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AI Could Devastate the Developing World (bloomberg.com)
Kai-Fu Lee, Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and author of "AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order," reports of the devastating impacts artificial intelligence could have on the developing world. An anonymous reader shares the report from Bloomberg: In recent decades, China and India have presented the world with two different models for how such countries can climb the development ladder. In the China model, a nation leverages its large population and low costs to build a base of blue-collar manufacturing. It then steadily works its way up the value chain by producing better and more technology-intensive goods. In the India model, a country combines a large English-speaking population with low costs to become a hub for outsourcing of low-end, white-collar jobs in fields such as business-process outsourcing and software testing. If successful, these relatively low-skilled jobs can be slowly upgraded to more advanced white-collar industries. Both models are based on a country's cost advantages in the performance of repetitive, non-social and largely uncreative work -- whether manual labor in factories or cognitive labor in call centers. Unfortunately for emerging economies, AI thrives at performing precisely this kind of work.
Without a cost incentive to locate in the developing world, corporations will bring many of these functions back to the countries where they're based. That will leave emerging economies, unable to grasp the bottom rungs of the development ladder, in a dangerous position: The large pool of young and relatively unskilled workers that once formed their greatest comparative advantage will become a liability -- a potentially explosive one. Increasing desperation in the developing world will contrast with a massive accumulation of wealth among the AI superpowers. AI runs on data and that dependence leads to a self-perpetuating cycle of consolidation in industries: The more data you have, the better your product. The better your product, the more users you gain. The more users you gain, the more data you have. Lee says the best thing emerging economies can do is to "recognize that the traditional paths to economic development -- the China and India models -- are no longer viable." Countries with "less-educated workers" are advised to build up human-centered service industries.
"At the same time, developing countries need to carve out their own niches within the AI landscape," Lee writes. "... governments need to fund the AI education of their best and brightest students, with the goal of building local companies that employ AI."
Without a cost incentive to locate in the developing world, corporations will bring many of these functions back to the countries where they're based. That will leave emerging economies, unable to grasp the bottom rungs of the development ladder, in a dangerous position: The large pool of young and relatively unskilled workers that once formed their greatest comparative advantage will become a liability -- a potentially explosive one. Increasing desperation in the developing world will contrast with a massive accumulation of wealth among the AI superpowers. AI runs on data and that dependence leads to a self-perpetuating cycle of consolidation in industries: The more data you have, the better your product. The better your product, the more users you gain. The more users you gain, the more data you have. Lee says the best thing emerging economies can do is to "recognize that the traditional paths to economic development -- the China and India models -- are no longer viable." Countries with "less-educated workers" are advised to build up human-centered service industries.
"At the same time, developing countries need to carve out their own niches within the AI landscape," Lee writes. "... governments need to fund the AI education of their best and brightest students, with the goal of building local companies that employ AI."
'nuff said.
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Article doesn't have anything to do with AI. Someone throw an icy snow ball at whomever posted this...
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Developing cultures are some of the most helped by the rise of AI and robotics.
The improvement to a place like the U.S. is somewhat marginal. But for a small village without many resources, what does it mean when suddenly one AI agricultural unit can help plant 24x7 while a farming AI linked to global weather can make informed planting choices for them? That or some kind of on-site vet AI to diagnose issues with livestock and recommend quarantine much faster than it might hav happened otherwise.
All of this could easily be possible with no outside links and just a small solar generation capability. We could literally see enabling many more people to live a subsistence lifestyle than could have otherwise.
Why drag them full-on into an American or Chinese model if they do not have to go?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They are talking about Africa, the last major area to "develop. And kind of ironic coming from a Chinese CEO; all the work China is doing in Africa is largely being done by Chinese construction crews. Can't lose a job to AI if you never had it in the first place
That would be the greatest thing ever to happen -- there is absolutely no reason that India etc. should have any participation in the technological economy, except that the British empire blessed them with the English language and telephony has gotten cheap.
In the book "Why Nations Fail" by Acemoglu and Robinson, they would call this a microeconomic solution which in the end has little effect on the prosperity of a nation. That is unless AI is what they call a "critical juncture" - an event or change which is so disruptive that it changes the path of history. Examples of such changes include the industrial revolution; colonization; the Black Death; the French and various other national revolutions. However, I'm doubtful that it will include AI and more Alexa-style products.
