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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.
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."
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."
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
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