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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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"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
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
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.
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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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Why can't the first world also go back to subsistence farming?
Because big Agra has has it all locked up here.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Different things are called "AI" these days. Thinking machines are still very primitive, there hasn't been a breakthrough there. What is starting to show results are statistical models on large data sets, that are constructed at least partially automatically.
But these depend on having a large data set, which means that whatever company has the most data will likely have the best model, which in turn attracts more users, allowing them to collect more data. So it's hard for a newcomer to gain traction.
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.
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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We could kill each other? We've mastered that skill pretty well.
Because subsistence farming in Europe would lead to a famine that makes the Irish famines of the 1840s look like a family picnic. There's WAY more people living there now than the continent itself can feed with low yield subsistence farming. And if history taught us one thing, then that societies with starving populations aren't too stable.
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"all the work China is doing in Africa is largely being done by Chinese construction crews"
There's a reason for that, but in todays politically correct west we're not allowed to say it. The chinese are less bothered by PC bullshit however which is why they'll probably triumph economically in the end.
Well, everyone going back to subsistence farming is such an obvious response to improvements in technology, that I just don't see what else we can do.
Food production is one of the most efficient industries of our modern economy. The US has went from 90% of our population being farmers in 1800 to 2% today, and we export about 20% of what we produce. Subsistence farming is a hobby, not a practical way for citizens in the developed world to feed themselves. Some form of basic income which covers necessities such as food is far more realistic than a return to subsistence farming.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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.