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AI Can Be Our Friend, Says Bill Gates (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: "AI can be our friend," says Gates. In response to the question, "What do you think will happen to human civilization with further development in AI technology?" Gates says the rise in artificial intelligence will mean society will be able to do more with less. "AI is just the latest in technologies that allow us to produce a lot more goods and services with less labor. And overwhelmingly, over the last several hundred years, that has been great for society," explains Gates. "We used to all have to go out and farm. We barely got enough food, when the weather was bad people would starve. Now through better seeds, fertilizer, lots of things, most people are not farmers. And so AI will bring us immense new productivity," says Gates.
Says Bill Gates.
Fuck off.
... the reality is there are billions of people in developing nations whose economies are suddenly irrelevant. Bill is a little too out of touch with reality. Many planners in the american military are planning for full dystopia.
Pentagon video warns of our dystopian future
Hey! It looks like you're writing a missive on how AI can be our friend.
Would you like help?
But he took too many shots.
Who brought us Clippy and Bob.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njos57IJf-0
"We barely got enough food, when the weather was bad people would starve. Now through better seeds, fertilizer, lots of things, most people are not farmers. And so AI will bring us immense new productivity"
That's some seriously out of touch nonsense. What, now AI = plain old science?
And the whole "we barely had enough food" before AI subtext is repulsive and a straight up lie. Lots of idiots will think that our bountiful food supply is a result of AI saving us from cave man technique. Couldn't be further from the truth.
Oh well, guess it's back to the algorithms vs AI argument. AI to me means a conscious machine, and we don't have that yet, and it might not even be possible.
At most, AI will help subject-matter experts avoid mistakes.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
I actually think this story is hilarious. Bill Gates basically has one claim to fame. He created one of the greatest of the corporate cancers. Made him rich, too.
Now the leading corporate cancers "are engaged in a great civil war" to see which corporate cancer shall swallow all of the others. Each of them seeks to create an AI sufficiently powerful to maximize profit to infinity and buy out and absorb all of the other corporate cancers. There is also a minor question as to whether the host (AKA human society) will die first. (My apologies to the ghost of Honest Abe.)
Bill Gates has one major claim to innovation. I think that Microsoft perfected the EULA. If you read it carefully, you will discover that you just signed up as cannon fodder. Nowadays you click past such contracts all the time for every sort of product. I think the key bit is the limitation of liability. Whatever goes wrong, whether its destruction of your personal information and identity due a software bug or a fatal self-driving car accident caused by the corporation's AI, you can't do anything about it. You already agreed you won't do anything to harm the profits of the corporation (AKA gigantic corporate cancer) whose license terms you accepted. Unread and with a click or a tear. (That's "tear" as in tearing open the shrinkwrap, not "tears" as in what you should be crying.)
Remember: "There is no gawd but Profit, and [put your favorite joke here]."
Why in gawd's name would ANY corporation's AI be a friend of ANY of the human cannon fodder?
(Answer: The AI might fake "friendship" as long as the calculations indicate profit will be increased.)
P.S. Sure would be nice if there were an honest governmental referee with a consumer protection agency of some sort and no concern about the unsolvable problem of maximizing profits to infinity. Eh?
P.P.S. I actually think there is a solution: A progressive tax on corporate profits based on market share. I also think there is almost no chance we can get there from here.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
he means billionaires.
"The Internet is a fad." - Bill Gates
"AI Can Be Our Friend" - Bill Gates
We Come in Peace -- Shoot to Kill
If there isn't any Microsoft inside (nor any Google, Facebook and a couple of other sociopaths, institutional or otherwise) then yes, AI might be my friend. Else...
If corps want to make use of AI to replace entry level workers, they better be ready to pony up with extremely reduced costs for their products, since they will cost less to produce. A massive corp tax to pay for a universal basic income for all the workers they have displaced. Or a combination of both.
In the end AI will end up replacing everyone. If corps aren't bringing in entry level workers to gain experience and work their way up the ladder, they are going to have no senior level workers to replace the current senior level workers when they retire. They had better still keep some entry level workers that can work their way up, or better hope that AI can also replace those senior level workers once they retire.
In the end there is probably going to have to be some kind of UBI, if all these workers are displaced, have no means of income, you're going to have a lot fewer people to purchase/use services of these corporations and thus the corporations will have no reason to exist any longer if no one can throw cash their way.
In the end this just looks like the race to the bottom that has been going on since the 80's, snowballing into a massive race to the bottom.
Lest I appear to be a Luddite, I think AI could be a great thing.
But it's only going to be used to drive every last bit of profit out of everything, and some people are going to lose their jobs as a result.
I bet his best friend is a $10 bill.
Just Another AI Incoherence(stolen from JAPH)
Those kind of people have microphones laid in front of them and they spew out every kind of shit they think... or even worse what they tell them to say.
It's been a long time since Hawking said something about AI, Musk too, but at least we keep this shit hot with Bill. Bill's your friend.. he doesn't and he never knew "how to CS", just like every other guy who's talking about AI, but hey, but he has an opinion about every hot CS topic.
Did you ever wonder what happened to AI and it got such a viral topic?
Did any good AI patents expire, just like 3D printers or drones?
