6 ms·

IBM CEO Says It's a 'Good Thing' If AI Takes Your Job

34 points by adrian_mrd 4y ago

nthngtshr 4y ago
How is it not? That’s what technological progress has always been doing for ages. That’s why we have all the good things.
- dogma1138 4y ago
  What activity would the majority of the population perform now that does not require one to be in the top few percentiles of human intellect (nature or nurture argument aside)? We moved people from fields to factories to offices with most of them still relegated to doing relatively simple repeatable tasks. Now if you have a tool which can take over those tasks, get better at doing them and other tasks at almost an exponential rate you might have a problem on your hands. And no UBI isn’t a solution and one of the possible danger of AI is that the change can be far more rapid than before. Mechanization and industrialization took generations, software can be iterated on and pushed at much greater pace so you also have a major risk that even if societal adaptations would be possible they might not be at the pace of change you’ll likely to see. Now it doesn’t mean that we should be smashing GPUs and FPGAs en mass however one should not dismiss the danger of what happens when several generations both incumbent and upcoming that were educated and trained for a very specific world all of a sudden find themselves in a very different one.
rcarr 4y ago
80% of CEOs are indistinguishable from Sydney Bing, change my mind.
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  Maybe you could ask ChatGPT to help with that.
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  CEOs are just a punching bag. They get punched on behalf of the board of directors. Everything they say will offend someone so they can't say anything. And they have to live in hiding with bodyguards. Being the CEO of a large corporation is probably the worst job in the world.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - rcarr 4y ago
    Writing a speech filled with meaningless buzz words then clocking off early to play golf with a client is such a rough gig. So much pressure if you fail as well. Imagining having to resign from your CEO job and then take a position as the chairman of another globo corp. Doesn't even bear thinking about.
    - 29athrowaway 4y ago
      And one day the board makes you let go 10,000 including disabled people and people coming out of parental leave. And read the news and see people talking shit about you for weeks. And everyone you know wants your money as if you won the lottery. And some people will hate you and want to harm you beyond insulting you online. If you walk in the streets without bodyguards again someone will surely brutalize you, because we live in a messed up world. So in the end you just make yourself a big visible target for everyone to throw shit at. On the other side, people on the board have none of that liability for the most part as nobody knows them.
      - rcarr 4y ago
        Yes but you have the money and resources to live in an entire different world. You eat in the finest restaurants. You get ferried about on private transport and stay in the finest hotels. You have the finest clothes and consumer goods and you probably have the most dating opportunities out of anyone on the planet save top athletes and celebrities. Look, I'm not saying that there aren't any downsides to the job. But saying being a CEO of a large corporation is the worst job in the world is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Find me a single CEO of a Fortune 500 company that wants to swap his job to become a rare metals miner with a pick axe in the Congo then come back to me.
Sunspark 4y ago
This guy is making a statement from his position of elite privilege. He already got his bag. When the Europeans came to feudal China they were mystified that the Chinese had all this technology they weren't using. It was intentional. The reason is because the Chinese were smart enough to know that if they automated and outsourced everything they would end up with roving bands of unemployed men causing trouble in the countryside. So yes, AI and ML can take many people's jobs today. Absolutely and in some areas it would be a beneficial improvement, e.g. guided medical procedures. But for other stuff, maybe not so much. What are these now unemployed people to do? There's only so many hamburgers that can be flipped, and you have to have money to buy one anyway. Is the IBM CEO's vision of the future an economy where everyone works at a hamburger joint and then goes to another one to spend their pay to eat a hamburger made elsewhere? Our society is not set up to allow for mass unemployment. Basic income needs to happen first.
- nadermx 4y ago
  I'm not sure what utopia you envision. But the reality is it takes an extreme amount to do none trivial things that arent just on a screen.
  - Sunspark 4y ago
    Where I live, McDonald's and other stores have already started replacing cashiers with touchscreens. Not everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer. What about all those people who used to do a job that is now replacing them with a touchscreen or a "chat bot"? What do you envision for them? That they go back to school to train to be a doctor or a lawyer? Sure, will you agree to making education and training free or accessible, or will this require continued privilege where it's a requirement to be born into a rich family first? There's over 8 billion people on the planet. How many blue collar jobs do you envision as being available to people if all the white collar jobs are replaced by AI and ML and automation and outsourcing and offshoring? Am I supposed to be a bricklayer now when I'm already too old physically for the punishing demands of that job? A long time ago I knew a guy whose job was off-shored to the Philippines from Canada. He actually moved to the Philippines to keep it, but this isn't an option available to most people.
more_corn 4y ago
For him
boh 4y ago
