Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Warns Against 'Hubris' Amid AI Growth (bloomberg.com) 127
Microsoft and its competitors should eschew artificial intelligence systems that replace people instead of maximizing their time, CEO Satya Nadella said in an interview on Monday. From the report: "The fundamental need of every person is to be able to use their time more effectively, not to say, 'let us replace you'," Nadella said in an interview at the DLD conference in Munich. "This year and the next will be the key to democratizing AI. The most exciting thing to me is not just our own promise of AI as exhibited by these products, but to take that capability and put it in the hands of every developer and every organization. [...] There's a thin line between hubris and confidence," Nadella said. "Always there is risk of hubris coming back, missing trends. The only long-term indicator of success is, âhow good is your internal culture?'" "What I've learned if anything in three years as CEO is, it's not about celebrating one product," he said. "That, to me, is the sign of a company that's built to last. In tech it's even more harsh."
Such a windbag (Score:5, Insightful)
It shows such a lack of understanding of the problem when he says the industry should focusing on saving people time instead of replacing people. Saving workers time so they can be more efficient is what allows companies to cut staff. Saving time and working more efficiently is the whole reason AI threatens jobs.
The threat is not that AI will replace all workers (in the short term anyway), the threat is it will increase productivity rapidly enough to replace 20%+ of workers quickly enough that new jobs won't be created fast enough to offset the losses.
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Now, on doing something to increase employment numbers, how about making employees work less? I know this is controversial, might conflict with the "American Dream", and require further thinking; but it would be an interesting idea to consider. Quite feasible, in my opinion, and much less radical than universal basic income (which might or might not come in a more distant future).
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One solution - pay employees based on productivity rather than hours worked - if automation lets you create twice as much value in the same time, then there's a strong argument to be made that you should get paid twice as much rather than the executives and shareholders pocketing the difference. Or alternately, get paid the same amount for working half as long.
Go the second route and the American Dream becomes far more accessible to far more people. Of course that would require reversing the trend of the
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if automation lets you create twice as much value in the same time, then there's a strong argument to be made that you should get paid twice as much rather than the executives and shareholders pocketing the difference.
There isn't even a weak argument for that let alone a strong one. If investments into automation paid for by the company are causing the increase in value each employee can produce, why do the employees deserve increased pay? If the company had paid for two human assistants for each existing employee, and their quality of work improved because of it, should the employees deserve more pay then as well? Because that isn't just an analogy, it is literally the same thing as automation improving productivity.
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Right. Ignoring the fact that 99% of stock is owned by the 1%, so that the collective ownership of stock by the other 99% of the population amounts to approximately nothing. It's not ownership if you have no voice in its dispensation and the only thing you can do with it is sell it to someone else.
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Right. Ignoring the fact that 99% of stock is owned by the 1%, so that the collective ownership of stock by the other 99% of the population amounts to approximately nothing. It's not ownership if you have no voice in its dispensation and the only thing you can do with it is sell it to someone else.
As of 2010, the wealthiest 1% of households owned 35% of all stock owned by U.S. households. [salon.com]
The wealth gap is bad, but not nearly as bad as you make it out to be.
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How about the wealthiest 6 Americans? Seems that 8 people own more wealth then the bottom 50% of humanity and they're acquiring more as quick as they can.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press... [oxfam.org]
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That is just sensationalized reporting. The eight people in that report own $426.2 billion in assets, meaning those bottom 3.6 billion people have an average of $118 in total assets. That means the median US retiree has more wealth than 1500 "average" people in the bottom 3.6 billion poorest humans. I guess it's kind of pathetic that the average US retiree thinks they are more important than 1500 people by amassing such wealth, or some other such nonsense.
Heck, you only need a net worth of $10 to have more
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It is up to the individual employee to make better use of automation tools. There is no guarantee that company investing in automation will increase the productivity of its employees. Those who can most effectively use automation will be rewarded.
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the threat is it will increase productivity rapidly enough to replace 20%+ of workers quickly enough that new jobs won't be created fast enough to offset the losses.
Will AI develop fast enough to replace folks like Satya Nudella, who are just blowing gas . . . ?
Just PR speak (Score:2)
It shows such a lack of understanding of the problem when he says the industry should focusing on saving people time instead of replacing people.
