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The Human Reservation Plan
Bill doesn't want to be left behind by Zuckerberg so he decided to share his own thoughts on AI. Different from his previous shared ideas about how great it was. Now there is a bit more doom and gloom. Crime. Unemployment. Healthcare. Horrible things. What the world needs is a plan. Guess who has a plan ... It's the pope, and Bill and "the government".
Set aside some jobs for humans.
A human reservation. For the human to human interactions. So you don't get the bad news from the machine. That it's the machine that tells one human to tell another human the bad news is apparently softening the blow of the bad news.
http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=26/08/13/2028222
Gates Warns Society Faces An AI-Pocalypse Unless We Get More Socialist
Bill Gates thinks that experts underestimate the potential havoc AI will wreak on society and says preparations to ease the transition are inadequate.
The Microsoft founder and former CEO is usually a cheerful proponent of AI tech, talking up its potential to transform healthcare, education, and business productivity.
Yet in a missive posted to his personal website, the billionaire philanthropist says the AI era is likely to be one of the most turbulent times in human history, and how we allow it to play out will determine whether the world becomes a fairer place or if the divide between rich and poor becomes greater than ever.
This kind of talk will sound dangerously close to socialism for many Americans. There are always winners and losers in a market-led economy, so why should things be any different with AI? Those wealthy enough to invest in it and control it will prosper, as others will find themselves on skid row.
But, Gates says, this time it will be different. Previous technology transitions happened over several generations and created new jobs where human cognition was required, whereas AI is starting to replace human cognition. The winners are likely to be a small group of people, and the losers will be everyone else.
It will not affect just one or two sectors, according to the AI fab club: AI will replace human roles in fields as diverse as law, customer services, medicine, software, and manufacturing. And it will hit these industries rapidly, over the course of a decade or less, rather than taking a few generations.
Gates wrote:
When a community has high unemployment, the ripple effects can be pervasive. Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses. Now imagine similar pressures on both white-collar and blue-collar workers nationwide.
There will be some new jobs created, Gates says, but without the right policies in place there will be far fewer than today, and entry-level jobs are among those most likely to vanish (as we're already seeing in the tech industry).
Blue-collar jobs will also be affected, as AI-powered robots are advancing faster than people realize - much of the progress is happening in China. These may begin to compete with people on some physical tasks, such as in the construction and hospitality industries, within a few years.
Gates says there are several big risks from AI adoption, foremost of which is that many work roles are set to disappear forever. He notes that during the Great Depression of the 1930s, unemployment in the US hit 25 percent and remained in double digits for much of that decade, but ultimately recovered as demand, investment, and growth returned. He fails to mention, however, that it took a global war for that to happen.
The biggest shift comes when AI operates error-free operation, without humans prepping its work or checking its output. Gates says we need to think now about reducing job losses, or risk much of society ending up unemployed.
Another danger, Gates says, is that AI empowers people to do harm: AI-driven malware already lets low-skilled attackers launch cyberattacks, while generative AI makes fraud, disinformation, and deepfakes easier to produce.
The third big threat is that AI systems could stunt the mental development of children, and crowd out human relationships.
So how is society meant to avoid this apocalyptic vision and ensure AI becomes the force for good that Microsoft's progenitor believes it to be?
Gates says AI needs both a domestic and international framework. Nationally, that means bodies that can set priorities across government agencies to ensure every risk is accounted for. Yet even a nation with its own house in order remains exposed to cross-border risks, so an international body must be built in parallel.
If that sounds like wishful thinking, get in the queue. Gates notes it would require US-China cooperation, and under the current Washington administration, that's about as likely as pigs flying..
Beyond that, some jobs - social care for instance - should stay human. Gates also thinks the tax system will need rebalancing, as more people out of work means less income tax to fund government itself.
A starting point, he suggests, is taxing AI tokens and robots to reduce corporations' incentives to swap meatbags for machines. This could fund retraining and a stronger safety net, but would need careful targeting so it doesn't hinder beneficial uses of AI, like drug discovery and better education
Again, critics will likely dismiss this as socialism and point out that Microsoft was ruthless in pursuing profits under Gates' leadership.
