AI is not eliminating jobs

Midwits keep asserting that “AI” is going to eliminate jobs. They say things like “those jobs aren’t coming back because of AI” (or screws or whatever other dumb excuse: but they’re real sure about those jobs not coming back).  These are not statements of scientific or technological fact, or even a reasonable prediction based on present trends. These are ideological political statements. “AI” is a soundbite/fnord excuse for not doing anything about the policy problems of the present.

The ruling caste of American tech and FIRE lizard people continue to make these statements, not because they are inevitable, but because this is their desired future. Their preferred future is a population consisting of powerless, preferably drugged up serfs on the “universal basic income” dole, ruled over by our present ruling class of grifters, rentiers, pyramid scheme salesmen, watched over by a surveillance hellscape.  The lizard people would like to continue our present policy of de-industrializing the country, breaking what little labor negotiating power US citizens have, and atomizing people to their raw protoplasm. It’s almost like a Freudian slip. Don’t bother agitating for any rights, slave, we soon will have electric Golems and won’t need you!

The most murderous drug dealers who ever existed … Google’s AI dude thinks they’re great! https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1093953731756867584

Oh I am sure the Google doofs would like to develop and control some strong AI, and perhaps a robot maid to replace Juanita. I, too, would like to have a magic technology which gives me infinite power, and a robot maid to iron my shirts. If I were a Silicon Valley oligarch rather than a humble nerd, I might develop delusions the pile of C++, Javascript and tech drones which made me rich could become a Golem of infinite power. Personally,  I would build rockets. At least I could get away from lizard people who want to turn the world into a soy dystopia.

If these clowns really believed that “AI” were something actually like an “AI” which could replace humans in general tasks, they’d use it to replace computer programmers. At one point in history, people believed CASE tools would eliminate most programmer jobs. How’s that working out for the AI geniuses at Google? They can’t even automate devops jobs; devops being one of the most automatable roles in tech companies. Devops tasks don’t seem much different from a computer strategy game.

Google’s “AI” team can’t do this useful thing, which, even by my lights, actually seems  achievable. Yet somehow, google boobs think they’re going to violate Moravec’s paradox and replace drivers. Think about that for a minute. It’s becoming clear that autonomous vehicle “technology” as sold to people for the last 10 years is basically fraud, and is still stuck in the 1980s when Ernst Dickmanns was driving around the autobahn with Sun Workstations in his back seat. Demonstrations of this tech always have a human in the loop (remote or in vehicle), because moving automobiles without human control are death machines under most circumstances.

Inside of the UniBwM autonomous experimental vehicle VaMP, at the rear bench where the computing system was installed for easy access and monitoring. This was at the PROMETHEUS demonstration in Paris in October 1994 | Photo by Reinhold Behringer

Even assuming I’m wrong and the media hyperbole is right and full level 5 autonomous vehicles are “right around the corner” Google also has zero business interest in “disrupting” driving. Google is a tech driven advertising company with a  collection of loss leaders. Yet they go after this preposterously difficult, possibly impossible task. Why not disrupt a business they presumably know how to disrupt, like that of the lowly ops engineer? At least this would be good for their bottom line, and it would be a real step forward in “AI” rather than a parlour trick perpetuated by marketing nerds and started by obvious mountebanks.

From a semiotics point of view, this shows astounding hostility to the types of people who drive cars and trucks for a living. Drivers are … ordinary, usually uneducated, salt of the earth people who have a fairly independent lifestyle and make a decent living. Google overlords must really hate such people, since they’re dumping all this skrilla into ruining their lives for no sane business reason. They will almost certainly fail, but man, why would you try to blow up those people’s lives? If this country really wanted to get rid of driving, or considered it a serious problem that there are too many cars on the road, or thought that people now employed as drivers should do something else, we had a solution to this problem invented in the late 1800s.

 

The other professions  people “think” will be replaced always seem to be low caste irritations or lawyers (lol). You regularly hear “experts” talking about how presently common jobs won’t exist in 20 years because of “AI.”  I’ve said multiple times now that all estimates for delivery of something in 20 years are bullshit. A prediction that a technology will do X in 20 years means “we don’t know how to do this, but we want your money to fool around with anyway.” Controlled nuclear fusion researchers being the most amusing case of the perpetual 20 year rice bowl. 20 years is a magic number, as it’s plenty of time for a technological mountebank to retire; and it’s at least 2-3 generations of tenured academics, which is enough to turn a scam subject like “quantum computing” or “nanotech” into an actual field.

“AI” doesn’t exist. Machine learning is a force multiplier and productivity enhancer for statisticians. If you believe the “automation”=”no more jobs” ding dongs, machine learning should have at least automated away the job of statistician. Yet somehow, the  statistician (aka “data scientist”) jobs are among the best paid and most in-demand jobs out there at present.

 

The last job category I can think of which was automated away is Flight Engineer on airliners. It mostly went away because of automation of airliners, but it wasn’t even computer related; just normal improvements of systems monitoring and reliability; good old mechanical and systems engineering. Despite 1/3 fewer seats in airliner cockpits, there are now more people with airline flight officer jobs now than ever before. Planes got cheaper and there are more of them servicing vastly more people.

The example of Flight Engineer is how the world works. Technological advances increase human power over nature and makes more things possible. Actual “AI” advances, should any eventually materialize, will work exactly like this.

AI has eliminated exactly zero professions, and essentially no jobs. Since the best prediction tool for a market is generally a random walk, my forecast is, barring giant breakthroughs, this trend of “nothing important actually happened” regarding AI job destruction will continue. If you disagree with me and have an alternate prediction on a normal human (aka 5 or 10 year) timescale, I am happy to entertain any long bets on whatever platform you care to use.