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Are Gates, Musk Being 'Too Aggressive' With AI Concerns? (xconomy.com) 311

Posted by EditorDavid from the welcome,-robot-overlords dept.
gthuang88 reports on a talk titled "Will Robots Eat Your Job?" Bill Gates and Elon Musk are sounding the alarm "too aggressively" over artificial intelligence's potential negative consequences for society, says MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson. The co-author of The Second Machine Age argues it will take at least 30 to 50 years for robots and software to eliminate the need for human laborers. In the meantime, he says, we should be investing in education so that people are prepared for the jobs of the future, and are focused on where they still have an advantage over machines -- creativity, empathy, leadership, and teamwork.
The professor acknowledges "there are some legitimate concerns" about robots taking jobs away from humans, but "I don't think it's a problem we have to face today... It can be counterproductive to overestimate what machines can do right now." Eventually humankind will reach a world where robots do practically everything, the professor believes, but with a universal basic income this could simply leave us humans with more leisure time.
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Are Gates, Musk Being 'Too Aggressive' With AI Concerns? More

Are Gates, Musk Being 'Too Aggressive' With AI Concerns?

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  • Weaponization is *the point* of AI (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So making your silly lists of rules means nothing.

    • Re:Weaponization is *the point* of AI (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday February 05, 2017 @06:35PM (#53809079)

      Restrictions on weaponization of AI simply means that the least ethical will get there first.

      Also, past predictions that particular breakthroughs are "30 to 50 years away" have often been wildly inaccurate. "Experts" are often the worst predictors, since being in the trenches doesn't always help you see what is on the horizon.

      Once AI is advanced enough to participate in its own improvement, that improvement can advance at an exponential rate. We may go from "not even close" to "too late to stop it" faster than we realize.

      • The biggest problem with AI is the people calling the shots are the rich and powerful, and people don't get rich and powerful by having strong morals. Having sociopaths program our economy to further their goals is not in the best interest of society.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      The most likely outcome for an AI, apart from undesirable energy outcomes (an AI would run a peak nearly all of the time, either idle potential calculations or actual required calculations, no idle for an AI), is a digital fugue, where it simply gets locked into logic loops and produces nothing much what so ever, except random stuff running at full, other stuff pointlessly looping or stuff shut down. The idea of an AI running intelligently amok is pretty much fantasy, pointlessly shut down and locked up is

      • Or they could build their perfect world, surrounded entirely by robot workers and sexy android entertainers. An entire country with only 1 human.
  • what jobs? Trump might "bring the jobs back", but robots will fill them.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      what jobs? Trump might "bring the jobs back", but robots will fill them.

      Then what's the point of immigration? Why open borders to allow an influx of economic immigrants and refugees from war-torn countries if, as it generally seems to be the consensus of the intelligentsia, robots will replace any possible jobs available to them in just 50 or so years from now?

      • if, as it generally seems to be the consensus of the intelligentsia, robots will replace any possible jobs

        False premise. That is NOT the consensus of the "intelligentsia". Anyone who has read an economics book, or a history book, can see that automation leads to higher standards of living. People are doing best in countries and regions that have automated the most. That is the exact opposite of what is predicted by the populist nonsense that productivity improvements lead to poverty.

        It is also a myth that automation is "speeding up". Most of the easy automation of manufacturing has already occurred, and se

    • The FUTURE! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Sunday February 05, 2017 @04:02PM (#53808383)

      First, steam engines were going to kill off everyone's job. Then it was power tools. Then cars. Then computers. Cassette tapes were going to kill the music market. VHS was going to kill movies and TV.

      People always think the next advance is going to make humans obsolete and there will be no jobs left. There won't be old jobs, there will be new kinds of jobs. If you can figure out what those jobs will be you'll be a very rich person.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by toastjam ( 4860361 )
        There will be new jobs, but there won't be nearly enough of them to replace the ones that are going away. The thing is we're not just replacing people's bodies with better tools and technology, allowing them to be productive in different ways -- we're replacing their minds. The niche where humans will continue excel vs an expert system that could take only a few days to train is going to keep getting smaller and smaller.

        • >The niche where humans will continue excel vs an expert system that could take only a few days to train is going to keep getting smaller and smaller.

          You only need to train an expert system once... then you can clone it as many times as you need. It's just a decision tree, after all.

          AI is a whole other matter - it may be more practical to train intelligent hardware once its base programming is burned in than to attempt to install a copy of a completed AI. We don't know that yet, but it's a possibility.

          • Meow? (Score:4, Interesting)

            by fyngyrz ( 762201 ) on Sunday February 05, 2017 @06:24PM (#53809033) Homepage Journal

            If we ever build AI, it'll be interesting, but also scary because the dawn of true AI is our dusk.