The idea of AI taking over customer service jobs essentially just means "we need an excuse to stop providing customer service". The open secret is that AI isn't very good at anything. That's why you're not getting driven by a driverless car, and you still have to yell at your Alexa to actually do what you asked it to do. This CEO's statement isn't for the public, it's to pretend to IBM's B2B clients that they have something that could actually cut costs. Thankfully it can't and it won't. The social implications are besides the point given that they're nowhere near to what they pretend they're capable of. Watson was a failure, Alexa is just bleeding money and ChatGPT is already losing its luster. AI is all hype, cheap labor overseas will take your job way before AI does.
- piuantiderp 4y ago
  I switched to Google Fiber primarily because of this, I can actually talk to someone just by calling. No endless messages, no nothing. Actual customer service and support. That I also get better speed is just the cherry on top
  - nine_k 4y ago
    This is the first time I see somebody praising a Google service for better support than competition, with actual humans in the loop! My applause to Google Fiber.
- gmadsen 4y ago
  Cruise has started aggressively scaling its fleet of driverless cars, that are currently taxiing people without a human driver.. I'm not sure if its some weird human psychology thing going on, but the amount of posts and emotional responses claiming that the current advances in AI are worthless is kind of crazy. AI is without a doubt going to change society, and I suppose that is scary, but we are only at the beginning.
  - yowlingcat 4y ago
    Why not put your money where your mouth is and start or invest in a company selling insurance to Cruise? I would personally feel reluctant to do so, because I think insuring the tail risk of a company like Cruise or really even Tesla (pertaining to FSD) is a fool's errand and not a positive ROI proposition. And I don't mean now, I mean until proven otherwise. There is no guarantee or even really proof points that the model AI works around even does a good enough job to account for edge case scenarios that account for most of the tail risk. If that is not the case, then the entire hypothesis around AI (which is that it is structurally more efficient than alternatives) really falls apart, doesn't it?
sublinear 4y ago
It would be even better if the AI actually worked as advertised. There's zero progress towards that though so this article is the purest of hot air.
freitzkriesler2 4y ago
AI will most likely eliminate most white collar workers up to and including CEOs when they are "good enough". I look forward to a board of directors replacing this try hard with AI.
vouaobrasil 4y ago
The problem with jobs being replaced by machines is that historically, there have always been other jobs that either (a) people could switch into that were still somewhat fulfilling or failing that, (b) at least the next generation could switch into. However, we have never tested the "limiting case" of this phenomenon, where there is a machine (AI) that is so good that it could take over most jobs. Are we there yet? No, but we are not far off either. Now, I'm not saying this is inevitable, but we have to ask the question: what if we CAN get to the limiting case where the only jobs left are a few coveted technical jobs or manual labor? Is there even a remote possibility that this could happen? I believe it's likely, and if it is, then what are we going to do? The best-case scenario is some sort of UBI scheme where most people don't work, but if you think about it, that's actually a horrible thing because most people need some kind of purpose in life, and very few people can find their purpose independently from a system which allows them to trade their comparitive advantages for those of others. Concluding, IBM's CEO is despicable of the highest order. He might be right in that AI taking your job is good for the economy, but if we unpack that statement, it basically means that AI is good as a mechanism to make our system more efficient for concentrating wealth into his pocket at the cost of long-term stability.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >there have always been other jobs that either (a) people could switch into that were still somewhat fulfilling That may have been the case till post-WW2 economy where if the refrigerator factory you used to work at got moved to China, you could take those skills to the car factory next door, but most of the industry jobs left in the west today, that haven't been offshored or automated away, are highly specialized ones that require years of training or higher education and don't have many transferable skills between them, and there's no way you can simply switch to those jobs without that specialized training the employers with those jobs are expecting you to have. It's a lot easier these days to find yourself obsolete and unemployable.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    Barbers do require months (though not years) of training, but obviously there is no reason for that to be the case.
zaphirplane 4y ago
CEO of company on a long death spiral talks about a bright future when ability to attract talent and execute doesn’t make a difference. A future where a company needs a great visionary CEO and an AI
larve 4y ago
I wouldn't care at all if IBM's CEO was actually an AI. But I sure as hell care that the person I have on the phone when inquiring about something is a human.
- dusted 4y ago
  Tell me you haven't been on the phone with a customer support person recently, without telling me you haven't been on the phone with a customer support person recently ;)
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    Even the worst customer support persons are infinitely better than the best "AI" replacements.
  - scubbo 4y ago
    Can you make your point more directly? I'm not sure what you mean. Anecdotally, whenever I've failed at solving a problem myself through online/self-serve tools, I have _never_ been able to then solve it by being connected to an Customer Service bot - but I've had pretty good results when speaking with an actual human. If I'm reading your implication correctly that "nowadays Customer Support people aren't useful" - I disagree.
