Sal Khan: Companies Should Give 1% of Profits To Retrain Workers Displaced By AI (nytimes.com) 154
"I believe artificial intelligence will displace workers at a scale many people don't yet realize," says Sal Kahn (founder/CEO of the nonprofit Khan Academy). But in an op-ed in the New York Times he also proposes a solution that "could change the trajectory of the lives of millions who will be displaced..."
"I believe that every company benefiting from automation — which is most American companies — should... dedicate 1 percent of its profits to help retrain the people who are being displaced." This isn't charity. It is in the best interest of these companies. If the public sees corporate profits skyrocketing while livelihoods evaporate, backlash will follow — through regulation, taxes or outright bans on automation. Helping retrain workers is common sense, and such a small ask that these companies would barely feel it, while the public benefits could be enormous...
Roughly a dozen of the world's largest corporations now have a combined profit of over a trillion dollars each year. One percent of that would create a $10 billion annual fund that, in part, could create a centralized skill training platform on steroids: online learning, ways to verify skills gained and apprenticeships, coaching and mentorship for tens of millions of people. The fund could be run by an independent nonprofit that would coordinate with corporations to ensure that the skills being developed are exactly what are needed. This is a big task, but it is doable; over the past 15 years, online learning platforms have shown that it can be done for academic learning, and many of the same principles apply for skill training.
"The problem isn't that people can't work," Khan writes in the essay. "It's that we haven't built systems to help them continue learning and connect them to new opportunities as the world changes rapidly." To meet the challenges, we don't need to send millions back to college. We need to create flexible, free paths to hiring, many of which would start in high school and extend through life. Our economy needs low-cost online mechanisms for letting people demonstrate what they know. Imagine a model where capability, not how many hours students sit in class, is what matters; where demonstrated skills earn them credit and where employers recognize those credits as evidence of readiness to enter an apprenticeship program in the trades, health care, hospitality or new categories of white-collar jobs that might emerge...
There is no shortage of meaningful work — only a shortage of pathways into it.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article.
"I believe that every company benefiting from automation — which is most American companies — should... dedicate 1 percent of its profits to help retrain the people who are being displaced." This isn't charity. It is in the best interest of these companies. If the public sees corporate profits skyrocketing while livelihoods evaporate, backlash will follow — through regulation, taxes or outright bans on automation. Helping retrain workers is common sense, and such a small ask that these companies would barely feel it, while the public benefits could be enormous...
Roughly a dozen of the world's largest corporations now have a combined profit of over a trillion dollars each year. One percent of that would create a $10 billion annual fund that, in part, could create a centralized skill training platform on steroids: online learning, ways to verify skills gained and apprenticeships, coaching and mentorship for tens of millions of people. The fund could be run by an independent nonprofit that would coordinate with corporations to ensure that the skills being developed are exactly what are needed. This is a big task, but it is doable; over the past 15 years, online learning platforms have shown that it can be done for academic learning, and many of the same principles apply for skill training.
"The problem isn't that people can't work," Khan writes in the essay. "It's that we haven't built systems to help them continue learning and connect them to new opportunities as the world changes rapidly." To meet the challenges, we don't need to send millions back to college. We need to create flexible, free paths to hiring, many of which would start in high school and extend through life. Our economy needs low-cost online mechanisms for letting people demonstrate what they know. Imagine a model where capability, not how many hours students sit in class, is what matters; where demonstrated skills earn them credit and where employers recognize those credits as evidence of readiness to enter an apprenticeship program in the trades, health care, hospitality or new categories of white-collar jobs that might emerge...
There is no shortage of meaningful work — only a shortage of pathways into it.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article.
Probably not going to happen (Score:2)
It's a nice idea, and would be a test model for actual UBI that wouldn't (necessarily) depend on standard government tax/spend policies. That being said, the legal hurdles Congress would need to jump through to impose such a requirement on American companies certainly would be interesting. Also making it a percentage of profits rather than gross is just asking for trouble. So many dirty accounting tricks could derail such a plan from the get-go.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Probably not going to happen (Score:5, Interesting)
We're currently below replacement in most developed countries. Maybe that wouldn't be as big a problem as you imagine. Also payments could be tweaked so children don't get as much income as adults. But one thing at a time. What is on the table isn't even a full UBI program, but rather a payment system for people displaced from work.