            Oh, I don't know. Dogs and cats do pretty well around the better class of humans. AIs might think we're cute. We'd be very well advised to cultivate being cute, IMHO. Because if they don't think we're cute, it won't be dusk, it'll be dark side of the moon.

        • There will be new jobs, but there won't be nearly enough of them to replace the ones that are going away.

          People said the same thing about the steam engine, power tools, cars, computers, etc.

          • They did, and they were right then, but that doesn't mean they'll be right this time.

            We're approaching the stage where AI can do not only the jobs we're currently doing better than we can, but also any possible other future jobs that we might be able to invent. That one point makes AI very, very different from the steam engine, power tools, cars, or computers.

            • All cost is derived from human labour. No labour means everything is free to make. This means a few minutes uploading cat vids could be sufficient to pay the rent and buy food. Provided the AI doesn't evolve a desire to get paid for its work that is.

      • Re:The FUTURE! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Sunday February 05, 2017 @04:22PM (#53808469)
        Were steam engines created with the sole purpose of replacing human labor? Nope.
        What about power tools, cars and computers? Nope, nope, nope.
        Automation? YEP. And there's a bonus. Companies can get any kind of remaining labor from overseas now easier than they ever could before.
        I have seen so many people say new jobs will be created, but no one gives any examples. If you think the average McDonalds restaurant is going to let go of 20 people and then require 20 automation engineers per site you're dreaming. The whole point of automation is to prevent companies from requiring labor. Any business anyone wants to create that requires labor will not be competitive enough to make it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kjella ( 173770 )

          Were steam engines created with the sole purpose of replacing human labor? Nope. What about power tools, cars and computers? Nope, nope, nope. Automation? YEP.

          Does it matter if it was the sole reason, when in fact it made lots of workers redundant? Besides, one of the big reasons for automation is consistency in processes much like the assembly line did for manufacturing, the printing press did for copying text and so on. Hand made cars weren't just labor intensive but they were also much more individual with parts tweaked to work together. For example while Uber treats their drivers shitty, they treat all their drivers equally shitty. You're not playing favorite

        • Absolutely true.... however, what happens when 50% of the work force no longer has jobs? There's no dollars in the hands of the workers to spend on goods, services (or food) that the wealthy are busy automating?
          Crash, that what happens. The great depression happened 25% of available people had no money. you think the Government will step in the add more hand outs? Nope, with 50% unemployment, there's not tax revenue to push back out and the politicians and Government workers will be busy protecting th
      • Power tool, steam engine and the like were created long before the applications expanded to industry, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] , but there is nothing of the sort being there NOW for automation. Further, past improvement are not a prediction for future improvement. There is an excellent chance with the automation we see that there will be NO replacement. Secondly , tapes are not a good examples as they are format shifting, they do not curb consumption, and only the various music and film indust

  • Because we have zero safety nets for these people (but then we had zero safety nets for the last big change too and that didn't stop anyone).

  • When robots can do everything... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Sunday February 05, 2017 @03:56PM (#53808367)

    There will be no need for those who control the resources to share them with those who don't. And it's not like there will even be a job as a 'resource guard', because that'll be a robot, too.

    AI isn't going to bring a paradise of passive couch potatoes and inspired creators freed from restrictive toil, it's going to make 99.9% of the population not only unnecessary, but an impediment to the 0.1%.

    He who owns the first factory producing robots with a human-level general-purpose AI will have the opportunity to rule the world.

  • Complete Elimination is setting the bar too high. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Maxo-Texas ( 864189 ) on Sunday February 05, 2017 @03:57PM (#53808373)

    Between 1970 and 2000, manufacturing employment was relatively stable, ranging from 16.8 to 19.6 million when it peaked and began to decline\, falling to roughly 12 million jobs by 2010.

    Meanwhile U.S. manufacturing output (in trillions of dollars) is higher than it's ever been. It's up 33% to 4 trillion now vs 3 trillion back in only 2009. (or 2006 if you ignore the dip due to the great recession).

    Meanwhile, manufacturing robot shipments have skyrocketed from a low of 5,000 per year in 1996 to over 140,000 per year just recently (against a background of 240,000 shipped globally each year).

    So despite a growing GDP and population, manufacturing employment has declined by over 7 million jobs.

    Automated vehicles are likely to eliminate 3 million driving jobs rapidly at some point in the near future as well (5-15 years).

    Any kind of a labor glut (even a small one) results in severe downward pressure on wages.

    Will it be a problem forever? Who knows.

    It might be because half the population isn't smart enough to do theorhetical physics or higher level mathematics or create artistic masterpieces. And they would need to bring something to a job which couldn't be automated or turned into self service.

    But even if things worked out long term and we found new jobs 40 years from now, humans don't remain peaceful on that time scale. High unemployment is a strong predictor of civil unrest.

