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Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

317 points by gflandre 10y ago

notliketherest 10y ago
"But it also has some downsides that we’re gonna have to figure out in terms of not eliminating jobs. It could increase inequality. It could suppress wages." No doubt that advances in technology have always done away with jobs. We're almost to the point at which the biggest blue collar industry (truck drivers) is about to be wiped out by self driving trucks. What I'm concerned about is the government stifling innovation such as driverless trucks to retain those jobs, or some sort of regulation that stifles the technology's potential. What is the alternative?
- eric_h 10y ago
  I'm more and more convinced that a UBI is the only way to deal with this problem, so the unemployed have a buffer to retrain to a new skillset. Of course, replacing the current social safety net (food stamps, et. al.) with a UBI would likely result in the trimming of government bureaucratic jobs. Everything's a trade off.
  - ronald_raygun 10y ago
    I would take a look at this argument done by Obama's main economist. He basically argues that UBI isn't actually that good because it doesn't shrink the gap as much as current systems (progressive taxes and the like). Plus it is a good read anyways because it is a much longer detailed analysis. https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/20160707_cea_ai_furman.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/20...
    - eric_h 10y ago
      Thank you, I skimmed the first two pages of that, will read the whole thing soon. Looks quite well thought out.
    - will_pseudonym 10y ago
      "The issue is not that automation will render the vast majority of the population unemployable. Instead, it is that workers will either lack the skills or the ability to successfully match with the good, high paying jobs created by automation." So those who are doing jobs that AI can do better and more cheaply than any human, they are going to somehow gain skills and/or ability to perform new good, high paying jobs created by automation? I don't buy it. Analogues to those hypothetical future high-quality jobs already exist, so why aren't the people in the soon-to-be obsolete jobs already doing the existent high quality jobs? Do they not like money? Training for these jobs has never been cheaper!
      - eric_h 10y ago
        Time is money. The actual monetary cost of training is irrelevant if you don't have the time to actually do it (learning new skills has never paid the bills in the right now timeframe).
      - morgante 10y ago
        Why would it be inherently different this time? Millions of farmers managed to learn new skills (or at least their children did). I think we'll eventually have work for everyone who wants it (but hopefully you won't have to work to live). The future will probably have a lot of demand for "artisanal" products (ie. produced by humans).
    - morgante 10y ago
      This seems to make the mistake, I believe, of focusing on "inequality" as a problem. Inequality is not a problem. Poverty is. If everyone has everything they need and most things they want, but a few super rich people own entire planets, I fail to see how that's not a utopian future.
      - imtringued 10y ago
        I would also argue that inheriting large wealth is not a problem. At some point the money had to be earned. If the inheritors do not use it wisely it will be gone within a few generations. Imagine a farmer working his entire life on his farm. Now that he is reaching the end of his lifespan he wants his children to benefit from his work. He built the house and everything himself. Why should the government take a chunk out of that? One might argue that the children do not work and therefore this "unearned" income is unfair because it's not possible to choose whether you are born into a wealthy family. However it is both earned by the work of the father and already taxed by the government through his income. By the time the father dies the children are likely already 40 to 50 years old but they benefited from his little wealth while he was still alive. The inheritance tax does not affect this. It only discourages using the inheritance efficiently over multiple generations.
  - mtgx 10y ago
    "Choosing" (even if you have a choice at that point) UBI when only 10% of the population is employed anymore is easy. The question is when do you start implementing UBI? When only 80% of the population have jobs anymore? 60%? 40%? Because when you do implement it, the money that goes to the unemployed people is going to have to come from those that still make money. And they will probably be pretty pissed off about it, too. Also, in a two-party system country like the U.S., the party you vote for may literally decide this outcome. Like say 70% of the people still have jobs and they don't want UBI, and the Democrats support switching to UBI after the election. It's very likely that the Democrats will not win an election again until a majority of the population supports implementing UBI, no matter what other terrible things the Republican party promises to do, while also promising not to implement UBI.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - eric_h 10y ago
      Well, arguably we currently have a safety net that is less efficient (in terms of bureaucracy/maintenance cost) than a UBI would be, so... how 'bout now? Regardless, you do make good points.
- nickff 10y ago
  The alternatives are mostly the pointless gestures we see when the government tries to protect jobs from progress, such as the regions where self-serve gas is illegal. I don't see any viable regulation of AI, other than some attempt to tax it.
  - tnecniv 10y ago
    I don't even see a practical scheme to tax AI. What counts as AI? Are A* and Sudoku solvers AI, or are we just talking about machine learning? If the latter, am I taxed for doing a linear regression, or only for the "cool" stuff like deep networks? If so, how deep? Am I charged per computation? How are you going to keep me honest?
    - davmre 10y ago
      Assuming that AI-generated wealth is accruing to some person or people, you can just tax it as ordinary income. The main difference is quantitative: in a world where all wealth is generated by AIs controlled by a small number of people, you'd need to tax and redistribute their incomes at much higher rates than we currently do (or just socialize the AIs entirely).
- pmyjavec 10y ago
  Why aren't you "concerned" about people losing their jobs? The alternatives are tech companies start to pay their taxes and humans start to use tech to care for one another, genuinely, not just wealthy Silicon Valley types trying to make buckets because their "entitled" to do so and pretend it's all in the name of progress. The idea of the Internet and Automation were exciting to me as it was about liberation and decentralisation, from where I'm sitting it's turning into a bit of a joke, it's just empowering those who own the tech and their not giving a whole lot back right now. Not attacking you personally, but this, attitude of "don't worry, those people who will be made redundant will be fine" thing is a myth, they will suffer and so will their families.
