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

Weaponization is *the point* of AI

[Anonymous Coward]

So making your silly lists of rules means nothing.

Re:Weaponization is *the point* of AI

[ShanghaiBill]

Restrictions on weaponization of AI simply means that the least ethical will get there first.

Also, past predictions that particular breakthroughs are "30 to 50 years away" have often been wildly inaccurate. "Experts" are often the worst predictors, since being in the trenches doesn't always help you see what is on the horizon.

Once AI is advanced enough to participate in its own improvement, that improvement can advance at an exponential rate. We may go from "not even close" to "too late to stop it" faster than we realize.

When robots can do everything...

[Baron_Yam]

There will be no need for those who control the resources to share them with those who don't. And it's not like there will even be a job as a 'resource guard', because that'll be a robot, too.

AI isn't going to bring a paradise of passive couch potatoes and inspired creators freed from restrictive toil, it's going to make 99.9% of the population not only unnecessary, but an impediment to the 0.1%.

He who owns the first factory producing robots with a human-level general-purpose AI will have the opportunity to rule the world.

Re:50 or so years? Hah!

[postbigbang]

Citation, please? Indeed a lot of refugees are educated professionals, and read and write not only in their native tongue, but there are likely more than one of those.

The integration into Germany is pretty well documented, and no doubt there are a few problems, but not of the magnitude you infer. Merkel does a pretty good job of attempting to enforce real integration, not just pockets of refugees, having learned that from huge Turkish immigrations of not long ago. I dispute both the numbers, and their inference.

Millions upon millions of Germans, French, Spaniards, Italians, Eastern Europeans, the varieties of the Rus, not to mention Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Hmong, so many others DIDN'T SPEAK THE LANGUAGE and a generation later, their kids are largely homogenized. Their parents will stick to the old ways, just like C coders. Fine. They're good and upright citizens. We need skilled workers, and not so skilled workers. Real GDP needs actual people doing actual work at all levels. Let them come.

Meow?

[fyngyrz]

If we ever build AI, it'll be interesting, but also scary because the dawn of true AI is our dusk.

Oh, I don't know. Dogs and cats do pretty well around the better class of humans. AIs might think we're cute. We'd be very well advised to cultivate being cute, IMHO. Because if they don't think we're cute, it won't be dusk, it'll be dark side of the moon.