To wonder what you all think of Stephen Hawking's thoughts on AI destroying the middle classes jobs?

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www.businessinsider.com/stephen-hawking-ai-automation-middle-class-jobs-most-dangerous-moment-humanity-2016-12?r=UK&IR=T

Sort of scary but sort of not. I don't know why I don't feel afraid of it all....maybe because I'm working class and know that money means little at the end of the day anyway.

It may or may not happen. People dislike the automated phone systems but Apps are increasingly being used and maybe ChatBots will replace some front line call handling jobs though humans will need to sort out the more complicated issues that customers have.

We have coffee vending machines but Starbucks, Costa, Nero and independent coffee shops are popular. They are doing online ordering but the drink is still made by a human. The machines have not taken over coffee making.

Nanny I think it will go further than apps etc. There are programmes in development which may take the place of solicitors etc. It won't stop...that's the issue.

Coffee making and service jobs are already on the start of the journey out...well...maybe not the making of them but the serving is being automated.

McDonalds has already fully automated many restaurants in the USA with staff only in the kitchen.

I'm interested in future studies and went to a fantastic talk about 3 years ago from a leading researcher in the field. The company undertakes research and horizon scanning for some of the big global players and blue chip firms.

Part of his talk was that over the next 15-20 years, they estimate that up to 40% of white collar jobs which currently exist will simply disappear because they'll become obsolete due to technology. I've seen a demo of software that can take a document of hundreds of pages and within 60 seconds, scan it and produce a one sheet summary of the major headings/findings. That wasn't a prototype either - it's actually in use.

However the researcher did say that new jobs will be created. Whilst software and robots might summarise a document, or pick goods in the warehouse for you, you still need a human being at the end to make a decision about what they want. Growth areas for job development were - unsurprisingly - tech and programming, cyber and risk assessment and management.

Playing devil's advocate, he also said that some of this may start but stall and never fully come to pass. Humans can be fickle and you may find a backlash against fully automated processes and consumerism. Ultimately you could have a wonderfully productive company with your software and robots, but it's not going to last very long if nobody can buy your products because they don't earn any money because they can't work.

Paul that's interesting...I wonder what will happen with social media management. Currently I work in this field and I basically only need to "tidy" up some of what the programmes do...they give a sentiment to each post on a certain companies Facebook for eg. Then I go in and check and correct the "work" it's done.

It gets a LOT wrong It seems not to grasp sarcasm for example.

He isn't saying anything new, although perhaps some will take notice who didn't before because it's Hawking.

I think there might be a sort of backlash, but only in the same way as middle class people now buying organic and artisan goods - something principally for those who can afford it.

I'm disappointed that a renowned thinker such as he is hasn't provided more detailed commentary on where this is going to intersect with climate change, eventual energy price increases and so on, as well as the shortage of consumers who can no longer afford to buy so many mass produced goods, due to low income.
I expect that there will be a period where large scale automation is a big deal and it will then gradually become more difficult to run.

As politicians now are running on tickets of bringing manufacturing back to North America and Europe, I think they will one day on "jobs for people, not machines". Factory robots can't vote. (Though, in some quarters, there are more fears for the future of democracy now than for goodness knows how long.)

Penny that's true. I had hoped posting it here might get a bit of interest and some discussion because I don't know an awful lot about it all...I've read things on Reddit in the past but nothing which helped me grasp the enormity of it all.

That's the issue - and actually a really good illustration of it. A machine will make decisions based on logic. It doesn't have emotions and will struggle with the subtleties of some of our more nuanced habits.

Look at the way that some cultures can clash or be wildly different. I have a very lovely American friend who found it difficult to understand the British way of being self-deprecating. So when sitting having a conversation about kids, another friend (English) was saying about her kids being feral and my US friend was horrified! She gets it now but says it's one of the weirdest and hardest things to try and get used to. Likewise I have another friend who has settled in the States and finds it really odd to keep pace with the conversation about achievements. Her social circle there talk quite happily about how amazing their kids are and how well their husband's done at work and so on. To her it sounds really boastful, but it's not meant that way - it's just a change in culture.

