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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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Hacking's just another word for nothing left to kludge.
(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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