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Elon Musk was recently interviewed at an MIT Symposium. An audience asked his views on artificial intelligence (AI). Musk turned very serious, and urged extreme caution and national or international regulation to avoid "doing something stupid" he said.
"With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon", said Musk. "In all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it's like, 'Yeah, he's sure he can control the demon.' Doesn't work out."
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Elon Musk: "We are Summoning the Demon"
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"The subspace _W inherits the other 8 properties of _V. And there aren't
even any property taxes."
-- J. MacKay, Mathematics 134b
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheLink on Monday October 27 2014, @02:05PM
To me the real initial threat would be stuff like Google's robot driver program eliminating _millions_ of jobs.
Those that assume there will always be jobs are making a big assumption. Plenty of jobs will be eliminated (and are being eliminated by automation), and many of these people won't be getting jobs that pay as well or won't be getting jobs at all. You don't need a million robot vehicle designers, engineers and programmers for the million drivers they eliminate.
When machines were created to do manual labour, the humans could move to the thinking jobs. But when machines are created to do the thinking, there are going to be plenty of humans that won't be able out-compete the machines in the available jobs for the price/cost. The workers in China, India etc might have some time because they are much cheaper. What then will happen to the expensive workers in USA? Already the USA has experienced something like that when the Chinese and Indian workers took many of their jobs - think of those workers as the first wave of robots. Many of them were doing robot like jobs. Go ask Foxconn - they're planning to replace their chinese workers with robots too.
When more and more workers lose their jobs who will buy the goods and services those robots are producing? Even if the cost and prices drop, they won't drop to zero will they? The jobless can afford to buy more cheap robot produced burgers from their dwindling savings, but without a job in the USA they can't keep doing that. If we are not careful - some will borrow billions from banks, funds and investors and rollout lots of robot stuff, and it all looks great at first, then the shit hits the fan (and the CxOs retire comfortably) .
The welfare state countries might transition more smoothly - since they could in theory take some of the robot productivity via taxes to support the jobless. But this may require some form of birth-control/reproduction limits or it eventually becomes unsustainable. For example if you're supported by the Country, how many kids you can have depends on how rich the Country is and is projected to be, or how many sponsors you can get to commit to supporting your children (some people might not want children of their own and let you have their quota, or some richer people think your genes are worth sponsoring).
The Skynet stuff can only happen if the AIs are given direct power to defend themselves AND are also able to get resources for themselves. The humans in power are unlikely to let that happen and more likely to use the AIs to try to increase their power. Anyone really think the people who can control/ignore Obama etc would let pesky AIs take over? It doesn't matter how smart you are if you have no means to defend yourself.
(Score: 2) by ticho on Monday October 27 2014, @04:00PM
Have you seen how shoddy most of the hardware and software is? There will be a lot of human work needed to keep those fleets of robots operational, and Skynet is not a threat, because it will disable itself few seconds after gaining self-awareness due to a buffer overflow or an off-by-one error.
I am not worried.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Monday October 27 2014, @04:56PM
Have you seen how shoddy most of the hardware and software is? There will be a lot of human work needed to keep those fleets of robots operational
Let's make the math simpler.
Before: 5 million trucks with 5 million truck drivers.
After: 5 million robot trucks, with X people to design, build, support, maintain, etc.
You really believe X would be anywhere close to 5 million? It won't or it's not profitable.
Those truck drivers will have to find jobs elsewhere. But the warehouse jobs are going to robots. The fast food kitchen jobs might too. Even the jobs of some doctors. So where are those millions of truck drivers going to find jobs?
When automation is used to increase profits it's via:
a) Cutting costs
b) Improving productivity
So if you are going to maintain the same total number of similar paying jobs after buying robots etc it means you will have to increase productivity and wealth creation. Where will that extra wealth come from? If it's "natural resources" or agricultural products be aware that though the Earth is vast it is still finite and while we are stuck on this planet there is no such thing as sustainable growth. So we will hit limits unless the population starts decreasing.
If the wealth is from "intellectual property" at some point it's still going to have to be traded for "natural resources" (whether directly or via money). Taking an extreme example if your productivity with the help of AI increases so you produce a million songs a year, how much bread do you think you can buy with those songs? A million loaves? I think you'd find the value of bread won't drop as much as the value of your songs. Unless of course those truck drivers are fine being paid solely with songs and e-books.
