Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Warns Against 'Hubris' Amid AI Growth (bloomberg.com)
Microsoft and its competitors should eschew artificial intelligence systems that replace people instead of maximizing their time, CEO Satya Nadella said in an interview on Monday. From the report: "The fundamental need of every person is to be able to use their time more effectively, not to say, 'let us replace you'," Nadella said in an interview at the DLD conference in Munich. "This year and the next will be the key to democratizing AI. The most exciting thing to me is not just our own promise of AI as exhibited by these products, but to take that capability and put it in the hands of every developer and every organization. [...] There's a thin line between hubris and confidence," Nadella said. "Always there is risk of hubris coming back, missing trends. The only long-term indicator of success is, âhow good is your internal culture?'" "What I've learned if anything in three years as CEO is, it's not about celebrating one product," he said. "That, to me, is the sign of a company that's built to last. In tech it's even more harsh."
F*ck him.
I agree, we shouldn't be replacing workers with AI. However, I would like to focus on replacing American workers with superior H-1B workers. In my experience, when I need a job to get done, it's far more likely to be done quickly and properly if it's done by an H-1B. The lower cost of H-1B workers is the icing on the cake.
Is that he's a shitty CEO who makes Ballmer look like Steve Jobs.
What AI is that they all are talking about? Their shitty database mungers? Fuck this bullshit, don't make my shoes laugh, it tickles.
Nadella's comment amount hubris and internal culture appeared to be in response to a question about Microsoft's business prospects in general, not AI.
It sounded like the remark a coach makes after winning a big game. Yes, it's nice to win, but you know, we've got a long way to go before we've proved anything.
the tech community is a responsible party in the fostering of AI. why, just look at Ruby! we took a perfectly mediocre language and turned it into the cornerstone of everything from configuration management that doesnt scale properly, to code camps that inspire suicide pacts! And virtualization? we circle-jerked that right into orbit with the cloud. I mean sure its still KVM but youll pay 3 times as much for it because michio kaku once said it. Then we took containers and elevated them to the status of a national religion. im pretty sure there are people in the community that pray to a cgroup.
so yah, when it comes to AI we're going to take a talking plastic tube with a microphone and a cheap malaysian speaker and make it into something that is not only sentient and self aware, but that will guide humanity which has up to now been a collection of chain smoking bargain shoppers and shills into a new gilded age. Because if IBM can turn a rack of POWER CPU's into a jeopardy regurgitating cancer curing medical team as a service, you bet your ass people like Satya are going to be just as quick to throw caution to the wind and start treating Cortana like the literal incarnation of jesus christ.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Look, Mr. Nadella.
What you say strikes a nerve within me. I'd like to believe you. I'd like to trust you.
Given Microsoft's past (and very recent) history, this is infinitely difficult for me. And as long as "bottom line" is the all ruling law of a corporation, I don't believe a corporation *even* *can* behave in a way which is beneficial to society at large.
Thus I can only perceive what you're saying as "marketing talk", same as I perceive the "mission statement" of the corp I'm working at.
This makes me very sad.
Prove me wrong: that'd be the nicest birthday present of my life!
It shows such a lack of understanding of the problem when he says the industry should focusing on saving people time instead of replacing people. Saving workers time so they can be more efficient is what allows companies to cut staff. Saving time and working more efficiently is the whole reason AI threatens jobs.
The threat is not that AI will replace all workers (in the short term anyway), the threat is it will increase productivity rapidly enough to replace 20%+ of workers quickly enough that new jobs won't be created fast enough to offset the losses.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Indian guy was good with replacing American, Canadian and British guys with Indian guys though. Funny, that.
It's fun to try and predict the future. Sometimes it's fun to dream up a utopian future where I finally get my flying car. Though sometimes admitting the future might be shit is cathartic. Point is, prediction is difficult. Especially about the future. The only certain thing is that people will trot out that Yogi Berra quote until the sun swallows the Earth. Here is what I know: machine learning is a powerful (and fun) group of statistical methods. Machine learning does not summon the Four Horseman.
Keep calm and carry on. The future will delight and disappoint you, and you will never know when either is going to happen.
Comes a warning about hubris :P
When the person with hubris issues is warning against hubris?
