[FRIAM] journalists

Thu Jun 4 00:58:51 EDT 2020

Tom,

I agree with you. I think the chances of AI and automation "taking over
most jobs" within say 10 years are very slim indeed. Further, as AI and
automation replaces some jobs, other jobs are created, so that with a
healthy economy you can have full employment. But that's not my point. It's
safe to say that as AI and automation replaces some jobs, new jobs are
being created. The million dollar question is how many new jobs are being
created for every one job loss. I argue that if that figure is less than
one, society faces huge problems.

I don't make predictions, I look at possible future scenarios. For now I'll
discuss only two:

a) After life returns to "normal" (whatever that is?), online shopping will
replace many small and "Mom and Pop" retail businesses. There could be a
significant nett loss in retail jobs. What are the owners and employees of
the lost small businesses going to do? Amazon is not going to employ them.

b) Peter Thiel famously said don't bet against Elon Musk. Maybe Elon will
not succeed this time, but there is certainly a reasonable chance that he
will succeed in full self driving cars and trucks within say ten years, or
very soon after that. I don't see enough other new jobs being created
to offset the job losses in human drivers.

To come back to your point - I agree that in the near future AI will not be
able to do everything. Even if AI does not do everything, society could
still have big problems. All that needs to happen is that the ratio of new
jobs to disappearing jobs to be less than one. Maybe it will happen, maybe
not. But I argue there is a reasonable chance of that happening.

Just to be clear, I'm not a Luddite. I am convinced there is enough
meaningful work for unemployed people to do. Let AI and automation do the
boring stuff, and let humans do the exciting creative stuff. We just need
to work out the details of how to organise the economy when a fraction of
the people are required to provide all the goods and services for all the
people.

On Thu, 4 Jun 2020 at 01:19, Tom Johnson <tom at jtjohnson.com> wrote:

> Pieter:
> Sorry for the delay in responding.
>
> The use of AI-type technologies has been around for 15-20 years as applied
> to constant, data-related topics, e.g. stock market stories ("The share
> price of X corporation rose Y on heavy trading today.") and sports stories
> -- football (yours and ours), baseball, horse racing, etc.  In a similar
> manner, obituaries can also be written if someone plugs in the vital
> components: So-and-so died X.  He was born Y in X and attended Z high
> school.
>
> I think though, it's going to be a while before AI can do everything.  For
> example, all phenomena/stories have Qualitative, Quantitative and
> Geographic aspects wrapped up in a Timeline to understand and reflect
> change(s).  The journalist, ideally, has to determine where to get the best
> data -- and in what format(s) -- to understand the phenomena, then what
> tools are best for analyzing it and, finally, how will the findings be best
> presented (this could be presented in multiple formats, but each will have
> different requirements).
>
> Or to take a current live example, if reporters are on the streets
> covering a demonstration, can AI be trained to "see" the best photo
> opportunity from infinite angles?  I don't think so, at least not yet.
>
> Tom
>
> ============================================
> Tom Johnson - tom at jtjohnson.com
> Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
> 505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
> *NM Foundation for Open Government* <http://nmfog.org>
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>
> ============================================
>
>
> On Sun, May 31, 2020 at 12:34 AM Pieter Steenekamp <
> pieters at randcontrols.co.za> wrote:
>
>> I'm not a journalist, but offer my opinion in any case:
>>
>> a) Accoriding to Forbes
>> https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2020/05/30/dozens-of-msn-journalists-to-be-replaced-by-robots/#14c9ff97333e ,
>> Microsoft does not produce their own stories, but uses editors to select
>> and adapt stories from other sources. They are replacing staff with AI, but
>> because they don't have journalists, they're not replacing journalists with
>> AI.
>>
>> b) I know it's opinion only, but IMO in a reasonably short time most
>> services and products will be provided with a fraction of all humans, AI
>> and automation will do the balance of the work.AI selecting news stories is
>> one example, Another example is, although Elon is probably not going to
>> meet his schedule with full self-driving cars, the probability is
>> reasonably high that he will achieve it in say 5 years. This is going to
>> cause massive unemployment - drivers are not going to learn to code, and
>> coders are being replaced by AI in any case too. If you're not a top
>> programmer, your employment prospects are not secure. Our challenge is to
>> adapt. I'm not American, but if America should elect Andrew Yang (maybe
>> 2024?) as president then America could lead the world in adapting for a
>> world where there are not conventional employment opportunities for all.
>>
>>
>> On Sat, 30 May 2020 at 20:34, Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I see that MSN is replacing human journalists with AIs. Curious as to
>>> the reaction from real journalists among FRIAM?
>>>
>>> davew
>>>
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