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AI Will Create 'Useless Class' Of Human, Predicts Bestselling Historian (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Yuval Noah Harari, author of the international bestseller "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind," doesn't have a very optimistic view of the future when it comes to artificial intelligence. He writes about how humans "might end up jobless and aimless, whiling away our days off our nuts and drugs, with VR headsets strapped to our faces," writes The Guardian. "Harari calls it 'the rise of the useless class' and ranks it as one of the most dire threats of the 21st century. As artificial intelligence gets smarter, more humans are pushed out of the job market. No one knows what to study at college, because no one knows what skills learned at 20 will be relevant at 40. Before you know it, billions of people are useless, not through chance but by definition." He likens his predictions, which have been been forecasted by others for at least 200 years, to the boy who cried wolf, saying, "But in the original story of the boy who cried wolf, in the end, the wolf actually comes, and I think that is true this time." Harari says there are two kinds of ability that make humans useful: physical ones and cognitive ones. He says humans have been largely safe in their work when it comes to cognitive powers. But with AI's now beginning to outperform humans in this field, Harari says, that even though new types of jobs will emerge, we cannot be sure that humans will do them better than AIs, computers and robots.
We already have a useless class. Mostly politicians and business executives, with some overlap. Has CxO productivity gone up 300 %? What about congressional gridlock inspired by special interests vs voters?
C|N>K
You mean like Elon Musk and other tech-celebrities who warned about the potential dangers of AI?
Own your own plot of land. Be prepared to defend it, grow your own food in grow boxes. Power it with solar. Then you don't have to be useful to anyone.
Useless by virtue of not having any abilities that would cause someone to pay you to do anything. If there are relatively cheap robots that don't need time off, paid leave, health insurance, or a paycheck at all (after completing the initial investment), and they're capable of doing any kind of manual labor, then someone who is only capable of doing manual labor is fairly useless to anyone who needs labor. The alternative would basically be working for nearly slave wages. I assume he's imagining that these people will be able to survive by virtue of some kind of social security system that pays people a basic income derived from taxes on business. Maybe that tax will be enough to make it cheaper to hire people instead of buying robots, but there's definitely going to come a time when all manner of menial jobs will be performed by robots. The question is what happens to the people who don't have any skills other than those required for menial jobs.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Though many pretend to be, many want to be, and parents+teachers say that everyone is, in reality only a (relative) few are actually talented enough for their creativity to be worthwhile.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
It is really endearing of Americans when they think they can use a few handguns to rise against an army having tanks, artillery and bombs.
It's like when you see the eyes of a child who still believes in Santa Claus light up in Christmas morning when they see the cookies and milk gone and presents instead.
[wipes off moist eyes]
Looks like we will all be trust fund babies... collecting art, sampling fine wine, travelling to exotic places, etc. Bring it on.