From "Jobs least and most vulnerable to AI" (WaPo)("See which jobs are most threatened by AI and who may be able to adapt").
I would have expended one of my 10 monthly gift links on this — so you could fiddle with the graphic depictions — but the graphics are so fussy and overwhelming that I couldn't find the gift-link button. Is that me being vulnerable, unadaptable, and replaceable or is that The Washington Post showing its decline?
Anyway, I like the idea that humility is coming into vogue in A.I. world. Or is that part of its plan to trick us into letting it take over everything?
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36 comments:
I once considered myself to be fairly adept at using Excel, but AI (Copilot) has shown me some tricks that would have taken days/weeks to figure out on my own. So there's that.
Economists are bad at many things but ever since the mistakes of The Jetsons they’ve been pretty consistent that technology net net creates new opportunities for labor not destroys them…
Now do the predictions of Climate Scientists
The tech bois are the ones making the bad predictions, high on their own AI and all…
Economics is art pretending to be science. Beyond the basics of supply and demand, they don’t really know anything.
Current AI quickly integrates the most common human language interpretations of any topic in the world. This causes smart novices to have "meaningful operational discussions" of any topic in record time. The final 20% of quality requires experience, fact validation, and serious skill. Those who turn AI systems over to decisions based on bottom 80% quality are destined to accidently rediscover the Pareto Principle.
Capable humans still have a key role -- a more important role -- in stopping terrible AI automation from running amok. Weak and ignorant and lazy humans are destined to return to physical jobs that cannot be given to machines, or struggle.
As we learned with the COVID lockdowns, physical jobs required over long time periods stand to be in high demand and pay serious money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
I look forward to AI replacing journalists. So, AI has a hazy take on reality, and makes up facts. So do journalists.
Economics is a science, but it is roundly ignored by the politicians who employ economists, and agenda driven politics is substituted. They are two different things, what is called economics in the news, and the genuine science of economics.
The sentence that became your headline could just as well ended at "terrible at predicting".
Cut the hands off the left handed economists
I’m not one but have to deal with the math and the behavioral aspects enough I might as well be. It’s fun and easy to poke fun if you think they’re gypsies with a crystal ball I suppose. They do collectively get many things very right. People are not always rational is a great one.
A good working definition of economics begins with Given scarce resources…. They’re way ahead of every politician accepting reality there…
What an awful graphic. Who is going to spend time running their cursor over large and small circles to find their spot in this future prediction?
I did...for a minute. And I quickly saw a very wrong one. 'Physicians Assistant' listed as safe and very adaptable. I have a family member who works for an AI firm that has created a program that listens in with the doc and patient, offering other opinions, suggesting additional questions, gathering data, producing reports, immediately. Not sure PAs will be necessary to take your blood pressure and check your medicine list. I'm sure that, too will be simplified. Or maybe we'll just see the PAs and the docs will be the expendable ones? Perhaps. Given that AI will have the medical library and all articles at its immediate disposal.
Also- lawyers. I didn't see a little lawyer bubble, but I know law associates will be eliminated, as will high level attorneys. I heard one attorney whose firm is already well into using AI talk about how they've eliminated a number of associates, and that AI could actually do his work.
What stays are those physical jobs. The grunt work and high level work that is non-repetitive and physical. That is until the robots get more highly developed.
Then everyone gets more time to attend protests.
In a world of finitely available and accessible resources, AI deprecated AI and is master and authority. Throw another baby on the barbie, it's over.
A.I. displacement doesn’t matter. Paul Ehrlich predicted most of us will be starved to death by then.
imTay said...Economics is a science,
Have you read The Worldly Philosophers? It's a summary of the theories of a collection of the most famous economists from the left, right, and center of the political spectrum. They directly contradict each other on every single issue but one--they all hate landlords.
Economics could accurately be called many thing. "Science" is not one of them.
Economics dresses sociology up with financial math, and economists love equations. But, ideological sociology it remains. It's less left-wing than sociology proper, but still packed with unspoken assumptions about psychology and tribalism.
The conclusions follow from a political agenda -- see Paul Krugman's 0 for 1000 "science" batting average.
Temujin,
Your comment about PA's seems to seriously misunderstand what it is a PA does (which is to *take the place of* The physician in simpler or routine cases.).
Perhaps the confusion would be mostly eliminated if the words were turned around: Assistant Physician.
Nobody would think that an Assistant Professor is a mere notetaker for a Full Professor, for example.
