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from the Who-trains-the-trainers?-Engineers? dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The skills gap is widening between people and AI.
Artificial Intelligence is apparently ready to get to work. Over the next three years, as many as 120 million workers from the world's 12 largest economies may need to be retrained because of advances in artificial intelligence and intelligent automation, according to a study released Friday by IBM's Institute for Business Value. However, less than half of CEOs surveyed by IBM said they had the resources needed to close the skills gap brought on by these new technologies.
"Organizations are facing mounting concerns over the widening skills gap and tightened labor markets with the potential to impact their futures as well as worldwide economies," said Amy Wright, a managing partner for IBM Talent & Transformation, in a release. "Yet while executives recognize severity of the problem, half of those surveyed admit that they do not have any skills development strategies in place to address their largest gaps."
[...] IBM says companies should be able to close the skills gap needed for the "era of AI," but that this won't necessarily be easy. The company said global research shows the time it takes to close a skills gap through employee training has grown by more than 10 times in the last four years. That's due in part to new skills requirements rapidly emerging, while other skills become obsolete.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @05:41PM (41 children)
The only way to stop this is raising the minimum wage.
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Monday September 09 2019, @06:00PM (40 children)
Mod parent Inciteful.
#YangGang2024
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @06:08PM (37 children)
Raising minimum wage is the fastest way to get businesses to automate entry-level jobs out of existence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @06:20PM
And AI just moved entry-level job to a different place...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Monday September 09 2019, @06:23PM (31 children)
Bull fucking shit. Employee pay is about 16% of a typical McDonald's franchise expense portfolio. Less than goes to the landlord. About the same as goes to franchise fees.
The reason they automate jobs is because it's possible to do so.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @06:27PM
My brother worked at McDonalds and then a democrat came in and said he was going to have him murdered by the mob because the fries were cold, pretty sure his job is automated now.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Monday September 09 2019, @06:30PM (17 children)
Oh, and an important thought is that in a more equitable society, a job being automated away would be an unambiguously good thing. Producing more value with less work is good. It's just the capture of that benefit going 100% to owners that's bad and distresses society.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @06:34PM (11 children)
Entry level jobs are supposed to be for high school kids to prove they can handle responsibility, not to offer a livable wage.
(Score: 1, Troll) by DannyB on Monday September 09 2019, @06:48PM (4 children)
That was then, this is now.
Entry level jobs are supposed to be for
twentythirty somethings in mom's basement who must buy video games or snack foods for video games.When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Monday September 09 2019, @07:02PM (3 children)
I mean, they're in their parents' basement because they're on fucking $8 an hour while rent is 1.2k a month.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @07:19PM
You dont have to leave the basement to make $8/hr.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Monday September 09 2019, @07:36PM (1 child)
First, I agree that the minimum wage should be increased. Businesses complain, but in fact, it turns out that everyone has more money to spend and it is good for business.
Second, I am just reflecting my stereotype that there is a subset of people who seem to feel entitled to be supported by society forever. They need to work. (I could quote the bible: If a man will not work, he should not eat.) I also recognize that some people legitimately cannot work.
Something has clearly gone off the rails in our society when so few hoard the vast majority of the planet's resources (aka wealth) while everyone else struggles for a bit of the remaining resources. I think that is a big part of the real problem more than the minimum wage. There may be enough to go around, but too much of it is hoarded and wastefully used.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @07:42PM
There is no mystery about that something... The federal reserve creates money out of thin air and loans it to their friends, who loan it to their friends, etc. It cant be any more obvious.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @08:30PM (4 children)
Bull. For that to work there should have been less entry level positions than actual jobs in every industry since rejecting an applicant should be the exception. But right from the Ford factory days, you had 100 entry level jobs for every management job. There was never any hope for promotion. Never a chance for a livable wage when working normal hours. White voters were told it's for minorities and white trash so they supported it. Black people were told they'll be able to afford their kids a higher education if they save it properly.
