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Personally, I think a future where AI can do most jobs is frightening. It will be run by a group of relatively few elites that are involved in power struggles

Personally, I think a future where AI can do most jobs is frightening. It will be run by a group of relatively few elites that are involved in power struggles for control of the AI and the rest of us that do stuff like pick fruit (assuming it's cheaper than having an AI do it) and serve as cannon fodder in the AI armies. I find people who believe that it will lead to some kind of Utopia horribly naive and they have no understanding of human nature.

SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
(I'm using "you" not to mean "you personally", but both uto/dystopian AI futurists.) You have used technology right? You know it is all mostly shit that breaks down, crashes, and gets replaced and thrown out on an 18 month cycle? What I think lots of people get wrong is forgetting just how crappy consumer tech is, and industrial/military isn't far behind. We may get AI working well in 5-25 years, but I doubt deployments will be any less buggy. Repairing & provisioning the billions of bots will be most of the "tech" jobs. Think like the IT dept at your company that hands out new laptops, times a million.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  "AI" is such a vague term we forget that it encompasses both horribly stupid industry/task specific systems as well as grand artificial minds that might one say dwarf all of human intelligence combined. For the first, you are right - certainly in that timescale. For the later, I assume we will need to justify our continued existence.
  - SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
    AI isn't a vague term at all. It is extremely well defined. The best example I can point you to is from the 1990's by Russell & Norvig in their seminal work "Artificial Intelligence" which coalesces a half century of research. They spend the first 100 pages clearly defining the types of domains and vocabulary needed to define the space of AI: it is an exhaustive analysis with citations going back decades, covering early thinkers like Norbert Wiener and Von Neumann. Your claim indicates you haven't really studied the field. But everyone jumping into tensorflow on a raspberry pi has probably had zero exposure the to decades of research put into AI. Your second claim about a giant mind that might dwarf all of humanity, is, well, grandiose sci-fi. Much like Dyson Spheres or Time Travel.
    - koheripbal 6y ago
      I would argue that an AI more intelligent than humanity is far more realistic than a Dyson Sphere or Time Travel - and something I would not be surprised to see within the next 100 years. ...simply because even a reasonably intelligent AI would have the ability to improve itself at a rate orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution.
tim333 6y ago
We went through a comparable transition from most people working in agriculture and farming to that being automated away and people doing stuff that hadn't been much worried about before. Given human nature hasn't changed I imagine it will be similar.
- woko 6y ago
  Automation did not make all of humanity transition. Manual labour is still used nowadays, even for works which could be automated in some way. Actually, there is a larger and larger gap between educated people with office jobs who earn a good salary to do "stuff that hadn't been worried about before"... and the rest of the barely educated people who barely earn anything and get to do all the manual work (taking care of the children, cleaning homes, offices, cooking food, delivering food, harvesting delicate fruit, etc.). The gap is bigger and bigger, despite or thanks to the progress of humanity. In a world where less of the manual people are asked to do manual work for some reason, these uneducated people won't transition to other jobs. Best case scenario is they get a minimal universal income to stay calm at home and generate clicks on social media to feed AI some new data. Worst case scenario is they will want to work, and be angry at society for making them feel useless.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  And then again during the industrial revolution and consequent automation, where the work previously done by 10 people is now done by 1. It's cyclical, and while I will concede that people lose their jobs because of automation, zooming out to the overall jobs market (and figures, which probably don't tell the whole story) things haven't really changed much. On an individual level though, people lose their jobs and livelihood, and have to settle for a lower paying, dumber job. That said, a lot of jobs replaced by automation are already low-paying, dumb jobs. Why stand 8 hours / day doing a repetitive manual job if a thing can do it just as well? Why expose yourself to the worst the internet comes up with when you can train an AI to detect CP? I don't believe we'll see jobs becoming largely obsolete in our lifetime, but I would like to fantasize about a future where work is a choice and everybody can live comfortably (quality housing, food and spending money) even without a job. Not going to happen as long as capitalism and the never ending pursuit of profit and profit increase are still a thing though. But, we're seeing some hopeful developments in that regard, with things like UBI and the like. (Aside: I don't believe UBI will work in the end, if everyone has a baseline income, nobody does. UBI only works if it's coupled with assurances of housing and that it's enough to cover all basic needs, which right now depend largely on the area you live in. I couldn't get an affordable rental place on my own income some years ago, because first there was a 15+ year waiting list, and later I was earning too much so I was thrown out to the 'free market', and there's a pretty big gap between the most expensive social housing and the cheapest free market housing. That gap is filled up with 'student' houses, think houses split up into multiple units / rooms. But nobody should be forced to live like that if they're out of college and have a paid full-time job.
aboringusername 6y ago
Who watches the watchers? ;) AI is all nice and rosy but how do we know it's "right"? How can a machine be indifferent to human influences? How do we know it's not biased? Does it discriminate? It's a not a human, it can't "think" like one, it's not capable of rational and fluid thought and argument. It's a dumb machine feeding off data, unless you give it all the data it's bound to be inaccurate at some point. AI is given too much credit for a little bit of intelligence (if you can call it that, I think that's how we perceive it), however as society changes so the AI has to. Does AI understand brexit yet? Does it influence policy decisions? Can it understand how people will react? Can it help during a pandemic? Can it talk and negotiate? Brexit was dumb and so is the UK.
- ben_w 6y ago
  While I would agree a current generation AI doesn’t think like a human, saying AI in general can’t is much to strong a claim. Also: > it's not capable of rational and fluid thought and argument applies to most humans, and > unless you give it all the data it's bound to be inaccurate at some point applies to all humans.
pmoriarty 6y ago
"the rest of us that do stuff like pick fruit (assuming it's cheaper than having an AI do it) and serve as cannon fodder in the AI armies." The lucky ones will be shining their shoes, giving them massages, tutoring their kids, cooking their meals, and giving them manicures. Many will prefer the human touch for things like that, even if they could be done by machines, and having human servants has always been a status symbol. This is what the non-wealthy among us have to look forward to.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Prostitution might be the last human occupation. ...poetics, I suppose, since it's often described as the first.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago

(I'm using "you" not to mean "you personally", but both uto/dystopian AI futurists.) You have used technology right? You know it is all mostly shit that breaks down, crashes, and gets replaced and thrown out on an 18 month cycle? What I think lots of people get wrong is forgetting just how crappy consumer tech is, and industrial/military isn't far behind. We may get AI working well in 5-25 years, but I doubt deployments will be any less buggy. Repairing & provisioning the billions of bots will be most of the "tech" jobs. Think like the IT dept at your company that hands out new laptops, times a million.

koheripbal 6y ago
"AI" is such a vague term we forget that it encompasses both horribly stupid industry/task specific systems as well as grand artificial minds that might one say dwarf all of human intelligence combined. For the first, you are right - certainly in that timescale. For the later, I assume we will need to justify our continued existence.
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
  AI isn't a vague term at all. It is extremely well defined. The best example I can point you to is from the 1990's by Russell & Norvig in their seminal work "Artificial Intelligence" which coalesces a half century of research. They spend the first 100 pages clearly defining the types of domains and vocabulary needed to define the space of AI: it is an exhaustive analysis with citations going back decades, covering early thinkers like Norbert Wiener and Von Neumann. Your claim indicates you haven't really studied the field. But everyone jumping into tensorflow on a raspberry pi has probably had zero exposure the to decades of research put into AI. Your second claim about a giant mind that might dwarf all of humanity, is, well, grandiose sci-fi. Much like Dyson Spheres or Time Travel.
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    I would argue that an AI more intelligent than humanity is far more realistic than a Dyson Sphere or Time Travel - and something I would not be surprised to see within the next 100 years. ...simply because even a reasonably intelligent AI would have the ability to improve itself at a rate orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution.

