This seems unfortunate and somewhat challenging to do. Our current economic model encourages improving efficiency of systems. This seems like a good thing. Its really too bad that people "need" jobs. Jobs should be creating value or they shouldn't exist. Artificially "creating" jobs to prop up the systems feels like fighting against reality and a bad long term plan.
Think about it: 50% unemployment is terrible. 100% unemployment is not unemployment. It means there are enough resources to go around that nobody has to work. There is so much food, shelter, and entertainment that we don't need to get up in the morning and go to work.
Obviously, 100% unemployment cannot happen. In all likelyhood, we'll still need doctors, chefs, artists, etc. But that the direction we are going in, and we better figure out how to set up a new economy to adapt to the new realities.
I envision a shift in the mind set. Personally, if I have more money then I could spend in a lifetime, and choose to work to make myself even richer, I don't care if 10 other families are living off my wealth. People will have a choice: do something productive for society, and live a slightly better lifestyle, or pursue more personal fulfillment. We'll see a lot more artists, and a lot less custodians. In the long run, I believe this shift will be a good thing, but it will require us to stop using terms like "moocher class".
The problem is getting people to pay for the "wants" part. I'm worried that the internet has accustomed people to treating creative content as a free resource by nature of being on the internet. It's the most efficient distribution mechanism for a lot of creative works, but the economics of an ad-filled internet experience with the user as product is very disturbing on a grand scale.
The whole dream of economic progress since the Enlightenment was that our needs would become increasingly solved so that we could focus on what we really enjoy as human beings. To quote John Adams:
> "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
But we live in a world with an ever expanding supply of people and a rapidly diminishing set of "necessary" jobs. If we want to avoid the end game of that situation (revolution) we need to find ways to get the economics of the unnecessary-but-still-valuable to work.
For instance a radiologist who has a very long education behind them and make $300K is in bigger risk of being replaced by image recognition software than a house cleaner.
With regards to art music is being made in large parts by machines and we are now at the point where humans can't hear the difference between a piece of music made by humans and machines.
I do agree with you about work though. Assuming a future government structure similar to our current one, a humane economic policy will probably need to provide some form of universal basic income.
The job decimation will be huge: truck drivers, delivery drivers, taxis, bus drivers, automotive insurance industry, traffic enforcement, collision repair shops, emergency services, car sales, car manufacturing (less accidents more vehicle sharing).
I'm sure it will create a few new job types, but a couple of orders of magnitude less jobs than the destruction. Hopefully the world considers this a good thing.
Honestly it seems that most people are too ignorant to see economic pain this will cause until it has happened. Unfortunately, I'm sure unions and industry groups see this train coming and will put up road blocks (pun intended) to delaying an inevitable roll out of the technology.
For instance, programmatically tuning some variables can be considered a standard task, either with some bruteforce or a small search between the possible combinations. This was earlier considered AI, but is now a common approach. AI now would probably be to do more advanced problems with genetic algorithms or similar. But where to draw the line?
The letter will have no effect. Similarly, you can sing a letter to stop drugs.
Why do shareholders of big corporations profit from science in a grossly non-proportional way, while more than 50% of world's population has to live on under $2 a day?
It is time for the world's greatest minds to start thinking about how to fix capitalism, because it seems to be seriously broken.
And we need it fixed more than we need e.g. iPhone 7.0, or Google Adwords 2.0.
Actually, we should start treating social fixes like we do technical rollouts. Prove it on a small scale somewhere first, and then carefully expand.
This seems like common sense. Yet for some reason changes in policies tend to be sweeping, national or even international.
Esther Duflo has pushing this approach at the MIT Poverty Action Lab. The main insight is to reject grand generalizations and broad theorizing. Sitting in an armchair pondering how to "fix capitalism" is unlikely to lead to useful lines of thought. Society is too complex a system, cause & effect relationships can be highly localized and context-dependent; formulaic thinking just leads one down ideological rabbit holes.
In fact, you guys had the unfortunate role to find out how well USSR style (I assume) communism works.
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...
Put another way: if the financial beneficiary of increased efficiency is NOT they who invested, why would those investors make the investment?
With my thesis now in AI, I probably know far more than those two about this. And we're sooo far away from AI being a superforce destroying mankind.
The initial version of this document was drafted by
Stuart Russell, Daniel Dewey & Max Tegmark, with major
input from Janos Kramar & Richard Mallah, and reflects
valuable feedback from Anthony Aguirre, Erik
Brynjolfsson, Ryan Calo, Tom Dietterich, Dileep George,
Bill Hibbard, Demis Hassabis, Eric Horvitz, Leslie Pack
Kaelbling, James Manyika, Luke Muehlhauser, Michael
Osborne, David Parkes, Heather Roff Perkins, Francesca
Rossi, Bart Selman, Murray Shanahan, and many others.It doesn't have to be conscious to be dangerous.
If we're far away from this being a problem, we may be far away from understanding how to solve it. We certainly wouldn't want the former to outpace the later, given what is at stake.
Am I thinking about this the wrong way?
Unless you believe there is something inherently special and unique about humans that make it impossible for this physical phenomenon to be replicated artificially, there is absolutely something to worry about here.
I can see how a bug in those kinds of systems could cause things like that without necessarily being conscious or intelligent.
My real concern with all of this is always the uncontrolled ecosystem of steadily evolving viruses and malware. We will never have control of that... and there is no telling what it can become in the future.
I think it will be a simple error induced by some random mutation in one of these malicious progams, not some vast artificial intelligence, that causes us problems in this arena first.
In effect the scariest AI is distributed, self propogating and can't be unpowered. Effectively a virus. I have yet to see a meaningful distributed AI, even in concept.
How much of this progress required training data generated by working humans? What would feed future statistical algorithms if this source of training data was greatly reduced?