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Trump Administration Unveils Order To Prioritize and Promote AI (reuters.com)

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday will sign an executive order asking federal government agencies to dedicate more resources and investment into research, promotion and training on artificial intelligence (AI), Reuters reports, citing a senior administration official said. From the report: Under the American AI Initiative, the administration will direct agencies to prioritize AI investments in research and development, increase access to federal data and models for that research and prepare workers to adapt to the era of AI. There was no specific funding announced for the initiative, the administration official said on a conference call, adding that it called for better reporting and tracking of spending on AI-related research and development. The initiative aims to make sure the United States keeps its research and development advantage in AI and related areas, such as advanced manufacturing and quantum computing. Trump, in his State of the Union speech last week, said he was willing to work with lawmakers to deliver new and important infrastructure investment, including investments in the cutting-edge industries of the future, calling it a "necessity."

8 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. Ahh I see by 110010001000 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Now I know what all the "AI" hype articles were for: grabbing taxpayer money. How original.

  2. Re:Jump on the buzzword bandwagon by penandpaper · · Score: 1, Insightful

    President Honorary Doctor

    His title is God Emperor and he just conquered Italy.

  3. Re:Technology creates jobs by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    " The jobs are different jobs but there are more of them in the end. Some people do have trouble with the changes but the economic gains by people at all levels of the economy at the end are indisputable."

    I agree with the rest of your comment, but I think crystal balls are cloudy in this area. The computers are now becoming capable of performing service jobs, which is where people went when automation reduced manufacturing jobs. As well, the workers' share of profits has been declining for decades, and wages aren't keeping up with inflation, so that final point is extremely disputable.

    What exactly do the humans do when robots do the service jobs?

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  4. Re:Technology creates jobs by hey! · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It'd be more accurate to say automation creates some jobs and destroys others. For example "computer" used to be a human job title. Large companies before computers employed massive accounting departments, the majority of people in them were responsible for performing and checking arithmetic all day.

    Introducing computers eliminated the jobs where you add up columns of numbers, but it allowed the creation of new jobs analyzing data. AI has the promise to replace some analytical jobs in the future, and it is likely in the short term that as computers take over the low hanging fruit, those analysts will be focused on tasks computers aren't good at yet. However you shouldn't expect that trend to continue indefinitely.

    You can't just draw a straight line across a past trend and extrapolate it indefinitely. There are step discontinuities and changing circumstances in the future. One of the concerns you should have is the growing trend of income stagnation. This has effected people in the lower two income quartiles since the 80s, as median income has shown no growth at all even as *average* income has continued it's steady post WW2 rise. It's clear that the new, higher paying jobs created don't always go to the people losing jobs, and as automation gets more sophisticated we're going to see the line of stagnation rise higher up the social strata.

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    Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  5. Re:Uh oh by ranton · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Who would have thought that the only President in modern times to use direct hatred and vitriol as his core platform would engender a negative emotional response from those he attacks? It doesn't make it right to dismiss everything the President says, but it takes a particularly strong person to look past Trump's demeanor to give him the benefit of the doubt on anything he says (unless they agree with his platform, which doesn't take any strength at all).

    When 90% of what someone says is hateful and ignorant garbage, anyone should be forgiven for writing off the other 10% too just for convenience sake. Most people have better things to do.

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    -- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
  6. Re:Uh oh by bobbied · · Score: 4, Insightful

    To be fair.... These type of gotcha "man on the street" interviews are very self serving to the interviewer's position.

    There are a pile of folks who whish to believe they are "in the know" and it's not hard to find somebody who *thinks* they are more knowledgeable than they really are. Such "I know everything" is common among college age people, who have still not completely developed their adult mental capacity and still have the adolescent tendencies. It's an age and maturity thing.

    I remember when I was younger, I knew a lot more then than I know now, at least in my estimates. I grew up, realized my knowledge is limited, and my attitudes changed quite a bit, listening more, being slower to answer, and prone to actually looking up the facts for myself before running off my mouth on stuff I don't know anything about.

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    "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
  7. Automation will not elminiate all jobs by sjbe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I agree with the rest of your comment, but I think crystal balls are cloudy in this area. The computers are now becoming capable of performing service jobs, which is where people went when automation reduced manufacturing jobs.

    I work in manufacturing. Manufacturing jobs have not been reduced the way many people think. Some have been relocated. There are more manufacturing jobs than ever globally. What has changed in the US is that labor intensive products are not built in countries with low labor costs. Capital intensive products are built in the US. The US has a $3 Trillion manufacturing sector. The total number of manufacturing jobs in the US is about the same as it was at the start of WWII. It's down from the peak numbers in the 1970s but still accounts for around 13 million people and holding. The percent of the jobs in the economy has fallen but that's largely because the other sectors grew while manufacturing jobs stayed steady.

    As well, the workers' share of profits has been declining for decades, and wages aren't keeping up with inflation, so that final point is extremely disputable.

    That depends on exactly how you measure it and which jobs you are measuring. Just because someone has a smaller piece of the pie doesn't mean they are worse off if the pie overall grew. And the evidence is clear that the pie has grown. Sure you can find some periods where the data shows a decline but I can show you hundreds of years of data showing a very steady increase. Yes there are some serious income inequality issues going on but that isn't proof of some irreversible decline in employment thanks to automation. Don't conflate the two issues.

    What exactly do the humans do when robots do the service jobs?

    Several answers to that.
    1) Robots do not and will not do all the service jobs. Automation does not solve every problem because it is not economical to automate everywhere. People naively extrapolate automation trends to infinity without really understanding what is going on. It's too expensive to automate problem and automation creates new jobs that cannot yet be automated. 70 years ago secretarial pools were a common thing. Today they are unheard of and yet we still have full employment.
    2) We have no idea what jobs will be created by further advances in automation. We never have known and cannot know. I'm old enough to pre-date the internet and if anyone claims they predicted what it would do and the huge economic impact it has had is lying. We dreamed about such things but had absolutely no idea what form it would actually take or what jobs it would involve. The jobs people will be doing in 50 years are hard to imagine today. Some will be the same but many haven't even been invented yet.
    3) Humans control legislatures and can easily regulate automation in places should it become necessary.
    4) The amount of economically valuable work that can be done is effectively infinite and our resources to automate are finite. Automation can sometimes depress wages but it doesn't eliminate them altogether. Some things that are currently impossible become economically achievable as automation makes it possible for people to address those problems.

  8. Re:The bar for AI will be set very low by Locke2005 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    That's nothing, my dog has a 30 point IQ advantage on the dotard! Too bad she's not old enough to run for president!

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    I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.