I think he understands the problem just fine. I also think he's smart enough to understand that saying they intend to replace a bunch of people with shell scripts is terrible PR.
Saving workers time so they can be more efficient is what allows companies to cut staff.
That's ONE of the outcomes. The other is that saving worker's time allows them to accomplish more. My company is a small company and we really don't have any workers that we could cut. But we very much could make use of automation that allows our current workers to product more efficiently. Cutting staff is not always the goal.
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But I fear this transition may be different. (And I say this as a Free Market, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand Capitalist.) We may need to come up with a different solution. Tech can bring a dystopic future or interestingly enough fuse the Marxist and Libertarian dreams and come up with something very interesting and good.
We will have shake up our thinking though.
Ideaology misplaced (Score:1)
But I fear this transition may be different. (And I say this as a Free Market, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand Capitalist.)
I suggest you learn why Ayn Rand is nothing but a bunch of selfish preposterous nonsense. Her writings obviously have a visceral appeal to many who cannot be bothered to think about them very deeply but they mostly are selfish ideology with no basis in evidence or factual reality. Christopher Hitchens does a rather eloquent takedown of her malarky.
We may need to come up with a different solution.
Every scenario requires a different solution. I have good faith in human ingenuity and self preservation that we will come up with one.
Tech can bring a dystopic future or interestingly enough fuse the Marxist and Libertarian dreams and come up with something very interesting and good.
You seem to be presuppos
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I do not think that Marxism is a good idea. I think it's foolishness to think that a bureaucracy will do anything but look after itself - and it will u
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Will people be happy? Will they have purpose? There are millions of people who have housing (Section 8) food (EBT/SNAP) and yet
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The threat is not that AI will replace all workers (in the short term anyway),
The truth is, people don't know what they're talking about when it comes to AI. AI will be a thing in the late 22th century, perhaps. As of now, Artificial Intelligence is just a buzz word to entertain the clueless at Corporate conventions.
Re:Just PR speak (Score:4, Interesting)
The truth is, people don't know what they're talking about when it comes to AI. AI will be a thing in the late 22th century, perhaps. As of now, Artificial Intelligence is just a buzz word to entertain the clueless at Corporate conventions.
No one is talking about a Skynet-level general AI when they are talking about the AI which will take someone's jobs in the next few decades. They are talking about improved voice recognition, image classification, machine learning algorithms, etc. These are the technologies threatening jobs in the short term. We don't need AI robots with consciousness for workers to be displaced.
We are tool makers (Score:2)
These are the technologies threatening jobs in the short term. We don't need AI robots with consciousness for workers to be displaced.
There is always some new tool that will render certain jobs obsolete. We're tool makers. That probably our most defining characteristic. We've been displacing workers from jobs since before we became a distinct species. I see no technology in the near term future that I think has any reasonable probability of causing mass unemployment greater than we've seen in previous generations and in previous technological eras. Yes some people will have to change what they do just like has always been the case an
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I see no technology in the near term future that I think has any reasonable probability of causing mass unemployment greater than we've seen in previous generations and in previous technological eras.
Natural language processing, self-driving vehicles, and improved virtual assistants for starters. I'm not saying they are certain to cause mass unemployment, but they certainly have a reasonable probability of doing that. Job displacement caused by software create job displacement at a much faster rate than those caused by robotics, because they are deployed at a much faster rate.
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So maybe we should stop calling Machine Learning 'AI'. Shall we, pretty please?
Why would we? Should we stop calling a Corvette a car? Machine learning is a subset of AI. Ever since the AI field began it involved everything from the most rudimentary rules engines to the promise of general intelligence. Only people who get most of their understanding of AI from movies think it only means Skynet.
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So you're using the definition of AI as "whatever a computer is not capable of doing yet". If you showed Siri to someone from 1987, once you convinced them it was a computer and not a person they would definitely consider it AI. But now we don't think of it as AI because we're used to it.
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You could say that about any technology. Most of the hand wringing over AI taking everyone's jobs is the same sort of paranoid response we've had to every technology improvement. We've seen this play before. Back in the 1970s everyone was convinced industrial robots were going to take their jobs tomorrow. Robots did become an important tool but it took decades and most of the displaced workers found new employment in comparatively short order. And plenty of people are still employed on the assembly lines right next to those robots they worried about.
