This is a fascinating documentary about artificial intelligence.
Robots are replacing jobs performed by humans.
Cashiers, secretaries, clerks, truck drivers.
There is no turning back. Middle-class jobs are disappearing.
Trump promises to bring back the jobs destroyed by AI. He won’t. He can’t.
China has perfected the art of facial recognition and uses it to surveil everyone.
We live in the “age of surveillance capitalism.” Also, “surveillance authoritarianism.”
A quote: “How do I do this more efficiently? That means, how do I do it with fewer workers?”
Another: ”Automation substitutes capital for labor.”
Automation increases inequality.
Surveillance eliminates the last vestiges of privacy.
This is a must-see documentary.
Think about it.
Prepare yourself to fight for privacy and humanity.
Insist on interpersonal interactions.
Don’t let Them fool you into thinking that an interaction with a machine is “personalized.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There will be MASSIVE problems … count on this.
There will be little HUMANITY and people will “GO NUTS.”
And please don’t put me in a driverless car. WHY? The software will not be thoroughly tested, people will die and become maimed, and the automobile companies will declare via their payouts that a human life is worth only “$100K/person” …. PAY OUTS for damage caused by BAD management, BAD design, BAD software … at least this is what I have noticed according to past pay outs.
I refuse to use self-checkout at any store. I also refuse to get my prescription from mail order companies. I need to see the faces of the people working and to also prevent management from firing people and replace them with machines.
No. The cars will work well enough. But they will put millions out of jobs. Uber drivers. Taxi drivers. Truck drivers. Auto service workers and gas pump operators (there will be fewer of these). Traffic cops. I’m not defending the car and its ubiquitousness. We should have switched to public transportation long, long ago. But I agree about the “self-service” portals and checkouts and stores. Don’t use them.
What makes you think the cars will work well enough? They don’t yet. Name me something that AI does well. Facial recognition? Nope. Voice recognition? Nope. How can we think it can do road/sign/other driver recognition well?
There are 1.25 million deaths from auto accidents, worldwide, each year. There are 3,287 a day. The odds of dying in a car trip are much greater (I’ve read that they are about 2,000 times greater) than they are in a plane trip. Why? Because the later doesn’t depend as much on human control.
In other words, industry has shown its ability to reduce defects per opportunities to astonishing degrees.
“If you think about airlines, they run two operations. They get you from point A to point B at from 7 to 8 Sigma. Your bags get there at 3 Sigma.” –Jack Welch, General Electric
Welch may have been overstating things a bit. Worldwide, there are 52.56 million flights each year and 36 airplane accidents. That puts the number of defects per million opportunities (DPMO) for airlines at 0.685. Airlines are operating at a 6.4 Sigma level. It seems likely, highly likely, that cars could operate at the same level, or at a greater level, if they weren’t driven by easily distractable humans. But this isn’t a sufficient argument for replacing humans with machines for most jobs.
The individually operated car will disappear in the driverless era. There will be centralized fleets of these driverless Ubers, and that’s how people will get around. And the maintenance and fueling of them will be standardized and centralized and automated. My take.
Self-driving cars won’t clean off the snow and ice during the winter nor shovel the driveway. How will self-driving cars deal with a flat or an unavoidable accident as a deer darting in front of the car or with a careless human driver (or another malfunctioning self-driving car) crashing into you? I wish self-driving cars were ready for prime time, I would enjoy being chauffeured around and just lounge around in the back seat. Even smart self driving trucks would still need humans aboard in case of emergencies, to load/unload the trucks, put air in the tires and to perform routine maintenance. I think at some point, probably years from now, truly autonomous cars will be a real thing, I probably won’t live to see it.
Roadways (and service stations) and much else will be redesigned around the new driverless vehicles. They won’t be the same ones that we have today. This is all going to come much more quickly than people think it will, I suspect, because the economic incentives exist. How long did it take cars to displace horses?
Most gas stations today offer no service. One person sells stuff.
Remember when you went to a “service station” and someone washed your windshield and checked the tires?
I do indeed. Years ago, my daughter was in a serious fire and suffered damage to her throat. She had to have a tracheotomy, and she came to live with me again, and I was told to rent a particular machine with which to clean this when it was blocked. On the side of the machine was a telephone number to call “in case of emergency.” Well, one fine day, she had a blockage, and she was having difficulty breathing, and the machine wouldn’t work. I called the number. I got a friendly automated customer service portal that asked me to choose among fifteen options, one of which asked me to choose from among another ten options, which landed me with an automated technical service AI that did not understand my questions. I tried dialing 0. I tried asking for a human tech representatives. No avail. I gave up and went back to the machine and figured it out. My daughter could well have died.
