Will artificial intelligence help improve the human race or wipe it out completely? The debate continues.
On March 24, 2015, Steve Crowe writes on Robotics Trends:
If you haven’t heard, Tesla founder Elon Musk is concerned about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence (AI). But he hasn’t really given specifics about why.
Until now.
In a recent interview with scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Musk said he’s not worried about self-driving cars, his concern is when a machine can rapidly educate itself. He explains:
“If there was a very deep digital superintelligence that was created that could go into rapid recursive self-improvement in a non-algorithmic way … it could reprogram itself to be smarter and iterate very quickly and do that 24 hours a day on millions of computers, well – ”
“Then that’s all she wrote,” interjected Tyson, laughing.
Musk certainly isn’t alone with his thinking. Stephen Hawking has said AI “could spell the end of the human race.” And Microsoft founder Bill Gates is worried about the dangers of AI. He recently wrote in a Reddit Ask Me Anything, “First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though, the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.”
We can’t even get drones to pick up and deliver shoes. We tried that, it was a disaster. What are the chances this superintelligence Musk speaks of comes to fruition? I’m no scientist, and there are more people than ever collaborating on AI, but the odds don’t seem too high. As Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, recently said, “we quite simply have to separate science from science fiction.”
Many experts disagree with the “AI is going to take over the world” theory, and their reasoning is this: computer algorithms are too narrow, and they don’t have imaginations.
Thomas Dietterich, president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and a professor of computer science at Oregon State University, says we’re asking AI to perform “high-stakes tasks that will depend on enormously complex algorithms.”
Dietterich says those algorithms won’t always work. “Computer systems can already beat humans at chess, but that doesn’t mean they can’t make a wrong move,” he tells Phys.org. “They can reason, but that doesn’t mean they always get the right answer. And they may be powerful, but that’s not the same thing as saying they will develop superpowers.”
The anti-AI crowd creates a lot of noise, so we thought it’s time to share the other side of the story. We’ve rounded up 5 experts who think the “dangers” of AI have been overblown, and we share their reasons why.
Click here for 5 Experts Who Say Elon Musk is Wrong About AI.
And if you’re in the anti-AI crowd, check out these experts who agree with you.
http://www.roboticstrends.com/article/5_experts_who_say_elon_musk_is_wrong_about_ai
In the meantime, robotics sales and the development of labor-saving computerized operations are increasing in all markets, as competitive intensity races to gain more efficient, lower-cost productive gains from the non-human factor of production. This is a disruptive technology that is rapidly shift toil work from human labor to smart, collaborative “tools” that reduce toil, enable otherwise impossible production, create new highly automated industries, and significantly change the way in which products and services are produced from labor intensive to capital intensive––the core function of technological invention and innovation. The trend represents an unprecedented and ever-accelerating shift to productive capital––which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. As a result, most changes moving forward in our productive capacity, and that of the world will be increasingly attributed to technological improvements in our capital assets, and a relatively diminishing proportion to human labor. It is nonsense to believe that physical capital “enhances” labor productivity (labor’s ability to produce economic goods). The fact is, the opposite is true. It makes many forms of labor unnecessary. As a result, the trend has been to diminish the importance of employment with productive capital ownership concentrating faster than ever, while technological change makes physical capital ever more productive.
Because productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth it should become the source of added property ownership incomes for all. If both labor and capital are independent factors of production, and if capital’s proportionate contributions are increasing relative to that of labor, then equality of opportunity and economic justice demands that the right to property (and access to the means of acquiring and possessing property) must in justice be extended to all. Yet, sadly, the American people and its leaders still pretend to believe that labor is becoming more productive and should be paid more, and ignore the necessity to broaden personal ownership of wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets simultaneously with the growth of the American economy as the legitimate means to increase incomes for EVERY child, woman. and man.
The question that requires an answer is now timely before us. It was first posed by binary economist Louis Kelso in the 1950s but has never been thoroughly discussed on the national stage. Nor has there been the proper education of our citizenry that addresses what economic justice is and what ownership is. Therefore, by ignoring such issues of economic justice and ownership, our leaders are ignoring the concentration of power through ownership of productive capital, with the result of denying the 99 percenters equal opportunity to become capital owners. The question, as posed by Kelso is: “how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (capital owners who OWN “tools”) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers, who only own their labor), a minor share of total goods and services,” and thus, “how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?”
