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The Forum > Article Comments > Artificial Intelligence: making the rich richer and the poor poorer > Comments

Artificial Intelligence: making the rich richer and the poor poorer : Comments

By Tania de Jong, published 26/4/2018

Underemployment and unemployment are being affected by growing use of artificial intelligence in the workplace.

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Artificial intelligence? Well, As we continue with migration to fill jobs that will disappear long before most of these folk reach retirement age! let's hope we find some cause there's bugger all in our parliaments! We're reliably informed as much as 90% of our occupations will be largely automated making many occupations, some of them white-collar, more or less redundant! Our answer? Import more and more people to create demand! And try and employ them in service industries? The most sensitive to economic downturns! So we have all these extra consumers, and by deliberate design! And toss them on the scrap heap long before their use by date! As we obsess over who occupies the treasury benches and whose cronies are best served by the current power paradigm! As logic's rites are sacrificed on the altar of rank political opportunism and climate change denial. Almost as if the inmates are now running the asylum? More later. Alan B.
Posted by Alan B., Thursday, 26 April 2018 9:41:51 AM
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Most of the unskilled jobs of this automated future will be in aged care! Gardeners, housekeepers, cooks and handymen, So, why not set the economy up as one vast retirement home by making it the premier retirement location for the cashed up, self-funded retirees of the world? And in the most desirable locations. As brand new built from the ground up Harvey Bay type development. There's a huge largely undeveloped western coastline and with a dry Mediterranean climate. Add energy costing as little as 2 cents per KwH and a tax paradigm that takes only 15% of their earnings? Add in very affordable desalination, a few golf courses and first world health clinics and this becomes retirement paradise. One of the services on offer has to be a translation teleservice, so these folk won't need English language skills, just pots and pot of liquid capital, invested here in high tech manufacture or self-terminating, tax-free government guaranteed, thirty-year bonds. The language translation services offered will, by and large, eliminate those migrants we'd rather not have inside our protected borders. With all the unskilled worker gainfully employed all we'd then need are our best and brightest employed in the high tech manufacturing industries of the future, which will best serve the local economy as, free market, private enterprise, co-ops!
Posted by Alan B., Thursday, 26 April 2018 10:10:27 AM
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Tania de Jong's thesis is a popular one, but it does not stand up to any hard scrutiny. Technology has obviously changed our lives in many ways, but has not boosted productivity. Yes statistics are compiled on this point and I invite Tania to make an effort to look at them. For years economists have been joking that the can see the IT revolution everywhere but in the productivity figures. No robot revolution - sorry. The question of just why this is so has been the subject of a lot of debate I'm not really qualified to discuss.. Then again I could be a rouge AI trying to confuse the issue.. Beep!
Posted by curmudgeonathome, Thursday, 26 April 2018 10:42:48 AM
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Following that link and reading Lee's article in the NY Times I thought to myself "what a fine writer and thinker, I wonder what else he does."

It turns out that he funds the deployment of algorithms which enable the finance industry to prey on the poor en masse by muscling in on the ages-old racket of lending them small amounts of money at absurd interest rates. Blessed with an amazing mind, at heart he is just another predator. With people like these at the helms of industry, what hope do we ordinary people have?

https://qz.com/984709/kai-fu-lee-a-former-google-china-ceo-predicts-big-banks-will-fall-first-to-artificial-intelligence/

"Lee’s VC firm, Sinovation Ventures, has started to invest in this space by financing Smart Finance Group, a company which algorithmically determines eligibility for payday loans. Lee expects the company’s algorithms to pay out 30 million loans this year, giving the company scale that would never have been achievable when hiring humans to do the same job. That core technology would be easily applicable to other kinds of loans and financial decisions."
Posted by JohnM, Thursday, 26 April 2018 11:17:04 AM
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We work harder and longer, without the productivity gains this was supposed to create! Why? Because our production is like the Leyland Brothers, all over the countryside. With nuts and bolts manufactured in one state, gearboxes and diffs in another and so on and so forth in the most disjointed, grown like Topsy, manufacturing paradigm in creation. And so it is with much of our manufactured products and contracting to the cities, service provision. Some of it created by the insane interstate competition! When our competition is out there, not inside our national sovereign borders. Fiat cars were, I'm led to believe, manufactured on a single site, every part of them! We need a good strong dose of rationalism and an ability to set aside our inculcated idealogical imperatives and servitude to any but our very own and inside our sovereign borders. By focusing on and preferencing cooperative capitalism at every opportunity, we can return Australia to the land of egalitarian opportunity it once was. Only more so! And if that makes me a rouge? Colour me a rouge! Alan B.
Posted by Alan B., Thursday, 26 April 2018 11:20:56 AM
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Alan B, you are a modern Machiavelli, outlining the parameters of a new feudalism in real time. Bravo!

