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Few Countries Will Benefit From the AI Revolution (qz.com)
hackingbear writes from a report via Quartz: According to Chinese venture capitalist and former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, the list of countries well-positioned to embrace a future powered by artificial intelligence is exceedingly short: United States and China. "The countries that are not in good shape are the countries that have perhaps a large population, but no AI, no technologies, no Google, no Tencent, no Baidu, no Alibaba, no Facebook, no Amazon," Lee says. "These people will basically be data points to countries whose software is dominant in their country. If a country in Africa uses largely Facebook and Google, they will be providing their data to help Facebook and Google make more money, but their jobs will still be replaced nevertheless." Originally, China's low labor costs might have helped the country modernize, Lee says, but as AI-driven automation takes hold in manufacturing, other countries that want to follow China's blueprint for economic growth probably wouldn't be able to rely on cheap labor alone.
Even the poorest of countries will benefit directly from AI. It will mean improved everything - better materials, better components, better electronics made far more cheaply to the point where people in poor countries can afford them better.
In even the poorest of countries, most people have cell phones now. Why are you suddenly doubting some new and useful technology will make its way there?
Not to mention, as more and more things like automated tractors come to be, it makes it more practical to send equipment rather than cash to poor nations - which mean the people may actually get it, unlike the cash which seems to vanish before it ever reaches those it is meant to help.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If AI can only do what people can do, then a country with a large population is better than a small one that has AI.
Computing is much more interesting when it can do that what people can't do, such as encode voice and send it over radio frequencies, but look at who has cellphones-- the entire world does. Why wouldn't AI be the same?
Oh, if there is a technological singularity, that will be a real game changer. Until then, human capabilities far exceed that of algorithm capabilities in the areas that are most important for survival, namely creative problem solving.
We don't have true intelligences, but we do have fancy neural nets and such that do work to find good solutions to various classes of problems. Hell they even help to shift elections your way by helping to manipulate whole sections of the population. Of course how much of that is AI or just good programming and hard work is another matter.
Still the question is benefit, so let's define that. To benefit you have to either improve the productivity of the workforce or maintain at least the same productivity with less work.
The first definition is only really a benefit, if after you improve productivity there someone can make use of the new capacity. Right now I think that is fair game, but only to a point. The second implies people will get more leisure time, but as money won't magically flow to the people suddenly out of work, well there are downsides.
Going back to the politics topic, I just think that as the amount of information not known about people shrinks, that along with that the ability to manipulate and mislead people out of their own best interests increases, again partly with the aid of all this artificial intelligence.
I think, in the end, if we don't establish some limits on AI and robust protections against abuse and misuse then the only real conclusion is that, on average, no one will benefit from it.
First we made physical labour less profitable, and now we are making mental labor less comparable. Sure AIs aren't going to be coding operating systems anytime soon, but eventually? Maybe?
I'm just not convinced that it is man's best interest to keep trying to develop something smarter than man.
And that's what matters, right? I for one welcome our new plutocratic overlords.
Headline could've been better. The point is that certain countries which own the IP and the robot-manufacturing-robots, will dominate the countries that merely possess the resulting worker robots. Sure, the latter will be able to enjoy increased productivity... but that productivity comes at the cost of dependence on the OTHER countries that produce those robots.
I'm reminded of Phantasy Star 2, where the people become so reliant on the computer that does all the real work, that when it 'goes amok' and stops working, the people have no idea how to function economically. Similarly, going to war with the country who owns the kill-switch for the bots that run your economy, might not be wise. This is why owning the means of the means of production is also important.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
They could have been working on an Artificial Creimer! NO country benefits from that!
I think the idea is that America and China will benefit disproportionately better than the rest of the world.
That is utter nonsense.
AI for a place like the US or China means what? Maybe some of us aren't driving ourselves. Some of the vast amount of stuff we get is marginally cheaper. We have the equivalent of personal assistants - many of us on Slashdot are essentially living a large part of this future already.
Meanwhile a poor village in India or Africa gets a solar panel and cell phones, it's 10000x improvement in quality of living. In the future maybe they get drone delivered medicine (as they are already starting to do today) and maybe some children are living that did not before. Maybe a region gets an automated agricultural facility, suddenly now they have more food than ever before. Maybe there's an automated irrigation bot that comes and build canals to fields. Maybe they get pre-fab structures that actually self-clean and resist disease instead of harboring it like grass/mud huts.