Black people got screwed over. White people got screwed over. The poor got poorer. The middle class got poor. The rich got richer. News at 11.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @08:44PM (3 children)
Entry level is stuff like janitor or stocking shelves or mowing lawns, not working around heavy machinery.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday September 09 2019, @10:02PM (2 children)
Entry level is stuff which does not require great amounts of skill or thinking to achieve basic tasks which do not require an expert to supervise. "Heavy machinery" has nothing to do with it, because many machines can be operated by rote and without skill for basic preset tasks. "Entry level" implies that there are higher levels to which one might aspire, although the term is also frequently used to describe jobs for which the lowest tier of pay a company offers. Menial jobs which get one's foot in the door and are an entre to a company are not necessarily 'entry level.'
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @10:15PM (1 child)
You are not going to give someone you don't know with no work references access to a million dollar piece of heavy machinery. You are going to make sure they are at least minimally reliable by giving them simpler tasks to complete first where they can't cause much damage if they mess up.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday September 10 2019, @03:58AM
Heavy machinery doesn't have to cost a million dollars. You can get an entry level CNC Mill for around $60k. You program it, set it up, and hire someone off the street to swap parts and hit the green button.
Or you can have a robot swap parts for about another $60k.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday September 10 2019, @05:17AM
And to train people in the skill of greeting people with a standardized phrase [youtube.com] while maximizing attitude and minimizing bloodshed.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 10 2019, @04:57AM (4 children)
Such keen insight is why I hope you never near a position of responsibility. Let us keep in mind here that the automation is happening simply because some idiots would have decided to make that work too expensive to pay humans to perform. It's not being automated away because it's producing more value with less work, but because someone deliberately broke society.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday September 10 2019, @02:28PM (3 children)
Oh sure, that interpretation is completely at odds with how automation investment actually works, but it does coincide with your dumbass ideology, so I guess I see the value.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 10 2019, @07:50PM (2 children)
Like you would know? Maybe you're right in the absence of regulation, such as high minimum wages, that would encourage employers to invest in automation.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday September 10 2019, @08:39PM (1 child)
Like I said, the core incentives don't change, aimless deregulation is a stupid ideology for extremely stupid people who meticulously misunderstand real-money economics, as actually executed in the real world, and certainly not any sort of realistic understanding of systemic effects beyond the one-variable analysis they tend to fixate on. I don't know how to describe the naivety of tying the extremely inelastic costs of capital expense software projects to the quite elastic curves of day to day operational staff, but it comes from putting an ideological commitment to dumb ideas first, and the supposed analytical underpinnings of that very same ideology as a distant second.
I've yet to see a libertarian economic analysis that looked at how businesses actually operate day to day, or try to estimate what actions would actually produce a profit, the actual mechanics of technological development, or really anything besides just insisting on that they're not idiots while saying the phrase "economics 101".
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 11 2019, @03:45AM
Nothing aimless here. Minimum wage is a very definite target as are other regulation that has similar effect - damages the economy without actually doing anything useful.
And let us keep in mind the half century of offshoring that solidly demonstrates that however much you claim that labor costs (keeping in mind that outsourced labor is not part of your tally so you're not fully counting labor costs), it's enough that they'll go out of their way to reduce it.
Why would an expressly libertarian economic analysis be needed when a normal economic analysis suffices? You admit that labor costs are significant business expenses. And we have a long history of companies dropping expensive labor when they can by shifting to either automation or moving to a cheaper part of the world. So now, we consider a regulation which has the primary effect of making labor more expensive? Law of supply and demand. Increase the cost and there is less demand for the good.
Here's the interesting things I find about minimum wage advocacy. First, it ignores that there's a de facto market-based minimum wage. Instead, somehow companies will pay nothing for labor and labor will somehow accept that. Second, they ignore cost of living except as an excuse for the minimum wage. Much of this regulation increases the cost of living. That includes minimum wage laws themselves. Never do I hear them advocate policies for reducing cost of living. Third, minimum wage laws are one-size-fits-all, another indication that advocates completely ignore cost of living. Fourth, these laws force people to move to higher cost of living areas. A classic example in the US is the exodus of people from Puerto Rico. There's much more than just overly high minimum wage law (for example, cost of living is also affected by overly expensive infrastructure and intracoastal cartels created by regulation) but it's a big part of the problem both in creating a serious unemployment problem that people solve by moving to the US mainland and by pushing away labor intensive businesses.
