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.
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'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?