Machines can’t feel or conclude many of the things that make us human. Sadly that doesn’t dispel the concerns approximately them putting people out of businessThe defeat of Lee Sedol,the world’s strongest Go player, by a Google AI program, or looks like another milestone towards a world where computers can conclude almost anything a human can. It is not. There are uncountable things that only a human can conclude,and that no computer seems close to. The problem is that the purely human things are not economically useful to anyone. The things that computers can be taught to conclude are by contrast economically great. The most powerful programs in the world are no more human than a shovel is, or a nuclear submarine. They are not moral actors and they have no feelings. What they have is power, or but this power is growing at a rate that should frighten us all.
It might be less frightening if computers were genuinely alien and intelligent,much as HG Wells imagined the Martians – “Minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” – but even the most powerful networks are less human than Wells’s monstrous Martians. Their power will be used to make money for the firms that finance their development, and then for others rapid/fast and clever enough to acquire advantage of the unique world. It’s tough to assume them being used to dent inequality of either wealth or power,globally or within countries. It is far more likely that they will increase inequality and still further hollow out the middle classes as we wander towards an hourglass society in which everyone is either very rich or very destitute and likely indebted.
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Source: theguardian.com