Comments 11

站在人工智能革命的风口浪尖

Sep 13, 2016 Marc Benioff

旧金山——过去三十年来，消费者已经从激动人心的技术进步中获益匪浅。在很多国家，大多数人揣在口袋里的个人电脑比二十世纪八十年代的大型计算机运算能力更强。高中时我用来开发游戏的Atari 800XL电脑其微处理器拥有3，500个晶体管；而今天我的iPhone 上运行的电脑其晶体管数达到20亿个之多。当时，1GB的存储装置耗资100,000美元，而且有冰箱大小；今天它几乎不花钱，尺寸也以毫米计量。

即使取得了如此大的进步，我们仍然可以在整个星球——包括所有人和物——联网的过程中期待更快的进步。已经有50亿人使用移动设备，超过 30亿人可以接入互联网。未来若干年，500亿件物品——从灯泡到冰箱、道路、服装等诸如此类——也将连接到互联网。

每过一代人左右，新兴技术就会出现融合，某种革命性的技术因此而诞生。比方说，成熟的互联网、廉价的带宽和文件压缩，以及苹果标志性的iPhone使得像Uber,、Airbnb、 YouTube、Facebook和Twitter这样的企业重新定义移动客户体验。

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 19 in all 19 Comments on this article

Tomas Ramirez Oct 21, 2016

Only 3,631 millions people around the world have Internet access less 50%
Tri Nguyen Oct 13, 2016

Although Benioff envisions a future where AI augments the productivity of workers, he overlooks the amount of turmoil that technological advancements cause as well as man’s value in relation to technology. The editor of the MIT Technology Review David Rotman emphasizes this about the Industrial Revolution in his article Who Will Own the Robots? saying, “the misery of factory workers is well documented in the literature and political writings of the day”. Indeed new machines forced a great number of workers such as farmers and tailors out of work, and factory owners exploited these displaced and desperate workers with hazardous machinery and wages as low as $8-$10 a week.
Today technology developments threaten to cause another economic oppression: the economic gap between high and low wage earners today has found itself at a historic high within the 34 developed countries within the OECD, with technology as a chief culprit. Within the US, less than 50% of African Americans have access to high-speed internet, and 56% of teachers state in low-income schools state access to technology as a major challenge for students at their schools. Tech journalist Adrienne Lafrance writes also points out in her article Technology, the Faux Equalizer that while companies such as Google and Facebook thrive in the Silicon Valley, many crucial technological advances for water safety and public health have little funding.
AI could very well “unleash new levels of productivity [and] augment our personal and professional lives,” but what good will it do if AI unleashes the productivity of only a select few? As Rotman writes, “If the rewards of new technologies go largely to the very richest, as has been the trend in recent decades, then dystopian visions could become reality.” We need to make sure that everyone owns their own piece of the future. And doing so can have great benefits: research shows that human-robot teams work even better than either one alone. AI can accomplish greater good if all people from large to small businesses and even individual workers can utilize it. For example, 3D printing developers can solely on expensive printers for large companies, but building cheap and user-friendly 3D printers can allow all craftsmen to shine in their own industries. And chatbots for small brick-and-mortar industries can prove themselves as a huge boon, so long as industry giants do not keep intelligent chatboxes for themselves. In order to realize Benioff’s vision of the future, engineers must consciously develop AI for all people rather than only an exclusive few.
Benioff has faith that “AI will also improve existing jobs and spawn new ones,” but he misses the fact that the true value of machinery comes from freeing humans from automatable labor. Humans will always have their place in the world even without labor, as the ones to reap all the benefits that machines sow and to decide what to do next. Kevin Kelley explains this in his article Better Than Human: Why Robots Will — And Must — Take Our Jobs when he writes, “The one thing humans can do that robots can’t (at least for a long while) is to decide what it is that humans want to do”. Just as Benioff speculates, AI has the potential to augment humans and help us accomplish whatever we desire; however, we must consciously develop AI to help mankind as a whole, and only then can we attain peaceful visions of a machine-augmented future for all.
Stephen Pain Sep 28, 2016

I agree with Victor Morris - there is a real danger of a disenfranchisement, and development of the connected and unconnected. There are still many who are illiterate and more so without the basic knowledge of how to use smartphones etc. They will be kicked to the wayside. I would prefer if the grand vision was much more people than IT centred. For example the desertification of Africa where people are dying of hunger and thirst. How will this impact upon them? Will they be empowered? No. The politics of power rests with those with. Clouding will give those with power more power. How else do you account for the obscenity of all those billionaires? How on earth can those millions share in the "mobile customer experience"?
hanno achenbach Sep 20, 2016

