People Don't Realize How Deep AI Already Is In So Many Things, Salesforce CEO Benioff Says (cnbc.com)

Evolving technologies should develop at a steady enough pace to adequately replace the jobs they eliminate, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told CNBC on Tuesday. From the report: "Technology's always taken jobs out of the system, and what you hope is that technology's going to put those jobs back in, too. That's what we call productivity," Benioff said on "Squawk Box" at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "I think a lot of people don't understand how deep AI already is in so many things," he said, one being Salesforce's newly updated Einstein product, which Benioff said is not yet available to clients but can tell the company whether it will make or miss earnings estimates using artificial intelligence What business leaders at the WEF have been calling the "Fourth Industrial Revolution" is at the center of a global transformation in the technology space, as artificial intelligence, robotics and cloud computing gain traction, he said.

Comments

Extrapolation?

[plopez]

How is this different from extrapolation or multivariate analysis?

Re:Extrapolation?

[AK Marc]

So Deep AI is the same as Deep Learning? Deep Learning isn't AI, though those that like it call it that. When Deep Learning can predict a future trend, then it will be useful. Identifying the start of a trend because something does what something else once did isn't the same.

When Deep Learning can look at the economy and predict the valuation curve of a house as it goes up and down over 20 years, that'd be something interesting. "Bob lives in ZIP 90210 and has previously bought blue boat shoes, his firstborn is likely gay." Is simple probabilities using more data than a human can sift through conveniently, and has no "intelligence" at all, and is not a path to anything that would have been called AI 20 years ago.

AI will exist only when we've finally shifted the definition far enough to allow non-AI to be classified as AI.

Re:Extrapolation?

[lgw]

Quants have made billions predicting changes in valuations. Once it's predictable it shortly thereafter becomes gamed, of course. Algorithmic trading is all trolls trolling trolls these days. But predicting future trends absent market reaction to that very prediction is certainly something software can do, regardless of the terminology.

AI will exist only when we've finally shifted the definition far enough to allow non-AI to be classified as AI.

That stuff you're calling "non-AI" is what AI researchers call "AI". AI is not the quest for machine consciousness - who wants that anyway? AI research is the field that solves problems that seemed at first glance to require consciousness to solve. One of the founders of the field once complained that, to the public "AI is the set of all the problems we haven't solved yet". Pretty much what you just said. But it's the field of AI that solves these "suddenly not AI" problems, and that's always been their goal.

Re:Is it me?

[AK Marc]

It is. AI now means "useful program". The spellcheck is AI, the car ECU that "learns" driving patterns is AI. Everyone has an AI.

Hope he's right, but I doubt it

[ErichTheRed]

"Technology's always taken jobs out of the system, and what you hope is that technology's going to put those jobs back in, too."

I doubt this is possible. Mechanization replaced subsistence farming and reduced the number of people in agriculture from 80+% to 2% of the US population. Factories replaced individual craftsmen with assembly line workers and also took up the unemployed farmers. Large organizations developing around manufacturing companies took up the slack of workers being replaced by machines and put them in desk jobs. This went well until the first downsizing waves of the 90s, which were largely driven by computers replacing manual clerical work like typing memos, routing correspondence and filing/records retrieval. This was the first time we didn't have a ready answer for what people could do next when they no longer needed a typing pool, etc. Some people wound up in IT, some people wound up in various other corporate positions, but a lot of them were forced out of the workforce. Now, this growth in the capability of computers and the amount of work they can automate threatens to remove another huge pillar of strength in the economy. All those corporate employees pushing around reports and being good little salesdroids (and using Salesforce in lots of places!) are about to see their ranks thinned as well. I don't see a good future for them unless we find some way to give them jobs that produce a similar standard of living.

I'm in IT (systems engineering, not operations) and see this every day -- every new system out there is shipped with automation capabilities that just didn't exist 15 years ago. One of my side projects is gluing together all this vendor automation into a Chef-like framework for the many small system on-site installations we do for customers. Having a way to have a tech follow "rack systems like so, attach cables here, plug in laptop here and power on" would save huge amounts of time and money since these systems are deployed to places where tech knowledge is spotty at best.

I hope executives like Benioff don't just assume everything is going to work out. Ask yourself this question -- what are we going to do with the millions of people who make large organizations work when a computer is in charge of most routine processes? Maybe 10% of them have the aptitude to move up to the "robot repairman" level of employment, so where does the other 90% go? While growing up in the Rust Belt, I saw factory closures that dumped thousands of low-skilled workers out onto the job market all at once. Sadly, the answer to this question in that case was that the 90% ended up moving away, employed in menial minimum wage jobs like home health care aides and fast food workers, or perpetually broke. Some sociology student should do a study negatively correlating income with increases in the number of shady personal injury lawyer advertisements around town...I know it's true but it just has to be proven! When people have no income and no way to get the old lifestyle they had, they're going to be hoping for a lottery payday or similar.