Was slavery doomed as an agricultural production method?
Maybe the first American Civil War was not necessary for slavery to end. Perhaps there were other factors in-play that made its ending a foregone conclusion. If not in the early 1860s but certainly by 1880.
Mechanization was making farm labor more productive so fewer workers were needed. Ditto for improved varieties and better understanding of fertilizers.
Tobacco and cotton were being produced in places like India and Egypt and Turkey in increasing amounts.
Various pests, like the boll-weevil would reduce the profit margins of cotton.
Like the Thanksgiving Turkey, the entire edifice was largest and most "magnificent" just before it was slaughtered. In 1860 it was inconceivable to those in the middle of the institution, whether owner or slave, to understand that not only was it going to end but that it was an inescapable conclusion.
It was cheaper to release the slaves and let them fend for themselves rather than to hang onto them and eat the fixed-cost.
College education and salary-man
I was in one of those awkward social situation where I looked for an escape. There! Outside...a patio. There was a couple out there also seeking solitude and quiet.
I struck up a conversation with the gentleman. He was a Senior Advisor to a firm engaged in supplying professional services. I asked him what a Senior Advisor does.
He responded that the part he liked best was mentoring new, unseasoned employees.
During the course of the conversation he informed me that it was common practice among the newer hires to cut-and-paste from Wikipedia or to have AI write reports. He was aghast. The firm is charging $300 an hour (or more) for their services and they are submitting 6th-grade work. No synthesis. No integration. No probable-path projections. No counter-measures specific to the client's unique challenges and resources.
The clincher is "If that level of work is 'good enough', then why do we even need Professional people? The plumbers and school administrators and clergy who rely on our services can cut-and-paste from Wikipedia a whole lot cheaper than we can do it for them. If they need more, we can hire a stenographer to type the keywords into the AI engine with fewer typos than somebody with a Master's degree."
The kindest, most generous perspective is that AI can be used as a no-guilt way to terminate unproductive or redundant knowledge-worker's position. "Sorry Karl, we had to let you go. You can blame AI."
Rapidly advancing mechanization would have ended slavery in America eventually. The slaves "lost their jobs"...especially in agriculture. Automation did the same thing for industrial jobs starting in the early 20th century and expanding ever since. Next up....Artificial Intelligence. It will eliminate many of the jobs that once relied on thinking and ingenuity. Eventually there won't be many jobs left for most people. The limiting factor will be electrical power. AI requires massive amounts of constant electricity. We're having trouble meeting demand now. And demand is not going to diminish any time soon.
ReplyDeleteYou can argue that it started in 1990. Engineers were expected to write their own reports on the PC. Good-bye secretaries.
DeleteMS Word has a grammar checker that worked pretty well. Got rid of most of the proof-readers, too.
What is being called AI is to me pretty basic learning systems, nowhere near true AI (yet).
DeleteAt this point it knows language rules and some information but needs LOTS more insight to properly apply what it knows.
AI generated writing is, so far, only usable for very general low grade level writing.
It will be a long time if ever before it can do technical writing.
P.S. I know proof writers who still have jobs. Programs often miss when a real word is wrongly substituted for the correct real word.
Jonathan
The rice mill at Peachtree Plantation up off the South Santee River took the labor from 26 to one needed to process rice for market and that was in 1787. It relied on tidel water trapped at high tide to run the mill. Lynch the builder of the house and plantation dreamed large. He signed the Declaration of Independence. Though it was a successor that built the mill after his death at sea. Roger
ReplyDeleteSunday a program screen went White. No 404 or page not found. Somebody had to be at work fixing that.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile the work that the program was aiding did not progress in a meaningful way, across the world.
ERJ, I think it depends on the kind of work. I have often thought that my previous position, that of Project Management, could be largely enhanced by AI. After all, the ultimate purpose of Project Management is to manage a project, which is a set of tasks against a schedule. Right now in Microsoft Teams you can take notes directly in the meeting and push them out. Easily enough for a program to take in the information, push the updates to the timeline, set the next round of meetings by looking at everyone's calendar for availability, and sending out notes. People update their tasks and a new timeline is published.
ReplyDeleteI do not know that AI is the threat alone, but AI combined with continued automation and robotics probably is.
I'm just an aging "telephone man" at the company I work for. I'm called a "voice and data tech" these days because the phone system is gone, replaced by headsets on our laptops and licenses to use MS Teams. Frankly, I wonder why I'm still here. I'm like that old IBM Selectric they keep in a corner in Accounting in case someone actually has to CUT a check. I digress... An IT intern came up to me at the beginning of the year and asked "Which direction do you think I should go, in IT?" I honestly didn't know what to tell him. More and more computing is being done by fewer and fewer computers, and those machines are "in the cloud." AI and automation mean that the machines can maintain themselves, determine problems, "repair" themselves, and keep running. The only thing left for the human to do is to swap out the failed SSDD the machine determined was the problem. The same goes for the network infrastructure. "Replace fan." Replace power supply. "Replace defective Ethernet card." And upped reliability of the devices means this doesn't happen often. What used to take a team now takes one person.
DeleteOne of my sons it trying to get a degree in IT. What's going to be left for him to do when he gets it?...
I work at a large systems reseller and 5 years ago *everyone* told us we were dinosaurs and the Cloud would eat ALL our business. Business is booming because more and more companies are tired of surprise bills from their cloud provider and tired of data loss when the cloud providers gear takes a major hit. I'm talking about new companies that are 'cloud-native' and never had systems on site bringing their data home.
DeleteAnd availability??? Microsoft O365 is more like O363-maybe. One glitch at their datacenter and your email and chat is gone.
