Quotes About Automation

Artificial intelligence is now poised to surpass human intelligence.

with the rise of AI, robots, and 3-D printers, cheap unskilled labor will become far less important

The most important question in twenty-first-century economics may well be what to do with all the superfluous people.

In other words, switching to autonomous vehicles is likely to save the lives of one million people every year. It would therefore be madness to block automation in fields such as transport and healthcare just in order to protect human jobs. After all, what we ultimately ought to protect is humans—not jobs. Displaced drivers and doctors will just have to find something else to do.

When considering automation, therefore, it is wrong to compare the abilities of a single human driver to that of a single self-driving car, or of a single human doctor to that of a single AI doctor. Rather, we should compare the abilities of a collection of human individuals to the abilities of an integrated network.

Two particularly important non-human abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updateability.

the job market of 2050 might well be characterized by human-AI cooperation rather than competition.

Creating new human jobs might prove easier than retraining humans to actually fill these jobs.

Bank clerks and travel agents, who a short time ago seemed completely secure from automation, have become endangered species.

The real problem with robots is not their own artificial intelligence but rather the natural stupidity and cruelty

Yet since we have no idea what the world and the job market will look like in 2050, we don't really know what particular skills people will need. We might invest a lot of effort teaching kids how to write in C++ or speak Chinese, only to discover that by 2050 AI can code software far better than humans, and a new Google Translate app will enable you to conduct a conversation in almost flawless Mandarin, Cantonese, or Hakka, even though you only know how to say "Ni hao.

Which means that when designing their self-driving car, Toyota or Tesla will be transforming a theoretical problem in the philosophy of ethics into a practical problem of engineering

The technological revolution might soon push billions of humans out of the job market and create a massive new "useless class," leading to social and political upheavals that no existing ideology knows how to handle.

In order to function, the people who operate such a system of drawers must be reprogrammed to stop thinking as humans and to start thinking as clerks and accountants.

Hence it would be madness to block automation in fields such as transport and healthcare just in order to protect human jobs. After all, what we ultimately ought to protect is humans – not jobs. Redundant drivers and doctors will just have to find something else to do.

Two particularly important nonhuman abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updatability.

Consequently, despite the appearance of many new human jobs, we might nevertheless witness the rise of a new useless class. We might actually get the worst of both worlds, suffering simultaneously from high unemployment and a shortage of skilled labor. Many people might share the fate not of nineteenth-century wagon drivers, who switched to driving taxis, but of nineteenth-century horses, who were increasingly pushed out of the job market altogether.15

Once algorithms choose and buy things for us, the traditional advertising industry will go bust.

patient. Therefore we will probably have an AI family doctor on our smartphone decades before we have a reliable nurse robot.9 The human care industry—which takes care of the sick, the young, and the elderly—is likely to remain a human bastion for a long time.

we would have to explore new models for post-work societies, post-work economies, and post-work politics.

the rise of AI might eliminate the economic value and political power of most humans.

drivers and traffic police (since when rowdy humans are replaced by obedient algorithms, traffic police will be redundant). However, there might be some new openings for philosophers, because their skills—until now devoid of much market value—will suddenly be in very high demand. So if you want to study something that will guarantee a good job in the future, maybe philosophy is not such a bad gamble.

One new model gaining increasing attention is universal basic income.

What will be the fate of all these lawyers once sophisticated search algorithms can locate more precedents in a day than a human can in a lifetime, and once brain scans can reveal lies and deceptions at the press of a button?