Its easy to find lots of people who worrythat artificial intelligence will create machines so smart that they will destroy a huge swath of jobs currently done by humans. As computers and robots become more adept at everything from driving to writing, say even some technology optimists such as venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, skilled jobs will quickly vanish, widening the income gap even amid unprecedented abundance. <\/p>\n
Its also easy to find lots of people who think those worries are hogwash. Technological advances have always improved productivity and created new jobs to replace those made obsolete, insistsmart people such as VC Marc Andreessen. <\/p>\n
But its rare to find people in the AI field openly fret about their work resulting in the elimination of millions upon millions of jobs. So it was interesting, indeed alarming, to find not one but two AI and machine intelligence experts raise serious concerns this week about the potential impact of recent advances on the labor market. <\/p>\n
One was Andrew Ng, the onetime head of the Google Google Brain project, a founder in the online education startup Coursera, and now chief scientist at the Chinese Internet company Baidu Baidu. At two conferences this week, the RE.WORK Deep Learning Summit in San Francisco and the Big Talk Summit in Mountain View, the former Stanford University computer science professor took the opportunity to sketch out AIs challenges to society as it replaces more and more jobs. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Historically technology has created challenges for labor, he noted. But while previous technological revolutions also eliminating many types of jobs and created some displacement, the shift happened slowly enough to provide new opportunities to successive generations of workers. The U.S. took 200 years to get from 98% to 2% farming employment, he said. Over that span of 200 years we could retrain the descendants of farmers. <\/p>\n
But he says the rapid pace of technological change today has changed everything. With this technology today, that transformation might happen much faster, he said. Self-driving cars, he suggested could quickly put 5 million truck drivers out of work. <\/p>\n
Retraining is a solution often suggested by the technology optimists. But Ng, who knows a little about education thanks to his cofounding of Coursera, doesnt believe retraining can be done quickly enough. What our educational system has never done is train many people who are alive today. Things like Coursera are our best shot, but I dont think theyre sufficient. People in the government and academia should have serious discussions about this. <\/p>\n
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