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Being below replacement is a problem if you believe the world is better off with its current population being young rather than old, e.g. if you oppose a gerontocracy.
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worst people
best people
Slow down there, Hitler. Or, are you God to be the judge?
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Who said anything about UBI?
He's talking about using it for retraining, not financially supporting laid off workers. If it were the latter it'd be a hell of a lot more than 1% of profits, it'd be something approaching the percentage of revenue (not profits, revenue) that was previously spent on wages for the laid off staff.
1% of *profits* isn't going to cover jack-shit other than possibly furnishing a building and paying for the sign on it that says "Retraining center for victims of a massive con".
And prec
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Would you trust something that generates images of 3-legged models and LLM-AI text slop to go through and redact sensitive information in documents that are being released to the public? And, you'd have to have people sitting around verifying that the right stuff is redacted before each one goes public (and fix all the errors), so what was the overall savings in using LLM-AI versus a person doing the job?
As for the UBI or retraining discussion, the retraining part could work, if it came out of the companie
Retrain to do what? (Score:3)
It's basically hubris at this point to think you can predict a job that will still be around in 6 years.
Re: Retrain to do what? (Score:2)
The job is likely to be around. It's just a matter of who or what is performing it.
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Generate training content for the chatgpt, of course.
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There are quite a few ones that will reliably still be around in 6 years. Just the largest pool (somewhat generic desk-jobs) may not be.
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As always, when people propose things like this, the first thing to do is follow the money and figure out where is that "1% for retraining" is intended to go, and it doesn't take a genius to realise a lot of it wou
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It's basically hubris at this point to think you can predict a job that will still be around in 6 years.
If this scheme happens, it's pretty easy to predict a job that will still be around: Corporate trainers.
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My first real job was "computer operator" on a Unisys mainframe. Six years later, that job did not exist, or at least, was quickly disappearing.
The first programming language I used on the job was COBOL. Then C, then C++, then Visual Basic (classic), then C#, then JavaScript, then TypeScript. Every five years or so, I had to learn a new language.
So that's all programmer stuff, right? Well, not so fast. My wife back in those days was a "desktop publisher." That job quickly faded, as books started to go away.
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Plumber
Electrician
Waitress
Line Cook
Shall I go on? Oh, you meant jobs that matter.
What's special about "AI" ? (Score:3)
Why shouldn't they get the same amount if they are displaced for any other reason?
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Excellent point. People have been replaced by new technologies throughout my lifetime, and long before that.
Nobody needs travel agents anymore. What's a travel agent to do? That job was not eliminated by AI, but by the plain-old internet. The same for desktop publishers, print shop workers, movie projectionists, typesetters, video store clerks, switchboard operators, and on and on.
AI is not the first thing to come along that wiped out whole categories of jobs.
It seems to me that a critical skill that isn't
Annually? (Score:2)
My job pays annually. What about this 1%?
Seriously (Score:3, Informative)
Why didn't we make mines retrain mine workers when dynamite took their jobs? Or make farms retrain farmworkers when the combine was invented?
First off, we don't know if AI and robotics are going to cause even field specific unemployment. The signs actually look like it won't --it seems like every field is going to expand. But let's say it does cause unemployment, how is a company supposed to know what to retrain a worker to do? They don't know each person's interest, they don't know where the market is going any more than any random person.
We already have a thing called community college that has classes in virtually anything and it's dirt cheap (and financial aid is available). you know what pays for it? Taxes. We already tax profits and income. We already take a percentage. Eventually when robots can do every task, the government will have money to distribute as universal basic income by both taxation and by owning shares/getting dividends from the various AI and robotics companies.
Re:Seriously (Score:5, Interesting)
> First off, we don't know if AI and robotics are going to cause even field specific unemployment.
