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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."
Nobody will need more.
Currency is an abstraction of labor, we use it to manage the effort put into things during trade - it's a lot more convenient than carrying around four cows and a goat. So, robots come along and take all the jobs? Well, no more scarcity of labor. And the systems of currency and capitalism we have grown so far get upended. They won't go out the window but they will see massive restructurings. If labor is not scarce, want a house? Go pick one down the street where the machines built fifty of them. Free. Because there was no scarce labor involved. Capitalism? Well, in a post scarcity economy the invisible hand that makes it go remains to be seen how that adapts. In the short term however, say ten to thirty years, a transition system where perhaps everyone gets a guaranteed minimum income until our society fully adapts to machines could help to minimize social upheaval over the machines taking all the jobs.
Shh.
Free, clean energy is. AI means the oligarchs get to remove more jobs from the masses, thus increasing suppression of dissent (until forced into revolution); but limitless energy means the world's population can all live far better lives regardless of where they're located. Water can be purified allowing food to be grown where it's cost prohibitive now, migration will slow down when the third world can live like the so-called first.
"alternative way to structure our society" or continuously cull the bottom 2-10% of the population through poverty-induced lifespan reductions to incentivize the remaining 90-98% of remaining livestock... (I mean: "taxpayers") to keep running on a treadmill that is continuously accelerating while rewarding the workers with smaller and smaller meal rations... (I mean: "salaries")?
With sufficiently kickass AI, you can pay lipservice to the idea of a post-scarcity utopia right up until judgement day, then fire all the programmers who helped write the greater than human general artificial intelligence, followed by slowly replacing the electrical engineers designing the CPUs/GPUs/ASICs/FPGAs/Quantum Computers with that artificial intelligence, followed by slowly replacing the foundry executives who manufacture the chips with the general artificial intelligence.
Once you have the MacGuffin, all pretenses can be dispensed with and you can immediately start leveraging the United Nations "Peace Keeping" bipedal munitions for law enforcement and riot control. A sufficiently overwhelming show of force in the face of #Occupy type dissent should establish a clear-enough message in the minds of any audience member who might consider exercising their right to protest in the future. And so divided they will fall...
This is my dream for the future. It's why I'm studying Math, Statistics, and Neural Networks. I think the story of the fate of the inventor of the Brazen Bull is very funny. AI is the Atomic bomb of this century.
Who needs a gas centrifuge when you can buy GPU time on AWS for $0.65/hour?
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.
You're exactly right, as was evidenced by AI being defined as some sort of dream come true. The harsh reality is our society is not even remotely prepared. Today we tell humans "Go get an education, idiot!". Soon, we'll be struggling to even figure out what the hell to TEACH humans to go DO, while our society tosses you aside because your "lazy" ass isn't working 40 hours a week. Are we prepared for a 10-hour workweek as the norm? We should be. After all, we built all this AI and automation to do our work for us. But the bottom line is we won't be prepared, humans will continue to be called "lazy", and tossed to the side to die while the elitists run the universe. Of course culling our ever-growing population is yet another "benefit" they'll see in all this.
This realization won't happen before billionaires become trillionaires, but it will be realized soon thereafter when their riches aren't worth shit, and the middle class they RELY on has been decimated by automation and AI. Government, you should be paying attention too, you're not exactly funded without a working class capable of paying taxes, unless you plan on finally taxing the elitists that created this mess. Fat chance of that happening. Their money is offshore and will stay there.
What was the answer to $15/hour minimum wage? Not to respect it, but instead to bypass it and build robots to replace workers. This is only scratching the surface. Watch as AI replaces educated humans. It can. And it will. And sooner than you think.
I see a more subtle but possibly ultimately more dangerous problem.
Imagine we can make AIs that are as smart as humans. Of course, 18 months later they will be twice as smart, and 15 years later they will be a thousand times as smart.
It stands to reason that these devices will develop some kind of consciousness. We will never be able to solve the question whether or not their consciousness is "real" (the only consciousness I can directly experience is my own, I can't even prove that any other human being has a "real" consiousness (aka "soul") let alone be certain whether a robot has it or not) but they will certainly behave that way, ask the same existential questions as we do ("why is everything so real, who am I, I know I'm just a bunch of tiny switches but it feels so real regardless, there has to be something more...") because any intelligent system thinking about itself will "feel" its own thought processes to be larger than life. So in the end we won't be able to tell the difference.
So now we have humans with all their biological quirks (irrational behaviour, gut bacteria and periods changing people's moods, finnicky sleep patterns, extreme fragility (try replacing someone's arm), complicated life support, diseases, radiation damage, etcetera) on one side, and superintelligent robots that are more intelligent and with none of those biological issues on the other hand.
Even if we do manage to contain them and remain in charge, it would be like ants herding elephants. It would no longer make sense. What's the meaning of life? How could we still justify our superiority to those more highly evolved AIs which will think like us and talk like us but a thousand times faster?
How would we colonize the galaxy? Send complex craft full of life support to keep multiple generations of people alive to try and geo-engineer some distant planet to make it somewhat usable for human life? Or send a bunch of robots that are smarter than humans and much easier to keep "alive" to spread human civilisation? The former takes enormous resources and may turn out to be impossible, the latter isn't even hard to do. So the latter it will be.
I don't think in that context there's any chance for human "civilisation" to survive in its current form. It just won't make sense anymore. Even if we can continue to live, we'll just be part of something much bigger that keeps us alive for its own entertainment (hopefully). No need for some armed robot uprising. They will just leave us behind as useless little impotent creatures. We, ourselves, will at some point have to admit that it no longer makes sense to keep us in charge.
Now don't get me wrong, I really like humans. I like good food, entertainment, sex, everything human. But much of this is biologically inspired and totally useless for robots. Will we be able to let our culture survive? Would it make sense to even try? Can we find some non-subjective reason for that? I hope we will, but it won't be easy.
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.
Yes, but isn't the real problem also automation and robotics? Once this hits a critical point where almost no humans are required all the power will have moved to the sub 1% of humans forever. How well would a revolt work when all militaries have gone 99% automated? How successful would halting human labor production be when it's 99% automated? This is unprecedented in all of history. The end game for free market capitalism sure looks like it won't work out well for the 99.999% of humans left out of control. If it takes 50 years or 500 we are on a highway to that destination.
That's ok the AI will feed you and your family. To the protein bank.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.