  - golergka 10y ago
    A lot of comments like yours are based on the assumption of "giving back". I don't quite understand it. Let's suppose I've founded booking.com and put a LOT of travel agents out of business. At what point did I assume the responsibility of giving back to those travel agents? I agree that they are miserable because of my actions. However, in real life, nothing happens because of a single reason. They are also miserable because of free choice of their former customers, who abandoned them. Those customers have profited from the change too: after all, they chose me because of lower prices and better service. Why am I, and not the customers that left them, have this responsibility?
    - forgetsusername 10y ago
      >At what point did I assume the responsibility of giving back to those travel agents? You won't have to. If it gets bad enough, they'll come take it.
      - golergka 10y ago
        You are correct. However, this discussion operates on some level of abstraction, and you're jumping off it. It's like talking about eucledian geometry and then saying that no physical object is actually a single point, straight lines do not exist and parallel lines would collide due to space-time curvature.
- throwaway729 10y ago
  Obama's answer to this seems to be training and education as opposed to regulating away progress. See: this article. I'd expect the latter to come from the right in the US, ironically enough.
- will_brown 10y ago
  >What I'm concerned about is the government stifling innovation such as driverless trucks to retain those jobs...What is the alternative? More likely the Government comes up with "innovative" ways to hide these people from the official unemployment numbers. Somehow unemployment is calculated at only 4.9% today...add 3.5 million newly unemployed commercial drivers tomorrow (>10% of US total population) and the new unemployment rate = 4.9%.
  - toomanybeersies 10y ago
    Unemployment is a very difficult number to define and calculate. Do you count those that are not actively looking for work, and don't want to look for work? e.g. House(wife|husband)s, semi-retired people. Do you count those that have given up looking for work? Do you count those that are working part time, but looking for full time work (i.e. the underemployed)? Do you count those that aren't really looking for work (for whatever reason), but occasionally look online at job listings (since it's a very low effort thing to do)? This is an interesting one, because Statistics New Zealand just recently decided that this doesn't count as actively seeking work, which seems right to me. I look at online job listings all the time, but am happily employed and not seeking other employment. Do you count the self employed? Contractors? Are Uber drivers considered employed? What about Airbnb hosts?
    - helthanatos 10y ago
      Employment: the condition of having paid work. a person's trade or profession. Just count those that want work or should have work (need to support a family/receiving government aid)
      - toomanybeersies 10y ago
        > Just count those that want work or should have work As I just commented, that's easier said than done.
        helthanatos 10y ago
- sundarurfriend 10y ago
  Relevant link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_occupations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_occupations Many of these seem to have been victims of cultural and political change, but there's quite a few (for eg., Knocker-up, Lamplighter, and more recently, Switchboard operator) that became obsolete due to technological advancements.
cjbprime 10y ago
> OBAMA: The way I’ve been thinking about the regulatory structure as AI emerges is that, early in a technology, a thousand flowers should bloom. I gotta say, I thought he'd be more familiar with that metaphor. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  The way I've been thinking about AI is that it reduces the need for grasping administrators with a surface understanding of technology. I'm not too surprised that the head administrator would see it in terms of his office gaining manifold new powers, though.
- will_pseudonym 10y ago
  Thank you for sharing. I hadn't heard the phrase before.
- msvan 10y ago
  I also thought it was a slightly inappropriate metaphor, but it gets the point across.
  - jMyles 10y ago
    By "the point," do you mean that the government intends to initially encourage innovation, only to later stifle, repress, and criminalize the elements it doesn't like? I mean, that's the reasonable application of the metaphor, right?
    - msvan 10y ago
      My point was that, assuming most people are unfamiliar with Chinese history under Mao, the expression will have positive connotations.
      - dmix 10y ago
        And those who are familiar with China under Mao will also find historically accurate connotations with Obama's quote.
msvan 10y ago
What does Hacker News think about AI? Is it real this time, or are we in for another winter? I'm seeing a lot of grand claims, and it certainly seems like there are plenty of applications, but I'm still not totally convinced that it will turn the entire economy upside down. Given the enormous amount of press, tweets, blog posts, conferences, degree programs, seminars and interviews popping up it seems like there has to be something more than just hot air here. Still, the most outrageous predictions are hinged on breakthroughs in unsupervised learning happening. Taking the pessimistic view on science, what if we don't get there?
- Swizec 10y ago
  Unlike 30, 20, or even 10 years ago, we have heaps upon heaps of labeled datasets now. So much human life happens through technology that we are doing an astounding job of producing labeled datasets. And computers are fast now. And RAM is infinite. And GPUs are fast and plentiful. And all of this is cheap. AI stuff is already real more than most of us realize on a day-to-day basis. While machines might not be "intelligent" per se, their cleverness has definitely started impacting desk jobs. The desk job stuff is what most of those alarmist news items are worried about. Nobody seems to worry [too much] about reducing blue collar jobs through automation. Can you imagine how many people you'd need to unload a modern container ship without computers tracking stuff and optimizing storage? Or how much work it would take to harvest modern crops where automated harvesters are used?
  - pakl 10y ago
