A Less Radical AI Apocalypse - Penn Engineeringcis521/Lectures/AI-Future Concerns.pdf · A Less...
Transcript of A Less Radical AI Apocalypse - Penn Engineeringcis521/Lectures/AI-Future Concerns.pdf · A Less...
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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