The reason it’s such an important topic in the culture war is because the truth or falsity of it has enormous consequences on how we might politically and economically approach the issue of inequality.
‘HBD’ is not the kind of thing you can usefully describe as “true or false” (which incidentally is why the terms ‘HBD’ and ‘human biodiversity’ are quite unhelpful except as a source of controversy). There clearly is some biodiversity among members of the human species; we are not biologically identical. The question is how important that biodiversity is for practical issues (such as inequality), and the most likely answer seems to be “not very, except inasmuch as it will probably cause some especially salient ethnic/racial groups to be somewhat less represented in very high-skill jobs, which people will inevitably blame on ‘structural racism’ when the underlying cause for this imbalance is in fact rather different.” But this is hardly a significant problem; it might even go entirely unnoticed, were it not for the underlying political contentiousness that’s the natural product of ethnic diversity in a modern mass society!
There clearly is some biodiversity among members of the human species; we are not biologically identical.
This seems to actually be the main source of contention, in that there are many claims of the sort such as “genetic differences are too small to really matter”, “the environment a person is raised in is the main, if not the only, causal determiner of life outcomes”, etc.
The question is how important that biodiversity is for practical issues (such as inequality), and the most likely answer seems to be “not very, except inasmuch as it will probably cause some especially salient ethnic/racial groups to be somewhat less represented in very high-skill jobs
Except that some ethnic groups are already far less represented in high-skill jobs, and our economy continues to transform into one with higher need for high-skill workers and a disappearing number of low-skill jobs. This is not just a problem due to differences in intelligence between ethic groups but also a problem due to the high variation in intelligence in general, and the fact that it is highly heritable. Low-skill, blue-collar jobs just aren’t going to exist forever and that’s something that has to be dealt with at some point if we don’t want people to suffer because of it.
All human jobs become redundant when AGI takes off, but before that, narrow AIs will take many. But that doesn’t mean there will be no “blue-collar” jobs left, nor does it mean that “white-collar” jobs are safe.
For example, radiology is traditionally white-collar, but image recognition AIs can be trained to be more accurate than any human. In the near future, I expect the demand for radiologists to plummet as these take over. You’ll still need a handful to help train the AIs, but that’s not nearly as many as we’re employing now.
On the other hand, something like a maid service is a traditionally blue-collar job, but I do not expect robots to replace them any time soon. Something we humans might consider a simple job, like “clean your room” is an extremely difficult AI/robotics problem. You have to safely navigate small spaces without breaking things. You have to classify a broad range of objects to decide what can be thrown away. But even this is easy compared to more human-service-oriented jobs, where an AI would basically have to pass the Turing Test before it could replace a human. If you want a blue-collar job safe from AI, look no further than “Task Rabbit handyman”.
“The McKinsey Global Institute analyzed the work activities of more than 800 occupations in the U.S. to determine what percentage of a job could be automated using current technology. It turns out, a small fraction of jobs are either entirely automatable or entirely robot-proof.”
I don’t agree with their conclusions, but at least they put their views down..
Moravec’s paradox doesn’t actually tell us very much. All it tells us is that our intuitions about the relative difficulty of specific problems were incorrect. This is not very surprising—we know extremely little about how intelligence works, and we have a long history of underestimating / overestimating the difficulty of various problems which goes far back into the history of mathematics. Our brains evolved to solve some pretty specific tasks, which made some tasks (like playing Chess) seem very difficult although they could easily be solved by a computer program, because we simply had no need for Chess playing abilities in order to survive. This doesn’t mean that the low-level tasks aren’t difficult in an absolute sense, it just means we shouldn’t extrapolate this observation to other tasks we currently consider very difficult. Note that computer-vision was usually thought to be one of the low-level tasks AI researchers thought was too difficult to be solved very soon, and then deep-learning changed that pretty quickly.
The way that I read your argument (and I may be reading it wrong) is that we shouldn’t expect all blue-collar jobs to be taken by robots before all white-color jobs. This assertion I think is probably true in the specific way it is stated, but I think you imply that we won’t need to worry about human jobs eventually only being available to a cognitive elite, where people who have lower cognitive ability find themselves unemployed and their jobs being automated out. This claim does not follow from the argument you gave, except in the specific case in which AI tends to replace jobs in an evenly-distributed way across the intelligence spectrum, or in the case in which we find other economically useful jobs for humans as quickly as AI replaces them. Both of those situations I think are unlikely.