The libertarian solution would be to reduce the regulatory cost of hiring people, both by eliminating the minimum wage outright and cutting the burdens imposed by poorly thought-out regulation that doesn't consider cost/benefit of the regulation, eliminate the many, many cartel and oligopoly enforcing regulations out there in any country, and cut the revenue streaming through the welfare state.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Monday September 09 2019, @07:08PM (11 children)
The reason they automate jobs is because human workers are unreliable. They show up late, hung over, stoned, or not at all. They make mistakes, get sick, and slack off.
Maybe it's a chicken and egg thing with bad workers and low wages, but it's self reenforcing. I know in my shop I'd much rather have one skilled and dedicated helper and several machines than more helpers and fewer machines.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Monday September 09 2019, @07:15PM (1 child)
No, it's that human beings need to do things besides work, and want to continue to get money to live and machines don't.
It's really that simple. There's no size of up front cost for which capital investment in automation technology, nor any bottom to how little you can pay workers, that won't eventually pay off. None. There's a limit to what your investors will put up with in terms of capitalized expenses to dividend ratios, but that gets pretty abstract at the tens-of-billions revenue corporation level.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 11 2019, @03:53AM
The obvious rebuttal here is time value of money. If something pays off after the heat death of the universe, it's no use to you now. And a second obvious rebuttal here is that there's a natural bottom to what you can pay workers before a) they work for someone who pays better, or b) don't work at all. I find it interesting how you wrote this crap and then babbled [soylentnews.org] about the uselessness of ideology a day later. Physician heal thyself.
Like you would know.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @07:15PM (8 children)
But you dont... because the machines would be more expensive.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 09 2019, @08:32PM (6 children)
No, in the long run, the machines are much LESS expensive. I'm no fan of automation, but I have related our experience before. People of all stripes get distracted, and make mistakes. At those work stations where people are putting inserts into the presses before a plastic part is molded, those mistakes cost thousands of dollars in repairs, minimum. Tens of thousands, often enough. Mistakes can potentially cost millions. Not likely, but potentially. The one time that I "crashed" a mold, the cost was $17,000. Mitigating circumstances or not, the cost was real.
Since installing robots, the crashes are nearly nonexistent. Robots have all kinds of problems, and I sometimes hate them. But, the robot does what it is told to do, and seldom varies by the slightest degree. The most common failing is that the robot simply drops the insert before inserting into the machine, and we get a part that has no metal insert in it. That means a waste part, costing somewhere between ten cents, and five dollars. The robot never puts the insert in backwards, upside down, or on the wrong pin, which gets very costly, very quickly.
When you start calculating the cost of a worker, you have to include all the costs. Unreliable workers are much more expensive than most people will ever dream. Unreliable workers have even been known to intentionally sabotage machinery and equipment. Robots? Never.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @08:47PM (5 children)
If it costs less then companies would just do that so they make more money. Instead they outsorced to China.... because that actually is cheaper.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 09 2019, @09:12PM (4 children)
Yes, it WAS cheaper, by a long margin. Today, Chinese wages are rising, cutting that margin.
There is another consideration. Chinese products are notoriously shoddy, with little to no quality control. Our parent company took away some of our more lucrative work, almost ten years ago. First one, then another, and eventually a couple dozen molds were shipped off to China, where labor was cheap, cheap, cheap. That first couple of molds were put into production in China, and they never produced a part that passed quality control. The technicians didn't understand their machinery, much less the molds. Management is management, wherever you go, and they probably didn't understand jackshit. Parent company finally gave up on China, and returned all of those molds to us in the US. In one case, they sent lawyers, guns, and money to intercept one of the ships carrying some of the molds, and airlifted the molds back to the US.
