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This led Silicon Valley entrepreneur Martin Ford to predict that AI was not likely to replace human truck drivers anytime soon. Their performance was not as good as a human. Three years later, six autonomous vehicles completed a 60-mile circuit through an abandoned military base among moving cars, pedestrians, and street signs. In a 2004 DARPA challenge, the best car chugged only seven miles down a straight road. Some apps even translate languages on the fly.Īutonomous cars show just how fast AI can evolve. Today, Apple’s Siri and its competitors provide (mostly) relevant answers to unstructured questions. Only a few years ago, for example, voice recognition worked in highly structured dialogues, where it expected certain types of responses.
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And its impact is growing because computers are getting smarter, quickly. This transformation is already having a profound effect on people’s employment prospects. As new algorithms arise to make sense of the data, they will only strengthen the second economy. The Internet of Things is creating masses of digital sensors, and they are going to generate masses of data,” Arthur said. “We’re undergoing a digital revolution, a transformation of the economy comparable to the Industrial Revolution. Similar conversations are happening everywhere in the economy-between RFID tags and scanners at ports and warehouses, between television sets and servers that stream movies, and more. It adds our weight and baggage to the flight manifest, and orders additional fuel for the flight.Įverything takes place within seconds, without any human intervention. It charges our credit card, checks our preferences, reserves our seat, and sees if we qualify for a security clearance or lounge access.
HISTORY OF AUTOMATION AND JOB MARKET SOFTWARE
Software gathers information about available flights. This sets off a conversation among machines. Twenty years ago, for example, when we wanted to travel we called travel agents, who would ask where and when we wanted to go, query some proprietary databases (or even paper catalogs), talk us through our options, and book reservations. “Today,” Arthur said, “we don’t have a sector that is growing fast enough to mop up those people who get laid off.”įive years ago, Arthur coined the phrase “the second economy” to describe a system in which Internet-enabled computers execute business processes once handled by people. When factory employment flattened, workers moved into offices. In the past, when mechanization disrupted farming, laborers took on factory jobs. And engineers increasingly rely on expert systems to assess designs and simulations. IBM is modifying its Jeopardy-winning Watson technology to diagnose diseases and read medical images. Software is replacing some loan officers, attorneys, and sports and business journalists who write news. Now algorithms are invading the skilled professions. All the travel agents that populated Palo Alto have disappeared.” Arthur points to the Blockbuster video chain: “It doesn’t employ fewer people, it’s gone. Similar declines occurred in 16 European economies.Īlgorithms running on interconnected computers have reshaped entire industries. Middle-skill occupations, which require more schooling or training than high school but less than a four-year college, fell from 60 percent of all U.S. “We’re living in a world where, for the first time in human history, we can get a lot done, not just in manufacturing but in the service economy, extraordinarily cheaply and automatically.”Īlgorithms have already eliminated millions of jobs among factory workers, video store clerks, travel agents, bookkeepers, and secretaries. Brian Arthur, a visiting researcher at the Intelligent Systems Lab at Palo Alto Research Center, whose theories shaped our understanding of the high-tech economy. “What’s new is that algorithms are sensing things and reacting almost as well as a human would,” said W. Every time, productivity grew, the economy thrived, and employment rose.
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Worries like those of the Luddites also arose when mechanization scythed through farm hands, when automation first threatened factory workers, and when PCs began to eliminate secretarial jobs. Two hundred years ago, English textile workers felt so threatened by power looms that they started smashing machinery. We have been down this road before, other economists fire back. Robots will perform 45 percent of all factory tasks by 2025, up from 10 percent today, blares Bank of America. Smart machines will replace one in three jobs by 2025, warns technology research firm Gartner. jobs could be automated within a decade or two, cautions a study by an Oxford University economist and engineer. That’s the gist of a number of recent reports by economists and technology researchers. The robots are coming for our jobs-and sooner than we think.