The Threat from AI is not What We Think I saw a piece about AI, which is Artificial Intelligence and it said not to worry about machines turning on us because they will have done so much damage to us before that there could be a revolt. I said to myself I have to read this. It was about a conference which was held with engineers and scientists. They were people who probably know more about AI than anyone else and it brought up some really good points. The most worrisome one is AI will wipe out the middle class, because all the jobs we would do will be taken up by devices which use AI. It went so far as to even discuss the fact the medical profession will be largely replaced. I have given a lot of thought to the dilemma and about the only solution I can see is the creation of new jobs, perhaps in space exploration and colonization of other planets, but even that might not work out. You have to wonder if other civilizations on other planets went through the same thing and how many of them survived and how did they do it. The conference came to the conclusion giving a guaranteed income to people would not solve the problem, because it would take away incentive for people to retrain for other jobs. One conclusion I didn’t agree with was the fact the participants thought high level and low-level jobs would still exist. Take low level jobs for instance, one would think they would be the easiest to replace. First let me say I believe all jobs are honorable and I would never look down on anyone who has any job, but it seems to me it would be pretty easy to replace someone who cleans floors and such with a machine that does the job. The only reason someone might be kept in a job like this in the future is they are paid so little it would be costlier to buy a machine and maintain it. Food servers are already being replaced in some places with machines. I have heard there are fast food restaurants where a human cannot be seen. You place your order with a machine and it comes out from a machine. It is said the entire establishment has only a human manager who is there to make sure there are no problems. The push to have cars, planes and trains drive themselves is going to cost millions of jobs. Where are these people going to go? It may take a little longer, but medical personnel are also threatened by AI. AI will probably be able to make a better diagnosis than a doctor, because it will be programmed with every disorder known at the time. Tests were made and it was found AI was as good as a doctor diagnosing ailments and is improving. There are already some places in some countries where nursing home attendants and social workers have been replaced with robots. What is next replacing nurses? Doctors are slowly being replaced by robots which have screens connecting them to a doctor. They make rounds in some hospitals reducing the number of doctors needed. The doctor can talk to the patient and listen to what they say and do things like check their records and get them help. Will the doctor eventually be eliminated from the loop? There are plenty of photos around showing factories from the 1950s or earlier. Interestingly there were thousands of people working on the factory floor. Take auto factories for example, the assembly line was completely manned. Today if you look at photos of auto factories you are lucky if you can see more than three people on the huge floor. The rest of the factory is filled with machines controlled by AI which are busily building cars. This does not bode well for the future. Some people think the creation of jobs in new fields will eliminate the worry of getting a job. Let’s look at web design. This didn’t exist before the internet. It became a promising field since everyone who wanted a website needed a designer to create it for them. As time went by software came out which allowed the average person who had no knowledge of web design to be able to create their own website. This cut down on the number of web designers needed. What is going to happen when it gets so easy to design a website even the big companies will be able to get an AI to do it, where will all the web design jobs go? I think we know the answer to that. Jobs like fund managers and other financial type jobs are not exempt from AIs taking over. An AI can make a stock trade far faster than a human can. It can also analyze data and history in a flash and come to a decision, one which eventually could be far better than any made by a human. So where would all this leave the human race? A few ultra-rich people would probably be leading the lives of royalty with the rest of the world starving and depending on scraps being thrown to them by these people. Humans could turn out to be victims of their own progress. In the past all the progress we made helped us and made our lives more productive and gave us more leisure time. Life is better for many people today than it was in the Middle Ages for example. Progress in AI may not be so good. What can be done to slow down AI? I hate to say this but probably nothing. The boards of corporations are all about profit and if they make more profit by employing less people they will go for it, it is human nature. The governments of the world are controlled by the businesses of the world so they would probably do nothing meaningful to halt our headlong rush into disaster, but if they could what would they do? They could put a tax on the use of AI which would be equal or more to the salary of an employee or employees an AI device replaces. This would never be allowed, but I am just musing here. The government could also limit the number of hours a robotic device could be used in a day. Robotic devices and AIs could be banned from certain industries. These ideas would have to be classified as pipe dreams, but there is not much else we could do to maintain some jobs. A storm of AIs is coming and unless we come up with a way to keep people employed, we are going to have a very big problem.
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