Can AI Replace Those Retiring Boomers? || Peter Zeihan

*This video was recorded in mid-July, prior to Peter departing on his backpacking trip.

As the baby boomers age into retirement and Gen Z fails to satisfy the gaping hole left in the labor market, will artificial intelligence be able to help mitigate some of the fallout?

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#ai #labor #artificialintelligence #robot

[stevemadak]

54 yr old Plumbing/HVAC guy here. Its a golden age for me rn. Its all the young guys going into IT instead of the trades. If you know a kid getting out of HS who isnt going to college, tell them to get a job- plumbing/hvac/electrical something like that and stick to that one job even if they switch employers and in ten years they will be making their own hours. I've seen it for years now. Nobody getting their contractors license behind us. I'm like a prince in a fiefdom

[MyUsernameIsAlsoBort]

“We live in the worst timeline. We were supposed to automate mindless manual labor so we could do creative things, but we’re instead automating the creative jobs so all that’s left is mindless manual labor.” I saw that comment on Instagram a while ago, and I’ve never forgotten it. Terrible timeline 😢

[frenchydampier]

I’m a former white collar worker who basically retired to do blue collar work because it’s so much more satisfying.
I built my own house. Designed, went to the woodlot and picked out the trees hauled them to a local sawmill to turn into Timbers and wood.
Dried milled shaped them. Put up the house, did the plumbing, wiring, etc.
Mostly all me. Very little help except when I needed someone on the other end of something.
Then I hired white collar workers with no prior experience.
Too bad I can’t show my work.
I saved a fortune. Enjoyed every minute of it.

[Jake-Day]

My crew and I just did a demolition on a greenhouse yesterday. We’re not worried about Ai and neither are the movers and the roofers working across the street.

[justinpaul]

I can confirm the blue collar labor shortage.

The wait time on welders and electricians is getting pretty wild.

[daverei]

Dishwashing machines in the 1970’s were the big productivity boom in the kitchen.

[SuperDrake]

Millennial white collar worker here: I hate to break it to the people here, but technology only works if you have 1.) the people that know how the technology works, 2.) leadership that is committed to spending the time and effort to actually use technology and get it right, which means they understand that it will be more expensive and less convenient on the front end, and everyone might have to learn stuff.

I work in an industry where the technology to significantly automate and streamline labor intensive practices has existed (in some form) since at least the 1990s, and probably earlier. But I've only rarely seen it actually utilized correctly and most of the time it achieves only a fraction of what it's capable of. The limiting factor is not chips. It's brainpower, leadership, and culture. That's why I laugh when I hear this like "Is AI going to take your job" sensationalism. We don't even consistently use the technology that's been sitting on the shelf for the last 30 years correctly, so I don't have a lot of confidence that this time will be any different.

[ZeCroiSSanT]

1. AI replaces primarily white collar work.

2. If the US is struggling to find workers it would do well to help men out or push them to get one. One in 10 men from 18-45 has given up on finding a job.

3. Any superpower must have at least 2 things to be one: a manufacturing base and an abundance of a wide variety of resources and the ability to process and use those resources effectively. AI might help with processing some of those resources and even contributing to them, but it will never make up most of the resources of any superpower's economy.

[JimAnderson-sx]

Paint spraying robots were common in the 1970's. 50+ years later thousands of people are still employed spray painting vehicles. Robots took over the job in very repetitive, controlled environments (assembly line). The still haven't penetrated the repair/repaint business. That requires a multitude of tasks that are unique to each job. It will be a long time before robots replace people repainting cars, and this is just one little niche as an example.
 
Regarding dishwashing automation:
In our house the dishwasher (machine) does two repetitive tasks in the job of the dishwasher (person). The job requires the moving of dishes from where used, separating garbage from dishes, segregating dishes that need special treatment, loading the dish washing machine correctly, starting the dishwashing cycle (wash, dry), and when finished unloading and storing dishes. I cannot say the job of dish washing is automated until most of those tasks are automated.

[jaycolucci]

Comments on Skilled Labor are spot on! I see this in the Maritime Industry as well.

