I've been watching the AI developments... and the bloggers writing about the AI "foom".
- Scott Alexander on the feeling of being on the verge of AI Apocalypse.
- Scott Alexander on the new Janus-faced AI simulators, a weird new breed of alien intelligence we didn't expect.
- Erik Hoel on why we shouldn't be cavalier about the potential impact of super-intelligent AI. (Item 4 of 9 on the page).
But in my opinion, the new AI chatbots may replace Google's current search, but they will stop far short of replacing anything but the most mundane human jobs.
Its so hilarious that people are worried about artificial intelligence when we haven't even made a robot that can flip hamburgers yet! Wake up and smell the grease: the real world is complicated and messy. We can't even replace the jobs that everyone, even the people currently working them, want replaced. I don't think we're going to be replacing professionals anytime soon.
Just look at driverless cars. Driving is a great example of something you'd think computers would be good at.... if you'd never driven a car in the real world! Computers are great at driving cars in video games, but the real world is messy. That's the Real World problem.
The second problem is even bigger: the messiness of the human social world! Even if driverless cars were better than human drivers, that's not good enough. We expect computers to be perfect. If a company sells me a car and I wreck it, I'm responsible. But if the company sells me a driverless car that crashes, the company is responsible.
For every task that matters we want a human to be responsible. Even if they solve the Real World problem with bigger and better AIs, the Responsibility problem will always prevent human replacement. Imagine if my boss could replace me with a computer: he would then be 100% liable for any mistakes the computer made! Is that the kind of liability any Pointy Haired Boss wants?? As long as he has real humans working for him, there's always someone to share the responsibility.
Example: imagine something that's even simpler than driving a car: flying a passenger airplane! I'm sure autopilot could fly an airplane as well as a human. But would anyone want to fly on an airplane with no human pilot? We'll always have the human pilots, even if the autopilot does more and more of the routine work.
Humans are social creatures. The humans who think AI will rule the world must be living inside a computer world. Its interesting that, as more and more of our world is computerized, we hear more and more from the people living inside the computer world. But its not the real world!
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