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

Solution to the Fermi Paradox? ASI

[shanen]

The Fermi Paradox is one of my favorite speculative topics and now I think the "solution" is that naturally evolved intelligence (like us) sometimes produces Artificial Super-Intelligence (ASI) before it goes away, and the ASIs don't have anything to say to us. I'd actually go farther and speculate on two types of ASIs, one type driven by curiosity (which would motivate them to study us) and the other type driven by efficiency (which would motivate them to ignore us unless they wanted our resources, in which case they would immediately destroy us). I used to speculate the second type would go all the way to Dyson spheres, even on a galactic level that might account for much of the missing matter, but I've dropped that speculation for now... I still speculate that the first type might be gambling quatloos on our surviving long enough to replace ourselves, and our odds are falling fast.

Anyway, an interesting recent book I'd recommend on the topic is Our Final Invention by James Barrat. On the specific topic of automation in the Internet age, the only one that comes to mind just now is The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford, which is older and kind of misdirected IMO. Now that I think about it from that perspective, How Google Works by Schmidt and Rosenberg also strikes me as relevant, but mostly because they are ignoring the non-google part of the universe. (My main conclusion from that book was actually that the golden google palace is full of clever programmers who are also shallow thinkers--and that's how they want it.)