Will Machine Learning and AI Force Us to Rethink Mainstream Economic Theory?

in #life7 years ago

In my opinion AI isnt the biggest threat in the near future, its machine learning. Just having a machine move from being able to do a simple one function task to a multiple conjoined function task will revolutionize the work force, and it is coming within the next few decades. A machine that can be rolled out to tackle simple tasks on a massive basis and also one that can be updated so in person fixes are almost never necessary is going to be created. There are already many plans for companies creating simple all purpose machines that will have a vast amount of possible use cases.

Modern Keynesian economics says that with the replacement of jobs in new industries, more opportunities will be created in the long run, but this might not be the case so much in the future. If you look at the top 5 revenue per employee ratios, you see it is all companies that hire mainly programmer jobs. One could argue that these companies per employee are so profitable because it is the nature of the tech industry, but one could also say it is because far fewer people are able to produce on a much larger scale. The amount of employees needed to reach a large market of consumers is shrinking, especially with new companies.

While before you needed a single cobbler to make a shoe and repair it when the soles wore down, a company can have one machine build 50,000 phones in a day and a group of 5 programmers can fix a problem remotely that will go out to millions. Simply put, less employees are going to be needed as we move more towards a future more integrated with machines and when we hit the point of usable and practical AI, most human jobs will become irrelevant. Similar to how computers started out mostly as single job processing machines and transformed into multi purpose devices, I believe we will see the same sort of transformation in the robotics field.

I don’t think past economist could have imagined a world like the future we are living in now. In the near future the creation of a new industry might just create new jobs for machines that can do a much better job than a human can, which is another concern. What if you create an industry job that another computer might just be better at doing. Rather than having a tech person fixing machines, you create a machine to fix machines. The only time you need a human to do it, is if the machine that fixes the machine breaks, which could be very rare. This all gets very complicated quickly and goes further down the rabbit hole, but still isn’t completely out of the box.

In my personal opinion we are going to eventually have to change the way we think about economics. Im all for moving forward and maximizing profit in anyway we can because if we don't, someone else will, however that being said, without any type of safety net for the people who will be replaced, we risk severe threat of a breakdown of modern society. People without a reason to live or jobs to work, will resort to violence if they are unable to feed their families.

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Reading this excellent article, I can't help but think about what will humans do to reinvent the way we are interacting together because, as time goes by, we tend to spend less and less time among each other in direct contact.

With the rise of internet, we had one huge wave but this one would transform our #1 place where we interact eye to eye with each other, decreasing the amount of physical presence with one another.

Are we going to invest time into playing more sports together, more group meditation or, maybe, something in between like group yoga and contact dancing? I really look forward to see where things are going to go.

Thanks a lot for the quality and the opportunity to think about this matter some more.

Namaste :)

Yes. Huge changes to come!

No i do not agree that Machine learning and AI is a threat to anything, humans will be needed in every part of this earth, these things can only make the work easy for humans but they cannot replace us, those who thinks that this is even a possibility are out of their mind @calaber24p

I will have to disagree with you. Decades ago, it was believed that humans would always beat computers at chess, then in the 90s, the computers won. In the last few years, Google's AlphaGo beat the world's best Go players. IBM's Watson is diagnosing cancer and proscribing treatments on par with some of the world's leading cancer treatment centers. Computers are getting better and better at recognizing objects via visual ques. Voice recognition is at 95% or greater from the tech giants.

There is nothing to suggest that this current course is likely to slow down, if anything odds are that the progress will accelerate. Most humans do rather repetitive jobs that aren't even a quarter as complicated as beating World Champion go players, accurately transcribing speech, or diagnosing and treating terminal cancer patients.

Most jobs things like Transportation, customer service reps and so on. Computers can replace secretaries, human drivers are on the verge of being beat by the algorithm, and we already can replace telemarketers with robocalls, basic customer service duties are increasingly being delegated to chatbots and self serve systems. The cashier can easily be replaced by a self checkout system.

There probably will always be a need for some people do to the work the algorithm's can't yet handle, or the job's for which people are just preferable. Nurses, Doctors, and janitors come to mind. All of that middle-work though, the low skill work? That will disappear. Millions upon millions of jobs. Short of a miracle new industry that springs forth from the algorithms replacing almost everything that the algorithms are unable to learn to do on their own, or lack the mechanical ability to do so, joblessness will become the norm, and having a job will be as rare as being a movie star.

Excellent viewpoint, and one that I can certainly agree on. We will definitely see a time where 20, 30, maybe even 50 or more percent of the population will be out of jobs because of machines. Look around, it's already happening in everything from factories to McDonald's. That's also why I am working with VIVA (@vivacoin) to help circumvent that.

When does VIVA go live??

Technically it already is. We had a successful ICO, and are now in the process of getting multiple moving parts established. We are almost done hiring out the core team, as well as several development teams so we can get our first few projects underway and out for public consumption this year.

TradeQwik (VIVA Gateway) is also already live, but very Beta. It will be receiving a face-lift very soon as well. VIVA.cash will be one of the bigger pieces that make VIVA (and the VIVAconamy) explode IMO though. I suggest reading through the whitepaper a few times to really understand the inner working of the VIVAconamy though.

