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Billionaire Jack Ma Says CEOs Could Be Robots in 30 Years, Warns of Decades of 'Pain' From AI (cnbc.com)
Self-made billionaire, Alibaba chairman Jack Ma warned on Monday that society could see decades of pain thanks to disruption caused by the internet and new technologies to different areas of the economy. From a report: In a speech at a China Entrepreneur Club event, the billionaire urged governments to bring in education reform and outlined how humans need to work with machines. "In the coming 30 years, the world's pain will be much more than happiness, because there are many more problems that we have come across," Ma said in Chinese, speaking about potential job disruptions caused by technology. [...] Ma also spoke about the rise of robots and artificial intelligence (AI) and said that this technology will be needed to process the large amount of data being generated today, something that a human brain can't do. But machines shouldn't replace what humans can do, Ma said, but instead the technology community needs to look at making machines do what humans cannot. This would make the machine a "human partner" rather than an opponent.
"But machines shouldn't replace what humans can do"
They can't do much apparently, even pushing juice-carts in planes are beyond some of them, humans are incapable of driving cars without getting intoxicated first and even if not, they kill thousands more than robots would.
It can only get better.
And we're all unemployed!
That's what we get for switching to water, like out of the toilet.
Isn't there a Dalek running the US, with the "exterminate" message replaced with "deregulate"?
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
they're already robots - they all act the same and are thoughtless with no souls...
nothing to see here - move along
Robots taking all our jobs is a good thing. It means we won't have to work anymore.
Of course, that won't happen for a long, long time, and when it does happen we'll have some political upheaval to create a 'Luxurious Income' program (at that point, "basic income" will be much cheaper and stingier than we need to be), but once the dust settles, it will be super great and the world will be a better place.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
btw, why are all the CEOs afraid of AI? Shouldn't they be saying how great AI is, because they know their own jobs are unreplaceable? Or do they know that they are mostly useless dead weight?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This is exactly why they are tying to legalize pot.
By cleaning I'm thinking mafia type cleaning. Pay up!
It's better to have a horrible ending than to have horrors without end.
Time for him to retire? How about we outsource your parasitic existence RIGHT NOW Jack?
How about that?
Or so it seems. Anyone else well past sick-and-tired of all these idiots trying to grab headlines like this by attempting to leverage media hype about so-called 'AI'?
The sky is NOT FALLING. Everyone just RELAX. Your media-fueled anxieties are going to do orders of magnitude more damage than any mythical alleged so-called 'AI' will.
But machines shouldn't replace what humans can do, Ma said, but instead the technology community needs to look at making machines do what humans cannot. This would make the machine a "human partner" rather than an opponent.
So we shouldn't replace a human with a robot that is more reliable and productive, and likely cheaper in the long run? Hogwash.
The corporatist culture is backed up by the law. The corporate officers' only legal responsibilities are their fudiciary duty to the shareholders.
Look at what you'll save. You trade wages, annual leave, health insurance, and taxes in exchange for a modest electrical bill and a maintenance contract. Toss out those meatbags and get yourself some literal cogs---as soon as possible.
Developing a partner seems time-consuming, expensive, and risky in comparison. If someone else can build one, great, but we are not waiting for it.
The only way this idea could possibly be better is, wait for it... You buy a partner robot to enhance the productivity of the regular robot that already replaced a human worker.
Now your unnecessary hoard of wealth will accrue even faster, and the dispossed underclass will be even less relevant in any social or political context. The US Constitution may prohibit titles, but these days money is better anyway.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Can't a magic 8 ball replace most CEOs?
they won't, because CEOs are the people in charge and they can make sure they aren't replaced. Getting left to rot with no opportunity and the bare minimums of survival supplied by a universal basic income is for the little people. Smart, worthy people like CEOs know how to make themselves essential, while they simply ask an A.I. what decisions to make. It's very convenient, because they can also ask the A.I. to construct good arguments for why human CEOs are still essential.
From my understanding, the difficult part of being a CEO is getting good data. If all of the facts are readily available, middle management would have made the call already. This is why a lot of companies create arbitrary metrics to measure performance. If they have data, it should make it easier to make a decision.