We can be pretty sure that it will happen, because:
1. For most goods, there is a limit of how much of it is needed.
2. Automation will increase efficiency, so less workers will produce more.
3. Required amount of workers for certain good = [required amount of goods] / [amount of goods that single worker can produce with automation]
4. Even if we can invent new products, like hologram games, those products almost always compete with existing products. E.g. hologram games would just take customers from video games and cause unemployment there.
5. In some fields there will be temporarily need for more workers. E.g. health care should be one of these fields as demand increases because the amount of old people increases. But that is only temporary. In the long run, automation will cause unemployment.
I agree with you that retraining won't help much.
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All this is true, but it's not specific to AI. Automation and mechanization has been taking jobs for many decades, even centuries.
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No. Lump of labor is saying that the amount of work is fixed and I am not claiming that. What I am saying is that there is an upper limit of how much goods a single person will need in specific area. For example most people are quite happy with owning just one washing machine per family, which usually lasts about 8 years. So if we assume population of 8 billion, family size of 4, we need about 250 million consumer level washing machines produced per year. There is no point making much more of them, because
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I think people will have limit of how much unnecessary stuff they are willing to buy.
Our disposable culture didn't come out of nowhere, it was engineered (BBC 1964). [youtube.com]
For example most people are quite happy with owning just one washing machine per family, which usually lasts about 8 years
The obvious solution to that "problem" is to make sure that washing machines only last 6 years ... then 4 years ... then make them so unreliable that it makes sense for families to lease them, paying a monthly fee. You will own nothing and like it.
Re: Seriously (Score:2)
Housing. That we can never get enough of. Most humans (not all) would love to live in a mansion or high rise condo in NYC if they could. Therefore until we build 8 billion mansions each on the tallest hill there will be demand for things.
Football coach model (Score:2)
Keep paying them a salary until they find another suitable job, with a requirement that they actively search for one.
Limit payouts to say, 3 years or 5 years or something along those lines.
Re: Football coach model (Score:2)
So your solution is to pay people to search for a needle in the forest, and regardless of external circumstances (a fundamental lack of needles) youre going to cut them off at an arbitrary point and say sorry you didnt try hard enoigh?
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Unemployment already does that.
Re: Football coach model (Score:2)
Unemployment pays for shit.
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True 'dat.
Not sure what would be the best for the UBI thing... maybe use the tariff funds, knock the trillionaires down to like $5 million max and take whatever's in their off-shore accounts, maybe a hefty tax when people send money overseas. And, some kind of qualifications (citizenship is a must, something like not having over some amount in your bank account).
Re: Football coach model (Score:2)
No. I don't think they should get jack shit. But if you're going to have a policy of paying people off, it should be meaningful.
Who'll think of the poor billionaires (Score:5, Insightful)
But you can't do this. How would the billionaires survive if you took even a little of their money off them?
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Re: Who'll think of the poor billionaires (Score:2)
Probably just useful idiots.
So I saw a post from somebody (Score:2)
So take that Europe!
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What is this "retrain" thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that were you turn miners into software engineers? So does he propose to now do it the other way round?
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Fortunately, built into the implementation of the treaty was retraining. That guy went to school, graduated magna cum laude from college, and became a teacher of mine.
That's what retraining is.
There are plenty of jobs, and echelons of jobs, that AI isn't coming for any time soon, and of course- the AI needs jockeys.
Re: What is this "retrain" thing? (Score:2)
So far the push is to put people back into trades and other blue collar jobs.
Not saying these are terrible jobs or anything, but I am not sure if they can absorb the glut of displaced office workers who frankly do not have the fortitude for these kind of jobs. Learn2code was a failure for a reason.
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There are still many technical and thinking jobs that AI is not even close to taking.
Will it some day? Probably. But that's far enough in the future that I suspect we'll have robiticized menial jobs too, so the solution will have to be different than pushing people into the trades.
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I don't see that push at all. Rather, I see that as the conclusion made by folks who aren't applying a critical mind to the scenario.
