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Bill Gates: AI Is The 'Holy Grail' (mashable.com)
An anonymous reader writes: At the Code Conference on Wednesday, Bill Gates balanced his fears of artificial intelligence with praise. He talked about two of the challenges AI will pose: a loss of existing jobs, and making sure humans remain in control of super-intelligent machines. Gates, as well as many other experts in the field, predict there will be an excess of labor resources as robots and AI systems take over. He plans to talk with others about ideas to combat the threat of AI controlling humans, specifically noting work being done at Stanford. Even with such threats, Gates called AI the "holy grail" as he envisions a future "with machines that are capable and more capable than human intelligence." Gates said, "We've made more progress in the last five years than at any time in history. [...] The dream is finally arriving. This is what it was all leading up to."
Loss of jobs is the big one. An AI is not only not capable of killing humans, but would have nothing to gain from killing the people who maintain it. On the other hand, poor and unemployed people with nothing to lose will tear our society apart if that part grows large enough (as has been demonstrated numerous times throughout history) and I fear nobody seems to be taking this situation seriously. We need to find an alternative way to structure our society, and quickly, if we want AI that does all our work for us.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
"AI is the holy grail" - Bill Gates, 2016
"Two years from now, spam will be solved" - Bill Gates, 2004
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates, 1981
Given the outcome of Gates' previous predictions, I think it's safe to presume that AI is and will never be the holy grail.
No more scarcity of labor doesn't mean no more scarcity of resources. It's not because the robots can build the house for almost nothing that you have the space, the raw materials and the energy to make that happen.
We are shifting to the purest capitalistic society possible: the things that you can have are no longer limited by the amount of labor you can put into them, but by the amount of capital you can transform into them. That means that the 7 billions people that own nothing still get nothing. In fact, it's even worse for them, because previously they could exchange their labor force for a living, while now it's worth nothing.
It's also not possible to assure everybody get a minimum, simply because resources don't grow (or we have to colonize other planets, which is likely to happen after the free labor). Or you have to limit the population to assure that this minimum resources doesn't decrease over time, which isn't very popular these times.
I think what will happen is an era of riots between the ones that own the resources and the huge remaining of the population. Eventually, the own-nothings will just die out from their miserable living conditions and the small percentage of humanity remaining will enjoy the leisure society like in The Dancers at the End of Time series by M Moorcock.
Or it could be that 2 parallel societies will coexist, the post-scarcity utopia and a low-tech mass population fighting for survival and trying to enter the utopia. Who knows?
Video of some good progressive thrash music
Or it could be that 2 parallel societies will coexist, the post-scarcity utopia and a low-tech mass population fighting for survival and trying to enter the utopia.
Isn't this, historically, what we've more or less always had?
An aristocracy which controls most of the resources, and vast peasantry largely living on whatever's left over, and what's left over is usually the crumbs whose marginal value to the aristocracy is so low they can't be bothered to monopolize that?
And usually there's just enough fear and cunning in the aristocracy that they grudgingly disgorge resources to keep the peasantry from rising against them -- usually known as bread and circuses -- or being useful as a tool to palace rivals in the aristocracy?
The current American political situation seems to be at the juncture where the aristocracy has misjudged the level of bread and circuses necessary to keep the peasantry in line, and they face some level of palace rivalry in the form of Trump and Sanders who find the peasantry's grumblings a useful tool for aspiring to power.
It's kind of re-run of the conflicts of the late Roman Republic. Sanders stands in for the Gracchi and their advocacy of the Plebs, Trump representing something of the advocate for the New Men, and Hillary a Sulla-like advocate for the established aristocracy.
"[...] more capable than human intelligence [...]"
I just can't understand all this nonsense some high profile people are talking about regarding AI these days. We're so far away from "real" AI today, that it's not even funny. While there has been great progress in machine learning in the last 2-3 decades - recent results pushing results more to the spotlight -, what we have are certain specific tasks where we have good results for (pattern/object/image recognition, games, etc.) but we have no intelligence in any sense of the word. Every working architecture that we have today is targeted and extensively trained for a single, very specific task (e.g., playing go, recognizing scenes and objects, recognizing specific patterns in signals and mimicking them - robotic arms, Google's music composer, etc.), incapable of doing anything else. E.g., an architecture built and trained for classifying and recognizing certain images and objects can't do anything with audio signals, radar signals, a go playing "AI" can't play chess, etc. No generalization, no transfer of gained experience for application to other tasks, and no real high level understanding and reasoning about anything. And let's not even start about chatbots.
I could go on with this, but my point is, talking about AI being more than humans, taking over, etc. is still very much sci-fi territory.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Well, I think he's right. And he's actually one of those people with enough experience to say this, since programming doesn't require pesky interaction with the real world like, say, automated cars do, humans obviously suck at programming big time, and Gates is one of those people who ... suck[s] big time at programming over multiple decades.
First, FTFY. Bill Gates' technical experience is primarily in writing really really crappy software that failed. Name a single thing he actually wrote or led that was remotely successful. MS Basic? MS bought GWU basic to replace it.
His experience in being a cunning and unethical asshole only interested in himself? Well, you got me there.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Give full control of software development to advanced AI and witness how the people saying that current software is bloated are proven right.
I'd lean more towards code being designed and written in such a way that the human brain would soon have no ability to understand even the simplest routines.
...or else you consider me and everyone else today who considered posting the EXACT same sentiments to this story.
This guy commenting on any tech advance annoys me as he was one of the main players in holding back computing technologies, either by squeezing better solutions out of the market, strangling new tech in the cradle, or just making darn sure such new tech would be Windows-only (remember he personally approved sabotaging ACPI for Linux)
Never, ever forget his role in computing history - villain, not visionary.