As for UBI, it's one way of addressing the fact that our civilization is mature enough to abandon the concept of having to work to be able to live (not to mention, non-bullshit jobs are steadily disappearing).
Or at least make the concept universal. It's been alive and well for the ruling classes for centuries.
But that's all irrelevant in any case, because the issue in question here wasn't working or not-working, but having to work to be permitted to live. Most of us have to. The ruling classes don't.
But, thus far, our best AIs are simply pattern recognition systems strung together like Christmas lights.
There's also no reason to think that 'intelligence' can be exponentially scaled or that any system can recognize how to improve itself -- or have the capacity to do so in situ.
Completely agree. I do believe calling current run of ML/DNNs "AI" is stretching it (and I expect to be hit with the "AI is a moving goalpost" argument but seriously? is it a moving goalpost for those who know how the current generation of solutions work?).
> There's also no reason to think that 'intelligence' can be exponentially scaled or that any system can recognize how to improve itself -- or have the capacity to do so in situ.
There's no reason to assume otherwise. Exponential scaling (i.e. "intelligence explosion") may be a contestable assumption, but really, we're in big trouble if a general AI reaches human levels. We know this level is possible because we exist. Even if AI did just that, we'd have to contest with a new sapient being, and give it ethical consideration. But I see nothing preventing that AI from being as smart as 10 or 100 humans combined.
The rest really follows from nature of technological artifacts - if you can make one, you can make one thousand (applies to both hardware and software) and make it work as one; you can iterate on it, and if you can, then a human-level AI will be able to do it too.
Who knows, maybe in a 1000 years? i don't see it happening in our lifetimes.
And what are all those AIs supposed to be working on? Based on the direction it's currentlying heading, it looks like we'll just be getting more the same stuff we don't need.
If AI is going to help humanity, it needs to be applied to maslow's hierarchy of needs. 99% of society still isn't past the first row. Look at the bottom row, it's pretty simple: Shelter, Food, Water and by extension to afford those things: transportation and medical insurance.
I would waget that's probably what the Great Filter is. Survival in nature inevitably transitions into survival among other intelligence. Intelligence seeks to preserve itself, not its eventual mastery of the universe, and it'll be a hard battl to win even if 99% are good-natured, 1% will still undermine others for their own benefit.
Our problems always have been, and always will be, each other. You point to AI as a problem, but we all should really be looking in the mirror instead. It's up to all of us to solve the social troubles that will arise from continual increases in efficiency.
UBI is one idea that might help prevent a severe imbalance of resources in society. But it alone won't be enough to solve our social problems, and I don't think most people claim it will. It's a start.
If this is really something that keeps you awake at night, be a part of the solution and help us think of realistic ways to address these issues. Going backwards in time isn't an option.
I see how the automation of those analytical scientist work a huge companies like google, where you probably save quite a few millions on having less employees, but even at our 20.000 employee municipality AI is an expense. Sure we could maybe cut the data/analytical staff down to half the size if we replaced them with data scientists, but data scientists are more expensive and you’d also need to pay a license for whatever ML platform you use, and none of our POCs with various consultants or academics have provided us with anything that was better than what we already have. In fact, In every test, it turned out our own human build models were a lot better at predicting and auditing than ML.
Heh.
AI is also struggling outside of big datas. We’ve run a poc on self driving cars for three years now, and they don’t work, at all. They certainly can work, if we replace and maintain every piece of road infrastructure to their exact needs, but that’s never going to happen.
I guess AI will eventually find a usage outside of advertising and privacy invasion, and don’t get me wrong, we certainly use it for things like trolling through millions of old case files as part of our quality control. So it’s not completely useless, but I don’t see how it’ll change the world anytime soon.
Boy if I could shout this from the rooftops to all the AI "luminaries" or people that think AI is going to deliver us to some utopian future where work is now unnecessary and we are all free to "chase our passions" (and along with it, this junk notion that UBI is somehow now fundamentally required to continue society), I would. This wisdom is greatly needed for all the current "future techies" out there.