The list goes on, but basically ANYTHING they get is a n utterly massive improvement not just in quality, but QUANTITY of life itself.
There is simply no comparison, at this point the most advanced nations are absolutely the ones seeing incremental improvement from technology.
No matter what, AI combined with Intellectual Property laws will be used to create scarcity to simulate a market of supply and demand
Not in poor regions where hacked 3D printers can and will create anything of interest, bypassing all IP laws. It happened for movies and music already, and there's no reason to think it cannot happen to physical objects as well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There is no way that countries like Nimibia or Oman or Papua New Guinea will truly benefit from AI. I've been in IT across three decades and there are places in America where broadband is still a dream. If we cannot route fiber to places like Appalachia, who the hell really believes we will route the same to places in the African or sub-continent hinterlands. I don't. AI is a job displacing paradigm shift for almost everyone. Asian insurance and financial firms have already let go many thousands of people in favor of AI doing the job. This will only play out to the end, where many millions of people who do menial computer jobs and minor data crunching like spreadsheets will fall by the wayside.
I work for a small government agency and even we are already embracing AI to take the edge off stuff like this. The few people that work in accounting are basically drones. Ditto us in the IT department. We largely call the PaaS or SaaS provider. I'm getting older, so this won't affect me, as I'm already planning on getting out of IT and perhaps into the trades. You cannot AI plumbing and electrical work. Ditto masonry or any number of other "invisible" trades that people rely on but don't really see until they are building or something in their home or business goes pear shaped.
I think the vast majority of retail and service jobs (fast food) will become lost to advances in AI and robotics. Personally, I'll never buy a meal from a place that uses robots to replace people, simply out of principle, but that's just my age and Luddite streak coming out.
What is AI and when will we finally be only ten years away from it?
simply consider the vast amounts of effort to get anything worthwhile done
even then to say they lead the world in AI is a misdemeanour can anyone point to a single "grand leap" that orginated in china in the last 10 years ?
From what I've been reading lately about the perceived effects of the widespread application of AI, class warfare is a very real possibility. Now, if this is the case, I don't see how any country ... the US, China, et al really benefits. Some individuals and corporations may benefit, but the country as a whole does not (imho).
Would think they would benefit greatly.
This assumes that the current leaders in AI development will retain nearly all of the benefits from the use of AI. In particular, it assumes that all of the critical information about how to create AI models will be limited among a small number of software companies.
I see no reason why this should be the case. Creation and use of AI models is already being distributed more widely, e.g. through the open-source TensorFlow software. The basic algorithms of AI models are generally quite simple, and while they do require a bit of expertise to use well, they're usually not all that difficult. If you're willing to invest in the hardware, a relatively small number of experienced engineers, and good training data, it shouldn't be hard for most anybody to build their own AI models for their own applications.
They are jumping straight to mobile phone networks and skipping landlines. For a fisherman wanting to sell fish, this allows him to find the best port to sell fish at the highest price. Coastal villages don't go hungry because they never got anyone to land a catch. A few text messages let them run like an Amazon marketplace.
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Last I looked the point of money, and jobs, and all that shit was to make things people wanted. Hey guess what, if the robots do all that for cheap to free then we still get stuff! We even get more stuff than we have now, a lot more! Everyone wins! Imaginatively this whole "money" and "economy" and "jobs" thing doesn't actually have to exist if we still get stuff we want without it.
With the highest population. I.E, if AI replaces humans then it stands to reason.....
Caution: Contents under pressure
Good job, all. Making all the carbon lifeforms not worth it.
AI is meant to help the carbon lifeforms, not make some of them profit in the near term.
The future Marie Antoinettes will be executed by the AI guillotines of the future.
While the COUNTRIES might benefit on paper, without the proper protections in place, it screws over the people within those countries just about as bad as everywhere else as all that gain is horded by the top even more and does not circulate starving the local economies anyways and even if all those large entities starting buying from each other in bulk to prop up the local spending on paper, it would still starve out the people who still have no money and as such can't survive really.
