A Less Radical AI Apocalypse

Some Context: February 1975

Taped to the wall of the elevator to the MIT AI Lab:

Special Meeting

David Baltimore will discuss

the temporary, total moratorium on

research on recombinant DNA

agreed upon at the Asilomar conference

last week

<time>

<place>

(For comparison to AI, see https://intelligence.org/files/TheAsilomarConference.pdf)

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“Yet an exclusive focus on AI and robotics

in terms of “end of the world” and other

doom scenarios … tend to distract from

very real and far more urgent ethical

and social issues raised by new

technological developments in these

areas.”

• Is there still a place for privacy in the …world

we are creating?

• Does work become increasingly stressful due to

information overload?

• Do large and powerful corporations such as

Google, Facebook, Apple, threaten democratic

governance of technology?

• Will further automatisation lead to fewer jobs?

• Are new financial technologies a danger for the

world economy?

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https://www.wired.com/2014/12/armageddon-is-not-the-ai-problem/

AI and jobs

• According to a study by Carl Frey and Michael

Osborne of the University of Oxford, almost 50

percent of jobs in the U.S. and U.K. are susceptible

of automation.

• Some people believe that this is no different than

every other automation that we’ve seen: Jobs will be

lost to machines, but other jobs will be created

instead.

• Others think that the automation of jobs will lead to

increased productivity but decreased

employability

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The New Luddites:What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

• “Replacing manual labor with machines on farms and in

factories was one thing, the worriers say…. But the 21st century

is witnessing the rise of far smarter machines that can perform

tasks previously thought to be immune to automation.

• Today’s software can answer your calls, organize your calendar,

sell you shoes, recommend your next movie…. Tomorrow’s

software will diagnose your diseases, write your news

stories, and even drive your car. When even high-skill

“knowledge workers” are at risk of being replaced by machines,

what human jobs will be left?”

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/08/the_new_

luddites_what_if_automation_is_a_job_killer_after_all.html

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Luddites

• The Luddites were 19th-

century English textile

workers (or self-employed

weavers) who, believing that

technology would render

workers obsolete, formed a

movement between 1811 to

1816 to protest against newly

developed technologies. -

Wikipedia

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Towards a happy equilibrium?

• Niall Firth: Are robots really taking our jobs?

Andrew McAfee: Sure, but there has always been job

destruction because of automation and technological

progress. The important thing to keep in mind is that there

has also always been job creation because of these same

forces.

• NF: How do you see it playing out?

AM: One [scenario] is that … in the end we will reach a happy

equilibrium. The Industrial Revolution was great news,

eventually, for British workers. Electrification of factories

eventually led to a large, stable, and prosperous American

middle class. That pattern should give us confidence that we will

wind up in another happy equilibrium.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/new_scientist/2014/05/robot

s_taking_jobs_technology_will_replace_driving_routine_physical_labor.html

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The standard economist’s rebuttal: the story of the

decline of agricultural jobs in the United States.

• In 1900, 41 percent of the American workforce was employed

in agriculture.

• Over the next 100 years, the technological revolution in farming …

enabled fewer and fewer people to produce more and more food.

• By 2000, just 2 percent of the workforce was employed in

agriculture.

• Yet this shift, which required millions of people to move off farms

and acquire new skills, didn't ruin the economy.

• Instead, by reducing food prices and freeing up people to do

more profitable things with their time, it contributed to

massive growth.

• Why won't that happen again with information technology—why

won't we all just learn new skills and find other jobs?

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/robot_invasion/2011/09/will_robots_ste

al_your_job.htmlCIS 421/ 521 - Intro to AI 9

The Robot Revolution Will Be the Quietest One By LIU CIXIN DEC. 7, 2016 (NYT)

• In 2016, self-driving cars made inroads in several countries,

many of which rewrote their laws to accommodate the new

technology. As a science-fiction writer, it’s my duty to warn the

human race that the robot revolution has begun — even if no

one has noticed yet.

• Let’s try to envision that future. As during every other

technological revolution, the robots will first transform our

economy. People who drive for a living will lose their jobs

— around 3 million in the United States alone. E-commerce

may experience further booms because of automation, and car

ownership is likely to become nearly obsolete as more targeted

car sharing and public transportation systems are developed.

Eventually, the robot cars could be integrated with other

transportation systems.

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The Robot Revolution Will Be the Quietest One By LIU CIXIN DEC. 7, 2016 (NYT)

• Robots will begin to creep into other areas of our lives …as our

investments in robotic transport improve their prowess in areas

such as environmental detection and modeling, hyper-complex

problem solving and fuzzy-logic applications. With every

advance, the use of A.I.-powered robots will expand into

other fields: health care, policing, national defense and

education.

• There will be scandals when things go wrong and backlash

movements from the new Luddites. But I don’t think we’ll protest

very much. The A.I. systems that drive our cars will teach us to

trust machine intelligence over the human variety — car

accidents will become very rare, for example — and when

given an opportunity to delegate a job to a robot, we will

placidly do so without giving it much thought.

