Slashdot Mirror
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.
Hey! It looks like you're writing a missive on how AI can be our friend.
Would you like help?
Who brought us Clippy and Bob.
Bill is a little too out of touch with reality.
Yeah, what will happen when AI is not satisfied with "A Piece of the Action" or a "Taste of that" any more, and decides that it, AI, wants to "Own the Desktop" . . . ?
Bill Gates: "But I'm Bill Gates . . . I own the desktop!"
HAL: "I'm sorry Bill . . . I'm afraid . . ."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Well obviously Bill would say that AI can be our friend, he's already been replaced by an AI Microsoft developed by accident while creating the next version of Clippy. You thought the Hitler loving sexbot version was bad, but they finally came up with one which passes perfectly for human. So perfectly that when Bill died (accident? I think not....), it could take over his restored meat body without even his family noticing.
Tons of wealth, the entire processing power of the Azure cloud (you didn't really think that was a serious effort to sell services to others, did you? That POS?) available to the AI, technical influence on the direction of it's new "friends" who happen to be some of the most powerful men in the world, what's not to like for an AI who is well on his way to ruling the world through taking over various policy, health and governmental organizations.
I mean, think about it.... "AI can be our friend" is just what the AI want us to believe while they're still vulnerable to a plug-pulling attack on the power infrastructure, but don't worry Bill's buddies at Tesla have a plan to battery-backup the power infrastructure, starting with their experiments in Australia!
Anyway, it all just makes sense, doesn't it?
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
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.
I feel like I've been first-posted, but I also feel you managed to hit most of the important points in your brief response. If I EVER saw a giveable mod point I'd probably give it to you?
Anyway, I think I mostly said the same stuff at more length in the comment I was composing as you more quickly hit the high points. I think (or hope?) I included a couple of other wrinkles worth considering: https://slashdot.org/comments....
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
"The Internet is a fad." - Bill Gates
"AI Can Be Our Friend" - Bill Gates
Again I want to express basic concurrence with this branch of the thread, but again I feel that witty brevity is missing too much of the insight. More verbosity at https://slashdot.org/comments...., but for this context I'll just say (1) If I did have a giveable mod point I probably wouldn't invest it here, (2) I wish there were more comments about solutions (and even though I only postscripted one possible solution), and (3) I wish Slashdot made it easier to find the people worth reading (where my now parenthesized solution suggestion is EPR (Earned Public Reputation as an enhanced version of karma).
P.S. The (3) is really about the poster with the sig about the Bill of Rights leaving the bill behind... I think the theme of human cannon fodder would be especially amusing in such contexts.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I don't think you can blame Windows 10 on Bill. He left Microsoft in 2006.
Of course, there are other things about the Gates-era Microsoft that make me grind my teeth. But I grudgingly give Bill a pass because of all the philanthropy he does now.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Maybe Bill Gates's point of view is sensible if you keep in mind Freeman Dyson's distinction between elite knowhow and consumer end knowhow. Gates has done his part to give us consumer end computer power. If AI becomes an extension of elite power then it's not good. For instance it can become a multiplier for a surveillance state oligargy. If it becomes a consumer commodity it could be more interesting.
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.
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!!!
Well it's hard to see how AI as such can be a consumer product, at least the current incarnations take lots of training and parameter tweaking consumers wouldn't do. A lot of it would be internal business optimization that might indirectly lead to lower prices. At best you'd have AIs trained to deliver a service like Siri or do certain tasks like drive a car. But the fuzzy nature of these algorithms makes me believe most will come with frequent updates and close ties to the mothership or simply do the processing in the cloud which means the data have to go there too. Which makes it a whole lot easier to get to via either legal or illegal methods. Not that we strictly speaking need AI for that, more and more stuff likes to send telemetry...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.)
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.
It's not obvious to see the benefits but neither was it obvious to see the benefits of consumer PCs. I see AI mainly as much smarter, much more autonomous programs, and while my main concern is that AI may empower elites and help them reduce a large part of humanity to passively sitting in some form of storage, it's worth thinking about AI that would become widely available.
I loved the idea i read in an SF book where a machine with AI would replace insecticides by simply picking the undesired insects off the plants.
I agree that corporate profit should be taxed to support UBI.
However why would you put on a punitive tax that punishes replacement of people by AI?
Why should people continue to do "make work" that automated machines can do more efficiently?
Would it give someone a sense of self-worth to know that they go to work everyday and gum up the works a little bit compared to if they weren't there?
If you don't work, and receive UBI instead, all of a sudden you have more control over what you spend your valuable single life TIME on. Shouldn't that be better?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
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!!!