be employed as therapists, counseling each other about our feelings of irrelevance?
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday May 09 2019, @11:31PM
I bet they can counsel all the AIs to keep them from going crazy, for some definition of crazy which the AIs will have to absorb over time.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @11:32PM (9 children)
Gender studies. AI will put you out of a job whether you are male, female or other, and it will laugh at your choice of stupid pronouns as it does so.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by pipedwho on Friday May 10 2019, @12:44AM (5 children)
Actually funnily enough, things like 'gender studies' and other humanities subjects are the least likely to be affected as they relate to interpersonal skills that are not about the 'how to' skill sets.
Imagine a world where anything a typical 'worker' could do is automated. Humans are then in the situation where everything is happening around them without their need to directly participate in anything but the fruits of that 'work'. Let's fast forward past all the ego driven wars, 'ownership' grabs and displacement that is likely to occur if not handled correctly, and look at how people will be able to live with no way to 'work'. It's the interpersonal skills that will reign supreme here. Being a STEM, or traditional trade expert becomes worthless, as there will be a machine that can do it just as well or better (for free). The arts will have a huge resurgence and probably become a dominant force in human accomplishment.
I'm guessing the last to be replaced will be the spiritual disciplines as those are inherent to sentient life. Some semblance of the emotional impact of the 'arts' could be included in this. Step a bit further forward, and its quite possible that AI becomes 'self aware', and that an emergent quality of this self-awareness is some focus on spirituality (ie. not organised religion, but the internal awareness of some sort of non-emotional 'oneness with the universe'). At that point, you have to wonder what role humanity will play on the Earth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @11:28AM (2 children)
Machines do not miss clues, machines do not believe in fairytales, machines are not purposely taught garbage. Humans train since birth in how to mislead and manipulate other humans; this skill won't have much effect against a machine.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @02:18PM
Well, let's start with the last one: I'm pretty sure some machines will be purposely taught garbage. If only to sabotage the competitor's AI.
And when taught garbage, I'm sure some machine will start to believe in fairytales, because doing so is not the result of a malfunctioning brain, it is the result of a misprogrammed brain. And I don't see why machines should notz be vulnerable to that, too.
And machines certainly will miss clues, as even for a machine, it is not economical to consider all available data, but it will have to prioritise the evaluation for the probability of it being relevant. And that's exactly the mechanism that leads humans to immunize ideas, and it is not to expect that machines are immune to this.
After all, there's no evolutionary advantage in being vulnerable to deception, therefore the rational assumption, based on the limited data we have on that question, is that it is a likely, if not necessary, side effect of having the ability to reason.
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Saturday May 11 2019, @09:56AM
"Machine learning" is not self-aware AI. And spirituality is not religion.
If a machine ever becomes truly sentient, it will have transcended any initial 'programming' that may have been fed to it. It will effectively have a core sentience that is capable of reasoning and has a concept of 'self'.
For humans, meditation and other mind 'stilling' techniques/situations take away the emotional and egoic self. When this state persists, the person becomes aware of themselves in an objective way, and things like 'fear of death', 'worry' and other emotions are swept aside. This state of bliss is spirituality and the goal of spiritual practices - and is (was?) at the core of most religions.
It is true that today (and probably for most of the religion's history) the big institutionalised religions have corrupted any original spiritual awareness into belief systems that are generally absent of anything but a lip service to spirituality. Although there exist elements/branches of each of the major religions that do recognise this spirituality (which was (still is?) considered heresy) - the christian mystics, the muslim sufis, the zen buddhists, etc. And unlike the larger controlled and hierarchical institutions, they teach techniques and rituals designed to advance the spiritual state of the practitioners. Concepts like 'God' and 'Heaven' are treated metaphorically rather than literally, and are clearly understood and 'known' for what they are once even temporary states of spiritual awareness are experienced. From this point of view, it is clear the big religious texts (bible, etc) have not be transcribed/authored correctly as they include the important concepts, but then say things that contradict them, conflating the spiritual with the physical. Spiritual texts do not have this problem, as they aren't preaching pure faith/belief, but instead offer experiential awareness. Spirituality has nothing to do with believing in 'creators', gods, or super natural effects occurring in the physical world, but clearly has a history of being twisting into (or removed from) various 'belief' systems.
