Now as many of you may know artificial intelligence is making massive progress in learning machines. That is Machines/computer programs that are given a task to get better at and then are capable of getting better at it over time until they as good if not better than any human alive. Now there are some tasks that haven't been cracked by programmes yet, there are still plenty of things that we as humans are better at than machines but that my not always be the case. So the question is what to do about this?
There have been numerous doomsday predictions from some leading scientists, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawkling immediately come to mind about a scenario where machines out pace humans and essentially render humans obsolete, I would taske these predictions with a massive pinch of salt as both Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking are not actually experts in the field but even if they were, it's very much a point of discussion whether a programme we could design could ever become what is termed "Strong artificial intelligence". Which is (basically) an artificial intelligence which thinks for it's self in the way a human does, a sentient machine that we would recognize as having the same abilities and reasoning skills as a human. Much less what the consequence would be if this did happen. The fear they are expressing and very much the route of Paranoia about AI is the fear of the unknown one of the most underlying fears in human existence we don't know what will happen if we design a strong AI and just like our fear of the dark is rooted in the fact that darkness obscures the world around us and means we don't know what is there the future is obscured from us and all we have is an over active imagination to fill it with boogeymen and strong AI is one such boogeyman.
But all this being said AI does produce some problems that aren't just anxiety about the unknown, with the ability for a machine to get better and better at a task it leads to the eventual problem that humans who do thoes tasks being not needed to do those tasks any more, to have their lively hood replaced by a machine which we've come to accept in menial jobs like being a cashier we've become at home with the fact that a machine can do a job that isn't what we consider a professional career. But what happens when machines become better doctors or engineers than we are? Do we clamp down on development of AI and leave these jobs for Human workers? essentially give in to our paranoia of the machine? Or do we build a new type of society a kind of service culture where humans are essentially left at their leisure to pursue things that they find value in whilst not actually being provided with recompense for it because the job that actually needs doing is handled by a machine?
So, whats your answer NSG? you may find the scenario I've outlined an irrational one, if so take a single example, (without the whole post scarcity society angle to it) Tomorrow we develop A doctor AI that is cheaper to go to than a real doctor it's capable of diagnosing a great range of conditions, and it's shown to be at least as effective as a human General Practitioner this greatly decreases the demand for doctors, a field that you were previously pretty much guaranteed some type of work in. What do we do with the doctors that we no longer need to employ? They've spent a longtime, an awful longtime becoming doctors do we just turn around and say re-train as something else? which it might not even be worth doing because who's to say the skill set they retrain into is going to be useful beyond a month? When professional skills start being automated in my opinion we're going to it's going to have a much greater effect on society than the menial jobs that we've already seen go. If a machine gets produced in a week to do a job that takes humans 5 years to do can field be considered safe any more?
There of course have been topics like this before on the general theme of automation or the singularity, but I feel like all these things have to be discussed in the context of each other. My own generalized answer to these question would be to develop a citizens income. To get away from the idea that a person needs to earn a wage to be performing a useful job and also to promote the general Idea that life is for personal enrichment rather than for supporting yourself and your loved ones. But of course I'm not capitalist so ideas like this come easy to me so what say ye oh generalities?
