2017-11-20
- It’s not that [AI will take jobs. It is that humans with high technology affinity will take the jobs of humans with low technology affinity.
Many people have the image of AI as an entity that actively takes away human jobs, premature anthropomorphism. [Before AI can act with free will, it must first be used by humans, and those who cannot be used by AI will be replaced by those who can.
Technological advances have indeed made some jobs obsolete. Automatic knitting machines, for example, have taken the jobs of hand knitters. This is precisely what happened: the capitalists who could afford to buy automatic knitting machines took the jobs of hand knitters. The destruction of machines in the Luddite movement did not stop social change. This is because the agents of change were not the technology and machines, but the people who used them.
There are three broad changes that are taking place commercially right now.
- The development of optimization methods such as AdaGrad has made it possible to train neural nets with many layers. Combined with such innovations as saving parameters by convolution, the accuracy of image recognition has increased dramatically through the training of neural nets. This has made it possible to mechanize fields where mechanization has not progressed due to the reason that “human beings have to make judgments by seeing.
- The entities that want to push for this are employers who are currently hiring people on a large scale for the purpose of “eyes” and whose productivity will increase once they have “eyes” that do not get tired and do not make mistakes. The ones who will be eliminated are those who were only contributing as “eyes”.
- The accuracy of natural language processing through statistics has increased, backed by a large corpus. Combined with the above-mentioned advances in deep learning, the accuracy of machine translation is increasing. This is making progress in mechanizing the need for “rough translation,” which does not need to be perfect.
- The entities that will push for this are companies with offices in multiple regions with different languages that will benefit from the elimination of language barriers. What will be eliminated will be translators who can only translate general texts without a high level of expertise or quality.
- Advances in technologies such as WebRTC for bidirectional video and voice communication via the Internet, as well as information sharing and task management technologies via the Internet, have reduced the cost of remote work and parallel work. This has led to increased collaboration among people and organizations that were previously unable to work together due to their physically distant locations.
- The entities that want to promote this are organizations that want to collaborate with a variety of specialists. What will be eliminated by this is the “person who is not so highly skilled that he/she has little value in the market, but is highly valued within the company because he/she is the most knowledgeable” who has been protected by the barrier of physical distance.
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