>> AI is to today what motorized farm equipment were in the late 19th century.
Well, I don't think so. I believe the scale is far bigger, as we have transitioned to an information economy in the meantime. I see what's going on around me; large companies gutting teams of process control personnel replacing them, even today, with AI-based systems. They move quickly: Instead of monitoring control system status they simply do it. And 20 people here, 50 people there, 40 there -- "retired" workers.
Self driving, alone, will rapidly double the "normal" unemployment rate from ~4% to ~8%. Just self-driving. And like it or not, humanoid robots are going to be here shortly and they are going to claim a TON of jobs, including making more robots. We will, potentially, in my lifetime (being optimistic), see a serious glut of workers and that does create something of a crisis.
When I was in university, I studied topics like gradient descent and linear systems, and promptly threw it was as currently useless theoretical overload. Never really had sufficient imagination to see this is where we'd be today, yet hear we are.
It is easy to say, "Yeah, we handled the Industrial Revolution" and here it comes again; there will always be jobs."
I do believe there is something like a singularity on the relatively near horizon. (Not in the sense that brute force has made machines like brains, but in the sense we are looking at a revolution that is quite different from yesterday's IR). |
