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We're Too Wise For Robots To Take Our Jobs, Alibaba's Jack Ma Says (scmp.com)
Have confidence in yourself -- technology will never replace human beings, insisted self-made billionaire Jack Ma in a keynote speech at Alibaba Cloud's Computing Conference in Hangzhou. From a report: There's one simple reason for that, the Alibaba founder said - we possess wisdom. "People are getting more worried about the future, about technology replacing humans, eliminating jobs and widening the gap between the rich and the poor," said Ma. "But I think these are empty worries. Technology exists for people. We worry about technology because we lack confidence in ourselves, and imagination for the future." Ma explained that humans are the only things on Earth that are wise. "People will always surpass machines because people possess wisdom," he said. Referencing AlphaGo, the Google artificial intelligence program that beat the world's top Go player at his own game, Ma said that there was no reason humanity should be saddened by the defeat. "AlphaGo? So what? AlphaGo should compete against AlphaGo 2.0, not us. There's no need to be upset that we lost. It shows that we're smart, because we created it."
Eventually, yes, computers will have more "wisdom" than humans. We aren't all that close to it now, but someday, we will.
Why is it that people who feel the need to explain that A.I. will not replace people always come up with the argument that A.I. "will never be as good as human" in one or another aspect?
That is just a baseless statement. Becoming as good as humans, or actually becoming better, in all aspects is exactly the goal of the A.I. research. There is no reason to think that "wisdom" or some other factor cannot be captured in A.I.
Not to mention that there is such a thing as "good enough". Employers would happily replace 10 people for 10 A.I.'s and 1 human troubleshooter.
When the people who will benefit most greatly from an impending change tell the people who will be most harmed (possibly starved out in this case) by the same impending change that change is good, worry. When they say, "You're too smart/wise to be harmed by this change," worry more. I don't fear Skynet. I fear VIKI.
The truth is, volitional AI is nowhere seen to be on the horizon, but non-volitional AI is already here, following our rules. Or, should I say, the rules of a few people who control the system. What are the odds those rules will be good for the people already in power?
Games are literally just sets of well defined rules.
Well, so is the physical universe.
You also don't seem to remember all of the go fanbois on this site a few years ago who kept asserting that go has some kind of inscrutable emergent behavior that requires human intuition to master, and machines were never going beat humans at go.
Maybe people who are making similar assumptions about the world in general are repeating that mistake.
The OP is crazy. Let's look at some hard realities: There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the USA...maybe half of those are long-distance. We already have cars that can auto-drive on the freeway adequately. How long will it be between the day the first viable self-driving truck arrives on the scene until about 1.75 million people wind up being unemployed?
With AI trucks being able to drive 24/7 without having to take mandatory breaks - goods will get where they're going about twice as fast...that's a HUGE win. You'll only need half the number of trucks to get the same amount of goods transported because half of them are not sitting idle in truck-stops like they are now. Without driver salaries (health care coverage, taxes, management) - and probably with lower insurance premiums - and likely with lower fuel bills (I'm betting the AI drives at the perfect speed/gear for the conditions 100% of the time)...road transport will probably be HALF the cost without human drivers.
About 10% of those truckers are self-employed - so they'll be in work until they can't work cheaply enough to beat the AI's - but the big fleets will be anxious to switch over as fast as they can. An average 18 wheeler truck is scrapped after 5 to 6 years in service. And that's probably the maximum amount of time it'll be until the last long distant truck driver is unemployed.
If existing truck vendors provide add-on kits for current generation trucks, the adoption rate could be much faster. If Elon Musk's upcoming all-electric truck works out as claimed - then with states like California having aggressive "zero emissions" policies - it could happen much faster even than that.
If only half the number of trucks are needed - then the truck manufacturers will have to down-size too. When you cut out the ancillary jobs such as fast-food cooks and truck-stop owners - you could easily be looking at 2 million job losses.
Sure, there will be gains in electronics to manufacture these AI units - but I think a lot of that stuff will go to China...only the R&D will stay in the USA.
Even if AI trucks are only smart enough to reliably do freeway driving - there would STILL be massive incentives to putting a human driver at the offramp to drive the truck from freeway to destination then drop it back onto the on-ramp for it's next trip. All he needs is a motorbike to get him on to the next freeway exit/entrance after each truck is on it's way. One human driver could handle a dozen trucks quite easily.
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