Robot reporter writes story (in Chinese) that’s not detectable as written by a machine. I have a journalism degree that I keep around for sentimental reasons … the question is, how long before message boards are deluged with posts written by machines seeking to extend the political and social influence of their owners?
I heard a report about that or something similar on NPR (maybe it was discussed in this thread already?), about these computers being able to write financial reports. Very interesting.
There are ‘bots’ on reddit (and, I assume, other sites as well) that crawl the forums and post messages in threads. They generally do helpful things like link to Wikipedia articles, show unit conversions, and there are even ‘moderator bots’ that automate some of the tasks of moderating the forums. They are identified as bots, however, and their posts, IME, are concise and not conversational.
I can’t help thinking that I’ve suddenly slipped into a science-fiction story without realising it, there was a segment on BBC News (a supposedly reputable source) that stated that experts (whoever they are) predict that 35% of all jobs in the UK will be fully automated by 2025, that’s only nine years away, and fully self-driving commercial vehicles will supposedly be on our roads in less time than that.
Is this all hype or actually feasible?
All of those type immediate predictions are bullshit.
Someone taking over your entertainment system and playing Wipeout over and over - inevitable given it that it is connected. Having your entertainment system networked with your driving system - not necessary and stupid. Not that it won’t happen, but it doesn’t have to happen.
I wonder if car insurance companies will refuse to pay claims from people who use “password” as their car password.
I wouldn’t be so sure. The near future is the easiest to predict IMO.
Thanks for the answers, I checked the BBC website and these two stories seem to be from the same source.
2025?Google would like to have a word with these slackers … try 2020!
When scientists predict that it will “only take 10 years”, it is as inaccurate as when the guy renovating your kitchen predicts that it will “only take 3 days”. 
well, not according to MIT. Because, to a google-car’s computer, “Pedestrians are detected simply as moving, column-shaped blurs of pixels—meaning that the car wouldn’t be able to spot a police officer at the side of the road frantically waving for traffic to stop.”
And the same article says that Google’s car can’t drive in rain or snow.
Sure, you can’t call it a certainty because it’s not. But you look at the trendlines and they are all going in the same direction … more automation, less employment. Now there are a number of things that can stop it or slow it down tremendously. For example, getting computers to emulate the incredible skill with which the human eye, hand and brain operate together to get things done in the real world has been very tough. We’re still not there yet. But there’s been a general trend for the problems to be solved piecemeal or worked around. I wouldn’t count on that being a bulwark to keep humans employed.
Some people think a functional AI will be needed but I don’t think so. Hell, Google’s self-driving car is not an AI, the computers that write their own code are not AIs, the expert systems that are replacing some lawyers and medical personnel are not AIs … fact is, for most jobs people do, an AI is way overpowered … hell, the problem with most jobs is that human intelligence is way overpowered for them, hence they are boring as hell.
My main fear is not that all jobs will be automated out of existence … I think that would be a good thing. My fear is that it will happen too fast, and human society, laden with slow-thinking conservatives and libertarians, will not provide the social safety net that will be needed, probably in the form of a Basic Income of some sort. I see One Percenter conservatives and libertarians fighting it tooth and nail while millions starve. Maybe I’m cynical … but my cynicism has been honed by the Bush/Reagan debacles, and the continuing debacle that is our Republican Congress.
I’d really like to be wrong about this … but I fear that I will not be.
The worst case is not 99% unemployment (or even 50%) and millions starving, because that just won’t be allowed to happen. That’s way beyond the tipping point. The worst case is the zone short of that, when you can still semi-plausibly argue that it’s possible for people to find jobs, and the economy suffers because the libertarians and one-percenters resist the shift to a new paradigm.
I agree that we’re unlikely to see full AI all that soon. It will be more subtle than that: various jobs will still ostensibly have humans doing them, but with such robust automated tools at their disposal that what takes hundreds of people to do now will take just one person ten years from now. At that point, has the job been “fully automated”? Technically, no: but the reduction in demand for labor in that category is so massively reduced that it functionally amounts to the same thing.
Robots now pwn us in rochambeau:
Not MIT - Technology Review, our alumni magazine which is independent, but which uses freelance writers. Only one MIT person was even quoted in the article.
As for 10 years not being enough, remember that in the first challenge, in 2004, none of the vehicles could finish the desert course. 10 years later they were driving the freeways, admittedly with limitations. As more companies pour more money into this area, not to be left behind, it is perfectly reasonable to think that a car could be sold in ten years time. It would be expensive and not mass market, for sure.
In ten years time pretty much all new cars will be somewhat self-driving, in that they won’t let you crash into the car in front of you or drift out of your lane.
Good point–similar to mine above about things being essentially automated before people consciously realize it is so.
And just think how much smartphone and tablet technology has advanced in ten years. Yet those were anticipated on Star Trek in the '90s.
I do not share your optimism. A recent study of wealthy Americans shows that the wealthiest Americans often have policy preferences that are directly contrary to the majority of Americans – and that Congress in almost every instance does what the wealthy favor and ignores the bulk of Americans.
Other studies show that the rich live in a bubble and are not at all in touch with what middle class and poor Americans feel. They will not feel our pain. They will not even notice it. And theirs are the only opinions that matter, policy-wise.
Uh, I guess you haven’t noticed that the Koch brothers have been unsuccessful at actually *implementing *their policy goals? Looks to me like we still have a minimum wage (increasing in a lot of places), an EPA that is getting increasingly aggressive, and a social safety net that is not so great in some states but at over two trillion dollars just from the federal budget (not including spending by states or counties) is still a whole lot more than what those guys would like it to be.
Residential home construction industry doom nears, asa fella in China has figured out how to build 3D-printed free-standing homes for $5000 each. In many places in America, that’s less than 6 mos. rent on a nice apartment.
Just because the Koch brothers have not been able to end every social safety net program does not mean that they are being ignored. Social Security and Medicare are particularly hard for even the wealthy to deal with because old people depend on them, and old people vote.
But upthread you seemed to be arguing that they would be able to implement a 19th-century style setup on steroids, in which the majority of people would be unemployed, they would have no food stamps or anything, and would just lie in the streets, starving to death. This would never fly: all the spending on political advertising in the universe wouldn’t convince people to vote for this. And if the government somehow did it anyway (don’t ask me how), there would be a revolution.
Depends on how well covered it is in the media. The US media is not controlled by the government, but it IS controlled by the oligarchs who own the big media companies. Iceland’s treatment of its bankers, and repudiation of the debt their gambling brought on the country, for instance, was almost completely ignored by the US mainstream media, even though it was DIRECTLY relevant to America’s financial problems (we didn’t jail OUR bankers, now did we?). The coverage of the caskets of dead American servicemen and women coming back from Iraq was successfully prevented by the US military during the second Iraq war.
And honestly, I don’t think the media would take note if the people lying in the streets starving to death were brown or black, it would take white Americans lying in the streets starving to death for the media to really get interested. And of course, it will be mostly black and brown Americans who will do the starving to death thing, at first. And the first white Americans who starve to death will likely be those rural white trash that everyone likes to bag on.
I don’t really think it will get that bad. I think a more likely response will be the usual half-assed, grudging, stingy response America brings to poverty. Something on the order of bread lines and tent cities. Something designed to make the recipients feel like useless crap while the oligarchs continue to rake in their billions.
My, I’m cynical. But I’ve seen enough of how America works to feel confident about my predictions.