Steve Wozniak recently announced his departure from Google to free himself up to discuss his deep fears regarding the implications of AI technology on society.
Via International Business Times:
A computer scientist often dubbed “the godfather of artificial intelligence” has quit his job at Google to speak out about the dangers of the technology, US media reported Monday.
Geoffrey Hinton, who created a foundation technology for AI systems, told The New York Times that advancements made in the field posed “profound risks to society and humanity”.
“Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he was quoted as saying in the piece, which was published on Monday.
“Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”
Hinton said that competition between tech giants was pushing companies to release new AI technologies at dangerous speeds, risking jobs and spreading misinformation.
“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he told the Times.
Wozniak’s apprehension centered on the potential of AI to be abused by bad actors for a variety of nefarious purposes — but, even absent those, the economic implications alone should be enough to warrant extreme caution.
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IBM to replace 8,000 workers with AI
Via City A.M.:
Artificial intelligence could replace 7,800 jobs at the technology giant, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), according to its chief executive.
Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg News on Monday that the company expected to pause hiring for non-customer facing roles, such as human resources.
“I could easily see 30 per cent of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period,” Krishna told the outlet, of the company’s 26,000 non-consumer facing roles.
The jobs are going bye-bye. They are not coming back.
More and more, human labor will become irrelevant — an overpriced, inefficient commodity.
Efficiency is what the market demands, so efficiency is what it gets.
Given the incentives in front of it in terms of potentially shaving labor costs and streamlining its workflow, why wouldn’t IBM replace its workers with AI, which is already faster, cheaper, and more proficient than humans and will continue to become even more so with time? It’s an exponential growth model.
The real question, for which there is no good, non-dystopian answer, is: what will happen when the oligarchic technocrats who run the United States decide they no longer require human labor to tend to their industries?
What will become of the “useless eaters,” as despots of yesteryear termed their human charges, when they no longer have their labor to bargain with?
