> tell me which people you know, in which industries, have outright 'lost their jobs' due to some AI or machine?
As software developers, it's literally our jobs to put people out of work. My software is specifically designed reduce the need for increased labor as the company crows. In my industry, legal, entire departments (like night word processing) no longer exist.
The fact is you cannot extrapolate from 100 years of human history and say everything will continue on. People just a few hundred years before that could not have predicted anything about modern employment.
> The fact is you cannot extrapolate from 100 years of human history and say everything will continue on
It's a lot more than 100 years. The invention of the scientific process, the printing press, the popularization of steel and before that, bronze, heck even the invention of agriculture radically changed human societies by increasing individual productivity and enabling specialization.
> People just a few hundred years before that could not have predicted anything about modern employment.
Right, which is why it's silly for us to look at the technology we have today and say "welp, that's the end of human employment."
It is your work to increase productivity. As tedious tasks are automated, you can deploy people doing new things. As you lower the cost of the product you manufacture or service you provide, you enable more people to afford it. That's how new industries are created. I am not to worried about the amount of work available as a whole. I am more worried about the nature of the work available, which will be increasingly skilled.
> As tedious tasks are automated, you can deploy people doing new things.
That has not been my experience at all. As tedious tasks are automated, the people who do those tedious tasks are no longer required.
Ultimately we are lowering the cost of our "product" but it's not to enable more people to afford it. We need to do that because less people can afford the service as is and we need to cut costs just to stay in business. It's a race to the bottom, not a race to the top.
Even better, as you have automated tools available, no one needs you any more. 'You' being the company, that is. As factories replaced craftsmen, and distribution chains replaced individual travelling merchants, I think there is a very good chance that the very structure of centralized companies with offices and on-staff employees will dissolve. You were replying to someone working in the legal field, for example. Why does the person putting together my will or litigating a suit for me need to be backed by an organization with an office building, expensive executives, etc? An individual with the right knowledge and tools, that's all that's actually NEEDED. Much of economics centers around assuming that the market will eventually pare away inefficiencies and competition will strip away all but what is actually needed.
There is a plan to start deploying Watson-like AIs in the legal field to automatically data mine for precedents and other legal resources.
> Why does the person putting together my will or litigating a suit for me need to be backed by an organization with an office building, expensive executives, etc?
These exists because they are currently necessary (they are the "tools" you speak of) but they're a pure business cost and constantly under pressure to not exist. Computers have already reduced this back-end cost immensely. For example, lawyers these days all use dictation software rather than having a secretary write out shorthand. If all the tools can be automated, they eventually will.
The legal field in particular is an interesting one as far as automation is concerned. Several states have passed laws which make illegal the creation of software systems that do simple easily-automatable tasks like generating boilerplate documents and filling in legal forms. They have variously considered either the creation or use of such software "practicing law without a license." Lawyers see the writing on the wall and are in the perfect position to do the most terrible thing possible - invent an artificial marketplace for services which should be being done by a machine.
This isn't a terribly novel idea. Companies which produce phonebooks have been suing the hell out of municipalities which wish to discontinue the practice of automatically giving a phonebook to their residents for years now. And, by the way, they win those cases. Even in municipalities where they simply want to change receiving a phonebook into an opt-in service, they're suing. That their product actually now goes beyond being worthless directly into the territory of actively destroying value, requiring the munis to put out special dumpsters so that the residents can immediately throw away the useless things, doesn't seem to bother them. They want their money and they don't care how or why they get it.
There was an article about the issue with writing software which does legal things in the Communications of the ACM a year or so ago. I haven't kept up with the topic, but at that time several states had adopted the laws and they were being considered in others. Having lawyers pushing new laws is a pretty easy sell, though, as most legislators come from law in the first place. Some of the states have a nice exemption that just really hammers the intent home - you can run a software service that lets people fill forms, get generated documents, etc... if you pay a lawyer for each thing it does. They don't have to be involved in any way. They don't have to review the documents and put their name on them or anything like that. They just have to get a check. Honestly though, I think that is better than only making it legal for lawyers to use the software. I fear a future where everyone is yolked and herded into a cubicle to sit there and push a single button mindlessly, prodding the automated system to do its thing simply because society and management want people to have to do a job.
"I am not to worried about the amount of work available as a whole. I am more worried about the nature of the work available, which will be increasingly skilled."
This is the same thing, FWIW. Opportunities to use skilled labour rely on the existence of skilled labour capable to fulfil it. The reason is that skilled labour shortages push up the price of labour, and that reduces the viability of businesses that use it as an input, and thus reduces the number of opportunities advertised.
>>As tedious tasks are automated, you can deploy people doing new things.
That almost never happens in my experience. Deploying those people to do new things requires training them on those new things, and most companies aren't willing to make that investment, especially since said people are usually near the bottom of the totem pole and the fact that they just got made redundant by software is regarded by management as proof that they are just cogs.
As software developers, it's literally our jobs to put people out of work. My software is specifically designed reduce the need for increased labor as the company crows. In my industry, legal, entire departments (like night word processing) no longer exist.
The fact is you cannot extrapolate from 100 years of human history and say everything will continue on. People just a few hundred years before that could not have predicted anything about modern employment.