See also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU [youtube.com]
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/42183592/ns/business-careers/t/nine-jobs-humans-may-lose-robots/ [nbcnews.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWNuaPE4DTc [youtube.com] (and note that the picker jobs could vanish too - there are other different maybe even better systems for warehouse automation )
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday October 27 2014, @06:28PM
You have left out the factor of ephemeralization. That doesn't solve everything, so you still have a point, but your current computer uses a lot less resources than then one you used a decade ago. Which weakens it (though by how much is unpredictable).
There's two separate problems here:
1) Finite resources need to be divided between a growing number of people.
2) Resources need to be divided fairly, when only some people can get jobs.
Point one requires limiting the number of people. I'd suggest working HARD on virtualization technologies and legalizing tranquilizing drugs.
Point two is a sticky one. The only answer that occurs to me is a universal guaranteed income combined with removal of minimum wage laws and no punitive restrictions on earning money over and above the stipend. This may mean removal of the personal income tax, with all taxes derived from taxes on businesses, though I'm not sure. It could also mean replacement of the current income tax with a "linear income tax" (y = mx + b) such that if the income (x) is zero, then the tax (y = b) is sufficiently negative to yield the decided upon guaranteed income. This, however, would seem to mean that taxes would fall due more than once a year. I'm not pleased with this answer, but it could work if there were no sources of excluded income.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Tuesday October 28 2014, @07:56AM
1) The super rich get lots of real stuff
2) The rest get real food/soylent, shelter, maybe real clothes and the rest is non-real virtual stuff (which might be good enough for some ;) ) paid for by the guaranteed income?
The wealth distribution curve probably won't be as extreme as that but that really depends on the path we end up on.
As for virtualization people might end up in The Matrix after all? Perhaps to further reduce resources consumption (computing, food etc) you'd put people in slowed/sleep/hibernate states (who'd know except those awake outside The Matrix? ;) ).
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday October 28 2014, @06:27PM
???
I took the work ephemeralization from Buckminister Fuller.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ephmeralization&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:unofficial&client=iceweasel-a&channel=nts [google.com]
Tech stuff gets done with fewer resources as the tech gets more advanced. This includes cars, computers, factories, etc. It doesn't include food or living space. Virtualization lets people vacation without moving, it lets them play games from their apartment, it lets video conferences happen without transportation, it lets people live close together without crowding, etc.
The Matrix was a movie. It is a metaphor of reality, not the real thing. Don't take it too literally. Don't believe it without thinking about it. Much of it wouldn't work no matter WHAT tech you had. If you want an actual vision of where this could lead, read "The Machine Stops":
The Machine Stops is a science fiction short story (of 12,000 words) by E. M. Forster. After initial publication in The Oxford and Cambridge Review (November 1909), the story was republished in Forster's The Eternal Moment and Other Stories in 1928. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops [wikisource.org]
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 27 2014, @08:19PM
Forget about the truck drivers! I'm still fixated on how to take care of all those horse and buggy whip makers.
(Score: 2) by fadrian on Tuesday October 28 2014, @06:05AM
Your analogy falls apart because the transition from buggy whip manufacturing worker to, say... steering tiller handle manufacturing worker is not nearly as great of a leap as from truck driver to robot repairman.
That is all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @08:07AM
When the moving machines came the horses lost their jobs. The whip makers could do other stuff - since the moving machines were actually replacing the horses not them.
When the thinking machines come, you should be careful because you're not that smart.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:17PM
No, but there was a surplus of horsemeat and a shortage of horseshit. And the smell in downtown areas was vastly improved.
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday October 28 2014, @03:37AM
The trouble with intellectual property is that it can only be sold once. After that someone WILL find a way to copy it, far more cheaply than you can sell your version. Maybe not immediately and maybe not perfectly, but soon enough, and good enough. Other people are not so stupid that they can't figure this out.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:09AM
AI displacement of certain industries will indeed create a few new jobs. But they will be much fewer, and require more skill.
The Next 9 Jobs That Will Be Replaced By Robots [businessinsider.com]
Paralegals have already had a tough time since digitization of records has increased productivity. Watson and various computers will displace not only paralegals but doctors. The future of medicine will see your vitals analyzed by a computer (and in real time, if wearable manufacturers manage to peddle their products). Your genome will be sequenced and analyzed to find the most effective drugs or other treatment methods. A human doctor will scrutinize the results, but the human doctors won't be expected to keep up with the many gigabytes of new research findings that come out all the time.
Driverless cars will wipe out taxi drivers and truck drivers. They won't all become software programmers or mechanics.
Manufacturing will gradually return to the United States. The problem is, there will be very few humans needed to man the factory. The savings will be in reducing the distance between the manufacturer and the consumers, while avoiding tariffs.
These things will happen gradually. We will see a gradual erosion in employment and job security until social unrest is triggered.
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