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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."
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Eventually, yes, computers will have more "wisdom" than humans. We aren't all that close to it now, but someday, we will.
from business leaders over the next few years. Lots and lots of talk about how robots aren't taking our jobs while they automate away millions of jobs. It's either that or we a) don't let them do it or b) tax the heck out of them and redistribute the wealth. And neither of those outcomes are desirable to them.
On the plus side I come from a short-lived family with poor genetics and I'm getting up there in years, so I'll probably be dead before the massive unemployment and chaos caused by the next industrial revolution.
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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.
Sure we're wise - look who we elected President! OK, so we're fsck'd.
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?
If your line in the sand is wisdom, then this is what you have to ask: can computers provide a substitute for wisdom that is cheap and convenient enough we can live with its shortcomings?
Think of wisdom as hardwood flooring and machine learning algorithms as floating melamine resin tiles with wood grain printing. Yes, solid maple tongue-and-groove planks are considered more valuable, but a lot more people put laminate tile in because it's way cheaper to buy and install.
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Like what, find some other way to scrounge for money? What are the billion stupid people supposed to do, starve to death?
Best place for an AI decision-engine computer would be in the public sector. Indifference to profit motive, complete objectivity, no biases or '-isms,' scrupulous with funds to the penny, can't be bought, sexual temptation means nothing, it can soak up data from dozens of intelligence networks, sensors, and organizations in real time to make decisions economic, military, etc. The bureaucracy shouldn't be human, it should be an API that humans control.
Of course if Jack Ma seriously suggested such a thing in CCCP-land, so close to the party Congress, it would be Joy Through Labor in the Gobi desert for him. Which kind of proves my point.
At some point the robots will be better at engineering better robots than humans too.
There is no reason AI won't be able to design, build and maintain robots... and be better at it than human too.
As soon as AI can do the work of an average AI engineer, most human intellectual work will be obsolete.
The time to start thinking about UBI is now.
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 actual conclusion here is that driving a car does not require intelligence. And no, none of the rules used are "soft".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A lot of people worry about being replaced by machines. That's been a concern for a significant portion of the population, since at least the 1600s. What actually gets tossed aside and replaced by a new machine, every few years, is old machines. Yet machines never worry about being replaced. Indeed they don't worry about anything, or have any concept of self at all. Let me know when machines start worrying about being replaced by Machine 2.0 and that's when I'll be worried.
"There's one simple reason for that, the Alibaba founder said - we possess wisdom."
Has he met us?
“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."
"Rest assured," Ma continues, "that after the majority of the world's GDP is managed by just a few mega corporations, who also dominate the funding for political elections and the media, that they will only have the welfare of all people in mind. After all, even greed has its limits.
"Remember... corporations are people, and as such can be held accountable too."
“Technology exists for people. We worry about technology because we lack confidence in ourselves, and imagination for the future.”
"Trust us," Ma says with the utmost sincerity, "there really is nothing to worry about. Have faith that the Free Market, holy be thy name, along with unshackled Capitalism, will ensure that technology will never leave large swathes of people unemployable or underemployed, fighting for scraps and having to suffer abusive jobs and crippling debt for a lack of better alternatives."
"Just use your imagination! Imagine a blissful future for everyone!"
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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If you spend even a little time thinking about it, it's more difficult to *avoid* concluding that machines will have more wisdom than humans than it is to imagine how they can. And stating that they never will is undefendable. Successful business people don't deserve instant credibility just for being successful - credibility has to be earned. He going to have to at least say a few credible things, first.
As far as your philosophy goes, it's called solopism, and what you claim is impossible to prove for computers is just as impossible to prove for humans.
Prove that *you* have your own thoughts and aren't just responding to stimuli. Basically you can't, and that *is* a philosophical problem, but irrelevant.
What matters is whether AI can perform as well or better than humans at any given task... And with very few exceptions (maybe prostitution) I can't think of anything that an AI won't be able to best humans at. It's just a matter of them being sufficiently advanced. They are already better at law than law graduates (can find the relevant laws and case history, etc, faster, from natural language problems), better than doctors at certain diagnostics, better than experts even at image recognition problems... over time the things that AI is better at than humans is only going to explode, probably at an exponential rate. Once we teach them to do AI engineering, it's all over.
By the way, "thought vectors" are a term used in AI/ML today.
They don't have to take every job, they just have to take enough of them. That's bad enough.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
Automation is more than enough. It's gotten a _lot_ more sophisticated. Yes, it's not technically AI, but will that distinction matter when you've got a pink slip in your hand? Or when you're working 90 hours a week because the supply of labor outstrips demand 100 to 1?
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