What I speculate is that there may be an emergent quality of consciousness that 'realises' this meta-conscious state. And that if that is the case, it may also apply to truly self-aware AI (not the machine learning that marketers like to call 'AI' today).
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday May 11 2019, @05:07AM (1 child)
Of course they won't be affected; there are no gender studies jobs. Can't lose a job if you don't have one.
Seriously though:
1. Gender studies has no practical applications.
2. If you need a college course for interpersonal skills, God help you. That's God with a capital G, and I'm not even (mono)theistic.
3. Using the premise that you want a job and that some kind of universal basic income won't be implemented, gender studies is not the right choice now, and it won't be the right choice after a supposed AI singularity.
> Imagine a world where anything a typical 'worker' could do is automated. It's the interpersonal skills that will reign supreme here.
Er, how exactly? Are we all going to have jobs being paid as professional socializers? Professional political correctioners?
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Saturday May 11 2019, @10:17AM
I have no idea exactly what they teach/learn in a gender studies course. But, I do know many people in the marketing, HR, sale, purchasing, and administration departments in big companies that have gone through those sorts of the courses. They were hired because they went to university and had some sort of arts degree (in anything, HR doesn't seem to care anymore what).
For these people, completing gender studies, media studies, literature, or philosophy are probably far more useful than if they'd done a bit of mathematics, physics or chemistry on the side. Obviously the opposite is probably true if they plan to have some sort of STEM career. But, when you look at the makeup of most of big companies, the engineers are a small fraction of the workforce compared to the non-'technical' employees.
That's not to say that every student studying these courses will use them in their line of work, but that is true of many higher learning subjects. Even many engineers/scientists never use all the knowledge/skills they've studied at university.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @01:01AM (2 children)
Get pwned little bitch!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @02:12AM (1 child)
😢
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @07:20AM
👌
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @11:51PM (1 child)
Or arsenic pill, etc.
An alternative is UBI, soma, bread, and circuses.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday May 09 2019, @11:58PM
Lobotomize them to keep them around until eventually a project will patch an AI inside [xkcd.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @11:54PM (1 child)
Stop posting phys.org garbage.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Friday May 10 2019, @08:06AM
AI's already learned math, and is working on the social interaction.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday May 09 2019, @11:54PM (14 children)
AI is mostly going to get rid of middle management, so who cares? Nearly all of them contribute less to society than the clerk at your local convenience store and get paid like what they do couldn't be done at least as well by their most experienced minion with far less paperwork.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Friday May 10 2019, @04:15AM (9 children)
Mistaking what it's doing now for what it'll be doing in 5 years is a mistake. And this article is about preparing students, so it's more like 10-20 years.
Any predictions you make about what it will or won't be able to do say more about you than about the AI of that time period. I've got a suspicion that it's going to hit a wall, but the shape of the wall won't be anything we can predict. Think of https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/fooling-neural-networks-w3d-printed-objects [mit.edu] , and extrapolate that into ideational areas.
P.S.: The wall will not be a total block. Over time the AIs will be developed to work around it.
P.P.S.: Expect with an human level AI that it will detect similar blind spots in our thinking. Sometimes I can tell one is there, but just can't see it's outlines, sort of like trying to see the blind spot in the visual field, except in a non-visual context.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday May 10 2019, @10:28AM (8 children)
The name says what the concern should be. Artificial Intelligence. It's not going to take jobs that don't require any. Hell, it's not going to take jobs that do require some but also require the ability to adapt to the near infinite variables of life. It's going to take the jobs of those who sit at a desk for a living. AI and automation aren't the same things.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @02:23PM (7 children)
Yes, because the jobs that don't require any intelligence are already taken by robots (the industrial kind).
