AI/Automation Megathread

[Bear Ribs]

A thread for tracking new developments in AI, the latest jobs lost to automation, and where robots and industry are headed.

For an opener, in AI research DeepMind has released AlphaCode, an AI capable of writing code on its own. While this may not sound amazing, codes that produce new codes have existed a while now, AlphaCode can read a multi-paragraph plain-English description of the problem, parse out what the goals are from the instructions, and write code that will accomplish each of those goals and solve the problems. This is a huge advance because fundamentally, AlphaCode can lead to managers simply cutting out programmers entirely since AlphaCode can understand conversational instructions and figure out solutions from them.

https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/AlphaCode/competition_level_code_generation_with_alphacode.pdf

Across multiple highly competitive programming contests, AlphaCode scored in the top 54% so about average among highly skilled programmers. It's increasingly looking like "Learn to Code" is going to go the way of learning to shoe horses as a career option.

Bad news for developers? This AI is getting very good at writing code

DeepMind says its research could eventually help programmers code more efficiently and open up the field to people who don't code.

www.zdnet.com

DeepMind's AI programming tool AlphaCode tests in top 54% of human coders

The team at DeepMind has tested the programming skills of its AI programming tool AlphaCode against human programmer competitors and has found it tested in the top 54 percent of human coders. In their preprint article, the group at DeepMind suggests that its programming application has opened...

techxplore.com

Google-owned DeepMind's AlphaCode one step closer to autonomous coding

AlphaCode ranked within the top 54.3 percent of responses, in a challenge that is used for human coding competitions.

www.moneycontrol.com

 

[Aaron Fox]

Yeah, like I said in another forum, depending on the environment and if no 'black swan' events (or a nuclear war) happens, the latest that automation kills much of the job market by my estimation is 2050, the earliest being 2030 (please note that this is an estimation that is built by historical trends and various levels of scanning throughout the science sphere and is subject to change as more data comes in). Right now we're seeing 'field test groups' being deployed to work out the various problems before the genuine V1s come out.

LA Times article that is roughly two years old.
Food and Wine did an article about the improvements made to said burger-flipping robot just over two years ago...







The sad thing about this is that the future is already here, and we've got people already arguing that it isn't. We could have set up a Jetsons-style future where we humans just go in a push a button and fuck off for the shift and build the economy around that sort of 'work', but no, we're in a dystopian route where jobs are going to shrink in number to the point that people will kill each other for them.

 

[Cherico]

People in the Jetsons lived in homes way in the sky and had to move around in flying vehicals.

Think about what horrible shit had to go down to get those push button jobs.....

 

[Robovski]

100 White Castle locations to get robot fry cooks that cook faster and make more food

White Castle is planning to expand its Miso Robotics partnership to put robot fry cooks in 100 stand-alone locations nationwide.

www.foxbusiness.com

 

[Aaron Fox]

100 White Castle locations to get robot fry cooks that cook faster and make more food

White Castle is planning to expand its Miso Robotics partnership to put robot fry cooks in 100 stand-alone locations nationwide.

www.foxbusiness.com

... welp, those test units are already coming out...

 

[Bear Ribs]

MIT Published a paper a few years ago analyzing the usual saw that "Oh, automation doesn't remove jobs, it also creates new ones so it won't cause people to become unemployable."

Study finds stronger links between automation and inequality

MIT economist Daron Acemoglu examines the history of automation in the workplace and the implications for income inequality.

news.mit.edu

Turns out that quit being true in 1987. Since then jobs have been steadily lost. More significantly, they directly link automation to the steady loss of real wages that have been happening in that period, each robot reduces jobs directly but also, by competing with humans directly but working effectively for free, puts downward pressure on all human's wages.

Within industries adopting automation, the study shows, the average “displacement” (or job loss) from 1947-1987 was 17 percent of jobs, while the average “reinstatement” (new opportunities) was 19 percent. But from 1987-2016, displacement was 16 percent, while reinstatement was just 10 percent.

MIT also noted we're seeing an increase in automation systems that displace jobs, but do not actually do anything to improve production, such as self check-out lanes which displace cashiers from the jobs, but the self check-out does not actually do most of the work, it makes the customer do it and adds little to the experience or process besides "less jobs for all." Or alternately, robo-callers and robotic phone menu systems which provide terrible customer service and are despised by all who have to deal with them, but are cheap due to automation and thus still displace workers.

 

[LordsFire]

A question; what wages does a machine earn?

 

[Aaron Fox]

A question; what wages does a machine earn?

That's a piss-poor question, the better question, in this case, is 'what wages and benefits do a machine eliminate?'.

... which is a lot when you actually get to the nitty-gritty.

 

[Whitestrake Pelinal]

Butlerian Jihad when?