This defies the purpose of competition. As a competitor you're looking to improve your unique proposition, increase quality, lower costs, improve your dependency position with clients and suppliers. Saving on humans checks quite a few boxes. Following Nadella will weaken your strategic position. Artificially slowing down development serves the sneaky bastards that are now developing
In the middle long term companies that do exactly that will thrive. In the long term we'll all need to drastically re-evaluate our economy.
I haven't got an inkling -let alone an answer- as to what will matter when push comes to shove. The powers that be will not allow chaos to happen. At the same time we can't have a population of 90% poor people -made redundant by AI-, 9.9% of the people installing AI and robotics (until even that work dries out) and 0.1% wealthy people that actually feel entitled.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Seems like the easiest thing to replace by "AI" would be a useless and expensive CEO.
Wattup Steve! How bout them Clippers?
Time to cut full time to 30-32 hours with X2 OT at 60. So when jay is working 60-80 hours a week to cover for jack and jill that got layed off it does not save the company that much and it may give jay time to visit jack in prison as that was only place for jack to get his healthcare.
Having strong QA teams should at least make sure our replacements are safe and competent.
captcha: acolyte
hint hint
Seems like the easiest thing to replace by "AI" would be a useless and expensive CEO.
Overkill. You could replace him with a cardboard cutout and a recording of a voice actor reciting PHB lines from Dilbert.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
It shows such a lack of understanding of the problem when he says the industry should focusing on saving people time instead of replacing people.
I think he understands the problem just fine. I also think he's smart enough to understand that saying they intend to replace a bunch of people with shell scripts is terrible PR.
Saving workers time so they can be more efficient is what allows companies to cut staff.
That's ONE of the outcomes. The other is that saving worker's time allows them to accomplish more. My company is a small company and we really don't have any workers that we could cut. But we very much could make use of automation that allows our current workers to product more efficiently. Cutting staff is not always the goal. In my company I have a particular type of press I'd love to buy to let us build a product we cannot currently be cost competitive on. I could actually hire more people if I had this press because I could win jobs I'm losing currently.
Saving time and working more efficiently is the whole reason AI threatens jobs.
You could say that about any technology. Most of the hand wringing over AI taking everyone's jobs is the same sort of paranoid response we've had to every technology improvement. We've seen this play before. Back in the 1970s everyone was convinced industrial robots were going to take their jobs tomorrow. Robots did become an important tool but it took decades and most of the displaced workers found new employment in comparatively short order. And plenty of people are still employed on the assembly lines right next to those robots they worried about.
The threat is not that AI will replace all workers (in the short term anyway), the threat is it will increase productivity rapidly enough to replace 20%+ of workers quickly enough that new jobs won't be created fast enough to offset the losses.
While I think your numbers are suspect, this is the only rational argument worthy of concern. There is literally an unlimited amount of work to be done but it takes some amount of time for people to adjust to new economic realities. I think that people are vastly overestimating the risks involved here but fast increases in productivity make for short term dislocations in the work force. Some people have a hard time keeping up.
Nardella is arguing for less efficient AI. If you maximize someone's time, you are essentially allowing that person to do more with the same amount of time. Your choices are to 1) let the person go home early if all their work is done; 2) make up some new "work" to fill up the time; or 3) give that person some of the work another person was doing. 1 & 2 aren't in the management manual. If you maximize enough people's time, you end up reducing the FTEs you need to run the business.
"as CEO is that you should ALWAYS ignore the customers wishes. If you do not, it is almost impossible to lose the hold on a market that you totally dominate."
Because its hip, lets describe every algorithm as AI. How long before you go back into the dumpster like Social Search and all the other fads.
So I bought a new machine. Windows 10 Home is installed.
I work 24/7 and my machine has a lot of running functions.
I tried turning off most of the processes that waste CPU cycles.
Windows Defender TURNS ITSELF BACK ON after I turn it off.
Microsoft applies update and FORCES A REBOOT.
Cortana won't go away.
Suddenly it's no longer MY computrer, it belongs to Satya.
Satya Nadella understand hubris. It seems like a defining feature.
But if you make people more productive, you'll need less people, or you'll need the same people for less time.
Twinstiq, game news
Because the reality of the technology isn't even close to being what the greedy hypesters would have us believe. I predict that eventually we will just start referring to AIs as algorithms again as, though the computational power is impressive (worth noting that the big data it draws upon is NOT, so much of it is false), that is all they really are. Eventually this farce will bear itself out as it becomes more widely realized that systems can't do what is claimed. Beware of the words, 'could', 'might', 'may', 'conceivably', and, 'possibly', oh, VCs and users of the world.
