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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.
The difference is the Daleks admit they're evil.
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."
A magic 8 ball cannot replace a CEO. CEOs make decisions carefully in order to achieve a goal. Magic 8 ball is random. Statistically a magic 8 ball will make the right decision some of the time. This would have a serious impact on how corporations operate.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
...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.
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.
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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
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
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
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?
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> Yes, and this is a *much bigger* problem than "climate change" upon which trillions are being spent for very little demonstrable benefit.
Uh huh. Wanna show where these "trillions" are being spent?
And no, half the human race being unemployed is not worse than climate change at the extreme. 100,000 years ago primitive man had no 401k at all and was just fine, but if climate change killed off all his food he hunted and gathered he'd be in a far worse state than not having an employment contract.
In short, tell me how all it all gets "better" when you and the other 40% of the human race find yourselves unemployable.
I gather you're an optimist, or you're thinking relatively short term, say 10-20 years out. Because I'm thinking we'll end up with close to 90% "unemployment". I put it in quotes because I'm sure we'll find ways to fill our time but it sure won't be slaving to make some corporate fuck rich. The 10 percent employed will be probably plumbers, and electricians to maintain the old infrastructure that can't be efficiently served by robots. That too will be short-lived (say 100 years max) as new infrastructure is replaced by more easily maintained versions.
Yes, the true problem to solve is greed, the solution will be nice and smooth, or bumpy. I'm going to go dust off my guillotine designs from my mechanisms class...
Only I can judge you.
Climate change is serious but not as serious as the limits to growth coming up. They are going to hit harder and sooner.
No more cheap stainless steel will be a big one.
We could see a billion people die ahead of time over a single decade sometime between 2050 and 2100. Likely to threaten civilization, provoke wars, and be a period when the carrying capacity of the earth drops by a couple billion people over 50 years.
Our usage of many resources continues to grow exponentially as the population continues to grow and the standard of living continues to rise. We consumed more chromium in 2014 than we did from 1901 to 2000 combined. And similar for many, many other resources.
At the same time climate change might destroy our ability to raise grain as it destroys viability of many of the worlds major growing zones and pushes the climate into areas not capable of growing. And changes the pattern of rainfall.
Climate change is dangerous and big- but limits to growth are much bleaker. And the most likely scenario is they will hit way to fast for us to mitigate them so we'll still be accelerating as we hit them head on.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Depending on whether you're considering the mean, median, or mode, the "average" may or may not be at the 50% point. Seemingly pedantic, but useful - having one billionaire could drive up the mean income in an entire county full of poverty to the point where it looks like you don't need to focus safety-net programs there. Meanwhile, I'll link you to a site on these averages, since they explain it better than I can. Now, it's entirely possible that the mode - the most common value - could be well above or below the 50% point - the median, really - in a skewed distribution.
You have to know which average to look at; some will tell you damn dirty lies about certain datasets.
The true problem to solve for is the Problem of Greed.
The answer to this is taxes and redistribution of wealth to provide a basic income for everyone.
Ah, because taxation of course has always made sure that the billionaires of the world are completely honest and ethical about paying their fair share today, because tax havens are a myth and don't exist, right?
Greed will guarantee that those you wish to burden with taxation to sustain the unemployable masses will lobby, cheat, and lie to ensure "basic income" is nothing more than Welfare 2.0, and not a penny more. For many, that isn't an acceptable answer to this.
As I said before, Solve for Greed.