"Cusp"
Concise Oxford Dictionary:
"Apex, peak."
Victor Morris Sep 19, 2016

To that end our human race will become like the Eloi In H G Wells "Time Machine" - but who will become the "Morlocks?
André Rebentisch Sep 16, 2016

Let us be frank. it is about applied Bayesian tools, not AI.
dan baur Sep 16, 2016

You can answer your own questions by looking at previous similar fears. Watch Metropolis, the movie and understand that it didn't come true.
- dan baur Sep 16, 2016
  
  for Michael Public
Michael Public Sep 16, 2016

From an economic perspective:

Virtually every single job other than prostitutes can be taken over by AI managed machines. Makes you wonder what the end game is here.

Imagine the year 2100 and work is no longer something people do. What is it like?

Are we all well off philosophers and socialites who spend the days living like royalty or, more likely, are 99.999999% living in a slum unable to afford AI machines of our own while the megacorporation UberFaceGoog owns and controls the entire production and service industries?
- yw yap Sep 22, 2016
  
  They might even able to create the thingy "intelligent" enough to satisfy your sexual need(s). Mostly machines, controlled by a few. The wealth gap will just grow larger. What will the society become next? Will the ppl just become zombies glueing to computer games?
Michael Public Sep 16, 2016

There is a common misconception that this article is also guilty of. Computers do not have intelligence, never have, and never will. What they do have is programming, which is a derivative of a certain type of logical human intelligence.

AI for instance, uses mathematics to find patterns in things. However, it cannot invest this mathematics - it is programmed to use this mathematics by humans who spent large amount of their intelligence deriving these types of mathematics.

AI appears to the layman to 'have intelligence' but to someone who understands how it works will understand that underneath it lies only a series of logical statements created by human intelligence.
dan baur Sep 13, 2016

AI will never surpass human intelligence because AI IS human intelligence augmented by a dumb machine.

Guess who's responsible when Tesla car kills someone or when Microsoft chatbot turns racist? That's right, "AI did it" won't fly.
- dan baur Sep 14, 2016
  
  @Paul
  Think back - we've trained dogs, horses and birds for thousands of years. yet there's no evidence they've become any smarter. Hollywood fantasy aside, time doesn't transform brainless tools into intelligent beings.
- Paul Friesen Sep 13, 2016
  
  Nothing we have now really deserves to be called artificial intelligence. But just think. It's perhaps 60 years since the first reasonable computers. That's miniscule, even on the time scale of human history. What will computers be like in a hundred years or a thousand years, or ten thousand years? You ain't seen nothin' yet.
Paul Friesen Sep 13, 2016

Artificial intelligence has the potential to be the most disruptive technology ever, if it gets to the point where it can make human workers obsolete in many areas. Already it is quite possible that truck, bus, and taxi drivers will be obsolete in the foreseeable future. And no job is really safe if we look far enough in the future.

We need to start thinking about how we handle the economics of this. If the machines and the natural resources needed to build them are owned only by a few people, this could create huge inequality, for no reason. We need to think about a future where all work is done by machines, but where the machines are owned by everybody, and everybody has an equal share. How we get there from here is the question.
- yw yap Sep 22, 2016
  
  Re Machines do most of the work, and Humans have plenty of free time. Scary isn't it? What will the politicians do to keep the people from getting restless and want to unseat them if they don't get what they want or wish for?
  
  The huge corps will want it this way. However, the huge disconnect in the social arena is a real "Uncertainty".
- dan baur Sep 14, 2016
  
  @stephan
  Your views are very 1867 but since then many things have happened. Among them, it turns out the "friends" of the peasants harmed them the most, while the capitalists shared their benefits as you should know if driving a car, speaking on a mobile phone or shopping cheaply at the megastore. In the US, the peasant population shrinked from 60%+ to 2% not because it was persecuted but because they moved up on the economic ladder.
- stephan Edwards Sep 14, 2016
  
  Mr. Baur do you honestly believe the people who will rep the benefits of the "AI revolution" will let a single dime of the benefits reach the working people ? Because if you do I have a bridge to sell you great view of Brooklyn. As the last four decades have proved the "Safety net will shrink even further. Most likely what this "AI Revolution" will lead to is a large number of unemployed "Peasants" and a small number of people rich beyond understanding. Sorry I do believe beneficiaries will do a damn thing for anybody else.
- dan baur Sep 13, 2016
  
  Who needs a job? All you need is the income and the free time to do whatever you want including working if that makes you happy.