What do you think of universal baseline income?

its predicted to be seeming random as far as which proffesions will be affected, but i think most technically minded people can figure out which jobs.

currently its not a problem because we have a massive 'baby boom' population that is retiring. but to ignore or be dismissive about it is beyond stupid.

Keep believing mate :)

And in 20-25 years your eldest will still be a veterinarian. If they chose that profession.

Well I have to, so my kids don't get blindsided by reality.

Like other have mention, I also work in a large company, and am at a high level, I see the writing on the wall for not only our remedial jobs, but as well as those of our engineers, designer, data analyst. That future is 15 to 20 years from the tipping point. Matter of fact, it might be the remedial more manual jobs that will be around longer than others.

I'll look it up and edit my post, but there is a country (Asian I believe) already trying cases with A.I. eliminating the need for lawyers and judges.

And what Asian country would that be? also until an AI learn to be 100% like a human there will never be AI judges, lawyers, or doctors or any other task where it requires the human factor.

Law or Medicin is not black and white, which is why there is not just one lawyer. Same goes for doctors, an AI can assist like Watson, but it will not be able to substitute the human factor.

no see Law and Medicine ARE black and white that is the point.

They are both HEAVILY regulated. Doctor has a very narrow set of options they can perscribe based on the numbers in the tests done on you.

Only if such medications dont work can it be taken to a new level of ?

I'm looking for the article, I texted it to a buddy (who is a lawyer) last year to see what he thinks about it. But some news on the subject.And more on the subject.

except that isn't an argument anyone has actually made in this thread.

the statement was that specific tasks, including non-menial "thinking" type of tasks, are ALREADY being replaced by machine systems and examples have been given.

i don't think anyone here has made the argument than in 10 years there will be a full-fledged terminator-type human replacement general purpose AI that will single-handedly replace all human labor, yet that is the argument you are trying to debunk, why?

EDIT: one more thing. don't confuse AI with robotics. distinguish between systems that process information only vs. those that have to actually interact w/ the human world because there seems to be some misunderstanding. a fully-autonomous robot that can interact with the world the way humans do with comparable strength, dexterity, and agility AND be able to figure out how to do tasks it has not been programmed to do is likely a LONG way off. a system that merely needs to process information and produce an output and can exist in a box on the floor or move in simple ways is something we already see. a lawyer "robot" doesn't need to be a walking, talking trial attorney. it can get by just doing paperwork.

Yup, these jobs have more hard line characteristics on the books than most, and the thought process to the conclusion is far easier to "code" than others.

Mechanical assistance already exist for most things, and the limiting factor really isn't the "brain" (read AI) its the fine mechanical piece that is the real hard part.

Well, funny enough that is my field which is why I am not worried one bit.

Also the article "We don’t see AI replacing judges or lawyers, but we think they’d find it useful for rapidly identifying patterns in cases that lead to certain outcomes,” said Dr Nikolaos Aletras, who led the study at UCL Computer Science"

And 79% of the verdict at the EHRC is not that hard to predict when you consider what the judges actually consider, they never look at the core of the actual case, but merely if there has been a breach of the human rights and if it's a legitimate breach. Also, they limited the AI to only look at certain fields and not all the human rights,

Anyways I am sure that AI will be helpful especially in a common law system like ours or Englands, where much of the work lies in knowing the precedences but it won´t be able to replace lawyers or judges, it won´t come to someone going into a courtroom and press a button and out comes a sentence.

oh for the love of god! because we need judges is evidence that legal jobs will not be heavly impacted.

jesus h.

look not literally 100% of all jobs will be affected, nobody is suggesting that. but a lot of jobs crossing all kinds of fields will be.

yup. this is an important point. automation doesn't need to replace EVERY job. shit, it doesn't even have to replace the MAJORITY of jobs.

Again no Law and medicine are not black/white, there is not a singular outcome.

Why do you think we are having the whole debate about the justice nomination? or why do you think there is a clear partisan line in certain cases. Or why do you think people go for second opinions as to diagnoses and in medicine?

As to the rest of your post, it´s utter ramblings.

Again with the ramblings. AI will be helpful, which is not the same as replacing.

again..

nobody is saying that 100% of all medical jobs need to be able to be automated in order for the entire medical profession to qualify for that claim

I will say there are many types of jobs INCLUDING THE DOCTOR that CAN be automated for most cases (not all cases..most cases...as in most visits for blood pressure can be handled automated, not all but most. after standard attempts are made THEN a real doctor can step in but that is almost always outlier cases)

And that statement might be true in certain fields.

AI may come in as a helpful tool, but the core of the arguments in this thread, even though it´s moved far off-topic, is that AI will replace jobs and humans will be "obsolete"

That argument is not going to happen in our lifetime or the next generation.

@Jacanuk: My company didn't move there, they ARE there. We are in over 100 countries across 5 continents. We are in Brazil because Brazil grows food.