All it tells us is that our intuitions about the relative difficulty of specific problems were incorrect.
What it tells us is that the nervous system is doing a lot of processing subconsciously. The kind of cognition we’re most aware of, the linguistic, step-by-step, system 2, frontal lobe stuff, is what we can program a computer to do by thinking through the steps and constraints. I think we need to be careful about using the word “difficulty” in this context. We figured out the system 2 stuff first not because it was easier, but because we knew more about it. The algorithms structuring the human brain are encoded in the genome, which is way simpler than the connectome it eventually builds. I don’t expect building general intelligence to be particularly difficult. I expect figuring out how it works to be the hard part. The question isn’t “How hard?”, but “How obscure?”.
we shouldn’t expect all blue-collar jobs to be taken by robots before all white-color jobs.
That’s not quite what I meant. But what a typical human considers difficult isn’t aligned with what an AI programmer considers difficult to teach robots. They are separate axes, though there is probably some correlation. I wasn’t suggesting a perfectly even distribution would magically emerge. We should expect some of both blue- and white-collar jobs to be lost to AI early on, and some of both to hold out for a long time, right up until the singularity.
but I think you imply that we won’t need to worry about human jobs eventually only being available to a cognitive elite, where people who have lower cognitive ability find themselves unemployed and their jobs being automated out.
Oh we should be worried. Mass automation has already been disruptive. Those factory jobs are never coming back. But the disruption might not go the way you expect.
Yes, those with high IQs will be better able to retrain to do other high-IQ jobs. But that can take years! I agree that expecting low-IQ people to retrain for high-IQ jobs is not realistic. (Unless some kind of brain-computer interface is developed soon enough to change the playing field.)
But studies indicate a significant inverse correlation between g and conscientiousness. The kind of people you want for Turing-test-complete service, or intimate, in-home maid/handyman/nanny jobs are exactly the obedient, dutiful, vigilant, lower-IQ, blue-collar, conscientious-type people. Your so-called “cognitive elite” aren’t that. The blue collar workers might actually be more flexible.
(Those who are both lower-IQ, and not conscientious don’t make good employees even now. Robots are not going to make this problem go away.)
I’m honestly not sure which group will get hit hardest. But let’s consider base rates. Are there more blue- or white-collar workers? Narrow AIs will probably have to be trained for each task. Is there more diversity of tasks in blue- or white-collar work?
in-home maid/handyman/nanny jobs are exactly the obedient, dutiful, vigilant, lower-IQ, blue-collar, conscientious-type people.
Your stereotypes are both inaccurate and harmful. All the handymen I know are extremely intelligent. Electrical systems, plumbing systems, etc. are both complex and require reasoning to work with. A lot of fix-it stuff is a mix of puzzles, and figuring out how to do things on the fly.
I myself am a nanny (if you do a SAT to IQ conversion, my IQ is 144, which I am only saying because that seems to be of particular importance to you). Nannies tend to be of about average intelligence, and if I were to think of the most common trait it’s that they were pioneering enough to either immigrate or leave their entire family behind to come to America to work.
Your stereotypes are both inaccurate and harmful. All the handymen I know are extremely intelligent.
Let’s decide what the truth is before we go calling it harmful. First, “dutiful”/”vigilant”, etc. are just synonyms with “conscientious”. That’s by definition, not stereotype. As for the “low-IQ” part, I only claimed that
studies found an inverse correlation between conscientiousness and the general intelligence factor, and
you want conscientious people for in-home and human-service jobs. (regardless of IQ)
It’s only an inverse correlation, and nowhere near a perfect −1. (Maybe −0.25) As I mentioned, there exist some who have both low-IQ and are not conscientious (who don’t make good employees), I thought that also implied the existence of the reverse.
If you want to claim we’re being inaccurate, we need data, not anecdotes. Stereotypes often have some statistical truth.