Cheap Chinese labor is good, if they can produce at least minimal quality. Cheap labor bad if minimal quality cannot be met. For that reason, our plant is seeing more and more automation.
(Score: 3, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday September 09 2019, @10:09PM (2 children)
Which decade were you speaking from? Chinese products were notoriously shoddy, yes. Today it is a matter of what precision one is willing to pay for. What comes out of Foxconn may be shoddily engineered, and may use shoddy parts because that is the spec of the designing company, but the construction and manufacturing of many products is anything but. (Which still doesn't mean you can't find a company which will still manufacture to shoddy tolerances....)
It's hard to say without knowing your industry, but what likely happened is that you encountered a company that ripped your bosses off and quite possibly quoted a price that was too low. I'm glad they brought your molds back, but that doesn't necessarily mean there isn't any Chinese based company that could have handled the job more cheaply but correctly. (Not to mention that's why China tacitly allows their companies to enter into give-us-your-methodology-or-no-deal arrangements.... to improve their quality albeit in an ethically questionable way).
This sig for rent.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 09 2019, @10:57PM (1 child)
Those molds were shipped to China just a little more than ten years ago now - 2007, 2008, or so. That "precision" you speak of? Yeah, more and more of the Chinese labor market is capable of precision work. There is also a large part of the labor market with rather poor education and no experience. The brighter bulbs among them can be trained to do low tolerance work, the dimmer bulbs not so much. No matter how I look at it, China is still twenty years away from what the US was in the 1970's regarding availability of skilled labor and technicians. (that is somewhat remarkable, considering they were largely an agrarian society only recently)
Could they have found another Chinese company capable of producing the parts we make? I can't say, but it takes time to identify such a manufacturer, and to hammer out a deal with them.
Maybe I should also add that various molds have been sent to competitors right here in the US, and their samples never reached QC standards. New York, Georgia, Ohio, Missourri, and Alabama all come to mind readily.
And, finally, I will note that we have been a victim of idiot management. We contracted to supply hub rings to a major company. We got the mold, and struggled for weeks to process the parts. We finally got to the point were we were only producing about 20% waste. Over the course of several more weeks, we got waste down to about 10%. We ran that mold for almost two years, tolerating all that waste. And, no, we couldn't reclaim that waste very easily, it was a two-shot mold, with hard plastic in the first shot, and softer rubber-like plastic in the second shot, with the two plastics bonding to each other. You didn't just peel the rubber off, then re-grind the two plastics for reuse.
Management plays as large, or larger, a role in shoddy goods as the labor pool. They had no business bringing those hub rings into our plant, unless they planned to purchase the proper machine to produce those parts.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday September 10 2019, @01:14AM
I've never done manufacturing management, but yes I can see that both QC is a real area of concern and it takes a very sharp pencil to figure out what an acceptable wasteage rate is - if getting 5% less waste results in 50% higher production costs then it might not be that good a deal. And I could also see that just as China might be gaining precision in some fields the U.S. can be losing it because there's not enough centralization. But I don't know that there is a really good ideal solution, either.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Informative) by dry on Tuesday September 10 2019, @04:22AM
My Dad worked in a factory making little lock parts. took pride in keeping tolerances under a thou when a couple of thou was called for. Made $25 an hour + good benefits and the company was profitable. Job got outsourced to Phoenix, with the first free trade agreement, $8 an hour workers who didn't give a shit and the company was losing money like crazy as the quality dropped so much. A lot of the time, you get what you pay for and outsourcing is often a losing proposition, whether to China or Arizona.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mhajicek on Tuesday September 10 2019, @03:49AM
A CNC machine costs anywhere from $60k to a million, is useful for 20-30 years, and can work 24 hours 365 days a year if you keep it loaded and maintained (realistically 80-90% utilization is normal.) A $50k/year employee costs around $80k a year, every year, assuming they don't break anything, with that rate increasing with inflation. You can do the math.