Brazil was the pilot program, as I mentioned. It was be expanded to the rest of the Americas next year and then across the pond.

why not plan for it as if it could.

look consider this, the OBJECTIVE of doing this is to reduce work for humans. That is a GOOD thing, so why not prepare for it so we can work extra hard (ironic I know) to make it come true?

Ok, never said your company moved there.

But good for the company that they get to cut a few expensive salaries.

Well, sure some tasks could probably be "automated" but that is a far stretch from saying the legal and medical field would be entirely automated. A doctor or lawyer can benefit from a system like Watson, I was at an MIT lecture that IBM held about Watson, And it looks good but it´s still in the early stages and from what he said it´s trial run will last a few more years.

Which both of us have been repeatedly screaming multiple times....WE NEVER SUGGESTED THAT!!!!!!!!!!!

When all the jobs are gone, and everyone has been replaced by robots, how do you expect people to survive at that point? UBI would be the only choice to make sure people can live, and the rich would have to pay for it, or else, they all lose all there money and businesses because no one left on earth would be able to buy anything. Or the super wealthy have to get there fat asses kicked, and be forced to give back the jobs and money they stole from everyone else.

@Jacanuk: Human factor is likely the most common source of misdiagnosis. As a doctor your job is to try to remember symptoms and test metrics and map them to a disease. A computer can do that far better than any human ever will.

Doctors won’t be eliminated, but it will be relegated to doing the final once-over of a chart to ensure the algorithm isn’t way off. But how many doctors do you need per hospital to do that?

Name a job even including software development and there is a team of software developers working literally right now attempting to eliminate it.

Yeah no. Most people don't get their own symptoms down correctly and a computer cannot cover that. This is getting foolish now.

The IBM machine Watson has helped in medicine for some years now. Though not with actual diagnostics I think. Rather suggesting treatment when a diagnose has been given.

People have a really hard time accepting the concept that our minds aren't special. We have limited memory, imprecise recollection, our brains make cognitive shortcuts that are often incorrect, and we often fail to come to the same solution when presented with the same situation repeated times. It will not be impossible to outperform them in most scenarios.

@Jacanuk My ideal future would be a total abolishment of welfare unless you are proven to be suffering from an actual illness

This seems quite a popular opinion to spout from you yanks or us brits (jacanUK?)but can you really believe that? It's so assinine.

After Thatcher closed all the mines and left half the country unemployed the choice was 1) leave them all to fester on their small town estates and devolve into anarchy and alternate power structures just to survive. Or 2) give them all just enough money to survive so they don't rise up and literally start their own economy simply to avoid starvation.

This was fine and half of the UK carried on ok well into the 90's on their run down estates living off dole money and cheap weed. Depressing, but not catastrophic.

Then Cameron got in and halved the welfare state in just under 4 years, something they have been trying to do since the 60's.

Now they are still poor but with less things like childcare and less healthcare and less benefit overall.

The reality is that there are no decent jobs. It's not high mindedness because they don't want to work on a factory line on minimum wage forever. They just know that those jobs barely give you more than benefit and take up 100% of you time and effort with no future in sight.

The only jobs for unskilled workers are taken and mostly favoured due to them willing to live in huts and things and work on a promise of payment without the government knowing about it with migrants like Poles sorting vegetables and mindless toil like that but they just send all the money back home then go back after 5-6 years if they even manage to make any money.

So benefit isn't a disincentive to work, it's just one way to avoid the workforce becoming a slave labour camp.

Keynes I think predicted by the time of the Industrial revolution all men will only work a 2 day week. This is plausible and tenable, however, the owners of the machines simply employed less people and laid everyone else off.

Now that everyone lives in cities and no longer tend the land, they have only one source of survival which is the government or the free market. If your government is socialist you might have quite a nice life but if it is capitalist, you might not.

I think the capitalist/free market dream is starting to wake up and come to an end as it simply does not support large populations in a sustainable way.

The Chinese factory workers nearly all return home to the farms after 10 years or so as there just are not enough secure jobs that offer a future income as the economy is far too volatile.

Most economist are not Keansean by the way, they are all neo-liberals who believe in a self regulating market.

Not what I was talking about but okay.

@mattbbpl: Cleary. Go on any YouTube video of self-driving trucks and the drivers are all in denial. It’s sad because the writing is on the wall for them. The tech is 5 years away from the driver being along for the ride (at a reduced wage) and 10-15 from not being in the cab at all, but they would rather pretend it’s not happening.

Driver-less vehicles need oversight. They have had accidents.

@LJS9502_basic: "Driver-less vehicles need oversight. They have had accidents."

So have human drivers.

Certainly the tech still needs work, but they'll eventually have a safer track record than humans because they don't drink, they don't get tired, they have faster reaction times, etc. It's just a matter of time.

Computers have glitches........

