SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the but-will-it-stop-for-coffee++? dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Udacity President Sebastian Thrun speaking at Vanity Fair's New Establishment Summit.
Prepare for your car to become an intellectual giant -- and for you to like it.
In a highly optimistic forecast at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco, computer scientist Sebastian Thrun said artificial intelligence will radically reshape our lives for the better.
"In the last 200 or 300 years, we have made ourselves into superhumans," able to plow a field a thousand times faster than our ancestors, fly across the Atlantic Ocean and talk to a person in Australia, he said. Artificial intelligence will take us to the next step: "Rather than replacing our muscles, we're going to be making our brains stronger."
That'll start with artificially intelligent cars, said Thrun, who rose to Silicon Valley fame in his former job leading Google's self-driving car project.
"All the unborn cars get born with the full wisdom of their forefathers. AI cars will outpace all of us because they can learn faster," said Thrun, still a Stanford professor and now president of online learning site Udacity.
Artificial intelligence is spreading like wildfire across the technology industry, screening out junk email, labeling our photos, translating foreign languages and helping us type faster. But not everybody is so sanguine about the possibility of AI machines taking over high-skilled jobs.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by shortscreen on Monday October 24 2016, @03:36AM
Using AI to do things that humans already do with relative efficiency is about as exciting as the invention of a self-soiling diaper. Sure, a diaper that dirties itself eliminates the baby from the equation, but the diaper was created for the baby and has no purpose on its own. Maybe you can produce goods and services without humans, but if there are no humans to buy goods and services then why bother?
I can think of a few jobs that do seem to be plagued by high labor costs, terrible inefficiency, and poor results. Maybe these would benefit from being shored up by AI: politician, CEO, journalist
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 24 2016, @08:52AM
The majority of fux-ups are due to the human element. And with the personnel excised thanks to automation, you will have more time available from fewer but more competent medical staff who can use the extra time to keep themselves up to date on the latest techniques and technologies, and reviewing medical cases the automation cannot handle/mishandled (which if you look at medical care mishaps, would not be any worse than it currently is, and would benefit from logging of all actions taken so that future failures of the same type won't happen, rather than coverups and finger pointing as often happens today.)
There are lots of ways automation could benefit us in this day and age. And even automated cars *COULD* provide a benefit. But that benefit would be best served focusing on where automation makes sense, like dedicated 'bus' lanes that doubled as a commuter/carpool service for people working jobs out of town. Park at a carpool parking lot, wait for your carpool car to show up, pile in with 4-8 other people, vehicle drives you to other town in a 'safe' lane that only requires stopping before the car in front of you and getting on/off the freeway at the correct exit.
The benefit with this system is it doesn't mix human and AI drivers and it covers the situation most dangerous for human drivers: Early morning/late evening commutes over long distances. Done properly this system could also help improve the usage of local regional transit services by increasing utilization and decreasing prices, bringing the advantage of lower prices which would help increase demand. Furthermore higher demand would increase service on most routes, and perhaps benefit underserviced routes by providing enough excess capital to run them more often than would normally be financially acceptable (perhaps utilizing smaller vehicles as well.)
The problem with America is everything needing to have continuing growth. The concept mentioned above would only be good for a few hundred thousand vehicles. Furthermore for most commuter vehicles there would be no need for more than 200 miles of capacity per vehicle charge since most commutes are 100-150 miles each way tops. Meaning currently available electric vehicles could meet that capacity given automation capabilities between the levels of Tesla's offerings and the Google/Uber/Car manufacturer offerings. Those could *CURRENTLY* safely operate within the constraints of a fully automated 'bus road' with only autonomous vehicles and maybe human driven RT vehicles that followed strict driving guidelines (most current automation issues would only happen due to road, driver, or environmental inconsistencies (smoke, fog, snow, heavy rain/hail, etc.) Two of those we have full control over, the last could be handled with radio beaconing, or most safely, by having the vehicles pull over if they believe road conditions to be unsafe. Inconvenient, but as long as you don't have to use the bathroom/need water you should be fine for the couple hours until it clears up, or rescue in the case of snow.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Monday October 24 2016, @08:23PM
Right, most of the risks of things like Skynet come from when we hand over the decision making process to the AI at the same time that we give it access to the things necessary to carry out its plans.
Simply restricting AI to carrying out human orders or repetitive tasks alone would greatly reduce the likelihood of the kinds of nightmare scenarios that come up in Sci-Fi and fantasy.