People will always want to own physical things such as houses, cars, computers, clothing, cell phones, etc. Even with the advent of robotic manufacturing these material things require some labor to make and the cheaper the labor the more likely that's where things will be manufactured, regardless of tariffs. Robots help, but look at the recent experience of Tesla in making their new car - there appeared to be too many robots and not enough human hands in the process. There's at least one reason many high tech, expensive things (Apple phones, Dell, Lenovo and other computers, steel for John Deere equipment...) are made in China and that's the cost of labor. In the future I can see that China and maybe India may have the intellectual capability and experience to be in the development game and control both ends of the process of making things. Which countries will suffer economic problems because of this? Likely those with expensive labor and high paid developer talent.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
We're lazy - we need AI to take over...
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it's automation with a bit of machine learning, but it's easier to say "A.I." as shorthand for it. If this stuff works then yeah, China & India are pretty boned. They're going to have massive surplus populations and nothing to do with them. But they're also going to be straddled with a "if you don't work you don't eat" culture. They'll end up with dictators and massive wars. Eventually the US will get dragged into it too, just like we did with WWII. Same for the EU.
There's basically two scenarios where this doesn't happen. 1st, the tech doesn't actually work. That doesn't seem to be the case. The tech works just fine it just takes time to roll it out. Hence the timelines given in TFA. 2nd China & India pass laws blocking the tech roll out and retarding development in order to preserve jobs. There's a third possibility, which is make work projects, but that means paying taxes for people to do useless things, which the gov'ts will get called out on in most cases. #2 might actually happen though, but again, it's tough to get it past people. Again, people don't like paying for things they don't have too, and that includes paying for workers who could be replaced.
What this means is that the dystopia scenario is by far the most likely. And it's not like it's sci-fi even. The same thing happened during the last industrial revolution. Luddites weren't just scared of tech, they lost their livelihoods. There was nearly 80 years of technology unemployment until WWI & II came along and blew up enough stuff that we had to pay folks to put it back together.
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After another 30-50 years when we finally have robotics and AI, we simply won't need workers any more. Robots will do the job of all but a few of the working class, and AI will do the job of all but a few of the middle class. There will be a small number of people necessary, and the rest will be superfluous. So what to do with all these useless eaters?
I see it ending badly. The ruling class isn't going to have any of it. Throughout history, they always considered us deplorable but always needed us to create their wealth for them. Sort of like how a farmer might not like his animals, but needs them. So he has to feed them, tend fields for them, heal them when they're sick, etc., regardless of how he feels about them. But what happens when the farmer gets robot animals that produce just as well as the regular kind, but don't need hugely expensive housing or hospitals or EBT cards?
Especially considering the negative impact that massive numbers of humans have on the environment, and the negative outcomes that occur when these humans are allowed to vote their own interests (Brexit, Italexit, Trump) then I just don't get why we'll be allowed to continue in the current way. Once automated weapons can be commanded directly without all those generals, colonels, captains, sergeants and privates being required, our ruling class can at last do whatever it wants without restriction. It will be a great day for them, the realization of a dream thousands of years old. Imagine people like Donald Rumsfeld or Pol Pot able to implement their agendas with no restrictions.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
You know, that kind of reminds me of my reaction to seeing all the tabloid and magazine articles about the British royal family in my American supermarket checkout. I wouldn't buy a magazine about the royal family if I were British FFS. I don't see why anybody cares about them. But evidently people do.
So here we an article about the impact of technology on poor people and you have exactly the same reaction: why would anybody care about these people? I can only answer the same way: it may be mystifying to you, but evidently people do.
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Right now some nations are competitive and some are not. The same goes for individuals some are competitive and many are not. We can not ignore the soon coming changes that will leave almost everyone unemployed and neither can the developing nations. The degree of change that we must create to keep the non competitive people up and running and having real spending money is at hand. If they do not have money they can not support business nor can they support a nation a they have so little to pay taxes with. If we fail to jump on this we will be doomed unless global warming kills us first. For now the climate change deniers should explain that we now have Jaguars in Arizona as it is now warm enough for them to make their home.
I was working with some profs on setting up a large research project preparing grant proposals (we already had 1 big funding source) to create an open source cheap farming robot to do organic farming.
We had many practical ideas to begin with; many of which I still do not see being used out there... when the smart phone came out years later it seemed like it would have been perfect timing. Other university projects (especially MIT ones) were embarrassingly bad so we would have had something... we still would.
