SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Your career is now a game of musical chairs: you need to be ready when the song stops
...
Although sixty years old, artificial intelligence remained mostly a curiosity until half a decade ago, when IBM's Watson trounced the world's best Jeopardy! players in a televised match. At the time, you might have thought nothing of that - what does a game show matter in the scheme of things?
It didn't stop there. IBM sent Watson to train with oncologists and lawyers and financial advisers. Quite suddenly, three very established professions, just the sort of thing you'd tell your kids to pursue as a ticket to prosperity, seemed a lot less certain of their futures in a world where intelligence, like computing before it, becomes pervasive, then commoditised.
These top-of-their-profession projects show that the driver to bring artificial intelligence into any field isn't the amount of labor, but rather the cost of that labor. A lawyer costs fifty times more per hour than a retail worker and so is that many times more likely to find themselves with an AI competitor.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @09:00PM
when the trucks come to pick up the first loads for processing
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @10:24PM
And I'm cheaper than you and cheaper than some developer + IBM's per year AI licensing fees (see the Watson pricing: https://console.ng.bluemix.net/?direct=classic/#/pricing/cloudOEPaneId=pricing&paneId=pricingSheet [bluemix.net] ). I'm a worker in a 3rd world country. The first batch of "robots" were the workers in India and China. They took the jobs of those "expensive" mediocre workers in the rich nations.
Many US people are really that retarded and rail against "socialists". Foxconn's robots are still more expensive than their human workers in China (not for that long maybe). However those robots are definitely cheaper than the workers in the USA. So those dumb US workers don't realize that Europe style "socialism" is one of the better paths for them if they can still take it. Capitalism will eventually leave most of them with no jobs or low income.
By the way, the Chinese can take the higher end jobs too: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/01/16/169528579/outsourced-employee-sends-own-job-to-china-surfs-web [npr.org]
And it turns out that the job done in China was above par — the employee's "code was clean, well written, and submitted in a timely fashion. Quarter after quarter, his performance review noted him as the best developer in the building,"
So the AIs and the higher end Chinese workers will eat the jobs of the US workers, from the top and bottom.
A fair number of smartphones and other stuff are designed in China and some are quite good. They may not be the best but how many of you are "the best" in your field? So if you're expensive but second rate or mediocre why should people keep paying you in a Capitalist country?