e767pmk@yahoo.co.uk
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2017 22:18:48 +0000
1. In the UK, politicians and commentators are getting in a panic about AI
taking away everybody's jobs; at risk of over-simplifying a huge topic, this
seems unlikely to me, as I can remember the mid-1970s, when computers were
moving from just being number-crunchers to doing more-glamorous jobs like
typesetting and page make-up for newspapers and magazines, and the Internet
and e-mail ("the electronic office") were on the horizon. These would let
us whizz through our work in no time, with confident predictions that by the
end of the century [1999] we would all be working 22-hour weeks and retiring
at 40, which generated concerns that the streets might be filled with bored
but well-off people causing social unrest. Now that we're well into the
21st century, how did it work out? Well... the typical working week is
still around 40 hours, as it has been since the 1950s, while with pension
funds depleted by an aging population and the credit crunch many people are
worried if they will not be able to retire as early as 65. Not only that,
but with computers, e-mail, the Internet, and cellphones, in many fields of
work employees are expected to deal with business matters 24/7. So what did
happen to the "leisure boom"? Obviously it's wise to anticipate likely
developments and be prepared for them, but the main RISK seems to be
planning in detail for a future which turns out to be quite different to
what's expected.
> (1) The problem isn't AI, or other forms of automation, it's the use to
> which AI and automation are put and the basic mechanisms for allocating and
> deploying resources in our society.
2. Not sure what this has to do with RISKS, but... this seems to take the view that there's a fixed amount of health, wealth, and happiness in the world, and there must be a better way of sharing it fairly, if only we could find it; I'm not convinced, but then I'm just an engineer.