What kind of glitches are we talking about? Hardware failures? Errors in perception? Mathematical errors? Logical errors? Errors due to incorrect information and presumptions?

Humans have all of those as well.

And yet a human can course correct........a computer glitch does not. It needs a reboot.

Depends on the glitch. A number of those that I've listed in this thread, human or otherwise, can't be. A number of them, human or otherwise, can be.

I mean, eventually robots will start getting sober and be unable to drive.

An alternative is to simply accept that self driving cars will also have accidents and crash.

Of course they will and it will cost lives. There will be mistakes elsewhere when automated systems do more and more for us as well as there has always been. The metric isn't whether or not the systems are 100% perfect because the bar isn't set at perfection, it is set at human. In many cases it isn't even that. If a system can do something 90% as good as a human worker but is 1/50th the cost then the choice is pretty clear. Economics always wins.

From a strictly hw/sw standpoint, it depends on how robust the systems are designed to be. Critical systems like these are likely designed with multiple redundancies in place. The detection of a failure in one simply triggers the redundant system to pick up the workload.

Of course there will still be faults, nothing is perfect.

Who do you blame? Do you fine and jail the person(s) in the car or simply give a fine to the company which produced the vehicle?

I have no idea :) Those are some of the tricky questions that humans will have to start sorting out. I imagine we'll make a bunch a mistakes trying to get the rules and regulations straight as well as perfecting the technology.

Unfortunately I have no doubt that the blame will be passed on to the little guy. The logic may not hold up, but I just don't see big corporations taking any hits, at least not in the US.

@comp_atkins said:

@Serraph105 said:

@mattbbpl said:

@LJS9502_basic said:

And yet a human can course correct........a computer glitch does not. It needs a reboot.

Depends on the glitch. A number of those that I've listed in this thread, human or otherwise, can't be. A number of them, human or otherwise, can be.

I mean, eventually robots will start getting sober and be unable to drive.

That poor guy needs a beer.

strongly disagree with this system. Money is a joke, its just something the government uses to satisfy the plebs. I would celebrate if the government got rid of 90% of its anti free market regulations, instead of giving people peanuts like this BS $500/month welfare cheque. Get rid of patents, intellectual property, anti free market regulations, all contract laws. There should not be any form of economic restriction enforced by a government or courts or any bureaucratic system, except for environmental protection laws (ie climate change). This would boost the economy and really help the middle/lower class. I say, take that $500, shine it up real nice turn it sideways and shove it straight up the governments candy azz. Get rid of the regulations, cut back on government, thats where the real meat and potatoes are.

I'm with @Fuhrer_D on this.

The thing is that we noobs are still thinking of advancement in technology as some kind of human thing with a human trajectory. There is no way that the progress is going to be somewhat linear or even human-like. We're probably within a lifetime's reach of A.I. that can do 100's of years of human theoretical development work in a matter of weeks. Whether that is used for the invention of military weapon systems or the creation of new functional materials in construction or for medicine or for predicting human behavior (determining police presence or creating commercial blockchains skipping stores or allowing us to plan stock accurately leading to less overproduction of goods). There's no denying that it's going to have a huge impact on our lives wherever it will be applied.

I think the question of how we're going to deal with it (not just economically but as a society) is more important (and interesting) than if we're going to have to deal with it. If not you, it'll be your children. We're not going to stop it, that's for sure. We're not going to delay it, because there are multiple governments vying for power who cannot trust each other to fall behind. If anything we're going to accelerate it as much as we can, the more we know about its potential. So what do we do with it? That's what I find interesting. Economically speaking it just means we are going to need a way to deal with mass unemployment. A redistribution of wealth. That probably means a kind of base income. A standard of living. Or we stay stuck in the system we have now and pay (and spend money for) machines too, as if they are virtual employees. None of those solutions are likely permanent solutions. We will likely have to rethink the meaning of money but I don't believe we're ready for that.

Most of the jobs that are about to be replaced first are shitty jobs and unhealthy jobs that nobody is going to miss. In my mind a loss of jobs is becoming a sign of progress and a luxury problem. I also think that the people whose jobs are decent and are less likely to be replaced first, are earning so much more than the normal person who is slaving away at the bottom that they're not just going to give up on their current relatively comfy jobs and take the financial hit. I don't really fear that at all. People in more comfortable positions tend to work for more than just financial survival.

Not in favor or against anything you say here, I just want to bring attention to the Dark Web apparently being a good example of a very free market and what becomes of it. I don't know how it's doing as I have never visited the place, but I hear it's going through very interesting developments. It may be a cool idea to look into it (maybe not directly), to see how that's functioning.

contract laws? so that's on your hit list now??

so if 2 parties enter into an agreement for one to provide a service and the other to pay for it and the service is done yet the bill never paid you support the party who was not paid to have no legal recourse via the courts?!?

reminds me of Social Security debate