Showing posts with label AI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AI. Show all posts
What would happen if more than one intelligent species existed on Earth?
I
would be happy to settle for one intelligent species to begin with. I
look at humanity and I find it very hard to describe most of their
actions as intelligent. We cure diseases only to pollute our
environment increasing cancer and heart failure. We find ways of
making more food only to grow less diversity and then refine the
goodness out so that we're eating rubbish. We create technology to
make our lives easier and then create a whole new raft of ways of
reducing our life like obesity and stress. Are these really the
evidence of an intelligent species?
This
is why I'm not so worried about AI. If it develops an intelligence
greater than ours, surely it won't come up with the same short-term
stupid thinking we do. By definition, it would seek a better
solution. So, maybe it will help us (or coerce us) into fixing the
problems we have made
Why don't we use biology to create super intelligence instead of computer AI?
We
already have super intelligence.
A
3 year old child already performs acts of intelligence that leave the
best and brightest of computers choking in her dust cloud.
The
problem isn’t having intelligence
The
problem is choosing to use it.
Humanity
has this incredible ability to choose to ignore their intelligence
and act stupidly.
I
cannot see a single evolutionary advantage to this skill, but we have
it and we use it. Boy! Do we use it.
The
challenge of AI isn’t that there will be another intelligent
lifeform to join the small group that already exists. What? You
thought man was the only intelligent creature on this planet?
Puh-leeze.
The
challenge is that it will be an intelligent lifeform that will not be
able to turn off its intelligence and will make the intelligent
decision every time.
How can people protect their potential income from the automation and redundancy of careers due to technology?
By
being human
If
you're doing a job that can be replaced by a machine, then you're
underperforming - by a huge way
A
machine is brilliant at dealing with what's in front of it. People
are brilliant at dealing with things that are to come. What is the
world going to be like in just 6 months time? Now a computer can
model that (thanks to a human actually doing all of the hard work for
it) but it's always wrong. Why? Because the variables are too many to
compute and we don't know all of their interactions. And yet,
somehow, people can happily work in this chaos and make reasonable
decisions and have been doing so since there were people. Sometimes,
it's so spooky, we believe that the person is in touch with the gods
or telepathic or something equally supernatural.
Technology
is a surfboard.
The
bestest, fastest supercomputer in the world can't do anything until
someone tell it what to do. "But, Phil one day computers will
decide their own purpose" you cry. Yeah, yeah, yeah! We're
having enough trouble producing Artificial Intelligence. We haven't
even started on Artificial Directiveness yet.
Thanks
to technology, I can now compose a piece of music for a 400 piece
orchestra, play it in full surround sound and even publish the sheet
music to have it played live if I wanted. The most amazing thing
about that is I have no musical training to speak of. Yet I can
contact people from around the globe who would be almost impossible
to meet any other way and get them involved in this project as well.
So
what could you do with technology that you couldn't do before?
How will society keep human labor relevant in an era of increasing automation?
Here is a brief timeline of human labour:
• Before
the Industrial Revolution, human labour was divided into highly
skilled, well-paid artisans who were in great demand; and unskilled
manual labour that was used on an ad-hoc basis as and when they were
required.
• During
the Industrial Revolution, large, costly factories were created that
needed people to be at a specific place at a specific time. The
concept of the "job" was created and in return for a job,
vast numbers of people were required to move to the close vicinity of
the factories and became slaves to the machine which told them when
they could work and when they could rest and how much they would be
paid. Because the humans were subservient to the machines, their work
was dumbed down until by the time of Henry Ford, people just became
minor cogs in a mass-prodution machine. The term "Luddite"
now refers to the uneducated and superstitious who want to stop
progress. In actual fact, the Luddites were well-paid, highly
skilled, self-employed workers who were being put out of business by
machines that didn't do as good as job as them but could do a
passable one cheaper. Their argument was that automation wasn't
progress. But as the work dumbed down, it meant that it was easy to
automate more and more of it as the machines became more
sophisticated.
• Then
we come to the Post-Industrial Revolution also known as the Knowledge
Revolution. Although first referred to in 1969, it didn't really take
off until the Eighties. What happened was that the machines became so
sophisticated that they allowed people to free themselves from
standard employment. So you had the development of remote workers who
were no longer tied to a specific location and flexible hours so
people could start moulding their work around their lives instead of
the other way around. So what happened? Well, machines that allowed
people to act smarter became affordable so more people started to act
smarter. Ironically, at the very time that machines are encouraging
us to take back our freedom, people have started wailing and
screaming that the machines are enslaving us. And, at a time when
they are making it more relevant to be human, people started wailing
and screaming that the machines are making us irrelevant and are
going to be able to kill us. Even Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking got
caught up in this "thinking". To be fair, this is a typical
human reaction to change and the unknown. The "job" is
dying and people didn't know what was going to come next so, of
course, they decide that the absolute worst is going to happen. In 15
years time, people are going to look back on this time and wonder
what all the fuss was about just in the same way we look back now and
wonder why people got so aerated over the "Millennium Bug"
that was going to destroy the world at midnight on January 1, 2000.
So,
where does that leave us in 2020?
Well,
what can be automated will continue to be automated. So expect
driverless cars and to go into fast food restaurants and pick your
selection from a touch screen rather than talk to a human.
But
there is a massive problem with automation. You can only automate a
process that is both fully understood and is required to be done many
times. And this is the blot that advocates of machine intelligence
try to paint over and ignore. It's been said that when Columbus set
off, he didn't know where he was going. When he arrived, he didn't
know where he was and when he left, he didn't know where he'd been.
But, in spite of that, he changed the way we view the world. That is
a perfect description of science. We continually discover stuff we
weren't even looking for. That can't be automated. Now we know where
America is, we can automate pilotless ships to cross the Atlantic.
Until then, automation was useless.
So
what about human labour? Well, I see a time when humans will be free
to do what humans do best: create. When I say that I usually get the
response
"Ah
but, Phil, we can't have 7 billion artists, poets and writers".
And I reply,
"So
who designs the bridges we drive over or the cars we drive in? Who
designs new pacemakers or a more effective cure for a disease? Do
these things just come out of thin air? Since when did 'creating'
become the exclusive domain of artists, poets and writers?"
So,
let me reduce the confusion by saying that I see a time when humans
will be free to do what they do best: create, explore and discover.
Could
the world use 7 billion more scientists and explorers? Er - yeah.
Imagine what would happen if just 10 million people decided to devote
their time and energies to curing cancer - would that make a
difference?
People
say knowledge is doubling every 12 months and soon it will be every
12 hours. This is incorrect. The amount of bullshine is doubling
every 12 months. The world isn't going to be improved by another
billion tweets about Kim Kardashian or Mickey Mouse. Real knowledge
is increasing at a much, much slower rate. Why? Lack of funding. If
it's not a popular area, it doesn't get as much funding. You can see
this at work in charity fundraising too. But what if people were
allowed to spend their own time and resources on whatever they felt
important and were able to do so because they'd been freed from
drudge work through automation? Would that change the world? Do we
think we might get some people wanting to solve our pollution
problems? Or make safer houses in earthquake zones? Or just finding
ways to make more people happier?
What's
the alternative? We do away with automation and keep people chained
to work that they're massively overqualified to do. I have said that
if a human is in a job that can be automated, the job should be
automated because you're wasting the human. I still believe that.
Credit: The header image
is available as wallpaper from wall.alphacoders.com
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