There’s no doubt that AI can have an amazing positive impact on the world, but it comes with costs. I’m not so concerned with most of the skill-loss we’ll experience since that’s always been a part of the human experience, the shedding of previously primary talents in favor new ones. There’s short-term risk, but I think in the longer run we’re talking about a natural progression. My greater concerns are the ethical ones that might result from software handling formerly human tasks. As sure as there’s prejudice embedded in most of us, there will be some (probably unwittingly) built into smart machines. Will it be more unimpeachable coming from our silicon sisters because they give off the air of indifference?

We also don’t know if we’re headed for a world sans work or one without enough jobs to support our economic systems. The latter, which seems more likely for the foreseeable future, could provoke serious turbulence or even societal collapse if public policy wasn’t nimble enough to deal with the transition. How quickly that changeover should occur will weigh heavily on how significant our response must be.

Two excerpts follow: 1) A paragraph from Ethan Wolff-Mann’s Time article in which a roboticist supports the false idea of robots necessarily being ethical, and 2) Madhumita Murgia of The Telegraph quoting Eric Schmidt, in his AlphaGo afterglow, about the evolutionary nature of job-killing machines.

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From Time:

It may not be long, for example, until androids replace sales associates. According to Osaka University professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, Japanese men don’t like talking with staff at stores because they might get pressured after they indicate they’re interested in making a purchase. “But they don’t hesitate to talk to the android,”he said at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, adding that a “robot never tells a lie, and that is why the android can sell lots of clothes.”

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From The Telegraph:

Few company chairmen could justify taking a 10- hour flight to travel 5,638 miles to watch a board game being played. But Eric Schmidt could.

The Alphabet chairman last week took the trip from Google’s holding company’s headquarters in California to Seoul, South Korea, to watch world Go champion Lee Se-dol go head to head with AlphaGo, an algorithm created by Google-owned British artificial intelligence company DeepMind, over five rounds of the ancient east Asian board game. 

“When I was a young computer scientist in the Seventies, there were many claims that we would beat human intelligence. None of it happened,” Schmidt said over a gourmet Chinese meal a few hours before the first Go game. “Now there is a sense that AI [artificial intelligence] has finally arrived.”

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Now that a machine has beaten a Go grand master at a game he’s been playing professionally for 20 years, surely there is a concern that AI-fuelled robots will be able to replace humans in other areas, hurting jobs? 

“There’s no question that as [AI] becomes more pervasive, people doing routine, repetitive tasks will be at risk,” Schmidt says. 

“I understand the economic arguments, but this technology benefits everyone on the planet, from the rich to the poor, the educated to uneducated, high IQ to low IQ, every conceivable human being. It genuinely makes us all smarter, so this is a natural next step.”

A natural next step for Alphabet, perhaps, but for those whose jobs may be displaced by robots and the like, Schmidt may yet have to do some convincing.•