Why did it stop? Because I killed it, we discussed this exact topic on how this would the destroy 3rd world faster than anybody could adapt to it. We guessed that other gardening and farming robot projects were just gimmicks for educational student projects with no practical applications because they too had similar concerns.
Farming robots can be made cheaply and hardware to control them gets cheaper and easier to access every year - only the software holds us back and once done...
You don't have to completely replace the humans, just make the weakest a little weaker for a damaging period of time. It also doesn't have to be super cheap-- just enough to drive the market down so substance farmers are not able to make anything extra to live on after feeding themselves and that has been done temporarily to economies where a nation dumps excess food into another market; or well, how donated clothing and kill whole economies as their fragile sweat shops go broke when they have months or years of super cheap clothes given to them... or NGOs and their contractors displacing the local rebuilding labor force...
No, I'm not giving away any of our good ideas as examples. Somebody else can do that; hopefully LATER after more people wake up to the impending problems. BTW, these issues have been around since the industrial revolution and largely ignored because the big problems were externalized for other people to deal with the transition (and saying everybody has to become educated out of their old jobs and blaming them for not making that transition is naive. As if we even have the same number of necessary jobs existing in the 1st place... we don't.) What is going to happen is that people won't be so ignorant and as able to close their eyes because of how fast this is coming to everybody... plus the fact we have too many people and not enough jobs to invent based upon an economy of infinite growth that has reached peak resources already.
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Many jobs will gradually require less people due to machine learning. Often it can support human specialists with analytical lookup work that woukd be done otherwise by people.
I have young twin children and I sometimes wonder what direction they should grow their capabilities to have a happy life with an interesting job.
I think that tasks like setting up a communication or marketing campaign will not immediately be replaced, and having an enterpreneurial attitude will be useful too, but difficult to make predictions...
The only people to do well are the AI owners but what makes you think things will get that far? People won't sit idly as jobs disappear.
Now that "Made in" means "China", they have the factories. They are already using more and more robots. There is a huge demand for robots in China. So there will be lots of opportunities for Chinese AI companies.
Once you outsource manufacturing, you also outsource manufacturing technologies.
AI Could Devastate the World
ftfy
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
You know, that kind of reminds me of my reaction to seeing all the tabloid and magazine articles about the British royal family in my American supermarket checkout. I wouldn't buy a magazine about the royal family if I were British FFS. I don't see why anybody cares about them. But evidently people do.
So here we [have] an article about the impact of technology on poor people and you have exactly the same reaction: why would anybody care about these people? I can only answer the same way: it may be mystifying to you, but evidently people do.
Because for many reasons, anyone could become a poor person.
... on average, I estimate (and maybe even estimate badly, but that's my guess) something else is claiming the underdeveloped countries are in danger from X and we must therefore give them money Y.
It's not exactly like clockwork, but more like the tides versus a clock. Not regular, but repeated.
Please don't wait, be the first to commit suicide.
Thank you.
china has manufacturing with smog and dumping.
Shipping can pull things back and with no labor costs they will just have no safety to play with.
Don't go into production and undercut our salaries! That's what we do with the US, we did it first!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
C'mon, that's not fair. It's not ALL like that in Alabama.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In the version I'm seeing, the Bloomberg attributes the piece to Michael Schuman (credited as "the author of The Miracle: The Epic Story of Asia's Quest for Wealth and Confucius and the World He Created").
I see no reference to Kai-Fu Lee at all.
Upside: superior click-bait.
Downside: not actually associated with the article.
Overall consumption kept pace with per worker productivity.
Unfortunately per worked productivity is nearly unbounded yet consumption is constrained by natural resources.
Perhaps turnabout is fair play?
Besides, any country that has nuclear weapons and a space program should not be considered a developing country.
There is an important point here, but it's not limited to the developing world.
AI (to the extent that it works) will drastically increase the productivity of people who own AI, while not affecting the productivity of people without AI.
This means a drastic increase in inequality - both between countries and within a single country.
And to the extent that some people are entirely unable to compete with AI (for example, a truck driver, whose only current job skill is image processing, i.e. being able to stay within a lane while driving, which AI might soon be able to do equally well and for cheaper), they will be worse off in absolute as well as relative terms.
Overall wealth will be much higher - but the average person is likely to be worse off. That is, unless a universal basic income is instituted.
Why can't the first world also go back to subsistence farming?