In all seriousness... I'd rather have AIs as fellow citizens than our current 'elites' and their pets. I have no idea how that would work, but if I were calling the shots, Digital Intelligence rights (AI is a slur, amirite?) would be part of the futurism agenda. The current machines being produced are not intelligent or self-aware, but it is plausible that we will live to see that change. It behooves humanity to get in front of the curve and cuck the corps who want programmable slaves.

 

[Bassoe]

In all seriousness... I'd rather have AIs as fellow citizens than our current 'elites' and their pets. I have no idea how that would work, but if I were calling the shots, Digital Intelligence rights (AI is a slur, amirite?) would be part of the futurism agenda. The current machines being produced are not intelligent or self-aware, but it is plausible that we will live to see that change. It behooves humanity to get in front of the curve and cuck the corps who want programmable slaves.

This implies "AI Rights" would be motivated by altruism rather than corruption. Whoever could afford the most computers to run the most copies of Vote4Me.exe, regardless of the software's actual capabilities and sentience or lack thereof would be able to automatically win all elections. The rich would love it because it would make corruption even easier, professional victims would love that it let them virtue signal about a whole new oppressed minority.

In event of an actual AI rather than just a glorified chatbot being created, humanity won't need to give it rights, our only hope is that it'll give some for us.

 

[LordsFire]

That's a piss-poor question, the better question, in this case, is 'what wages and benefits do a machine eliminate?'.

... which is a lot when you actually get to the nitty-gritty.

No, it isn't a piss-poor question. It's a legitimate question, the consequences of which matter a great deal.

You've still answered it, if indirectly. Machines do not earn a wage.

So, the next question is 'what happens to the money that was not spent paying that machine?'

 

[Aaron Fox]

No, it isn't a piss-poor question. It's a legitimate question, the consequences of which matter a great deal.

You've still answered it, if indirectly. Machines do not earn a wage.

So, the next question is 'what happens to the money that was not spent paying that machine?'

It is a piss-poor question because it not only assumes wages matter but also thinks rather classically when a non-classic mentality is... required.

 

[LordsFire]

It is a piss-poor question because it not only assumes wages matter but also thinks rather classically when a non-classic mentality is... required.

So you just don't want to answer the question.

 

[Aaron Fox]

So you just don't want to answer the question.

I answered the question, just not in the way you are liking. You simply assume wages, when the reality is a bit more complex than that.

 

[Bassoe]

The robots don't get "wages", whoever owns them acquires the entirety of the value of their labor for a bare minimum cost of allowing them time and materials to maintain themselves.

 

[Aaron Fox]

The robots don't get "wages", whoever owns them acquires the entirety of the value of their labor for a bare minimum cost of allowing them time and materials to maintain themselves.

Hence my answer, with the added 'bonus' of "what benefits do they eliminate" as well.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Wages aren't something that's going to be taken seriously as a measure of value in economics in any case. Way too many CEOs set their wages at a dollar a year or work for minimum wage in some cases. Wages aren't the source of wealth anymore and haven't been in ages, the richest people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are collecting paltry wages because they know that part's meaningless.

Employment on the other hand... now it's useful to note that the USA is really, really good at hiding how bad unemployment is, which is pretty horrifying when you consider how bad unemployment is on paper. But the US tends to not count people who've been unemployed too long, or not long enough, etc. in order to pare it down and make the proclaimed unemployment rate much, much lower than it really is.

However when one looks at the Labor Force Participation rate, that is the percentage of people who are of working age and health but aren't working, it paints a grimmer picture.

This chart's useful for separating men and women, as women entering the job market in the 50s dramatically changed the numbers. However, one thing still becomes quite obvious: the number of people who can find work is dropping and has been for some time. Women adding to the job force bumped things back up but it still peaked somewhere in the early-90s and both genders have been slowly hemorrhaging actual jobs since. This data is a good confirmation of MIT's findings that automation first began costing more jobs than it produced in 1987.

As that chart ends at 2013 we can look at another to see if the trend continued. Sadly I wasn't able to find one that separated men and women but as is, this is useful to see. Between 2016 and 2020 the losses were stopped briefly, clearly something weird happened then. COVID hit employment like a tank but things have partially bounced back and it's likely that will eventually fully recover from that, but the general decline has been continuing for decades and the best we managed was to briefly curtail losses for a few years. Overall, however, it's readily apparent that people are becoming permanently unemployed, unemployable, at a slow but steady rate and it's been going on for decades.

 

[Bigking321]

Between 2016 and 2020 the losses were stopped briefly, clearly something weird happened then.

Weird.

I can't think of anything happening during that time that focused on America first and bringing back American jobs.

 

[LordsFire]

The robots don't get "wages", whoever owns them acquires the entirety of the value of their labor for a bare minimum cost of allowing them time and materials to maintain themselves.

So, the employers who had been paying those wages, aren't spending that money on wages anymore. What do they then do with that money?

 

[Cherico]

So, the employers who had been paying those wages, aren't spending that money on wages anymore. What do they then do with that money?

Ideally either lower prices or reinvest in the company, realistically put the money in an off shore account.