Drive out to Jersey sometime — you’re not allowed to pump your own gas there!
OK. The math on the number of auto accidents per day and year worldwide is a bit off. But you get the idea.
I am an IT professional. This phenomenon is not news. More jobs are facing loss through automation.
There is an old story: A washing machine factory owner was showing his new robotic assembly line to a union organizer. He asked he union man, “How are you going to organize these robots into your union?”.
The organizer replied “How are you going to sell them washing machines?”
Bottom line: Automation CREATES jobs. My brother-in-law is a robotic technician, and he makes an excellent living. Engineers who design robotics make serious money.
Robotics relieve drudgery, and increase productivity, and increase standards of living.
US factory operators will not have to relocate to third-world nations to get their cheap labor. I would rather buy a widget made by a US robot, than one made by some Indian in a sweat-shop.
So you think automation doesn’t cost jobs?
I have a friend who worked for Kraft Foods.
He visited factories.
He told me of a candy factory that employed1,000 people.
1,000
It now employs 2.
2.
Do you think the other 998 are now robot technicians?
I have seen no serious study that suggests that automation results in a similar number of jobs or in an increase in number of jobs. Quite the contrary is, in fact, the case, in the extended near-term (for many decades). And as this documentary points out, we’re talking about a whole other level of disruption here–one that affects cognitive tasks.
Many, many current technologies will put enormous power and ability and command and control in the hands of a few. Time for people to reread H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (no, not to watch the stupid movies; those are terrible and miss the point of Wells’s prescient book). We’re headed into a period in which we’ll have a golden few and a vast, struggling, sickly underclass, but to a greater extent than in the horrific times of the past. The Eloi and the Morlocks.
But you know what happens to the Eloi eventually, in that scenario? The Morlocks eat them.
I never said that automation does not cost jobs. I stated that automation creates jobs. When new technology increases productivity, there are jobs eliminated.
The invention of the automobile cost the jobs of buggy-whip makers, and livery stable operators, and blacksmiths, and people who were involved in the transportation industry that used horses.
But the automobile created jobs for assembly-line workers, and auto mechanics, and filling station operators.
Automation causes a NET increase in jobs, as old jobs are eliminated, new jobs come in.
Automation results in higher productivity. (The steam shovel eliminated the jobs of ditch-diggers). Higher productivity increases the output per worker-hour, and costs decline, and there is a higher standard of living.
I do not think that the workers who were displaced at the candy factory all became robotic specialists.
In a dynamic economy, jobs are created and lost. Part of the solution to displaced workers, is job training, and relocation into new positions.
The Economist predicted a few years ago, in a cover story that I blogged about, that automation will eliminate 47% of all jobs without replacing them.
Wake up. Your job may be next.
Hi Mr. of many hats = many titles:
You are definitely talented in a shadowed mind = narrowed mind.
Please forgive me if I mistake you as being a person who married someone who is Russian immigrant as your second wife in years ago.
I thought that you are not IT professional, but are in some sort of government representatives.
In short, I wonder that whether any psychologist in this educational blog can point out the future babies can communicate with robots which deliver them and feed them plus care for their many miscellaneous.
Most of all, I cannot be more delighted for men from young to old who will have a special tender love from AI robots. If men can create that AI robots, women will be free. Yes, finally, it is about time that women can be leaders who create literature to command AI robots. Are men the followers? Just foods for thoughts :)) Back2basic
Charles
It appears you did not get the ” joke”, which is at its core quite serious.
The market economy is prefaced on having both sellers and buyers.
Without buyers (people who can afford to buy washing machines), it comes to a halt.
Recessions and depressions are mostly due to the latter phenomenon.
We have now reached the stage where automation threatens in the not too distant future to put a significant fraction of workers (including white collar workers like accountants) out of jobs and hence out of money to buy things.
The question the union organizer asked was well ahead of its time but is actually very serious and is one that the “automaters” have yet to adequately address (if at all)
The statement that automation creates jobs is not only false in many cases, but conveniently avoids the problem of Who is going to be able to buy what the producers are selling after automation puts large numbers of people out of work?
It also avoids the question of Who is going to finance the government — including YOUR government sponsored job– when there are not enough taxpayers left?