    There are some promising ideas out there based on unsupervised ("self-supervised") learning. There, the problem of needing big labeled datasets doesn't exist: just turn on a camera and have a motor point it at the surrounding world. Data of this kind is and always has been super abundant. But using it requires making a conceptual leap away from supervised pattern recognition -- which is pretty much what today's "AI" does...
    - andirk 10y ago
      It'll make you miss spam.
helthanatos 10y ago
"we found that most people liked the idea that the driver and the passengers could be sacrificed to save many people" Understand morals? Probably not...
- ericlavigne 10y ago
  MIT's "moral machine" site presents a set of ethical dilemmas involving driving so you can explore your own perspective on morality. http://jalopnik.com/this-mit-online-activity-lets-you-choose-who-gets-kille-1787333738 http://jalopnik.com/this-mit-online-activity-lets-you-choose... http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ http://moralmachine.mit.edu/
  - helthanatos 10y ago
    Yeah. Anyone doing that should have kept alive whoever was not breaking the law. I noticed that it said I killed more women, but women broke the law more.
gefh 10y ago
I wish people would stop bringing up the trolley problem as somehow relevant to self driving cars. In any situation,a car is going to brake as hard as possible while maintaining control, and only serve if there's no way to stop and a clear space. Other than that, a good enough interview that I can't see taking place again next presidential term.
- greeneggs 10y ago
  The trolley problem is just an extreme example, that people can easily understand and think about. Less extreme versions of it occur all the time. For example, say you are driving along a road, passing a bicyclist. You'd like to give the cyclist more room, but there's an oncoming car in the lane next to you. How much room do you give? At exactly what threshold do you decide to wait to pass the cyclist? What if the cyclist is a kid? All the time, the driver has to make decisions that trade off the safety of multiple parties, from the car's occupants to other drivers, to bicyclists and pedestrians. In reality, these will almost always be statistical tradeoffs, and usually comparing very small probabilities of accidents, but they are still real ethical decisions that have to be made.
  - inimino 10y ago
    Exactly, and if a few high-profile accidents give a manufacturer a reputation as a public menace, lawsuits and legislation won't be far behind.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - imtringued 10y ago
    If there is an oncoming car you don't overtake.
    - AstralStorm 10y ago
      I know a plenty of people that attempt to squeeze past the cyclist giving them scant room. Almost 100% of the time, despite it being forbidden by law here.
zanny 10y ago
Rawr rah, mandatory link to Humans Need Not Apply: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU I wonder if President Obama has seen it yet, because while his wording obviously has to be steeped in establishment rhetoric, its not a matter of "if" the automation comes for our jobs, but that we are already dealing, will continue to deal, and how we will deal in the future with the reality that for decades now automation of varying degrees has been eroding the market for human mental labor. It is exactly like climate change. It is not a future problem. It is a now problem, but the progress is so slow and the symptoms variable enough you don't obviously see the underlying trend already taking place, so nobody regards it with the urgency it deserves. Social stratification, growing wealth inequality, growing partisanship, growing radicalism, and growing unemployability is already expanding globally in response to the ongoing obsolescence of the human mind. The first step is to recognize that it is happening.
nohat 10y ago
Interesting that Obama is particularly concerned with specialized ai for cyber security/warfare applications. I thought he had a fairly balanced and knowledgeable viewpoint on these issues, though I think both he and Ito underestimate the impact and timeline. Not much to say on the general AI question, but that's understandable.
haalcion2 10y ago
> Ito: I generally agree. The only caveat is that there are a few people who believe that there is a fairly high-percentage chance that a generalized AI will happen in the next 10 years. But the way I look at it is that in order for that to happen, we’re going to need a dozen or two different breakthroughs. So you can monitor when you think these breakthroughs will happen. > Obama: And you just have to have somebody close to the power cord. [Laughs.] Right when you see it about to happen, you gotta yank that electricity out of the wall, man. Do we seriously think that it would be that easy? I think an a "generalized" AI, if aware of the ability for a human to remove its power and so that as a bad thing, would not be stopped by unplugging it. By the point you realized you needed to unplug it, it would have already convinced a human that to help it spread and it would have found other sources of power.
- GunboatDiplomat 10y ago
  That's kind of handwavy, don't you think? How does an AI, presumably requiring specialized (and expensive) hardware, simply escape? Further, this requires humans to be easily hackable by the AI, which is not obviously going to be the case. Why would human cognition have a built in flaw the AI can exploit to escape? Imagine a superintelligent person in a cage, a person as smart as an AI. No matter how clever he is, he's not going to be able to escape that cage given certain levels of precaution. If you'd say that the AI will be super-persuasive, persuasive enough to make humans behave irrationally, I say, maybe, but it's possible to simply use already irrationally fearful humans as guards to prevent the AI from escaping.
  - tdaltonc 10y ago
    I find the scenario in 'Avogadro Corp' pretty reasonable.
- themacguffinman 10y ago
  It sounds like Obama was making a joke.
pashariger 10y ago
I don't know about you, but I'm very thankful that we have a president that can understand and intelligently talk about these issues (rather than thinking it's all just black magic).
- AJRF 10y ago
  It was a lot of waffle, with the odd buzzword interspersed. I don't mind Obama, but I do mind when people attribute understanding to him when he talks at an extremely thin level about topics.
  - ap22213 10y ago
    Many forget that 8 years ago Obama was highly criticized for being a 'technocrat' and populating his cabinet with 'technologist' outsiders. Leaders don't always have to understand the tactical details that are required for executing their strategy. Obama led as a technologist from day one.
    - marcoperaza 10y ago
      Except that's not what happened. There was a lot of speculation that it would, but then he appointed a bunch of politicians to the cabinet, as is tradition.