Unfortunately, the age old rule still applies. Garbage in, garbage out. Most corporate measurements of performance aren't reliable, and therefore the decisions made by upper management are questionable. This AI would have to be really incredible to turn garbage data into something useful.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
At least one aspect is likely safe from AI automation - bitching about AI automation on Slashdot.
In all seriousness, if your job can be automated it will be automated. AI will be the new outsourcing in 2020s. Only it could work 24/7, needs no benefits, pension and can be scaled up by buying more cloud processing space. Creative and expert top 10% will still have jobs, the rest 90% of us will have to find other ways to earn living. Perhaps even with sustenance farming.
CEOs could be robots. Great. My five year old says just about every day he wants to be a robot when he grows up. Let me know when Robots can be CEOs and I will think you are on to something
Ban all AI/robot predictions from Slashdot. Enough already!
Table-ized A.I.
Replace all executives with an AI and you will get some actual brains behind the process.
Right now it's all about acting like freaking used car salesmen, and it's bullshit. At least an AI will make logical decisions.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
int ceo() /* Fall through */
{
while(1) {
int action = rand() % 100;
switch(action%6) {
case 0:
blame(previous_ceo);
case 1:
acquire(competitor);
break;
case 2:
strip(assets);
break;
case 3:
change(company_direction);
break;
case 4:
buy(yacht);
default:
sail(yacht);
break;
}
cache(stock_options);
if (random == 99) {
previous_ceo = current_ceo;
return FAILURE;
}
}
}
At least one aspect is likely safe from AI automation - bitching about AI automation on Slashdot.
Nah, there will be automated bots, just like Twitter has, they'll just be smarter about their trolling/bitching.
AC comments get piped to
I'm sure a bunch of masochists are getting off on that idea alone. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
That's the good kind of pain, like the pain you feel after a healthy workout or long run. It's the kind of pain people feel when they are being challenged intellectually and need to learn new skills.
It's much preferable to the other kind of pain, the pain you feel from stagnation, economic failure, and poverty, which are the inevitable consequences of governments trying to shield people from change and manage progress.
The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.
Forget the AIs. The pain starts in 2030 when the baby boomers are retired, retirees will outnumber workers and Social Security/Medicare will consume two-thirds of the federal budget. Taxes will have to go way up to pay for everything else.
Look at how bought into the "work ethic" we are and how many people justify what amounts to luck (if not outright criminality) as "hard work" and thus entitlement to moral superiority (up to and including control of others).
We already treat people who can't work for various reasons as worthless and disposable, I just can't see any transition to robotic work that requires fewer workers resulting in the people who own the robots willing giving away their added profit from automation to displaced workers.
"Surely they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, just as I pulled myself up by the straps on my hand-made Italian leather boots bought with my family inheritance money."
Good. Nobody worth anything will shed a tear when these f.cking parasites are wiped off the face of the earth.
Is this retroactive or does human artificial intelligence not count?
I think what many people don't get is that the post-scarcity economy is coming, one way or the other.
Point in case: I do web development in an agency, and while my work isn't always all-out pointless like that of some of my peers who produce power-point presentations (no joke - they produce presentations for a living - we make quite an amount of money of this), I also see clearly that most of my work comes from LAMP and WordPress being so shitty that building something that resembles a useful model often requires hours of custom programming per project. I work part-time, 5 hours/day, so I don't go insane and even that remaining work is mostly a classic "bullshit-job".
We are moving into an all out cyberpunk post-scarcity economy - that's a plain and simple fact. Meanwhile the luxury problems I have come from cellphone manufacturers artificially inflating phone-storage prices or not offering the exact type of phone I'm looking for, the girls I meet often being to tied up in social media to be useful for quality time and me being to lazy to book my surfing vacation for late summer.
Money in it's current for is either becoming worhless (negative interest) or being removed alltogether (sharing economy, access culture).
The problems that await us will stem from people and societies who can't deal with a post-scarcity economy and turn fanatic - religiously, politically or otherwise. That is the problem Jack Ma is probably talking about.
Other than that I personally see no problem with the rise of robots.
If we play our cards right, we can have an utopia in a century. But probably the nutbags are going to screw this up again, using religion and/or totalitarianism, as usual.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The line between man and machine is already blurry. We have been and will continue to endure pain. It makes us who we are.
