• Home
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Special Offers
Business Intelligence Info
  • Business Intelligence
    • BI News and Info
    • Big Data
    • Mobile and Cloud
    • Self-Service BI
  • CRM
    • CRM News and Info
    • InfusionSoft
    • Microsoft Dynamics CRM
    • NetSuite
    • OnContact
    • Salesforce
    • Workbooks
  • Data Mining
    • Pentaho
    • Sisense
    • Tableau
    • TIBCO Spotfire
  • Data Warehousing
    • DWH News and Info
    • IBM DB2
    • Microsoft SQL Server
    • Oracle
    • Teradata
  • Predictive Analytics
    • FICO
    • KNIME
    • Mathematica
    • Matlab
    • Minitab
    • RapidMiner
    • Revolution
    • SAP
    • SAS/SPSS
  • Humor

Is there a future for humans?

May 14, 2017   Big Data

Lurking beneath the fear of artificial intelligence and automation threatening people’s jobs lies a deeper, far more profound threat. Do artificial intelligence and automation imperil humanity itself?

Those predicting a dystopian future include Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and many others. For some of them, it’s only a matter of time before the prophecy of Yuval Noah Harari’s great book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, comes to pass. The bleak vision: a world where a small group of humans control machines, which in turn control the rest of humanity.

Meanwhile, there are others who, even while feeling blindsided by the rapid development of AI, see the potential for a bright future. “The revolution in deep nets has been very profound, it definitely surprised me, even though I was sitting right there,” said Google cofounder Sergey Brin at the World Economic Forum in January. “What can these things do? We don’t really know the limits,” he said. “It has incredible possibilities. I think it’s impossible to forecast accurately.”

And there’s plenty to be optimistic about. Already AI, automation and other digital technologies are helping realize everything from medical breakthroughs to increased economic productivity to self-driving cars. Yet for alarmists, these activities are rendering humans the metaphorical equivalents of frogs inside a pot of water on the stove, unaware that the water is getting warm.

Wading into this controversy are Stephen Wolfram, founder of Wolfram Research, and Irwin Gotlieb, chairman of GroupM. Speaking with VentureBeat editor in chief Blaise Zerega onstage at Collision in New Orleans, the pair voiced carefully reasoned, but very different, approaches to the issue in a session titled “Is there a future for humans?” (Watch video above.)

Wolfram explained that the current kerfuffle around AI is really just a continuation of the way technology helps humans by taking on tasks so that we no longer have to do them. “If there’s one thing that has advanced throughout history, it’s technology,” he said. “The question then is: What is it that humans still have to do?” In his view, we’re rapidly getting to a place where humans will be setting goals and then turning to technology to achieve them, as automatically as possible.

 Is there a future for humans?

Above: Stephen Wolfram, founder of Wolfram Research, asked, “What is it that humans still have to do?”

“When people ask what’s the space left for the humans,” Wolfram said, “the figuring out of what do is the kind of quintessential human piece.”

Gotlieb agreed with Wolfram on this principle — to a point. “I am much more fearful than Stephen,” he countered. “All of a sudden, problems that we thought we had two decades to deal with, we’re going to be facing them much, much more quickly.” He explained that the nerd in him welcomed the advances wrought by AI, but at the same time, “there’s a little voice in the back of my head that’s saying the dystopian outcome is perhaps more likely.”

 Is there a future for humans?

Above: Irwin Gotlieb, chairman of GroupM, said, “There’s a little voice in the back of my head that’s saying the dystopian outcome is perhaps more likely.”

The two discussed ways rapid technological advances were accelerating income inequality, societal changes, and job losses, as well as the need for collective action to better understand and even regulate the ways AI might be used in future. For instance, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov’s three rules of robotics have held up so far, and more recently, Wolfram has described the need for an AI Constitution.

And yet when the conversation took a turn towards ethics and humanity’s general quest for meaning, the importance of human judgment rose to the surface. Gotlieb raised the scenario of one AI-car carrying one passenger and another carrying several passengers; if only one vehicle could be saved, how would an AI system determine a response?

“At the moment there isn’t one solution for the world, and different parties will put different rule sets against it, with different objectives,” Gotlieb said.

“This question of ‘Can we invent one perfect set of mathematical principles that will determine the AIs for all eternity?’ — the answer, I think, is no,” Wolfram said. “In the longer future, we’re being asked to look at ourselves and ask: What is the essence of humanity? If we could define an AI Constitution, what would we want it to say?”

On this they agreed: The future for humans is up to, well, us humans.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

future, Humans, There
  • Recent Posts

    • 5 CRM Marketing Tips to Use as Resolutions for 2021
    • Sidney Poitier To Get A School Named After Him
    • Using Power Automate to Automatically Move Your Email Attachments to SharePoint
    • Why it’s time for fintechs and FIs to jump on the open banking bandwagon (VB Live)
    • Integrating a function with integration limits also dependent on a variable
  • Categories

  • Archives

    • January 2021
    • December 2020
    • November 2020
    • October 2020
    • September 2020
    • August 2020
    • July 2020
    • June 2020
    • May 2020
    • April 2020
    • March 2020
    • February 2020
    • January 2020
    • December 2019
    • November 2019
    • October 2019
    • September 2019
    • August 2019
    • July 2019
    • June 2019
    • May 2019
    • April 2019
    • March 2019
    • February 2019
    • January 2019
    • December 2018
    • November 2018
    • October 2018
    • September 2018
    • August 2018
    • July 2018
    • June 2018
    • May 2018
    • April 2018
    • March 2018
    • February 2018
    • January 2018
    • December 2017
    • November 2017
    • October 2017
    • September 2017
    • August 2017
    • July 2017
    • June 2017
    • May 2017
    • April 2017
    • March 2017
    • February 2017
    • January 2017
    • December 2016
    • November 2016
    • October 2016
    • September 2016
    • August 2016
    • July 2016
    • June 2016
    • May 2016
    • April 2016
    • March 2016
    • February 2016
    • January 2016
    • December 2015
    • November 2015
    • October 2015
    • September 2015
    • August 2015
    • July 2015
    • June 2015
    • May 2015
    • April 2015
    • March 2015
    • February 2015
    • January 2015
    • December 2014
    • November 2014
© 2021 Business Intelligence Info
Power BI Training | G Com Solutions Limited