The chart michaelkeenan linked to is instructive. There is considerable overlap in these curves. Average-IQ (~100) people can get most jobs on that chart, but would find it difficult to get the high-IQ jobs near the bottom, and probably can’t get a medical doctor job at all. An IQ-85 person could realistically get an electrician job, but not an electrical engineering job.
If we believe the chart, then we should also expect a significant number of above-average-IQ people working blue collar jobs. I do not dispute this. You claim to be an example of that. But they can retrain and even get merit scholarships. I pointed out that this process would still be disruptive, since the training process could take years.
But they (and you) are part of the “cognitive elite” that tristanm isn’t worried about becoming perpetually unemployed. It’s the other side, precisely the low-IQ people who can’t retrain for high-IQ jobs that were cause for concern. I pointed out they may have other advantages (conscientiousness) that could mitigate that somewhat, and furthermore, what is easy for humans is not the same as what is easy for robots anyway.
my IQ is 144, which I am only saying because that seems to be of particular importance to you
Who, me? Why are you so surprised I’m talking about it when this is the direct topic of the thread? The g factor is real, and significant to life outcomes. This is settled science.
This is google-able—I found this chart. It’s probably imperfect, but from a brief glance at the source I’d trust it more than anecdote or my own experience.
Even in your chart, the top 25% of janitors (the lowest IQ occupation) are smarter than the bottom 25% of college professors (the second highest IQ occupation). IQ ranges within an occupation are MUCH bigger than IQ ranges between occupations.
All the handymen I know are extremely intelligent.
That is not true for me. But I am curious—if you think that this type of service/blue-collar jobs are occupied by highly intelligent people, where are the stupids? Half of the population is below the median intelligence, where are they? Where do they work? What kind of jobs do they take?
Nannies tend to be of about average intelligence
Again, not according to my observations (though I admit we may have different baselines). I agree that immigrant nannies—like other immigrants—have to demonstrate a certain level of capability and independence to get to where they are. But I don’t think this level is very high.
On the other hand, for some intelligent people becoming a nanny in the US is the easiest way to improve their condition. So there is a lot of variance—some nannies are very bright and some are not. Just like most people, really :-)
But low-IQ people won’t do well in a large corporation. They are not that good at covering their asses and are not very valuable as minions. A large corp will probably have difficulties getting rid of them (for a variety of reasons), but it’s not their natural habitat.
Good point. I imagine many are in prison, homeless, or perpetually unemployed on welfare or supported by family, but no way that accounts for half of the working-age population at present. The rest must be working, and not as rocket surgeons.
‘HBD’ is not the kind of thing you can usefully describe as “true or false” (which incidentally is why the terms ‘HBD’ and ‘human biodiversity’ are quite unhelpful except as a source of controversy). There clearly is some biodiversity among members of the human species; we are not biologically identical. The question is how important that biodiversity is for practical issues (such as inequality), and the most likely answer seems to be “not very, except inasmuch as it will probably cause some especially salient ethnic/racial groups to be somewhat less represented in very high-skill jobs, which people will inevitably blame on ‘structural racism’ when the underlying cause for this imbalance is in fact rather different.” But this is hardly a significant problem; it might even go entirely unnoticed, were it not for the underlying political contentiousness that’s the natural product of ethnic diversity in a modern mass society!
Au contraire, the most likely answer seems to be “very”. And it is a significant problem.
This seems to actually be the main source of contention, in that there are many claims of the sort such as “genetic differences are too small to really matter”, “the environment a person is raised in is the main, if not the only, causal determiner of life outcomes”, etc.
Except that some ethnic groups are already far less represented in high-skill jobs, and our economy continues to transform into one with higher need for high-skill workers and a disappearing number of low-skill jobs. This is not just a problem due to differences in intelligence between ethic groups but also a problem due to the high variation in intelligence in general, and the fact that it is highly heritable. Low-skill, blue-collar jobs just aren’t going to exist forever and that’s something that has to be dealt with at some point if we don’t want people to suffer because of it.
All human jobs become redundant when AGI takes off, but before that, narrow AIs will take many. But that doesn’t mean there will be no “blue-collar” jobs left, nor does it mean that “white-collar” jobs are safe.
