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Bill Gates: AI Is The 'Holy Grail' (mashable.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the Monty-Python dept.

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."

39 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. 640k of Skynet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Nobody will need more.

  2. Loss of jobs... by EmeraldBot · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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."
    1. Re:Loss of jobs... by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Computers and AI do automate jobs, with worldwide impact. That tends to accelerate the revenue "production", earned by fewer people / entities. 30 years ago the job automation was already predicted - this was regarded as a good omen: people would have had to work less thanks to automation, and earn the same.

      However automation proved over time that it's also a good way for the company to earn the same (more or less depending on fields of work) with fewer people. Human beings have the natural tendency to expect philanthropy when it comes to an ideal future. Reality is different, and people are looking out for their own interests, naturally.

      Society needs rules (laws) to balance people interests and freedom, this is the only way most of the people might get a fair share of the cake. Unfortunately, not only governments didn't anticipate, decades ago, the necessary societal changes due to computers and automation, but the current growing inequalities and losses of jobs are not addressed the way it should, i.e. adapt our laws to conform to the changes we see in technologies.

      --
      Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
    2. Re:Loss of jobs... by geekmux · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Loss of jobs... by michelcolman · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Loss of jobs... by burtosis · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:Loss of jobs... by beh · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "Human beings have the natural tendency to expect philanthropy when it comes to an ideal future."
      that's an interesting statement, particularly if you put it into context with the kind of vitriol you might hear from people opposing a Universal Basic Income...

      That's not to say whether you yourself might be pro/con UBI, ... But a lot of economic talk seems to imply that the future will be better (even if there will be fewer jobs - but none really want to address where the consumers should come from in a society (largely) without income...

    6. Re:Loss of jobs... by danbert8 · · Score: 2

      There is a lot of truth to this. We are in for a lot of hurt as AI and robotics take over the vast majority of labor in the world. It's going to happen and it's going to happen in a generation. I am lucky to be in a highly paid, hard to automate job at the moment, but I don't understand why we are still working so much... The Industrial Revolution brought the weekend. Unions fought for limited 40 hour work weeks which became the norm. You'd think with computers, the internet, smart phones, and remote access we'd have reduced work hours, increased vacation, etc? Nope, vacation time is still stingy as all hell and if anything hours for salaried employees has gone up. We need to start dropping work days or work hours during the day to let more people in on the dwindling job market before it's too late.

      --
      Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
    7. Re:Loss of jobs... by tomhath · · Score: 2

      It stands to reason that these devices will develop some kind of consciousness

      No, it doesn't.

      Now step away from the science fiction books. Computers do what we program them to do, and if the program doesn't do what we intended, we shut it down.

    8. Re:Loss of jobs... by michelcolman · · Score: 2

      Have you seen demonstrations of the latest walking robots? They use neural networks that work a lot like our brains (on a smaller scale, obviously) and they end up behaving very similarly. When they are learning to walk, it looks like an animal learning to walk. Eerily similar.

      These systems will grow more and more complex. Instead of just telling the robot to go forward or backward, we'll be able to just tell it to go some place and it will figure out the optimal route on its own. That doesn't seem like too much of a stretch, does it?

      Ever more sophisticated neural networks will take verbal commands, execute instructions and possibly even anticipate what we will want without us asking, like a butler who knows his master very well. All based on neural networks that will start to resemble actual brains more and more as their capacity keeps going up. We are no longer programming them, just including a sufficiently large number of neural nodes and providing input and a feedback function so they can learn.

      Now, a neural network designed to analyze situations to look for the most appropriate response, will start to analyze pretty much anything it sees. Or feels. They will start analyzing themselves at some point.

      How do you think human consciousness evolved? You think it was created by God, do you?

      An ant probably doesn't wrestle with existential questions. Yet we do. It won't be long before robot brains will start to resemble ant brains. How much longer before they resemble ours?

      They will gradually become better than us at pretty much anything. They are already beating us at chess and go, they are proving mathematical theorems (not just the brute force coloring theorem proofs, but actual logical deduction), recognizing faces, steering cars. Much of that is still programmed by humans, but more and more is just neural networks that program themselves. We don't even know what really goes on in them anymore. Just like brains.

      I don't see why there would be anything that our brains can do, that an artificial neural network couldn't. And inevitably, then, they will get better than us. Even if we can keep them tamed, at some point it will become hard to argue our own superiority.

      I am convinced their actions will resemble consciousness at some point, even though we'll never be able to be certain one way or the other. We can't even define what this "soul" is, other than something you "really feel". Well, from within the context of the logic inside a neural network, its own consciousness will feel very real indeed. Does that make it real? What makes us real? Maybe it will take a stronger AI to figure that out, it's probably beyond our capacity.

    9. Re:Loss of jobs... by Beezlebub33 · · Score: 2

      Computers do what we program them to do, and if the program doesn't do what we intended, we shut it down.