      - ap22213 10y ago
        I agree. But, I'd also argue that if he hadn't had the ongoing wars, recession, and hostile congress to deal with then lots would have happened.
        marcoperaza 10y ago
        Could've, would've, should've. Let's look at the one area where he had almost total discretion, foreign policy and national security. There's not much to speak of in terms of success there. Not only did he fail to advance the interests of the US, he also failed to deliver on progressive promises of scaling back the surveillance state. The recent shenanigans with Russia are incredibly telling. Perhaps you remember in 2012 how Obama and his surrogates viciously mocked Romney for claiming that Russia was the biggest geopolitical threat faced by the US. Obama was caught on tape telling the Russians he could be "more flexible after the election". They took his flexibility and marched right into Ukraine with it. They took Obama's cancellation of a European missile defense shield, and reciprocated by positioning nukes on the border. They saw Obama's incoherent Middle East strategy, and took the Iranian-Syrian-Russian bloc to new heights. Now, they're apparently hacking our election infrastructure and have released incredibly embarrassing emails about the corrupt machinery of Obama's chosen successor. The humiliation is total. Obama owes Mitt Romney an apology. There's another recent President who faced a hostile Congress, Bill Clinton. He was able to achieve a lot by being willing to compromise.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
andirk 10y ago
What was that about "a friar... who is trying to understand Bitcoin encryption... from the perspective of the Catholics"?
ensiferum 10y ago
The future of humanity? The few and select Big Corp will own the infrastructure and technology and employ and sell it to reduce human labor as much as possible thereby creating massive value increases for the stock holders and displacing millions of blue collar workers into poverty. (In later stages also white collar workers). The execs will all be trillionaires and live off their own walled societies while the rest of us fight for our lives for tooth and nail. Eventually we can't even have a revolution since the goverments are owned by the Big Corp, which has manipulated and coerced the system into activities such as spying on their own citizens on the pretext of terrorism etc. Any act of revolution will be quickly and swiftly dealt with immediate force.
harry8 10y ago
I like Barack and this is not a party political statement when I say I am about as interested in what he thinks about tech as Jim Carter, George Bush Jnr & Snr or Bill Clinton. Now he's not likely to affect much in the way of policy there are just more insightful people to read and listen to so what we're left with is a bit of celebrity worship, which is fine with me as long as I acknowledge it as such. What the two possible next presidents think is more interesting simply because they may affect policy, regardless of their being more or less insightful than B.O.
V-2 10y ago
> JOI ITO: This may upset some of my students at MIT, but one of my concerns is that it’s been a predominately male gang of kids, mostly white, who are building the core computer science around AI, and they’re more comfortable talking to computers than to human beings. A lot of them feel that if they could just make that science-fiction, generalized AI, we wouldn’t have to worry about all the messy stuff like politics and society. They think machines will just figure it all out for us. Why is that a problem that they're mostly white? The interviewer doesn't bother to elaborate, it's sort of mentioned in passing as if it were something obvious. To me (a non-American here, mind you) it isn't. Would the difficulties they mention be alleviated if that wasn't the case? Why? Couldn't - say - an Asian student fall into a misconception that machines will come up with answers to all questions? Is it less likely? What substantiates such a claim?
- macns 10y ago
  They were both[Obama, Ito] focusing on AI's social effects and to how societal values can be built into AI. So Ito's concern was probably that a group of people of similar characteristics(i.e white male geeks) is not diverse enough to address the world's social problems, especially when this group of people is not social enough; they're more comfortable talking to computers than to human beings. This fits with what he says in the end Because the question is, how do we build societal values into AI? - he's more concerned about the builders themselves.
  - V-2 10y ago
    I do understand that as far as the social aspect goes, still I think that a white computer geek has much more in common with an Asian or black computer geek than with - say - an average white truck driver, and obviously the same applies to the other geeks as well. Basically once we control for the cultural aspect (which is correlated with ethnicity, but we controlled this out already), I don't think ethnicity by itself should matter much
    - flopto 10y ago
      In the U.S., a black software engineer is more likely to be able to design technology that helps keep people safe from police regardless of geekery and socioeconomic status.
macns 10y ago
I was intrigued by this: Part of what makes us human are the kinks. They’re the mutations, the outliers, the flaws that create art or the new invention, right? We have to assume that if a system is perfect, then it’s static. And part of what makes us who we are, and part of what makes us alive, is that we’re dynamic and we’re surprised. And then he goes on: One of the challenges that we’ll have to think about is, where and when is it appropriate for us to have things work exactly the way they’re supposed to, without surprises? One might argue that in software development things never work exactly the way they're supposed to.
throw2016 10y ago
I think their discussion on AI and implications was insightful. Their perspective is much wider, multifaceted and reflects a deeper and more nuanced perspective of technological and socio-political issues. I think HN is best when its money or pure tech and tends to be dismissive or diminish the other stuff and you are left with a sterile unidimensional discussion. Its like the gold rush, they can generate the wealth but the harder questions around politics, economics, social structures and humanity will have to be done in more 'distant' surroundings less touched by the frenzy of greed and profit.
gxs 10y ago
Somehow, someway, a discussion about AI has to touch on disadvantaged people and racism. Sigh. Can't wait for a new president.
rl12345 10y ago
Every time I listen or read Obama talk, I become a bigger fan of the guy.
jjtheblunt 10y ago
Barack Obama couldn't figure out how to take a selfie with Bear Grylls with an iPhone, but people are going to listen to his prognostications on AI? WTF!

