SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The hysteria about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere. There seems to be no shortage of sensationalist news about how AI could cure diseases, accelerate human innovation and improve human creativity. Just looking at the media headlines, you might think that we are already living in a future where AI has infiltrated every aspect of society.
While it is undeniable that AI has opened up a wealth of promising opportunities, it has also led to the emergence of a mindset that can be best described as "AI solutionism". This is the philosophy that, given enough data, machine learning algorithms can solve all of humanity's problems.
But there's a big problem with this idea. Instead of supporting AI progress, it actually jeopardises the value of machine intelligence by disregarding important AI safety principles and setting unrealistic expectations about what AI can really do for humanity.
In only a few years, the pendulum has swung from the dystopian notion that AI will destroy humanity to the utopian belief that our algorithmic saviour is here.
[...] Examples demonstrate that there is no AI solution for everything. Using AI simply for the sake of AI may not always be productive or useful. Not every problem is best addressed by applying machine intelligence to it. This is the crucial lesson for everyone aiming to boost investments in national AI programmes: all solutions come with a cost and not everything that can be automated should be.
What is your take on this? Do you think AI (as currently defined), can solve any of the problems, man-made and otherwise, of this world?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday May 30 2018, @04:10AM
What exactly is wrong with plundering resources? They're not doing anyone any good sitting in the ground. And the vast majority are so plentiful and easy to come by (even with that environmental footprint) that it doesn't make sense to keep it in the ground. Finally, we have over seven billion people to care for and improve the lives of. Artificial restrictions on resource consumption run contrary to what has worked amazingly well so far.
Let's look at that argument in more detail. First, resource extraction just isn't that bad environmentally outside of agriculture. The environmental destruction can be quite severe, but it's just that area that is affected. And we've developed a bunch of technologies and strategies for limiting our impact of resource extraction.
The real pollution problems happen after its dug out of the ground. But even that is manageable. It's a solved problem in the developed world.
And what's the point of saving in the ground merely so that another generation can also save it in the ground so that another generation can... At some point, resources have to come up in order for them to have value to us. It is merely a matter of whether it's better to mine them as soon as convenient or let them wait for a future generation. Here, the obvious thing is that our technologies of extraction, recycling, and such improves over time. So future generations won't have the same resource headaches we do now. So why coddle them?
Agriculture is a bit different, but it has the virtue of being heavily renewable. With sparing use of natural gas-based fertilizers, one should be able to get it to keep going for another century. By then we'll probably have long closed the gap in renewable nitrogen and perhaps figured out how to recycle phosphorus and other macronutrients as well (depends on whether we need to, of course).
Moving on, why the obsession with resources anyway? They're not that scarce and their exploitation doesn't cause that much in the way of trouble (particularly in the developed world). Meanwhile we're doing amazing things with those resources, such as elevating the entirety of humanity out of poverty and developing a global, high tech society. Don't we have better things to do with our time?