Re:Should economists be more concerned about AI?
by the_cyber_pass on Thursday March 02, 2017 @02:04AM
(#13772132)
I think the point they were trying to make is that although we might not see the complete collapse of these industries now, there is a good chance it is still coming. They might already be dead by something already created but the knowledge just isn't widespread yet and is sitting in someones thesis just waiting for another person to try a practical version of a now theoretical concept. As to their other point getting rid of the programmer is very much on peoples todo list right now. It's a massive cost center. To think this one line of work is somehow immune from this trend seems short cited. I am sure the horse caretakers had a hundred reasons why they would survive automobiles until they didn't.
Re:Should economists be more concerned about AI?
by xbmcuser on Thursday March 02, 2017 @03:06AM
(#13772460)
Ai is already being used to find security bugs in software. An Ai is able to do in a few minutes which would take multiple programmers 1000s of man hours to do. As these Ai keep getting better the need for thousands of such code analyst programming jobs will be lost. 1 programmer with the help of Ai will be doing jobs of hundreds of programmers.
With the current economic systems the income of many will be funneled at a n exponential rate to the top. Rich people getting more wealth doesn't help the economy. A billion going to billionaire will hurt the economy compared to 100k going to 10k people. As those 10k people will use it and it would be used in the economy multiple times where as the billiionare will probably keep in his bank account.
A horse or an assembly line worker do lots of repetitive work. A programmer does lots of non-repetitive/creative work. It's a whole different game. There are examples of creative AI but it is clearly inferior to humans in music, painting, poetry, translation and many other tasks, while in programming it's completely incapable as of yet.
Maybe if conversational agents become good enough to replace lots of websites and apps - that could make a dent. Yet chatbots are quite limited today and in the next few years. It could take 5-10 years before they can be good enough to threaten app makers, and in the meantime there is a glut of unused apps.
The largest threat to programmers is Wordpress, Facebook and Ebay in my opinion. Instead of paying for a new website, Joe Business Owner would suffice with just a FB page or a Wordpress blog. Instead of making an online store, he would prefer being a simple Amazon or Ebay reseller.