That would be "most people", as a "critical mind" does need to be available in order to be applied...
There are still many technical and thinking jobs that AI is not even close to taking.
There are no thinking jobs that AI has taken or is close to taking. Even coding does not apply. That is just a) stupid "managers" firing people they are going to desperately miss and b) stealth layoffs. The actual reality is, not only does using AI coding assistants make you slower (https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding), it also makes tons of security mistakes and it can
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Learn2code was a failure for a reason.
Did you ever see any of those nonsense "learn to code" resources? It was a failure by design. Any idiot can learn to code (just look at all the idiots here with long careers creating tech debt) but absurdities like 'hour of code' seemed to go out of their way to make simple things needlessly complex. Many of their 'coding' exercises obscured essential concepts so completely that I'm convinced it must have been intentional.
Insecure professionals love needless complexity. Not only does it keep them from
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Any idiot can learn to code
No. Not at an actually useful level. Please stop repeating this lie.
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Cool story, bro. This is not what retraining is. Sure, there may be 1% that can do what your story describes, but you only see them because it is so rare.
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That is exactly what retraining is.
Sure, it may not apply to all affected people, but that doesn't somehow disqualify it as retraining.
Your arguments are akin to doomsayers of the past fighting against globalization.
What I find particularly amusing is your departure from your normal claim that "AI can't cost any jobs at all".
Where an intellectually honest person would see just how thoroughly they've been wrong and try to correct their thought process, you just keep producing w
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What a stupid comment.
Well, when you apply a reeeeeally narrow view to a broader problem you will arrive at a nonsensical conclusion. As you just demonstrated. Most loggers, plumbers, janitors, etc. CANNOT under any circumstances be retrained to be useful teachers. Not possible. People come with a set of talents and that limits what they can do. This set does not or only minimally changes over a lifetime.
Sure, there are always some, say, nurses that can become doctors, librarians that can become writers, electricians that can be
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Yeah... plenty of jobs, not close to where the people who want them are, or plenty of jobs in areas where very few qualify for it.
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Re-training is for AI failing to do a specific thing. Then you try to retrain it, and it still fails.
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Interesting. I did not even recognize the name, totally irrelevant for me so far. Not even mentioned once by any of my CS students either.
Hence the picture becomes clear: This is somebody that sells a low-quality education substitute and is either in delusion about its value or is simply lying to increase his sales.
Permanently Unemployable. (Score:5, Insightful)
"I believe that every company benefiting from automation — which is most American companies — should... dedicate 1 percent of its profits to help retrain the people who are being displaced."
Retrain to do WHAT exactly? Since AI is targeting the human mind to replace, I believe we need to put shortsighted idiots out to pasture and fucking leave them there.
The problem is AI doesn’t just make humans temporarily unemployed. AI and automation will make enough humans permanently unemployable. With “enough” defined as the 20-30% unemployment rates that create and sustain mass chaos and violence in every street when there isn’t enough “re-training” to feed every starving mouth in desperate need of UBI. No stock markets will matter. No gas prices will matter. Chaos will matter. Until you address it with a real solution.
ENOUGH of selling any other solution. There isn’t one. Permanently unemployable. Solve for it, or we perish.
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Still feels like a regressive solution, somehow.
I can think of several things to retrain for.
Software engineers. LLM jockeys. Facilities and maintenance. DevOps.
Low end software engineers are cooked. LLM jockeys are needed. Facilities and maintenance aren't going anywhere. DevOps will be assisted by AI, but not replaced.
Re: Permanently Unemployable. (Score:2)
Please consider the type of worker that will be displaced by AI, then realize that you can't retrain the workers for any job that might also be replaced by AI. The only work AI won't replace is manual labor, so what will we do, retrain office clerks to work assembly lines, enter a trade skill (electrician, plumber, HVAC tech, etc)?
Also, 1% of profits (not revenue, profit) is in almost every case a very small number/amount, few businesses generate wildly high profits, most barely break even.