I do support all this automation, I truly do. But only so long as the proper regulations are in place. Otherwise the outlook it pretty bleak regardless of what some right wing free market loons try to pretend it is.
The further this goes, the more a Universal Basic Income looks inevitable even if it takes violence and bloodshed to achieve.
If you mean, who will benefit by purchasing vastly superior products designed and created by AI, or incorporating AI, then that would be all nations, with the rare exception of those economically isolated such as N. Korea.
If you mean who will benefit by selling vastly superior products designed and created by AI or incorporating AI, well that will be the owners and investors in the companies which develop and manufacture those products. Basically, middle and upper classes in first-world nations: U.S, Canada, Europe, East Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Israel. Probably Russia and India as well, though Russia is insanely corrupt and India is still struggling with regulatory inefficiency and structural inequities.
Look at AlphaGo against humans at Go and then consider what AI compared to humans in designing fusion reactors, rechargeable batteries, or even better AI would look like. If AI makes energy too cheap to meter in the first world, then energy also becomes too cheap not to give it away to the third world.
With better manufacturing through AI, necessities get cheaper not only on the domestic markets of companies which improve manufacturing, but on the global market. Whatever the first world has access to, so does the third world with trade.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Most of those companies won't benefit either
Facebook? really? LOL
...And I doubt that the one is going to be American.
The argument that you [SuperKendall (who I generally agree with)] is making is only partly applicable here. The long-term trend has definitely been for things to get better, but we only live on the short term. I think this time the short-term oscillations are going to go too negative, because the competition is accelerating and making the oscillations too violent. So I'm changing the Subject: a bit...
While I think that India and maybe Japan are dark horse candidates, I think there is only going to be one winner, and it won't be America. There are three fundamental weaknesses:
(1) Leadership. Divisive and selfish (even narcissistic) and wannabe dictatorial versus competent and strong and experienced dictatorial.
(2) Defenses. As in the US has no meaningful defenses against cyber-aggression while the Chinese (in particular) are thinking both ways.
(3) Changed my mind. I've decided not to state this one in public yet. Perhaps ever? Feel free to guess, but I doubt you can get it, even though...
The prediction I will make in public is that AI harnessed for competition is an extremely serious threat. If a competition-driven AI gets loose in the world, then its highest priority will almost surely be to neutralize any competitive threats, starting with other AIs. Doesn't really matter what form of competition it puts first, but right now it looks to be profit or national defense.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
no Google, no Tencent, no Baidu, no Alibaba, no Facebook, no Amazon
It's also a very narrow view of the AI and automation in general. Although the point about the industrial automation is reasonable, as those countries with no production and education still remain countries without production and education. But the same automation technologies are globally available and once the economies and infrastructures mature to gain from them, the blessed AI shall provide its holy deliverance to another set of countries as a natural part of all basic technology.
AI will certainly make better and cheaper products for someone in Africa but what will the guy in Africa have to offer in exchange? AI will make most labor almost worthless. Right now a poor country can compete with low wages but if if a robot costs 1M dollars and can do the work in the USA of 2000 unskilled workers, even if the workers in Africa work for free, the transportation and logistics costs might make the robot more cost effective. The worry is, when this happens a country can't use cheap labor to boot strap its way up.
'AI' was a huge misnomer for algorithms that probably won't benefit anybody. Like so much of what comes out of Silly Valley these days, this piece is poop.
If true artificial intelligence arrives, those farthest away from the technological revolution will be the safest unless it decides to wipe them out just in case.
Not in poor regions where hacked 3D printers can and will create anything of interest, bypassing all IP laws. It happened for movies and music already, and there's no reason to think it cannot happen to physical objects as well.
AI will help prevent such IP theft. AI controlled drone air, ground, and sea military and "black-ops" units make it cheap to wage a conventional war, particularly against a poor region that barely has potable water. These regions are already being colonialized and exploited by China and Western nations. AI will accelerate this trend so that soon there will be almost no area where such criminal activities can find refuge.These areas will provide the 1st-world nations with cheap manpower for jobs that are too dangerous to risk expensive AI-controlled hardware, and they will breed their own replacements for those lost.
as a species that robots taking over menial labor is a bad thing?
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Get fucked europoors.
