Labor activists have been warning for years that rapidly developing technology — and in particular artificial intelligence — poses significant threats to the stability of the workforce.
Probably not a great sign when the AI advocates start saying the same thing:
Artificial intelligence could replace 80 percent of human jobs in the coming years -- but that's a good thing, says US-Brazilian researcher Ben Goertzel, a leading AI guru.
It's a "good thing." You know who says that? The "AI guru." It's not hard to see why an "AI guru" would feel that way. When the rest of us are losing our jobs, who do you think will be safely, gainfully employed?
Maybe we should be doubtful of claims made by a guy who dresses like this:
Mathematician, cognitive scientist and famed robot-creator Goertzel, 56, is founder and chief executive of SingularityNET, a research group he launched to create "Artificial General Intelligence," or AGI -- artificial intelligence with human cognitive abilities.
With his long hair and leopard-print cowboy hat, Goertzel was in provocateur mode last week at Web Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the world's biggest annual technology conference, where he told AFP in an interview that AGI is just years away and spoke out against recent efforts to curb artificial intelligence research.
Before modern tech, 90% of people worked in agriculture. Now we don't have to. Every time a new technology is invented, it allows people to not work less, but to work more at what they love.
I'm not sure if that's this guy's dream, or if he wants a hippie communist utopia where work is outlawed:
You could probably obsolete maybe 80 percent of jobs that people do ... I don't think it's a threat. I think it's a benefit. People can find better things to do with their life than work for a living... Pretty much every job involving paperwork should be automatable.
"People can find better things to do with their life than work for a living."
Can they? I myself am highly dubious that throwing huge numbers of people into effectively permanent unemployment, supplying them with government cash while taking away the meaningful labor that once defined their lives, will not exactly end well. But I guess I don't think like an artificial intelligence expert.
Let's pray our overlords don't use AI to try to take meaningful work from us.
