Marketwatch: Fed out to lunch on automation

[Winehole23]

To say Sen. Heidi Heitkamp didn’t like the answer she received from Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen on the issue of automation taking away jobs is a bit of an understatement.


Heitkamp, a North Dakota Democrat who sits on the Senate Banking Committee, asked Yellen at a hearing Tuesday about whether the central bank has studied the issue — she referenced a Bank of England study that showed up to 80 million U.S. jobs at risk (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/eighty-million-us-jobs-at-risk-from-automation-central-bank-official-says-2015-11-12) — and how to draw attention to it. Heitkamp said automation, more than trade, has hurt the American worker, despite a presidential campaign that zeroed in on the latter issue.


The Federal Reserve chairwoman admitted the central bank hasn’t really studied the issue and suggested that more training is needed for U.S. workers.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-one-senator-is-quizzing-yellen-about-robots-taking-us-jobs-2017-02-16

[boutons_deux]

"admitted the central bank hasn’t really studied the issue"

:lol

Fed's closed club lost in groupthink and 1000s of sycophantic, agreeing (non-challenging) economists seeking grants?

https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/27/alphabet-program-beats-the-european-human-go-champion/?_r=0

[Thread]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, [automation]. Before Trump, the jobs were just on the other side of the line, in sight, waiting there for us...waiting for Hillary to lose the election OR for Trump to win it. Done. Now?

Nope. It was a mirage, those jobs are GWTW. (They're) gonna pound that Global Wa, I mean they're gonna pound the new drum beat (automation). They're going to beat that to death.

"(You) get nothing. Absolutely nothing until we get the con again." The fucks.

[101A]

Props to Heitkamp. This is the issue that is going to spawn the revolution. When labor is the only thing the vast majority of people have to trade for capital (money), and labor becomes value-less? Capitalism cannot work.

[rmt]

This machine learning stuff is kinda scary - as in Terminator scary. Computers are beating humans at chess, jeopardy, even poker.

One thing my dd is noticing is that American born computer science students tend to take jobs after they get their bachelor's - because a master's doesn't yield much more for the extra 1-2 years and the opportunity cost for a PHD is even worse. It's the foreigners - mostly Indians - who are the PHDs at Google - because they have to have PHDs in order to get a job/visa/residency.

IMO, US students are sorely unprepared for the math necessary for all this new technology. A lot of my ds' classmates are opting out of PreCalc to take Math for College Readiness or Probability and Statistics. They couldn't care less about their Alg 2 class and the teacher (I feel so sorry for him) is gonna be blamed for the poor results when it wasn't his teaching but the students' lack of desire to learn.

How much of a service economy can we be? The retail sector is going away with Amazon (even Walmart is feeling it as Buffett sold his position) - what's gonna happen to the department stores, malls, strip plazas? Then the transportation industry with the driverless vehicles and drones?

[z0sa]

Props to Heitkamp. This is the issue that is going to spawn the revolution. When labor is the only thing the vast majority of people have to trade for capital (money), and labor becomes value-less? Capitalism cannot work.

Yup.

Number one reason Im back in uni for electrical/computer engineering is so Ill never have to worry about this exact problem.

[Thread]

Yup.

Number one reason Im back in uni for electrical/computer engineering is so Ill never have to worry about this exact problem.

Number two reason is so you can have underwear raids.

[Winehole23]

behind the curtains, prison labor, underpaid grunts and "ghost work"


Now a startup named Vainu has found a new source of cheap labor (https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/28/18285572/prison-labor-finland-artificial-intelligence-data-tagging-vainu): prison inmates. It has been partnering with two prisons in Finland over the last few months, specifically to improve its Finnish natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. The co-founder told The Verge that while it uses Amazon Mechanical Turk to crowdsource labor for English NLP training, it initially struggled to find a scalable Finnish alternative at the same low cost. The company now pays as much as it would for Mechanical Turk directly to the government agency that oversees the prisons. It’s not known how much actually reaches the prisoners.


Vainu has publicized its effort as “a prime example of a company creating work because of AI [... to] employ and empower the new working class.” Really, it serves to highlight a growing concern among AI experts and labor activists about how the technology will create even more banal and soul-crushing tasks than those that it is designed to eliminate.


Data-labeling is just one among many examples, including safety drivers who monotonously sit behind the wheel of self-driving cars and content moderators who mindlessly sift through Facebook posts and YouTube videos to clean up after imprecise algorithms.


All of these jobs fall into the category of what anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri call “ghost work (https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Work-Silicon-Building-Underclass/dp/1328566242),” a type of labor that fuels the mirage of automation but is devalued because it’s meant to be invisible.
https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/613246/an-ai-startup-has-found-a-new-source-of-cheap-labor-for-training-algorithms/