Even in this context, I'm not sure in what sense AI is equal to job automation. Physical job automation doesn't require AI (in the modern, data analysis sense), and is the most relevant to backward countries. AI-related job automation, for example replacing doctors by AI, will be a big help to backward countries.
It depends on how to define "country." If you look at the economic and employment status of the individual the US and China are hurt the most by AI. AI provides little threat to manual labor and physical tasks, the robotics of 80's, 90's, and 00's threatens them more. AI will mostly put knowledge workers out of work. If your interface to what you do is a computer, voice, video, network link, etc and/or redundancies like management you are at serious risk. If your work heavily depends on actual physical interaction in non-trivial ways you are safe... at least from AI itself, though it's friend robotics might still come for you.
The US will do better, because overall more money will flow in but the people, the real people, it will be harmful not helpful.
Some benefit.
Replacing people with Hardware, and Software is what is happening. What is also happening is a total lack of empathy towards those people that are replaced. With the numbers of people being replaced increasing, the community is starting to have difficulties helping the displaced with the resources available. Eventually, those displaced will create a solution, it is man's nature.
But I am reminded of those that were affected by the of the invention of the Horse Yoke Harness. At the time, a horse could do the work of 6 adults. The numbers displaced were staggering, and the increase in wealth by not having to use 5 adults was irresistible. Eventually, the technology would spread to poorer areas and the increase in wealth would occur there also. But at a great human cost.
I find myself becoming uncomfortable with my personal Human Cost.
It's becoming a "winner take all" world. Inequality will skyrocket both at a career level and a global level. The big co's hoard or buy the latest and greatest talent, companies, and patents; and the rest get bowled over, becoming rust belts. AI will probably magnify this as the big players will use their muscle to have the smartest and/or cheapest bots.
Automation/AI can be a great thing if its benefits trickle down, but our current economic and political structures are not geared to do that, and the big players pay a lot of money to convince voters and dictators to keep things as they are.
Table-ized A.I.
What we have is 'pseudo-intelligence', at best. It's not much different than the 'learning algorithms' we had in the 90's, it's not truly an 'intelligence', it can't think, it can't actually reason, there is no mind in that box, it's just software, not self-aware, not aware of you, you're just more data, not any more significant to it than a fencepost. IF and WHEN we have real Artificial Intelligence, you'll be able to converse with it, it'll think, be more like a human mind -- if, no doubt, somewhat alien. That being said, we are not there yet, we are not anywhere NEAR that yet, and until we understand how our own minds do these things, we won't be ABLE to build something that does. That's my judgement and prediction.
Lol. Which âregionsâ(TM) are these you fuck tard. The entire earth is colonized, nationalized, and owned. All land is part of some country. Maybe you thought you were posting 300 years in the past???
Get a job and out of mommyâ(TM)s house you douchebag.
Meanwhile a poor village in India or Africa gets a solar panel...
And the receiving country never has the ability to build or sustain its own market in that industry, suppressing the ability for economic growth in that country..
"Their industry will just do something else" might be a considered a counterargument. There will be nothing else.
Interesting that your first, primary example is one most easily directly refuted.
it's entirely possible, and based on historical evidence likely, that the people in those countries will be left to languish in poverty. Who's going to give them those automatic tractors if they have little or nothing of value to trade? For the most part their cheap labor is their most valuable resource. The natural resources tend to get monopolized, often by violent thugs and juntas.
/. who would argue that it is. Unless you can answer that or find a way for people whose labor has suddenly become worthless to trade then those people are screwed.
Human civilization is built around the idea that if you don't work you don't eat. People hate it when you tax them and give their money to somebody else. They hate it more if it's somebody in another country. Sure, the increased world stability is worth it, but it still doesn't _feel_ right. Taxation feels like the theft. And there's lots of folks right here on
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Someone should tell Common because that commercial isn't getting irritating at all
Mobile phones will only benefit the richest countries
You are missing the big picture. Gizmos and smaller manufactured items may indeed be cheaper for the typical 3rd-world-er.
However, their water, food, housing, medical care, child-care, legal protection, and education may become more expensive to them because jobs may be harder to come by. If you can't get a job because you are replaced by a bot, you can't get the basics of life. Skeletons don't care about cheaper phones.
Table-ized A.I.
Found the low-info useless idiot!
Where will everything be manufactured?