<story><title>The rise of the useless class</title><url>http://ideas.ted.com/the-rise-of-the-useless-class/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>charles-salvia</author><text>I can&amp;#x27;t help but be skeptical of things like this... historically speaking, humans tend to underestimate just how many things we do that require full &amp;quot;general intelligence&amp;quot; to make &amp;quot;common-sense&amp;quot; decisions. Despite recent advances in machine-learning (i.e. adding more layers to neural networks, i.e. adding more columns to a matrix), we don&amp;#x27;t really have anything that even approaches an artificial general intelligence.  What we &lt;i&gt;do&lt;/i&gt; have is a suite of sophisticated statistical algorithms that basically perform regression using huge data sets.  This often approximates &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; subset of what a general artifical intelligence could do for &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; use cases that mostly apply to recognizing fuzzy patterns.  But it&amp;#x27;s not even close to approaching human-level intelligence.&lt;p&gt;In general, modern machine learning has focused mostly on the &amp;quot;pattern recognition&amp;quot; aspect of intelligence derived from statistical algorithms, while making little significant progress with other key aspects associated with higher cognitive processes such as general reasoning, planning and creativity (apart from simplistic rule-based approaches like decision trees, or highly domain-specific problems like using massive data sets to teach a computer to play Go.)&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t doubt that something close to general AI will eventually seriously threaten human usefulness&amp;#x2F;dignity, but I question the timeline of &amp;quot;decades away&amp;quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>The rise of the useless class</title><url>http://ideas.ted.com/the-rise-of-the-useless-class/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>shas3</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m sure there is a good critique of that Frey and Osborne paper. Epistemologically, it sounds weird to assign &amp;#x27;probabilities of automation.&amp;#x27; I don&amp;#x27;t have the time to read the paper in detail, but here are a few things:&lt;p&gt;1. Automation doesn&amp;#x27;t imply that jobs go away. Classic example, deposits and withdrawals were automated by ATMs. Yet, the number of cashiers increased.&lt;p&gt;2. Automation by itself is not sufficient. Will we reach a point where it is cheaper to automate a job than hire a person? Think of non-forklift lifting&amp;#x2F;moving of heavy stuff, we don&amp;#x27;t really need people doing this manually, robots should be able to do it. But we see with the Boston Dynamics robots that we are many years or decades away from commoditizing lifting robots.&lt;p&gt;3. &amp;#x27;useless&amp;#x27; class already exists. Employment and usefulness aren&amp;#x27;t necessarily the same. There are many millions of people in jobs that are &amp;#x27;useless&amp;#x27; by some metrics (gas station attendant, supermarket cashiers, etc).</text></comment>