Submitted by Shelfrock77 t3_yer544 in singularity
Reply to comment by RavenWolf1 in The Great People Shortage is coming — and it's going to cause global economic chaos | Researchers predict that the world's population will decline in the next 40 years due to declining birth rates — and it will cause a massive shortage of workers. by Shelfrock77
Until we have automation that can design, install, maintain, and upgrade itself, we are going to need engineers to do so. I can tell you as someone trying to hire skilled engineers right now, it's only getting worse out there. We don't have the educated population to maintain our path of global innovation.
The less people need to do other jobs the mor engineers you can have. Not everyone can be an engineer but there is more people who can be engineers than those that actually become engineers.
Those people go work on Wall Street instead.
Somewhat true. One of my profs wanted initially to work in a financial firm but at the end said fuck it. Wall Street will (or at least should if not even must) loose importance so we should free up more potential engineers.
Lose
Let loose the Import Ants!
Maybe we shouldn't have made military service a prerequisites for higher education for the majority of the population?
But think of the profits of warmongering weapons manufacturers!
SERVICE GUARANTEES CITIZENSHIP!
That joke just emanates more cruelty as the years go by.
It's the same amount of cruelty but just more evident as the years better reveal the hypocrisy inherent in Western Capitalism cloaked in jingoistic bullshit.
We don’t need a complete solution to have massive efficiencies. A car used to take 1000 workers to build in 1980. Today it takes fewer than 250 workers… and even fewer at a Tesla plant.
A gas car has 2000 moving parts. An electric car has 100. It takes way less effort to design, source, build, and test an electric car than a gas car.
Automation can actually design and code it's self now. People have no idea how advanced the next gen of robotics will be. It will be near human and the only thing we need to worry about is the power source. It will be here in 2 years.
Robots will NOT be near human in 2 years. Are you saying that in 2 years, a robot will be able to drive itself to someone’s house in a work truck, and perform any plumbing job that a human can? More like 20-30 years.
I agree on the unrealistic expectation of 2 years. The closest thing to human agility we have is Boston Dynamics robots which use hand-tuned dynamic control algorithms. This approach is not scalable by itself and it's unlikely that it will be integrated with machine learning approaches in 2 years. Or that the transformer-based robotic control will scale to realtime control of humanoid (or equally complex) robot.
But at some point AI controlled robots will start feeding back into manufacture of AI hardware. At that point AI-based economy will explode by removing inefficiencies of human-based economy (coordination problems, lengthy learning time, wages and so on).
It will not take much time after that for operating cost of a universal robot to sink below minimum wage.
Every year that passes increases probability of such an explosion. So 2040s can (and most likely will) be in an entirely different era than 2030s.
That's why I distrust confident technological predictions on the scales of 20 years or more.
The main problem besides the AI is the robot hands. We have nothing that is even close to the strength, speed, flexibility and agility of the human hand, and it may be an engineering problem that would require exotic materials to achieve.
Ah, engineering problems. They are certainly a factor. However, AIs seem to be good at coming up with potential solutions (take AlphaFold for example) and prototyping and testing could be made highly parallelized in AI-controlled R&D.
It’s possible, but it’s not close to being developed yet. I am baffled by the people who actually believe that we will have robots that can do anything a human can do in 2-3 years.
Yep, Gates' law: "Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years."
Bro, just trust him, bro. He reads about AI, so he knows.
agreed, 2-5 years
Still need people to repair them. That's what the future will be. Repair techs, managers, safety teams, compliance teams and HR.
The average person does not have the chops to become an engineer.
The average engineer does not have the chops to be an average person either. :o
Best!
You must have never met an engineer
I’ve worked with many. I don’t know what engineers are like where you’re from, but where I am, I can assure you most people would never get through 4 years of university math,physics an EE to even become an engineer. I’m sorry to hear the engineers where you’re from are idiots. Do buildings fall down a lot there?
I remember my first EE course freshman year of college after earning a reputation as a “smart guy” my whole life and I was like “This is difficult enough to learn, but you’re telling me some madman just sat around and invented this, from scratch?!”
That’s when I learned the difference between above average intelligence and genius.
The average citizen where you're from can't afford college and is an idiot? You must be American. Takes a real weirdo to need your fellow citizens to be powerless so non-threatening to feel good about yourself. Good luck in the coming years 🤧
I’m not American. And you missed my point.
The dude probably doesn't even have a degree, or if he does, it must be in a subject like history or art. Anyone who comes from a STEM background will know that engineering is a difficult major. It has one of the highest dropout rates.
I'm fairly confident in saying that the average person would be unable (or unwilling) to finish a bachelor's in engineering.
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LMAO that's probably because you have a degree in history or art. It's a well known fact that the majority of engineering students dropout.
Do you think it's likely that all of those students had experienced some unfortunate life-changing event which suddenly forces them to dropout, or is it more likely that they simply aren't smart enough to complete the degree?
Also, you shouldn't use words if you don't know the meaning of them. Genetics isn't the same as eugenics, idiot.
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Maybe AI won’t automate engineers but surely it will augment and improve the current workload?
Of course it will automate engineers. Many but not all engineering problems are described as a simple optimization problem you can autograde.
I think “autograding” is what a robotic teacher does, right? :)
Yeah basically. Typing on my phone but yes. Basically like if you want to engineer a gear train you are really asking for "the cheapest set of gears that does function X, has a 99 percent chance of working past warranty period Y, and fits in as small as space as possible".
So the machine can propose various gear sets and you can auto score how well it met the 3 terms I gave above.
It can use that score as an RL signal to propose better gears.
At scale - with millions of simulated years of practice and hundreds of thousands of variations of the "design a gear train" problem - even a very stupid algorithm that learns poorly will still be better than any human alive.
Simply by brute force - it has more experience and can propose a thousand solutions in the time a human engineer needs to propose one.
I don't think it'll be a huge issue if there are enough workers and it's just a matter of there not being enough with the proper qualifications in a particular field. There are many things you can do to encourage people towards certain jobs that we mostly just don't want to invest in. Make tuition and housing free for anyone in that course as long as they're passing their classes and guarantee them a good job afterwards. We need to be willing to invest in the kind of workers we have shortages of.
Not only is it getting worse but so are standards. Imagine how many incompetent engineers are out there.
On top of that because demand is so high there is essentially zero benefit to working hard and bettering yourself. They do not reward hardwork in tech at all, they just promote you instead. That's how they can justify it to their investors. I want to be paid more for what I do, not take on more responsibilities.
Sry for the rant. It's been a day.
Automated tools will allow 1 engineer to maintain 100 robots.
Probably won't even take an engineer just a technician working remotely.
Actual engineers are generally level 3 or level 4 of tech support chains.
a decade in engineering:
it's been happening for a while, cad/cam improves, less engineers needed, ai is already in common use to optimize structures...
it's just a matter of time before the majority of people just aren't competent enough to be useful...
So the automation will be developed regardless of if usaians are available to do it. China is investing heavily in AI also and has less obstructive regulations actually enforced. (They care a lot less about the risks to workers and pollution)
A shortage of workers means more potential profits for automation.
We absolutely do have the numbers. What we also have is a gross misalignment in the economy where many developers and engineers are being paid to make bullshit, and a lot of them are doing redundant work because the idiotic "competition is always good no matter what" stance of capitalism, even when it's purely wasted effort.
In addition, a lot of people who are smart and hard working enough to be engineers simply don't have reasonable access to education.
We do still need more educated people, but we could be putting who we have to more productive use.
AI has entered the chat.
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