Hacker News Reader

Comment by pluma | Hacker News Reader

There isn't a market for strong AI yet, anyway.

We don't want machines that think like humans. We want machines that can perform certain tasks with an error rate less than or equal to that of humans (adjusted for other economical factors like price of labour).

While strong AI is a great plot device for science fiction, it's still fiction.

Sure, there are attempts in academia to replicate human intelligence, but even those rarely attempt to replicate a cohesive whole.

We want AIs that can reason about real-world objects and consequences, yes, but there is no benefit in making them sentient. Self-driving cars don't have to be sentient. An AI can be largely autonomous without requiring sentience.

Obligatory XKCD What If?: https://what-if.xkcd.com/5/

View on HN

I disagree. If you could run a machine that performed equally well in a real-world environment as a human, at a lower cost than it costs to feed and pay a human laborer, it would be a no-brainer to invest in thousands of these machines to perform various consulting services that are bought and sold over the internet. And here I've only touched the slice of the world economy that exclusively consists of information-inputs being turned into information-outputs.

The market for general AI is massive. The only reason you can't see it is that no similar service exists. So this is not an argument.

(In fact, a similar service does exist: Indian IT outsourcing sweatshops, which while usually not delivering top-quality products still are massively profitable).

Yes and no. Right to a certain degree, but AI taking away jobs may mean an economic chaos in third-world nations?

Why only third-world nations? The inhabitants of "third-world" countries do not produce lsss economic output than first-world countries because they are inferior in intelligence to people in the West. It's all in the education and culture, and there is no reason to believe that this could not be adapted if human-level AI is reached.

It is incredibly myopic to believe that the Western would would be shielded from the impact of such a development. But this is really beside the point I wanted to bring up. My key point is that this argument shows that AI could constitute a threat to humanity in the long term, and that it is necessary to provide more funding for research on AI safety. The economic incentives will bring this stuff to the center stage once it becomes possible, and by then we better have a damn good idea how to ensure that super-human AI keeps acting in our interests.

Why do you think we need general AIs to replace human labour?

I'm struggling to find any cost-intensive labour that would require anything beyond a small group of specialist AIs to replace human labourers.

Also, these discussions tend to assume that we (by which I mean those making these decisions) want to replace every profession with AIs. We don't. Even if we fully automate certain forms of labour, we still want human oversight, if only so we have someone to blame in case something goes wrong.

There is a huge 'market' for robots which can make money. Unfortunatelly if a robot could do my job or yours at least as well as we do (I am a software developer) that would worth lots of money to some business people... Obviously I don't want those robots to exist, but some business-people will always want the cheaper workforce. (Even if at the next level they will face robot competition too...) Now the question is whether can a robot be a good software developer (or UX designer, or project manager) without being very human like... Maybe, but I don't think so. I think if a program will be able to do our job well, that would be strong A.I.

I, oddly enough, want these AI to exist. It would signal the end of the industrial revolution (finally), and force us to consider doing other things than "work 40 hours a week." Assuming of course our AI overlords don't decide we are irrelevant and exterminate us all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com