Sergey Brin warns of AI threats through a 'technology renaissance'

The idea that AI will affect employment is very dubious to me:<p>- This stuff was talked about all the time during the industrial revolution. But it turns out that automation just increased worked productivity and made people more valuable.<p>- Since ATMs were introduced, the number of bank tellers in the US actually went up.<p>- Certain industries have actually become <i>de</i>automated over time. As an example: coffee. It used to be exclusively made by automated machines. Now hand-making coffees is one of the largest businesses in America.<p>- AI is only as smart as the data you feed it. Even Google&#x27;s own search rankings have to have human minders because people are too good at gaming their algorithms.<p>- AI is only good at the thing that human beings are very bad at - making quick, analytics based decisions. Of course this is a threat to middle management and executive functions. But for people who actually make things or solve problems, there&#x27;s just one more thing to make and solve problems about.<p>There are some very real concerns about organizations using AI to make decisions about people without human oversight. Imagine an AI tasked with college admissions, bad decisions without possibility of human intervention could hurt people - are we sure it would be that much worse than our current system, often tainted by bias, money, and racism?<p>My concern is that the leaders in the corporate tech world created huge organizations by automating our lives, and now they want to act as gatekeepers on the kinds of automation that is acceptable.<p>Edit:<p>To add to this - a companies stance on AI will probably follow their belief in whether humans are underrated or overrated. Google designs products believing humans are overrated - they think people will be victims of AI. Amazon thinks people are underrated (based on Amazon Turk, customer service, warehouse design) - ironically, they won&#x27;t think humans will overall be harmed by AI.

Not to worry just yet as AI still hasn&#x27;t been realized.<p>What many developers call AI, or more precisely machine learning (ML), are a collection of algorithms for making more intelligent decisions in context to the data at hand. That is simply smarter programming, but it isn&#x27;t intelligence. The machine is still limited to the static instructions available.<p>Real AI will allow machines to spawn original decisions to solve new problems spontaneously. We aren&#x27;t there yet. The ethical implications will likely not be any different than those confronted by people. It generally boils down to <i>just because you can do something doesn&#x27;t mean you should</i>.

Until we invent (or accidentally stumble upon) an artificial mind with volition and a sense of self, AI will continue to be an increasingly powerful, increasingly self-directed set of optimizers. We&#x27;ll continue to use AI in more and more for the ultimate goal of, well, optimizing. Optimizing what exactly? Energy efficiency. Check. Materials. Check. Drug discovery. Check. Financial transactions. Business rules. Capacity planning. Cryptocurrencies. Stock market. Ad placement and targeting. Predicting consumer behavior. Wait...<p>You see, it will all end up in the same place. AI is a way to <i>make money</i>. AI is <i>just</i> optimizing economics, but <i>optimizing economics on steroids</i>. Eventually, the company with the best AI is going to have the best advantage in all business interactions and planning. The first to master-level AI is going to end up with essentially all the money in the end.<p>Don&#x27;t you think the big players know this? Of course. AI will be employed in exactly the same way as every other piece of tech in recent history: to make obscene amounts of money.<p>Don&#x27;t be surprised when making money screws consumers over. It&#x27;s just business. No hard feelings, right? Thankfully, the AI is incapable of feeling.<p>The ultimate AI is the one you can give one command to: <i>MAKE MONEY!</i>

At least there isn&#x27;t anyone out there designing and manufacturing military grade weaponised drones and letting them autonomously decide whether to pull the trigger.<p>Right?

There needs to be term to describe these rail thin articles whose only real affect is to provide an HN conversation-inspiring headline.

So a sort-of-on-topic question: for all the people who are warning of the coming AI apocalypse and warning us to be careful with AI... how do you enforce that? What’s the enforcement mechanism to ensure that the bad people don’t get AI and that people don’t create bad AI? All these warnings, but what can we do about it?<p>If strong AI is invented, especially if it’s open-sourced, the cat is out of the bag and it’s game over, right? We’ve seen how good we are at preventing rogue states from getting nukes. How can we keep them from getting life-ending AI?

