IBM: AI Will Change Every Job and Increase Demand For Creative Skills (venturebeat.com) 80
AI is likely to change how every job is performed, eliminating work related to repetitive tasks but increasing the need for creative thinkers, according to a new study. From a report: These findings are contained in a report released this week by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab called "The Future of Work: How New Technologies Are Transforming Tasks." The study found signs that AI is beginning to slowly redefine the nature of tasks performed in certain jobs as automation gains ground. "As new technologies continue to scale within businesses and across industries, it is our responsibility as innovators to understand not only the business process implications, but also the societal impact," said Martin Fleming, vice president and chief economist of IBM, in a statement. "To that end, this empirical research from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab sheds new light on how tasks are reorganizing between people and machines as a result of AI and new technologies."
With the rise of AI and automation, there has been growing debate and anxiety about how these trends will disrupt current job markets. While some have argued AI and automation will be job killers, others have said the emerging technology will be a net creator of new jobs. The IBM-MIT study offers a bit of nuance to that discussion. The researchers used machine learning to analyze 170 million U.S. job postings between 2010 and 2017. They found that out of 18,500 possible tasks employees might be asked to do on average, the number had fallen by 3.7 over seven years. A drop, though hardly radical.
With the rise of AI and automation, there has been growing debate and anxiety about how these trends will disrupt current job markets. While some have argued AI and automation will be job killers, others have said the emerging technology will be a net creator of new jobs. The IBM-MIT study offers a bit of nuance to that discussion. The researchers used machine learning to analyze 170 million U.S. job postings between 2010 and 2017. They found that out of 18,500 possible tasks employees might be asked to do on average, the number had fallen by 3.7 over seven years. A drop, though hardly radical.
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run away with the circus has multiple parsings (Score:1, Insightful)
Other than deranged Protestants and Capitalists.
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Nobody has to say it. It's common fucking sense.
Re:run away with the circus has multiple parsings (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody has to say it. It's common fucking sense.
"Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind before you reach eighteen".
- Attributed to Albert Einstein in Mathematics, Queen and Servant of the Sciences (1952) by Eric Temple Bell.
Common sense stretches only so far. It may seem self-evident to you that no one can (or may) live without working to earn a living. But a little thought shows that it need not be true.
If you are Jewish, Christian or Muslim, you probably believe that Adam and Eve lived a pleasant life with everything they needed, without doing a stroke of work. And this by the personal will of God.
Regardless of your religious beliefs, hunter-gatherers have been shown to survive comfortably enough while spending no more than three or four hours a day gathering food and doing necessary chores.
Given virtually unlimited free energy - such as might one day be yielded by fusion - and reasonable ingenuity, it's quite possible that people might live a luxurious life while having to work no more than a few hours a week. In such a scenario work might be voluntary - it might even by a prize worth competing for.
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"Given virtually unlimited free energy - such as might one day be yielded by fusion - and reasonable ingenuity, it's quite possible that people might live a luxurious life while having to work no more than a few hours a week. In such a scenario work might be voluntary - it might even by a prize worth competing for."
So, the fact that work is required to provide for the necessities of life is common sense after all.
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So, the fact that work is required to provide for the necessities of life is common sense after all.
It is indeed common sense today.
But AI either changes everything ... or it doesn't.
If it does, then "common sense" no longer applies. We will be living in a world as different from now as today is from the neolithic when "men hunt, women gather" was common sense.
If it doesn't, then we are experiencing just another wave of automation. People will adapt, productivity will rise, new jobs will emerge, and living standards will go up. This has been happening continuously for centuries.
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By luxurious life, you mean sitting in their own filth hooked up to VR games/porn/whatever 24/7? That would be my best guess for what a true post-scarcity society would devolve into -- aside from the relatively rare self-driven person, who would more than likely succeed anyways.
Work and a sense of purpose are more related than you might think.
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Responsibility for the necessities of life is what gives life meaning to a large portion of the population. Take away any chance for people to support themselves, and you'll see a huge spike in the number of apathetic hedonists who live only to get high the following day.
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you'll see a huge spike in the number of apathetic hedonists who live only to get high the following day.
Why is that a bad thing?
You aren't depending on these people since robots will provide everything, so why do you care what they do with their lives?
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How about human nature? This fantasy of machines doing everything while people get to lounge around and do nothing and have all of their needs met is just that, a fantasy. Might as well believe in Unicorns and fairy dust.