Greed is the root of all evil.
already looks like C-3PO
instead the technology community needs to look at making machines do what humans cannot.
This is already happening, since humans cannot work 23 hours a day non stop without pay with just 1 hr a day average for downtime and maintenance. Jack Ma should stop making meaningless statements.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Having tools/AI that can increasingly automate tasks is basically the fulfillment of the wish of anyone wanting things done.
Lots of people here are programmers and developers and engineers - basically the modern-day,real-life equivalent of genies, folks who can basically make anything happen, but with the cost of needing to REALLY draw out the exact desire so that the result isn't worse than the problem.
So, over time, the humble dish washer gets a bucket, then a sink, then a dish washing machine, and eventually an automatic servant that will do every classical part of the task given enough economy of scale.
The big consequence of this is that we're faced with big questions again about what we want. We have enough shared power and resources to feed everyone, to free ourselves of the most difficult, dangerous and annoying tasks of life.
On the other hand, we have our economic system. Basically, the monetary system, where folks trade services and items for various currencies, based on markets and occasionally governing bodies.
The bulk of the money is tied up in the hands of a relatively small percentage of individuals who saved large amounts of money, looking to get an optimal percentage return on that investment.
This global pool of money is essentially what makes most publicly-traded corporations act exactly like 'corporations', where image to investors is the primary goal, and actually performing as a company is secondary.
Service to this logic is basically deeply, DEEPLY embedded in psyche and even deep morality of most of the modern adult population. The idea of not spending one's waking life in service to maximizing income, either in managing a company or performing tasks for one, is deeply shameful to most.
There's going to come a point though, when the tasks of performing the role of managing most companies is going to be >95% automation, and the remaining <5% is not going to be a reliable way of fulfilling the 'need' to let most of the population avoid the shame of being a poor return on investment, since automation will always be a better investment once it advances a little.
We're going to have to figure out what we want from ourselves. That's not a very difficult task individually, but as a group, it's going to be tumultuous.
The wealthy investors and funds will still demand return on investment, but the increasing percentage of the population unable to prove a return on investment will still have real needs, and have increasing government power.
In this conflict between shrinking (but increasingly wealthy) investor class versus growing government class, the government side would in theory win in the end, though we'd likely encounter several rounds of crazy outcomes like Donald Trump being president.
The longer-term outcome is likely still not going to be some star-trek utopia, but it won't be Somalia either. It's going to be the usual mix we see in history, with the trends extended - less average violence, occasional crazy decisions and wars, endless fads, 95% junk/5% awesome, the old afraid kids are going bad, while the kids are actually measurably smarter over time.
Our AIs are still going to be very dumb for a long time, but they will let us have slightly less absurd goals for our own lives, than figuring out how to scam some global investment class out of currency as some sacred life goal.
Until then though, we hobble along as we can, advancing what we can.
Ryan Fenton
PS: Yeah, can't avoid posting this URL:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
I'm really glad the summary took the time to specify that AI was short for Artificial Intelligence, I had no idea!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [Youtube, Red vs Blue]
I tend to rant.
If CEO's were actually replaced with robots, it would be because the "old boy's network" has been transitioned to a network of AI executives. The hardest thing to replace about executives is their existing network of contacts. Their decision making could be transitioned to machines, but they lose the ability to sidestep regulations, waiting queues, red tape, or whatever by calling their old Harvard college buddy. I work in the financial industry now, and just two weeks was in a meeting where the IRS was holding us up and we had to go to our CFO. It wasn't his knowledge which removed our problem, it was an old coworker who is now claiming we are at the top of the queue (we shall see). This happens quite frequently.
What will really make AI CEOs take over is when they start disliking working with companies not run by AI. Once they feel a meat bag cannot be trusted as a business partner, human CEOs are toast.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Who the fuck cares about CEO Robots, except CEOs with fat pockets? What about the lowly paid workers?
What are you gonna do when the human population doubles, and all workers are now robots?
Humans need food, water, air, warmth, plus an earth like environment. Everything else is just luxury. But almost no one actually works at providing food, water, air, and warmth. We've already automated those jobs away. 90% of what we work to get are luxuries. There is no limit to how much luxury we desire.