If it speeds up conveyancing I think I might be all in favour of less work for solicitors! Somehow, I think the job is more nuanced than that, though.

Hawking is quite the doom-mongerer nowadays. I can't help but wonder if that's b/c of the stress of his own situation. I don't share his pessimism, although I think plenty could go wrong, not in the high-tech way he always thinks. The digital divide between high & low income countries will continue to be astonishing, too.

Remember 1950s predictions that all the modern cleaning machines would make the housewife's life one of mostly leisure, Did that happen?

It's not exactly his area of expertise, is it?

He's a physicist.

For looking at what jobs may become obsolete I'd expect us to need some people who work in technology, alongside people who currently work in those industries.

For looking at what the future will be like if certain jobs become obsolete I'd expect us to need some sociologists, economists, etc.

One of the emerging areas I've been looking at, as a hobby, is the theory that megacities will become more commonplace. Land is finite and with rising sea levels, not static forever. Increases in population mean more people to house, which puts pressure on land - look at the changes in house sizes through the years.

Land from the perspective of feeding people is also scarce, so technology is having to develop to address this issue. Meat eating will become a luxury simply because in future years there will not be enough space to accommodate livestock in the volumes needed to satisfy demand - and that's before you look at the pressure that increased housing stock will place on agricultural space. 'Real' meat will become a luxe item and the rise of micro-protein such as insects could address the gap for affordable food. Alternatively lab grown meat may also fill this gap. There's the climate issue from livestock, but I suspect that cost and the practicality of food will outweigh concerns on that front.

We're already starting to see tech to address the space issues - vertical farming for instance, in large cities like Singapore and HK.

Paul fascinating! Micro proteins! No! Fly pie and no job.

Oh God!

I lived in Silicon Valley for ten years, right in the heart of where all the big tech companies have their hqs, we saw all the new processes and applications first, there are always people out and about testing out new devices before they hit the market, apps are sent out to local industry to be beta tested, we saw them trying out the first self-driving Google cars on the streets etc. Lots of supporting industries in the area too, CNC machining and the like.

Right there is where you can already see the winds of change in the working demographic Professor Hawking talks about. It's more noticeable there but, if you're in a traditional middle-class, middle management, middle income job in the engineering, manufacturing production industries yes, I'd be worried. There is a clear and growing divide between the elite tech jobs at the top and the jobs available to those without engineering and tech degrees. As automated and app based processes replace human personnel, at the top end you will get a few more IT geniuses, programmers, design engineers, developers earning a lot of money but fewer and fewer middle range jobs available. Losses are mostly in admin, company accounting, shipping and receiving and production management since the most current software can do everything from buying raw materials right through to balancing the bought/sold ledger needing only a handful of people to do data entry whereas before you'd need at least two or three times as many to do the stuff manually. Yes, there are others jobs becoming available but these are generally support and service industry jobs that are unskilled and therefore much lower paid.

there are programmes in development which may take the place of solicitors

Where do I sign? !

I would love to crowdfund this. The legal system is the only closed shop the politicians never came after - presumably as so many did and still do make plenty from it. It needs a massive overhaul.

Cities - as with automation I think there will be growth and then crunch points (differing between cities) as growing inequality (lower employment, more crime) makes massive urban areas less appealing places to live for those in the middle. Those in huge cities in developing countries are used to such conditions, but a lot of Westerners may be frightened by the decline from what they were used to. The Greek economic crisis prompted people to leave Athens and return to the countryside as there it is easier for them to feed themselves with low or uncertain income and poor work prospects because they can grow food.

I think megacities are likely to be most appealing in countries where there is still a lot of growth and effective infrastructure investment, like China.

Haven't read the link, but the sort of job that could be taken over by a computer is probably the sort of job that could be taken over by a human in India, say. So if you have that sort of job, being paid at UK rates, the threat is more immediate than future AI.

Interesting article. He has a good point, despite being only a physicist.
Jobs are not only being moved to other countries, they are being abolished altogether and automated. He describes the process as socially destructive, and its knock on effect on politics.

