Captain Obvious Report: Smart Software Will Kill Jobs
February 12, 2017
I love the chatter about artificial intelligence. Lists Like “Experts Have Come Up with 23 Guidelines to Avoid an AI Apocalypse” are amusing. The outfits applying smart software are focused on revenues, deals, market share, big contracts, and money. I am not sure worrying about how a Boston Dynamics-type robot will operate when deployed in a war zone in swarm autonomous mode is going to do much for the apocalypse worriers.
There are the obvious statements about smart software. You know. Search systems that deliver information to you before you knew you needed that information. A digital mom or a persistent and ever present significant other. Enter our Captain Obvious report. Read on.
I read the “Experts Have Come Up with…” article can absorbed this injunction:
the Asilomar AI Principles (after the beach in California, where they were thought up), the guidelines cover research issues, ethics and values, and longer-term issues – everything from how scientists should work with governments to how lethal weapons should be handled. On that point: “An arms race in lethal autonomous weapons should be avoided,” says principle 18.
Interesting. You can look at the complete list, sort of like a year end top 10 films output, at this link.
Enter Captain Obvious. Navigate to “Google’s Diane Greene: Machine Learning Will Cost Jobs, So Skills Training Is Essential.” I love it when Googlers make it so easy for folks with dull normal IQs to get good advice for working in the post smart software world. But our intrepid Captain Obvious intellect spotted this gem:
Greene said, “machines are better than humans” at some tasks. Recently they’ve started to do better at some kinds of image and speech recognition, and they’re performing tasks such as finding signs of disease, such as retinopathy, from images more accurately than humans.
Yikes, aren’t these jobs performed by people with college educations and maybe graduate degrees?
Captain Obvious enters:
people, especially those that are computer-literate, shouldn’t have a problem getting new jobs. “This has happened before in the world,” she said, such as during the Industrial Revolution. “There’s new jobs they can easily do. It’s all about training.” But others need to be helped through the transition.
So no work. Retraining. What about some folks who are not too bright? asks Captain Obvious. These people can work on “new” jobs at Google maybe?
Stephen E Arnold, February 11, 2017
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