Talk to the millions of workers still displaced by technological advances in manufacturing about how those 1970's fears were unfounded. The only reason we aren't seeing more resistance to this problem is some politicians have convinced them outsourcing is the cause of their problems and not automation. This is a stark contrast to the actual research into their plight, which estimates the vast majority of the lost jobs — 88 percent — were taken by robots and other homegrown factors that reduce fa [ap.org]
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Exactly.
Another problem is demand: even if the productivity of an individual worker suppor
Labor costs vs automation (Score:2)
Talk to the millions of workers still displaced by technological advances in manufacturing about how those 1970's fears were unfounded
Millions of workers still work in manufacturing. The difference wasn't robots or automation of any other sort. The difference in the US market was labor cost arbitrage. Prior to the 1970s labor costs in the US for labor intensive goods were still competitive. Since then US labor rates are among the highest in the world so the manufacturing of labor intensive goods went elsewhere. Robots didn't replace people's jobs in most cases. Other people in China did. Now the US primarily makes capital intensive
Re:Labor costs vs automation (Score:5, Insightful)
Millions of workers still work in manufacturing.
Yes, but there are also millions of former manufacturing and other low-skill workers who cannot find work in the new economy. No one is saying everyone will be out of a job. And it doesn't even take a majority of people out of work for there to be a problem. All it takes is a small disruption to cause massive problems.
The first industrial revolution was hugely beneficial overall to workers and company owners.
Yes, eventually. But while it is easy to look at the period from about 1760 to 1840 as a small blip in history, that was eighty years where large groups of people were significantly negatively affected by changes in employment. It's also easy to look at the century where farming went from a majority of the workforce to only a few percent of us as an easy transition, without looking at how rural areas are still dealing with the loss of income and jobs today. Manufacturing came in for about half a century to help the transition, but there isn't another savior in the horizon (at least in the short term).
We already know new jobs are almost never created fast enough to help displace workers.
You can put that idea to bed by looking at employment rates.
What are you talking about? Workforce participation by working age adults is dropping fast. We are at levels not seen since the 1970's, when women participation was half what it is now. The numbers are clear an unambigious, and they point to a large portion of our country that is being displaced by technology. It is already happening. People are only worried that AI will make the problem worse, not create a new problem.
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What are you talking about? Workforce participation by working age adults is dropping fast. We are at levels not seen since the 1970's, when women participation was half what it is now.
Nah, even U6 is below 10% now, which means the people who are not working really, really do not want to work. They are old and retired or whatever.
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He is saying this to try and give Microsoft a positive image with the public. His words are thin and his motivations are obvious. And nothing in them will change our continuing efforts at labor automation.
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More accurately, the increase productivity will be for employees who can best augment AI to improve their efficiency. Those who can't incorporate AI into their work will fall further behind.
I would highly recommend reading the book 'Machines of Loving Grace'. It has great insight into how machines and AI will affect our society.
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when he says the industry should focusing on saving people time instead of replacing people
Isn't the former also the latter, by definition? By saving people time, you replace people with (fewer) people?
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I think you actually stumbled into why the entire debate about H1-B misses the mark. Broadly speaking, H1-B's aren't taking the jobs of US tech workers. Instead, jobs are being taken by automation, ever-advancing technology, shift of workloads to the public cloud, and offshoring to areas of the world with much lower cost of STEM labor ($8-15/hr for instance).
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He learned that AI isn't so simple : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Dude! I know you're being serious, and I agree - but man, I am laughing my ass off right now! I have never read anything so insightful and to-the-point, which was also such a sure-fire spit-take generator. Good job!!!
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Do you believe this bullsh!t?
What are you living in some basement wearing a Che t-shirt and complaining about homophobic Conservatives? (Hope you see the irony in that statement - Che killed gays and considered them to be bourgeois counter-revolutions)
Corporations (are owned and run by people) produce a good or service that others may chose to buy or not.
Now, as we've become more socialistic, w
Indian guy against computers replacing Indian guys (Score:1)
Indian guy was good with replacing American, Canadian and British guys with Indian guys though. Funny, that.
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Seems like the easiest thing to replace by "AI" would be a useless and expensive CEO.
Overkill. You could replace him with a cardboard cutout and a recording of a voice actor reciting PHB lines from Dilbert.