''He frames this economic anxiety as a reason for the rise in right-wing, populist politics in the West: "We are living in a world of widening, not diminishing, financial inequality, in which many people can see not just their standard of living, but their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing. It is no wonder then that they are searching for a new deal, which Trump and Brexit might have appeared to represent."

BTW: Stephen Hawking - 'only a physicist'?

Are some here are being tongue in cheek by dismissing one of the most brilliant and informed minds of the last century as 'only a physicist'?

He's also a professor of applied mathematics, an acclaimed writer of books and papers that show him to be a philosopher and visionary as well as someone who can make complex scientific concepts accessible to the less scientifically minded, he's also a passionate and assiduous human/civil/disabled rights activist. His teaching positions at some of our greatest intellectual institutes include Caltech (in the aforesaid Silicon Valley) and he still very much connected to and in consultation with scientists, innovators and developers there and worldwide.

I think he deserves some recognition for being a lot more than 'only a physicist'.

I'm sceptical about this kind of pronouncement. We were supposed to have robots doing our housework now, if I recall correctly some of the forecasts made twenty years ago. Well, I'd like to know - where the fuck is my fucking robot!!

He is an informed commentator on a number of areas, but this interview repeats material that has been discussed in the media for 3 or so years now; there was a spate of books on it last year, too. The comments are based on others' research, it's not just speculation. Those wanting detailed systematic research could do worse than to look at this: www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/view/1314
For a shorter read, here's one of the many articles summarising that paper: www.bloomberg.com/graphics/infographics/job-automation-threatens-workforce.html

This one is better:
www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/11219688/Ten-million-jobs-at-risk-from-advancing-technology.html

LordRothmere We already have robots and automated devices doing some of the housework, robot vacuum cleaners and mops, dishwashers, washing machines, self-cleaning ovens, throw in fridges that can inventorise the contents by sending pics to your smartphone so you can see when when you're running low on milk, hepa filters in air con and heating systems to suck dust out of the air. No, it's not quite CP-3O running around with a feather duster (which would be endlessly entertaining to me, I'm easily amused) but we're already almost there.

When my parents worked they were very involved in the concept of the paperless office. Yet now some 30+ years later we still are not fully paperless in offices. Technology has changed things and it has reduced jobs - long gone is the Typing Pool - but it has also created jobs in supporting that technology, such as software development, IT support, maintenance.

Our some sectors at risk more than others? What sort of jobs are they? Could we see the likes of what happened when coal production was dramatically decreased?

"I'm disappointed that a renowned thinker such as he is hasn't provided more detailed commentary on where this is going to intersect with climate change, eventual energy price increases and so on, as well as the shortage of consumers who can no longer afford to buy so many mass produced goods, due to low income."

Perhaps because for an opinion piece in the Guardian (which is what this is - the story the OP linked to is simply a story about a Guardian piece) you only get about 900 words and you can't cover everything.

It's a good piece, but it's not saying anything new. Firms like Amazon, Facebook and Google are absolutely enormous in terms of their operations and profit but have a tiny staff. Most of what they do is automated.

At the same time, you have IBM Watson, which uses cognitive computing to carry out tasks previously carried out by highly educated people such as doctors and lawyers. It won't replace them entirely, of course not, but it will be able to do some of that work.

I would read about the Luddities before you start panicking. We have a huge range of household robots, so no need for servants, but other jobs are created. In 1901, we had 1.5 million domestic servants in a population of 38m, so about 5%. Nowadays we have very few, but not 3m unemployed servants wondering around complaining about lost jobs due to robots.

On the other hand, look at agriculture and how for centuries, a lot of innovation involved improved ways of working with horses (types of plough and so on), just as much automation improved human work. But then horses were almost entirely replaced by machines. There was no longer enough for all those horses to do.

I think the main difference is that large numbers of dissatisfied working age humans without enough to do will become a political threat or influence, in the way that animals wouldn't, and therefore to an extent they need to be catered to. The influence of exporting jobs already shows in the Brexit and Trump results; nineteenth century workers didn't have a vote, and the idea of "knowing your place" was strong.