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The Robot Revolution Will Be the Quietest One By LIU CIXIN DEC. 7, 2016 (NYT)

• In all previous technological revolutions, people who

lost their jobs mostly moved to new ones, but that will

be less likely when the robots take over. A.I. that can

learn from experience will replace many accountants, lawyers,

bankers, insurance adjusters, doctors, scientific researchers and

some creative professionals. Intelligence and advanced training

will no longer mean job stability…. [T]he remaining jobs may

dwindle to a fraction of what they were, employing perhaps

10 percent or even less of the total population. These may

be highly creative or complex jobs that robots can’t do, such as

senior management, directing scientific research or nursing and

child care.

• In the dystopian scenario, as jobless numbers rise across

the globe, our societies sink into prolonged turmoil. The

technocratic 10 percent could end up living in a gated

community with armed robot guards.CIS 421/ 521 - Intro to AI 13

The Robot Revolution Will Be the Quietest One By LIU CIXIN DEC. 7, 2016 (NYT)

• There is a second, utopian scenario, where we’ve anticipated

these changes and come up with solutions beforehand. Those

in political power have planned a smoother, gentler transition,

perhaps using A.I. to help them anticipate and modulate the

strife. At the end of it, almost all of us live on social welfare.

• How we will spend our time is hard to predict. “He who does not

work, neither shall he eat” has been the cornerstone of

civilizations through the ages, but that will have vanished.

History shows that those who haven’t had to work —

aristocrats, say — have often spent their time entertaining

and developing their artistic and sporting talents while

scrupulously observing elaborate rituals of dress and

manners.

• In this future, creativity is highly valued. We sport ever more

fantastic makeup, hairstyles and clothing. The labor of past ages

seems barbaric.CIS 421/ 521 - Intro to AI 14

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It could happen….

The worst case scenario for artificial intelligence run amok isn't killer

robots. It's widespread unemployment.

That's the view expressed by Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu, a

Chinese-language Internet search engine….

Ng, a veteran of Google and Coursera, said he doesn't see a path from

the state of current technology to the sort of super-intelligence necessary

for malevolent cyborgs. But he does see reason to worry about the

economic impact of advances in computer learning and expert systems.

"If we succeed in building self-driving cars, that's 3.5 million truck

drivers who might have to find a new job," he said.

• During the industrial revolution, Ng said, the population had 200 years to

shift from 98% farmers to 2% farmers. The transformation brought

about by computer technology "will be much faster.“

http://www.informationweek.com/it-life/artificial-intelligence-will-put-us-out-of-

work/d/d-id/1318875

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AI and privacy

Dear valued customer, thank you for giving us all of

your personal data - The Globe and Mail Jun. 08, 2011

• in the next decade, smart phones may be configured to collect

your purchasing history or web browsing habits to send you

customized alerts about a sale at your favourite store, deliver

electronic newspapers tailored to your preferences, or offer

promotions to a restaurant as you walk by it.

• It's convenient, helpful and time-saving. But the trade-off will

be computers know your location at all times, have a highly

detailed profile of your personal preferences and habits and

are able to use that information for an endless array of

purposes using built-in global position system devices, data

storage and the application of AI.

Last updated Friday, Aug. 24, 2012 3:56PM EDT

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Voice Recognition: Risks To Our Privacy Forbes (Oct 6, 2016)

• [Since] speech recognition technologies pierce the

"veil of anonymity" by matching a voice or speech

sample against a database of such samples, a

person can be identified and "tagged" forever. Not

only the person's identity can be revealed, but all of his or

her voice communications can be intercepted and

movements traced for the rest of one’s life. This amounts

to targeted surveillance and computers make it

possible to extend the practice to entire populations,

turning it into a mass surveillance scheme.

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AI and Jail

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AI and warfare

Autonomous Weapons: SDI (“Star Wars”

• (1983) The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a proposed

missile defense system intended to protect the United States

from attack by ballistic strategic nuclear weapons….The system,

which was to combine ground-based units and orbital

deployment platforms, was first publicly announced by

President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983.[1] The initiative

focused on strategic defense rather than the prior strategic

offense doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD). –

Wikipedia

• Key component: Launch detection, and counter attack all

launched autonomously by space based weapons

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The semester’s

last story…Just war theory, crossbows, human volition

and canon law…

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“Autonomous weapons: An open letter

July 2015”• “Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where

the deployment of such systems is … feasible within years, not

decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been

described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and

nuclear arms.”

• It will only be a matter of time until [autonomous weapons] appear on

the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to

better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic

cleansing.

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“Autonomous weapons: An open letter

July 2015”

• “Just as most chemists and biologists have no interest in building

chemical or biological weapons, most AI researchers have no interest

in building AI weapons — and do not want others to tarnish their field

by doing so…. Indeed, chemists and biologists have broadly

supported international agreements that have successfully prohibited

chemical and biological weapons, just as most physicists supported

the treaties banning space-based nuclear weapons….

• [W]e believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many

ways, and that the goal of the field should be to do so. Starting a

military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a

ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful

human control.

• Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Daniel Dennett, Noam Chomsky,

Martin Rees …

• Stuart Russell, Nils Nilsson, Barbara Grosz, Tom Mitchell, Martha Pollack, Henry

Kautz,

• Penn CIS: Aravind Joshi, Eric Eaton, <me>CIS 421/ 521 - Intro to AI 27

For more info

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