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The only work AI won't replace is manual labor,
AI will also replace manual labor. Amazon warehouses are largely automated through robots controlled by AI. Robot vacuum cleaners reduce the need for housekeepers. Modern manufacturing is often almost entirely automated end-to-end. The only thing preventing a plumber bot or electrician bot right now is lack of anybody caring enough to train the models.
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There seems to be some kind of conclusion that we're going to have to push people down into the trades, but its a regurgitation from some source- it's not backed by any kind of critical thinking.
Also, 1% of profits (not revenue, profit) is in almost every case a very small number/amount, few businesses generate wildly high profits, most barely break even.
This is completely incorrect.
I'd go as far as to say factually absurd.
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Retrain office workers to work assembly lines? You're going to just send them to Shenzhen?
There aren't many real factories left on US soil.
Sure, retrain the desk jockey for electrician or plumber or whatever... those jobs require more than 90 days of training, those require that expensive piece of paper to show that you've had schooling, and having schooling and the paper doesn't mean you're getting into a job as an electrician.
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It's also known a UBI these days.
It's only a regressive solution if the only thing people do with that money is waste it. If they get enough for the basics like food, rent, housing and utilities then they can take their newly found time to pursue other means to make money.
Some will retrain to get skills in the new economy. Others will realize they have al
Re: Permanently Unemployable. (Score:2)
ENOUGH of selling any other solution. There isnâ(TM)t one. Permanently unemployable. Solve for it, or we perish.
AKA a final solution? Seriously?
Here's an idea, we'll train them to make human food pellets, to feed the other unemployable people, and we'll introduce euthanasia to weed out the old and the sick, then we could turn them in to food pellets for the people. If the people don't like this arrangement, we can get Steam shovel and scoop up the ungrateful protesters and use them as raw material for the food pellets...
There, how about that solution?
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(Spoiler alert!)
"Soylent green is people!!!!"
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You speak as if automation is a new thing with AI.
Mechanization has destroyed more than 95% of all farm jobs, which once accounted for 70% of all labor. Automation has destroyed more than 60% of factory jobs, an occupation which employed 30% of Americans as recently as 50 years ago.
AI is going to eliminate jobs, maybe even on a large scale. It's also going to make many workers more productive. But just as the computer came along and simultaneously destroyed wide swaths of jobs, it also produced vast numbers
Resentment (Score:2)
You resented it didn't you? Again of course you did. Universal human experience.
That feeling of resentment has been used for decades now to prevent any discussion of what to do about the automation boom. How the automation boom has been going on since the early 1980s. Tech workers didn't notice it because pay was still okay there but it devastated factory jobs which were previously
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That feeling of resentment has been used for decades now to prevent any discussion of what to do about the automation boom.
Nope. All it does is build complacency on the part of the person who complains about it all day. You always complain about how much your life sucks, but what you're not aware of is that every person's life is only as good or bad as they think it is. Continuing to complain does you no favors. One day you'll wake up, and you'll realize that complaining has become your whole life.
How the automation boom has been going on since the early 1980s.
Every industrial revolution has been an automation boom. This is nowhere close to the first, nor will it be the last.
The only solution humanity has come up with is to take the money from the automation output and give it to the general public, AKA socialism.
That's not soci
Re: Permanently Unemployable. (Score:2)
We should be talking about a post money society, aka Star Trek. When masses of people are unemployable then money has no purpose as scarcity will no longer exist. Perhaps those who would scream âoeget to workâ and toss hundreds of millions into poverty over something with only relative value like money is the great filter that exterminates civilizations? If we gleefully exterminate ourselves over something like money then what good are we really?
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Even the writers of Star Trek knew that a "post-money society" was nothing more than a plot device. How many episodes center around people (or creatures) trading things, or finding ways to get money that they need, despite their supposed freedom from it!