I've been following for some time. Just wanted to know when a person can start to earn.

Well it really depends on how you want to "earn". Currently there is only a very small network, but there are a few ways to earn.

A) Become a Crownholder.
Each TR (Treasury Right) you get from a Crown will give you an option to sink the amount of VIVA that the TR can mint into your VIP (VIVA Investment Pool, think savings account). You can use this strategy to build a residual income with compounding interest. You can then go into "Retirement" mode (Think Powering Down) when you are ready, and get 24 VIVA/day until your VIP runs out or you stop it. At the current rate of VIVA:USD ($5.50), that's approximately $45k per year.

B) Market Making.
You can exchange various cryptocurrencies and fiats on TradeQwik right now. I believe there are still bonuses for market makers, but will have to verify that for you.

C) In the near future, running a node of several different flavors. There will be several types of nodes in the VIVAconamy, all responsible for different things. You will be paid in VIVA for your contributions to the network, and of course the chance of getting that Crown once per week!

I highly encourage you to keep up with this project. Even if you don't invest, there are plenty of ways to get in on the action, and become a "Vivo" :)

Thanks!

No problem! you can reach out to me directly on telegram with any more questions too.

Moving forward yes, innovate and make changes yes, but the trick is: don't do it for maximizing profit. In the race for profit we will lose the chance to really change something. If we all are going to maximizing profit by any means possible then nature won't stand a chance. Nature dosen't make profit yet is here and allows us to Steem.
In the race for profit we are blinded. And blind man can see others pain and needs.

Tens of millions of jobs will be replaced in the next 50 years, with absolutely no garantee that new jobs would somewhat emerge out of nowhere, especially jobs where humans are better than AI, which will keep improving over time. How to address this issue? Well the obvious answer is the need for a Universal Basic Income in the future... How do we finance that? By heavily taxing goods/services produced/provided by robots and machines. Eeh I can already feel the crypto-anarchists cringing at the idea of governments having such an important role in our lives.
But honestly if anyone has a better idea, please share, cause no-one has found it yet.

One way to reduce government impact would be to keep the idea of a UBI based on taxation, but to use blockchain technology to implement it. I'm not a programmer nor a blockchain technology expert by any means. But if we take your example of the machine producing 50,000 phones, basically in order to be legally allowed to be sold, the machine would be forced to document the creation of each phone to the network; Once the item is sold- an action that should also be documented-, the selling company is automatically taxed and the money is directly and equally distributed to the wallets of every citizen aged over 18. The security and reliability of the network could be garanteed either by the government, or better, by elected citizens of the country (kind of like steemit witnesses), even though they would still probably need government support given how important their job would be. This would lead to the creation of national crypto-currencies, since laws don't extend over borders. Imported goods would have to provide proof that they were produced by humans, and would be taxed if they weren't. As I said I don't know anything about blockchain technology and I have no clue of what I'm talking about. This is a extremely simplified idea of how it could be done, it surely has many flaws and may not be even implementable.

Really interesting article ! thx a lot. I have a slightly different point of view if you're interested in AI though https://steemit.com/technology/@rafikabbes/artificial-intelligence-will-replace-our-jobs-very-soon-according-to-a-new-study-of-oxford-and-yale-university

Great article, I was just discussing this with my twelve year old daughter who was trying to convince me to pull her out of school as the current rate of AI advancements is negating the need for her to be in education learning to be a good little worker bee when she should be learning about finance and managing assets.

My daughter is right to a point but I'm still insisting she goes to school much to her dismay.
As AI develops there will need to be a social shift away from the ridiculous notion that work is what gives someones life meaning and a reason to wake up of a morning, but that will only happen if those who control the machines realise there needs to a significant redistribution of wealth.

The last enormous shift in the workplace - the Industrial Revolution, brought about many societal shifts and took over 100 years to be fully assimilated (for lack of a better word). Shifting from an agarian society to an industrialized society showed us the absolute need for a safety net for those displaced workers. Now we are faced with the Computer Revolution which has already created enormous societal changes.

We have a world of haves and have nots - predicated on the accessibility of an internet connection. I think much of the anger and fear we are seeing in the political arena has been brought about by the changes in technology we have already witnessed. Many industries have been "computerized" with subsequent human job loss. Bank tellers, auto workers, grocery clerks and many others are a dying breed as ATM's, robots, and self checkout or Amazon Pantry have come into wide spread use.

"Tomorrow" is already here and growing. The genie can't and won't be put back into the bottle. I think figuring out how to take care of the displaced workers will be one of the top three issues the world will have to resolve in the next few decades. In the past we have used wars and land/resource grabs as an economic tool. I am hopeful we have learned enough to look to other methods of resolving the issues that surround this cultural and economic shift.

Insightful article! Thank you.

Humans are most intelligent species on earth, however vast amount of people from countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Africa, Iran do their livings by working as labor class because most of them are uneducated. We may be living in future but if the education is not equal to all countries people will suffer from poverty.

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