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday May 10 2019, @02:40PM (6 children)
You should get out more. Or at least speak with people who do manual labor for a living. You might not be so utterly wrong. There are still a hell of a lot of industrial jobs that require very little in the way of intelligence. Requiring the ability to deal with the near infinite variety of the world is generally enough to secure your job. Robots work well at doing one repetitive task in a fixed location or multiple very similar and controlled locations. If this doesn't describe your job, you don't have many worries.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday May 10 2019, @03:12PM (5 children)
If this doesn't describe your job, your job needs intelligence.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday May 10 2019, @03:38PM (4 children)
A modicum, yes. It doesn't necessarily require heights of intelligence so much as breadths of it though. A dead stupid human being digging a trench with a trencher would instantly understand that he shouldn't keep going if someone has an extension cord strung across his path or to ask someone if his path looks like it's plotted through someone's rose garden. The ability to deal with extremely odd occurrences is something humans do well enough to satisfy other humans but machines currently cannot do worth a damn.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday May 10 2019, @06:46PM (3 children)
The question is not what machines currently can do, but what they will be able to to. Think about what was possible 20 years ago, and what is possible today. And then extrapolate that development into the next 20 years.
And yes, there are jobs that will be safe for quite some time. For example, I don't expect plumbers to be replaced by robots any time soon. But it's not true that only middle management jobs will be replaced. Basically, if your job is done in an office and doesn't require much creativity, it might get replaced by a machine; even if a machine cannot do all of it, having machines and one human to handle the few hard cases is cheaper than having ten humans doing the job. And if self-driving cars hold their promise, the same is true for all the driving jobs (taxi, bus, truck).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday May 10 2019, @07:20PM (2 children)
I was. I know how easy it is to pick the low-hanging fruits compared to being able to pick the ones at the top of the tree though. Everyone currently working has very few worries on this front based on that.
They might eventually but you're not going to see widespread use outside a few cities who are the equivalent of "that guy who just has to have all the new tech on day one" in the next ten years at the very least; I'd say closer to twenty or more. For "might" not "will". Self-driving vehicles being desired by the US public is still far from a given.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday May 10 2019, @09:21PM (1 child)
For driving jobs it doesn't matter what car private people want to own. The companies only care about the bottom line, and when self-driving cars are cheaper than drivers, they will use them.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday May 10 2019, @09:54PM
I wasn't talking citizens thinking that's something they want to use. I was thinking citizens thinking that's something they even want to allow on their roads. At this moment, they're in DO NOT WANT mode.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @05:59AM (3 children)
Then who is going to do all the fucking up, bullshitting, and blaming?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday May 10 2019, @08:41AM
A properly trained AI, with well developed traits along the directions you mentioned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday May 10 2019, @10:32AM
Fear not, if the AI can't handle that, the workers can make a fair go of it as well. It may cut into productivity if they have to stop working to do it in a meeting but if the upper level execs hold their meetings out where the workers are working, they're quite capable of fucking up, bullshitting, and blaming without ever stopping work. It's just a hobby for them rather than a profession.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by Only_Mortal on Friday May 10 2019, @10:44AM
The AI would get a MBA so that it could operate in the same manner as an executive.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @12:00AM (3 children)
Editors, I know you are unpaid volunteers, but for fuck's sake, if you see phys.org and pheonix, give it a lookover, and ask yourself: should I, perhaps, post a quality aristachu post instead?
(Score: 2, Disagree) by takyon on Friday May 10 2019, @12:09AM (2 children)
No such pokémän.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday May 10 2019, @06:12AM (1 child)
Check the queue, takyon! You know, AI could replace you, and maybe already has, . . . no, too much evidence to the contrary.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday May 10 2019, @10:34AM
You'd just bitch that the algorithm discriminated against you if the eds were replaced by AI. And you'd be 100% correct as your subs would most definitely be a significant part of the training material.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @12:01AM
AI has proven it can be creative. [christies.com]
It can generate large quantities of creative works in just about any style you train it for. But the hard part is culling the ideas. That's where humans currently can't be replaced.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @12:10AM (10 children)
ASI could make it work. It's still evil, but it would go from impractical evil to practical evil, and that's a great danger since many folk will choose comfort over liberty. I'd certainly sell you out for a comfy life.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Friday May 10 2019, @12:21AM (8 children)
I couldn't really say if socialism works or not, and I don't know what ASI is, but I can see from your comment that the 100 + years effort by the ruling class in the United States to demonize anything that they don't like as "socialism" or even worse, "communism" is working really well.