317 points by gflandre 10y ago

"But it also has some downsides that we’re gonna have to figure out in terms of not eliminating jobs. It could increase inequality. It could suppress wages." No doubt that advances in technology have always done away with jobs. We're almost to the point at which the biggest blue collar industry (truck drivers) is about to be wiped out by self driving trucks. What I'm concerned about is the government stifling innovation such as driverless trucks to retain those jobs, or some sort of regulation that stifles the technology's potential. What is the alternative?

eric_h 10y ago
I'm more and more convinced that a UBI is the only way to deal with this problem, so the unemployed have a buffer to retrain to a new skillset. Of course, replacing the current social safety net (food stamps, et. al.) with a UBI would likely result in the trimming of government bureaucratic jobs. Everything's a trade off.
- ronald_raygun 10y ago
  I would take a look at this argument done by Obama's main economist. He basically argues that UBI isn't actually that good because it doesn't shrink the gap as much as current systems (progressive taxes and the like). Plus it is a good read anyways because it is a much longer detailed analysis. https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/20160707_cea_ai_furman.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/20...
  - eric_h 10y ago
    Thank you, I skimmed the first two pages of that, will read the whole thing soon. Looks quite well thought out.
  - will_pseudonym 10y ago
    "The issue is not that automation will render the vast majority of the population unemployable. Instead, it is that workers will either lack the skills or the ability to successfully match with the good, high paying jobs created by automation." So those who are doing jobs that AI can do better and more cheaply than any human, they are going to somehow gain skills and/or ability to perform new good, high paying jobs created by automation? I don't buy it. Analogues to those hypothetical future high-quality jobs already exist, so why aren't the people in the soon-to-be obsolete jobs already doing the existent high quality jobs? Do they not like money? Training for these jobs has never been cheaper!
    - eric_h 10y ago
      Time is money. The actual monetary cost of training is irrelevant if you don't have the time to actually do it (learning new skills has never paid the bills in the right now timeframe).
    - morgante 10y ago
      Why would it be inherently different this time? Millions of farmers managed to learn new skills (or at least their children did). I think we'll eventually have work for everyone who wants it (but hopefully you won't have to work to live). The future will probably have a lot of demand for "artisanal" products (ie. produced by humans).
  - morgante 10y ago
    This seems to make the mistake, I believe, of focusing on "inequality" as a problem. Inequality is not a problem. Poverty is. If everyone has everything they need and most things they want, but a few super rich people own entire planets, I fail to see how that's not a utopian future.
    - imtringued 10y ago
      I would also argue that inheriting large wealth is not a problem. At some point the money had to be earned. If the inheritors do not use it wisely it will be gone within a few generations. Imagine a farmer working his entire life on his farm. Now that he is reaching the end of his lifespan he wants his children to benefit from his work. He built the house and everything himself. Why should the government take a chunk out of that? One might argue that the children do not work and therefore this "unearned" income is unfair because it's not possible to choose whether you are born into a wealthy family. However it is both earned by the work of the father and already taxed by the government through his income. By the time the father dies the children are likely already 40 to 50 years old but they benefited from his little wealth while he was still alive. The inheritance tax does not affect this. It only discourages using the inheritance efficiently over multiple generations.
- mtgx 10y ago
  "Choosing" (even if you have a choice at that point) UBI when only 10% of the population is employed anymore is easy. The question is when do you start implementing UBI? When only 80% of the population have jobs anymore? 60%? 40%? Because when you do implement it, the money that goes to the unemployed people is going to have to come from those that still make money. And they will probably be pretty pissed off about it, too. Also, in a two-party system country like the U.S., the party you vote for may literally decide this outcome. Like say 70% of the people still have jobs and they don't want UBI, and the Democrats support switching to UBI after the election. It's very likely that the Democrats will not win an election again until a majority of the population supports implementing UBI, no matter what other terrible things the Republican party promises to do, while also promising not to implement UBI.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - eric_h 10y ago
    Well, arguably we currently have a safety net that is less efficient (in terms of bureaucracy/maintenance cost) than a UBI would be, so... how 'bout now? Regardless, you do make good points.
nickff 10y ago
The alternatives are mostly the pointless gestures we see when the government tries to protect jobs from progress, such as the regions where self-serve gas is illegal. I don't see any viable regulation of AI, other than some attempt to tax it.
- tnecniv 10y ago
  I don't even see a practical scheme to tax AI. What counts as AI? Are A* and Sudoku solvers AI, or are we just talking about machine learning? If the latter, am I taxed for doing a linear regression, or only for the "cool" stuff like deep networks? If so, how deep? Am I charged per computation? How are you going to keep me honest?
  - davmre 10y ago
    Assuming that AI-generated wealth is accruing to some person or people, you can just tax it as ordinary income. The main difference is quantitative: in a world where all wealth is generated by AIs controlled by a small number of people, you'd need to tax and redistribute their incomes at much higher rates than we currently do (or just socialize the AIs entirely).
pmyjavec 10y ago
Why aren't you "concerned" about people losing their jobs? The alternatives are tech companies start to pay their taxes and humans start to use tech to care for one another, genuinely, not just wealthy Silicon Valley types trying to make buckets because their "entitled" to do so and pretend it's all in the name of progress. The idea of the Internet and Automation were exciting to me as it was about liberation and decentralisation, from where I'm sitting it's turning into a bit of a joke, it's just empowering those who own the tech and their not giving a whole lot back right now. Not attacking you personally, but this, attitude of "don't worry, those people who will be made redundant will be fine" thing is a myth, they will suffer and so will their families.
- golergka 10y ago
  A lot of comments like yours are based on the assumption of "giving back". I don't quite understand it. Let's suppose I've founded booking.com and put a LOT of travel agents out of business. At what point did I assume the responsibility of giving back to those travel agents? I agree that they are miserable because of my actions. However, in real life, nothing happens because of a single reason. They are also miserable because of free choice of their former customers, who abandoned them. Those customers have profited from the change too: after all, they chose me because of lower prices and better service. Why am I, and not the customers that left them, have this responsibility?
  - forgetsusername 10y ago
    >At what point did I assume the responsibility of giving back to those travel agents? You won't have to. If it gets bad enough, they'll come take it.
    - golergka 10y ago
      You are correct. However, this discussion operates on some level of abstraction, and you're jumping off it. It's like talking about eucledian geometry and then saying that no physical object is actually a single point, straight lines do not exist and parallel lines would collide due to space-time curvature.
throwaway729 10y ago
Obama's answer to this seems to be training and education as opposed to regulating away progress. See: this article. I'd expect the latter to come from the right in the US, ironically enough.
will_brown 10y ago
>What I'm concerned about is the government stifling innovation such as driverless trucks to retain those jobs...What is the alternative? More likely the Government comes up with "innovative" ways to hide these people from the official unemployment numbers. Somehow unemployment is calculated at only 4.9% today...add 3.5 million newly unemployed commercial drivers tomorrow (>10% of US total population) and the new unemployment rate = 4.9%.
- toomanybeersies 10y ago
  Unemployment is a very difficult number to define and calculate. Do you count those that are not actively looking for work, and don't want to look for work? e.g. House(wife|husband)s, semi-retired people. Do you count those that have given up looking for work? Do you count those that are working part time, but looking for full time work (i.e. the underemployed)? Do you count those that aren't really looking for work (for whatever reason), but occasionally look online at job listings (since it's a very low effort thing to do)? This is an interesting one, because Statistics New Zealand just recently decided that this doesn't count as actively seeking work, which seems right to me. I look at online job listings all the time, but am happily employed and not seeking other employment. Do you count the self employed? Contractors? Are Uber drivers considered employed? What about Airbnb hosts?
  - helthanatos 10y ago
    Employment: the condition of having paid work. a person's trade or profession. Just count those that want work or should have work (need to support a family/receiving government aid)
    - toomanybeersies 10y ago
      > Just count those that want work or should have work As I just commented, that's easier said than done.
      - helthanatos 10y ago
sundarurfriend 10y ago
Relevant link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_occupations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_occupations Many of these seem to have been victims of cultural and political change, but there's quite a few (for eg., Knocker-up, Lamplighter, and more recently, Switchboard operator) that became obsolete due to technological advancements.