In a final message to world leaders, Gates urges them to act now, "before unemployment rises sharply, communities are hurting, and public trust has eroded."
This marks a shift for the Microsoft founder, who two years ago told people not to worry about AI, in particular energy use and increased greenhouse gas emissions, arguing AI would eventually solve the problems it creates.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28, @12:32PM (8 children)
*sigh* the world's oldest cliche..
Eh, whatever, I guess billionaires are starting to worry about how to protect their fortunes, eh?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 28, @01:11PM (7 children)
Money is only power when there are people you can push around with it. Billionaires in isolation have to scrub their own toilets.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28, @07:13PM (3 children)
I'd like to introduce you to reality, where UBI is nowhere despite every test of it showing unalloyed benefit and success .
Capitalists conspire to keep unemployement up, so that unreasonable offers must be accepted.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 29, @02:33AM
I'd like to introduce you to reality, where UBI is everywhere, just administered by sadistic post-Kafka bureaucratic tools.
It's the epitome of malicious compliance, those who hate "money for nothing" secretly acknowledge its necessity but do everything in their power to torture recipients.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 30, @07:18PM
I see we're ignoring real world tests when you speak of "every test". For example, the US has numerous large scale, long term (multi-decade) programs that share many aspects of UBI. For example, US Social Security and Medicare: universal, basic, and near analogues to revenue. They also threaten the future of the US with spending greater than revenue and a large slice of the political spectrum strictly interested in short-term prolonging of the problem than in a fix: raising taxes rather than cutting benefits. In addition, the movement of wealth just creates problems: such as wealth transfer from a group that needs it, young adults to a group that doesn't, the elderly.
To be blunt, small scale UBI experiments run for short periods of time and cover a few people. US Social Security and Medicare have run for many decades and cover the entire US - over three hundred million people. They show the real problems with UBI: long term threats to a country's future, create large scale dependency and conflict of interest (such as incentivizing people to take more rather than fix fiscal problems with the benefits program), don't actually solve the problems they are allegedly meant to address (bonus points for the stolen concept fallacy of needs-based justifications for a non-needs-based program), are Ponzi schemes which require infinite population growth to succeed, promise breaking long after after the promise makers have disappeared, and of course, generate an ideological complex which has no interest in controlling any of these problems.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Monday August 31, @12:08PM
There's a massive elephant in the room regarding UBI here in the UK and it has been evident for nearly 30 years.
Many jobs pay so poorly, and working hours are so few, that many people need State Benefits ("welfare" in American) just to be able to go to work. And in the last 10-15 years, things have got so bad that working people often have to rely on food banks because things like rent and other essentials keep getting more and more expensive while pay does not keep pace. On top of that there was the COVID pandemic which adversely affected the long-term health of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.
The benefits are really, really difficult to claim. The system is humiliating and exhausting. It's designed to put people off. Even people with permanent disabilities keep having to reapply every few months. This is apparently to "encourage people back to work" (many are already working as hard as they can) or in case they have "recovered" from their permanent disabilities.
You won't be shocked to learn that the current system was designed by right-thinking, upstanding, common-sense Conservatives, all with plenty of money and good incomes...
UBI would go a long way to making life so much better for millions, including business owners. However, they refuse to see the bigger picture.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday August 29, @02:25AM (2 children)
Funny thing, I was about to suggest "reserving" that job for Bill Gates.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29, @04:06AM (1 child)
Which sort of leads to the first thought I had when reading tfa:
I know what Bill is good at--if I want advice on starting out rich and building a monopoly I'll surely go to him...
Why would I expect Bill to understand anything about technology & society?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Gaaark on Sunday August 30, @04:32PM
He doesn't: in his one book, he says that the internet is just a fad. That is why Windows on the internet is not safe: security was built in ad-hoc as needed, not from the get-go.
He is a dumb feck who just knows how to do business: screw everyone who isn't me.
My guess is that Micro-dalek is falling behind in AI, so he wants government control of it til they can catch up... then, fuck everyone. Exterminate!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --