At the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland on Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella explained that his company has designed its artificial intelligence (AI) solutions specifically to augment human workers, not replace them.
In a panel discussion with other tech leaders, Nadella said that AI, much like user experience, can be designed with a goal in mind. While some are designing AI systems to think like humans in order to replace them, he said, Microsoft is designing systems to assist humanity. Nadella said that Microsoft was utilizing “pragmatic principles that can guide AI creation.” He also mentioned that this isn’t a new strategy for Microsoft, as he pointed out this idea in his 10 rules for AI that he posted in June 2016.
Of the rules initially proposed by Nadella, the two most relevant are :
“A.I. must be designed to assist humanity,”
and
“A.I. must maximize efficiencies without destroying the dignity of people.”
In his original post he made on Slate, he wrote, “we want to build intelligence that augments human abilities and experiences. Ultimately, it’s not going to be about human vs. machine.”
Nadella also spoke on the mission of tech companies to democratize AI. “To me, the key right now in this next phase of AI is: How do we put tools so that others can create intelligence in every walk of life?,” The Second Machine Age, a book that asks what jobs will be left once software has perfected the art of driving cars, translating speech and other tasks once considered the domain of humans.
Some fear a vision of a world where computers entrench the power of a wealthy elite and push the majority into poverty.
Brynjolfsson identifies various astonishing technologies lining up to encroach on human labour. Such as always been the case with new technologies. Taxis generally work better than rickshaws, and now we have self-driving cars.. Lifts work 24 hours a day 7 days a week with no holidays, pay rises or pensions.
The question is whether the rate and adoption of technological change is of a different order in the digital information age to the industrial revolution. Unlike much of the 20th century we’re now seeing a falling ratio of employment to population. Maybe with an aging population pretty much globally (except maybe Middle East and Nigeria) machines taking over work from human may prove to be a necessity.
There has been much discussion of a tipping point being reached with many technologies- growth is logarithmic rather than linear. For most of the second half of the twentieth century the economic value generated – a country’s productivity – grew hand-in-hand with the number of workers. Since 2000 the two measures began to diverge. From the turn of the century a gap has opened up between productivity and total employment. That gap has widened significantly, and reflects continued economic growth but no associated increase in job creation. Despite all of Trump’s electioneering claim about jobs, Obama actually increased jobs, but many jobs were lost not to Mexican nd Chinese workers but to automation Caiifornian orange orchard growers are not looking to switch orange picking jobs from Mexicans to Americans they are automating the job. A wide range of studies shows that simple algorithms generally provide better decision than expert intuition. The City of London financial sector and is not so much threatened by Brexit and loss of jobs to Frankfurt but that its bankers will be replaced by machines that calculate faster and more consistently with less risk.
Another trend over the past quarter of a century the income gap between the richest and the poorest in OECD countries has continued to widen. Today the average income of the richest in these countries is nine times that of the poorest. . For the first time since the Great Depression, over half the total income in the United States went to the top 10 percent of Americans in 2012. Between 1973 and 2011 the median hourly wage in the US barely changed, growing by just 0.1 percent per year. This wealth gap isn’t restricted to America. In Sweden, Finland and Germany, income inequality has grown more quickly over the past 20 to 30 years than in the US.
The message again is be smarter than a machine, or cheaper.
Production in the second machine age depends less on physical equipment and structures and more on the four categories of intangible assets: intellectual property, organizational capital, user-generated content, and human capital,” the book states, and points out that in the US, the share of GDP that goes to labor has declined over the past decade, falling to its lowest point in the third quarter of 2010, 57.8 percent. Muhc more ahs gone to assets and to owners.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Wassily Leontief stated as long back as 1983 that ‘the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors’.”
John Maynard Keynes, forecast it as an inevitable outcome of society discovering ways to make labour more efficient more rapidly than finding new uses for labour. There’s no economic law that says ‘You will always create enough jobs or the balance will always be even’, it’s possible for a technology to dramatically favour one group and to hurt another group, and the that overall have fewer jobs.
A law firm may not hire as many researchers because a machine can scan through hundreds of thousands or millions of documents and find the relevant information for a case or a trial much more quickly and accurately than a human. Call centre operators gradually are gradually being replaced by question-answering, automated systems. Cortana on your pc shows the power of a digital assistant with voice recognition. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne from Oxford Martin School & Faculty of Philosophy in the UK wrote “According to our estimate, 47 percent of total US employment is in the high risk category, meaning that associated occupations are potentially automatable over some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two,” they predict in the report The Future of Employment. During the coming decades they forecast two “waves of computerisation” during which different categories of jobs will be washed away, with no field of employment left untouched.
“In the first wave, we find that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labour in production occupations, are likely to be substituted by computer capital. As computerised cars are already being developed and the declining cost of sensors makes augmenting vehicles with advanced sensors increasingly cost-effective, the automation of transportation and logistics occupations is in line with the technological developments documented in the literature. Furthermore, algorithms for big data are already rapidly entering domains reliant upon storing or accessing information, making it equally intuitive that office and administrative support occupations will be subject to computerisation. The computerisation of production occupations simply suggests a continuation of a trend that has been observed over the past decades, with industrial robots taking on the routine tasks of most operatives in manufacturing. As industrial robots are becoming more advanced, with enhanced senses and dexterity, they will be able to perform a wider scope of non-routine manual tasks. From a technological capabilities point of view, the vast remainder of employment in production occupations is thus likely to diminish over the next decade.”
They also predict disruption to jobs in services industries from personal and household services robots, automation of more routine sales roles, such as cashier and telemarketers, and from prefabrication of buildings to construction jobs.
Digital technology drastically reduces the cost of technologies, as well as the infrastructure and people needed to support those industries that use the technology. Digital photography us an eample Brynjolfsson and McAfee point out, in an age where our photos sit on hard drives rather than in ring-bound albums, the need for a large number of workers disappears. “These photos are all digital, so hundreds of thousands of people who used to work making photography chemicals and paper are no longer needed. In a digital age, they need to find some other way to support themselvesindispensable complement to something that’s getting cheap and plentiful.”
