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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."
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.
"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.
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.
"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...
"[...] 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.
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.
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.