tim333 6y ago

We went through a comparable transition from most people working in agriculture and farming to that being automated away and people doing stuff that hadn't been much worried about before. Given human nature hasn't changed I imagine it will be similar.

woko 6y ago
Automation did not make all of humanity transition. Manual labour is still used nowadays, even for works which could be automated in some way. Actually, there is a larger and larger gap between educated people with office jobs who earn a good salary to do "stuff that hadn't been worried about before"... and the rest of the barely educated people who barely earn anything and get to do all the manual work (taking care of the children, cleaning homes, offices, cooking food, delivering food, harvesting delicate fruit, etc.). The gap is bigger and bigger, despite or thanks to the progress of humanity. In a world where less of the manual people are asked to do manual work for some reason, these uneducated people won't transition to other jobs. Best case scenario is they get a minimal universal income to stay calm at home and generate clicks on social media to feed AI some new data. Worst case scenario is they will want to work, and be angry at society for making them feel useless.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
And then again during the industrial revolution and consequent automation, where the work previously done by 10 people is now done by 1. It's cyclical, and while I will concede that people lose their jobs because of automation, zooming out to the overall jobs market (and figures, which probably don't tell the whole story) things haven't really changed much. On an individual level though, people lose their jobs and livelihood, and have to settle for a lower paying, dumber job. That said, a lot of jobs replaced by automation are already low-paying, dumb jobs. Why stand 8 hours / day doing a repetitive manual job if a thing can do it just as well? Why expose yourself to the worst the internet comes up with when you can train an AI to detect CP? I don't believe we'll see jobs becoming largely obsolete in our lifetime, but I would like to fantasize about a future where work is a choice and everybody can live comfortably (quality housing, food and spending money) even without a job. Not going to happen as long as capitalism and the never ending pursuit of profit and profit increase are still a thing though. But, we're seeing some hopeful developments in that regard, with things like UBI and the like. (Aside: I don't believe UBI will work in the end, if everyone has a baseline income, nobody does. UBI only works if it's coupled with assurances of housing and that it's enough to cover all basic needs, which right now depend largely on the area you live in. I couldn't get an affordable rental place on my own income some years ago, because first there was a 15+ year waiting list, and later I was earning too much so I was thrown out to the 'free market', and there's a pretty big gap between the most expensive social housing and the cheapest free market housing. That gap is filled up with 'student' houses, think houses split up into multiple units / rooms. But nobody should be forced to live like that if they're out of college and have a paid full-time job.

aboringusername 6y ago

Who watches the watchers? ;) AI is all nice and rosy but how do we know it's "right"? How can a machine be indifferent to human influences? How do we know it's not biased? Does it discriminate? It's a not a human, it can't "think" like one, it's not capable of rational and fluid thought and argument. It's a dumb machine feeding off data, unless you give it all the data it's bound to be inaccurate at some point. AI is given too much credit for a little bit of intelligence (if you can call it that, I think that's how we perceive it), however as society changes so the AI has to. Does AI understand brexit yet? Does it influence policy decisions? Can it understand how people will react? Can it help during a pandemic? Can it talk and negotiate? Brexit was dumb and so is the UK.

ben_w 6y ago
While I would agree a current generation AI doesn’t think like a human, saying AI in general can’t is much to strong a claim. Also: > it's not capable of rational and fluid thought and argument applies to most humans, and > unless you give it all the data it's bound to be inaccurate at some point applies to all humans.

pmoriarty 6y ago

"the rest of us that do stuff like pick fruit (assuming it's cheaper than having an AI do it) and serve as cannon fodder in the AI armies." The lucky ones will be shining their shoes, giving them massages, tutoring their kids, cooking their meals, and giving them manicures. Many will prefer the human touch for things like that, even if they could be done by machines, and having human servants has always been a status symbol. This is what the non-wealthy among us have to look forward to.

koheripbal 6y ago
Prostitution might be the last human occupation. ...poetics, I suppose, since it's often described as the first.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]