That is just wrong, and here is why.<p>We, the People are under the money pressure from that last 7000 years, this slavery mode of Society was a type of model that bring us, after many trouble to this point of our evolution.<p>Now that the robotics&#x2F;cobotics&#x2F;mechatronics sciences are on the point to reach and join with Artificial Intelligence we, the People are close to be free from the money Society model.<p>And that will be great, when 100% of goods and services will be product by the machine, that will be good and great enough to offer us the way to type 1 in the Kardashev Scale, we are at the time we will know an evolution type in our civilization.

Open source image recognition has a ton of ethical problems. Now for a low cost people can set up very sophisticated spying apparatus. I can&#x27;t wait until neural nets can decipher people moving their lips. You could read people&#x27;s conversations from a distance, automatically. Get ready to censor yourself all the time

I have heard the narrative that 90% of people farmed 120 years ago and now look at things. I just do not buy this is going to work this time.<p>I live in the US and at some point we will have to talk about UBI. But right now we can not even have constructive conversations about simple things.

Can we please not upvote articles from tabloid websites? The article is breif, shallow and has a glaring typo in it. This is not journalism. They simply reprinted some quotes. Zero research, zero value added to the conversation. Zero editing. The topic is interesting, but I wish a more legitimate source was linked. Why are we rewarding shoddy work with ad exposures?

While its easy to dismiss the Sci-fi fantastical end of the world claims on the dangers of AI, its important to at least address some of the realistic externalities of this technology.<p>&quot;Brin is showing more real-world concerns of AI-powered systems replacing human jobs or being used to spread propaganda and fake news rather than rise up and enslave humanity&quot;

AI is a threat? Seems more like tech companies leaking or selling personal information is the real threat.<p>AI looks to be more of a distraction.

Maybe we should start with solving OCR, before taking on artificial intelligence. OK, we have self driving cars, but they can&#x27;t actually read road signs.

Link to the Alphabet 2017 Founder&#x27;s Letter : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc.xyz&#x2F;investor&#x2F;founders-letters&#x2F;2017&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc.xyz&#x2F;investor&#x2F;founders-letters&#x2F;2017&#x2F;index.html</a>

this is all fine, first generation of &#x27;true&#x27; ai will probably be extremely biased and too simple for practical use. even though we are automating and digitizing more and more and making everything more streamlined the rules will be as rigid as they have ever been. the human factor will come from generations of ai iterations -- if we are lucky. to be rejected by a machine will be brutal experiences when we all get this pushed in our faces. rich will grow richer and middle class will disappear in favor of poverty across the board.

Human immiseration mitigated by AI—it’s the algorithm’s digital design?

Human immiseration mitigated by AI—algorithmic design decisions?

After multiple months of research, FBI and cybercrime agents realized that the perpetrators and the hackers running the servers were not real humans. It was a decentralized consciousness running across multiple AWS instances. A presidential order was issued to shutdown all of AWS data centers.<p>But it was too late. The decentralized super AI had already recruited and payed humans through cryptocurrencies to run servers at home in order to process the AI algorithms. It did even plan for a power outage scenario. Several people bought electricity generators financed by the AI crypto account.<p>Decentralization is a big problem for the US and Europe. It is very hard to get the whole world onboard with fighting the super AI. By the time (couple days) the UN held most of the world leaders in Geneva, the super AI had already controlled a fund of over $500bn. It created a marketplace to recruit people, hackers, military persons and businesses.<p>Chaos stormed big cities. Police officers were shot dead by professional snippers. Fake news were rampant and nobody could believe, trust or understand anyone else. Several infrastructure services were disturbed by massive DDOS attacks. In the mean time, the AI was able to recruit a couple countries and get them onboard for a huge attack on all other countries. There were no negotiations, the AI calculated the probability of success of its massive attack operation and went full retard.