Member Since: 2/15/2012
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Robots/AI could take over 47% of all jobs in a decade
Quote:
White House report cautiously optimistic about job-killing AI
Drivers and cashiers, it's time to look for a different line of work
In a followup to its smash hit, Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence, the White House on Tuesday released Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy, a report that attempts to outline the economic consequences of expected advances in automation and machine learning without actually risking a prediction of what's to come.
"Accelerating AI capabilities will enable automation of some tasks that have long required human labor."
The report does manage to muster some general guidance for policymakers:
AI will boost productivity. This is as it should be for systems that never sleep.
Technical skills will see more demand. Someone will have to repair our robot overlords.
The effects of AI will be uneven across industries and society. Here's a forecast that's guaranteed, given the implausibility of the alternative – that AI could affect everything and everyone in exactly the same way.
Some jobs will disappear as others will be created. This misses the one thing on everyone's mind: whether job losses will exceed job gains over time, or vice versa.
And some workers will lose their jobs for a while, or maybe for a long time, depending upon policy responses.
Which workers? It would be good to know. The report offers the widely stated claim that routine, low-skill jobs will be the first to go.
"At a minimum, some occupations such as drivers and cashiers are likely to face displacement from or restructuring of their current jobs, leading millions of Americans to experience economic hardship in the short-run absent new policies," the report says.
Minimum here means 9 per cent. The report observes that the predicted percentage of threatened jobs over the next decade ranges from 9 per cent to 47 per cent.
To frame that figure in a larger economic context, it also states that every three months, 6 per cent of jobs are lost through normal economic churn and are replaced by a slightly larger percentage of new jobs.
For policymakers, the salient point is this: At some point, the unemployed, disenfranchised, and impoverished people could storm the barricades. The report recalls the Luddite Riots of the early 1800s, when skilled craftspeople reacted to the mechanization that allowed less-skilled workers, aided by machines, to compete with them.
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12...jobkilling_ai/
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