/sarc off
Posted by JohnM, Thursday, 26 April 2018 11:25:58 AM
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This article is sound in the way that it raises the perceived problems which could occur with wide use of AI. However, the author writes within the reasoning constraints of present day times and does not factor in the innate ability of mankind to adapt to new methods and craft them towards previously unrecognised goals. The tenor of Tania's article is couched strongly in the origin of the English 19th weavers who formed the Luddites to subvert the introduction and use of automated looms. Naturally, they had no possibility of forecasting the beneficial outcome of this new mechanical intelligence - this is perfectly normal for most of mankind. Yet there are brilliant thinkers who perhaps glimpse possible adaptions of emergent technology. Over a little more than a century, we have seen the operation of the motor car shift from a replacement of the horse, with the legal need to be preceded by a walking person bearing a red warning flag, to the present day when autonomous GPS controlled driverless card are a fact of existence. Don't overlook mankind's ability to devise and adapt changes to what is perceived as threatening technology and put it to uses which as yet are unforseen.
Posted by Ponder, Thursday, 26 April 2018 12:34:43 PM
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I once upon a time had a school friend who's father had a small workshop in his back yard, where for endlessly, he manufactured wooden pegs.
Thane came plastic pegs. Wherefore art thou now O old wooden peg maker?
Posted by diver dan, Thursday, 26 April 2018 12:59:28 PM
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JohnM. Suggest you try talking from a little higher up next time. What I'm suggesting is very much the opposite of feudalism. Co-ops were largely the only PRIVATE ENTERPRISE, FREE MARKET, BUSINESS MODEL TO SURVIVE THE GREAT DEPRESSION, MOSTLY INTACT! If you want to see this model demonstrated in real time? Take a trip to Melany in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. Simply put, co-ops outperform every other business model hands down and are invariably places completely free of union interference. Moreover, the money earned by such co-operative, free-market, private enterprise, stays far longer in the local economy! Thereby making the usual economic flow-on factors do as much as 7-8 times more (economic growth) work and wealth creation, for more than just a few. The key to making this work is to quarantine both energy, capital and the real estate market from the ravages of debt-laden foreign speculation! Which by the way, all it took to destroy the Celtic Tiger/Irish economic miracle! Alan B.
Posted by Alan B., Thursday, 26 April 2018 2:38:24 PM
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Alan B, you are quite right, that comment was beneath me. Please accept my apologies for the sarcasm.

The problem as I see it with your vision of the future is not the prevalance of co-ops, but that you seem to think it a desirable thing that the poor of Australia maintain the retirement estates of the rich of the world.

As for those of us who, by dint of talent or good fortune, do not have to work the states of the world's retired aristocracy being employed in techno-utopian co-ops, I am ambivalent. It depends entirely on what they are producing and the net benefit to mankind and the planet at large. So far the record of humans and the uses to which they put technology has been far from good.

Production of good and services is not, despite the economic orthodoxy, necessarily a good thing in and of itself. To be a good thing it must be part of a socially and environmentally sound endeavour. Natural disasters and medical mistakes add to GDP just like construction or manufacturing. Will these techno-collectives be producing war machines, by any chance? Or machines for environmental remediation? Or more machines to put even more people out of their jobs so that they have to labour in the ever-growing estate-cities?

Even after more in-depth consideration, the retirement estate labour element of your utopia still looks distinctly feudal to me, and the techno-collective elements seems morally socially, ethically and environmentally indifferent.

In short, it is not a pleasant vision of an Australian future.

On the other hand, quarantining Australia from the ravages of debt-laden foreign investment is an admirable concept. The Whitlam Government had the same idea in the early 70s and it didn't turn out all that well for them. Foreign capital has a way of getting what it wants.

I enjoy your posts, Alan. Please accept my comments as critical rejoinders in the greater cause of developing sensible policy.
Posted by JohnM, Thursday, 26 April 2018 3:53:02 PM
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Tania de Jong,

You (like many others) fail to understand that it's quite easy for governments to enable enough jobs to be created for everyone. All they have to do is set fiscal and monetary policy to ensure there's enough money going into the economy.

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Alan B.,

What makes you think we don't have the productivity gains this was supposed to create?
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Diver,

I don't think you understand the meaning of "wherefore".
Posted by Aidan, Thursday, 26 April 2018 6:03:46 PM
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