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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."
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.
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.
I think you actually stumbled into why the entire debate about H1-B misses the mark. Broadly speaking, H1-B's aren't taking the jobs of US tech workers. Instead, jobs are being taken by automation, ever-advancing technology, shift of workloads to the public cloud, and offshoring to areas of the world with much lower cost of STEM labor ($8-15/hr for instance).
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
" I don't believe a corporation *even* *can* behave in a way which is beneficial to society at large."
Do you believe this bullsh!t?
What are you living in some basement wearing a Che t-shirt and complaining about homophobic Conservatives? (Hope you see the irony in that statement - Che killed gays and considered them to be bourgeois counter-revolutions)
Corporations (are owned and run by people) produce a good or service that others may chose to buy or not.
Now, as we've become more socialistic, we've making it easier for companies to use the force of law to use their services. Socialism is not the answer . You must think that an all-knowing, all-powerful, bureaucracy is the solution. I think it leads to a dystopic future and civil war.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
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.
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 suggest you learn why Ayn Rand is nothing but a bunch of selfish preposterous nonsense. - Please. Do you say the same thing about Nietzsche? She says many interesting things on metaphysics and epistemology. Maybe you should read them. Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are novels attempting to bring ideas to the general public. She wrote other works.
I do not think that Marxism is a good idea. I think it's foolishness to think that a bureaucracy will do anything but look after itself - and it will use police powers to enforce its decisions. And yet there are many socialists / communists / Marxists out there (yes I understand the differences, I too have read underdevelopment theory) who think that there can be a future where basic needs are met (good food, housing, healthcare, things to do and safe neighborhoods) without having to work for a living. (See the UBI movement as an example.)
The concern that there will not be enough jobs for all is not unreasonable. In less that 40 years these jobs will be gone - taxi drivers, truck drivers, stock-shelf refillers (Home Depot, Target, Walmart, A&P, Walgreens, CVS), warehouse people, most middle-management jobs (including gov't), basic financial services (banks and brokerages) and more.
Restaurants will hire cooks and waiters will only be there for customer interaction. They will not be needed to order food, to bus the tables, etc... So fast food places will have 1 or 2 people per shift as opposed to 10.
This is our future.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
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.
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
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.
It's about freeing people to labor. And then what? Will we have a utopia?
... how many are happy, productive individuals? How many are studying STEM, getting degrees, building skills? As an evil landlord who looked at investing in the Section 8 sector (and who grew up in poor NYC neighborhoods) I did not see people studying, gardening, learning to play musical instruments, and other "utopic" activities.
Will people be happy? Will they have purpose? There are millions of people who have housing (Section 8) food (EBT/SNAP) and yet
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond