When Will AI Exceed Human Performance?

AKALib

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday June 05, 2017 · 3:12 PM PDT

2017/06/05 · 15:12

http://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/photo/robot-woman-manipulating-hologram-displey-royalty-free-image/511972513

TAGS

Edit Tags

Tag History

Done Editing Tags

“When Will AI Exceed Human Performance?” — that is the question posed by researchers at Oxford and Yale Universities, to a number of leading machine learning researchers. The survey results are described in a paper by Katja Grace and others at arxiv.org/.… published last week.

In summary, researchers predict AI will outperform humans in many activities in the next 10 to 35 years, as shown in the table below. Researchers believe there is a 50% chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks in 45 years and of automating all human jobs in 120 years, with Asian respondents expecting these dates much earlier than North Americans.

Work Activity	Year AI will outperform humans
Translating languages	2026
Driving a truck	2027
Working in retail	2031
Writing a bestselling book	2049
Working as a surgeon	2053
Performing AI Research	2102

The following figures show a summary of the full set of work categories. The “low-hanging fruit” over the next 15 years will have devastative consequences for the workforce and as a society, we need to understand it and plan for it. It is not science-fiction anymore.

Aggregate subjective probability of ‘high-level machine intelligence’ arrival by future years

Interestingly, Asian respondents expect HLMI (High Level machine Intelligence) to be reached in 30 years, while North American ones expect so in 74 years, with an overall median value of 45 years.

Other Findings

Researchers believe the field of machine learning has accelerated in recent years,
Explosive progress in AI after HLMI (High-level machine intelligence) is seen as possible but improbable,
HLMI is seen as likely to have positive outcomes but catastrophic risks are possible,
Society should prioritize research aimed at minimizing the potential risks of AI.

Methodology

The survey population was composed of researchers who published at the 2015 NIPS and ICML conferences (two of the premier venues for peer-reviewed research in machine learning). A total of 352 researchers responded to the survey invitation (21% of the 1634 authors contacted).

The paper contains more details on the survey questions and the methodology used to tabulate results.

Accuracy

The results obviously should be taken with a few grains of salt. Predicting the future is an activity fraught with dangers and we are off more often than not. However the authors state —

While individual breakthroughs are unpredictable, longer term progress in R&D for many domains (including computer hardware, genomics, solar energy) has been impressively regular. Such regularity is also displayed by trends in AI performance in SAT problem solving, games-playing, and computer vision and could be exploited by AI experts in their predictions. Finally, it is well established that aggregating individual predictions can lead to big improvements over the predictions of a random individual.

The Current Administration

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin in an interview in March 2017 at www.axios.com/… on the subject of Artificial Intelligence (AI) supplanting human jobs stated - "It's not even on our radar screen.... 50-100 more years away. I'm not worried at all about robots displacing humans in the near future. In fact I'm optimistic.” This misguided statement is frightening in its ignorance, real or willful.

See my earlier diary AI and the Future of Jobs for reactions to the above statement, its comparison with studies conducted and recommendations made by the Obama administration and other informed opinion on this subject.

Other Informed Opinion

From www.economist.com/… —

What determines vulnerability to automation, experts say, is not so much whether the work concerned is manual or white-collar but whether or not it is routine.

In “This is the most dangerous time for our planet”, Stephen Hawking writes -

The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.

Barack Obama in an interview at www.wired.com/… —

You’re exactly right, and that’s what I mean by redesigning the social compact. Now, whether a universal income is the right model—is it gonna be accepted by a broad base of people?—that’s a debate that we’ll be having over the next 10 or 20 years. You’re also right that the jobs that are going be displaced by AI are not just low-skill service jobs; they might be high-skill jobs but ones that are repeatable and that computers can do.

Few Examples of current AI and Automation

The field of AI, automation, robotics and machine-learning has accelerated over the past few years. These technologies have been around since the birth of computers, but recent advances has brought forth companies with deep pockets and simple applications that are amenable to AI techniques, that have become pervasive.

AI, big data analysis and learning algorithms are part of our everyday lives, more than we realize.

Facebook uses AI for targeted advertising, photo tagging, and curated news feeds.
Microsoft and Apple use AI to power their digital assistants, Cortana and Siri.
Google’s search engine from the beginning has been dependent on AI.
Fanuc, maker of the industrial robots used to assemble iPhones for Apple and cars for Volkswagen and Tesla, is now adding artificial intelligence and machine learning to its robots.
Self-driving cars, with technology development and investment by most car manufacturers, Google, Tesla, Apple and Intel.
Google’s DeepMind, IBM’s TrueNorth (neural chip) and many more projects listed at en.wikipedia.org/… are examples of recent progress and examples of what’s in the pipeline.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/11/artificial-intelligence

Solutions

en.wikipedia.org/… describes the following categories of solutions that have been proposed and experimented with to deal with AI caused disruptions in the job market —

Banning/refusing innovation
Welfare payments
Basic income
Education
Public works
Shorter working hours
Broadening the ownership of technological assets
Structural changes towards a post-scarcity economy
Merge the human brain with software and AI — (Elon Musk www.theverge.com/…)

Universal Basic Income

A basic income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement. (From basicincome.org/...)

From the article “A Plan in Case Robots Take the Jobs: Give Everyone a Paycheck” at www.nytimes.com/…

How will society function after humanity has been made redundant? Technologists and economists have been grappling with this fear for decades, but in the last few years, one idea has gained widespread interest — including from some of the very technologists who are now building the bot-ruled future.

Their plan is known as “universal basic income,” or U.B.I., and it goes like this: As the jobs dry up because of the spread of artificial intelligence, why not just give everyone a paycheck?

“I think it’s a bad use of a human to spend 20 years of their life driving a truck back and forth across the United States,” Mr. Wenger said. “That’s not what we aspire to do as humans — it’s a bad use of a human brain — and automation and basic income is a development that will free us to do lots of incredible things that are more aligned with what it means to be human.”

Elon Musk at the World Government Summit in Dubai -

I think we'll end up doing universal basic income. It's going to be necessary.

YouTube Video

Remarks

We have tough challenges ahead in so many areas, but our government has been hijacked by some of the most science-illiterate and incompetent people on the planet. Instead of understanding the changes that have been wrought by technology and planning for the even more drastic changes on the horizon, they are busy deceiving the American workforce into thinking that the future of the workplace lies with good old-fashioned manufacturing, mining and trucking jobs.

The message for most of us is not to think of UBI as a savior for us personally; we need to keep building our skills and those of our children, because there will be plenty of jobs that will require human ingenuity and thought processes.

What do you think? What will the future bring for the human workforce? What jobs will be left for humans to perform? Will the workforce adapt to automation or will millions be left unemployed? Is UBI inevitable? What will society look like post-UBI?

References

Poll
72 votes Show Results
Addressing the effects of AI on the future of jobs will require -

Banning/refusing innovation

Ignoring it; AI will not replace humans

Ignoring it; AI is a Chinese hoax

Education, training and Basic Income

Reducing world population

72 votes Vote Now!
Addressing the effects of AI on the future of jobs will require -

Banning/refusing innovation

3%

2 votes

Ignoring it; AI will not replace humans

3%

2 votes

Ignoring it; AI is a Chinese hoax

0%

0 votes

Education, training and Basic Income

58 votes

Reducing world population

10 votes

This content was created by a Daily Kos Community member.

Make YOUR voice heard!

When Will AI Exceed Human Performance?

Comments are closed on this story.