1y ago

Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman warns AI is a ‘fundamentally labor replacing’ tool over the long term

fortune.com DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman warns AI is a 'fundamentally labor replacing' tool

Despite today’s AI hype, it’s still a “truly transformational” technology that will replace jobs unless policy steps in, Suleyman said.

Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman warns AI is a ‘fundamentally labor replacing’ tool over the long term::Despite today’s AI hype, it’s still a “truly transformational” technology that will replace jobs unless policy steps in, Suleyman said.

42 comments

It sucks because it should be a good thing that it replaces labor. We could have more time to be humans.
But instead, less labor = more money for the rich and more misery for the rest
- Its okay, if enough of us are left twiddling our thumbs we'll find a place to jam them up. Oh what a good boy am I.
  
  Imagine how many thumbs could be jammed into us if we had time to.
- Tax the rich, (not taxing AI that would be stupid) and redistribute the money via UBI.
  Also reduce work week to 4 days and have mandatory overtime for working more than 32 hours a week. Work week to be reduced as ai replaces more jobs.
  Nobel please.
  
  I agree 100% with you. I will write a letter of recommendation for you.

...Which means people can labor less without losing their quality of life, right?
- We won't be living in a dystopia once they replace the police with AI robocops.
- padme_worry.jpg
- What is the path to UBI from here? AI tax?
  
  In a more reasonable world, it would be something levied at the people who demand (and have been receiving) infinite growth...
  
  A wealth tax.
- That would only happen if people thought the disparity in wealth should shrink instead of grow.

IMO, the warning should be with companies, not individuals.
So, if a company needs fewer employees, there will be more companies, and more competition in the market. You lay off thousands of very smart people, and they'll go to your competitors, or create new ones using the skills you gave them.
The problem right now is that companies are expecting AI to replace people right now. If you do, you're in for a world of hurt as hallucinations and training issues will almost certainly give you some headaches - whether it's a HR agent committing an offence that makes the company legally or financially liable, recruitment AI that rejects candidates disproportionately, or software tools that decide to invent features or introduce nested, poor-performing bullshit. This doesn't even go into the liability issues of pumping your customer and employee data into third-party tools. AI in it's current state is a useful tool, nothing more.
- The competitors are also using AI. They don't want to deal with "employees" any more than the big guys do. They'll actually get more done in less time with AI. So at best, you stand out among the thousands that get laid off and some other employer lets you be the lucky one to gently steer the AI when it goes off course.
- This is the most realistic outcome imo. Even before AI there's already a pattern where employees jump through companies before they gather enough experience to make their own.
- If you do, you’re in for a world of hurt as hallucinations and training issues will almost certainly give you some headaches
  I think the next wave of work will be a huge bunch of mechanical turks to fight against hallucinations. These jobs will barely pay above minimum wage and you will be instructed to either tag data or generate new "pure human sourced" data.

Sucks that we live in the one timeline where AI is guaranteed to become an agent of coercion and exploitation, and do a better job than any human at optimizing the system of inequality.
- by definition that wouldn't be the case, there would be an infinite number of timelines like that.

I think it's rather that current forms of capitalism are 'fundamentally labor replacing' with AI being the most effective tool to accomplish that goal.
- Probably not. The same technology would be able to and would likely replace labor in any economic system. Exactly how that happens and what the effects on work and the workers is could vary. E.g. everyone working fewer hours vs some working full time and others living off a comprehensive welfare system, etc.

I think we all saw this coming. But the worst part is this: they want to replace white collar jobs like Developers, Managers, Architects, Engineers etc - all the educated people.
Whereas it should be used to replace manual labour jobs in conjunction with robotics to spare humans doing heavy and dangerous labour, freeing them to go study and get white collar jobs. Thereby improving society and raising people on the bottom, to the middle and beyond.
Instead they are cutting down the top and the middle, making these people jobless and poor thereby increasing the poverty!
Just so that a few billionaires can get even richer! It's disgusting!

No shit?
That's why these companies need to be taxed heavier (and tax loopholes closed) in order to cover basic necessities and reeducation of the workforce using UBI.