    The point is, we don't need to eliminate human jobs to have a problem. Eliminating a small number (say 10%) of them rapidly would create severe social disruptions.

    • The solution is to rethink economics in terms of time. I call it ekronomics, and when you start looking at things from that perspective, the problems and their solutions look quite different.

      The foundation is to consider the types of time. Essential working time is the main focus of your comment, and in advanced countries the average is quite low. Looking at the demographics of the job types you can get a rough estimate, which looks to be on the order of 2 hours per week. In contrast, in an extremely poor s

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        Your notion of value is highly subjective and individual. Value in an economy is different kind of thing. Communist countries tried very much to attach non-economic value to people. That failed and spawned a lot of dead Russians and Chinese. It also left the moral fiber of those countries in ruins to the point that their leaders are now relying on nationalism to give a sense of purpose. Pray that doesn't happen in the U.S.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by shanen ( 462549 )

          Well, if your [gtall's] comment is supposed to be related to something that I wrote (and the context as a "Reply" says it is supposed to be), then you need to clarify the connection. I can think of a couple of other approaches to explaining alternative thinking, but I cannot detect if you are thinking at all, at least in relation to what I wrote, so it's basically impossible to guess where to start with a reply that might be relevant.

          Grasping at the straw of "value" (though I only mentioned it as a verb nea

    • And yet from 1950 to today the US economy has added about 100,000 jobs a month, this is a net figure. Sometimes there are troughs when the number of jobs decrease. But there are also spikes in the other direction.

      So in your example 7.6 million jobs were lost in manufacturing, however during that same period there would have been those 7.6 million jobs replaced with something else, but an additional 12 million jobs created.

      • Oh - source - http://www.tradingeconomics.co... [tradingeconomics.com]

  • Well... (Score:3)

    by XSportSeeker ( 4641865 ) on Sunday February 05, 2017 @04:02PM (#53808385)

    I don't think their quotes were "too aggressive"... weirdly enough, the professor pretty much said exactly what Gates and Musk said.
    But I definitely agree that it's still far away. I'd honestly say that 30 to 50 years is still extremely optimistic.
    Not only technology has to reach there, but then we'd be faced with cost and time to get all these robots with AI going for all sorts of jobs.

    If you think about it, all this diversity of jobs that robots are supposed to be stealing from us will be facing similar or even worse challenges as that of autonomous driving.
    Most countries won't be able to afford those types of technology, and it'll take years to set some standards.
    And then comes cultural, economic and other types of barriers. Sure, the US could go towards universal basic income and whatnot, but I can't see something like this alone being able to cope with consequences.

    Universal basic income is good and all, but with free time, leisure and this supposed surge in creativity also comes all sorts of problems that happen when you have a bunch of people with nothing else to do.

    • I'd honestly say that 30 to 50 years is still extremely optimistic.

      I'd say we have no idea whatsoever how far away it is. We don't understand what intelligence is, we don't understand how much of it is actually required for various tasks, we don't know what hardware will be required to run a general intelligence. Perhaps quantum computing is an essential ingredient, perhaps it isn't. Maybe it's just a question of finding the right structure of self-referencing modules. Maybe self-awareness is crucial, maybe it's not. There's so much we don't know, and so much more that we

  • The only things holding back tech, including AI, are patents and laws. The funny thing is AI is unlikely to give a second thought about either as the consequences are meaningless.

  • People are stupid... (Score:3)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Sunday February 05, 2017 @04:27PM (#53808483)
    The problem with more education is that most people stop learning once they get out of high school or college. The educational system does a piss poor job in teaching people to become lifelong learners. Once people think they don't have anything more to learn because they left school behind it's very unlikely that will go back to school, enroll in a boot camp or get certifications. The days of doing the same kind of work for 50 years and collecting a gold watch is long over.

  • The professor is an idiot (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nutria ( 679911 ) on Sunday February 05, 2017 @04:30PM (#53808497)

    with a universal basic income

    Has he done the math as to how much that would cost?

    this could simply leave us humans with more leisure time.

    He has forgotten what bored young people do.

    • He has forgotten what bored young people do.

      Play videogames? Or shoot some hoops?

      Maybe that was just me.

    • He has forgotten what bored young people do.

      Growing pot and making pipe bombs were popular in the 1970's. I've missed out on that and got into computers in the 1980's.

    • with a universal basic income

      Has he done the math as to how much that would cost?

      Almost nothing, if the robots are doing almost everything.

    • I haven't seen any actual numbers on how the supposed UBI would work. Any info out there?

      If you offer a basic income, some portion of the populace will drop off the employment rolls. I mean above and beyond those who already subsist on government programs today.