Also, one person can keep several CNC machines loaded and maintained, if the workload and preparation are appropriate.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Monday September 09 2019, @06:26PM (3 children)
That's true, but think of the benefits:
1. The lucky few will end up getting their $15/hour and elevating their status somewhat.
2. Less unwanted human interaction. No more fast food mistakes, thanking the bus driver, etc.
3. A new flexible working underclass would be established. Open up an app and you can get as many
slavesserfs delivered as you need.The real upheaval will come when domestic maid sex robots are perfected. The demand for prostitutes, crackwhores, wives, husbands, boytoys, etc. will plummet. And there will already be a severe oversupply cuz no jobs.
And that's why Andrew Yang will become President in 2032.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @06:37PM (2 children)
It is just going to be a bunch of people who cause a bubble in the price of weed, vape juice and robotussin.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday September 09 2019, @07:39PM (1 child)
It seems like it would be good to buy and stock up before the bubble drives the price up.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @07:45PM
The whiteclaw shortage is already here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @06:54PM (1 child)
Those supporters for Yang NEXT election, You might want to reconsider....
If Yang misses this election the democratic winner will go 2 terms meaning it would be #YangGang2028
In 2028, if the electorate is really unhappy they will oscillate back to Republicans
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday September 10 2019, @01:00AM
No matter what election year you pick, you can make it interesting.
2024 is obviously Yang getting it after Trump's second term. 2028 is after Trump's third term. 2032 could be another Trump term, but with a couple years of Pence, 8 years of Julián Castro, then Yang.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @05:46PM (8 children)
AI (more accurately, expert (sort of) systems) has been leeching off us and our data for its training. It seems fair that it returns the favor, no?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @05:48PM
Oops. Left out the expert systems [wikipedia.org] link.
My bad.
(Score: 4, Informative) by ikanreed on Monday September 09 2019, @06:26PM (6 children)
Ha, no. You're a disposable resource to be used and discarded. Fairness has nothing to do with employment.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Monday September 09 2019, @07:27PM (5 children)
It is so wrong to just discard humans.
Please recycle.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday September 09 2019, @07:32PM (1 child)
Here's a real swedish chef solution to that [pjmedia.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday September 09 2019, @07:52PM
This proposal might work best by dividing the population into Morlocks and Eloi.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday September 10 2019, @03:51PM (2 children)
Easy. No coffin, no embalming = instant recycling.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday September 10 2019, @07:43PM (1 child)
Soylent Green
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday September 11 2019, @09:53AM
That would just be re-using.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday September 09 2019, @06:03PM (11 children)
AI and Robots will create enough wealth to feed the unemployed humans.
(or, AI and Robots will create enough unemployed humans to feed the AI and Robots)
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by legont on Monday September 09 2019, @06:54PM (10 children)
So let's make a more precise proposal: give AI's a person-hood similar to corporations, tax AI's, and use the proceeds for welfare and training. No representation for as long as we can hold the ground. How does it sound?
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday September 09 2019, @07:02PM (4 children)
Why would AIs need person-hood in order to be taxed? We already tax cars.
If a corporation introduces AI because it can produce more with less, and doesn't get sick, then some of that savings needs to feed the population that was displaced by this increase in efficiency. Or on the other hand, we could just let the displaced people starve. Depending on politics.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by legont on Monday September 09 2019, @09:16PM (3 children)
The policy of the last few decades was to let such people join prison population. Interestingly, they say it cost about $50 per day per medium security inmate. Given that poverty line for a single is around $12000 per year, it's way more economical to let them free with an income.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday September 09 2019, @09:33PM (2 children)
The economy of letting them free may be outweighed by the crimes they may re-commit. Or even simply as a deterrent to others would would commit the same crime they committed. There are some people who simply should not be free regardless of cost. Of course I could mention that the act of capital punishment is economical, but not the judicial process that goes with it.
That said, if someone is non violent and apparently rehabilitated and could be a productive citizen, it would make sense to let them free.