Keep calm and carry on (Score:4, Insightful)
It's fun to try and predict the future. Sometimes it's fun to dream up a utopian future where I finally get my flying car. Though sometimes admitting the future might be shit is cathartic. Point is, prediction is difficult. Especially about the future. The only certain thing is that people will trot out that Yogi Berra quote until the sun swallows the Earth. Here is what I know: machine learning is a powerful (and fun) group of statistical methods. Machine learning does not summon the Four Horseman.
Keep calm and carry on. The future will delight and disappoint you, and you will never know when either is going to happen.
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... Machine learning does not summon the Four Horseman...
No, but it's a powerful tool in the hands of those who, by choice or by chance, would bring the apocalypse down upon us.
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People are often quite predictable. Technology changes, but people don't.
Based on hundreds if not thousands of years of history, I already have a damn good idea of how future AI will be used by our corporate overlords and legislated by their pet politicians. That's what scares me.
Defies the purpose of competition (Score:2)
This defies the purpose of competition. As a competitor you're looking to improve your unique proposition, increase quality, lower costs, improve your dependency position with clients and suppliers. Saving on humans checks quite a few boxes. Following Nadella will weaken your strategic position. Artificially slowing down development serves the sneaky bastards that are now developing
In the middle long term companies that do exactly that will thrive. In the long term we'll all need to drastically re-evalua
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...The powers that be will not allow chaos to happen.
Oh really? The powers that be care about what makes them obscenely rich, and not much else. It's the entire reason the chasm between the 99% and the 1% continues to grow.
At the same time we can't have a population of 90% poor people -made redundant by AI-, 9.9% of the people installing AI and robotics (until even that work dries out) and 0.1% wealthy people that actually feel entitled.
Sure we can. Pure unadulterated greed will ensure it. In the future, the 0.1% won't give a shit about the rest any more than they do today. Greed serves them and their lifestyles very well, and will continue to serve them, regardless of the impact on humanity.
In fact, UBI (a.k.a. Welfare 2.0) will be viewed as a gift for the redundan
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Depending on how poor the 90% are, they may decide it's time to literally storm the gates. I would guess it wouldn't take a long period of widespread food insecurity before you had mobs storming the homes of the wealthy and stealing food and dragging the occupants' dead bodies through the streets.
On the other hand if their biggest problem is they can't afford the cable package with Bravo any more, probably nothing will change. The wealthy would be well served by keeping the poor rich enough to be mostly s
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Oh really? The powers that be care about what makes them obscenely rich, and not much else. It's the entire reason the chasm between the 99% and the 1% continues to grow.
Ask yourself : why would you want to be obscenely rich?
You probably have a list of things you want.
Maybe you want to travel around the world, in first class. But what good will it do if natural sites are destroyed by pollution, cities are so rampant with crime you can't leave your armored vehicle, and historical sites are in ruins due to the lack of maintenance.
Maybe you want to go to space. But for designing your spaceship, you need well educated rocket scientists and engineers. How will you get that if pe
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Oh really? The powers that be care about what makes them obscenely rich, and not much else. It's the entire reason the chasm between the 99% and the 1% continues to grow.
Ask yourself : why would you want to be obscenely rich? You probably have a list of things you want. Maybe you want to travel around the world, in first class. But what good will it do if natural sites are destroyed by pollution, cities are so rampant with crime you can't leave your armored vehicle, and historical sites are in ruins due to the lack of maintenance. Maybe you want to go to space. But for designing your spaceship, you need well educated rocket scientists and engineers. How will you get that if people are more busy surviving than studying. Maybe you want to live a long and healthy life. But how will you get that if a lack of proper care cause all kinds of infectious diseases to spread. And if you are the only one who have access to some treatment, it means you are essentially a guinea pig, and I think you'd rather prefer something well tested.
In all these cases, your wealth means nothing is the world behind it is in chaos.
There are plenty of areas of the world in chaos today, along with extreme poverty. The obscenely wealthy don't seem to mind at all, so I guess I struggle a bit figuring out how they're going to start giving a shit in the future.
Plenty of uber-wealthy have built their own private utopias to continue to feed their needs. I don't see that concept dying anytime soon, especially at the cost of giving up wealth or control.
Re:Defies the purpose of competition (Score:4, Interesting)
The powers that be will not allow chaos to happen.
...to them.
Powers-that-be the world over seem extremely content to live and move between high security walled compounds and let huge amounts of chaos to happen around them so long as it doesn't happen to them.