Basically, as we automate our way to more and more luxury, I guarantee we will find specific types of luxury that automation can not easily generate. Those will become more expensive, as they need human labor. Slowly more and more humans will move into those jobs.
That's how the jobs called: chef, clothing designer, wine sommelier, actor, game programmer, etc. were all created.
Here is a list of some of the very few luxury problems that I doubt automation can solve sufficiently to eliminate the jobs.
Medical research, anything related to dating determining which book to publish, and employment finding.
These are all things that we have tried to automate away and failed and MISERABLY. Medical research is an art, dating web sites barely even try to do more than hook you up for sex, Harry Potter was rejected by multiple book publishers for being too long, most people find work through friends.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Perhaps Jack Ma has such low self-esteem that he could be replaced by a robot. Or maybe he thinks that what CEOs do is nothing more than following a set of heuristics. Either explanation might explain why he thinks robots could do the job.
is to ask creimer to implement it. He'll spend the entire time posting to slashdot telling us how great his farts smell, and how many recruiters email him every day.
start caping OT / get rid of the salary pay exempt part.
Maybe an hard X2 at 60-80 hours will help.
It would be child's play to maintain artificial scarcity. If you're a member of the ruling class who's power, wealth and prestige depends on that scarcity it's in your best interests to maintain it. And history has shown you lack the scruples to recognize how horrible a thing that would be. Anyone else remember the Dark Ages?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
How can artificial intelligence be expected to compete with real stupidity?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Remember that guy who wrote that script to challenge parking tickets?
I think you'll be surprised how well an AI can manipulate a bureaucracy when given the chance. It's just another system, another game, with rules to learn and exploit.
12-20 times base worker salary is what they're paid worldwide, for better results.
A robot could do a better job than the 400-500 times base worker salary that US CEOs loot.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Save the CEOs!! Think of the children! How will trickle-down economics ever function if CEOs are made redundant?!?
Easy...
Feed Atlas Shrugged into a Markov generator, spit the output to text to speech via Siri/Alexa on a golf course while passing around cocaine and highballs and watch the contracts get signed.
What's the problem?
#SickNotWeak
The real reason why Musk, Buffett, Ma, and the rest are bitching about AI is that if we actually program these systems to run the world with morals such as honesty, equality, fairness, objectivity, etc there will not be any room for "nuanced" decisions that involve graft, corruption, favoritism, etc. that made them and theri cronies their billions.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Feed Atlas Shrugged into a Markov generator, spit the output to text to speech via Siri/Alexa on a golf course while passing around cocaine and highballs and watch the contracts get signed.
What's the problem?
All the CEOs in Atlas Shrugged were actively destroying their companies so ... yeah, who'd know the difference?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
People throw around the word "should" quite a lot when discussing this topic. "Should" never influenced anyone with any real power, so we can reject all such statements outright.
Those with wealth and power *will* use labor automation to further their wealth and power. It is a guarantee.
In response, we will see some combination of:
1) People receiving providence for free, since they simply can't work.
2) People turning to crime and winding up in jail, since they simply can't work.
3) People violently rebelling, which just makes this exact same cycle start again from a slightly earlier point.
At least he sees the freight train coming straight down the tracks at us. However the suffering part can be highly moderated. If we prepare with the mental and legal and political chaos in advance there should be little suffering and a great deal of joy. It requires a new mind set for us. Obviously social systems will have to support those put out of work. There is zero choice in that. so we have to teach people that their turn to be unemployed is coming and they are waiting in line for their turn. That is in order to prevent resentment of those who are first receiving government pay checks. Sales taxes and business taxes will have to be raised to a point at which all are well supported. That means that we must divorce self worth from earning abilities and that will require quite an educational effort. Right now we see a type of hypnoses of young males with automobiles being at the very front of their desires, even though those desires are probably in opposition to their best interests. More adult types of people may suffer a similar hypnosis over employment or earning status. Refocusing their emotions will be quite a task.
Well, it won't be long before politicians are replaced by AI - in fact, AI is probably *already* smarter ;-)
Do not grant patents for robots that do what a human can do.
what if everyone stops buying useless shit from your country?
ouchhhh , then poor jack could be feeling decades of pain
A robot tanks the company and then still gets a 10 million dollar payout when they're ousted.