[wanaced]

FINALLY he address this. Been waiting ages

[chuckc]

As a licensed professional, “when” AI replaces my position can AI assume the legal liability for decisions made that accompanies the license?

[bozolito]

Not to mention energy constraints. AI is the Cookie Monster of electricity

[Ravencef]

Being an A.I. tech worker, I'm not sure I completely agree with your assessment. Blue collar industry and white collar work both, has been nibbled at like "eating the elephant". I've been replacing "labor hours" with A.I. for six years now, and I've watched the department I have been responsible for automating, go from 14 people down to four. When 2000 hours has been saved in various areas of the business, they just don't replace the retiree with someone else. They reshuffle work and start eating at it again and again and again. Every time a new and improved algorithm or compute resource becomes available, we can eat a little more. I have to think the same happens on the robotics side for blue collar work as well. There seems to be this assumption that A.I. needs to be at a certain level to make this happen and it's already there and we have the resources to do it now. We can make a A.I. that welds tirelessly for 24 hours. We can make an A.I. that tirelessly runs an accounting office and we can make an A.I. that tirelessly does the dishes. ALL... right now, it's just three separate A.I. models. We have simply and quietly been moving the ball for years. A lot of boomers from my perspective have already been replaced and we do more work with four people now, than we ever did with the 14. It's happening just like the replacement of farmers, a hundred years ago. Now one man can do a thousand times the work a farmer did back then, but we don't even appreciate or question it today.

[mm]

This is mostly correct, but misses a few subtleties...

1. Demand is generally very elastic for most forms of labor. If labor is cheap, companies will use more, if not they'll use less.

2. Demand is very elastic for most service oriented products. If Warehousing, or Deep Tissue Massage, or Entertainment is cheap, more will be consumed. if not less will be consumed. We are nowhere NEAR close to saturating the potential demand for most such products.

3. There is a difference between a Job and a Task. Serving coffee is a task. Taking payment is a task. Wiping down tables is a task. Being a Barista is a JOB... it includes these tasks and thousands of others which almost certainly do NOT appear on the job description! As such, modern AI and robots are capable of TASKS... not JOBS. Further, the easiest to automate tasks are the ones that get automated first making each subsequent round of automation more expensive, more sophisticated, and harder to implement generally than the last. As such, the last job is always the hardest to eliminate, and you are left with businesses like convenience store gas stations that only have on employee per site, and even then only during day time hours, with automated pumps and refrigerated vending machines and car washes working 24/7. From the outside it looks like that employee is just a cashier, but actually he's maintenance, and security, and stocking, and janitor, and general handy-man, and on-sight inspector, signing authority, auditor, etc.... all the tasks that the many automated systems couldn't do. We should look at automation as labor saving devices, not labor replacing devices.

These three facts interact with one another. They mean that AI and Robotics (good job on recognizing that while related they are not the same) will have a brief reduction in jobs (that's a good thing if you see the shrinking labor force as a problem), but in the long run what they'll really do is drive down the price of expanding one's businesses. The Pie will grow because the cost of having more massages and warehouses, and entertainment products will go down because the labor in those products costs less because of automation. Thus, most, not all, but most of the reduction in jobs will be absorbed by the elastic demand and realized in a larger market.

[cache]

The one possible flaw with this logic is the assumption we'll need so many more chips. You only need those for training the algorithms, while clients running those afterwards, don't. So I wonder if that changes the equation in any way?

[owly]

I'm happy to hear that even Peter doesn't sound too confident with his prediction here. Anyone who thinks they know how AI thing is gonna play out in 5-10 years time is deluding themselves.

[johnkubek]

I remember my Mom telling me that my grandfather would say ‘Nobody wants to do the dishes.’ He was a lineman for the phone company and I think he was observing a trend where most people want white collar jobs but the blue collar work still must get done.

[BRODI-vthy]

Hey Siri can you fix grandma’s faucet…. ? Hey Siri..

[blacklabworld]

Peter finding new ways to pretend that Tesla — the single most sophisticated AI company that is busy integrating that technology with mobile robotics and is already testing humanoid robots in its factories — doesn’t exist.