Humans Need Not Apply - Wealth & work in the age of artificial intelligence
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Hunter
Hi Product Hunt, I’m Jerry Kaplan – the old dude with the gray hair grinning in the picture. Here’s a little background.
The boring bio is that I co-founded four Silicon Valley startups, two of which became publicly traded companies. My non-fiction novel “Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure” was named one of the top ten business books by Business Week. I’ve been profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Business Week, Red Herring, and Upside. I’ve got street cred: a Ph.D. in Computer Science from U of Pennsylvania, I’m a visiting lecturer in Computer Science at Stanford where I teach ethics and impact of Artificial Intelligence, and I’m a fellow at The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, whatever that is.
The fun bio: I’ve got four girls ages 16-22. Two just got their first jobs, one for Udacity and one doing social media promotion for restaurants. (The latter thinks Erik Torenberg is super cool!) Neither profession existed when they were entering high school, which is a great indication of why our system of education (at least with respect to vocational training) is so messed up, and why wrote my new book.
The book is not what you think it is. It’s full of amazing stories, for instance about my creepy old rich and famous tech industry friends, contrasted with a detailed description of how the American Dream was nothing more than a fairy tale for my former Admin Assistant. My last bestseller, “Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure” nearly got me run out of town, particularly after I sold the movie rights to Sony Pictures. I’ve done a lot of thinking about what’s real and what bull around AI, so AMAway. Bring your tin foil hat if you believe in the Singularity!
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Hi @jerry_kaplan, here's a question. With 70% of jobs threatened by the existence of AI, do you think the future of work is no work? Will we be living a life that goes back to crafts, focus on arts and leisure as the majority of the worlds jobs will be done by a few?
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Hunter
@adpreneurs Everything old is new again. You could have asked the same question 200 years ago about farm work. It employed 90% of the population and today only 2%. What would they think about today's jobs? That they were optional since we could live just like them and work like 1 hour a week. Really.
They would think what we call work today is nuts. Same thing will happen in the future to us. Things that we don't think of as work today will become 'jobs' -- like playing video games competitively, mining bitcoins, doing arts and crafts. Unpleasant work that can only be done by people will command high pay. Sounds like fun to me, hope I live to see it! (Now that I think about it, look what I do for a living ... answer questions on line. Maybe someday we'll pay people to do this??)
What do you want Silicon Valley and the tech community to walk away with after reading this book?
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Hunter
@eriktorenberg Houston we have a problem. The wonderful new technology we're delivering to a needy world is great, but without some changes to our social and economic policies, it's going to create a lot of short-term human misery in the form of unemployment and increased inequality. We need to start thinking about these things so we can head off the problems.
We also need to work on having our creations properly reflect our ethical and social norms. At Stanford (in the AI lab) I'm not seeing much if any awareness of this, which is why I teach a course on the subject.
It is my pleasure to introduce Jerry Kaplan for an AMA today at 1pm PST. Jerry is a Silicon Valley technologist, serial entrepreneur, technical innovator, bestselling author, and futurist. His latest book is "Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”. AMA about whether your kids will marry a robot, what Steve Jobs was like, among other cool topics. Ask questions in advance... :)!
Hi @jerry_kaplan! For those that are going to be directly impacted by AI supplementing or replacing their jobs, what is the biggest hope for them to adjust in the future environment?
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Hunter
@kunalslab The best defense is to engage in activities that really require human attention or interaction and are not easily automatable. For some insight into this, check out my article on TheAtlantic.com titled "The Age of the Robot Worker Will Be Worse for Men" I don't know if they allow links here, but here it is:
http://www.theatlantic.com/busin...
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Do you think, like Ray Kurzweil, that the 2040's will see the advent of the general AI that will change everything?
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Hunter
@atrusf I think it's very unlikely. This is mostly just wishful thinking IMO. AI will continuously become more general, just as your phone gets more general as you add apps, but that doesn't mean that some magic threshold will be crossed where suddenly these things will 'come alive' in some sense and become sentient.
Machines are machines, people are people. Both may improve over time, but machines are likely to do it faster. ;)
There are some cool academic papers that study when pundits predict AI nirvana, and note that it somehow seems to match up with how long the authors think they might live in a lot of cases. Personally I predict it won't happen as long as I'm alive, so it's in your interest to make sure I live as long as possible!
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Hunter
Absolutely correct --- I cover this in lurid detail in my book. We're looking for risks in the wrong direction. While it's easy to spot a menacing cyborg, we aren't adapted to recognize when we're getting screwed by invisible algorithms. Like viruses, they can be invisible but deadly. Unless we find ways to identify and neutralize these risks, things will just seem to get inexplicably worse for most people while a few take home all the riches -- laughing all the way to the bank and blaming the poor for their own circumstances.
Hi Jerry - I'm reading more and more about the automation of community forums. PR companies paying folks to promote products in comment sections, political pundits spamming message boards, Twitter bots entering every online giveaway they can find, invisible girlfriends that will text and email you. Are there situations where someone would see the benefit of creating artificial intelligence agents to enter any of these communities?
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Hunter
@jeffumbro These developments are an unfortunately side effect of technology. The purpose of social media should be to be social -- which means person to person. The rest is simply spam, highjacking the bandwidth for (mostly) commercial purposes. Who wants to date a robot!
Is there an emerging futurist you admire who has challenged/pushed your own views of AI and the Singularity?
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Hunter
@melissajoykong A tough question to answer ... certainly Nick Bostrom's book super intelligence was influential for me, but not in that I was persuaded by his arguments ... they were specific and analytic enough that it helped me to understand just what's wrong with the whole "singularity" concept.
I've come to believe that its mostly nonsense, and is distracting us from dealing with the very real problems that AI are causing and are likely to get worse. (For example, automated stock trading using AI.) We need engineering standards, licensing, and constraints on just when, where, and how an AI can act on your behalf.
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