For example, radiology is traditionally white-collar, but image recognition AIs can be trained to be more accurate than any human. In the near future, I expect the demand for radiologists to plummet as these take over. You’ll still need a handful to help train the AIs, but that’s not nearly as many as we’re employing now.
On the other hand, something like a maid service is a traditionally blue-collar job, but I do not expect robots to replace them any time soon. Something we humans might consider a simple job, like “clean your room” is an extremely difficult AI/robotics problem. You have to safely navigate small spaces without breaking things. You have to classify a broad range of objects to decide what can be thrown away. But even this is easy compared to more human-service-oriented jobs, where an AI would basically have to pass the Turing Test before it could replace a human. If you want a blue-collar job safe from AI, look no further than “Task Rabbit handyman”.
See also Moravec’s paradox.
Robot-Proof Jobs
https://features.marketplace.org/robotproof/
“The McKinsey Global Institute analyzed the work activities of more than 800 occupations in the U.S. to determine what percentage of a job could be automated using current technology. It turns out, a small fraction of jobs are either entirely automatable or entirely robot-proof.”
I don’t agree with their conclusions, but at least they put their views down..
Moravec’s paradox doesn’t actually tell us very much. All it tells us is that our intuitions about the relative difficulty of specific problems were incorrect. This is not very surprising—we know extremely little about how intelligence works, and we have a long history of underestimating / overestimating the difficulty of various problems which goes far back into the history of mathematics. Our brains evolved to solve some pretty specific tasks, which made some tasks (like playing Chess) seem very difficult although they could easily be solved by a computer program, because we simply had no need for Chess playing abilities in order to survive. This doesn’t mean that the low-level tasks aren’t difficult in an absolute sense, it just means we shouldn’t extrapolate this observation to other tasks we currently consider very difficult. Note that computer-vision was usually thought to be one of the low-level tasks AI researchers thought was too difficult to be solved very soon, and then deep-learning changed that pretty quickly.
The way that I read your argument (and I may be reading it wrong) is that we shouldn’t expect all blue-collar jobs to be taken by robots before all white-color jobs. This assertion I think is probably true in the specific way it is stated, but I think you imply that we won’t need to worry about human jobs eventually only being available to a cognitive elite, where people who have lower cognitive ability find themselves unemployed and their jobs being automated out. This claim does not follow from the argument you gave, except in the specific case in which AI tends to replace jobs in an evenly-distributed way across the intelligence spectrum, or in the case in which we find other economically useful jobs for humans as quickly as AI replaces them. Both of those situations I think are unlikely.
What it tells us is that the nervous system is doing a lot of processing subconsciously. The kind of cognition we’re most aware of, the linguistic, step-by-step, system 2, frontal lobe stuff, is what we can program a computer to do by thinking through the steps and constraints. I think we need to be careful about using the word “difficulty” in this context. We figured out the system 2 stuff first not because it was easier, but because we knew more about it. The algorithms structuring the human brain are encoded in the genome, which is way simpler than the connectome it eventually builds. I don’t expect building general intelligence to be particularly difficult. I expect figuring out how it works to be the hard part. The question isn’t “How hard?”, but “How obscure?”.
That’s not quite what I meant. But what a typical human considers difficult isn’t aligned with what an AI programmer considers difficult to teach robots. They are separate axes, though there is probably some correlation. I wasn’t suggesting a perfectly even distribution would magically emerge. We should expect some of both blue- and white-collar jobs to be lost to AI early on, and some of both to hold out for a long time, right up until the singularity.
Oh we should be worried. Mass automation has already been disruptive. Those factory jobs are never coming back. But the disruption might not go the way you expect.
Yes, those with high IQs will be better able to retrain to do other high-IQ jobs. But that can take years! I agree that expecting low-IQ people to retrain for high-IQ jobs is not realistic. (Unless some kind of brain-computer interface is developed soon enough to change the playing field.)
But studies indicate a significant inverse correlation between g and conscientiousness. The kind of people you want for Turing-test-complete service, or intimate, in-home maid/handyman/nanny jobs are exactly the obedient, dutiful, vigilant, lower-IQ, blue-collar, conscientious-type people. Your so-called “cognitive elite” aren’t that. The blue collar workers might actually be more flexible.