atemerev 4y ago
A “job” is when you are doing something useful for other people, and you are rare enough so it makes sense to pay you money for it for a long time. Nobody ever guarantees you a “job” if you are not useful anymore for some specific field of work. It doesn’t make any business sense. If you continue to get money for something while not being useful enough for your employer, this is not a “job”, this is charity. And since jobs were a XX century social construct where one could expect that people would have professions which are useful enough for most of their lives — there will be no more “jobs” soon. Only contracts, alms, charities, and war mercenaries. And there is no way to turn this around, until we invent new ways of doing business, without relying on “jobs”.
29athrowaway 4y ago
I don't care what IBM has to say about the future. It is a company from the past.
worksonmine 4y ago
I agree with him, but this also implies there's a sustainable plan for everyone out of work going forward. I'd love a world where having a career is an active choice. Not everyone can and should work, with all the progress we've made we should try to work less and let the machines do more for us. Unfortunately not many people can imagine a world like that so we end up chasing growth just for the sake of growth. Meanwhile the world we're supposed to share is shrinking. For reference, 8 people own half of the so-called resources (yes I know it's not liquid) on the planet. Before covid that number was around 30.
yellowapple 4y ago
It'd be a good thing if AI took his job.
dusted 4y ago
I think IBMs CEO is being a bit on the optimistic side with regards to the actualy capabilities of AI.. However, I do hope strong AI will emerge eventually, and it will start some singularity-type event that basically makes most humans redundant. If nobody's got a job, nobody's got money, money becomes redundant too.. If machines are taking care of mankinds basic needs, we become free to pursue higher purposes than merely surviving by working. As fulfilling as our white-collar jobs may be, we'd still not do exactly THAT if we weren't paid.. We'd do something slightly different that we personally wanted.. I love programming, but I love programming my little useless hobby projects more than I enjoy programming whatever the company I work for pays me to do (even if those projects are honestly pretty cool at times).. When I was a kid, I was sure that by the time I'd be an adult, I'd not have to work, because I had already seen robots assembling cars!! I lacked the imagination to think that mankind weren't coorporating towards the obvious goal of making survival, production of food, housing and other required work be done by machines.. I didn't realize at the time how silly my fellow humans were.. But something like a strong, general-purpose artificial intelligence, it should force the decision to either kill everyone who becomes redundant, or set mankind free to pursue higher, personal goals, while the machines work for them.. I'd prefer the latter option.
- quantified 4y ago
  What if those machines are owned for the purpose of profiting their funders? They are only made for the purpose of returning billions to these owners, where do thise come from?
  - dusted 4y ago
    In my opinion, there will be a point where profits lose their meaning. That point might be either, or a combination of: Nobody else has any money to be taken (because they have no jobs) Stuff is free because machines are making it, so you can just get whatever you want made for you. Money are a proxy for time and work, when machines get to a point where they're autonomously able to spend all the required time and do all the required work, there's nothing left for money to do.. If we stood on the edge of a scarcity-free world, I doubt even the greediest *illionaire would find any good reason to stop it (and if they did, well, I doubt they'd survive it for long)
briga 4y ago
> The CEO also said AI can do a better job than a human employee at administrative work Perhaps he imagines he is doing something other than administrative work?
John23832 4y ago
First, often the premise of these pontifications conflate AI’s with automation. Automation will take many jobs, AI won’t. Second, the problem with these hypotheses is that AI’s don’t really work better than humans. They just are cheaper and corporations are in the position that they can force customers to use them instead of humans. Nobody wants to call an AI model . They would rather call a human with the ability to actually solve their problems. When you call an AI, you don’t have something that can solve your problem, you’re presented with a stone wall of options (most of which are suboptimal). The same goes for most direct human to AI interactions. AIs (short of a true general AI) work best in augmenting human ability. Helping doctors/radiologists read X-rays and mris better. Helping farmers predict weather patterns for farming. Folding proteins. These are the best utilizations of AI. Not wholesale replacements or humans.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >They would rather call a human with the ability to actually solve their problems. Unfortunately a lot of humans in customer support are also failing to solve my problem since they have little say in the system, and are mostly meat based automatons following a script or logic flow chart they've been given. If your problem doesn't fall into what they've been taught to do, well, then tough shit for you, you might as well have been talking to an AI bot instead of the metatag getting paid minimum wage to take shit from customers angry at the corporation for failing to provide the service they took your money for.
  - John23832 4y ago
    True, but I think it’s easier to solve the meat problem than the silicon one.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > Automation will take many jobs, AI won’t. AI _is_ automation.
flandish 4y ago
Well yeah of COURSE it’s a good thing: AI replacing labor means less labor costs and that means more shareholder ROI. Won’t someone please think of the shareholders?? (/s… in case it’s not obvious..)