      1. No, they have not been doing directly what we program them to do for a couple of years now. Nobody understands the networks that deep learning produce. Yes, we wrote the program that created and learned the network, but what comes out of the process and then is embedded into a operational system (object recognition, speech recognition, automated stock trading, learned arm movement) is beyond our grasp. We don't understand it and don't know how to fix it when it breaks other than re-training it. Further, while we're currently writing the programs that create and train the network, people are working on networks that create and train networks. At that point, we'll have absolutely no idea how the black box all works.

      2. The programs do not do what we intend them to do all the time. They make errors (that we don't understand). However, we don't turn them off; we continue using them because they are useful. The financial world uses these sorts of networks all over the place and we don't understand them, but we cannot just shut them down. Flash crash in the stock marker? Well, just live with it, turning them off would be a financial disaster. Siri did not understand what you said? Well, just try again or type it in.

      --
      The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
  3. Post-Scarcity Star Trek Economy by headkase · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Post-Scarcity Star Trek Economy by lorinc · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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
    2. Re:Post-Scarcity Star Trek Economy by swb · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Post-Scarcity Star Trek Economy by MrKaos · · Score: 2

      Currency is an abstraction of labor, we use it to manage the effort put into things during trade

      Ah, this was the line of thought I was looking for, thanks for putting it out there. If you don't mind me expanding on this and sharing my thoughts. AI make a resource based society more realistic, because who want to do a boring job like managing resources - that is an ideal job for AI.

      Just look around, this money political market system we have just does not work. Can anyone honestly say that the world is going to be *better* in 10 years if we keep going the way we are. How long to the next GFC? Just how many Einsteins have we lost because they are unemployed and sleeping in their car or stuck in a refugee camp. It's fucking stupid. I look forward to the day when people aren't dumbed down by this cunt of a system we live in now.

      Currency becomes obsolete, that means no debt and all of these political systems (capital, commun, social and so on) that were devised when it was thought that resources were infinite, which we now know are not, also become obsolete. Ask yourself what you would do if you wern't chained to being a wage slave for a boss you hate doing something you aren't interested in to buy shit you don't really want? If food, water and shelter were provided and we could actually build a social fabric based on science instead of arcane political power systems and the concept of ownership, but you'd still have what you own. Not a market based economy, a resource based economy. We all are finally free and we can finally evolve. What is the point of capital when we have abundance and you can manage things to be made without planned obsolesence driving consumerism? When you can just ask the AI to build you a house over there.

      However I also have a nightmare scenario for you as well. If you have AI driving production, then why not propogate it through the management all the way to the board. If you think companies are destructive now, imagine a CAI with a board of AIs doing all the un-ethical things humans did. AIs codified to look for legal loopholes to maximize shareholder profit. That's when we are extinct.

      I don't know, I'm as uncertain about this as anyone, and scared too because the power elite *will* hang on to power and will probably try to destroy us all rather than give up on having that power to control us all. After all the goal of power, is power. However capital will always push for lower labour costs and when all the jobs are gone, no-one has money to buy anything, nothing has value anymore because it costs virtually nothing to produce, what then is the point of money?

      What can humanity do when we are no longer slaves to debt?

      --
      My ism, it's full of beliefs.
  4. The Oracle Has Spoken by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

    1. Re:The Oracle Has Spoken by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2

      "640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates, 1981

      Do you have a source for this? I remember it being repeated a lot in the '90s, but in the '80s I remember the quote being that 64KB ought to be enough for anyone, in relation to a hard limit imposed by Microsoft BASIC. This version makes more sense, as 640KB was an Intel limitation - the 64KB limit came from code written by Gates himself.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    2. Re:The Oracle Has Spoken by tigersha · · Score: 2

      The 64K limits came from Intel's chip architecture. I am pretty sure Gates did not do that intentionally. On a 8086 the pointers were 16 bits and you could shift around the segments, but 64K was a real hardware limitation caused by 16 bit addressing.

      --
      The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
    3. Re:The Oracle Has Spoken by itamihn · · Score: 2

      Spam has not been a problem for me since 2006. Are you using any spam filters?

  5. Yeah, right... by muecksteiner · · Score: 3, Informative

    "Bill Gates"

    "Expert in the field"

    malicious snickering... :)

  6. Re:And this guy knows by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

    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 have seen thousands of people suck big time at programming over multiple decades. So your argument actually supports him. Maybe that's the whole reason why he's so optimistic about making people redundant in the first place!

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
  7. No it isn't by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:No it isn't by swb · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Free clean energy might also allow us to do more resource recovery. A lot of recycling is energy bound -- collection and processing of resources into reusable elements faces an energy ceiling where recycling what we've already extracted is more expensive than extracting new.

      If energy weren't an issue, you'd think that we'd have made all the first generation plastics we'd ever need, and new plastics would just be created from depolymerizing existing plastics down and creating new. But oil is cheap enough that we mostly just landfill or burn existing plastics and make new.

  8. At this point... by Kokuyo · · Score: 2

    And some day, we'll just be interesting fauna for sentient machines to keep around. Frankly, the way we're going, I'm not sure I object.

    We're not even able to see the signs of automation. The some who do want basic income and the rest is only able to scoff at the paradigm change but has no alternatives... I would even say they aren't convinced at all that we're going to run into a massive problem.

