Is increasing economic inequality inevitable without catastrophe?

musicprnt
Thu, 11 May 2017 15:29:43 +0000

@momsquad:
I wish I could be more optimistic, this line in particular:
"
The next generation of movers and shakers are smart, equipped with social conscience and very diverse."

That raises a real question, are they? Are the silicon valley entrepeneurs any different than past generations in terms of caring about the wider world, or are they the same. While for example Mark Zuckerberg is used as an example of someone who at least seems to be trying to change things, for every one of him, what about the head of Uber who comes off as a sleazeball? How about the scores of kids coming out of places like Wharton and Harvard business school, are they going to be socially conscious or will they be all full of the metrics and the stockholder management that is the dominant philosophy out there? Are they going to be worried about the impact of their decisions, or will they have the mentality that they are doing their jobs, they are successful, and if people fall by the wayside 'well, that is what happens when things happen, some people win, others lose?". I wish I could be optimistic, but from what I see the movers and shakers of the next generation aren’t all that much different than the ones before them, they talk big about being socially conscious and whatnot, but in the end it seems like what they create or what they do is about personal gain and benefit while talking the party line about responsibility. I work in a building with quite a few financial firms, and I see the young kids coming to work there fresh out of top business schools and such, and judging by their conversations and the way they talk in the elevator, they could be any corporate type from any time and place.

@roethlisburger:

Language translation is not simple, most human languages on the Chomsky hierarchy are context sensitive languages, and if you take a language like English it is not a mechanical process, even with so called ‘regular grammar’ languages like Romance languages, large elements are contextual. As far as driving being simple tasks, it appears simple because we aren’t aware of the many sub conscious elements that go into human learning, the muscle memory and actions in our neural net that we aren’t aware of. Not to mention that the biggest problem automated driving systems face is having to drive with human drivers, who don’t drive as well or rationally as they claim to, the person driving with their legs while eating, the woman putting on makeup, the person who discovers his exist it coming up and scoots across 4 lanes of traffic, etc, all make it a complex problem.

The thing about AI is that it is very much like an iceberg, what you see is only what is visible, but much of the foundation is already out there, you just don’t know about it, fully automated factories. For example, people love the vision of Wall Street with these idiots snorting coke in shirt and tie (think of “the Wolf of Wall Street” or “Wall Street”), rough talking traders yelling and screaming, etc. The problem with that is that is 30 years out of date, much of the trading these days is done by algo systems, and the so called buy side firms (institutional investors) are doing more and more of their fund management using automated systems, that aren’t what they were in the past, running off standard models, the big firms now have systems in some cases that are using machine learning to basically ‘learn’ from what is happening in the markets, and change their operating models to fit what they see. Most systems of course are plain old "algo’ systems, running off fixed models, but they are being replaced.

You also are forgetting technological acceleration, 25 years ago the internet was a curiousity to many people, 25 years ago most businesses were still using leased lines for their communications, today the overwhelming majority of traffic is going over the internet. No, AI isn’t going to replace all jobs anytime soon, but it is going to heavily affect some areas in big ways much sooner than 3 or 4 decades out, I think self driving trucks are going to be here within 5-10 years, I think that people like research analysts, brokers, traders and fund managers are going to be increasingly gone, thinks like corporate tax analysis that today corporations like GE have huge departments to handle, will likely be done via large scale AI systems.

Put it this way, if 10 years ago or so you had predicted what smartphones were going to do, the impact they have had across the board, people would have laughed at you, today people have the power of a supercomputer 15 years ago sitting in their hands.

It is true they have been hyping AI for as many years as the term has been around, and that a lot of what they promised still has not come about (kind of reminds me of nuclear fusion technology, always seems to be 10-15 years out), but the reality is that AI is used in all kinds of things you wouldn’t even think about, it is more the frog in the pot of water thing than jumping into the boiling pot. There is an interesting chicken and egg thing here to me, after reading Sebastian Junger’s book (well, really a novella, it is only 80 pages) called “Tribe”, the economic dislocation of many have caused a societal schism, division, whatever you want to call it, at a time when you would hope people pull together and realize they have a common cause, instead they are more and more divided, and this doesn’t bode well because on the part of those who will benefit greatly from AI taking over jobs will say “I got mine, that is all that matters”, and those displaced, angry, will be looking for scapegoats to blame and any messiah they can grasp onto, rather than coming together and demanding that they have a right to a good life, too.

BTW, even if the impact of AI is decades away, even if it won’t affect many of us, it will affect our kids and grandkids, that is another problem with many, they don’t seem to care what will come for their descendents and only focus on today.