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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday November 15 2016, @06:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the better-jump-the-shark dept.

Your career is now a game of musical chairs: you need to be ready when the song stops

...

Although sixty years old, artificial intelligence remained mostly a curiosity until half a decade ago, when IBM's Watson trounced the world's best Jeopardy! players in a televised match. At the time, you might have thought nothing of that - what does a game show matter in the scheme of things?

It didn't stop there. IBM sent Watson to train with oncologists and lawyers and financial advisers. Quite suddenly, three very established professions, just the sort of thing you'd tell your kids to pursue as a ticket to prosperity, seemed a lot less certain of their futures in a world where intelligence, like computing before it, becomes pervasive, then commoditised.

These top-of-their-profession projects show that the driver to bring artificial intelligence into any field isn't the amount of labor, but rather the cost of that labor. A lawyer costs fifty times more per hour than a retail worker and so is that many times more likely to find themselves with an AI competitor.


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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday November 15 2016, @07:36PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday November 15 2016, @07:36PM (#427141) Journal

    I've been contemplating the eventual replacement of pretty much every desk job with AI, and manual labor jobs with robots. AI's will win their way with demonstrably fairer and smarter decisions, no more of this hidden agenda bullcrap, pretexts, and unconscious biases that so thoroughly infest human decisions. More corruption will bring it all the faster.

    The big question is, what do we all do when no one has to work any more? When people aren't wanted for most work? It will be a huge social change, with all kinds of implications and consequences that are awfully hard to predict. We better have some kind of basic income in place by then. I feel sure we won't all just sit in front of our TVs or computers and play solitaire all day long. Many of us will still work, but only for fun.

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  • (Score: 2) by t-3 on Tuesday November 15 2016, @07:54PM

    by t-3 (4907) on Tuesday November 15 2016, @07:54PM (#427148)

    There will still be work, giving input to the AIs. They will need to be told what is needed and what isn't, they will make mistakes that need correcting, there will be sudden needs for 10 billion iphone 22S's and the next day as many Samsung Supernova 5G All Screen edition because iphones are no longer cool. Music, literature, cooking, and other arts, parenting, teaching, philosophy, and other human duties. Humans will have free time to focus on advancing the sciences, expanding into space, politicking and bickering among ourselves, and a million other things.

    • (Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday November 15 2016, @10:24PM

      by MostCynical (2589) on Tuesday November 15 2016, @10:24PM (#427243) Journal

      Sorry: Iain M. Banks didn't write documentaries.
      Culture Minds are a long, long way off. Likely we'll destroy ourselves before AI gets anywhere close.

      --
      "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
      • (Score: 2) by t-3 on Wednesday November 16 2016, @02:18AM

        by t-3 (4907) on Wednesday November 16 2016, @02:18AM (#427320)

        Yeah, but what I just described could be in place long long before "strong AI". Weak AI is all that's necessary, it just needs people to tell it what to do.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @08:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @08:46PM (#427178)

    AI's will win their way with demonstrably fairer and smarter decisions, no more of this hidden agenda bullcrap, pretexts, and unconscious biases that so thoroughly infest human decisions.

    That's naive. Its garbage in - garbage out and since its still people designing and deploying these systems they will be loaded with the computer equivalent of unconscious bias. Even worse, they will have no capacity for self-reflection, so literally no chance of ever facing their own failings and improving themselves. Tyranny of the machine is going to be pretty damn bad for the people who get caught up in it.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @09:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @09:57AM (#427446)

    You have to look at extremely wide picture to understand the change.

    Economy is basically nothing but a multilateral exchange + facility to enable that exchange. Exchange needs two sides, goods need buyers to bring wealth to its peddler.

    Wealth on its own is nothing but a positive imbalance in commanding power (and money is the most common and versatile form of it), either used to stop others from commanding you, or to give you leverage over as many others as your ego needs. So, if someone's position in human hierarchy depends on receiving a steady flow of surplus commanding power, this surplus is existing and means something only as long as it is in the circulation.

    Now, if circulation stops because consumers have nothing to exchange for goods (their work is not needed), then, with energy sources and robotic army of producers and soldiers on one's side, a top-tier megaowner can keep command over other humans using nothing but the threat of violence.

    However, as history shows, fear as a tool for ego-stroking has serious limitations. That's why even if there is no need for that, human societies will probably always have some sort of tiered hierarchical organization and will always have a class of "surrogate friends and family for hire" - entertainers (musicians, actors, comedians, sports, opinionators - philosophers and other intellectuals, including scientists) and touchers (not necessary prostitutes, but also groomers, servants, ... ).

    So, some, even very large, groups of professions will wither out, but stability will be artificially enforced and money will be given on shady pretexts to buy peace at large and to ensure those at the top can assure their own happiness.

    However, all this stands on assumption that the key figure at the top actually has human weakness and yearns company of other humans.
    If the top themselves are replaced by a non-caring AI, the whole human race may be endangered.