3 ms·

What happened to the horses after cars and trains took their jobs? Sure we still keep them around but mostly just for fun. We don't need horses anymore. If ro

What happened to the horses after cars and trains took their jobs? Sure we still keep them around but mostly just for fun. We don't need horses anymore. If robots can farm, mine, refine, and manufacture everything, what's left for people to do? Secretary? Replaced by AI. Customer service? AI. Fast food? AI. Bartender? AI. Doctor? AI. Lawyer? AI. Accountant? AI. Programmer? AI.

retube 10y ago
Horses were good at one thing: dragging stuff around. Humans are a bit more adaptable.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  AI is (only currently theoretically) capable of infinitely more than a human. Let's say you have an expert blacksmith. He comes from a long line of blacksmiths, each a renowned expert in their trade. One day, he starts teaching an AI (which has human dexterity) how to do his job, as his forefathers taught their children. Eventually the AI matches his skills, maybe even surpasses. The AI will never die. It can copy its instances infinitely. We don't need human blacksmiths anymore. When humans began to take over the earth, the single best survival trait among other organisms was being useful to humans. How useful are we to an intelligence that never gets tired, that can manage all the resources and means of production on earth? What if humans are seen as a net drain on the earth and its resources? What if 1% of the population doesn't need the 99% for anything anymore?
  - studentrob 10y ago
    True AI is a long way off according to top ML people like Yann LeCun We have no idea how a computer can be designed to come up with its own goals. We can teach it English, French, and Chinese, or get near perfect photo identification, but the computer cannot decide to learn to write a novel on its own. We could teach it to write novels, but there would still be other tasks it can't do. Even if a computer could self-direct 99% of known possible things in the universe, if there were one thing we could prove it would never learn, then it's not AI. It may not even be possible and we could be stuck with humans around forever. Ug.
    - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
      I guess we'll see who's eating who's words in time. Most "basic" AI stuff like voice and image recognition was "a long way off" for like, forever. Every "advancement" in machine learning since the 50s ended up as a dud. Then BAM! Voice recognition is here. Not perfect but definitely good enough. Image recognition is way, way, way better than it was 10 years ago (which was only marginally better than it was 10 years previous). The current trend of machine learning is accelerating progress, not a plateau. Just think of the Geth from Mass Effect: their creators made them to perform basic tasks and share data. As their scope widened they were tweaked to handle more work. Eventually they became self-aware before they or even their creators really understood what was going on. Besides, why use novels as a use case? Why not, I don't know, organized crime drama? They all follow the same arc anyway: someone does something evil or greedy, rivals descend into civil war, leader(s) assassinated, vague hope for better tomorrow. It'll be like Winston Smith in 1984, writing the same stories over and over again and changing little more than names.
      - studentrob 10y ago
        > Most "basic" AI stuff like voice and image recognition was "a long way off" for like, forever. Every "advancement" in machine learning since the 50s ended up as a dud. That was the general public's perception. Certain people in the field of ML knew such advances in application-specific domains such as voice and imagery would come at some point. The difference between the application-specific solutions and general AI is top researchers don't have any real theories about general AI. Even the OpenAI folks have toned down the rhetoric on their about page [1]. Their goal is no longer general AI, as Musk and Altman defined it at the outset. It's to contribute to existing developments. They write, "In the short term, we're building on recent advances in AI research and working towards the next set of breakthroughs." I can't explain my view any better in text. I've studied ML, ML researchers are nearest to AI, and they're all saying it isn't around the corner. They don't even have theories on how to make it truly general. Society will continue to see really great advances as a result of ML developments, but general AI isn't going to be one of them. [1] https://openai.com/about/ https://openai.com/about/

retube 10y ago

Horses were good at one thing: dragging stuff around. Humans are a bit more adaptable.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
AI is (only currently theoretically) capable of infinitely more than a human. Let's say you have an expert blacksmith. He comes from a long line of blacksmiths, each a renowned expert in their trade. One day, he starts teaching an AI (which has human dexterity) how to do his job, as his forefathers taught their children. Eventually the AI matches his skills, maybe even surpasses. The AI will never die. It can copy its instances infinitely. We don't need human blacksmiths anymore. When humans began to take over the earth, the single best survival trait among other organisms was being useful to humans. How useful are we to an intelligence that never gets tired, that can manage all the resources and means of production on earth? What if humans are seen as a net drain on the earth and its resources? What if 1% of the population doesn't need the 99% for anything anymore?
- studentrob 10y ago
  True AI is a long way off according to top ML people like Yann LeCun We have no idea how a computer can be designed to come up with its own goals. We can teach it English, French, and Chinese, or get near perfect photo identification, but the computer cannot decide to learn to write a novel on its own. We could teach it to write novels, but there would still be other tasks it can't do. Even if a computer could self-direct 99% of known possible things in the universe, if there were one thing we could prove it would never learn, then it's not AI. It may not even be possible and we could be stuck with humans around forever. Ug.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    I guess we'll see who's eating who's words in time. Most "basic" AI stuff like voice and image recognition was "a long way off" for like, forever. Every "advancement" in machine learning since the 50s ended up as a dud. Then BAM! Voice recognition is here. Not perfect but definitely good enough. Image recognition is way, way, way better than it was 10 years ago (which was only marginally better than it was 10 years previous). The current trend of machine learning is accelerating progress, not a plateau. Just think of the Geth from Mass Effect: their creators made them to perform basic tasks and share data. As their scope widened they were tweaked to handle more work. Eventually they became self-aware before they or even their creators really understood what was going on. Besides, why use novels as a use case? Why not, I don't know, organized crime drama? They all follow the same arc anyway: someone does something evil or greedy, rivals descend into civil war, leader(s) assassinated, vague hope for better tomorrow. It'll be like Winston Smith in 1984, writing the same stories over and over again and changing little more than names.
    - studentrob 10y ago
      > Most "basic" AI stuff like voice and image recognition was "a long way off" for like, forever. Every "advancement" in machine learning since the 50s ended up as a dud. That was the general public's perception. Certain people in the field of ML knew such advances in application-specific domains such as voice and imagery would come at some point. The difference between the application-specific solutions and general AI is top researchers don't have any real theories about general AI. Even the OpenAI folks have toned down the rhetoric on their about page [1]. Their goal is no longer general AI, as Musk and Altman defined it at the outset. It's to contribute to existing developments. They write, "In the short term, we're building on recent advances in AI research and working towards the next set of breakthroughs." I can't explain my view any better in text. I've studied ML, ML researchers are nearest to AI, and they're all saying it isn't around the corner. They don't even have theories on how to make it truly general. Society will continue to see really great advances as a result of ML developments, but general AI isn't going to be one of them. [1] https://openai.com/about/ https://openai.com/about/