Is OpenAI Solving the Wrong Problem? (hbr.org)

hype7 writes: The Harvard Business Review is running an article looking at the recently announced OpenAI initiative, and its decision to structure the venture as a non-profit. It goes on to ask some pretty provocative questions: why are the 21st century's greatest tech luminaries opting out of the system that made them so successful in order to tackle one of humanity's thorniest problems? "Implicit in this: You can do more good operating outside the bounds of capitalism than within them. Coming from folks who are at the upper echelons of the system, it’s a pretty powerful statement." And, if the underlying system that we all operate in is broken, is creating a vehicle without the profit motive inside of it going to be enough?

Comments

The cynic would say...

[JoeMerchant]

The cynic would say that these upper echelon individuals don't need your capitalist system funding in order to pursue their AI goals, the resource demands just aren't that high, at least for anything that will find a near-term broad market application.

The cynic would also say that these same individuals may not care whether they succeed or fail, having already met the capital requirements for the basic needs of themselves and their next 4 generations of progeny. But, on the off chance that they do succeed, they may have control of a tool so powerful that they can grab the capitalist system by the balls and yank a thousand times harder than they managed on their last joyride.

Re:Hobbies

[ranton]

Personally, I think they are being silly. Real human-level AI is still a ways off, and corporate AI is focused on solving practical problems rather than creating Skynet.

From a human perspective, the most likely dangers from AI are systems which can solve enough difficult problems to put the majority of today's workers out of work in a very short time frame. A combination of self driving vehicles, speech recognition and image identification at human levels of accuracy, expert systems, and more agile robotics could realistically put most humans out of work. New jobs may be created, but likely not as fast as they are destroyed.

The real moral issues are what to do with the unemployable for decades or perhaps even forever. The social change which would be required to handle a 60% U3 unemployment rate is likely to be messy.