The real reason we fear AI: we will control it
TL;DR - AI might take jobs but it will be *humans* that make the decisions and that's what we should fear, not AI.
One hears a lot on the web these days about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to go all HAL2000 or Skynet on us at any moment. I hope to outline why that isn't the case in our lifetimes at least and what actually is likely. But first what is AI?
AI is likely hard to define because intelligence is hard to define. So let's generalize AI to Artificial Life (AL). Life is easier but not easy to define. Certainly a reasonable definition for "life" is:
0 An environment
1 A distinction from the environment
2 An intrinsic ability to exist, grow and die
This may seem controversial since, say fire, is "life" by this definition however this is the least cumbersome I have yet conceived of that admits non-biological life.
So using this definition, existing technological systems can be seen as examples of AL (but certainly not AI, ;>).
So life exists, grows or ceases to exist. What then is the meaning of life? The meaning of life is to exist (proof is left as an exercise to the reader, haha).
Unfit life dies but how does AL exist or grow? It has to provide value to it's environment. Humans are this environment as it's plain to see that, just as we depend on plants to create oxygen for us to breath, AL depends on us for power, parts, etc. It's almost impossible for any right-minded person to imagine any non-biological system existing without *deep* support from humans.
Like it or not we, today, exist in an environment deeply dependent on AL but if one thinks about it, casting aside fantasy, computer systems are and will be for at least the next hundred years much more dependent on us.
But what about AI? By the same argument AI will only be a minute amount less dependent on us. Also if we define an average adult as having an intelligence of 1 it's very,very,very hard for me, an expert in computers and a journeyman in AI to imagine a computer getting close to that in the next say 50 years. To put that in perspective, creating an operating system is well understood and can be easily imagined however creating a new one from scratch might take a decade of work by experts.
The better question is: will AL take existing jobs? Absolutely, and many of them but probably only those that can be done mostly in software. Robots are far too inefficient when compared with humans for most jobs because they're far too inflexible.
In terms of the positions I believe will be extinct in the next decade:
1 CSRs - Siri, Cortana, etc already are beyond the capacities of a good fraction of existing CSRs and even though CSRs are relatively cheap, large companies have internally turned "call center" into a pejorative term such are they loathed.
2 Truck drivers, taxi drivers, etc.
3 Check-out aisle cashier - already disappearing to self-serve kiosks.
And I'm sure there are several others.
But who will be responsible for these job losses? Us. CEOs will "AI-source" call centers, people will take tax-AIs, and buy from check-out AIsles (see what I did there? :> ).
The most common rejoinder to this is "they'll just get other jobs". For small, slow changes this can be true but I believe that there will be large, permanent "holes" in the labour market where any area with near "AI-performable" skills will keep sucking jobs in like a black hole. So you'll have clusters of low-paying, competition-intensive jobs too rooted in the physical world for AI and then very high skill jobs at intelligence > 2 on the scale above, too complex for AI.
In the end we will all have a hand in this revolution just as we did in the Walmart revolution which has direct parallels. "They'll find other jobs" was completely wrong there too.
I am reminded of the chapter in Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" where Pablo, after having taken back a town from the Nationalists, is barricaded in the church with his prisoners - the townsfolk who have cooperated with the fascists. He doesn't execute them, but rather he makes all the other townspeople line up outside and receive their neighbours-then-cooperators-then-prisoners one by one.
The scene doesn't play out as one would expect. The townsfolk are not angry, abusive then embarrassed and finally repentant. Rather the opposite - they quickly degenerate into an angry bloodthursty mob.
The title of that novel is from a poem. I believe the poet meant to say the death of one man should mean something to everyone because we are all are a part of this world - this environment.
And so, ask not for whom the redundancies go to; they go to thee.
One hears a lot on the web these days about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to go all HAL2000 or Skynet on us at any moment. I hope to outline why that isn't the case in our lifetimes at least and what actually is likely. But first what is AI?
AI is likely hard to define because intelligence is hard to define. So let's generalize AI to Artificial Life (AL). Life is easier but not easy to define. Certainly a reasonable definition for "life" is:
0 An environment
1 A distinction from the environment
2 An intrinsic ability to exist, grow and die
This may seem controversial since, say fire, is "life" by this definition however this is the least cumbersome I have yet conceived of that admits non-biological life.
So using this definition, existing technological systems can be seen as examples of AL (but certainly not AI, ;>).
So life exists, grows or ceases to exist. What then is the meaning of life? The meaning of life is to exist (proof is left as an exercise to the reader, haha).
Unfit life dies but how does AL exist or grow? It has to provide value to it's environment. Humans are this environment as it's plain to see that, just as we depend on plants to create oxygen for us to breath, AL depends on us for power, parts, etc. It's almost impossible for any right-minded person to imagine any non-biological system existing without *deep* support from humans.
Like it or not we, today, exist in an environment deeply dependent on AL but if one thinks about it, casting aside fantasy, computer systems are and will be for at least the next hundred years much more dependent on us.
But what about AI? By the same argument AI will only be a minute amount less dependent on us. Also if we define an average adult as having an intelligence of 1 it's very,very,very hard for me, an expert in computers and a journeyman in AI to imagine a computer getting close to that in the next say 50 years. To put that in perspective, creating an operating system is well understood and can be easily imagined however creating a new one from scratch might take a decade of work by experts.
The better question is: will AL take existing jobs? Absolutely, and many of them but probably only those that can be done mostly in software. Robots are far too inefficient when compared with humans for most jobs because they're far too inflexible.
In terms of the positions I believe will be extinct in the next decade:
1 CSRs - Siri, Cortana, etc already are beyond the capacities of a good fraction of existing CSRs and even though CSRs are relatively cheap, large companies have internally turned "call center" into a pejorative term such are they loathed.
2 Truck drivers, taxi drivers, etc.
3 Check-out aisle cashier - already disappearing to self-serve kiosks.
And I'm sure there are several others.
But who will be responsible for these job losses? Us. CEOs will "AI-source" call centers, people will take tax-AIs, and buy from check-out AIsles (see what I did there? :> ).
The most common rejoinder to this is "they'll just get other jobs". For small, slow changes this can be true but I believe that there will be large, permanent "holes" in the labour market where any area with near "AI-performable" skills will keep sucking jobs in like a black hole. So you'll have clusters of low-paying, competition-intensive jobs too rooted in the physical world for AI and then very high skill jobs at intelligence > 2 on the scale above, too complex for AI.
In the end we will all have a hand in this revolution just as we did in the Walmart revolution which has direct parallels. "They'll find other jobs" was completely wrong there too.
I am reminded of the chapter in Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" where Pablo, after having taken back a town from the Nationalists, is barricaded in the church with his prisoners - the townsfolk who have cooperated with the fascists. He doesn't execute them, but rather he makes all the other townspeople line up outside and receive their neighbours-then-cooperators-then-prisoners one by one.
The scene doesn't play out as one would expect. The townsfolk are not angry, abusive then embarrassed and finally repentant. Rather the opposite - they quickly degenerate into an angry bloodthursty mob.
The title of that novel is from a poem. I believe the poet meant to say the death of one man should mean something to everyone because we are all are a part of this world - this environment.
And so, ask not for whom the redundancies go to; they go to thee.
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