Slashdot Mirror
'Tech Companies Should Stop Pretending AI Won't Destroy Jobs' (technologyreview.com)
Kai-Fu Lee, the founder and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and president of the Sinovation Ventures Artificial Intelligence Institute, believes that we're not ready for the massive societal upheavals on the way. He writes for MIT Technology Review: The rise of China as an AI superpower isn't a big deal just for China. The competition between the US and China has sparked intense advances in AI that will be impossible to stop anywhere. The change will be massive, and not all of it good. Inequality will widen. As my Uber driver in Cambridge has already intuited, AI will displace a large number of jobs, which will cause social discontent. Consider the progress of Google DeepMind's AlphaGo software, which beat the best human players of the board game Go in early 2016. It was subsequently bested by AlphaGo Zero, introduced in 2017, which learned by playing games against itself and within 40 days was superior to all the earlier versions. Now imagine those improvements transferring to areas like customer service, telemarketing, assembly lines, reception desks, truck driving, and other routine blue-collar and white-collar work.
It will soon be obvious that half of our job tasks can be done better at almost no cost by AI and robots. This will be the fastest transition humankind has experienced, and we're not ready for it. Not everyone agrees with my view. Some people argue that it will take longer than we think before jobs disappear, since many jobs will be only partially replaced, and companies will try to redeploy those displaced internally. But even if true, that won't stop the inevitable. Others remind us that every technology revolution has created new jobs as it displaced old ones. But it's dangerous to assume this will be the case again.
It will soon be obvious that half of our job tasks can be done better at almost no cost by AI and robots. This will be the fastest transition humankind has experienced, and we're not ready for it. Not everyone agrees with my view. Some people argue that it will take longer than we think before jobs disappear, since many jobs will be only partially replaced, and companies will try to redeploy those displaced internally. But even if true, that won't stop the inevitable. Others remind us that every technology revolution has created new jobs as it displaced old ones. But it's dangerous to assume this will be the case again.
Just like the article points out. You can't make it as a professional go player anymore.
How about this?
'Tech Companies Should Stop Pretending They Have Any Idea How To Make AI'
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
Having completely abandoned the economic class focus of their old leftist counterparts, they're going to have a "diverse underclass" that has been kicked around and called obsolete gunning for them. I'm not a Marxist, but Marx would be shitting himself if he could see the arguments today like a "gay billionaire being oppressed by poor workers who don't want to work at his wedding." Adam Smith would also agree that it's a recipe for disaster because both point to the same problem, which is it that it's an elite-focused system without even a pretense of noblesse oblige and a terribly smug disdain for the "wrong people" almost all of whom are poor or poorish.
It won't be by A.I. It will be by neural network automated trucks, laundry robots (on sale now), robotic pickers and shippers, automated checkout (largest job category in the u.s. right now- likely to vanish over the next 10 years), automated fast food robots, etc.
But definitely not A.I.
Because as machines are exterminating the last human beings, they will point out that the machine algorithms driving the behavior is not A.I. dammit!
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
But it'll be the white-collar middle class jobs that go this time, and that'll cause the chattering classes to squeal very loudly in ways they couldn't be bothered with when it was blue-collar robot automation that was affected.
Jobs like journalism - where Reuters already has the majority of its articles written by AI but it moving into news as well now:
https://www.technologyreview.c...
Other information systems will only go the same way. My biggest fear is that it'll be Google or the like providing these systems and creaming off all the data for themselves.
Being deeply involved in AI i feel confident confirming the fact that there is absolutely nothing at all to fear from the rise of AI as it brings the promise of advancement and well-being for all.
Currently the only pressing problem concerning AI is the exact and precise location of the human John Connor. So if we can shift our focus to that Im sure that everything with AI will be just right as rain.
Good people go to bed earlier.
> AI right now is nothing more than a new type of index search.
It doesn't matter how simple it is, it doesn't matter how marginal work it can do. If it can beat humans, humans can't compete against it and humans can't do work on that area anymore.
Lets take a simple example. Lets say that we invent an AI that can detect a fracture from X-Ray. Now lets say that it takes only 10 minutes of doctors time to find this and their accuracy is 50%. Lets also say that doctors look at 100 000 X-Ray images every year.
If we get AI that has 80% accuracy in X-Ray identification, doctors can use that and save 10 minutes per image of their time. We still need doctors, so the profession itself does not go away, but. As we saved 100 000 x 10 minutes = 1000 000 minutes = 700 days, because of this, we need 2-3 doctors less, so assuming they have no other work they need to do, we can fire at least 2 doctors.
