[Chopsah2]

Hi, I'm one of the engineers working on this project at Google. If the AI disconnects or starts to make bad control decisions, the local control system (which has veto power) kicks it out and takes over. We lose some efficiency when this happens, but the cooling system stays safe and operates in a mode that the human operators understand completely.

[candiodari]

That was true for this system as well. How long until management fires these people ? How long until nobody in the industry knows anymore ?

[Chopsah2]

Here's an excerpt from https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-alphabet/google-s... where our VP Joe Kava addresses that question:

What About the Jobs?

With more and more of the company’s data centers shifting to automated infrastructure control, and with the real possibility that the same will eventually start happening outside of Google, arises the inevitable question of jobs. Are Google’s data center engineers engineering themselves and their colleagues out of work?

So far, Kava hasn’t seen evidence of that happening.

“We still have people there, because they still have to do all the maintenance,” he said. “So, you’re not getting rid of the people, you’re augmenting” the existing team’s capabilities. “Instead of trying to tune the system themselves, they can focus more of their time on preventative maintenance and corrective repairs.”

Besides, AI still does poorly in situations “outside of the envelope of its training,” he said. People are very good at making observations in what Kava likes to call “corner cases” and coming up with a course of action on the spot. AI isn’t.

In other words, it’s a good idea to have AI fine-tune a cooling system to improve efficiency in pre-tornado conditions, but you better have some human engineers around in case a tornado forms.

[friday99]

I think the problem is in the idea that "you better have some human engineers around in case a tornado forms." That is a completely different job than the original job and the folks waiting around "in case a tornado forms" likely won't have the skills to fix that tornado anymore. The issue isn't that "the robots are going to take our jobs!" its that the new jobs are ones humans actually aren't very good at; waiting around ever vigilant until the automated system screws up and then immediately coming up to speed and fixing the system they no longer have any interaction with.

[mlthoughts2018]

It’s so funny to me how no one working on technology that will wipe out classes of jobs ever self-reports evidence that it will wipe out classes of jobs.

I’m sure early automakers “saw no evidence” in jobs for carriage drivers too.