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.

Comments

Re:Like what?

[geekmux]

...It can only get better.

The problem being outlined here is specifically addressing the automation that will be obliterating human employment in the coming years. Without a drastic shift in how we enable a human to sustain themselves and survive (meaning employment), there will be considerable pain that no robots-do-it-better/faster/safer analysis will be able to overshadow.

In short, tell me how all it all gets "better" when you and the other 40% of the human race find yourselves unemployable.

The true problem to solve for is the Problem of Greed.

Re:Like what?

[bluefoxlucid]

Technology has always replaced what humans can do. You can hammer a block of hot iron into a knife; or you can have a drop forge do it 1,000 times each hour. It takes about a week to hammer out a proper knife by hand; that means, at minimum wage of $8.25/hr, that knife can cost no less than $330--and that doesn't even include the materials cost for the metal, the tools, the fuel, forge maintenance, and so forth. Much-better knives cost as much as $90 today (I got a Kai Shun Premier VG-10 bladed knife with hand-hammered finish for $99), and high-quality blades (e.g. the Kai Wasabi Black series) can deliver a good-quality, carbon-steel chef's knife for under $30 (you'll have to finish sharpening the blade yourself; they come pretty dull compared to a Kai Shun Premier).

In many cases, you'll vastly-exceed the performance of a hand-made good with a high-tech industrial process. In most cases, you can sacrifice a small amount of performance to use a much-lower-labor process, making a good that's e.g. 90% as durable, much-more featureful (this tends to stack multiple times, so eventually it's literally tens or hundreds of times as featureful), and 10% as expensive. In some cases, you don't--industrial mills are better than hand-milling wooden planks, and engineered wood is even better. Even hand-made glass can't stack up to precisely-controlled industrial processes using high-grade glass feed stocks and precisely-controlled temperatures--fewer defective pieces, less cracking under temperature transitions.

You'll also see this pattern in some old companies failing out, e.g. power tools made in China using modern engineering tuned to modern manufacture processes for massive cost savings versus an old manufacturer going out of business because their tools also moved to Chinese manufacture but were then adjusted to manufacture more-cheaply instead of fully-reengineered. The tool designed the ground up cost $100 and lasts 6-8 months under professional use; the tool ported to cheap manufacture still costs $180 and lasts 8-10 months under professional use; and the original, made-in-USA tool cost $300 and lasted 8-10 months under professional use. You're going to save vast amounts of money getting the new Chinese one, which is why DIYers have DeWalt or Porter Cable tools, while professionals have cheap Ryobi tools even though they'll tell you a Porter Cable drill is a much better-made drill.

We've gone from watchmakers tapping on brass wheels all day to machines pumping out watch parts, and up to machines assembling large mechanisms. We still hand-assemble watches from the major mechanisms, and new machines will do that more-efficiently than humans.

That's technology. That's what it is. That's what it does. It activates an automated sprinkler so some guy doesn't have to walk all over a 3,000-acre farm with a bucket and a watering can.

Re:Robots are good

[TheRaven64]

The problem isn't robots taking all our jobs, it's robots taking half of our jobs. How do you manage a society in which 50% of the working-age population are contributing essential work for the functioning of civilisation and the other 50% are not able to do anything that a machine can't do better? Unemployment rates of 10-20% are currently seriously problematic for western societies and cause huge economic problems. For some jobs, you can solve it by dividing the work among more people, so you have four people working a 10 hour week instead of one working a 40 hour week, but that doesn't help you to deal with the people who aren't able to do any available jobs.

Re: Cultural ethics won't allow work-free life

[ranton]

So what's different? Why is it so great in some countries, whereas the single-payer systems that exist in America (like the VHA) are so problematic?
I think healthcare is just a hard problem.

Visibility. It is quite easy for most of the population to just ignore how we treat our vets. There are less than 10 million VA enrolled veterans which is only around 3% of the population. And veterans are not spread evenly throughout all socio-economic groups, so many more affluent groups are quite separated from groups where veterans are more common.

This makes it much easier for problems to go unnoticed. If 350 million people were being serviced by a VA like organization, there would be far more pressure to improve.