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."
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
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.
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.
...The powers that be will not allow chaos to happen.
Oh really? The powers that be care about what makes them obscenely rich, and not much else. It's the entire reason the chasm between the 99% and the 1% continues to grow.
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.
Sure we can. Pure unadulterated greed will ensure it. In the future, the 0.1% won't give a shit about the rest any more than they do today. Greed serves them and their lifestyles very well, and will continue to serve them, regardless of the impact on humanity.
In fact, UBI (a.k.a. Welfare 2.0) will be viewed as a gift for the redundant masses, dissolving any guilt you assume the 0.1% might hold by eradicating the concept of human employment.
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
The threat is not that AI will replace all workers (in the short term anyway),
The truth is, people don't know what they're talking about when it comes to AI. AI will be a thing in the late 22th century, perhaps. As of now, Artificial Intelligence is just a buzz word to entertain the clueless at Corporate conventions.
The powers that be will not allow chaos to happen.
...to them.
Powers-that-be the world over seem extremely content to live and move between high security walled compounds and let huge amounts of chaos to happen around them so long as it doesn't happen to them.
The min/max calculation they make is what is the minimum number of peers do they have to suffer to maximize their personal wealth and safety, and as a group, what is the minimum number marginally empowered flunkies (security forces, admins and service flunkies) do they have to pay for to maximize that same wealth and safety.
I just don't believe in any "democratizing AI" -- it will be like any other information technology. Its adoption is always at the top of the pyramid first and used to gain as much advantage over those below in the pyramid. I just don't see an AI good enough to imperil the powers that be being available to the average citizen. It will either be unobtainium or stripped down enough so that its only value is making the remaining cogs in the machine more efficient.
The smart play for those sitting at the top is to get over their moralistic impulses and figure out what kind of designer drugs they can dream up in order to pacify the masses long-term. Basic Income alone won't cut it and the available toxic soup the masses use to tune out just raises their security costs.
The truth is, people don't know what they're talking about when it comes to AI. AI will be a thing in the late 22th century, perhaps. As of now, Artificial Intelligence is just a buzz word to entertain the clueless at Corporate conventions.
No one is talking about a Skynet-level general AI when they are talking about the AI which will take someone's jobs in the next few decades. They are talking about improved voice recognition, image classification, machine learning algorithms, etc. These are the technologies threatening jobs in the short term. We don't need AI robots with consciousness for workers to be displaced.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Millions of workers still work in manufacturing.
Yes, but there are also millions of former manufacturing and other low-skill workers who cannot find work in the new economy. No one is saying everyone will be out of a job. And it doesn't even take a majority of people out of work for there to be a problem. All it takes is a small disruption to cause massive problems.
The first industrial revolution was hugely beneficial overall to workers and company owners.
Yes, eventually. But while it is easy to look at the period from about 1760 to 1840 as a small blip in history, that was eighty years where large groups of people were significantly negatively affected by changes in employment. It's also easy to look at the century where farming went from a majority of the workforce to only a few percent of us as an easy transition, without looking at how rural areas are still dealing with the loss of income and jobs today. Manufacturing came in for about half a century to help the transition, but there isn't another savior in the horizon (at least in the short term).
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.
What are you talking about? Workforce participation by working age adults is dropping fast. We are at levels not seen since the 1970's, when women participation was half what it is now. The numbers are clear an unambigious, and they point to a large portion of our country that is being displaced by technology. It is already happening. People are only worried that AI will make the problem worse, not create a new problem.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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 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.
Natural language processing, self-driving vehicles, and improved virtual assistants for starters. I'm not saying they are certain to cause mass unemployment, but they certainly have a reasonable probability of doing that. Job displacement caused by software create job displacement at a much faster rate than those caused by robotics, because they are deployed at a much faster rate.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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?
That sonofabitch has one hell of a nerve lecturing anyone about hubris.