cjbprime 10y ago

> OBAMA: The way I’ve been thinking about the regulatory structure as AI emerges is that, early in a technology, a thousand flowers should bloom. I gotta say, I thought he'd be more familiar with that metaphor. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign

oldmanjay 10y ago
The way I've been thinking about AI is that it reduces the need for grasping administrators with a surface understanding of technology. I'm not too surprised that the head administrator would see it in terms of his office gaining manifold new powers, though.
will_pseudonym 10y ago
Thank you for sharing. I hadn't heard the phrase before.
msvan 10y ago
I also thought it was a slightly inappropriate metaphor, but it gets the point across.
- jMyles 10y ago
  By "the point," do you mean that the government intends to initially encourage innovation, only to later stifle, repress, and criminalize the elements it doesn't like? I mean, that's the reasonable application of the metaphor, right?
  - msvan 10y ago
    My point was that, assuming most people are unfamiliar with Chinese history under Mao, the expression will have positive connotations.
    - dmix 10y ago
      And those who are familiar with China under Mao will also find historically accurate connotations with Obama's quote.

msvan 10y ago

What does Hacker News think about AI? Is it real this time, or are we in for another winter? I'm seeing a lot of grand claims, and it certainly seems like there are plenty of applications, but I'm still not totally convinced that it will turn the entire economy upside down. Given the enormous amount of press, tweets, blog posts, conferences, degree programs, seminars and interviews popping up it seems like there has to be something more than just hot air here. Still, the most outrageous predictions are hinged on breakthroughs in unsupervised learning happening. Taking the pessimistic view on science, what if we don't get there?

Swizec 10y ago
Unlike 30, 20, or even 10 years ago, we have heaps upon heaps of labeled datasets now. So much human life happens through technology that we are doing an astounding job of producing labeled datasets. And computers are fast now. And RAM is infinite. And GPUs are fast and plentiful. And all of this is cheap. AI stuff is already real more than most of us realize on a day-to-day basis. While machines might not be "intelligent" per se, their cleverness has definitely started impacting desk jobs. The desk job stuff is what most of those alarmist news items are worried about. Nobody seems to worry [too much] about reducing blue collar jobs through automation. Can you imagine how many people you'd need to unload a modern container ship without computers tracking stuff and optimizing storage? Or how much work it would take to harvest modern crops where automated harvesters are used?
- pakl 10y ago
  There are some promising ideas out there based on unsupervised ("self-supervised") learning. There, the problem of needing big labeled datasets doesn't exist: just turn on a camera and have a motor point it at the surrounding world. Data of this kind is and always has been super abundant. But using it requires making a conceptual leap away from supervised pattern recognition -- which is pretty much what today's "AI" does...
  - andirk 10y ago
    It'll make you miss spam.

helthanatos 10y ago

"we found that most people liked the idea that the driver and the passengers could be sacrificed to save many people" Understand morals? Probably not...

ericlavigne 10y ago
MIT's "moral machine" site presents a set of ethical dilemmas involving driving so you can explore your own perspective on morality. http://jalopnik.com/this-mit-online-activity-lets-you-choose-who-gets-kille-1787333738 http://jalopnik.com/this-mit-online-activity-lets-you-choose... http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ http://moralmachine.mit.edu/
- helthanatos 10y ago
  Yeah. Anyone doing that should have kept alive whoever was not breaking the law. I noticed that it said I killed more women, but women broke the law more.

gefh 10y ago

I wish people would stop bringing up the trolley problem as somehow relevant to self driving cars. In any situation,a car is going to brake as hard as possible while maintaining control, and only serve if there's no way to stop and a clear space. Other than that, a good enough interview that I can't see taking place again next presidential term.

greeneggs 10y ago
The trolley problem is just an extreme example, that people can easily understand and think about. Less extreme versions of it occur all the time. For example, say you are driving along a road, passing a bicyclist. You'd like to give the cyclist more room, but there's an oncoming car in the lane next to you. How much room do you give? At exactly what threshold do you decide to wait to pass the cyclist? What if the cyclist is a kid? All the time, the driver has to make decisions that trade off the safety of multiple parties, from the car's occupants to other drivers, to bicyclists and pedestrians. In reality, these will almost always be statistical tradeoffs, and usually comparing very small probabilities of accidents, but they are still real ethical decisions that have to be made.
- inimino 10y ago
  Exactly, and if a few high-profile accidents give a manufacturer a reputation as a public menace, lawsuits and legislation won't be far behind.
  - deleted 10y ago
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- imtringued 10y ago
  If there is an oncoming car you don't overtake.
  - AstralStorm 10y ago
    I know a plenty of people that attempt to squeeze past the cyclist giving them scant room. Almost 100% of the time, despite it being forbidden by law here.

zanny 10y ago

Rawr rah, mandatory link to Humans Need Not Apply: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU I wonder if President Obama has seen it yet, because while his wording obviously has to be steeped in establishment rhetoric, its not a matter of "if" the automation comes for our jobs, but that we are already dealing, will continue to deal, and how we will deal in the future with the reality that for decades now automation of varying degrees has been eroding the market for human mental labor. It is exactly like climate change. It is not a future problem. It is a now problem, but the progress is so slow and the symptoms variable enough you don't obviously see the underlying trend already taking place, so nobody regards it with the urgency it deserves. Social stratification, growing wealth inequality, growing partisanship, growing radicalism, and growing unemployability is already expanding globally in response to the ongoing obsolescence of the human mind. The first step is to recognize that it is happening.

nohat 10y ago

Interesting that Obama is particularly concerned with specialized ai for cyber security/warfare applications. I thought he had a fairly balanced and knowledgeable viewpoint on these issues, though I think both he and Ito underestimate the impact and timeline. Not much to say on the general AI question, but that's understandable.

haalcion2 10y ago

> Ito: I generally agree. The only caveat is that there are a few people who believe that there is a fairly high-percentage chance that a generalized AI will happen in the next 10 years. But the way I look at it is that in order for that to happen, we’re going to need a dozen or two different breakthroughs. So you can monitor when you think these breakthroughs will happen. > Obama: And you just have to have somebody close to the power cord. [Laughs.] Right when you see it about to happen, you gotta yank that electricity out of the wall, man. Do we seriously think that it would be that easy? I think an a "generalized" AI, if aware of the ability for a human to remove its power and so that as a bad thing, would not be stopped by unplugging it. By the point you realized you needed to unplug it, it would have already convinced a human that to help it spread and it would have found other sources of power.

GunboatDiplomat 10y ago
That's kind of handwavy, don't you think? How does an AI, presumably requiring specialized (and expensive) hardware, simply escape? Further, this requires humans to be easily hackable by the AI, which is not obviously going to be the case. Why would human cognition have a built in flaw the AI can exploit to escape? Imagine a superintelligent person in a cage, a person as smart as an AI. No matter how clever he is, he's not going to be able to escape that cage given certain levels of precaution. If you'd say that the AI will be super-persuasive, persuasive enough to make humans behave irrationally, I say, maybe, but it's possible to simply use already irrationally fearful humans as guards to prevent the AI from escaping.
- tdaltonc 10y ago
  I find the scenario in 'Avogadro Corp' pretty reasonable.
themacguffinman 10y ago
It sounds like Obama was making a joke.

pashariger 10y ago

I don't know about you, but I'm very thankful that we have a president that can understand and intelligently talk about these issues (rather than thinking it's all just black magic).