34 points by adrian_mrd 4y ago

How is it not? That’s what technological progress has always been doing for ages. That’s why we have all the good things.

dogma1138 4y ago
What activity would the majority of the population perform now that does not require one to be in the top few percentiles of human intellect (nature or nurture argument aside)? We moved people from fields to factories to offices with most of them still relegated to doing relatively simple repeatable tasks. Now if you have a tool which can take over those tasks, get better at doing them and other tasks at almost an exponential rate you might have a problem on your hands. And no UBI isn’t a solution and one of the possible danger of AI is that the change can be far more rapid than before. Mechanization and industrialization took generations, software can be iterated on and pushed at much greater pace so you also have a major risk that even if societal adaptations would be possible they might not be at the pace of change you’ll likely to see. Now it doesn’t mean that we should be smashing GPUs and FPGAs en mass however one should not dismiss the danger of what happens when several generations both incumbent and upcoming that were educated and trained for a very specific world all of a sudden find themselves in a very different one.

rcarr 4y ago

80% of CEOs are indistinguishable from Sydney Bing, change my mind.

nathanaldensr 4y ago
Maybe you could ask ChatGPT to help with that.
29athrowaway 4y ago
CEOs are just a punching bag. They get punched on behalf of the board of directors. Everything they say will offend someone so they can't say anything. And they have to live in hiding with bodyguards. Being the CEO of a large corporation is probably the worst job in the world.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rcarr 4y ago
  Writing a speech filled with meaningless buzz words then clocking off early to play golf with a client is such a rough gig. So much pressure if you fail as well. Imagining having to resign from your CEO job and then take a position as the chairman of another globo corp. Doesn't even bear thinking about.
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    And one day the board makes you let go 10,000 including disabled people and people coming out of parental leave. And read the news and see people talking shit about you for weeks. And everyone you know wants your money as if you won the lottery. And some people will hate you and want to harm you beyond insulting you online. If you walk in the streets without bodyguards again someone will surely brutalize you, because we live in a messed up world. So in the end you just make yourself a big visible target for everyone to throw shit at. On the other side, people on the board have none of that liability for the most part as nobody knows them.
    - rcarr 4y ago
      Yes but you have the money and resources to live in an entire different world. You eat in the finest restaurants. You get ferried about on private transport and stay in the finest hotels. You have the finest clothes and consumer goods and you probably have the most dating opportunities out of anyone on the planet save top athletes and celebrities. Look, I'm not saying that there aren't any downsides to the job. But saying being a CEO of a large corporation is the worst job in the world is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Find me a single CEO of a Fortune 500 company that wants to swap his job to become a rare metals miner with a pick axe in the Congo then come back to me.

