Slashdot Mirror
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.
I can't leave this discussion without a mention of Manna by Marshal Brain http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
It's two extreme scenarios for what might happen if we are able to replace the entire workforce.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Slashdotters have been experimenting with this fate for a decade. Now get me some more Cheetos, Mom.
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
The government is getting ready for this state of affairs by removing their means of revolt.
Have gnu, will travel.
Evolution has shaped humans into pretty efficient workers under the environmental conditions on earth. Why should an AI not utilize this? There's plenty of humans around, they are relatively easy to spawn, feed and keep healthy, and technology will make it increasingly easy to prevent any kind of unwillingness to serve the AI.
Actually, people will hardly notice they have begun working for an AI. They'll still think they work for some large global corporation that happenes to run data centers and "Internet of Things"-stuff when control of that corporation is already with the AI hosted in those data centers.
The AI won't even have to build "Terminators" to keep the puny carbon units under control - it just needs to provide enough bread, games and illusion of freedom of choice.
You mean like Elon Musk and other tech-celebrities who warned about the potential dangers of AI?
Presently they're called MBAs, and I'm sure they could be easily replaced with a magic 8-ball.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Written sixteen years ago by Bill Joy One the best articles on the subject.
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.
Experts have been predicting the end of the world for centuries and they've been wrong every time.
I'm going to predict that the world will never end, and I'll only be wrong once.
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
Well, if they follow your example, they'll all pee sitting down.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Well, at least this means there won't be a shortage of ACs posting on Slashdot.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I mean, I don't see how there could be some class of Humans that would not be useless when compared to AI in a century or two.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
The driver for self-preservation is what will save humans. AI may become self-aware, but it won't have inner driver to evolve to preserve itself at all costs. In fact, because it will be created by humans, its most primal drive will be the laws of robotics. Humans, at large, will do what specialists do when they see their livelihood threatened. They will pretend to cooperate, but their full drive to make themselves obsolete will be just a facade. They will learn to fail just frequently enough to make themselves relevant, but not frequently enough to make themselves useless. It's how car manufacturers continue to exist. The cars have built-in defects which develop over time. So car manufacturers continue to be needed. Unions, professional licenses... it's all there to slow down the course of history until the people who developed very specialized skills live out their usefulness rather than outlive it. News business was supposed to be dead, but all that's happened is the number of newsmen has decreased. 80% of the population were farmers. Today it's less than 5%. If humans, at large, can become irrelevant, then humans at large will find ways to stretch out the period over which this irrelevance sets in or they will continue to produce AI with imperfections subtle enough to continue ongoing development (just as car companies do). This may seem far fetched, but, as an example, cars in Cuba are all from the 50s. It's not because cubans are "poor", as much as it is because in the absence of new cars, old ones get maintained to last much longer than car manufactures would have you believe cars can survive.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
int the Time Machine were much the same thing: a technical, behind the scenes class that probably started off taking care of a useless "nobility", gradually evolving to exploit them as a food source. Our Morlocks would be a select few who directly serve and service the machines, the nobility are all the suit-and-tie wearers who get most of the benefits already. Think how many tech executives don't even know what their company's product is.
Our "extras" probably won't be cared for very nicely, even at first, considering how the upper classes treat them now when they're actually needed.
...The question is what happens to the people who don't have any skills other than those required for menial jobs.
No, I'm pretty sure the question is "what happens to even the people who have fairly advanced skills, when automation and AI can do their work so cheaply and so well that giving the job to a human is merely an act of charity?"
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Looks like we will all be trust fund babies... collecting art, sampling fine wine, travelling to exotic places, etc. Bring it on.
400% overcapacity? Where'd you come up with that number?
Maybe you should try your hand at foraging, hunting, or non-mechanized agriculture if you don't think those are really jobs.
No, it is not. Capitalism "wins" because its the most efficient means of gross national product; but you can always change the definition of "winning". If we want a society at its present population levels being relatively stable and productive, we need to change its philosophical mindset, and provide the means to achieve that equilibrium. Namely, basic income, coupled with heavily educating its citizen populace (non-STEM as well as STEM), and investment into academic/scientific pursuits. In the previous century, gov't was taxing the rich to provide infrastructure to underdeveloped areas of the US, a radical change in real estate policy that resulted in wealth in the middle classes, and encouraging the population to get advanced degrees (from 5% to about 30% today).
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon