Everything I hear from the liberalverse says that all jobs will be going away because of robots and artificial intelligence, therefore we must impose a universal basic income...blah, blah, blah.
Working at GD, I wrote a proposal to my boss for automating a substantial portion of his department’s work using programs we already owned. He smiled and said, “Fine. You’ll be the first one I lay off.”
The thing is, their overhead was ridiculous. It was costing the company business. But, their thinking was, the higher the cost the more the profit. That only goes so far and then companies like Oshkosh and General Defense eat your lunch, as, indeed, they did.
I note that all of these companies tout the capabilities of AI to help market and sell more effectively. That's just great. I really want to be hectored to buy useless, over priced products that I don't want or need, by a clever machine. As if loud radio and TV ads, and pop ups on the internet weren't aggravating enough.
Worldwide there is a big shortage of AI competent people. It requires math skills that used to be common among tool and die makers ... but are now rare. AI requires building models where the bias is known. But it seems there is a shortage of people who can recognize their bias.
So if AI creates a million jobs and 95% of those jobs cannot be filled by competent people, then what good is it to society? If 25% of those jobs are filled by incompetent people who can’t do math and don’t recognize their bias, then is that 25% of jobs an asset to society?
For example, a well known AI health analytics firm did analytics and got the math all wrong... and they got it wrong because their bias convinced them that the wrong answer was the right answer.
Don’t hold your breath.