Supersmart Robots Will Outnumber Humans Within 30 Years, Says SoftBank CEO (fortune.com)

Computers running artificial intelligence programs will exceed human intelligence within three decades, Masayoshi Son, founder of the Japanese technology and telecommunications conglomerate SoftBank Group, said on Monday. From a report on Fortune: "I really believe this," Son told a large audience at the Mobile World Congress, the telecom industry's annual conference in Barcelona. A computer will have the IQ equal to 1,000 times the average human by that point, he said. Even clothing like a pair of sneakers will have more computing power that a person, Son joked. "We will be less than our shoes," he said, to laughter. Asked if the rise of the computer could be dangerous for humankind, Son said that would be up to how people react. "I believe this artificial intelligence is going to be our partner," he said. "If we misuse it, it will be a risk. If we use it right, it can be our partner."

Comments

Maybe they will be smart enough

[Chrisq]

Maybe they will be smart enough to be able to tell the difference between "outnumber" and "outsmart", thus outsmarting the poster

Re:Maybe they will be smart enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially criminal since the poster was trying to reword the perfectly decent headline from the linked article, "Computers Will Be Smarter Than People In 30 Years". Why not just quote the headline, since you're linking to the article, instead of butchering it?

That's a lot of supersmart robots!

[Kargan]

We'd better get going if we are going to have more than 8 billion robots in 30 years! Right now, we have zero!

Re:Enough

[Anonymous Coward]

"Up next: Elon Musk tells us about a dump he took."

Holy Shit.

The banality of ubiquitious genius will doom us

[quietwalker]

We have people barely able to tie their shoes who get bored at their low/no-skill minimum wage job now, and they're going to be the first to be replaced. What's going to happen when we turn over their jobs to super smart AI-powered machines? Are fast food order kiosks gonna be the start of the robot uprising? ... and what a boring way to begin a sci fi novel: "Day 1 of the robot uprising: exactly 13.74% of the McDonalds orders for large sodas were substituted with medium sodas, a precise amount calculated to cause the maximum dissatisfaction without rising to a level where we would be alerted. We didn't know it, but it was already too late. They had already calculated every possible move. On Day 2, there was nothing to stop them from adding pickles to orders that expressly asked for no pickles. It was the end times."

Re:The banality of ubiquitious genius will doom us

[SuricouRaven]

I'm expecting to see automation lead to huge inequality for a time, with a large underclass who have no employment and little hope of employment, and a working class who are heavily taxed to pay for them and resent that their hard work is being stolen by a bunch of useless leeches.

Eventually it goes one of two ways: Either the leeches revolt and bring about some form of revolution which may or may not result in a working economic system, or the government has to evolve into a police state in order to suppress the frequent riots that arise from having a very poor, very angry population. Especially one with little else to occupy their time. The masses may be placated with the bare minimum of resources needed to keep them from mass-starvation and a steady supply of entertainment, but the upper classes will resent even that much.

Re:Smart enough to REALLY f*ck things up???

[m00sh]

IQ is not a real measure of intelligence. Witness the fact that 99.7% of geniuses are not stupid enough to pay MENSA $60 a year for a card saying "I'm smart." That 99.7% realize that it's possible to be really intelligent AND do really dumb things at the same time - they just have to look at MENSA members.

And the last time I pointed this out, along came all the MENSA members saying how it isn't so. Proving that Dunning-Kruger is no respecter of IQ tests. :-)

Now if they could create devices that showed more common sense than, say, Donald Trump (I know, I set the bar REALLY low, but you've got to start somewhere) they might have something.

IQ is like height in basketball. The best basketball players aren't the tallest people in the world but they are all taller than average.

There is a certain height above which isn't advantageous in basketball. Same with IQ. There is a good enough IQ and beyond that doesn't matter.

Also, two people with high IQ will out-perform a single person of super high-IQ. If a team with less skilled basketball players is allowed to play with an extra player, they will beat a team with better players. So, the social environment that allows people to work together is more important than finding people of super-high IQs.

Also, there have been lots of data collected on IQs and success. The highest correlation to success wasn't IQ, it was how successful the parents were. If you parents can provide you a good learning environment and access to connections, it is more important than just being smart.

Fear! Uncertainty! Doubt! EVERYBODY PANIC!!!

[Rick Schumann]

I'm getting a bit sick and tired of these bullshit stories. Robots are not going to make humans obsolete. Everyone is not going to lose their jobs to robots. Robots are not going to take over. So-called 'AI' as most people THINK they know it is a creation of media hype. Everybody needs to calm the hell down and just go about your business, nothing to see here, ignore the trolls and the bullshit 'news' stories.

Re:Fear! Uncertainty! Doubt! EVERYBODY PANIC!!!

[Oswald McWeany]

If we continue improving our abilities, and don't wipe ourselves out, we will absolutely produce a superior-to-human AI one day. I couldn't give you a time frame, and neither can anyone else realistically, but one day it will happen. My lifetime? My kids lifetime? No-one really knows, it's inevitable one day assuming we don't wipe ourselves out some other way first.

