Future of AI

 

'How Routine Is Your Job?': Narrow AI's Impact on the Workforce 

During a lecture last fall at Northwestern University, AI guru Kai-Fu Lee championed AI technology and its forthcoming impact while also noting its side effects and limitations. Of the former, he warned:

“The bottom 90 percent, especially the bottom 50 percent of the world in terms of income or education, will be badly hurt with job displacement…The simple question to ask is, ‘How routine is a job?’ And that is how likely [it is] a job will be replaced by AI, because AI can, within the routine task, learn to optimize itself. And the more quantitative, the more objective the job is—separating things into bins, washing dishes, picking fruits and answering customer service calls—those are very much scripted tasks that are repetitive and routine in nature. In the matter of five, 10 or 15 years, they will be displaced by AI.”

In the warehouses of online giant and AI powerhouse Amazon, which buzz with more than 100,000 robots, picking and packing functions are still performed by humans — but that will change.

 

 

 

Helpful or Homicidal: The Fantastical Possibilities of Artificial General Intelligence

Speaking at London’s Westminster Abbey in late November of 2018, internationally renowned AI expert Stuart Russell joked (or not) about his “formal agreement with journalists that I won’t talk to them unless they agree not to put a Terminator robot in the article.” His quip revealed an obvious contempt for Hollywood representations of far-future AI, which tend toward the overwrought and apocalyptic. What Russell referred to as “human-level AI,” also known as artificial general intelligence, has long been fodder for fantasy. But the chances of its being realized anytime soon, or at all, are pretty slim. The machines almost certainly won’t rise (sorry, Dr. Russell) during the lifetime of anyone reading this story.

 

“The goal has always been to try to build what we call the cognitive architecture, what we think is innate to an intelligence system,” he says of work that’s largely inspired by human psychology. “One of the things we know, for example, is the human brain is not really just a homogenous set of neurons. There’s a real structure in terms of different components, some of which are associated with knowledge about how to do things in the world.”

 

War Robots & Nefarious Motives: How Humans Might Use AGI Is the Real Threat

Klabjan also puts little stock in extreme scenarios — the type involving, say, murderous cyborgs that turn the earth into a smoldering hellscape. He’s much more concerned with machines — war robots, for instance — being fed faulty “incentives” by nefarious humans. As MIT physics professors and leading AI researcher Max Tegmark put it in a 2018 TED Talk, “The real threat from AI isn’t malice, like in silly Hollywood movies, but competence — AI accomplishing goals that just aren’t aligned with ours.” That’s Laird’s take, too.

 

“I definitely don’t see the scenario where something wakes up and decides it wants to take over the world,” he says. “I think that’s science fiction and not the way it’s going to play out.”

What Laird worries most about isn’t evil AI, per se, but “evil humans using AI as a sort of false force multiplier” for things like bank robbery and credit card fraud, among many other crimes. And so, while he’s often frustrated with the pace of progress, AI’s slow burn may actually be a blessing.

“Time to understand what we’re creating and how we’re going to incorporate it into society,” Laird says, “might be exactly what we need.”

But no one knows for sure.