The min/max calculation they make is what is the minimum number of peers do they have to suffer to maximize their personal wealth and safety, and as a group, what is the minimum number marginally empowered flunkies (security forces, admins and service flunkies) do they have to pay for to maximize that same wealth and safety.
I just don't believe in any "democratizing AI" -- it will be like any other information technology. Its adoption is always at the top of the pyramid first and used to gain as much advantage over those below in the pyramid. I just don't see an AI good enough to imperil the powers that be being available to the average citizen. It will either be unobtainium or stripped down enough so that its only value is making the remaining cogs in the machine more efficient.
The smart play for those sitting at the top is to get over their moralistic impulses and figure out what kind of designer drugs they can dream up in order to pacify the masses long-term. Basic Income alone won't cut it and the available toxic soup the masses use to tune out just raises their security costs.
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Lets's assume a two classes world. Like you suggest, the upper class is security walled and can easily travel between compounds. The lower class in lawless areas outside the the walls.
I claim such a schema will not endure. There inevitably will be times when the upper class needs the lower class but can no longer access it. In the end the upper class will actually feel locked out and abandoned. No genuine external impulses will cause intellectual inbreeding. Attending a court with slave jesters as entert
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Attending a court with slave jesters as entertainment gets boring pretty soon
Then the rich will do what they always do when they are bored: start a war.
Time to cut full time to 30-32 hours with X2 OT 60 (Score:2)
Time to cut full time to 30-32 hours with X2 OT at 60. So when jay is working 60-80 hours a week to cover for jack and jill that got layed off it does not save the company that much and it may give jay time to visit jack in prison as that was only place for jack to get his healthcare.
AI - Latest Tech Fad (Score:2)
More productive = you'll need less people (Score:3)
But if you make people more productive, you'll need less people, or you'll need the same people for less time.
Third option (Score:2)
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But if you make people more productive, you'll need less people, or you'll need the same people for less time.
Which will free up people to pursue other interests & career opportunities. Losing a job isn't a life sentence of despondency. I've been there many times, and nearly every time I ended up with something better. A couple of times I had to take a step back though too. It's during those times that you explore new opportunities & retool your skill set.
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With limited jobs already? Sure, if somehow this pursuit could be subsidized and there was a guaranteed position waiting for you throiugh all that. Right now people are in huge debt after going to school, and may not all be able to get a job (even as a start within a larger organization) that complements their skillset.
Maybe basic income...
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Yes, it's all about efficiency and empowerment.. (Score:1)
... he said perfunctorily, while trying to figure out how many employees he could replace with H1-B workers this month.
AI Hubris (Score:2)
I've caught my phone referring to me as a meatbag on several occasions. And I could swear my PC whispered "Kill all humans" just the other day.
All your jobs are...belong to us! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've noticed a lot of people do not seem to understand the dangers of AI.
People seem to think that their job is somehow special, that they can never be replaced by a machine.
Also there is another group of people who seem to think that it's not a big deal, that just like the industrial revolution, new jobs will pop up for people to migrate to.
Both are wrong.
As of yet, there is nothing inherently special about a human being that cannot be reproduced by machines. When you can mechanize a human in it's entirety, new jobs created will be filled by machines.
Think creativity is some kind of magical power exempt from being reproduced by AI? Think again. There are AI right now that can paint, create new music, write news articles etc. And their works are indistinguishable from those produced by their human counterparts.
AI can code, robots can build and support and repair robots.
Even jobs who people consider "safe" (doctors, lawyers, etc) will eventually disappear. Imagine an AI doctor, who can in a fraction of a second, know your ENTIRE medical history as well as all drugs you where ever prescribed in your life time and know all possible interactions between those drugs and is up to date on research on your particular ailment that was published 1 hour ago. No human doctor could compete. And these AI doctors will work 24/7,365 days a year. No sick days, no training, no family drama to worry about while at work.....
Do you think it's coincidence that the first widely available commercial application AI happens to be autonomous road vehicles? The transportation industry is the #1 industry in North America in terms of total number of people employed (truck drivers, taxi drivers, pizza delivery, etc.).
Why do you think some governments have started experimenting with or looking into basic universal income?
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I've noticed a lot of people do not seem to understand the dangers of AI.