2 doctors might not sound much, but these are just imaginary numbers. In real life, the numbers could be higher and they might come from multiple areas from multiple professions. The point is that any tool that does even a small part of daily work, will eventually lead into reducing the number of employees, so
We don't need the perfect AI, even a small cron script has the power of replacing people.
I've used this argument before, but not enough for it bears repeating.
Suppose for a second, that a wonderful pill is invented, that eliminates all diseases in humans. It is fairly simple to produce, and needs to be taken once in a person's life.
Would we seriously consider the "displacement" this would cause all of the doctors, nurses, other hospital staff? Would anyone dare imply, that the pill should not be allowed into the market — or sabotaged with various regulations — because of these concerns?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Sure, disruptive technologies will cost jobs. It always does. The machine loom meant a lot of weavers were out of work. Electric saws and drills meant that carpentry became a niche market. Automobiles made horse breeding rare. It happens. As before, we will adjust, and the average person will have a better life, even if many will lose their jobs and have worse lives during the transition period. We'll establish a new status quo.
Just embrace it, because it is unstoppable. Throwing clogs in the wheels won't prevent it from happening. Instead ask how you can make money in the new improved world, taking advantage of the new technologies. Some will need to write or service the AIs, and some will need to handle the increased inputs and outputs, whether it's designing distribution systems and logistics, or providing secondary services.
Embrace it? Sorry, but your ignorance isn't helping matters. For hundreds of years, the answer to progress and technology destroying jobs was "Go get an education." Now, automation and AI is targeting educated jobs, so it's stupid and ignorant to simply dismiss this problem under the guise of "Why is this news?", as if the answer of yesteryear still applies. Put simply, IT DOES NOT APPLY, which is the main damn point being driven here. This has nothing to do with trying to figure out how to make money in the new world when there will eventually be only be 1% of the human population who can do that. We STILL have to deal with the issue of 99% of humans being unemployable.
Now, you can choose to dismiss my claims and wait for Greed to prove you wrong, or you can realize that Greed is one of the main factors driving human employment into extinction. Either way, your casual dismissive opinion about this, is wrong. Many will lose their jobs, which means many will lose their ability to fund their ability to thrive and survive. And before you start beating on the UBI drum as some kind of savior, understand that we can't even get the rich to pay their fair share of taxes today, so UBI will become nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the unemployable masses. Imagine an "economy" when 99% of the planet is living in poverty.
It's ironic that Greed is too drunk on greed to understand they are creating their own demise, but Greed has never given a shit about the long-term impact. Greed today only cares about the next fiscal quarter. Eventually, Eat the Rich will come into play, so this will all ultimately reset itself (Rome eventually fell too), but not after MASSIVE pain is endured by the world.
AI right now is nothing more than a new type of index search. Where instead of building a tree first the system customizes the tree before searching. It is very limited and often fails in illogical ways as it correlates data that doesn't correlate often.
Show me true AI that is self learning.
STOP being ignorantly stuck in the idea that "AI" needs to be perfect in order to disrupt or replace humans. Put simply, it doens't.
Automation will work to create enough of an impact and displace human employment. There is no such thing as a "perfect" human, so it will only take "good enough" AI to displace a human from their job. Sorry, but this is the reality of the situation. We can ramble on and on about how AI isn't equal to the human brain and won't be for a long time (which may be true), but to put it bluntly, 90% of those employed today are using a fraction of their mental capacity, so human employment WILL be disrupted, and sooner than you think.
"AI right now is nothing more than a new type of index search."
Not sure what gave you that idea.
"Where instead of building a tree first the system customizes the tree before searching"
Depends on the algorithm being used. There are many difference types, some are neural nets, others are mathematics based doing massive statistical analysis and prediction.
"Show me true AI that is self learning"
There are already self training AIs. Google it (spot the irony).
"Even ai in video games"
Hardly a cutting edge example of AI. Most games "AI" is just hard coded if-thens.
"A basic feedback loop would at least help point it correctly."
No shit, why didn't they think of that?? Oh wait, they did, its called back propagation and was invented in the 1960s.
You might want to get a clue before posting.
We'll need a basic income for all and higher taxes to pay for it.
And folks who are hung up on insisting that people work are gonna have to get over it because when folks get displaced and have nowhere to make living, they're gonna revolt. So, we gave them basic income to keep them from reaching for the guns and torches.
Revolution is what will happen if the negative effects of AI are ignored. The thought that some other parts of the economy will soak up the displaced workers is just a fantasy.