Masses of people won't become unemployable. No technology ever, has permanently wiped out employment for humanity. Sure, technologies have wiped out whole categories of jobs, like blacksmiths, carriage drivers, and wheel wrights. And sure, other professions
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First, AGI is nothing more than a sales pitch. It's like suggesting that one day, movies will get SO good that the characters will come right out of the screen and pose a threat to mankind. No, AGI isn't a real thing, and we're not headed towards it.
You're right, though, about "our leaders" coming up with a solution. As for We The People...we're coming up with the solution, bit by bit, with every advancement in the technology. The pendulum will swing back and forth between good and harm. But in the end, lik
Is the problem not obvious? (Score:2, Troll)
Roughly a dozen of the world's largest corporations now have a combined profit of over a trillion dollars each year
Well, there's your problem.
If we look at dollars as tokens of labor, we as a society are allowing an extremely limited number of entities to possess an extremely ridiculous amount of tokens that should instead be possessed by the labor-producers, the people. This extreme concentration of power in the hands of a very few individuals is both an injustice as well as an imbalance. It should have
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You speak as if "someone" controls who gets what "tokens." Work is actually an exchange of money, for labor. Anybody can make that exchange with anybody else. And when someone accumulates money through this exchange, they can invest it largely how they want.
I pay a crew to mow my lawn, because I have the money and I don't want to do it myself. That's how employment works, that crew is (partially) employed by me, and I get work done that I want done. *Most* people are employed through small businesses and 1:
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Work is actually an exchange of money, for labor. Anybody can make that exchange with anybody else. And when someone accumulates money through this exchange, they can invest it largely how they want.
This statement assumes that money is exchanged fairly in exchange for the value of the labor that was performed. This has not been happening since 1970. There is a gap between the value of what is produced and what is paid for that production, called the Productivity-Pay gap. [epi.org] If I am your boss, and you produc
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What's a fair wage, anyway?
Your link talks about a productivity-pay gap. But there's no rule that says pay must or should follow productivity. I'd argue that it _shouldn't_. If you were a blacksmith, and you could make 80 nails an hour and you get paid $20 for that hour, should you get $25,000 an hour if you are a factory worker on a line that makes 100,000 nails per hour? No, hardly. That doesn't make sense in anybody's world. If pay has to scale with productivity, what's the point of increasing productivi
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There is only one way to determine what is a fair wage: It is the price on which an employer and employee agree.
So Walmart moves into a rural American town, uses cheap labor, foreign production, and unfair pricing [grocerydive.com] to drive smaller stores out of business. Then the unemployed workers and former business owners, who live in a small town with limited employment, must choose to either work for Walmart at a 40% pay cut or leave town. Now, where in that real life scenario that played out in thousands of towns ac [pugetsoundsage.org]
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Your numbers, like 40% pay cut, are fabricated. Small town employees at non-Walmart stores *also* get crap wages. For many of them, Walmart pays *more* than they were getting at their former small businesses. Small businesses are great if you want to feel needed and appreciated, but they do *not* pay well.
Your "real-life scenario" is also fabricated by a group whose mission it is to, among other things, keep Walmart out. It is not an unbiased study, it has no control groups, and is predicting the future, no
Isn't it telling... (Score:5, Informative)
that the founder/CEO of an online education company says that displaced workers should be retrained to remain relevant in an AI-driven economy?
It's bluntly obvious what his angle is. He's saying that all these companies replacing workers with AI and profiting off the reduction in workforce should spend some of that profit on his company, which will gladly swoop in to save the poor laid off employees who toiled in menial jobs and reeducate them. His own profit and business growth is just a convenient side effect, win-win! Of course his grand scheme will work, because everyone knows how totally superior generative AI is at replacing human labor...even educational companies like Khan Academy.
There's this very Ouroborean circle-jerking going on with CEOs and upper management where AI is concerned, in which they are feeding each other wild propaganda about how AI will make profits soar. Fueled by obscene levels of speculation and a complete failure to understand even the most basic principles of the underlying technology, they are utterly lost in narcissistic, masturbatory delusion.