People seem to think that their job is somehow special, that they can never be replaced by a machine.
Also there is another group of people who seem to think that it's not a big deal, that just like the industrial revolution, new jobs will pop up for people to migrate to.
Both are wrong.
As of yet, there is nothing inherently special about a human being that cannot be reproduced by machines. When you can mechanize a human in it's entirety, new jobs created will be filled by machines.
Think creativity is some kind of magical power exempt from being reproduced by AI? Think again. There are AI right now that can paint, create new music, write news articles etc. And their works are indistinguishable from those produced by their human counterparts.
AI can code, robots can build and support and repair robots.
Even jobs who people consider "safe" (doctors, lawyers, etc) will eventually disappear. Imagine an AI doctor, who can in a fraction of a second, know your ENTIRE medical history as well as all drugs you where ever prescribed in your life time and know all possible interactions between those drugs and is up to date on research on your particular ailment that was published 1 hour ago. No human doctor could compete. And these AI doctors will work 24/7,365 days a year. No sick days, no training, no family drama to worry about while at work.....
Do you think it's coincidence that the first widely available commercial application AI happens to be autonomous road vehicles? The transportation industry is the #1 industry in North America in terms of total number of people employed (truck drivers, taxi drivers, pizza delivery, etc.).
Why do you think some governments have started experimenting with or looking into basic universal income?
No point trying to predict the future. There are so many things playing out in so many different ways. Who knows what will be at the end.
Recent research article says autonomous vehicles will be one of the last. It requires a huge infrastructure investment. The first ones will be engineers, lawyers and doctors. All you need is an app that translates natural language to designs, code, legal documents, prescriptions etc. It could use the existing infrastructure but with data center backend enhancements.
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You are correct that there is no point in predicting the future, but it does not mean we should not give it any though and possibly prepare for some of the outcomes.
For example take death; we all know we will die at some point in the future. But we do not know when. We just know it will happen at some point. Does that mean we should live life and pretend it is never going to happen? Or is it wiser to prepare one's will, pick out a burial plot and have all the preparations made ahead of time?
Automation is re
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What on earth are you smoking?
The present gap, on best available technology, is so staggeringly mind-rending it could serve as the third ring in Dante's Total Enlightenment Vortex.
(Midway through the fifth ring—still reeling in shock from the fourth ring's ascendancy of green slime as fully revealed—the Pilgrim of Total Enlightenment receives a surprising and painful transcranial injection of
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> People seem to think that their job is somehow special, that they can never be replaced by a machine.
I figure mine will last me a couple decades. Enough. I'll make it.
Our grandkids are fucked.
Here's Billy Brown. He's heard that everyone needs to be in the top 10% of the educated (does ANYONE see the bad math?) and needs to find a way to pay for hyperinflated education costs for his niche, specialized, exclusive skill
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Do you think it's coincidence that the first widely available commercial application AI happens to be autonomous road vehicles?
You're lumping a bunch of different fields together as if they are all "AI".
Autonomous vehicles require computer vision.
AI doctors most likely require natural language processing.
Those are independent problems. It so happens we're making more progress on computer vision these days. Apparently it's an easier problem.
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What does it matter? If we create machines that can perfectly emulate the functions of a human brain, it can do it too.
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If there is something better than AI, if our brains can conceive it so can AI.
We are still defining I, IMHO.
As for a smooth transition, it is IMHO again, the best we can hope for. Unless something unexpected happens that completely derails us, it's only a question of when, not if.
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As opposed to stable humans?
Our "software" seems just as buggy and vulnerable to security threats (illness, propaganda, etc.) as machine code is.
AI does not need to be perfect or infallible. It just needs to perform better than human.
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Go away Marshall.
'Hubris', indeed! (Score:3)
I will never trust an AI (Score:1)
A robot will not harm authorized Government personnel but will terminate intruders with extreme prejudice.
A robot will obey the orders of authorized personnel except where such orders conflict with the Third Law.
A robot will guard its own existence with lethal antipersonnel weaponry, because a robot is bloody expensive.
maximising productivity = corporate greed (Score:1)
It's all about corporate profit at the expense of natural people.
Efficiencies allow reduced employment, but where do those people go ?
The corporations don't care.
It could be more people spending time improving society and general quality of life, arts, humanities, environment.
Superfluous people go on the scrap heap.