Jobs in danger: prepare for an AI world.

17

October

2018

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Fearing new technologies lies in our human nature. The upcoming technology of Artificial Intelligende (AI) is no exception. We can see several similarities with for example the development of the internal combustion engine in the past. People feared that it could have a negative impact on the number of jobs available for them. However, we have seen that this was not the case as the technology allowed for the emergence of new jobs in the same industries. Around experts there is not much consensus about whether the same will happen with AI. For example, Erik Brynjolfsson and Daniel Rock, with MIT, and Tom Mitchell of Carnegie Mellon University, point out that AI will have a limited impact on people’s jobs (McKendrick, 2018). They state that AI is highly specified and that the technology will be able to only take over just parts of many jobs. According to them, most jobs incorporate both tasks that are suitable for machine learning and tasks that are not suitable for machine learning and require human capabilities which leads to jobs being only partially taken over by AI. This is the optimistic view. However, a Pew Research Center study found that 48% of 1896 experts “envision a future in which robots and digital agents will have displaced significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers” (Smith & Anderson, 2014). In line with this vision, Subhash Kak states that AI is different from earlier technological revolutions in the sense that is does not aim for just increasing industry efficiency (Kak, 2018). It aims to replace the human mind, making it essentially different from earlier automating revolutions.

As the fear of technology taking over jobs could this time actually be true, we should start thinking about the implications for society. For example, as Subhash Kak mentions, modern society needs jobs for emotional wellbeing. The solution of a guaranteed minimum income, as proposed by some people, does not provide in this human need. Humans need a purpose in life, a job gives them a sense of contribution and status. As AI could take this away from a large part of the workforce, this could have serious implications on their emotional wellbeing. In my opinion, this kind of implications of AI deserves more attention. Of course, AI will have different implications for different jobs, but in general I think we can say that certain jobs are in danger of disappearing and that this will have major consequences for the people affected. At this moment we are already well into the transaction to a society in which AI plays a major role, therefore we should start thinking about it’s consequences right now instead of when problems start occurring.

Kak, S. (2018) Will Robots take your tob? Humans ignore the coming AI revolution at their peril. [Online, available at https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/will-robots-take-your-job-humans-ignore-coming-ai-revolution-ncna845366 ] (Accessed on 17-10-2018)

McKendrick, J. (2018) Artificial Intelligence will take over tasks, not jobs. [Online, available at https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2018/08/14/artificial-intelligence-will-replace-tasks-not-jobs/#7c0c1bbca7fa ] (Accessed on 17-10-2018)

Smith, A., Anderson, J. (2014) AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs, Pew Research Center.

 

 

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Can A Machine Make Ethical Decisions?

15

September

2018

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Jeroen van Hoven, professor in the Ethics and Technology department of the TU Delft was one of the guests in the Dutch news programme Buitenhof in their broadcast of the 26th of August. One of the points he brought up was that with all the current technological developments like Artificial Intelligence, philosophers will play a big role in future discussions, as future machines might for example reach a state in which they could make decisions autonomously. I agree with him that we should think carefully about what kind of we decisions are appropriate to delegate to machines. For example, do we want weapon systems to use AI to recognize targets and make life or death decisions?

As these new systems are often called to be ‘autonomous’, some people are afraid of this kind of scenario’s becoming reality. It feels like we are losing control. However, in my opinion this fear is not entirely justified. Autonomy is a human characteristic, and it is does not correspond with the autonomy nowadays associated with computers and machines. Humans have a moral autonomy, which means that if we have moral objections against something, we can decide not to do it. For example, when a soldier has moral objections against fulfilling his given mission, he can decide not to execute it. A computer however, even with Artificial Intelligence, does not have this moral autonomy. It only has machine autonomy: it performs it’s given tasks, it responds to changing situations and makes decisions with little human oversight. This means that a computer is not capable of changing the role the programmer gave him. Brad Templeton, a software architect, once put it this way: “A robot will be truly autonomous when you instruct it to go to work and it decides to go to the beach instead”. In other words: we don’t have to be afraid of a machine autonomously making decisions which don’t correspond with what it was programmed to do in the first place.

Although autonomous systems will take over a big part of human decision making, this does not include ethical decisions. Ethical decisions, like life or death decisions, will in essence not be made by machines once they are in operation. They are made by human beings when programming them.

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