https://www.lexisnexis.com/communities/state-net/b/capitol-j…
and not a very penetrating one at that.
IMO these “experts” have no idea what is going to happen.
There are numerous prognostications about the number of jobs that will eventually disappear from the human experience, to be taken over by the robots of the burgeoning artificial intelligence revolution.
This is the kind of thinking that leads to the video that I refused to watch. Why concentrate on the jobs that will be lost instead of on the jobs that will be created? Frederic Bastiat answered that question in his 1848 essay What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen. People can easily see the jobs that exist but they cannot even imagine what jobs might be created. Besides, bad news gets more attention than good news.
To give one example, how many computer programmers existed in 1945? ONE! Alan Turing who invented the concept of stored programs. How many are there today?
Oct 31, 2017
How Many IT Professionals Are There in the World?
Just how many developers are there in the world? This seems like a pretty straightforward question, but the answer to it is far from simple. It comes down to one fact: counting people is hard. The most commonly estimated figure in various software developer statistics is 20 million developers. Meanwhile in 2014, IDC calculated that there were approximately 18.5 million programmers worldwide. More recent data provided by Evans Data Corporation, which regularly conducts in-depth surveys of the global developer population, suggest that the total number of developers in the world is 21 million.
Whatever the real number of developers is, one thing is certain: it’s definitely larger than 21 million. Proof? There’s 21 million active GitHub users alone. While some may be duplicates, it seems implausible that GitHub would have more users than the entire industry.
The one thing we can safely assume is that there are currently over 21 million developers in the world, but any figure beyond that would be no more than a wild guess.
https://www.daxx.com/article/software-developer-statistics-2…
From one to 21 million in 73 years is a growth rate of 26%. So that the number does not look so inflated, assume there were 1000 programmers in 1945 – very highly unlikely. That would still be a growth rate of 14.6%. If we start with a more realistic 100 programmers in 1945 the growth rate would be 17%. This is what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction” which is what powers high tech stocks.
Expect politicians to come up with fluff AI laws.
Denny Schlesinger
What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen by Frederic Bastiat
http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html
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The thing is that this time is really different. No jobs will be created. Once AI’s can do things better than people can, they’ll be able to do any new job better too. Game over, man.
This really isn’t that complicated.
-IGU-
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What’s been behind the big push into AI lately - is it more powerful computers that are now cheap enough, or is it breakthroughs in software?
Look at the history of Nvidia GPUs and how they are beating Moore’s law. They perhaps may answer your question.
Tinker
What’s been behind the big push into AI lately - is it more powerful computers that are now cheap enough, or is it breakthroughs in software?
Things “emerge” when the conditions are ripe. Machine learning and deep learning require huge amounts of data which means a source, a collecting device, transmission, storage, processing power, and the right software. That would include the Internet, IoT, cloud computing, consumer electronics, neural networks and that’s a whole bunch of technologies and companies coming together to make it happen.
Most people don’t realize it but the human brain is a HUGE storage device. Under the right stimuli people can relive most of their lives because it’s all stored in the brain.
Denny Schlesinger
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