Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagUnemployment

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3D rendering of a conceptual images of office cubicles where workers where replaced by artificial intelligence.

Will AI Ever Replace Human Beings? Why Do You Ask?

A better question might be: Why do we want to know the future of artificial intelligence?
The question of whether a machine can ever fully replace a human can only have one, predefined answer. My question is, why bother asking the question? You already know the only answer you will accept! Read More ›
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Restaurant automation service concept. Robot waiter serving a tray with a bottles and wine glass. Two wheels robotic character on yellow wall, gray floor background. copy space

A World Without Work? Don’t Hold Your Breath

Predictions of mass unemployment caused by robots continue to be wildly inaccurate

Will we soon be sitting on couches watching reality TV shows while robots work 24/7 doing all of the work humans used to do? The idea that robots will replace most human labor has been around for almost 100 years and has become more popular with each new advance, from sensors and microprocessors to enterprise software, data analytics, and AI. The latest wave of robot hysteria was tweaked by The Singularity is Near in 2005, emboldened by Race Against the Machine in 2012, and sent over the top by The Second Machine Age and The Rise of Robots in 2016, and A World Without Work in 2020, all best sellers. A World Without Work was shortlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey 2020 Business Book of the Year, in addition Read More ›

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Businessman working with skeleton in office

Sci-fi Saturday: When “The Workplace” Is Anything But

The short film (less than 10 min) starts with a woman reassuring herself, unsettlingly, “I AM the boss”

“The Workplace” at DUST by Carlyn Hudson (April 1, 2021, 9:32 min) We’ve been warned: “You are very qualified.” For what though? “In a future economy subsumed by technological employment, humans continue to find meaning through their ‘work’ — where the lucky ones get to show up to an “office” from 9-5 and live out their mundane workplace fantasies.” This sci-fi short will appeal to many who have had a job at the corner of Rat and Race and sense that’s a blessing compared to the alternative. It starts with a woman reassuring herself, “I AM the boss,” and cuts to her interviewing a job candidate who seems off-putting at first but appears qualified — and then things get weird. Read More ›

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Afro-american boy hiding in ruined building, escaped from dysfunctional family

Woke Medicine Is Very Bad for Everyone’s Health

The issues raised by Critical Race Theory are real but I believe that the diagnosis is deeply flawed

Critical Race Theory and claims about structural racism in American society are infiltrating medical care and education. There is a major effort in medical education today to indoctrinate students and resident physicians into Critical Theory. This is, in my view, a deeply misguided approach.The issues raised by Critical Race Theory are real but I believe that the diagnosis is deeply flawed. The question we face is: how can we protect medical education and practice from this latest iteration of Marxism, and at the same time work to improve deficiencies in education and medical care that Critical Race Theorists correctly point out? It is undeniable that there are structural problems in medicine. Many of these problems impede good medical care, especially Read More ›

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Nerd with glasses hacking websites

Beware of Geeks Bearing Formulas—It’s Often Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience based on data without theory and theory without data undermine the credibility of real science, which is the key to human progress

Elsewhere I have warned of the perils of making decisions based on data without theory. For example, the patterns discovered by data-mining computer algorithms are often nothing more than meaningless coincidences. It is also perilous to go to the opposite extreme—to make decisions based on theory without data. Once upon a time, for example, economists were fond of sketching labor demand and supply curves and assuming that the economy was at their intersection. That is, labor demand is equal to supply, so that everyone who wants to work is working. The unemployed have chosen to be unemployed because they value leisure more than income. True believers were fond of this theory and little troubled by reality. Between 1929 and 1933, Read More ›

robots in a car plant

Will the COVID-19 Pandemic Promote Mass Automation?

Caution! Robots don’t file for benefits but that’s not all we need to know about them

I understand the panic many business leaders experience as they try to stay solvent while customers evaporate. Panic, however, is a poor teacher: AI-based automation will not only not solve all their problems, it may very well add to them. AI is not a magic box into which we can stuff them and make them disappear.

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Industrial robotic welding and robot gripping working on smart factory, on machine blue tone color background, industry 4.0 and technology.

Maybe the robot will do you a favor and snatch your job

The historical pattern is that drudgery gets automated, not creativity

Fear of toxic but improbable futures sometimes distracts us from clearly understanding and preparing for the real changes that are happening now.

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Universal Basic Income? Fear of AI Fuels Bad Economics

If new technology led to mass permanent unemployment, history would be an endless saga of expanding joblessness

Although the coming shift will be abrupt, new technologies enable us to focus, as economists would put it, on our comparative advantage over machines. 

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Vintage abacus

Robotic Accounting Department

The future of number crunching

Technology has almost entirely replaced the travel agent as well as many brick and mortar stores. But high tech tools like bots are replacing employment in, of all places, accounting. Show Notes 01:30 | Introduction; Jeremiah Marks 02:00 | Forbes and AI accounting prime time 03:00 | What is Mint? 04:48 | Natural language recognition in accounting 06:15 | What Read More ›

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Machinist working a loom

Remember the Luddites!

The Luddites became famous for breaking machinery during the Industrial Revolution. Were they entirely wrong?
People often think that the Luddites were merely anti-technology because they opposed automation during the Industrial Revolution (1760–1840). The story is more complex. As we face increasing automation today, we might want to see what we can learn from their history. Read More ›
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Workers at Hino Motors Manufacturing Indonesia, Indonesia

Is AI Creating the Conditions for Marxist Revolution?

An analyst looks at the conditions then and now
Last summer, we noted Karl Marx’s eerie AI prediction; he felt that capitalism would fall when machines replaced human labor. While today’s market economy doesn’t seem in a hurry to fulfill either prediction, some see artificial intelligence as enabling a comeback of his theories. Read More ›
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The Hills Go High Tech

An American community finding its way in the new digital economy
At present, says Hochschild, Ankur Gopal and Interapt are sourcing as many new hillbillies as they can find: “For now, there is so much demand for I.T. workers — 10,000 estimated openings by 2020 in the Louisville metro area alone — that Mr. Gopal is reaching out to new groups. Read More ›
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Is the future of jobs over?

Should people be paid to let machines do the work?
Recently, there have been short-term limited experiments with a Universal Basic Income but it’s hard to evaluate a transformative social policy with such limited and cherry-picked data. And, says Richards, paying people not to work would simply slow their move into the job markets of the digital age. Read More ›
Team welding Robot movement Industrial automotive part in factory

Karl Marx’s Eerie AI Prediction

He felt that capitalism would fall when machines replaced human labor
Because Marx held that the value of goods resided in the labor required to produce them, if goods were produced by automatons, without human labor, the economy would fall apart and capitalism would fail. Read More ›
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Will AI lead to mass joblessness and social unrest?

A 2018 book by political scientist Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor argues that it will: “automated systems entrench social and economic inequality by design and undermine private and public welfare.”

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