Tech Companies Should Stop Pretending AI Won't Destroy Jobs

[DamianTV]

https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/0...t-destroy-jobs

Kai-Fu Lee, the founder and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and president of the Sinovation Ventures Artificial Intelligence Institute, believes that we're not ready for the massive societal upheavals on the way. He writes for MIT Technology Review:

The rise of China as an AI superpower isn't a big deal just for China. The competition between the US and China has sparked intense advances in AI that will be impossible to stop anywhere. The change will be massive, and not all of it good. Inequality will widen. As my Uber driver in Cambridge has already intuited, AI will displace a large number of jobs, which will cause social discontent. Consider the progress of Google DeepMind's AlphaGo software, which beat the best human players of the board game Go in early 2016. It was subsequently bested by AlphaGo Zero, introduced in 2017, which learned by playing games against itself and within 40 days was superior to all the earlier versions. Now imagine those improvements transferring to areas like customer service, telemarketing, assembly lines, reception desks, truck driving, and other routine blue-collar and white-collar work.

It will soon be obvious that half of our job tasks can be done better at almost no cost by AI and robots. This will be the fastest transition humankind has experienced, and we're not ready for it. Not everyone agrees with my view. Some people argue that it will take longer than we think before jobs disappear, since many jobs will be only partially replaced, and companies will try to redeploy those displaced internally. But even if true, that won't stop the inevitable. Others remind us that every technology revolution has created new jobs as it displaced old ones. But it's dangerous to assume this will be the case again.

The real danger is not whether or not AI can actually think, it is whether or not men think.

[Intoxiklown]

Cambridge just released a paper a few days ago regarding some of the pitfalls of AI. Some deal with concerns mentioned in your posted article, and others such as their use to aid hacker groups as well as enemy governments. We're seeing more and more discussion of these possibilities because AI is advancing at a rate that is shocking. It was made worse when Putin made a comment several months ago along the lines of, "Whichever nation leads the world in AI will rule the world". Not that the notion was earth shattering, but that comment in conjunction with China pouring billions into AI research gave a lot of people a reality check.


AI is a threat to global stability, warns Cambridge University report

In a report titled The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation, the university body warns that malicious manipulation of AI could create a destabilising effect and calls on governments and corporations worldwide to ensure that this does not happen.

It also warns of the rise of “highly believable fake videos” impersonating prominent figures or faking events to manipulate public opinion around political events.

The 100-page report identifies three security domains (digital, physical and political security) as particularly relevant to the malicious use of AI. It suggests that AI will disrupt the trade-off between scale and efficiency and allow large-scale, finely-targeted and highly-efficient attacks.

The authors expect novel cyber-attacks, such as automated hacking, speech synthesis used to impersonate targets, finely-targeted spam emails using information scraped from social media, or exploiting the vulnerabilities of AI systems themselves (e.g. through adversarial examples and data poisoning).

Likewise, the proliferation of drones and cyber-physical systems will allow attackers to deploy or repurpose such systems for harmful ends, such as crashing fleets of autonomous vehicles, turning commercial drones into face-targeting missiles or holding critical infrastructure to ransom.

It also warns about the rise of autonomous weapons systems on the battlefield, which risks the loss of human control and presents “tempting targets for attack”.

It suggests that academics and others should rein in what they publish or disclose about new developments in AI until other experts in the field have a chance to study and react to potential dangers they might pose.

Report co-author Dr Sean O hEigeartaigh [sic] said: “Artificial intelligence is a game changer and this report has imagined what the world could look like in the next five to 10 years.

“We live in a world that could become fraught with day-to-day hazards from the misuse of AI and we need to take ownership of the problems, because the risks are real.

“There are choices that we need to make now and our report is a call-to-action for governments, institutions and individuals across the globe.

More at source: https://eandt.theiet.org/content/art...ersity-report/