Actually, economics is two things. Science and advocacy. The science part is taking the supply demand curve as far as it will go and I believe most economists will agree on the science part.
The other half is advocacy or choosing priorities. This is where the left wing economists make crazy choices and they all disagree.
For example I think almost all economists agree price controls - rent control eg - result in shortages, black markets, poor quality. The left still advocates for it. The right wing economists advocate against it.
Kirk - PA is not a physician, assistant or otherwise. The program is 2 to 3 years and the student is expected to learn and be competent and execute similar to a position who has a minimum four years medical school and minimum three years residency. The theory is a less competitive, less driven less advanced student will learn in 2 to 3 years what it takes at minimum seven years for a more driven more academic student.
The reality is for simple things it is an adequate system. An older person coming in with chest pain has a limited number of considerations, and there is simply a standard decision as to is this person sick enough to go to the hospital or work up as an outpatient, five or six tests to be performed, and then a limited number of choices for intervention.
The problem is that there are easy things and hard things. This itself might not be a big problem. If there’s something easy, the physician assistant can handle it. If there is something hard, the physician assistant should know to pass it on to someone better trained. The problem is that there are a lot of hard things that look easy and because the entire program is only 2 to 3 years and attended by people that did not have the same kind of overwhelming Dr. as medical students the physician assistant is likely to miss the hard things that present like easy things.
In terms of artificial intelligence mid-level providers as they are called, already allow an offramp to be able to pay primary care physicians less. I think primary care, physicians job stability, as well as physician assistance will be hurt greatly by artificial intelligence. The technology is already good enough that if you type in your symptoms, you are likely to have an accurate diagnosis and plan by artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence, of course, as the advantage of every diagnosis instantly at its fingertips. In the past, there were programs that could not always weigh the like we had of a common diagnosis against a rare diagnosis. I think artificial intelligence is quite good in this respect now.
It should be very frightening to be a primary care physician just starting practice Now. The technology might come for proceduralists Like surgeons, but I think we are still away offer for that.
Belaire, now THAT'S comedy!
"Best guesses" but all the predictions of AI taking everyone's job, as Elon Musk frequently does, will only cause fewer births feeding Musks fear of declining wage slave population in the future. Granted a lot of the layoffs recently have been CEOs using AI to hide that they are getting ride of the excess labor they hired after Biden entered the office.
Now some of this was to try to hide the rapid decline in the value of a university/college degree. A mass of useless degree holders on social media complaining about not being able to find a job was considered a problem. Universities just couldn't absorb anymore grad into make-work admin jobs as they had for years.
But a hope of stable employment in the next 20+ years is required to induce more births in the post-agricultural economies.
"People had to be able to ‘afford’ to marry and have children. When economic conditions changed dramatically and called for a huge burst of extra labour, in other words with the early labour-intensive phase of the industrial revolution, then the age at marriage dropped and a larger proportion of the population married. Population grew rapidly as jobs became available."
--Invention of the Modern World, Alan Macfarlane
That half point rise in the TFR in the UK had dropped out after 40 years in 1840. And both the US and UK TFR dropped from 5 in 1880 to 2 in1940. Then a small pop to 3.5 by 1959. And back to below 2 in 1975 when jobs were moved offshore and imports rose. Where it hovered until the marked decline starting in 2008
I like the idea that humility is coming into vogue in A.I. world.
Are the periods in "AI" an act of defiance or habit?
Don Cherry,
You are correct in all the particulars you mentioned, especially the lesser trained person not knowing when to punt.
But that's not what I'm talking about; rather I am referring to the actual roles played in real life situations. In my experience whatever I or my kids were seen by a PA, they were the only medical person involved in the process. The MD who actually ran the practice was not involved in any way.
Techies and humility, the twain shall never meet.
Kirk - I don’t disagree with what you see in real life. In theory, the physicians assistant is not allowed to practice independently. I think they are trying to get that changed. In theory, the physician always supervises. I have, however, seen several cases where the case presented as something that looked pretty easy, but turned out to be something pretty bad. A competent physician in my field would have seen the problem and obtained for the work up. Clearly, in these situations that I personally have seen the position, absolutely did not review anything. The patients went on to catastrophe as would be expected, essentially useless limbs. In theory, the physicians assistant is authorized only in so much as he or she is supervised by a real physician. In practice, this is not often the case. In practice, they are generally unsupervised, and the physician leaves it up to the assistant as to whether or not to ask for Instruction.