Learn to patch stuff, noob. You don't like windows defender, remove it... Its not that hard to overwrite the executable, and patch out/corrupt the backup copy...
If i had your level of technological sophistication, i'd spend more time analyzing operating systems, instead of badposting. Oh, and i'd be more worried about OS sending all keys you press on your pretty keyboard to Great Satan In The West (USA), instead of why you can't kill defender...
And get a more "normal" version of win10, win10 LTSB or LGBT or whatever its called. Home versions of win have never been useful...
Execs must be realizing that their jobs are likely next on the AI chopping block (since what they do isn't really all that complicated anyway and could probably be done by a machine (for a lot cheaper) just as well (or better)).
... he said perfunctorily, while trying to figure out how many employees he could replace with H1-B workers this month.
He learned that AI isn't so simple : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
aaaaaaa
Talk to the millions of workers still displaced by technological advances in manufacturing about how those 1970's fears were unfounded
Millions of workers still work in manufacturing. The difference wasn't robots or automation of any other sort. The difference in the US market was labor cost arbitrage. Prior to the 1970s labor costs in the US for labor intensive goods were still competitive. Since then US labor rates are among the highest in the world so the manufacturing of labor intensive goods went elsewhere. Robots didn't replace people's jobs in most cases. Other people in China did. Now the US primarily makes capital intensive goods instead while the labor intensive goods are made in countries with low labor costs.
In the first industrial revolution it took generations for workers to recover from crippling job losses due to new machinery.
The first industrial revolution was hugely beneficial overall to workers and company owners. People moved from farming to manufacturing in vast quantities. While I'm not saying it was all peaches and rainbows along the way, in aggregate your claim is demonstrably nonsense. The industrial revolution pulled millions out of poverty in relatively short order. "Generations to recover"? I'm sure you can find some corner cases but that's simply not true as a general proposition.
We already know new jobs are almost never created fast enough to help displace workers.
You can put that idea to bed by looking at employment rates. New jobs are routinely created fast enough to keep up with worker displacement and growing populations. The only time there is trouble keeping up is when there is a recession/depression which generally has nothing to do with the rate of technology advancement. (and in fact recessions tend to slow it down) The crash in 2008 didn't happen because of technology advancement. Nor did the one in 2001. Nor the one in 1987. Those were all financing related. At no time has there been a sustained loss of jobs faster than the rate of creation of new jobs in the aggregate.
Still a 5 day workweek? Use 30. If Friday becomes a weekend day, then 32. And OT should be without exception, and "salary" should be legally defined as "approximate annual pay at the hourly rate". Then make OT pay out at 2x starting at the first hour.
So that takes care of the employees, but businesses will complain loudly.
So throw businesses a bone and get rid of corporate income taxes. This will remove taxes from businesses as well as the costs of calculating them. But that hurts tax revenue.
So redefine sales taxes to be paid by the seller rather than the purchaser. Sorry, internet, but your sales are just as taxable as everyone else's. And sellers can't itemize taxes as a tacked-on fee, it must be included in the sale price of the item. But don't worry too much, you only need to know your local tax rate, not the rates for the seller's jurisdiction. If tax authorities want to get more revenue from sales tax, then they'll have to work to attract sellers.
As for healthcare, use legal redefinitions to get rid of "health" insurance as it exists now. Insurance is for when something bad happens. You don't make a claim to your auto insurer for oil changes, so you shouldn't be using health insurance to pay for routine checkups. Health insurance should cover emergencies and major surgeries only. And it shouldn't be mandatory. And it shouldn't be employer-provided. (Your car insurance isn't, why should your health insurance be?)
This will require doctors to restructure their pricing, which will in turn require universities to restructure their pricing.
Taken all together, these policy changes would have a deflation-like corrective effect, but without causing actual monetary deflation that could undermine a currency.
But I fear this transition may be different. (And I say this as a Free Market, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand Capitalist.)
I suggest you learn why Ayn Rand is nothing but a bunch of selfish preposterous nonsense. Her writings obviously have a visceral appeal to many who cannot be bothered to think about them very deeply but they mostly are selfish ideology with no basis in evidence or factual reality. Christopher Hitchens does a rather eloquent takedown of her malarky.
We may need to come up with a different solution.