    1. Re:At this point... by Bongo · · Score: 2

      Maybe we are already a billion years in the future, and part of our schooling is to simulate a corporeal existence. Kinda like The Matrix but, with a less mundane red pill. When we die, the Near Death Experience is just the end of the level, and we return to whatever it is we are actually inhabiting, sentiences which were "uploaded" to non-biological existence, half a billion years ago. Cue Buffy's The Trio, dancing in a field, dressed in togas, singing, "We are gods..."

  9. Re:And this guy knows by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

    Marginally. Give full control of software development to advanced AI and witness how the people saying that current software is bloated are proven right. You shouldn't need ten million lines of code to make up the usual software for a simple personal computer.

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
  10. Re:The holy grail of what exactly? by dcollins117 · · Score: 2

    The Holy Grail, according to Arthurian legend, bestows upon it's finder eternal youth, happiness, and an infinite abundance of food. It is a symbol of an ideal that every man seeks but can never attain. As such, it's a rather good metaphor for Artificial Intelligence research.

  11. Re:And this guy knows by Nyder · · Score: 4, Informative

    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 have seen thousands of people suck big time at programming over multiple decades. So your argument actually supports him. Maybe that's the whole reason why he's so optimistic about making people redundant in the first place!

    I think Bill Gates is a prick and his opinion on anything doesn't mean shit. It's okay with him if AI's take over peoples jobs, he doesn't have to worry about feeding his family when he can't get a job because AI's/robots are doing all the jobs you can get.

    --
    Be seeing you...
  12. dreams by l3v1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "[...] 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.
  13. Re:And this guy knows by Dunbal · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  14. Intelligence is vastly overrated by petes_PoV · · Score: 2

    machines that are capable and more capable than human intelligence

    Most of what the human race needs in order to progress is a lack of greed, diligence, honesty, compliance with the laws, less ill-founded beliefs and a willingness to reign in the "entitlement" attitude.

    You don't need super intelligent machines (or people) to pick up litter, assemble cars, staff call centres, deliver stuff, report the news, teach children or grow crops. At the risk of falling into the the world will only need half a dozen computers trap, the opportunities for any thing or person with super-intelligence seem rather limited.So although many of these jobs can be automated - driverless cars being the NEXT BIG THING, they don't need to be intelligent to function. They just need to be safe, able to deal with people, reliable and cheap. It seems to me that it's the cheapness that will push up unemployment, not artificial intelligence.

    --
    politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
  15. Re:And this guy knows by Gr8Apes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  16. Re:And this guy knows by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

    First, FTFY. Bill Gates' technical experience is primarily in writing really really crappy software that failed.

    Of course. He's one of the people I was talking about. But even commercially successful software can be (and overwhelmingly seems to be) a technical failure. For commercial success, it only has to be slightly less of a failure than its competition. That doesn't define the boundaries of technical possibility.

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
  17. Re:And this guy knows by HumanWiki · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  18. For businesses trying to sell it, yes. by RogueWarrior65 · · Score: 2

    I'd venture to say that AI is the opposite end of the spectrum of complexity from web design. Given that, AI development will be the exclusive purview of elite companies that develop it in the same way that nobody makes their own chips and very few people make their own computers from scratch but a whole lot of people with minimal computer knowledge do at least basic web development. You might buy an AI engine from Microsoft but you'll never really know how it works to the point of being able to roll your own. You might say that open-source will handle that but how many people really understand the inner workings of Linux?

  19. "Remain" in control? by Sloppy · · Score: 2

    I am totally unconcerned with "making sure humans [emph mine] remain in control of super-intelligent machines." It's not that I think it's unimportant; it's just that I think it's trivial. The real issue is which humans.

    AI is going to create super-powerful humans (or groups of humans, i.e. corporations and governments). You are probably not one of them. Nearly no one is, but someone (him? them? that board? that law enforcement division?) will be.

    This isn't merely a fear, either: it's a contemporary diagnosis. We already see that a supermajority of people give control of their computers to other entities. "My computer must answer to me," isn't anyone's priority or requirement, except for "OSS zealots." And that's a problem: it means that our new gods' place is already nearly assured.

    We don't need to remain in control; we need to regain control.

    Look at your fucking phone, Blu-ray player, etc and tell me it isn't already (in 2016) running exactly the kind of software that metaphorically tells its users "I'm sorry, Dave, but I can't do that." It's not because it has gone off to left field with amazing inhuman inferences. It's because its master's desires and your desires conflict. This is a human-vs-human conflict, and most humans are losing because they have allowed their opponents to infiltrate their lives.

    --
    As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
  20. Re:And this guy knows by invid · · Score: 2

    I think Bill Gates is a prick and his opinion on anything doesn't mean shit. It's okay with him if AI's take over peoples jobs, he doesn't have to worry about feeding his family when he can't get a job because AI's/robots are doing all the jobs you can get.

    Bill will only have no worries if the AIs decide that money has value.

    --
    The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
  21. Re:And this guy knows by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

    Exactly right. If you read Bill Gates book (the first edition) he got everything wrong. He didn't even mention the Internet. He isn't a big thinker.

  22. Re: parent is no troll by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...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.