Sunspark 4y ago

This guy is making a statement from his position of elite privilege. He already got his bag. When the Europeans came to feudal China they were mystified that the Chinese had all this technology they weren't using. It was intentional. The reason is because the Chinese were smart enough to know that if they automated and outsourced everything they would end up with roving bands of unemployed men causing trouble in the countryside. So yes, AI and ML can take many people's jobs today. Absolutely and in some areas it would be a beneficial improvement, e.g. guided medical procedures. But for other stuff, maybe not so much. What are these now unemployed people to do? There's only so many hamburgers that can be flipped, and you have to have money to buy one anyway. Is the IBM CEO's vision of the future an economy where everyone works at a hamburger joint and then goes to another one to spend their pay to eat a hamburger made elsewhere? Our society is not set up to allow for mass unemployment. Basic income needs to happen first.

nadermx 4y ago
I'm not sure what utopia you envision. But the reality is it takes an extreme amount to do none trivial things that arent just on a screen.
- Sunspark 4y ago
  Where I live, McDonald's and other stores have already started replacing cashiers with touchscreens. Not everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer. What about all those people who used to do a job that is now replacing them with a touchscreen or a "chat bot"? What do you envision for them? That they go back to school to train to be a doctor or a lawyer? Sure, will you agree to making education and training free or accessible, or will this require continued privilege where it's a requirement to be born into a rich family first? There's over 8 billion people on the planet. How many blue collar jobs do you envision as being available to people if all the white collar jobs are replaced by AI and ML and automation and outsourcing and offshoring? Am I supposed to be a bricklayer now when I'm already too old physically for the punishing demands of that job? A long time ago I knew a guy whose job was off-shored to the Philippines from Canada. He actually moved to the Philippines to keep it, but this isn't an option available to most people.

more_corn 4y ago

For him

boh 4y ago

The idea of AI taking over customer service jobs essentially just means "we need an excuse to stop providing customer service". The open secret is that AI isn't very good at anything. That's why you're not getting driven by a driverless car, and you still have to yell at your Alexa to actually do what you asked it to do. This CEO's statement isn't for the public, it's to pretend to IBM's B2B clients that they have something that could actually cut costs. Thankfully it can't and it won't. The social implications are besides the point given that they're nowhere near to what they pretend they're capable of. Watson was a failure, Alexa is just bleeding money and ChatGPT is already losing its luster. AI is all hype, cheap labor overseas will take your job way before AI does.

piuantiderp 4y ago
I switched to Google Fiber primarily because of this, I can actually talk to someone just by calling. No endless messages, no nothing. Actual customer service and support. That I also get better speed is just the cherry on top
- nine_k 4y ago
  This is the first time I see somebody praising a Google service for better support than competition, with actual humans in the loop! My applause to Google Fiber.
gmadsen 4y ago
Cruise has started aggressively scaling its fleet of driverless cars, that are currently taxiing people without a human driver.. I'm not sure if its some weird human psychology thing going on, but the amount of posts and emotional responses claiming that the current advances in AI are worthless is kind of crazy. AI is without a doubt going to change society, and I suppose that is scary, but we are only at the beginning.
- yowlingcat 4y ago
  Why not put your money where your mouth is and start or invest in a company selling insurance to Cruise? I would personally feel reluctant to do so, because I think insuring the tail risk of a company like Cruise or really even Tesla (pertaining to FSD) is a fool's errand and not a positive ROI proposition. And I don't mean now, I mean until proven otherwise. There is no guarantee or even really proof points that the model AI works around even does a good enough job to account for edge case scenarios that account for most of the tail risk. If that is not the case, then the entire hypothesis around AI (which is that it is structurally more efficient than alternatives) really falls apart, doesn't it?