It's pretty funny seeing the discrepancy between this thread beeing overall positive of ai replacing jobs, and the other one where google is letting people off and commenters are pissed about it.

Yeah no shit. Any media hack who tells you otherwise is misinformed, on some hidden payroll, or willfully ignorant
New technologies are eventually used to disenfranchise and disempower people.
- New technologies are eventually used to disenfranchise and disempower people.
  Lol, what? Are you familiar with the Luddites?

I WOULD like to pump my own gas, please. Don't force me to pay somebody else to do it for me
- While I agree that less mindless work is better as someone from nj, it’s quite nice not having to get out of my car to pump gas when it’s cold windy rainy or snowing or stupidly hot
  They also wipe windshields and rear windows for free with the squeegee stick
  Maybe in some future where we drive up to automated car chargers that can plug ur car in or auto battery swaps I’ll call gas pumpers redundant but honestly It’s not that bad a deal if it needs a person
  
  Unless the worker is vastly underpaid nothing is worth that

WE NEED TO REPLACE THE PEOPLE WHO BUY OUR @&$! WITH ROBOTS -a cigar chomping executive somewhere
- Well, I, one of those people who would be replaced by said robots, am all for it. Fuck work. Buuut, without some other kind of economic system in place, we will be cut off from the food and water and housing trades pretty goddamn quick. Capitalism and leisure don’t go hand in hand. Capitalism and human and/or animal and/or plant life don’t go hand in hand. In short, capitalism is incompatible with life. Period. It’s a system of death that runs on the idea that if you exploit someone to the point of nearly starving, you’ll win more. If you can exploit people all down the chain to the point that they make next to nothing, you’ll win capitalism.
  The system is so short sighted that they are trying to cut costs no matter what, while still actively fighting anything that makes life remotely livable for, yknow, the people. That line go up, all is right with world.
  I wonder how many people will die before they start seeing a dent in their bottom line and start beating their head against the “we need to tax the people (not our businesses) so you can pay the people (that have no work and no money) so they can make my business profit!” wall before they actually give in to increasing their own taxes…so with that excess profit, people can hand it back to them in purchases?
  I dunno, but there’s no way I see capitalism and no work ever coexisting. It just doesn’t make sense. Not to mention “they” would never allow it because they hoard more and more and we all starve.
  
  Capitalism is the economic equivalent of a previous age of technology. It’s time is over and people are struggling to adjust to a new era where leisure is a result of progress.

And so were the Conveyor-Belt and the Steam-Engine.
Progress in production makes our lives better and raise our standard of living. It also frees up labour for other new Sectors.
- The problem is that each of those examples is a single thing. It solved a particular problem and moved jobs away from that one particular task.
  But AI is, by definition, general purpose. It doesn't solve a particular task it solves all the tasks, or at least tries to. So it theoretically removes labor from everything. Which in and of itself isn't a problem, but society needs to be adapted to deal with the fact that most people won't have jobs through no fault of their own.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Oxford dropout worked as a negotiator for the United Nations and the Dutch government early in his career, but then pivoted to AI and founded DeepMind in 2010 alongside Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg.
The machine learning lab grew like a weed under Suleyman, with the backing of Peter Thiel’s Founders’ Fund, before selling to Google parent company Alphabet for £400 million in 2014.
While Suleyman expects AI to “augment us and make us smarter and more productive for the next couple decades,” over the long term, its impact is still “an open question.”
In a Jan. 10 Wired article, MIT professor Daron Acemoglu predicted that AI would disappoint everyone in 2024, proving itself merely a form of “so-so automation” that will take jobs from workers but fail to deliver the expected monumental improvements to productivity.
The true impact of AI, from its ability to birth revolutionary technologies to its potential to stoke epic job losses, likely won’t hit for years.
“AI is truly one of the most incredible technologies of our lifetimes, but at the same time, it feels like expectations about its delivery are higher than they’ve ever been and maybe we have hit a kind of peak hype for this moment,” he explained.
The original article contains 770 words, the summary contains 207 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Good?
Why don't we want machines doing the work we don't want to do?
Oh right, white collar workers want to hold everyone else back so they don't have to adapt.
Where have I seen this before...

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