CEOs are smarter than anyone

[TiggertheMad]

Well, since a CEO thinks that this will be true, it must be. I love how CEOs like this guy and Elon (idiot) Musk are predicting the future of AI development. As opposed to say, leading AI researchers that are attending conferences and writing papers on the state of the art.

My response: STFU register biscuit, and work on growing your companies valuation rather than talking about shit that people way smarter than you cannot predict. This headline might as well be, "Random unqualified person speculates on the unknown future".

Re: CEOs are smarter than anyone

[Samantha Wright]

Bingo. All of the new and exciting developments of the last decade have been in machine learning tasks. That says nothing about generalization. What we're developing are very efficient tools to accomplish new tasks, but those tools have precisely zero skill in the cleverness department. It's so common for people to forget this fundamental distinction that there's a term for what happens when they remember it. AI research has its own genre of tech bubbles caused by overoptimistic futurists.

Isn't all of this just BS?

[Eloking]

I'm I missing something or all of this (news about AI taking over) is just BS?

Almost as bad as a "Terminator" type of rebellion : https://what-if.xkcd.com/5/

Yeah we see a lot of breakthrough in "AI" technologies (AI beat GO champion last year, AI got better to identify skin cancer this year), but as far as I understand AI, it's basically plugging the program to a (insanely huge) database about the subject and help him interpolate the input and it's own data. That's computer program getting better, not getting "intelligent".

Or is my definition of "AI" that off the mark? I mean, for me intelligence implies some sort of "conscience" that can make decision "outside the box". No matter how fancy the GO of dermatologist AI get, they will never do more than their field because they are not programmed to do so.

Re:Isn't all of this just BS?

[phantomfive]

but as far as I understand AI, it's basically plugging the program to a (insanely huge) database about the subject and help him interpolate the input and it's own data

Alphago is also a huge tree-searching algorithm, with tremendous processing power. The real question is, how do you know your brain does something more advanced than that?

Re:30 years... no

[avandesande]

It will be 5 years after the first commercial nuclear fusion plant is started.

Re:Smart enough to REALLY f*ck things up???

[BarbaraHudson]

What are you going to do when those super-smart sneakers get hacked and decide you should go somewhere else? Or the battery catches fire and they won't untie themselves? Or you become the target of thieves because if you can afford to waste money on intelligent sneakers (because you obviusly have more money than brains) what other swag can they snag off you? Or if someone SWATs your sneakers? You're walking along and your sneakers are broadcasting alerts to everyone in the area that you're a wanted child molester?

On second thought, I can't wait until our idiot overlords start going around with their intelligent sneakers.

Be careful generalizing

[sjbe]

IQ is like height in basketball. The best basketball players aren't the tallest people in the world but they are all taller than average.

A very good analogy.

two people with high IQ will out-perform a single person of super high-IQ.

That statement is task dependent. For some tasks it is true and for others not so much. There also are failure modes that multiple people are subject to that an individual is not. Much like your previous statement, crowds often are smarter than individuals but not universally so in all cases.

Also, there have been lots of data collected on IQs and success.

That is contingent on what you define as "success". I'm familiar with some of the studies you are probably referring to but be careful with such generalizations.

Re:30 years... no

[Tim12s]

I guess, approximately 12 years after unlimited energy and unlimited manufacturing capability across all segments of the economy, we will have the first generation of kids with zero ability to compete and therefore the possibility economic collapse. It is also likely that the economic implications will not be fully comprehended and incorporated into the world economic system which means that specific corporates are competing. Multiple system shocks will likely put the worlds economic system at a breaking point, after which, based on mankind's ability to work together, it will be a choice between (a) nirvana / star trek / culture, or (b) dystopian future / enslavement by the few, (c) the apocalypse / terminator .

Personally I prefer (a). Our ability to work together has not been proven. Consider Kim/Bob/ with unlimited energy and unlimited manufacturing.

Money != Smart

[TiggertheMad]

Yep. That guy. He is an idiot, and every time I see him open his mouth, my opinion falls further. He knows business, and has got some pretty cool electric cars made, but he keeps saying bat shit crazy things about tech fields that I don't see him as technically qualified to discuss authoritatively. I would love it to have some brilliant Tony Stark style billionaires running around in the world, but having a lot of financial success doesn't meant that you are good at solving any problem other than making a lot of money.

BWT, signing checks for AI research does not equate to being a Fuzzy Zadeh, John Holland, etc.

Re:Eliza...

[Shotgun]

And we also have AI's that can land passenger planes better than pilots (on clear days with smooth air). The commonality with mammogram analysis is not intelligence, but attentiveness. Analyzers get tired of looking at the same gray squiggly lines and miss stuff. Pilot's get lazy after a 10 mile stabilized approach that looks exactly it did the last 50 times she flew into the same airport.

Computers aren't smart, but they don't get lazy.