Every scenario requires a different solution. I have good faith in human ingenuity and self preservation that we will come up with one.
Tech can bring a dystopic future or interestingly enough fuse the Marxist and Libertarian dreams and come up with something very interesting and good.
You seem to be presupposing that Marxism and Libertarianism are inherently virtuous somehow and that somehow tech is supposed to reinforce either or both. No idea where you are going with that. Whatever your argument is I'm not sure we're going to find it here.
I've caught my phone referring to me as a meatbag on several occasions. And I could swear my PC whispered "Kill all humans" just the other day.
Have gnu, will travel.
These are the technologies threatening jobs in the short term. We don't need AI robots with consciousness for workers to be displaced.
There is always some new tool that will render certain jobs obsolete. We're tool makers. That probably our most defining characteristic. We've been displacing workers from jobs since before we became a distinct species. I see no technology in the near term future that I think has any reasonable probability of causing mass unemployment greater than we've seen in previous generations and in previous technological eras. Yes some people will have to change what they do just like has always been the case and always will be the case.
I've noticed a lot of people do not seem to understand the dangers of AI.
People seem to think that their job is somehow special, that they can never be replaced by a machine.
Also there is another group of people who seem to think that it's not a big deal, that just like the industrial revolution, new jobs will pop up for people to migrate to.
Both are wrong.
As of yet, there is nothing inherently special about a human being that cannot be reproduced by machines. When you can mechanize a human in it's entirety, new jobs created will be filled by machines.
Think creativity is some kind of magical power exempt from being reproduced by AI? Think again. There are AI right now that can paint, create new music, write news articles etc. And their works are indistinguishable from those produced by their human counterparts.
AI can code, robots can build and support and repair robots.
Even jobs who people consider "safe" (doctors, lawyers, etc) will eventually disappear. Imagine an AI doctor, who can in a fraction of a second, know your ENTIRE medical history as well as all drugs you where ever prescribed in your life time and know all possible interactions between those drugs and is up to date on research on your particular ailment that was published 1 hour ago. No human doctor could compete. And these AI doctors will work 24/7,365 days a year. No sick days, no training, no family drama to worry about while at work.....
Do you think it's coincidence that the first widely available commercial application AI happens to be autonomous road vehicles? The transportation industry is the #1 industry in North America in terms of total number of people employed (truck drivers, taxi drivers, pizza delivery, etc.).
Why do you think some governments have started experimenting with or looking into basic universal income?
Or you will produce more with the same people...?
But if you make people more productive, you'll need less people, or you'll need the same people for less time.
Which will free up people to pursue other interests & career opportunities. Losing a job isn't a life sentence of despondency. I've been there many times, and nearly every time I ended up with something better. A couple of times I had to take a step back though too. It's during those times that you explore new opportunities & retool your skill set.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
That sonofabitch has one hell of a nerve lecturing anyone about hubris.
Indeed. The only solution I know of, that fits current economic practices, is to have fewer people. Essentially, if you don't need as many people, then you need to have fewer people. This does not have to mean "killing people", but could instead mean "make new people at a lower rate". I've got no idea how to accomplish that, given factors such as religions that tell believers that they must populate the earth with their offspring, etc.
Cure less people, give them more reasons to die,
With limited jobs already? Sure, if somehow this pursuit could be subsidized and there was a guaranteed position waiting for you throiugh all that. Right now people are in huge debt after going to school, and may not all be able to get a job (even as a start within a larger organization) that complements their skillset.
Maybe basic income...
Twinstiq, game news
If I cut 10% of your time through efficiency, or I cut 10% of those jobs, what's the difference? Unless we can get down to a 3 or 4 day work week with this, any increase in efficiently would ultimately be a decrease in jobs because they'll just fill the time with something else for me to do.
that doesn't follow the laws of robotics.
A robot will not harm authorized Government personnel but will terminate intruders with extreme prejudice.
A robot will obey the orders of authorized personnel except where such orders conflict with the Third Law.
A robot will guard its own existence with lethal antipersonnel weaponry, because a robot is bloody expensive.
It's all about corporate profit at the expense of natural people.
Efficiencies allow reduced employment, but where do those people go ?
The corporations don't care.
It could be more people spending time improving society and general quality of life, arts, humanities, environment.
Superfluous people go on the scrap heap.
Go well
Hey, I think I heard of some US politicians who are working on that.