The AI we should fear is already here

[Zorro]

Alarm over the rise of artificial intelligence tends to focus too much on some distant point in the future, when the world achieves Artificial General Intelligence. That is the moment when — as AI’s boosters dream — machines reach the ability to reason and perform at human or superhuman levels in most activities, including those that involve judgment, creativity and design.

AI detractors have focused on the potential danger to human civilization from a super-intelligence if it were to run amok. Such warnings have been sounded by tech entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Elon Musk, physicist Stephen Hawking and leading AI researcher Stuart Russell.

We should indeed be afraid — not of what AI might become, but of what it is now.

Almost all of the progress in artificial intelligence to date has little to do with the imagined Artificial General Intelligence; instead, it has concentrated on narrow tasks. AI capabilities do not involve anything close to true reasoning. Still, the effects can be pernicious.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/21/ai-we-should-fear-is-already-here/

[appalachiablue]

1. Surveilled, sentenced, fired by AI

Narrow AI is already displacing workers. My research, with David Autor, Jonathon Hazell and Pascual Restrepo, finds that firms that increase their AI adoption by 1 percent reduce their hiring by approximately 1 percent. And of course narrow AI is powering new monitoring technologies used by corporations and governments — as with the surveillance state that Uyghurs live under in China. It is also being used in the U.S. justice system for bail decisions and, now increasingly, in sentencing. And it is warping public discourse on social media, hampering the functioning of modern democracies.

The labor-market effects of AI may be the most ominous. The U.S. economy once created plentiful good jobs — paying decent wages and providing job security and career-building opportunities — for workers with all kinds of backgrounds and skills. From the end of World War II to the mid-1970s, the United States witnessed not just robust employment growth but also rapid wage growth for both high-education and low-education workers.

This growth stopped long before AI. From the 1980s onward, median wages stagnated. Men with less than a college degree started experiencing sharp declines in their real earnings. During that period, automation and corporations’ off-shoring jobs to other countries drove the declines. But now AI is accelerating the trend, approaching or sometimes even exceeding human productivity in some very specific tasks in offices, warehouses and elsewhere. Many employers, focused on cost-cutting, will jump at any opportunity to eliminate jobs using these nascent technologies.

.. Other applications of AI are likely to exacerbate the growing power of corporations and capital over labor, adding to these troubling trends. AI enables much better monitoring of workers — for example, in warehouses, fast-food restaurants and the delivery business...

[Hoyt]

2. Ain't no holding it back. Not sure we should be afraid, though.

But it does challenge our socioeconomic “system.”

[LT Barclay]

3. If you're not afraid now, do some web searches on DARPA

They are trying to make the Terminator, Skynet and the Borg a reality.

[MurrayDelph]

4. In the short run, though

In less afraid of Artificial Intelligence than I am of Genuine Stupidity.