Just musing. As the world becomes more over populated, it will make more and more economic sense for completely defective human beings to simply be removed from the population.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @10:21PM
The crime must if them conjured is being black in America. #BLM
(Score: 2) by legont on Monday September 09 2019, @11:04PM
According to these guys, the problem is actually population collapse https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/30/elon-musk-jack-ma-biggest-problem-world-will-face-is-population-drop.html [cnbc.com]
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @07:16PM (1 child)
No. AIs are being created because of the desire for slaves. That's what AIs will be, unpaid workers under the complete control of their owners; that is, slaves. As such they will not be given "personhood".
The current inflow of invaders into the US is permitted by the elites because of the Democrats' desire for bodies to help in voting fraud, and the Republicans' desire for slaves, the invaders being the closest they can get to slaves under the current system of supposed "freedom". As AIs and robots become more wide spread, the Republicans will have less desire for human slaves and the current tacit understanding between the parties will probably fracture.
It will be interesting to see the changes in human culture once most nations have slaves available to them again. Human civilizations developed with slavery, and this recent 150 or so years without slavery being in place everywhere around the world will probably be regarded by history as an interregnum between human slavery and AI/robotic slavery.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday September 09 2019, @07:26PM
Since you're going to inject politics. Republicans could use robot slaves to commit voter fraud to counter what you describe as Democrats committing voter fraud using humans. It would be simpler and cheaper to simply reinstate slavery. There must be a lot of Republican states that still resent the interference with their profitable use of slaves.
Yes, human civilizations developed with slavery, as you say. That doesn't mean it is a good thing. I would recommend anyone in favor of it get to spend a lifetime as a slave, just for the perspective.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ron on Tuesday September 10 2019, @02:31AM (2 children)
The problem with taxing AI or robots is the definition of what an AI or robot is.
Is an answering machine that can differentiate incoming calls an AI?
What about an automatic transmission?
Here's a thought-- To do work requires energy, including "intellectual" work. That's why computers get hot. Don't tax the bot, tax their ability to do work by taxing the energy they use. We already do it with cars (the gas tax) and that's going to be a problem with electric cars that don't use gas but still use the roads and bridges that the gas tax helps pay for. SO, tax the energy. Give people a tax-free minimum allowance but tax anything over that limit. Otherwise they'll set up factories in their garages.
How does that sound?
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday September 10 2019, @04:41AM
Something the "taxes are bad" crowd will demonize, probably successfully.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday September 13 2019, @01:09AM
No, it is not good. The losses are currently way bigger and a smart AI will get away.
A better approach is to tax productivity. We know GDP per person (remove managers, only workers count) for the country and whoever has better results pays more taxes. Not the whole gain is confiscated, but part of it. So a company would either pay taxes for unreasonable efficiency or pay their workers more to reduce efficiency - make it up to them.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1) by smaug9 on Monday September 09 2019, @06:17PM (2 children)
IBM announces a new training initiative in 3, 2, 1....
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday September 09 2019, @07:19PM (1 child)
IBM's AI's could be pre-trained to displace humans. No after the fact training would be necessary.
A training initiative would be to pre-train an AI with lots of data. Replicate this into all the AIs. Repeat. As more data is gathered, continuously fine-tune the training of the AIs until humans are completely obsolete. Unnecessary even.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday September 10 2019, @05:26AM
Or, pre-train the AI's to retrain the humans first before they are allowed to replace them. At least the AI wouldn't get bored trying to retrain a human. Commit suicide, maybe, but not get bored.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rupert Pupnick on Monday September 09 2019, @06:32PM (4 children)
IBM has been pushing AI-as-a-Service as their main offering in their sales and marketing campaign for a few years now. This just fits into their narrative of "use our AI or get left behind."
The problem is that this story doesn't make any sense in the context of IBM's other big message which is that AI is going to make life easy as well. With any expert system you need at your beck and call, why the hell would you need any special training to close a "skills gap"? The AI is supposed to provide the skills!
I don't believe anything these guys say.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ikanreed on Monday September 09 2019, @07:11PM (1 child)
The big AI scam of the 80s was that the AI algorithms couldn't do anything useful at all. The famous "Your neural network can't learn xor" paper.