sublinear 4y ago

It would be even better if the AI actually worked as advertised. There's zero progress towards that though so this article is the purest of hot air.

freitzkriesler2 4y ago

AI will most likely eliminate most white collar workers up to and including CEOs when they are "good enough". I look forward to a board of directors replacing this try hard with AI.

vouaobrasil 4y ago

The problem with jobs being replaced by machines is that historically, there have always been other jobs that either (a) people could switch into that were still somewhat fulfilling or failing that, (b) at least the next generation could switch into. However, we have never tested the "limiting case" of this phenomenon, where there is a machine (AI) that is so good that it could take over most jobs. Are we there yet? No, but we are not far off either. Now, I'm not saying this is inevitable, but we have to ask the question: what if we CAN get to the limiting case where the only jobs left are a few coveted technical jobs or manual labor? Is there even a remote possibility that this could happen? I believe it's likely, and if it is, then what are we going to do? The best-case scenario is some sort of UBI scheme where most people don't work, but if you think about it, that's actually a horrible thing because most people need some kind of purpose in life, and very few people can find their purpose independently from a system which allows them to trade their comparitive advantages for those of others. Concluding, IBM's CEO is despicable of the highest order. He might be right in that AI taking your job is good for the economy, but if we unpack that statement, it basically means that AI is good as a mechanism to make our system more efficient for concentrating wealth into his pocket at the cost of long-term stability.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>there have always been other jobs that either (a) people could switch into that were still somewhat fulfilling That may have been the case till post-WW2 economy where if the refrigerator factory you used to work at got moved to China, you could take those skills to the car factory next door, but most of the industry jobs left in the west today, that haven't been offshored or automated away, are highly specialized ones that require years of training or higher education and don't have many transferable skills between them, and there's no way you can simply switch to those jobs without that specialized training the employers with those jobs are expecting you to have. It's a lot easier these days to find yourself obsolete and unemployable.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  Barbers do require months (though not years) of training, but obviously there is no reason for that to be the case.

zaphirplane 4y ago

CEO of company on a long death spiral talks about a bright future when ability to attract talent and execute doesn’t make a difference. A future where a company needs a great visionary CEO and an AI

larve 4y ago

I wouldn't care at all if IBM's CEO was actually an AI. But I sure as hell care that the person I have on the phone when inquiring about something is a human.

dusted 4y ago
Tell me you haven't been on the phone with a customer support person recently, without telling me you haven't been on the phone with a customer support person recently ;)
- yellowapple 4y ago
  Even the worst customer support persons are infinitely better than the best "AI" replacements.
- scubbo 4y ago
  Can you make your point more directly? I'm not sure what you mean. Anecdotally, whenever I've failed at solving a problem myself through online/self-serve tools, I have _never_ been able to then solve it by being connected to an Customer Service bot - but I've had pretty good results when speaking with an actual human. If I'm reading your implication correctly that "nowadays Customer Support people aren't useful" - I disagree.

atemerev 4y ago

A “job” is when you are doing something useful for other people, and you are rare enough so it makes sense to pay you money for it for a long time. Nobody ever guarantees you a “job” if you are not useful anymore for some specific field of work. It doesn’t make any business sense. If you continue to get money for something while not being useful enough for your employer, this is not a “job”, this is charity. And since jobs were a XX century social construct where one could expect that people would have professions which are useful enough for most of their lives — there will be no more “jobs” soon. Only contracts, alms, charities, and war mercenaries. And there is no way to turn this around, until we invent new ways of doing business, without relying on “jobs”.