Most of the time this is not an issue. Most of the time something that looks easy is in fact, easy and something that looks hard is in fact hard. There is no chance that the physician assistant is going to pick up that thing that is really a catastrophe that looks like something easy.
I guess it is still better than being in Britain or Canada where you won’t see anybody, but seeing a physician assistant is certainly not the same thing as seeing a physician.
Don Cherry,
I disagree about any part of econ being science, however, and there is a simple proof: How do you do a repeatable experiment?
Economics is much closer to history or linguistics, where if it's well done it's based on close observation of human behavior. But the use of math in Econ can be quite deceiving if it's used as a veneer to boost the claim that econ is a "hard science". I can take n units of C and burn it with n units of O2, and every physicist in the world will tell you that I will end up with n units of CO2; whereas it's any economist's guess what the effect will be of the Fed raising interest rates by half a percent.
Having said that, your division of econ into two parts is great - - and I would sign on to it if we called the first part "observation" rather than "science". The separation of advocacy is quite important, especially in our current age where the "expertise" of people on the observational or technical side is taken to somehow give them greater authority on the advocacy side.
And especially when the advocacy ends up being advocacy about what other people's levels of risk tolerance should be.
Econmics is a "science" in the same sense as Sociology. I give you Nobel winner Paul Krugman and Boston University Econ grad - AOC.
The Nobel Committee added an Economics category long after the early prizes were established. That decision was based on extremely primitive models and 'science' of 1968. We all know how good the Nobel Committee's judgement has been in other areas...
It would have made far more sense to add Cognitive Psychology as a close cousin of biology, as at least it's a real science. Econ and Sociology never will be science. They involve too many uncontrolled variables for the methods possible in a natural environment.
“so take forecasts like this one seriously but not literally.“
So, it’s important that something was predicted, even though it is wrong. Said this stupid person.
Adam Smith wrote “Wealth of Nations” 250 years ago to clear up all the euro royalist longings and fallacies. Unfortunately there was no substance for a follow on program. To save face, Economists replaced thought with a simulacrum of advanced math.
One of my favorite economic quotations:
"As Frank H. Knight has so often emphasized, problems of welfare economics must ultimately dissolve into a study of aesthetics and morals."
- Ronald Coase, The Problem of Social Cost
“I guess it is still better than being in Britain or Canada where you won’t see anybody, but seeing a physician assistant is certainly not the same thing as seeing a physician.”
Not sure I agree. The hospitals in LAS and PHX Seem to have gone to a system of “Hospitalists” who are the attending physicians in the hospital. They tend to be young and often not that bright. What is really bad is that they often won’t talk to your specialists. In the ER, the physician determined that my wife had a sprained back, and the attending hospitalists went from there. Her spine surgeon thought that was ridiculous. He’s maybe the top spine surgeon in the state, and does many of his surgeries there. He has done a dozen or so on my partner, over the years. He had to go through channels, and threaten to pull his surgeries from their hospital, to get the attending hospitalist to take his calls.
In another case, she was in anaphylactic shock from an alergic reaction. She knew it. I knew it. But the ambulance EMT diagnosed it as bipolar, psychotic, or something else ridiculous. And treated her accordingly. The ER followed the EMT’s lead, as did the attending Hospitalists. The nurses kept trying to slip her anti-psychotic meds. Her pain management doc freaked out when he found out. Of course, they wouldn’t take his call either. She managed to hid,e the fact that she wasn’t taking that med the entirety of the time she was in there.
We have a couple more horror stories about Hospitalists. As far as I can tell, it was to reduce the work on the nursing staff. And it doesn’t work. You have the attending physician without any skin in the game. In one case, he was too busy to see her one morning, so never came by. Then went home at 4 pm. And was incommunicado after that. She had met every benchmark for her discharge the night before, but no one could authorize her discharge. The result was an extra day and a half there.
On the flip side, we have had good experience with PAs and NPs. Except for one, going through menopause, who would rag on my partner for being on estrogen. She’s been on it for almost 40 years now, without problems, and can’t get ovarian or uterine cancer. Still, had many good experiences with them. A PA diagnosed skin cancer, when several MDs missed it. It was real, and thanks to her, it was caught in time. We both prefer the PAs at our home in MT over the male MD supposedly overseeing them.
Enigma said…
“Weak and ignorant and lazy humans are destined to return to physical jobs that cannot be given to machines, or struggle.“
They might also have an opportunity to be a consultant.
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