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The Future of AI: a Non-Alarmist Viewpoint
Nerval's Lobster writes: There has been a lot of discussion recently about the dangers posed by building truly intelligent machines. A lot of well-educated and smart people, including Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, have stated they are fearful about the dangers that sentient Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses to humanity. But maybe it makes more sense to focus on the societal challenges that advances in AI will pose in the near future (Dice link), rather than worrying about what will happen when we eventually solve the titanic problem of building an artificial general intelligence that actually works. Once the self-driving car becomes a reality, for example, thousands of taxi drivers, truck drivers and delivery people will be out of a job practically overnight, as economic competition forces companies to make the switch to self-driving fleets as quickly as possible. Don't worry about a hypothetical SkyNet, in other words; the bigger issue is what a (dumber) AI will do to your profession over the next several years.
AI will obsolete your job before it obsoletes humanity.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
In the old 'world of the future' exhibits they prophecized that we would have machines doing the work for us and that all humans would enjoy more leisure time
We end up with is the masses being commoditized out of jobs and the wealthy reaping all of the benefits
What happened to get us all to sell ourselves out so cheaply and willingly accept the idea that a few bastards should end up with the bulk of the nations wealth while our children are faced with a future with no jobs and parents whose retirement funds cannot pay to take care of them?
Dystopia? We are living it and don't even see it
Wherever You Go, There You Are
The article's viewpoint is dangerous. We must solve the Friendliness problem before AGI is developed, or the resulting superintelligence will most likely be unfriendly.
The author also assumes an AI will not be interested in the real world, preferring virtual environments. This ignores the need for a physical computing base, which will entice any superintelligence to convert all matter on Earth (and then, the universe) to computronium. If the AI is not perfectly friendly, humans are unlikely to survive that conversion.
This is just a painful transition. Once all the unnecessary people died and failed to reproduce, there will the leisure society we are all dreaming about.
The real problem is that the leisure society we all dream about isn't compatible with 7+ billion people. Why? Because the earth is too small to account for all resources exploitation necessary to perform these luxury automations.
So it's either that: we continue world population growth in an industrial age, or we have a massive reduction in world population to sustain the leisure age. While everyone agrees to "have the machines doing the work for us and that all humans would enjoy more leisure time", you have to accept that the price to pay is birth control (voluntary, regulated or forced by unemployment and starvation).
Video of some good progressive thrash music
... They won't feed you.
The utopia that artificial intelligence promises will be theirs alone to reap, not yours. You will receive only ashes, and death.
This is the future we've earned.
In the old 'world of the future' exhibits they prophecized that we would have machines doing the work for us and that all humans would enjoy more leisure time
Still riding a horse, sweeping the floors and hand washing are you? Do you think your ancestors would've been able to watch as much television as you if it had existed? Did they take holidays? Most of them would have worked before and after school - and between semesters. If you think the jobs of today are as physically hard on the body as the jobs of the not so distant past you should spend a little time researching the bones of your ancestors. Even your teeth have it easier now.
Modern life is largely leisure time - the forty hour week and retirement are relatively recent changes.
While I share Stephen Hawkings concerns about the danger of AI for the most part my concern comes from the huge disparity between those that understand the technology and those that deploy and employ it - much like the infernal combustion engine.
That said - few civilizations spent as little time gathering food and working to provide shelter as the Hawaiians did at the time Cook first visited, and none do now. But that overlooks other factors - like decreased rates of death during childbirth, potatoes, grains, penicillin, blood transfusions, books, higher education, and holidays in Portugal.
As for the dystopian nightmare - I don't want it, and I fiercely oppose it, but if I was given a choice between living now and living during the Holy Roman Empire the decision is a no brainer. The middle-class is also a relatively recent phenomena, a direct result of technology. It's easy to be a Luddite, but it's hard to make the reality of manual labor attractive. Most of the cab drivers I talk to would prefer a "better job" (that's why so many did their MSCEs). Likewise the truck drivers. Much of this "debate" smacks of knee-jerk unrealistic conservatism that romanticizes the past (like the bullshit of Walden Pond). Little different to the introduction of steam engines, trains, automobiles, electricity, cinemas, radio, television, and video. They all "posed" threats of mass unemployment that failed to deliver. The only real difference economically between pre-industrialisation and the present is the growth of the middle class and the transition from lord of the manor/slave owner and guild member, to factory owner, distributor and retailer. Different dogs, same leg action doesn't quite cover it considering the vast increase in knowledge available to those that seek it.
This is just a painful transition. Once all the unnecessary people died and failed to reproduce, there will the leisure society we are all dreaming about.
Which fails to account for the trend where those with a higher education (and higher income) have smaller families.
Dystopia? We are living it and don't even see it.
The problem is powerful tools in stupid hands. Or greedy hands - greedy being a subset of stupid.
If we'd take a measured approach to tech advancement - which might even mean an accelerated approach - we'd all be living in a utopia already.
The US has no or only very little means of wealth distribution, which is why life can suck so hard over there. But even a bum doesn't have to starve in the US and child labour and epidemics are basically history there too - so I'd say all in all that we're headed in the right direction in that dept.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You outnumber the 1%'ers literally 99 to 1.
In a democracy, no less.
If you cant manage to out fight or out vote them, then you deserve the shitty country you live in.
Signed - Rest of the world.
If predicting that AI will destroy civilization isn't alarmist I would be interested in hearing the other side.
The world has changed a lot in the past 100 years. It will change a lot in the next 100. Deal with it.
In the old 'world of the future' exhibits they prophecized that ... all humans would enjoy more leisure time
And that was, and continues to be, the single biggest mistake of optimistic utopian predictions. Not the "more leisure time" part, mind you, but the "enjoy" part.
If you want to live at a standard set by the 1920's, you can... Living with cheap goods, no electronics, and an hourly factory job, you can meet those basic needs pretty easily. If you're working only a few hours per week to meet those minimal expenses, however, your copious leisure time will be quite boring by modern standards. Knowing what else is available, it takes quite a lot of discipline to maintain that nice simple life.
What happened to get us all to sell ourselves out so cheaply
We realized that we like advancing progress. We like our iPhones, laptops, Internet, movies, and TV shows. We like these things so much that we're still willing to work a full-time job to have them.
our children are faced with a future with no jobs and parents whose retirement funds cannot pay to take care of them?
This is the single biggest mistake of pessimistic dystopian predictions: The assumption that somehow we're sitting at the absolute maximum of progress, and the precariously balanced economy will topple down the hill on the other side.
The reality is that human nature has not changed. We always want to have the best the world can offer. If that means working just as much as our parents did for a low wage, so be it. At the end of the day, we'll still be able to go to our air-conditioned home, turn on the trillions of transistors in our gaming computers, and play a video game that runs more computations in five minutes than were executed during the entire Apollo 11 mission.
We don't have any more leisure time than we did when those "world of the future" exhibits were built. What's happened instead is that both our working and leisure time have become more effective. At work, we do in an hour what would have taken a team of people several days to accomplish, because our tools are so greatly improved. At play, we routinely spend our time doing what once would have been once-in-a-lifetime activities, because our toys are so greatly improved.
Utopia? We are living it and don't even see it
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.