Prolly not. So what happened?
Fud. The same fud that brought VR in the foreground of every company's TODO product stack.
And did you notice something else? Every fucking idiot that talks about AI he talks with analogies, or irrelevant examples about how everything got better since AI started circulating news outlets last year.
I understand that people fall for that kind of shit, because they think AI is just a very smart entity, something like Zordon, but even people who should hide their ignorance level because they part of CS related companies, they think of potatoes and onions when asked about AI. No Bill. Potatoes, Chips, Asics, e.t.c. are produced efficiently and in larger quantities due to lean production(engineers). Seeds are getting better due to genetics(Biologists), massive equipment(engineers), better farming(agronomists) and a shitload of related science fields that do applied research on that topic.
Gates says the rise in artificial intelligence will mean society will be able to do more with less.
Those who own the companies and such will be able to do more with less. Those of us that don't will simply have to do with less. Big societal disrupting tech typically starts out pretty rocky and those that want to survive will clash with those that want to retain their money making business model. Just look at the companies that finance the RIAA an MPAA for a recent example. When only a fraction of the population is needed for the few jobs that are left, the owners, producers, and shareholders are not going to want to have to pay increased taxes for those who they made obsolete. I'm not sure what the actual solution will be, but we are in for some interesting times.
16 chars of amen.
" Now through better seeds, fertilizer, lots of things, most people are not farmers."
The "lots of things" being dozens of billions of farm subsidies, because natural intelligence doesn't cut it yet apparently.
1: Because we're humans. We just don't do "friendly". We just fake it, badly, for a while until we judge who/whatever it is will no longer be of use to us. Then we make a chimpanzee on PCP look like a Buddhist monk.
2: We, rightly, don't trust AI. Why? Because we know the assholes who programmed it. And those assholes are US!
3: And this is all before we ever delve into the whole telemetry issue.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Elon Mush and Dr Hawking say AI could be a danger: meh.
Bill Gates says AI can be our friend: oh shit, kill all the AI's now.
And of course fossil fuels (which are peaking) that power mechanized agriculture had nothing to do with it.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Who proves that Natural Stupidity is still a more clear and present danger than Artificial Intelligence.
Especially when it's coupled with pathological greed.
AI could be our friend if that's what its owners/creators want it to do.
So far, it looks like they want it to corner markets, deploy advertising, create addictions, shape public opinion, and subvert democracy.
The big tech companies aren't even trying to solve the big problems that face humanity. They're not even trying to solve the big problems created by their huge campuses (housing, transportation). Where's the money in that?
Gates himself once said that we tend to overestimate what we can achieve in one year, yet underestimate what we can achieve in ten years.
Insightful.
Yet he seems blind to what we are likely to achieve in 50..200 years. Namely machines that can really think. Machines that can program themselves. Machines that no longer need us.
Why would such machines want to support parasitic humans? And how could they in the ongoing battle for existence?
http://www.computersthink.com/
(I actually sent Gates a copy of the book, he evidently did not read it.)
Ai might be *my* friend.
But you pushed windowME onto the world.
Ai gonna kill you for that. Which is what we should have done.
captcha:horror (see. it knows)
Sure, he can be your friend.
You could even say Al could be your pal.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
AI will be whatever it's programmed to be.
I picked up a book the other day on AI coding on .NET - it was fascinating.
How do I do image recognition? Well... you take a photo, and send it off to an Azure web service, and then hey presto, you'll receive a message with the data from the photo.
How do I do voice recognition? Well... you get some audio, and send it off to an Azure web service...
This isn't an exclusive Microsoft shitheap, for a change. There's a real push to have AI behind a paywall. That suggests to me that AI won't be inherently friendly, or unfriendly. It'll simply be profitable.
AI itself does not scares me. AI in the hands of greedy capitalists is what frightens me.
Indeed they will do more with less: more sales, more profits, less workers, less income. And everything will collapse again in an overproduction crisis, with an exploding amount of poverty and inequalities.
AI is not going to be like rocket science. You won't need billions to run an experiment or to create your own. Everyone will be able to use AI for anything they desire, it won't serve only the 1%. Even today, the AI applications we have serve the general public and many SOTA models are freely accessible on github. You only need a few GPUs to do cutting edge research, you can do AI development in a garage with less money than it cost to raise the house. The datasets we have in public domain are ever growing and more complete, the datasets that Google and FB hoard are just marketing shit useful for advertising - not the kind of data we need for creating general intelligence.
Cleaning up water that his organization helped pollute. Using other people's money to try to shove Microsoft software into schools at extra long term costs to the schools, but lining his personal pockets. Using donation money to dictate what Gates thinks should be taught in schools. Trading money to desperate people for their chance to reproduce.
Honestly, this world could benefit from less of his form of so called philanthropy. He uses the so called "charity" to further his aims of power and control.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
"Is" or "Will always be" would sound much better.. a simple "can besounds suboptimal for me.
"A sword has no loyalty but to the hand that wields it."
inviting you to a sleepover.
You missed my point.
It's not because we can't make perfectly serviceable, friendly AI.
It's because humans, at the bottom of it all, are assholes who could fuck up a nightmare.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!