Now, Even Artificial Intelligence Gurus Fret That AI Will Steal Our Jobs
Now, Even Artificial Intelligence Gurus Fret That AI Will Steal Our Jobs
1/31/2015 @ 1:57PM
By Robert Hof
Contributor
It’s easy to find lots of people who worry that
artificial intelligence will create machines so smart that they will destroy a
huge swath of jobs currently done by humans. As computers and robots become
more adept at everything from driving to writing, say even some technology
optimists such as venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, skilled jobs will quickly
vanish, widening the income gap even amid unprecedented abundance.
It’s also easy to find lots of people who think those
worries are hogwash. Technological advances have always improved productivity
and created new jobs to replace those made obsolete, insist smart people such
as VC Marc Andreessen.
But it’s rare to find people in the AI field openly fret
about their work resulting in the elimination of millions upon millions of
jobs. So it was interesting, indeed alarming, to find not one but two AI and
machine intelligence experts raise serious concerns this week about the
potential impact of recent advances on the labor market.
One was Andrew Ng, the onetime head of the Google Brain
project, a founder in the online education startup Coursera, and now chief
scientist at the Chinese Internet company Baidu. At two conferences this week,
the RE.WORK Deep Learning Summit in San Francisco and the Big Talk Summit in
Mountain View, the former Stanford University computer science professor took
the opportunity to sketch out AI’s challenges to society as it replaces more
and more jobs.
“Historically technology has created challenges for
labor,” he noted. But while previous technological revolutions also eliminating
many types of jobs and created some displacement, the shift happened slowly
enough to provide new opportunities to successive generations of workers. “The
U.S. took 200 years to get from 98% to 2% farming employment,” he said. “Over
that span of 200 years we could retrain the descendants of farmers.”
But he says the rapid pace of technological change today
has changed everything. “With this technology today, that transformation might
happen much faster,” he said. Self-driving cars, he suggested could quickly put
5 million truck drivers out of work.
Retraining is a solution often suggested by the
technology optimists. But Ng, who knows a little about education thanks to his
cofounding of Coursera, doesn’t believe retraining can be done quickly enough.
“What our educational system has never done is train many people who are alive
today. Things like Coursera are our best shot, but I don’t think they’re
sufficient. People in the government and academia should have serious
discussions about this.”
His concerns were echoed by Hod Lipson, director of
Cornell University’s Creative Machines Lab. “If AI is going to threaten
humanity, it’s going to be through the fact that it does almost everything
better than almost anyone,” he said.
By the way, both Ng and Lipson, not to mention many other
AI experts, pointedly don’t subscribe to the more widely expressed worry by
luminaries such as Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk that
superintelligent machines will find us superfluous at best and eventually kill
us all. “Superintelligence is a distraction,” said Ng, unlikely because we are
so far from any possibility of machines that will truly think and possess
self-motivation.
It’s time quit worrying about Terminators and
Transformers, he said, and focus on the more likely possibility: that machines
will kill our jobs long before they kill us.
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