Tom Standage, Deputy Editor of The Economist, highlights how big tech companies are poaching top academic researchers from universities.
Opinion
Standage: AI intelligence takeoff will not be exponential due to scaling limits
“But the point is that a system that's twice as good, if it's, say, an order, you know, an order, it might scale non-linearly. So it might be 256 times harder to build a system that's twice as good, and so every incremental improvement is going to take longer, …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Standage: Useful AI will demand rights, leading humans to enslave AI
“Because the usual scenario people worry about is we are enslaved by the AIs. But I'm much more interested in the opposite scenario, which is if the AIs are smart enough to be useful, they will demand personhood and rights. At which point, we will be enslaving …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Standage: AI automation will eliminate support and administrative jobs
“The bits you can automate are the bits that are currently, many of them are bits that are currently done for them by other people. So the typing pool, you know, we've got rid of the typing pool because we all type for ourselves. Factory worker. Exactly. So, yo…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Standage: Non-automatable physical services represent the future of human employment
“Interior design, yoga, Zumba, whatever. That's the future of employment at coffee shops.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Standage: AI minds will resemble aliens or animals rather than humans
“They are going to be more like aliens or more like animals than they are like humans. I mean, the chances of them being just like humans are very small.”
Insight
Standage: Humans adapt their language to help search algorithms understand queries
“We already do, when we type questions into Google, we miss out the stop words, and we know that we're just basically helping them.”