AI Won’t End the World, But It Might Take Your Job
AI Won’t End the World, But It Might Take Your Job
By Robert McMillan
02.02.15 6:30 am
There’s been a lot of fear about the future of artificial
intelligence.
Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk worry that AI-powered
computers might one day become uncontrollable super-intelligent demons. So does
Bill Gates.
But Baidu chief scientist Andrew Ng—one of the world’s
best-known AI researchers and a guy who’s building out what is likely one of
the world’s largest applied AI projects—says we really ought to worry more
about robot truck drivers than the Terminator.
In fact, he’s irritated by the discussion about
scientists somehow building an apocalyptic super-intelligence. “I think it’s a
distraction from the conversation about…serious issues,” Ng said at an AI
conference in San Francisco last week.
Ng isn’t alone in thinking this way. A select group of AI
luminaries met recently at a closed door retreat in Puerto Rico to discuss
ethics and AI. WIRED interviewed some of them, and the consensus was that there
are short-term and long-term AI issues to worry about. But it’s the long-term
questions getting all the press.
Artificial intelligence is likely to start having an
important effect on society over the next five to 10 years, according to Murray
Shanahan, a professor of cognitive robotics with Imperial College, Professor of
Cognitive Robotics. “It’s hard to predict exactly what’s going on,” he told
WIRED a few weeks ago, “but we can be pretty sure that these technologies are
going to impact and society quite a bit. ”
The way Ng sees it, it took the US about 200 years to
switch from an agricultural economy where 90 percent of the country worked on
farms, to our current economy, where the number is closer to 2 percent. The AI
switchover promises to come must faster, and that could make it a bigger
problem.
That’s an idea echoed in two MIT academics, Erik
Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, who argue that we’re entering a “second machine
age,” where the accelerating rate of change brought on by digital technologies
could leave millions of medium-and-low skilled workers behind.
Some AI technologies, such as the self-driving car, could
be extremely disruptive, but over a much shorter period of time than the
industrial revolution. There are three million truck drivers in the US,
according to the American Trucking Association. What happens if self-driving
vehicles put them all out of a job in a matter of years?
With recent advances in perception, the range of things
that machines can do is getting a boost. Computers are better at understanding
what we say and analyzing data in a way that used to be the exclusive domain of
humans.
Last month, Audi’s self-driving car took WIRED’s Alex
Davies for a 500 mile ride. In Cupertino, California’s Aloft Hotel a robot
butler can deliver you a toothbrush. Paralegals are now finding their work
performed by data-sifting computers. And just last year, Google told us about a
group of workers who were doing mundane image recognition work for the search
giant—jobs like figuring out the difference between telephone numbers and
street addresses on building walls. Google figured out how to do this by machine,
and so they’ve now moved onto other things.
Ng, who also co-founded the online learning company
Coursera, says that if AI really starts taking jobs, retraining all of those
workers could present a major challenge. When it comes to retraining workers,
he said, “our education system has historically found it very difficult.”
Comments
Post a Comment