(Those who are both lower-IQ, and not conscientious don’t make good employees even now. Robots are not going to make this problem go away.)
I’m honestly not sure which group will get hit hardest. But let’s consider base rates. Are there more blue- or white-collar workers? Narrow AIs will probably have to be trained for each task. Is there more diversity of tasks in blue- or white-collar work?
Your stereotypes are both inaccurate and harmful. All the handymen I know are extremely intelligent. Electrical systems, plumbing systems, etc. are both complex and require reasoning to work with. A lot of fix-it stuff is a mix of puzzles, and figuring out how to do things on the fly.
I myself am a nanny (if you do a SAT to IQ conversion, my IQ is 144, which I am only saying because that seems to be of particular importance to you). Nannies tend to be of about average intelligence, and if I were to think of the most common trait it’s that they were pioneering enough to either immigrate or leave their entire family behind to come to America to work.
Let’s decide what the truth is before we go calling it harmful. First, “dutiful”/”vigilant”, etc. are just synonyms with “conscientious”. That’s by definition, not stereotype. As for the “low-IQ” part, I only claimed that
studies found an inverse correlation between conscientiousness and the general intelligence factor, and
you want conscientious people for in-home and human-service jobs. (regardless of IQ)
It’s only an inverse correlation, and nowhere near a perfect −1. (Maybe −0.25) As I mentioned, there exist some who have both low-IQ and are not conscientious (who don’t make good employees), I thought that also implied the existence of the reverse.
If you want to claim we’re being inaccurate, we need data, not anecdotes. Stereotypes often have some statistical truth.
The chart michaelkeenan linked to is instructive. There is considerable overlap in these curves. Average-IQ (~100) people can get most jobs on that chart, but would find it difficult to get the high-IQ jobs near the bottom, and probably can’t get a medical doctor job at all. An IQ-85 person could realistically get an electrician job, but not an electrical engineering job.
If we believe the chart, then we should also expect a significant number of above-average-IQ people working blue collar jobs. I do not dispute this. You claim to be an example of that. But they can retrain and even get merit scholarships. I pointed out that this process would still be disruptive, since the training process could take years.
But they (and you) are part of the “cognitive elite” that tristanm isn’t worried about becoming perpetually unemployed. It’s the other side, precisely the low-IQ people who can’t retrain for high-IQ jobs that were cause for concern. I pointed out they may have other advantages (conscientiousness) that could mitigate that somewhat, and furthermore, what is easy for humans is not the same as what is easy for robots anyway.
Who, me? Why are you so surprised I’m talking about it when this is the direct topic of the thread? The g factor is real, and significant to life outcomes. This is settled science.
This is google-able—I found this chart. It’s probably imperfect, but from a brief glance at the source I’d trust it more than anecdote or my own experience.
Even in your chart, the top 25% of janitors (the lowest IQ occupation) are smarter than the bottom 25% of college professors (the second highest IQ occupation). IQ ranges within an occupation are MUCH bigger than IQ ranges between occupations.
That is not true for me. But I am curious—if you think that this type of service/blue-collar jobs are occupied by highly intelligent people, where are the stupids? Half of the population is below the median intelligence, where are they? Where do they work? What kind of jobs do they take?
Again, not according to my observations (though I admit we may have different baselines). I agree that immigrant nannies—like other immigrants—have to demonstrate a certain level of capability and independence to get to where they are. But I don’t think this level is very high.
On the other hand, for some intelligent people becoming a nanny in the US is the easiest way to improve their condition. So there is a lot of variance—some nannies are very bright and some are not. Just like most people, really :-)
Clearly you’ve never worked at a big corporation.
Your username is delicious :-)
But low-IQ people won’t do well in a large corporation. They are not that good at covering their asses and are not very valuable as minions. A large corp will probably have difficulties getting rid of them (for a variety of reasons), but it’s not their natural habitat.
Good point. I imagine many are in prison, homeless, or perpetually unemployed on welfare or supported by family, but no way that accounts for half of the working-age population at present. The rest must be working, and not as rocket surgeons.