Are Gates, Musk Being 'Too Aggressive' With AI Concerns? (xconomy.com)

gthuang88 reports on a talk titled "Will Robots Eat Your Job?" Bill Gates and Elon Musk are sounding the alarm "too aggressively" over artificial intelligence's potential negative consequences for society, says MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson. The co-author of The Second Machine Age argues it will take at least 30 to 50 years for robots and software to eliminate the need for human laborers. In the meantime, he says, we should be investing in education so that people are prepared for the jobs of the future, and are focused on where they still have an advantage over machines -- creativity, empathy, leadership, and teamwork.
The professor acknowledges "there are some legitimate concerns" about robots taking jobs away from humans, but "I don't think it's a problem we have to face today... It can be counterproductive to overestimate what machines can do right now." Eventually humankind will reach a world where robots do practically everything, the professor believes, but with a universal basic income this could simply leave us humans with more leisure time.

Comments

Complete Elimination is setting the bar too high.

[Maxo-Texas]

Between 1970 and 2000, manufacturing employment was relatively stable, ranging from 16.8 to 19.6 million when it peaked and began to decline\, falling to roughly 12 million jobs by 2010.

Meanwhile U.S. manufacturing output (in trillions of dollars) is higher than it's ever been. It's up 33% to 4 trillion now vs 3 trillion back in only 2009. (or 2006 if you ignore the dip due to the great recession).

Meanwhile, manufacturing robot shipments have skyrocketed from a low of 5,000 per year in 1996 to over 140,000 per year just recently (against a background of 240,000 shipped globally each year).

So despite a growing GDP and population, manufacturing employment has declined by over 7 million jobs.

Automated vehicles are likely to eliminate 3 million driving jobs rapidly at some point in the near future as well (5-15 years).

Any kind of a labor glut (even a small one) results in severe downward pressure on wages.

Will it be a problem forever? Who knows.

It might be because half the population isn't smart enough to do theorhetical physics or higher level mathematics or create artistic masterpieces. And they would need to bring something to a job which couldn't be automated or turned into self service.

But even if things worked out long term and we found new jobs 40 years from now, humans don't remain peaceful on that time scale. High unemployment is a strong predictor of civil unrest.

The point is, we don't need to eliminate human jobs to have a problem. Eliminating a small number (say 10%) of them rapidly would create severe social disruptions.