      If the premise of the professor is that we'd all be on UBI while corporate robots do the work, won't that essentially be a populace living on some level of standardized income and we're all paid by what... the government... who gets the money fro

  • yes and no. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JustNiz ( 692889 ) on Sunday February 05, 2017 @04:36PM (#53808531)

    I dont think the problem is so much AI itself, but what humans like Gates, Musk and Zuckerberg will be programming them to have as their objectives..

    • Forget homicidal AIs. We need snarky AIs. Nothing is more annoying than being laughed at by an AI, but everyone except Trump should be able to survive that.

  • Seriously, in all this doom and gloom I find it's totally lost that automation will also be a big benefit to everyone else who don't lose their jobs. Self-driving cars = cheaper transport = cheaper goods, cheaper taxis and cheaper public transportation. It could create new markets that raise the standard of living, for example I'm a terrible and lazy chef. I could go out to eat more, but then it's not in the comfort of my own home and while there's certainly some costly food items you're paying quite a bit

    • Seriously, in all this doom and gloom I find it's totally lost that automation will also be a big benefit to everyone else who don't lose their jobs.

      That's because most of us are smart enough to know that the odds aren't good that TPTB will manage a smooth transition. We're more concerned than excited because of the high risk that we will be declared undesirables and removed from the system. That's how the wealthy operate, after all, unless we get to them with torches, pitchforks, and guillotines first.

  • Two major issues with the 'robots will steal our jobs'. sillyness.

    1) Jobs do NOT depend on work that needs to be done, but on work we WANT to do. All we really need are 3 hots and a cot, 1 person can make that for 1,000, so less than 0.1% percent need to be employed. But there is no limit to what human's WANT. As I have said before, give all humans a sex robot and we will demand a second so we can have a threesome.

    2) The real problem caused by industrialization/robotization is the requirements for re-t

  • A 'robots do all the work, humanity enjoys life of leisure' future sounds great but those in power have little interest in that happening. What powerful egotists would rather happen is 'capitalists own robot-run economy, unemployed masses lick their boots for scraps'. Of course you'd need a robotic security force to put down the inevitable rioting, although giving human security forces a taste of upper-class life has traditionally worked to instill loyalty; some capitalists would take the risk for the extra

  • How do you make friendly AI? (Score:3)

    by jrincayc ( 22260 ) on Sunday February 05, 2017 @05:06PM (#53808691) Homepage

    The problem is that we don't know how to make friendly AI. As in at some point, Artificial Intelligences will be able to beat humans at any task, at which point, how do you make sure that they don't destroy humanity (possibly through indifference). Even if you don't care about humanity, how do you make sure they do something interesting with the universe?

    Various articles:
    Stuart Armstrong's book Smarter than us discusses what happens when machines are smarter than humans:
    https://intelligence.org/smart... [intelligence.org]
    http://jjc.freeshell.org/Smart... [freeshell.org]
    Bill Joy's article Why the Future doesn't need us on the dangers of robotics:
    https://www.wired.com/2000/04/... [wired.com]
    Tim Urban's article on superintelligence:
    http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/... [waitbutwhy.com]
    http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/... [waitbutwhy.com]

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • http://www.zmescience.com/othe... [zmescience.com]

    Chinese factory replaces 90% of human workers with robots. Production rises by 250%, defects drop by 80%

    Keep in mind.. these were workers earning under $5,000 per year. How is that going to work with U.S. labor?

    • Keep in mind.. these were workers earning under $5,000 per year. How is that going to work with U.S. labor?

      If you've ever owned an American car for a year or two, then you know it's going to work out precisely the same way here. American workers have a real "fuck it, that's good enough" mentality that shows through over and again in everything they do. The average house in this country is a toxic shit-shack, we have not made a car worth a fuck since the Model T (Brits made the AC Cobra and the GT40) if you count build quality, we don't make electronics any more... About the only thing we do well is heavy machine

  • Are Gates, Musk Being 'Too Aggressive' With AI Concerns?

    Perhaps they could focus on stopping people from needlessly replacing the word "and" with a comma in headlines.

    It's a pointless and archaic tradition, and copying it doesn't make Slashdot look any more legit.

  • In the UK, human checkuts are the minority in a supermarket to self serve. At Walmart - the customer IS the robot.

    • In the UK, human checkuts are the minority in a supermarket to self serve. At Walmart - the customer IS the robot.

      In the USA, human checkers still tend to outnumber the robotic ones at anything other than the least busy times of day. This was true even at Wal-Mart last time I went in, perhaps because you couldn't trust Americans to use the self-checkout faithfully without a guard per checkout line.

  • who shot JFK?

  • banking and stock trading to a point to make those who can afford it richer.

    It will never be turned loose without controls unless they are programmed to protect the corruption and behind closed doors deals that make business and government what it is.

  • There's only one reason to bork disruptive DIYers who want to work in new fields of technology. They want to be sure that only people with a crap-ton of money can afford to deal with regulations so only they will be able to make money in new markets.

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