The Third Industrial Revolution Will Be Bigger Than the First Two

[ClydeR]

People are starting to catch on..

In a recent study (pdf), economists Daren Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University try to quantify how worried we should be about robots. They examine the impact of industrial automation on the US labor market from 1990 to 2007. They conclude that each additional robot reduced employment in a given commuting area by 3-6 workers, and lowered overall wages by 0.25-0.5%.

A central question about robots is whether they replace human workers or augment them by boosting productivity. Acemoglu and Restrepo’s research is a powerful piece of evidence on the side of replacement. So, brace yourself: According to the International Federation of Robotics, there are already between 1.5-1.75 million industrial robots in operation, and some observers expect that number to more than double by 2025.

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[ClydeR]

Almost 4 in 10 U.S. jobs are at risk from being taken over by robots, according to the latest report from consultancy firm PwC.

The analysis released Friday suggested that 38 percent of U.S. jobs could be at high risk of automation by the early 2030s, higher than the U.K. (30 percent), Germany (35 percent) and Japan (21 percent).

The 15-year timeline does not appear to be shared by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, however. In comments made to Axios Media on Friday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he was not worried about the mass displacement of U.S. workers by robots and could be a century before a labor crisis eventuates.

"It's not even on our radar screen ... 50-100 more years," Mnuchin said.

He added that he was "not worried at all" about robots displacing humans in the near future.

"In fact I'm optimistic".

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This is one of those things that will come back to haunt a person.

[ClydeR]

Artificial intelligence is changing the world and doing it at breakneck speed. The promise is that intelligent machines will be able to do every task better and more cheaply than humans. Rightly or wrongly, one industry after another is falling under its spell, even though few have benefited significantly so far.

And that raises an interesting question: when will artificial intelligence exceed human performance? More specifically, when will a machine do your job better than you?

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The experts predict that AI will outperform humans in the next 10 years in tasks such as translating languages (by 2024), writing high school essays (by 2026), and driving trucks (by 2027).

But many other tasks will take much longer for machines to master. AI won’t be better than humans at working in retail until 2031, able to write a bestselling book until 2049, or capable of working as a surgeon until 2053.

The experts are far from infallible. They predicted that AI would be better than humans at Go by about 2027. (This was in 2015, remember.) In fact, Google’s DeepMind subsidiary has already developed an artificial intelligence capable of beating the best humans. That took two years rather than 12. It’s easy to think that this gives the lie to these predictions.

The experts go on to predict a 50 percent chance that AI will be better than humans at more or less everything in about 45 years.

Although the article explains the uncertainty of long-range predictions, it seems certain that the short-term predictions will happen.

[ClydeR]

Did you see this? Elon Musk wants the government to regulate AI.

“AI is the rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive. Because I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’ll be too late,” Musk told the meeting. “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilisation.”

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[ClydeR]

The author of the below article says the potential economic effects of AI can be evaluated by reference to how spreadsheets impacted the accounting and financial sectors 25-35 years ago.

Just as spreadsheets drove costs down and demand up for calculations, machine learning—the application of AI to large data sets—will do the same for predictions, argue Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb, who teach at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “Prediction about uncertain state of the world is an input into decision making,” they wrote in a recent paper.

Unlike spreadsheets, machine learning doesn’t yield exact answers. But it reduces the uncertainty around different risks. For example, AI makes mammograms more accurate, the authors note, so doctors can better judge when to conduct invasive biopsies. That makes the doctor’s judgment more valuable.

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That is undoubtedly true, but it ignores the massive and pervasive disruptions that will come in a shorter period of time than in past industrial revolutions. In fact, driving down the cost of AI and increasing demand for AI will accelerate economic disruption.

[ClydeR]

Kai-Fu Lee, a big shot technology thinker in China, wrote a provocative oped in the NYT in June. Below are some excerpts to whet your appetite or wet your whistle.

Unlike the Industrial Revolution and the computer revolution, the A.I. revolution is not taking certain jobs (artisans, personal assistants who use paper and typewriters) and replacing them with other jobs (assembly-line workers, personal assistants conversant with computers). Instead, it is poised to bring about a wide-scale decimation of jobs — mostly lower-paying jobs, but some higher-paying ones, too.

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We are thus facing two developments that do not sit easily together: enormous wealth concentrated in relatively few hands and enormous numbers of people out of work. What is to be done?

How many bartenders does a society really need?

[~Rocktar~]

I would tend to argue, like Asimov, that we should have regulations on the development toward, creation of and existence of AI's.

[ClydeR]

An interactive map showing where the robots are in the US..

https://www.axios.com/robots-are-lan...472985699.html

[hello]

Dude it's still just hype... people like Elon Musk hypes up shit like this to drum up capital and raise stock prices.

[Latrinsorm]

^^ minimum wage slavery is so bad robots would literally rather kill themselves