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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: 2) by Unixnut on Friday August 28, @09:28PM
Which brings me to the Australia project, on paper it sounds like a utopia, everything is free, you can have and do whatever you want. bliss and pleasure and joy forever...
However to be in this utopia you have to agree to a set of terms, including:
1. completely foregoing any kind of privacy and anonymity
2. Having a robot inserted between your brain and your body
Now this robot can record everything from your eyes/ears/sensory organs, and it can also take control of your body. It can disconnect your retinas from your brain and inject images instead, it can disconnect your ears and inject sound into your brain. It can speak on your behalf using your voice, and move your body. It is effectively your own personal spy and policeman in one, built into your body, that can never be turned off, and can disconnect you and take over your body if the system decides needs must.
That to me is terrifying, it is possible for you to be a prisoner in your own body. How can you even know if the other person you are talking to is really that person, or if their body has been taken over via the spinal robot?
I mean the two girls who came to the brown hovel to talk about the Australia project, their brains may have been disconnected and the robot was doing all the talking, trying to convince more people to have spinal-robots inserted and their bodies taken control of. Perhaps the whole story of the guys father buying shares in the company to give his son and partner an "escape route" from their current predicament may even be a lie in itself they tell everyone. Just because the Australia project bills itself as some glorious human emancipation society doesn't mean it is true. Once the spinal robot is inserted you can never be 100% sure that you are talking to the original person the body belonged to.
Then the whole "network vulnerability" of the system is glossed over in the story with "magic technology and referees", like somehow they have made the perfect bug-free software system that can never be hacked and your body taken control of unwillingly.
And of course the idea that some nefarious person/group would not abuse this excellent opportunity to turn 2+ billion people into human robots that would obey their every whim is not even mentioned, as if the human condition has vanished completely (a large oversight if you consider that in the story the Neo-feudal USA is full just those kind of people "at the top", so they are obviously out there).
So to me the Australia project is a far worse prison than the brown cubes. As I mentioned earlier, in such a dismal state as the brown cube world there is always hope for resistance, for people to organise to overthrow the oppressors, either by themselves or with sympathetic (if self serving) oligarchs. They still own and control their own bodies and they can trust their senses are not lying to them.
The Australia project however makes that impossible. Because of the spinal robot, people no longer own their own bodies. It is impossible for people to ever get together to discuss things, to complain about the system, or consider overthrowing it or just trying to reform the system because they have objections. Everything is recorded, everything is logged, and if you violate the rules they can disconnect your brain from your body.
On the flip side, the robot controls your vision and sensory organs. When you wake up and you "see" what is in front of you, how do you know you are really seeing it and the robot is not projecting images directly to your brain? How do you know the people you are talking to are really there? You end up not being able to trust any of your senses. Dissent, let alone revolution, becomes impossible. It is like some horrific mix of the Matrix and 1984, but on another level. I think I'd go stark-raving mad if I was put in such a position.
I noticed that they don't mention the spinal-robot when they got the characters to sign up to their terms, you only find that out after they have shipped you to Australia , you've done the induction and now you are near the end-stages when they release you into the system. It is never mentioned what might happen if you refuse the spinal robot, the general gist of it is that you have no say about your body or what they do to it at this point.
I wonder how many people would have agreed to their terms if the first thing they mentioned was the spinal robot.
I can also make a point about the laws of physics making "free" energy impossible, nothing is free - even the wind turbines have a cost, by extracting energy from the wind they change the local climate, and they are not energy dense, having enough of them to support such an advanced technological society just seems like wishful thinking.
Which is another point, both of these societies are extremely complex and energy hungry, which makes them extremely fragile. I haven't even gone into the fact that in the story there are apparently only two countries on earth, the USA and Australia, it is as if the rest of the world does not exist, and people can't leave the oppressive brown cubes to live elsewhere. Likewise there is no war or geopolitics, no happy middle between these two extremes presented.
I mean I can suspend belief for a good fantasy story, but this story has too many holes for me to suspend belief, especially as its not supposed to be a fantasy as much as a warning about a real future world.