The reality is going to be far darker and more vicious than you can possibly imagine. If you think the homeless situation is bad now.....
And do you think this fantasy world will apply to the whole Earth? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!
Yes, things will be really, really ugly.
Re: commentsubject (Score:1)
I'm waiting patiently for them to implement dexterity ratings for bots (for arms, movement, etc) and would purchase a chore bot for home in a flash without blinking an eye.
Time is still the most precious resource... Until its not....
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The Universe; noun/verb/adjective: The thing that happened because people actually want a life where they do absolutely nothing.
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"AI" cannot do that. It would require a fundamental breakthrough and that is not even on the distant horizon. The problem is that current "AI" is not intelligent. It can only do repetitive tasks and tasks that can be done as the statistical average of known tasks. It cannot do anything new as it has zero understanding of things.
That said, a lot of tasks can still be done by automation (as current "AI" is properly called), but quite a few are completely out of its reach.
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If I wanted a life where I did nothing I could play insane and get committed. I want a life where I don't have to do anything stupid just because shelter is the privilege of the working class and their corporate masters. I wouldn't do nothing.
If machines make everything for the plebes then the hot thing will go back to handcrafts. There will still be knowledge work to be done, and people will do it even if they aren't paid simply to alleviate boredom.
If true, general AI actually comes along, it won't need u
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Every Tree they cut down, they know the value of it. They can tell by the shape of the tree, size, general health, and things like if there is a nail in it or not.
Cutting a tree down, needs to be done safely without collateral damage.
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You will only get resignation at best. Neither party holds a bright future for America. Left or Right, the country appears doomed because many on both sides would rather see it doomed than to not be the one in power. The question is how long will it take? Sure something might come along and help set the ship right but Trump is a symptom, not the problem.
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IBM Pollyanna Principle (Score:3)
This is actually a very old quip that IBM came up with a long time ago:
IBM Pollyanna Principle [wiktionary.org]
"Machines should work; people should think."
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I think it's long past due time to break IBM apart into pieces so small they cannot threaten anything
The US government tried that and failed. The cases were eventually dropped because the rise of the PC meant that IBM didn't have the monopoly that is used to have with the mainframe anymore.
In 1968 the first of a series of antitrust suits against IBM was filed by Control Data Corp (CDC). It was followed in 1969 by the US government’s antitrust complaint, then by 19 private US antitrust complaints and one European complaint. In the end IBM settled a few of these matters but mainly won. The US government’s case sustained by four US Presidents and their Attorney’s General was dropped as “without merit” in 1982 by William Baxter, US President Reagans’ Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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But what about people who don't / won't think?
And therein lies the problem (Score:2)
Too many people think they're creative but whatever they come up with is total crap. Case-in-point: the Liberty Mutual ad campaign. It's obvious that they're trying to be GEICO and Farmers but they're failing miserably at it.
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I think that this bit of dialogue [youtube.com] from Pirates of the Caribbean conveys the point quite well.
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I'm reminded of the line from "City Slickers"
"So?"
"So... it's stupid. It's annoying. It makes people change the station."
"I didn't write it."
"But you bought it and you put on the air three times a night during drive time. People are having accidents!"
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Case-in-point: the Liberty Mutual ad campaign. It's obvious that they're trying to be GEICO and Farmers but they're failing miserably at it.
Aha, but did that fail because of the creative people, or because of the business people? My but it was the overseeing committee that drug that ad in a bad direction.
There are a lot of actually creative people that are stifled all the time.
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Maybe but I'm guessing the meeting went something like this:
Liberty: "Make us a funny ad campaign like GEICO's"
Them: "We think this is funny."
Liberty: "No, that sucks."
Them: "It's going to cost a lot more money to change it."
Liberty: "Sh*t."
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Speaking of GEICO, it's obvious that they spent their advertising budget on one song, because they've put it into a half dozen different commercials lately, all of which are variations on the same theme (the song is used the same way in each commercial.) Talk about lack of creativity...
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Well, a licensed song is a recurring expense as is the use of actors. They get residuals now which is why you see movie and TV actors doing commercials.
If they used their own jingle, they don't have to pay license fees. "We are Farmers. Ba ba da da da da da da da." costs a lot less money than using covers of pop music hits which you find in a lot of drug ads. That tells you that the drug companies are spending a crapton of money on advertising.
And we believe them because? (Score:2)
IBM is not known for honorable labor practices, so why should anyone believe when they tell them how to prepare for a job?
I will accept that they have forecasts that they believe are "probably accurate", but I'm quite dubious about the claim that that's what they're sharing.
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IBM is not known for many honorable things (e.g. there is a reason there is an IBM-DEHOMAG tabulating system in the US Holocost Museum). Their history and that of Thomas Watson is absolutely mortifying. So, what did they do, with their natural-language AI System? They name it after Thomas Watson.
AI can be creative (Score:2)
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You mean modern auto-tuned "music" is creative? Who knew! /s
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a lot of press releases/articles are already written by AI's.
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a lot of press releases/articles are already written by AI's.
So are the comments.
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You are so wrong it is staggering. Machines cannot be "creative". There are no algorithms for that.
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So what is the magic ingredient people have and machines cannot have? Why do you think people are not just a kind of biological machine?
Of course machines can be creative. In the worst case, creativity (an inductive process) is just an exhaustive search for a better model of reality than we have now. But the search can be optimized almost for sure. The only question is how quick the machines will be at it compared to people. Machines are terribly slow now but that will probably change in the far future.
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So what is the magic ingredient people have and machines cannot have? Why do you think people are not just a kind of biological machine?
Because I am not a physicalist idiot, blinded by quasi-religious fanaticism.
Actual science says that this question is wide open and that we have no clue what makes consciousness, intelligence, intuition and, yes, creativity work.
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Actual science says that this question is wide open and that we have no clue what makes consciousness, intelligence, intuition and, yes, creativity work.
And yet it is you who claims that
Machines cannot be "creative"
Truth is, nobody knows what machines will be capable of in the distant future.
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Actual science says that this question is wide open and that we have no clue what makes consciousness, intelligence, intuition and, yes, creativity work.
And yet it is you who claims that
Excuse me?
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Actual science says that this question is wide open and that we have no clue what makes consciousness, intelligence, intuition and, yes, creativity work.
And yet you claimed that:
Machines cannot be "creative".
You obviously did not came to this conclusion from "actual science" because the "actual science" says that it is unknown. So you must know more than what is known to "actual science". Therefore I restate my question: What makes people creative? What is it which machines cannot obtain?
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They're so bad at it, that judges of AI contests think it should never be a criteria for winning anything.
The human discretion that was given to you is a personal gift from Jesus Christ.
Then what? (Score:3, Interesting)
I am all in favour of AI replacing the crap jobs that blight existence. The problem is ... what then? Displacing millions of people with nothing to replace the work they were doing will not be without consequences. Now I am sure some folks would be for setting up camps and eliminating them. Or just have a massive social welfare program that would allow them to slouch about with nothing to do but have their needs met. And being out of work and needing retraining is also not much of a strategy in today's for profit education market. Hope some responsible person is thinking about this... because its not a recipe for social stability.
Same job better tools, and tooling jobs (Score:3)
No more bending over planting corn all day!
The history of the human race over the last 2,000 years or so has been better and better tooling and automation. From tilling a field by hand with a sharp rock attached to a stick, to driving an ox that pulls the plow, to Ford tractors, and now the latest equipment is self-driving making rows accurate to within inches.
We no longer have 300 people planting a corn field, each with a pointed stick to make the holes. Instead we have one person driving a $120,000 machi
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Automation is steadily improving, we are probably within 30-40 years of cheap androids (effectively much cheaper wages paid
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> . This is the future unless the crackdown starts soon to make the power work for the people instead of for a handful of traitors to the human race.
Could be. Or what always happens could keep happening.
Either way, for me and my kid, the best course of action is to invest in learning the technology and put something aside for a rainy day, because shit happens. It's hard to predict what kind of shit will happen, but almost definitely shit will happen.
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Or what always happens could keep happening.
This is just a simple extension from what always happens, and what is currently happening. We haven't seen the actual impact from cheap automation, robotics, and actual AI. People over 30 may not live to see it. Kids today will likely be living it by the time they are seniors.
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Well, what job do YOU do? Very likely you do a job that didn't exist 200 years ago. Personally I do cybersecurity, a job that didn't exist 70 years ago, or really until the mid 1990s. Certainly John Deere employs a lot of people - the fighter-jet style heads up display in some tractors doesn't magically make itself. But most of us do jobs unlike anything that existed 200 years ago, because new tech allows us to do new things. And the vast majority of the new jobs are indoors, with air conditioning. :)
Agreed. It's hard to quake too much about automation when "social media specialist" is an actual job.
I do not doubt our ability to invent new jobs anymore ...
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And that is the question. Even with an UBI that you can live off well, many people will be very dissatisfied with that state of affairs. The problem is that most people cannot fill their time by themselves in a meaningful way. Take away work and unrest will follow, possibly up to and including the collapse of society.
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Take away the treadmill that people need to keep a roof over their head and society might collapse?
People will find a way to make themselves useful or entertained. Charity, conservation work, learning, fitness and ... wait for it, having the time to be fully invested in raising their children. All of which would be a net benefit to society.
Just imagine if millions more people were freed to look up at the stars as our next challenge.
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Good luck with that.
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Thanks, we'll need it.
As the demand for human labor approaches zero due to automation, and unemployment reaches critical mass while there isn't some kind of alternative plan to late-stage capitalism, then things are going to get very interesting. "We'll just create new jobs into infinitity" seems like even greater wishful thinking.
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People will find a way to make themselves useful or entertained.
Yes - they will take opiods until they can't function anymore and die of an overdose.
Maybe that will be how they will be removed from society.
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I am all in favour of AI replacing the crap jobs that blight existence. The problem is ... what then?
That's we start having an annual Purge Day. ;)
Copy and Paste jobs in trouble. (Score:3)
uhm (Score:2)
Probably won't work out that way (Score:5, Insightful)
My problem with this idea that AI will free everyone from work and unleash a massive creative spike is that it's not realistic. I've spent half a career working in IT for various large companies. The majority of paper-processing jobs were eliminated or offshored in the 90s/2000s, but you'd be surprised how many people are just doing basic input-output type office work. Pick something up from the input stack, do your process on it, send it on to the next level work...definitely not "creative" in any way. What are we going to do when millions of people who used to be earning semi-decent (and sometimes very good) pay have no labor to sell? Society is certainly not going to remold itself around the idea that you're not working a full week anymore, because there will be just enough people who are.
Kicking these people out of work with no way to make money is going to have major knock-on effects.. People won't bother going to school anymore because there will be very limited paths to get ahead. When i graduated 20 years ago (with a hard-science BS) even the people who were partying their way through and barely passing generic "Business" or Psychology or Communications degrees would get work. Now we're seeing fewer companies offering the generic entry-level processor jobs that we would give to these people. Things are going to get a whole lot worse when you go up a level on the food chain and get rid of middle-skilled work. Now you'll have millions of people out of work, broke, with no skills anyone wants and no way to make money...not a good thing.
I'm all for giving people chances and not saying no one can escape this. But, over a 20+ year career I've run into people who can barely handle their own simple job let alone rise up to the level of Renaissance Man/Woman. IBM is just trying to keep people from freaking out as yet another rung on the career ladder is kicked out.
Most creative skills (Score:2)
Aren't actually creative and can be replaced by trained algorithms that are Good Enough(tm).
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Aren't actually creative and can be replaced by trained algorithms that are Good Enough(tm).
Aren't actually creative and can be replaced by trained algorithms that are Good Enough(tm).
Spoken like a true non-creative. Creativity can not be automated or templated. AI will never conceptualize. AI will never have an imagination. AI will never seek to evoke and express emotions. Non-creatives hate creatives because we can do things they never could. It drives them crazy. Out of envy and frustration, they place no value on creativity. It is no surprise they think a machine can do it.
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AI will never conceptualize. AI will never have an imagination. AI will never seek to evoke and express emotions.
None of those things are what the market values as creativity.
Non-creatives hate creatives because we can do things they never could. It drives them crazy.
I've never met a "non-creative". Is this something you created for this argument, or have you recycled this idea from discussions in the past?
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Creativity can not be automated or templated.
You wish.
I believe it when I see it (Score:1)
Same ol shit (Score:2)
User Interface (Score:2)
But how we will place a value on human life.... (Score:2)
Why is anyone listening to IBM? (Score:1)
They seem to have all these patents for how to drive stock prices into the ground and betray their own employees, but what do they understand about the industry?
If they knew anything about the industry, wouldn't investors be betting on them?
They just want their partners to stick around long enough to pull the plug on them.