Techno-utopians wish for all of us to believe (and be resigned to the “fact”) that this “progression” is “inevitable.” Well, one thing it most surely is is incompatible with the biological world (of which we are a part). And, just the energy and natural resource requirements alone make this ever-accelerating technological “progression” a dangerous folly. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/16/can-planet-afford-exorbitant-power-demands-of-machine-learning. #resist #SayNoToTheBorg
Amen
100% agree, Karen Merriam. Techno-utopians want us to believe that they can re-create human judgement, analytical abilities and creativity with algorithms. There’s a big hole in that argument, though. Their unregulated experiments to eliminate payrolls kill people.
Boeing killed 346 people when their 737 Max software was designed to override human intervention. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/11/business/boeing-737-max.html
Don’t forget the articles claiming self-driving cars would actually REDUCE cars on the road, somehow, That is, if they actually worked. https://jalopnik.com/zombie-miles-and-napa-weekends-how-a-week-with-chauffe-1839648416
We’ve seen Silicon Valley & Wall St fail more times than not to take their hype seriously. We will always have jobs that need humans to do work. What we need is a commitment invest in people.
Yes, jgrim–all one has to do is say “Boeing.”
Well stated, Karen. We, not technology, control our fate.
I’m just glad that the pedophilanthropist facilitators at MIT are making the important decisions that will determine our future as a society.
I’m so glad the tech billionaires have purchased control of PBS so they can use it as a propaganda platform and instill fear of China to propel their power hegemony of data. They actually called it a Sputnik moment. Another one. PISA wasn’t enough. I wish I had time to break down the lies, one by one.
As regards those you mention from MIT, this is a damning take:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/07/jeffrey-epstein-mit-funding-tech-intellectuals
Even when they are not shilling for their underwear-writers (techies who sit in their parents basement in their underwear writing code) PBS is generally very poor when it comes to science and technology reporting.
They tend to just repeat the hype that they have been told without challenge (about “Artificial Intelligence”(did), facial recognition, self driving cars, Michelle Rhee and lots of other stuff)
“PBS is generally very poor when it comes to science and technology reporting.”
PBS and NPR newsreporting are on the same topics as the major news networks: politics, wars, disasters, crime.
Karen Merriman, the money quote:
“To treat their ideas as genuine but wrong is too generous; the only genuine thing about them is their fakeness. Big tech and its apologists do produce the big thoughts – alas, mostly accidental byproducts of them chasing the big bucks.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/07/jeffrey-epstein-mit-funding-tech-intellectuals
Here is another good article from an anonymous Florida teacher that laments the wholesale acceptance of technology. She hides her identity because our punitive surveillance society. https://theedvocateblog.wordpress.com/2019/11/18/fl-teacher-speaks-ed-tech-the-dystopia-of-individualized-learning/?fbclid=IwAR2lJv2IM0AXKixIw2_IdrOtVYYO52Ee_N2SxOg5bblGJd1v8ZTGS5KBCDc
Great article. Shows what digital learning looks like right now in a well-funded district, & it ain’t a good look.
Is this true in most schools? I can’t imagine having music classes without Orff instruments, a selection of percussion instruments and grade level classroom BOOKS from which to sing songs. I used the copy machine quite a bit.
…………………..
Quote from article: We were told to have “back up plans” on paper but with copy limitations (some schools don’t allow photocopies at all, or only at teacher expense) and with fewer textbooks (some schools have replaced all of their textbooks with the digital version) that only goes so far.
As Master of the Universe Bill Gates pointed out in a recent Bill Gates Love Fest erroneously described as an interview, the big fortunes today (by which he means, really big) all come from tech. And so, tech is very seductive to the oligarch, despite its dangers. It’s easy to overlook the downside of anything that is going to bring one, personally, THAT MUCH money. So, few (Bill Joy is an example) will call it out, even when it is so obviously a car self-driving at enormous speed (and acceleration) into a wall.
So, self-deception is easy when one is benefiting from it. Another example: That’s why we have an entire political party that is willfully ignoring the obvious elephant in the room–the fact that Donald Trump is a Russian asset. Yes, there are some who are too stupid to recognize this, but this group doesn’t include most Republicans slithering across the NATIONAL stage. They know well what the man is, but they are benefiting too much from his ignorance and amorality and neglect of the nation’s business. They are engaged in a riot of looting and can do so because this guy is in charge.