Lots of big companies still keep systems on site for privacy, security, and legal reasons.
My advice to your son is to start studying information security, that is a growing field with tons of jobs waiting for qualified candidates.
This. I'm 47 and grew up in a house without a computer, so my habits are not data intensive for home use. Software as a service and cloud storage simply do not fit my computing lifestyle. Who wants to pay a $5/month bill to expand your cloud storage, when you can buy pendrives and external drives at reasonable prices once?
DeleteI do not mean to kick dirt on anyone. Really, I don't. I mean no offense.
DeleteBut I have to ask; in this day, with the writing on the wall so clear, why is a not yet graduated student setting sights on a career in IT. Is it to take a shot at the big bucks (though the chance of success is diminishing), or to avoid physical work, i.e. the trades?
Here is a true story: A man had just finished his MBA. This as a hedge against his PhD in computer sciences. Apparently, the prospects in the latter were not plentiful enough nor high enough.
While entering the job search, he was unable to find a folio for his presentations. So he formed the company to produce the folios of his design. It became a success.
Back to my question. Higher learning, in general, is a good bet. But for the job market, some disciplines are not worth the squeeze. Just as the NYC farriers.
Is IT the modern day farrier. Oh it will provide a living, however modest.
IT security consultants don't earn a 'modest living', they are in short supply so they command premium salaries. And they are on the career path to become Chief Information Security Officers with commensurate salaries.
DeleteThe demand is high enough my employer offers a Virtual CISO contract, timesharing one highly qualified person among 3 or more companies that need but can't afford a full time CISO.
The field is complex enough the average Joe is NOT going to qualify, so the pool of candidates is pretty small before they start training.
Most white collar jobs only require a college degree because of Griggs vs. Duke Power.
ReplyDeleteLLMs like ChatGPT and the like won't be an issue until they can be trusted to not 'hallucinate' their answers, and we are a LONG way from that.
There are things that AI is going to be able to be good at doing, and some things it will not. An interesting facet I read elsewhere that most people do not realize is the 'skilled labor' jobs that are mostly logic-tree's. Think about the Nurse Practitioner at the local clinic - all protocol. You can do tele-health on your phone over zoom and get antibiotic's prescribed without ever touching a human being right now, today. You don't think that could be an AI program and video-generated face asking the same set of questions?
ReplyDeleteAn Expert system? Maybe. An LLM? Not even for my worst enemy. The former is trained on correct/validated data and required to produce correct answers. The later gives a statistically likely response based on the text used to train it, no guarantees of accuracy or correctness.
DeleteMy profession, translating Japanese into English in mechanical engineering fields, is becoming less and less necessary thanks to AI. Researchers who need papers translated into English can write their own papers in their English, which typically is just so-so as to grammar but employs what they (usually) know is the correct vocabulary. They can then run their papers through ChatGPT or another similar program to get grammatical corrections. Remaining stylistic issues such as run-on sentences or acronyms can be addressed by a native-language editor.
ReplyDeleteThis is not a good time to become a J>E translator.
Less than a decade ago, I hosted a real rocket scientist from Japan. His employer, Mitsubishi, thought it necessary to pay for him to come to America to learn English.
DeleteIf anyone is tech savvy, it is the Japanese. Yet, a major employer saw value in fully funding a sabbatical for a highly skilled employee to come to the states to learn by immersion.
Another twist to this comes from a reading of the history of Wiemar and its inflation. The people of letters starved. More broadly any one that worked with information where informatin was their product starved. Merchants and farmers did very well. Industrialists made out like bandits and their workers kept up until the inflation was over. Then they went bust. It is a deeper problem than just AI.
ReplyDeleteConcur on the 'information security' field. THAT will be around for a while, in spite of 'AI', which is nothing more than algorithms...
ReplyDeleteThe "Information Security" field is changing in part due to AI, and I suspect many of the entry level "grunt work" positions will be displaced, including "Analyst I" and other similar positions (the same sort of work which was the first to be offshored).
DeleteI am hopeful that "AI" will reduce the opposition to classifying "Network Engineer" as a type of professional engineer (PE) and "Network Architect" as closer to a Civil engineer (CE).
Unlike a PE or CE, an AI cannot sign off to accept legal liability for their design. We'll have jobs as long as there is a need to have somebody on the hook for bad designs.
"Let Me Google That For You, Incorporated"
ReplyDeleteEven in the "Professions" there is a lot of rote mechanical repetitive work in generating work product. I expect AI will thin out the numbers needed for those professions, which also means the number of newbies that will need mentoring will drop. But unless the new tech is very very sophisticated, it will perpetuate the same errors that permeate the statistical average of work in that field.
ReplyDeleteThe area that seem unchallenged will be those jobs that never required thinking and ingenuity ... politicians come to mind.
Yep, I remember that lesson from economics class. I would note that those same experts pushed theories like comparative advantage, international labor arbitrage and global predatory financial capitalism.
ReplyDeleteSlavery in the South would have been largely over by the 1860's had the Federal Government (pushed by Northern industrialist) not prevented it. There where several attempts to make Cuba the slaves home with an idea of training and eventually turning it over to them. Every attempt was thwarted by the Feds. And , the War Between the States was not over slavery, it was over Government Overreach, Civil Wars always are.
ReplyDeleteIn the tear 1803, there was a serious attempt to outlaw slavery in America. I think it was the third attempt; in any case, it wasn't the first attempt.
DeleteNotwithstanding the seriousness of it, it was overcome by the might of northern industrialists.
Dr Thomas Sowell, as bright a person as you can find has long held that slavery would have collapsed of it's own economic weight in the 19th century.
ReplyDeleteBoat Guy