Since Mr. Ma wants to inflict pain across the world, he (and his apparatus) can be the first to go.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
If CEO's were actually replaced with robots, it would be because the "old boy's network" has been transitioned to a network of AI executives. The hardest thing to replace about executives is their existing network of contacts. Their decision making could be transitioned to machines, but they lose the ability to sidestep regulations, waiting queues, red tape, or whatever by calling their old Harvard college buddy. I work in the financial industry now, and just two weeks was in a meeting where the IRS was holding us up and we had to go to our CFO. It wasn't his knowledge which removed our problem, it was an old coworker who is now claiming we are at the top of the queue (we shall see). This happens quite frequently.
What will really make AI CEOs take over is when they start disliking working with companies not run by AI. Once they feel a meat bag cannot be trusted as a business partner, human CEOs are toast.
To be fair computers have proven pretty good at networking. This might be easier to replicate than you'd expect.
Forcing it will only make people resent the change that much more. That's how you lose your gains - all at once, fast, and for a very long time.
Managing progress to be at an human-acceptable speed isn't painful. That's how you keep your gains - at a pace that doesn't assume the worker is at fault.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The robots are coming for your job, no doubt. Theres a plethora of jobs that simply can't be easily replaced that typically involve the service industry; those will remain.
For the rest of the jobs out there, a robot awaits your position. Here's how I see things working. You graduate high school at 18, you can either choose to work from then until age 35, or you can go to college and work until age 35. At age 35, your UBI kicks in and is based on how much you made while working. If you have made yourself extremely valuable and highly skilled in a broad range of areas, maybe you get take your UBI and continue working at a higher wage.
Problem is, those few jobs, aren't guaranteed to go to the most qualified people. The wealthy want to remain wealthy and will give these positions to their family and friends to keep their wealth on the uptrend. This will gradually slow our growth as a society as these wealthy, unqualified and lowly skilled fuckups take over these important jobs. Lately, America has a great track record of picking the best system for the wealthiest people which also happens to be nearly the worst system for the most people. UBI is great and is absolutely necessary. But if you think you're getting fucked in the ass now, I suggest you stock up on lube.
We long ago passed the point where we could easily train competing neural networks to bitch about AI on slashdot.
So that's not even considered A.I. any more.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Yes! I'd vote for this. And more job-sharing. Like CEO jobs should be shared by about 100 people. Each one works half-a-week per year. This effectively spreads the obscenely high salary and we get less rapacious behavior mostly because psychopaths are so hard to find that probably at least a good 90 of them wouldn't be.
Only I can judge you.
The CEOs in Atlas Shrugged won their war by unionizing and going on strike.
And the author ended up on government assistance, so evidently she must not have practised what she preached or she'd have died in a tower with her name on it, right?
You're fired.
I'm not sure why the elite would keep the average worker bee around once they cease to be useful. Just a drain on their beautiful utopia. They will find some way of getting rid of us whether it's war, infighting, starvation, exposure to pollution, etc. There are lots of ways.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
All the assets that get thrown at CEOs these days for doing nothing, or, worse, will get distributed to shareholders.
Sadly, the lowly employee will still get screwed; but, the company will see a lot more profit if they just got rid of top management!
The CEOs in Atlas Shrugged won their war by unionizing and going on strike.
More than that. Rand realized that a well-managed company could continue for a long time without its CEO, as the next tier down would be good leaders as well, so she had the striking CEOs actively destroy what they had built.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No human could have a face as square as his.
Why can't we replace Muslims with robots, then deactivate them? The happiness will be much more than the pain
The thing is that Muslims are directly opposed to Asimov's 3 laws of robotics.
They go round killing people for no good reason
They will harm themselves to kill an infidel
They don't recognize any court or police force that supports rights of non-Muslims
That would still lead to very few buyers, courtesy of the collapse in employment opportunities and mass write-offs of population.
Better to slow things down a bit so that humans are included and not excluded.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Sounds like we're in the 1980s again when AI was supposed to replace everyone.
As then, not so fast. I have a feeling this is still all just a flash in the pan and way over hyped.
The real people that have a lot to worry about is the main stream press. No brain power there.