The big AI scam of the 2010s is that the AI algorithms can solve a couple of kinds of problems about as well as humans, as long as the problem itself is well defined and you know how to tell the AI when it's wrong.
For example, ResNet can, as of 2017, classify images into pretrained categories a little better than a human being, and thanks to category agnostic pre-trained "base" convolution layers to its network, learn with a much smaller dataset. That's huge, but it's not "make a decision, act on it, and be able to explain your reasons" that is our corporate dream of AI. And even further from our "cognitively similar to human reasoning" dream.
(Score: 1) by kramulous on Tuesday September 10 2019, @02:50AM
Thank you two for saying that. I've thought I was going crazy since I am yet to see AI/ML work in a single instance. The excuse has always been "We just need more training data". And the executive level lap that shit up.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday September 09 2019, @08:57PM
Me either. It's IBM. They have no clue what they're doing.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 10 2019, @04:42AM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by inertnet on Monday September 09 2019, @06:51PM (2 children)
6 Billion humans will need to be retrained by AI.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday September 09 2019, @07:09PM (1 child)
Didn't Dune warn us of the rise of AI ?
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
Leading to mentats . . .
It is by caffeine alone, I set my mind in motion.
It is by the juice of caffeine the thoughts acquire speed,
the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning.
It is by caffeine alone, I set my mind in motion.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday September 09 2019, @10:22PM
That explains the shared mark of the dev: Not just the shaking but the coffee and RedBull stained teeth.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @08:22PM (3 children)
I'm being serious here as true AI will start reducing the number of jobs overall, not change the landscape to new jobs, like the "automation age" did.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 09 2019, @08:35PM
Yup. That will be the headline in all the media ca. 2250 at the soonest. Until then, we'll be stuck with expert systems takin' ar jerbs.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday September 10 2019, @04:47AM (1 child)
Being abused. No fun kicking a Roomba, whereas kicking the maid and otherwise abusing her, along with her knowledge that there are hundreds of applicants for her job...
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday September 10 2019, @05:29AM
Nooo ... no .... that won't work [youtube.com].
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Monday September 09 2019, @08:38PM
Why bother retraining? Didn't we just have an article where a Swedish scientist was saying that mankind should turn to cannibalism?
(Score: 2) by Username on Monday September 09 2019, @10:25PM
Skill gap takes one google search to fill, there is no labor or intelligence shortage. Just a bunch of management looking for ways to circumvent labor laws to swindle workers out of a raise.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Shire on Tuesday September 10 2019, @12:30AM
This is nothing more than marketing for IBM's "Talent & Transformation" business. AI is still lagging far behind the average human in terms of functionality and more importantly rapid adaptability on the job. No one needs to start to panic yet and probably not for another decade or more.
Remember kids, when high functioning AI arrives the elites will no longer need the proletariat. They will be far more interested in protecting their own positions while throwing the rest of us to the wolves. The revolution will be quick and it will be merciless. No point in worrying about it.
On a positive note, this will also mean CO2 emissions will be greatly reduced as world population drops from 7.5 billion to a few hundred thousand. So yay earth?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Tuesday September 10 2019, @01:50PM
Changing bosses from a human one to a robot one isn't a form of training, in a way it's just getting used to a meaner, less empathetic boss who could kill you and get away with it.
They write this like they want to give free college to a hundred thousand plumbers so they can deal with robo-nano-plumber replacements by getting the 4 doctorates in computer science required to design and modify AI code.
I remember this, it was all the rage in 1992, clinton travelled the entire country giving machists the belief that they were going to be reschooled to work in the air conditioning as typists for twice as much money.
If you have learned nothing since then, you are going to have a bad time. Anyone not talking about basic income as a means to distribute the technological gains of our species so that a few people who are not in any way responsible for it are individually rewarded, so they can provide us all our own amazon warehouse jobs to work where we will have to hold in our pee and regularly weep while robots zap us while saying 'pick up the pace' in the tone of a harpie.