And speaking of intelligence, if there is anyone in our intelligence services who still doubts that Donald Trump is a Russian asset, then we certainly can’t use the term “intelligence” to describe him or her. As I said after the nadir of Western Civilization was reached in the recent laying on of hands on Trump in the Whiter House’s Offal Office, well, that’s that. Perhaps there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
The bots are coming for our liberties, for our jobs, and then for our lives. And we are paying for the privilege. The daughter of a friend of mine recently graduated from Chicago Law School. You’re lucky, they told her class at orientation, because you are attending one of the top schools. You will have a job. Most of this work will soon be automated.
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/05/11/he-sees-you-when-youre-sleeping-2/
A very sad reality, Bob, for our future. Even some of the “ever Trumpers” are having second thoughts about the orange menace, but the vast majority remain loyally brainwashed.
Much credit to Andrew Yang for bringing this issue to the forefront this primary season.
YES!!! And for this, he gets made fun of. I read those pieces about Yang and despair.
So, what do we do about it? Will some actual intelligence in the universe stumble on our planet after we are gone and dig up our movies and comic books and say, “They saw it coming and did nothing about it because they were too busy asking Alexa to play ‘Earth’ by Little Dickey.”
NB: I am not attacking Little Dickey. Irony. It’s a literary technique, he says, anachronistically.
I stumbled upon this episode about 1/2 way through and it was really unsettling to watch. It made me glad that I have invested in life skills while staying home with my kids (gardening, canning, fermentation, cooking, sewing etc) because there will be no more middle class. It will be the haves and the have nots and the have nots will live like peasants.
OMG, Lisa!!!! YES!!!!!! Smart.
I, too, have invested in learning and teaching these skills.
Lisa. This is a robot trained to make “Grandma’s Spaghetti.” I
t also does other kitchen chores. This You Tube has been ginned up with several story lines, but the sections showing the skills of the robot are worth looking at.
“He sees you when you’re sleeping.” –from “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” John Frederick Coots and Haven Gillespie
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face–forever.” –George Orwell, 1984
“Every time I close my eyes, all I see is people dying.” –Sentence spoken spontaneously to San Franciscan Shawn Kinnear by the Amazon Echo personal assistant Alexa
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/17/my-candidate-for-the-most-important-book-you-could-ever-read/
An important and beautifully written post, Diane.
China has perfected the art of facial recognition and uses it to surveil everyone.”
They may use it to surveil everyone but there is good reason to believe that they have not perfected it.
Even state of the art systems are easily fooled and unreliable even when they are not being fooled.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/3/13507542/facial-recognition-glasses-trick-impersonate-fool
Of course, I am sure the Chinese government is not particularly concerned about that.
The documentary “In the Age of AI” has a good segment about Chinese facial recognition and surveillance
I watched the Frontline Age of AI. Thanks for the heads up. I was aware of the evolving use of social credit scores in China, based on multi-location surveillance for compliance with rules for “good behavior.” I did not see/hear a discussion of the techniques being developed to defeat facial recognition, many of these extensions of old fashioned “fool the eye” painting, makeup for the stage, and principles for camouflage in military contexts. Computers are being trained to detect fake photos of people.
I get news about biometric tracking from this website. https://www.biometricupdate.com.
Some time ago, a member of Congress tried to introduce a bill limiting data-collection. It reflected a sophisticated understanding of the connection between biometric data gathering and the use of predictive analytics for “affective” states in addition to academics. At some other time I will find the failed legislation and post it.
And here, a piece of flash fiction-a very short short story–about surveillance: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/17/he-sees-you-when-youre-sleeping/
And a longer one (sci fi): https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/stories/algorithm-a-short-story-bob-shepherd/
The Terminator – The Machines are Coming .
perhaps more like, the NUMBERS are coming….
This is an excellent documentary. It makes the key points that around 1975, wages decoupled from productivity. The former went flat, the latter continued to climb enormously, almost doubling to date. The number of workers needed to produce the same value almost halved due to automation. This trend isn’t going to stop. It’s going to accelerate. The question is, what do we do about this? But we are having no national conversation about this. We have Mr. Yang, who gets it, speaking into a hurricane.
Meanwhile, Mr. Zuckerberg, who has committed himself to computerizing our social lives and the schooling of our children, is teaching himself how to slaughter and dress his own goats. I’m not making this up. I wish I were.
You wish you were learning to slaughter and dress your own goat So?
No slaughtering goats for me. I’m a vegan. LOL.
Sounds like he totally gets where we’re headed…
Mark Zuckerberg is dressing goats?