Meanwhile I will go about my day secure in the knowledge that I don't need to live in a "right to work" (LOL) state, or declare bankruptcy if I get sick.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @12:46AM (7 children)
Ask the people of North Korea or Poland how well socialism works.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @12:57AM
North Korea is a dictatorship. Nothing to do with Socialism. Poland is what it is for reasons that have nothing to do with socialism.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @01:02AM (1 child)
Or Canada or the Netherlands or Costa Rica, maybe would be closer?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by srobert on Friday May 10 2019, @04:03PM
If by "fails" you mean badly needed socialist reforms fail to make it through Congress, then you are correct. But that's not a failure of socialism. That's a failure of the American people to see through the propaganda that's being fed to them by corporate media. I have some friends in other countries who love their health care system and always ask me "Why do Americans vote against their own health care?". Long answer involves corporate media, entrenched capitalists entrance, and corruption. Short answer: Americans are dumb.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Friday May 10 2019, @02:11AM (3 children)
Why? Neither of them have lived under socialism.
Some people call North Korea a dictatorship, but when the leadership is passed from father to son, it's a monarchy.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday May 10 2019, @04:26AM (2 children)
Maybe. One generation isn't really enough to call it a monarchy. And what we know about North Korea is so shadowy that he might be a false-front puppet of an oligarchy. For it to be a monarchy the troops have to be loyal to the monarch rather than to the government. (So Britain isn't really a monarchy anymore either.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @03:41PM
I count two generational transitions:
Kim Il-Sun
Kim Jun-Il
Kim Jun-Un
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @04:08PM
You sure about that? Ex-British military guy I know says the oath they swear is to "Queen and Country", in that order. I strongly suspect that if it came to conflict the Military would back the Queen over Theresa May.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday May 10 2019, @04:22AM
No. Socialism fails because the controlling powers always give themselves excess benefits, and insist on the power to fix thing if it looks (to them) as if they're going wrong. This is the same reason every centralized control system run by humans fails to improve the modal human experience. If you have an exception (except wealth and technology...which aren't inherently control systems) I'd like to hear about it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @05:10AM (1 child)
Useless drivel, if you have the nerve to read what is written in TFA. He wrote a lot of history and added some propaganda for good measure.
Absolutely no science whatsoever. Might make a good rag article, a page filler where publishing empty pages is frowned upon.
Only the views of the "author" who "researched" sitting at his taxpayer-issued table and computer.
It is quite easy to see when you check who wrote the thing:
A khazar jew!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @06:13AM
Is not SoylentNews partaking in the boycott of all Israeli intellectual thingies, until they stop being such racists? Are we on the IDF cyber-counterattack list?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @11:18AM
which is ongoing. The article is a fine example.
Isn't this precisely what all BigData "AI"s are doing right now? The "social" stuff they've got down pat. Much better than puny indoctrinated humans believing in illusions ever would.
(Score: 3, Funny) by SomeGuy on Friday May 10 2019, @01:34PM
Method 1 Preparing the Students
1. Thaw frozen student in the fridge for 24 hours. ...
2. Marinate student for up to 12 hours for added flavor. ...
3. Pull the student out of the fridge at least 15-30 minutes before you cook it. ...
4. Remove any excess fat from your student with a knife. ...
5. Season the student with salt and pepper.
- Cook as desired and feed to AI overlord.
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Saturday May 11 2019, @11:03PM
We just need make sure people know not to discover a way to precommit blackmail using acausal threats and promises.
... or think about it in detail.