29athrowaway 4y ago

I don't care what IBM has to say about the future. It is a company from the past.

worksonmine 4y ago

I agree with him, but this also implies there's a sustainable plan for everyone out of work going forward. I'd love a world where having a career is an active choice. Not everyone can and should work, with all the progress we've made we should try to work less and let the machines do more for us. Unfortunately not many people can imagine a world like that so we end up chasing growth just for the sake of growth. Meanwhile the world we're supposed to share is shrinking. For reference, 8 people own half of the so-called resources (yes I know it's not liquid) on the planet. Before covid that number was around 30.

yellowapple 4y ago

It'd be a good thing if AI took his job.

dusted 4y ago

I think IBMs CEO is being a bit on the optimistic side with regards to the actualy capabilities of AI.. However, I do hope strong AI will emerge eventually, and it will start some singularity-type event that basically makes most humans redundant. If nobody's got a job, nobody's got money, money becomes redundant too.. If machines are taking care of mankinds basic needs, we become free to pursue higher purposes than merely surviving by working. As fulfilling as our white-collar jobs may be, we'd still not do exactly THAT if we weren't paid.. We'd do something slightly different that we personally wanted.. I love programming, but I love programming my little useless hobby projects more than I enjoy programming whatever the company I work for pays me to do (even if those projects are honestly pretty cool at times).. When I was a kid, I was sure that by the time I'd be an adult, I'd not have to work, because I had already seen robots assembling cars!! I lacked the imagination to think that mankind weren't coorporating towards the obvious goal of making survival, production of food, housing and other required work be done by machines.. I didn't realize at the time how silly my fellow humans were.. But something like a strong, general-purpose artificial intelligence, it should force the decision to either kill everyone who becomes redundant, or set mankind free to pursue higher, personal goals, while the machines work for them.. I'd prefer the latter option.

quantified 4y ago
What if those machines are owned for the purpose of profiting their funders? They are only made for the purpose of returning billions to these owners, where do thise come from?
- dusted 4y ago
  In my opinion, there will be a point where profits lose their meaning. That point might be either, or a combination of: Nobody else has any money to be taken (because they have no jobs) Stuff is free because machines are making it, so you can just get whatever you want made for you. Money are a proxy for time and work, when machines get to a point where they're autonomously able to spend all the required time and do all the required work, there's nothing left for money to do.. If we stood on the edge of a scarcity-free world, I doubt even the greediest *illionaire would find any good reason to stop it (and if they did, well, I doubt they'd survive it for long)

briga 4y ago

> The CEO also said AI can do a better job than a human employee at administrative work Perhaps he imagines he is doing something other than administrative work?

John23832 4y ago

First, often the premise of these pontifications conflate AI’s with automation. Automation will take many jobs, AI won’t. Second, the problem with these hypotheses is that AI’s don’t really work better than humans. They just are cheaper and corporations are in the position that they can force customers to use them instead of humans. Nobody wants to call an AI model . They would rather call a human with the ability to actually solve their problems. When you call an AI, you don’t have something that can solve your problem, you’re presented with a stone wall of options (most of which are suboptimal). The same goes for most direct human to AI interactions. AIs (short of a true general AI) work best in augmenting human ability. Helping doctors/radiologists read X-rays and mris better. Helping farmers predict weather patterns for farming. Folding proteins. These are the best utilizations of AI. Not wholesale replacements or humans.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>They would rather call a human with the ability to actually solve their problems. Unfortunately a lot of humans in customer support are also failing to solve my problem since they have little say in the system, and are mostly meat based automatons following a script or logic flow chart they've been given. If your problem doesn't fall into what they've been taught to do, well, then tough shit for you, you might as well have been talking to an AI bot instead of the metatag getting paid minimum wage to take shit from customers angry at the corporation for failing to provide the service they took your money for.
- John23832 4y ago
  True, but I think it’s easier to solve the meat problem than the silicon one.
JohnFen 4y ago
> Automation will take many jobs, AI won’t. AI _is_ automation.

flandish 4y ago

Well yeah of COURSE it’s a good thing: AI replacing labor means less labor costs and that means more shareholder ROI. Won’t someone please think of the shareholders?? (/s… in case it’s not obvious..)