SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 4, Informative) by Unixnut on Friday August 28, @11:11PM
Yes and no, it wasn't just about the profits. For a long time weavers and spinners and similar "fabric industry" people were effectively self-employed, so called "cottage industry". They owned their tools, they worked from home, they worked the hours they wanted at the pace they liked.
However when the mechanical cotton spinning and weaving machines came into being, they were too expensive for a single self-employed person to buy, so "investors" with large amounts of money (either their own or the ability to borrow cheaply) would buy the machines and build the water/steam powered mill factories to install the machines, and they would then hire people and pay them fixed wages to work fixed hours.
This was the beginning of the "employee", up until then the concept did not really exist. Either you were a tenant farmer, so you worked according to natures schedule and kicked up some percentage of your harvest to the landlord, or you owned you own cottage industry business, everything from weaving to blacksmithing to tavern owners who lived in the taverns with their family.
You did have labourers and workmen, but they were paid by the day. You had to negotiate their wages each time, and they had the right to refuse the work if they did not want to do it.
The concept of an "employee" was someone who had to work fixed hours for fixed wages, day in and day out. Unscrupulous mill owners realised that if they increased the speed the machines run at, they would create more money as the wages were fixed but they produced more product per unit time (i.e. they "improved employee productivity"). Problem is running the machines faster made them more dangerous, these were big machines with fast moving metal parts and no real protection from the clockwork mechanisms they used. People would lose fingers and limbs all the time, children would be hired to oil the machines from underneath while they were still running (because shutting them down meant lost production), and every once in a while a child would get caught in the machinery and end up either dead or horrifically crippled, at which point if their families could not sustain them they would end up begging on the street or in the poorhouse.
The fixed hours worked meant that people could not decide how much and when they worked, plus they had to live near the mill to "commute" by foot. They had to leave the countryside and live close to the mill, resulting in horrifically bad slum housing near the mills, full of all kinds of diseases and completely unhygienic environment.
Going from their cottage industry work, many were upset with this change and they started rioting, smashing up machines etc... but it was mostly disorganised and any half-decent organised policing action put it down easily.
The problem came after mechanisation took the low level jobs, when machines started replacing the master craftsmen. The master weavers/spinners were masters not just because they were good at their jobs, but because they had experience and also they had many apprentices. They knew how to organise and manage people -- they were effectively the middle managers of their day, and were correspondingly well paid.
When they started losing their jobs, they were offered the same employment conditions and wages as the other employees, which they protested against. They also knew how to organise people, and they turned the previous riots by the lower skilled ex-workers into proper organised vigilanties who would go around destroying machines of owners who did not pay good wages or who had poor working conditions. To avoid any one of the organisers being singled out for retribution and eventual execution at the hands of the state, a mythical "General Ludd" came into being, his followers being known as "Luddites", they would attack and destroy machines in "the name of General Ludd", and their statements and proclamations would be signed by the same General Ludd. That way they could work through a pseudonym and the state had no one physical leader to arrest and make an example of.
Some mill owners, like Titus Salt [wikipedia.org] decided treating employees like dirt was a bad idea, so he actually built them a proper town next to his mill [wikipedia.org], called "Saltaire" it had a school, hospital, good quality clean (but modest) housing and he generally treated his employees well. Needless to say such owners did not have many problems with Luddites.
Other mill owners, when confronted with the Luddites, went the other way. Instead of improving working conditions or paying higher wages they invested in armour for their mills and armed guards to shoot any attacking Luddites. This caused an escalation into proper firefights, entire mills being set on fire and even targeted assassinations of such mill owners.
The government, fearing the escalating violence decided to intervene... on the side of the mill owners. They sent in the army to put down the rebellion, and after much death and destruction the Luddites were crushed.
However the Luddites set the stage for the later development of things like minimum wage, health and safety and labour protection laws to prevent exploitation of workers, if for no other reason than it was bad for long-term business to have to keep killing your rebelling workforce while they do their best to destroy your capital investment.
In some ways the Luddites were the first to fight for employee/labour rights, using the only tools at their disposal at the time. The fact they are remembered as a bunch of "backward peasants who opposed technology only to fail to stem the march of progress" says more about which side is currently writing our history books than anything else.
A decent read about the Luddites can be found here if interested: https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/The-Luddites/ [historic-uk.com]