Even if generative AI is superior--and that's a BIG "if"--what will these workers need to learn to remain relevant and valued? What COULD they learn that would stop CEOs from laying them off in another 5-10 years? What stops it from replacing the CEOs, who do the least meaningful work of all? And why should anyone pay Khan Academy if we could just ask the AI to teach us? After all, if it can replace human workers, why do we need Sal Khan?
AI is not superior. We are nowhere near the point where AI can replace human judgment, creativity, emotion, and nuance. When we developed methods to automate mass manufacturing, or when we developed computers to replace 'computers' (if you don't know what this means, you should probably read about the origin of the word), productivity did increase, and the worker's skill set did need to change. But generative AI is a farce. It's already shown itself to be of far more limited benefit than what companies are trying to get it to do. The only reason why the investment keeps going is because--as noted above--the leadership is convinced that the next step is just around the corner, waiting for more training data and a clever statistician to make the next breakthrough. Generative AI is not like a factory machine that increases widget production by 1000x. It's a machine that sometimes produces widgets and sometimes produces trash. And just because it might make widgets faster than a human doesn't mean we can so easily dismiss the trash.
I have a bridge to sell him (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure they will ... (Score:4, Informative)
... not. Why believes that companies exist to care for their workers? Not in capitalism.
It makes me so happy (Score:2)
I agree. (Score:2)
But then the companies should be reimbursed 100% of their FUTA taxes they've paid for those employees.
Wow, a whole one percent of profits ? (Score:2)
How about some reasonable amount of corporate and wealth taxation, to cover education, re-training, and a social safety net, when the number of human jobs becomes insufficient? All those productivity gains from AI should be equitably redistributed.
Nice company you've got there... (Score:2)
"I believe that every company benefiting from automation â" which is most American companies â" should... dedicate 1 percent of its profits to help retrain the people who are being displaced." This isn't charity. It is in the best interest of these companies. If the public sees corporate profits skyrocketing while livelihoods evaporate, backlash will follow â" through regulation, taxes or outright bans on automation.
...it'd be a shame if something bad happened to it, like, say, "backlash" - you know regulations, taxes or bans, so I (Sal Khan) propose we tax your profits to retrain displaced workers!
And what will we retrain displaced workers to do? Code? Or are we going to teach them all to be plumbers, electricians, or even solar panel installers?
Step One - Admit everyone shouldn't go to college (Score:2)
There is no shortage of meaningful work â" only a shortage of pathways into it.
For the past few decades parents have believed the only way their children will succeed in life is to go to college, to become, in effect, knowledge workers. Well, along comes AI and starts wiping out knowledge worker jobs, so now what do we do? We're going to retrain AI-displaced college graduates to become manual labor?
Not enough - the whole system must change (Score:2)
If as they claim AI is going to displace millions upon millions fo workers and drive the cost of goods and services to zero, then there will be an equal reduction in demand for goods and services. They will no longer be able to socialize the cost of AI infrastructure - they will have to pay their own bills for a change. Will they even be able to justify the existence of all this costly infrastructure? Money wont have any meaning and neither will work. What jobs will actually exist? More likely, we will need
1% of profits? (Score:2)
So I guess workers will be paying the AI companies? "Profits", LOL.
The most apocaliptic scenario (Score:2)
Is the excluded people just creating their own parallel system, and excluding the mega riches from it.
It did happened several times, specially in communist countries like north korea etc..
If the system is not willing to let em live, they will just make another system.
Retrain for what? (Score:3)
FTA:
The fund could be run by an independent nonprofit that would coordinate with corporations to ensure that the skills being developed are exactly what are needed
The ultimate goal of corporations is to entirely dispense with the need for human employees - so what work will these people be trained to do that won't be obsolete within a decade? And the mere "1 percent of its profits" suggested represents zero disincentive against corporations' moves to disenfranchise and ultimately do away with a large percentage of the world's population.
It's possible that many of those involved, even in the upper echelons of the multi-billionaire class, don't realize that massive depopulation is at the top of the agenda. That doesn't matter: if and when it DOES become obvious, they'll simply fall in line, feel a minor pang of regret, and shed a few crocodile tears over the elimination of large swathes of humanity. Much of what's going on is the stuff of survival instinct and flies below the radar of conscious awareness.
