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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.
Hey! It looks like you're writing a missive on how AI can be our friend.
Would you like help?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.