AJRF 10y ago
It was a lot of waffle, with the odd buzzword interspersed. I don't mind Obama, but I do mind when people attribute understanding to him when he talks at an extremely thin level about topics.
- ap22213 10y ago
  Many forget that 8 years ago Obama was highly criticized for being a 'technocrat' and populating his cabinet with 'technologist' outsiders. Leaders don't always have to understand the tactical details that are required for executing their strategy. Obama led as a technologist from day one.
  - marcoperaza 10y ago
    Except that's not what happened. There was a lot of speculation that it would, but then he appointed a bunch of politicians to the cabinet, as is tradition.
    - ap22213 10y ago
      I agree. But, I'd also argue that if he hadn't had the ongoing wars, recession, and hostile congress to deal with then lots would have happened.
      - marcoperaza 10y ago
        Could've, would've, should've. Let's look at the one area where he had almost total discretion, foreign policy and national security. There's not much to speak of in terms of success there. Not only did he fail to advance the interests of the US, he also failed to deliver on progressive promises of scaling back the surveillance state. The recent shenanigans with Russia are incredibly telling. Perhaps you remember in 2012 how Obama and his surrogates viciously mocked Romney for claiming that Russia was the biggest geopolitical threat faced by the US. Obama was caught on tape telling the Russians he could be "more flexible after the election". They took his flexibility and marched right into Ukraine with it. They took Obama's cancellation of a European missile defense shield, and reciprocated by positioning nukes on the border. They saw Obama's incoherent Middle East strategy, and took the Iranian-Syrian-Russian bloc to new heights. Now, they're apparently hacking our election infrastructure and have released incredibly embarrassing emails about the corrupt machinery of Obama's chosen successor. The humiliation is total. Obama owes Mitt Romney an apology. There's another recent President who faced a hostile Congress, Bill Clinton. He was able to achieve a lot by being willing to compromise.

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andirk 10y ago

What was that about "a friar... who is trying to understand Bitcoin encryption... from the perspective of the Catholics"?

ensiferum 10y ago

The future of humanity? The few and select Big Corp will own the infrastructure and technology and employ and sell it to reduce human labor as much as possible thereby creating massive value increases for the stock holders and displacing millions of blue collar workers into poverty. (In later stages also white collar workers). The execs will all be trillionaires and live off their own walled societies while the rest of us fight for our lives for tooth and nail. Eventually we can't even have a revolution since the goverments are owned by the Big Corp, which has manipulated and coerced the system into activities such as spying on their own citizens on the pretext of terrorism etc. Any act of revolution will be quickly and swiftly dealt with immediate force.

harry8 10y ago

I like Barack and this is not a party political statement when I say I am about as interested in what he thinks about tech as Jim Carter, George Bush Jnr & Snr or Bill Clinton. Now he's not likely to affect much in the way of policy there are just more insightful people to read and listen to so what we're left with is a bit of celebrity worship, which is fine with me as long as I acknowledge it as such. What the two possible next presidents think is more interesting simply because they may affect policy, regardless of their being more or less insightful than B.O.

V-2 10y ago

> JOI ITO: This may upset some of my students at MIT, but one of my concerns is that it’s been a predominately male gang of kids, mostly white, who are building the core computer science around AI, and they’re more comfortable talking to computers than to human beings. A lot of them feel that if they could just make that science-fiction, generalized AI, we wouldn’t have to worry about all the messy stuff like politics and society. They think machines will just figure it all out for us. Why is that a problem that they're mostly white? The interviewer doesn't bother to elaborate, it's sort of mentioned in passing as if it were something obvious. To me (a non-American here, mind you) it isn't. Would the difficulties they mention be alleviated if that wasn't the case? Why? Couldn't - say - an Asian student fall into a misconception that machines will come up with answers to all questions? Is it less likely? What substantiates such a claim?

macns 10y ago
They were both[Obama, Ito] focusing on AI's social effects and to how societal values can be built into AI. So Ito's concern was probably that a group of people of similar characteristics(i.e white male geeks) is not diverse enough to address the world's social problems, especially when this group of people is not social enough; they're more comfortable talking to computers than to human beings. This fits with what he says in the end Because the question is, how do we build societal values into AI? - he's more concerned about the builders themselves.
- V-2 10y ago
  I do understand that as far as the social aspect goes, still I think that a white computer geek has much more in common with an Asian or black computer geek than with - say - an average white truck driver, and obviously the same applies to the other geeks as well. Basically once we control for the cultural aspect (which is correlated with ethnicity, but we controlled this out already), I don't think ethnicity by itself should matter much
  - flopto 10y ago
    In the U.S., a black software engineer is more likely to be able to design technology that helps keep people safe from police regardless of geekery and socioeconomic status.

macns 10y ago

I was intrigued by this: Part of what makes us human are the kinks. They’re the mutations, the outliers, the flaws that create art or the new invention, right? We have to assume that if a system is perfect, then it’s static. And part of what makes us who we are, and part of what makes us alive, is that we’re dynamic and we’re surprised. And then he goes on: One of the challenges that we’ll have to think about is, where and when is it appropriate for us to have things work exactly the way they’re supposed to, without surprises? One might argue that in software development things never work exactly the way they're supposed to.

throw2016 10y ago

I think their discussion on AI and implications was insightful. Their perspective is much wider, multifaceted and reflects a deeper and more nuanced perspective of technological and socio-political issues. I think HN is best when its money or pure tech and tends to be dismissive or diminish the other stuff and you are left with a sterile unidimensional discussion. Its like the gold rush, they can generate the wealth but the harder questions around politics, economics, social structures and humanity will have to be done in more 'distant' surroundings less touched by the frenzy of greed and profit.

gxs 10y ago

Somehow, someway, a discussion about AI has to touch on disadvantaged people and racism. Sigh. Can't wait for a new president.

rl12345 10y ago

Every time I listen or read Obama talk, I become a bigger fan of the guy.

jjtheblunt 10y ago

Barack Obama couldn't figure out how to take a selfie with Bear Grylls with an iPhone, but people are going to listen to his prognostications on AI? WTF!