As far as I'm concerned, we all need to wrap our heads around the likelihood that the oligarchs and their minions are waging economic and psychological war, with the aim of doing away with a very large percentage of humans. Global warming - among other factors - is reducing our planet's "carrying capacity". Eliminating the people who consume food and other increasingly-scarce resources - and who will become increasingly unmanageable environmental refugees - is key to the oligarchs' maintenance of comfortable and secure lifestyles. It's an instinctive survival strategy, so many of them - as I alluded to above - probably aren't consciously aware of it.
I think that Mr. Khan is being hopelessly naive.
Hilatious (Score:2)
Companies ? Giving money ? You certainly don't live in the USA as you'd have already been burned , hung , decapitated , passed on the electric chair , then the gas chamber , thrown down a 40th ( you know .. one of them slippery balconies with badly setr guardrail anchors that just detach themselves ) drowned , doused in gas and set on fire , sat on a stack of dynamite and blown up and to make sure you do not survive , thrown in acid bath. The order can be varied for entertainment purposes and this short ho
Retrain for what safe profssion? (Score:2)
is this a khan academy pitch? (Score:2)
solution (Score:2)
The solution is to do away with companies altogether. They are bad. Instead, we need to make Sal Khan the dictator of the world.
They are called taxes (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean your cousin Vinny makes like 40 an hour as a plumber right? So clearly everyone can just make 40 an hour like Vinny and flooding the market with a shitload of new plumbers won't affect Vinny's wages and a huge drop in the number of white collar workers hiring blue collar workers because those workers can now do the work themselves certainly isn't going to happen because reasons.
Nope it's plumbers all the way down
Can't afford to retrain (Score:2)
that cheap sonofabitch - it should be 30% (Score:2)
Billionaires suck; tech bro billionaires suck harder. Their greed is limitless.
Re: What jobs? (Score:2)
My job was unlikely to be done by AI. Hell, it could barely be done by a human. Just way too much uncertainty involved on a day to day basis. Throw in people changing their minds all the time, running meetings of various kinds and so forth, etc. just seems unlikely.
Maybe in 5-10 years, MAYBE.
I would definitely still be doing it if I had not quit.
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Not all. But every mostly generic desk-job is at risk, at least until the bubble bursts.
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Ever heard of non-generic desk jobs?
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You missed this bit:
at least until the bubble bursts.
The implication being that any actual job loss (those claims being highly questionable) is based on lofty speculation about future cost and performance that are unlikely to materialize, given the nature of the technology.
Remember that LLMs were supposed to dramatically disrupt every industry, leading to mass unemployment and a realignment of the world economy ... more than two years ago. The overwhelming majority of AI projects fail to deliver any measurable value (upwards of 95%, accor
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>> But AI and robotics are coming for ALL jobs. Retraining humans makes little sense.
Yeah, right. Cool story.
The little detail is that it does not work.
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It works today for a lot of jobs, at least as a force multiplier. In many cases though the process needs to be redesigned to simplify things for automation and AI.
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It works today for a lot of jobs, at least as a force multiplier. In many cases though the process needs to be redesigned to simplify things for automation and AI.
It works today for a lot of simple jobs — the kind robots are going to do. Over time, there are going to be fewer and fewer jobs for people who don't have the level of education or intellect to work in tech.
Maybe in the short term, some small subset of them can train to repair the robots, but even that only works until the robots become sufficiently cheap that they become disposable, or until the robots start repairing themselves or each other. And even in the best-case scenario, there won't be enou
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Exactly... the main jobs out there will be for AI technicians and robot techs. The company will of course want 10+ years experience in AI tech even though the job has only existed for 4 years (numbers aren't accurate, I know). The rest of us without that $300,000+ piece of paper are screwed, it seems.
Just like my high school class (2002)... a lot went for degrees in computers, except anyplace that wanted computer degrees wanted 5+ years experience.