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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.


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