Re:The Long-Term Jobs Killer Is Not China, It’s Automation
by edblarney on Thursday December 22, 2016 @03:26AM
(#13235816)
" But it is reasonable to expect that they will get better, and it is reasonable to expect that we will be able to emulate the brain with transistors and on a much bigger scale some days."
No, it's not reasonable to assume they will emulate brains.
Not even the experts are saying that.
They're not trying to emulate brains at all.
Re:The Long-Term Jobs Killer Is Not China, It’s Automation
by otakucode on Thursday December 22, 2016 @07:46AM
(#13236895)
Uhm... yes, they most definitely are. There are many efforts underway right now building 'neuromorphic' architectures with memristors (which function very similarly to neurons). I don't think there is any promise in the approach personally (our 'mind' is a property of the feedback loop between our body and the world, and can not exist without the body, dualism is just wrong) but there are many who disagree.
Also, even going back to von Neumann it has always been expected that the brain will be able to be built in hardware, simply because neurons exhibit binary behavior. They fire or not, and all the rest is massive interconnectedness and adaptive changes to their activation potential. There's lots of argument about whether reproducing the behavior of neurons will result in a 'mind' or be useful, but no one would argue that we simply won't be able to build a brain workalike.
Re:The Long-Term Jobs Killer Is Not China, It’s Automation
by cm2187 on Thursday December 22, 2016 @03:45AM
(#13235889)
I was under the impression that neural networks are inspired by the brain. And as we understand how the brain works better, it is obvious that we will be replicating it mechanically.
Re:The Long-Term Jobs Killer Is Not China, It’s Automation
by Ar-Curunir on Thursday December 22, 2016 @05:27AM
(#13236286)
Only superficially. Deep learning has little to do with biology, and even if a future AGI was running on a NN, it's structure would be very different from our brains.
Re:The Long-Term Jobs Killer Is Not China, It’s Automation
by zigzigzag on Thursday December 22, 2016 @05:40AM
(#13236343)
A not insignificant share of the population just cannot become skilled.
Can you justify that statement?
> tell me which people you know, in which industries, have outright 'lost their jobs' due to some AI or machine
Right now AI is still a future technology. The current AI algorithms are the equivalent of the early GSM phones, which looked like car batteries, very far from modern smartphones. But it is reasonable to expect that they will get better, and it is reasonable to expect that we will be able to emulate the brain with transistors and on a much bigger scale some days.
The second objection is that the demand for unskilled workers keeps shrinking. Our society has adapted to the industrial revolution by having a much larger skilled worker base, pretty much everyone can now read and write, college degrees have become the norm, etc. But there are brick walls to how skilled a society can be. A not insignificant share of the population just cannot become skilled. And even among skilled workers, only a fraction will always be capable to satisfy the demand for the "hotest" skills (engineering, software development, etc).
So I think that as that imbalance develops, we are bound to live with a structurally unequal society. And it doesn't have much to do with capitalism, it has more to do with the evolution of the technology outpacing the biological evolution of our species.