[beagle3]

Person tracking.

We're going through something similar to the industrial revolution, lots of people will lose their job to AI (or still be employed, but with significantly lower wages - even previously untouchable professions like lawyers, doctors and programmers).

To avoid riots, these people will be fed either through existing welfare programs or new basic-income style ones. But the old guard will want to make sure they don't blow their money on hookers and blow and booze, so anyone who peddles "here's how we can figure out which of the welfare recipients is non-compliant with their spending habits" is going to make a killing.

Sad, but inevitable in the current political climate.

[orthoganol]

Maybe in the next 50 years, but not the next 5. There's about a 10-1 marketing to actual breakthrough ratio for AI changing our economy. I agree it will eventually, and has made some inroads, but it won't anytime soon to the extent where we have to solve problems of demographic shifts.

There are few people I'm aware of who think to the contrary who are actually working at a technical level in the field of AI, and not founders of a startup riding buzzword funding or who have financial or PR interests to hype AI.

I'll add a caveat that the invention of general AI would accelerate this timeline. I think it will require paradigm shifts, not feature-augmented/ exotic ensembles of neural networks with RL layers, or other approaches possible with current techniques, but think it is still more possible, sooner than AI skeptics believe, but still beyond 5 years.

[beagle3]

I think the nature of these revolutions is that they happen slowly but invisibly until one day all of a sudden everyone is aware of them. I wrote "AI", but it's not just AI, it's a lot of things that are coming of age.

Some "Minimum wage jobs" are disappearing -- a local fast food joint now has about 1/3 of the employees it had a couple of years ago: they have better automated machines in the kitchen, and a smart ordering kiosk that most people use (though there's still a person at the register, for people who are uncomfortable with the kiosk or requests that are not available through it).

Translators, as a job, have almost disappeared (relegated to those needing "an official translation"). That happened in the last 10 years, starting with an awfully funny and weird altavista or google translate that would give you results that could only be meaningful if you had some familiarity with both languages - down to modern translation which, while not perfect, is readable and understandable.

Professional photohgraphers for newspapers used to command a $3,000/day salary just 10 years ago. Now it's closer to $300/day, if they can get it at all - because there's already someone on the scene, with a smart phone camera -- the pictures are horrible, but people are willing to give them for credit, so a photographer is unneeded.

The army of people working for Google/Facebook/Amazon to moderate user content, is being decimated.

It's started to happen to lawyers; It's not prevalent yet, but it is eating the more "mechanical" parts of a lawyer's job - finding relevant historical cases and summarizing them. Computers are now slightly better than the interns that used to be assigned to these jobs. In 5 years, they might be better than the experienced partners at these kinds of jobs.

It's closer than most people think in many, many jobs. Truck drivers will likely not be completely replaced in 5 years, but their jobs might change to "24 hour shifts" in which they are allowed to sleep until the automated truck wakes them up to deal with some condition.

You know, writing down what's in a picture, was almost sci-fi 10 years ago, and right now you have Google, Microsoft and ClariFi offering this as a cheap API.