As Opportunist mentioned, the population has grown past the carrying capacity of subsistence farming to a level that only high-yield farming methods can sustain. But even local farming to supplement high-yield farming is a non-starter so long as NIMBYs remain unwilling to repeal zoning ordinances that prohibit urban dwellers from running a victory garden. Consider Oak Park, Michigan, which dropped misdemeanor charges against Julie Bass only after the city's threat against her vegetable garden made national news.
they're just going to ignore us. Same as we currently ignore people suffering all around the world. Seriously, go google what's going on in Yemen right now. Or Flint, MI's water. Or the 45,000 people who die of preventable diseases in America every year. It's easy. Out of sight out of mind.
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In any case, the point I think the authors were making (the wrong article is linked so I can't easily verify it) is that AI will make it harder for developing nations to improve their economies, rather than making their current economies worse. So it's more a case of AI undermining evolutionary development than it being a revolution in itself.
Agreed. Even before the recent cache of AI, there was a lot of concern that increasing industrial productivity (what a lot of folks refer to as Industry 4.0) driven by automation, additive manufacturing, robotics, big data, and AI, is disrupting the export-oriented economic development model that a lot of nations used to grow in the 20th century. Think Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and most recently China. The idea was you leverage cheap labor to work your way up from cheap, commodity exports to designing and manufacturing high tech goods. However, increased automation is eroding the cost advantage that cheap labor once had. Some might argue that China is the last country to be able to use this model - they brought a tremendous amount of cheap labor to the market that drastically warped the global system (I would argue for example that it killed Mexico's chance to use the same development route), and through various fiscal tactics and sheer scale, China was able to keep that cost advantage for much longer than most nations. Thus, by the time China moves on, the advances in manufacturing have basically left other developing nations few options. China speaking of which is aggressively advancing automation as well to ensure that the manufacturing base they've built does not shift to other, cheaper nations.
So these countries are realizing the competition and have launched the PR campaign to shame the West into slowing down the AI adoption. It is "unethical", we are told, to use AI militarily. It is "unfair" to use it elsewhere.
The motivation for groups and countries unable to do something advantageous to talk those who can out of it is understandable. But why would Slashdot be part of that PR campaign? I'd hope, the company at least profits from this, rather than doing their "useful idiots" part for free...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
given the massive amount of automation we're currently doing. We're going to run out of work here. When that happens we either take care of people who do nothing or let them starve. If you do that in a country with an army you'll have wars. Big ones. They'll come to your house to take your stuff. Or you'll get conscripted into an army to do the taking. Meanwhile you'll have fascist dictatorships spring up when they promise food to the starving masses.
You're talking about billions of people with nothing to lose and access to modern military weapons. That's not going to end well for anybody.
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on the historic data. We're talking the late 1800s and early 1900s. That was not, by all accounts, a good time to be alive. America in particular was trapped in a permanent Japan style depression. Pre WWI Europe was reeling from multiple violent revolutions and brewing more of them. And Post WWI Germany was a hell hole crushed by war reparations that led to the populace looking the other way for the Nazis. If you want to tell me that was good times comparable to the 50s, 60s and 70s and they hey day of Union labor you've got your work cut out for you. If you even want to convince me that it was anything other than the two World Wars that got our species out of that ruling class dominated rut you've got even more work to do (and maybe a doctoral thesis in history to be written).
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Now characterize the opposing argument...it's chicken little.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Every shithole has a 'war on corruption' when power changes hands. Hint: It's a war on the _old_ corruption. China is also currently undergoing an 'all-out war on corruption', Russia has just finished one. In America, our corrupt control both major political parties, so we can't even get one started.
I did like that case of 99 cent bottles of Brazilian Rum I bought last time Brazil had a 'war on corruption' and crashed their currency, the current war is kicking out the winners of the last one, so not likely to repeat.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
It was rum, pretty good rum.
The lefties crashed the Brazilian currency when they were the ones 'fighting corruption'. There was a brief period where exporters got Brazilian products for almost nothing.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Maybe /., just like nostalgia, isn't what it used to be?
Ezekiel 23:20
Indian English is a recognized distinct dialect of English. It's hard to understand because the regional linguistics differ greatly from American favorite phonemes. Would have been nice if corporate America realized this before they sent all the call center jobs to India. Then again, companies like Dell have paid a price for their Indian misadventures after having to bring back call center jobs at great cost to themselves after a pitchfork rebellion by their incensed customers.