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AI will create 'useless class' of humans

theguardian.com

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Re: AI will create 'useless class' of humans

#71

Post by random_upvoter »

terhechte wrote: post #33
agentultra wrote: post #25

These screeds have one grave misunderstanding: that AI can compete with a human. It's like apples to oranges. Alpha Go may have beat the best human player in the world but you can't ask it to fold the laundry or how it felt about Angela's Ashes. I think we'll be able to optimize away boring, repetitive jobs and tasks that require vast numerical and statistical quantities. And that's a good thing. We'll just need to a…

Something I never see answered in these discussions: What are the previous workers to do, those whose jobs were so simple that a properly configured AI can perform it faster and better. Every other job that they would be capable of is just as likely to be replaced by another properly configured machine. If every possible tasks a person would be capable of handling can be solved by a specific machine in a better way t…

IMO programmers have got more to worry about the future of their job than bricklayers. It seems rather obvious to me that the job of software developer would be the first victim of advances in AI.

Re: AI will create 'useless class' of humans

#72

Post by albi_lander »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #67
bsbechtel wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When this happens, costs for virtually everything will more or less go to zero, because we can make humans to make more humans to make everything else in our society that costs money. Try to imagine a society where virtually everything is free...visualize walking around and getting free coffee from Starbucks, free rides from Uber, free meals three times a day, free healthcare, free housing, etc. If everything is free…

You're assuming that human brains and bodies are grossly inefficient. I would argue that while humans are bad at some tasks, the brain is a fairly efficient _low-order_ general probabalistic computer, and the body is a fairly efficient as a highly general object manipulation system. I doubt for highly varied, extremely low value tasks that robots backed by AI will be significantly cheaper than humans for a long time,…

Don't forget that natural evolution is a very slow and inefficient process, essentially driven by randomness, and that there is no such "optimization" that you describe, only selection. Moore's law may come to an end, but we have many great things coming such as quantum computing or nuclear fusion.

Re: AI will create 'useless class' of humans

#75

Post by CuriouslyC »

albi_lander wrote: post #72
CuriouslyC wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that human brains and bodies are grossly inefficient. I would argue that while humans are bad at some tasks, the brain is a fairly efficient _low-order_ general probabalistic computer, and the body is a fairly efficient as a highly general object manipulation system. I doubt for highly varied, extremely low value tasks that robots backed by AI will be significantly cheaper than humans for a long time,…

Don't forget that natural evolution is a very slow and inefficient process, essentially driven by randomness, and that there is no such "optimization" that you describe, only selection. Moore's law may come to an end, but we have many great things coming such as quantum computing or nuclear fusion.

The natural selection process, when paired with random variation, is a functional optimization algorithm for things that impact survival. Energy efficiency very directly impacts survival. Ergo, life has "optimized" energy efficiency to some degree.

With regards to quantum computing and nuclear fusion, I prefer not to count my chickens before they've hatched. We may get both (and more!) or we may find that they are only functional under specific contexts that limit their utility.

Re: AI will create 'useless class' of humans

#76

Post by DougN7 »

bsbechtel wrote: post #49
Udik wrote: post #38

I see a lot of comments saying "this happened in the past, and the new technologies never made the humans useless". Well, maybe a good way to state the current problem is the following: the aim of this new technology is to produce humans . A potentially infinite amount of them. Running on electricity instead of food. Needing the space of a box. Without the need to sleep, socialize, furnish their apartments, look for…

When this happens, costs for virtually everything will more or less go to zero, because we can make humans to make more humans to make everything else in our society that costs money. Try to imagine a society where virtually everything is free...visualize walking around and getting free coffee from Starbucks, free rides from Uber, free meals three times a day, free healthcare, free housing, etc. If everything is free…

Even if every is free, it doesn't mean it's unlimited. I doubt we have the capacity to produce everything that everyone on the planet might want. That will of necessity give rise to some sort of prioritization or right to have what you want when you want it. Money of some for or another will return.

Re: AI will create 'useless class' of humans

#77

Post by vinceguidry »

thomasahle wrote: post #66
vinceguidry wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI is truly useful, then it'll be put to use for everybody. Technology has been dicking around with our social classes for thousands of years. You could argue that technology is the whole reason we have social classes in the first place. You have to ask yourself what's so different about AI. It's an interesting question, but none of the more dramatic answers are really unprecedented. It's a "what is true isn't new…

> there won't be any point in just deploying AI to serve only the elites. Why? If it's the elites that deploy it?

Technology is always deployed first by the elites to serve the elites. But those elites don't live in a vacuum and are never completely self-sufficient. So eventually they'll want to trade access to their technology for something they do want.

An example of this is military tech. The US sells surplus military equipment to anybody that will buy it, even sophisticated kit like F-16s. Naturally, they keep the best stuff to themselves, you can't buy an F-22 at the moment for any price. But eventually even the F-22 will be old tech and you'll be able to buy one.

Re: AI will create 'useless class' of humans

#78

Post by majewsky »

harperlee wrote: post #68
majewsky wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap shirts can be had for under 5 € in Germany, with minimum wage at 8.50 €. (The fine print: These cheap shirts likely contain more chemicals than cotton.)

So they are made with other organic compounds. Do they function as shirts? What is the problem with nylon?

I don't mean the fabric. I mean all the chemicals applied to it. I have a Vietnamese-owned minimart down the street and whenever I walk past it during opening hours, it smells like a chemicals factory.

Re: AI will create 'useless class' of humans

#79

Post by lgas »

Houshalter wrote: post #14
decayy wrote: post #10

Every time a new tech emerges someone will always say, that the new tech will take away human jobs. The new tech will take away human jobs. But the humans will just go do other newly created jobs.

There is no law of economics that says the value of labor has to be above survival, let alone minimum wage. When cars replaced horses, most horses didn't get new jobs. They literally became worth less than the cost of feeding them, and were slaughtered. Near future AI will make the majority of humans basically worthless. There isn't much left that people can do, and computers can't. Sure maybe high intelligence jobs…

Do you have any citation on the assertions that the invention of cars resulted in the slaughter of many horses? I've spent a fair amount of time googling but can't find anything about it.

Re: AI will create 'useless class' of humans

#80

Post by eva1984 »

decayy wrote: post #62
bad_alloc wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far we've automated physical tasks. It was possible to go into intellectual jobs as an alternative avenue, since automating that wasn't possible. However now we're automating mental work. Humans can currently go into jobs requiring higher education or creativity but 1) this won't work for everybody and 2) this is not a new avenue outside of the reach of automatization. The machines have a good chance of catching,…

We seem to be ignoring the current theoretical limitations of A.I. I'm not an C.S or A.I expert. But what I can remember from university is that we need a pretty big breakthrough in computer science to get to that stage. I'm not saying it won't happen. But who knows.

It is already happening. The whole deep learning thing is no joke. They cannot replace human, but can achieve close to or better than human level of performance in certain specific tasks. Before that, close to human performance is never achieved for certain tasks, and largely considered impossible in near future just 5 years ago, like image recognition/playing go/speech recognition.

It is already eliminating jobs, gradually, not overnight but steadily, and this time it is from higher above, say, Wall Street traders.It is very easy to see there is a trend out there, that data + smart algorithms is going to take over a lot decision-making processes, that currently belongs to analyst.

The theoretical limitation of AI is bullshit. We don't get know what intelligence is, how do you think we quantify and draw a line around it?

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