This is a good point. And before machines create the next Shakespeare or Dickens, there are going to be (by design) a lot of these equivalents:

"It was the best of times. It was the blurst of times."

I am confident that you will not see at least 90% of what has been talked about ITT regarding the robots taking over just as our kids won't either.

Uh, yes. My God man.

This is how you know it will all happen.

People have been worrying about robots since the 50's. It will be fine.

I will say that I don't think AI is as immediate and inevitable as the community seems to think.

It seems very likely to me that we could be asymptotically approaching the achievement of conscious, deep AI.

And while in a technical sense means we never get there (totally possible IMO), I mean more practically. As in while we are close, the actual singularity could be decades, centuries, or millenia away.

And your reasoning behind this thesis is...?

I'll take the under.

There are serious, respectable people talking about it right now bec they see it in sight. For the life of me I can't understand readers not thinking that that means anything and that they know better than experts in the field. That is not to say that they are right, there are experts on the other side as there always are, but dismissing their concerns out of hand? I think that's a wrong thing to do.

Im working on a CSE MS in Data Mining and Machine learning from a good university.

I don't feel like laying out my reasoning right now. But I will say its a combination of education and intuition.

The impression I am getting from both various internet communities and expert panels is that it is inevitable and and rather eminent.

What I am trying to say is that I think people are miscalculating the probability of its inevitability. And overestimating its eminence.

I am not saying it won't happen or it can't happen in ten years. But rather that I don't think its as in the bag as everyone seems to think.

It is called the singularity for a reason. And some things are just really hard to achieve. Like traveling (moving mass, not a wormhole) at light speed.

Giving birth to truly conscious AI is sort like becoming god. IDK if there a good in the typical sense or not, but if there is we don't feel all that close to him IMO...

If you are referring to me I am not dismissing their concerns as out of hand. Elon Musk is more right than most people that disagree with him.

The concerns, their nature, are valid IMO, but the likelihood we get there and likelihood it is anytime soon seem overblown to me.

My remark was aimed at everyone itt who doesn't think there's a problem.

There's not. Just typical fear mongering.

Also, what experts are you citing? Elon Musk is not an expert on this and has zero crediblity.

The head of AI at google disagrees with you.

The World Economic Forum is one.

Politicians have blamed globalization for the loss of jobs at home, but the report emphasized the role of automation in displacing workers, calling it a key threat to the economy.

"While innovation has historically created new kinds of jobs as well as destroying old kinds, this process may be slowing," noted the report.

Jack Ma, founder and CEO of Alibaba is another.

“In the next 30 years, the world will see much more pain than happiness,” Ma said of job disruptions caused by the internet. “Social conflicts in the next three decades will have an impact on all sorts of industries and walks of life.”

'Social conflicts.' Do some research on your own.

Here's a 2000 year history of global temperatures: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...Comparison.png

Just the past 130 years: https://www.nasa.gov/images/content/...ocean-full.jpg

The only way people can deny that global warming is taking place is by saying this data is fabricated.

If you agree the data is true, then many people will say well it's not humans causing this rise. This argument is much more reasonable than the argument that warming is not taking place, but I mean, just think about it logically. What's changed more in the past 100 years?

a)Humans' activity and the industrial revolution, mass burning of carbon fuels, mass domestication of cows and huge population growth or
b)the relative distance of the sun to the earth?

The most likely explanation is clearly a) that's causing the warming. Even if it isn't a) there is still a finite supply of fossil fuels on the planet and eventually we will have to move to renewable energy anyways otherwise we run out of energy.

Regarding the article and how he doesn't believe CO2 is the sole cause of global warming he is 100% right because CO2 is only one of many greenhouse gases. CO2 is still a huge contributor to the problem. It's not the ONLY contributor however.
https://www.thoughtco.com/worst-greenhouse-gases-606789

The only reason coal has been a "cheaper" energy in the past is because there is no carbon tax or air pollution tax so the costs of dealing with those problems are outsourced to the government to the coal companies' benefit.

I thought we were on a derail discussing killer robots. I have no doubt there will be conflicts going forward, the most dire between people being forced to go to war to get limited resources in an increasingly overpopulated planet, and I think that is still a ways away with any risk from automation after that. I don't think automation is going to have nearly the type of impact in our lifetimes as it is being made out to be, jobs are still increasing and there is a lot that cannot be automated for a very long time yet, and even if they are, that is dependent on other types of jobs not being created.

I think the way of the future is not that jobs are going to disappear, but rather jobs are going to become way more social in nature. A bartender is a job that can't really become automated. Not because a machine can't make a drink, but because of the social interaction that the bartender provides. I think things like professional friend type arrangements may come about. It is going to be much more about social interaction in these jobs.

I think jobs and being productive is good for humans to "feel" productive, even if they aren't

Just checking in to see if the hi-level discourse returned once the P meanies left.

Hi-level confirmed.

from the mouths of babes...

No, no, no. I don't think you get it. There has been an insane amount of times throughout history when people thought technology would drastically increase unemployment and they have been wrong every time, but this time is different. This time is different for the same reason all the other times people thought they were different.

That reason is that it sells books and allows silly people to go on talking tours.

People becoming cyborgs (a combination of man and machine, aka singularity), is no more interesting than saying that a cowboy on a horse is a horseman.

Some people wear glasses now; tech meets man.

I go to bars to talk to my friends and to drink, not to talk to the bartender. The fact that bartenders are usually social and friendly is nice (let's not forget they work for tips), but it is by no means such a defining feature of the job that it's irreplaceable by machines. Making drinks is easily automated (compared to what else is being discussed ITT) - and once that's in place it'll be awesome to not have to wait as long for a drink as is sometimes required.

(Of course, not all bartenders will be replaced - some customers will still want to pay extra for the experience of human interaction and "something different", but, again, suggesting that the social aspect is such a defining feature of the job is a silly notion - and I'm not just picking on your bartender example - this is true for many service industry jobs).

This is the first time that technology is creating intellect.

How will robots get good software quickly?

Human emotion/intelligence is the results of millions years of evolution via feedback loops in the real world. The goal of every species is/was survival and trough billions of interactions with the environment we developed attributes that increased the odds of surviving.

Now AIs are developed in a similair way. You create a virtual envirionment, give the PC a goal, and then let it make random adaptions so that it evolves to become better at its goal. So with for example chess you have a clear set of rules and a well defined goal. You start with random moves, let the computer play infinite games against itself, and every time it made a move that increased it % of winning u save it in the strategy. Enough trials and eventually the pc gets really good at chess.

But what if there are no feedback loops availiable? (Or very limited). Its difficult to create virtual simulations of complex situations in the real-world For example: Writing a book that humans will enjoy. For a pc to learn this task, it needs to have some kind of objective function. In this case: How enjoyable is the book to a human. But in order to to calculate the objective score a human will need to give feedback on the quality of whatever the robot is writing. This will take a lot of time?

How does IBM's Watson reliably beat humans in Jeopardy?

By practising tons of questions and searching the internet? A lot of human evaluation was needed in the process of developing this program I think?