[ExI] ai and job loss

[spike]

>… On Behalf Of John Clark
Subject: Re: [ExI] ai and job loss

 

>…On Tue, Jan 3, 2017 at 3:49 PM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com <mailto:foozler83 at gmail.com> > wrote:

 

http://qz.com/875491/japanese-white-collar-workers-are-already-being-replaced-by-artificial-intelligence/?utm_source=pocket <http://qz.com/875491/japanese-white-collar-workers-are-already-being-replaced-by-artificial-intelligence/?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits> &utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

 

 

>…We can expect to see more and more of this sort of thing in the immediate future, and job loss won't be limited just to unskilled workers, it will effect everyone. The gap between rich and poor is HUGE and it's increasing. In 2010 the richest 388 people had as much wealth as half of the entire human race, that's 3.6 Billion people. …  John K Clark

 

 

John, the way you placed these two disparate concepts in the same paragraph suggests that job loss and wealth concentration are the same thing.  I would suggest the two concepts do not belong in the same paragraph.

 

We know that job loss is a huge and growing problem, and we know that advancing technology does not necessarily compensate for the jobs it eliminates.  It is past time we technophiles face that reality.  But having wealth in the hands of a few is in a way a solution rather than a problem.  Reason: people with grand piles of money have grand visions.  These grand visions employ people, and in some cases build great things far more effectively than any government can.

 

Consider all the things the Gates Foundation is doing.  Consider all the cool stuff one of our own, Peter Thiel is doing with his money, among them funding Eliezer Yudkowsky’s AI research group.  We know some billionaires do evil with their wealth, but those are the minority.  

 

In most cases, vast fortunes are created from some really cool product, such as Apple or the legion of internet companies.  We saw a recent example where a vast fortune was amassed without an actual tangible product: selling government influence.  But this is mercifully rare.  The majority of the fortunes gave us something in return, and build great things once amassed.

 

spike

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20170105/a839e12b/attachment.html>