Why does that not surprise me?
I wonder what his wife thinks.
What worries me the most is that there is actually one episode that looks quite familiar [similar] to today, which is the British Industrial Revolution, where wages didn’t grow for nine decades, and a lot of people actually saw living standards decline. –Swedish-German economist Carl Benedikt Frey, author of The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor and Power in the Age of Automation (from the documentary referenced in Diane’s post).
I got to watch the first fifteen minutes of the documentary. At school where I have the ability. At my house, TV channels I used to get quite clearly are now pixels, and Internet connection is too slow without the expensive satellite. The irony mentioned above about the British Industrial Revolution is being replayed at my house as I become more disconnected while society becomes more connected.
One point about technology makes me think of anoth r phenomenon in the first industrial revolution. Machines did in fact make better cloth and thread. After a time, wages and standard of living rose for Europeans, though not for Congolese, Chinese, or Indians. The rise in wages worldwide in the present cycle of industrial development is not distributed very evenly, and the social impact of this threatens to rend the world social fabric.
Kurt Vonnegut raised a lot of pertainent questions about such a world in Player Piano, a dystopian novel. I think I should read it again.
Roy,
Watch the whole documentary! You won’t regret it.
Good advice about Player Piano. A great book. And prescient.
Remember when they said there would be flying cars by such and such a date? Self-driving cars would dominate the roads by 2020? Why do tech enthusiasts always think they can predict the future of products still in development? They’re usually wrong.
The flying cars are already here , as the techies promised.
Teslas and other self driving vehicles are flying into pedestrians, semis, road work barriers, parked fire trucks and various and sundry other moving and fixed objects.
And they would be probably be a lot safer if they were flying more than ten feet off the ground.
I couldn’t agree more. I’m also concerned about how evolution will be affected.
With good reason. The emerging transhumanist technologies will be available to an d controlled by the very wealthy.
Instead of talking about loss of jobs, workers should demand that the benefits of automation are shared with them: they should be able to work at less repetitive, less dangerous jobs, they should work, say, only 6 hours a day for the same or better pay, and should have 2 months paid vacation time every year.
We have billionaires exactly because the benefits of the modern world are only theirs. This needs to change.
Your point was literally driven home to me on a recent trip to Florida with my father, whom I helped drive down.
Along the way we passed many many (did I say many?) Amazon trucks travelling roads that we the American public have paid for.
Amazon alone accounts for half of all e commerce.
Jeff Bezos owes his entire fortune to US, the American taxpayers, not just because we buy his stuff, but also because his business depends on public infrastructure (same with Zuckergberg, whose company exists solely because of the internet, a government funded project)
If it’s not bad enough that Bezos trucks are driving around essentially for for free on our roads (and degrading them with their heavy loads so that we will have to redo them), his company pays no taxes
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/02/15/amazon-pays-no-2018-federal-income-tax-report-says/2886639002/
Bezos is what you call a freeloader (freeroader too). He’s worse by far than even the very worst “welfare King or Queen”
Seriously, SDP, do you think this will change?
We must change it, or Bezos will make himself king of the world and all of us his servants. Can we change it? Of course we can; we’ve done it before. Standard Oil was broken up. FDR was elected president four times. The ozone layer was saved… Go Bernie.
SomeDAM Poet You are correct,of course. Republicans are busy damning publically funded infrastucture and services as socialism, of course. At the same time they are eager to engage in “asset recycling” a fancy phrase for any scheme that extracts profits from public investments.
I find this whole thing frightening.
Self driving cars? Maybe someday they’ll work, but for now I wouldn’t ever get inside one.
High tech in schools? Children are not learning social skills nor how to write long compositions since they text in short sentences. Suicides and loneliness are on the rise because humans are meant to interact with each other.
Facial recognition? Imagine the trouble protestors like me would get into if Trump had more power. This ability to ‘look’ into everything that everyone is doing is frightening because it is laying the groundwork for abuse by individuals with power.
If all of this continues, it will make me long to retreat to some far away place where the internet never reached. I’d much rather look at the beauty of nature…which is being polluted and destroyed by our ‘advancements’.
Dearest carolmalaysia:
I have the same of your idea – “to retreat to some faraway place where the internet never reached.” –
Let billionaires and millionaires along with their “fame, fortune and greedy servants “enjoying their own creation of polluted beaches and mountains”. Sigh! Love you. May
Indeed ! Documentary about ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is very informative.