Advances in artificial intelligence are to soon lead to robots that are capable of nearly everything humans do, threatening tens of millions of jobs in the coming 30 years, experts warned on Saturday.
“We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task,” said Moshe Vardi, director of the Institute for Information Technology at Rice University in Texas.
“I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?” he asked at a panel discussion on artificial intelligence at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Vardi said there would always be some need for human work in the future, but robot replacements could drastically change the landscape, with no profession safe, and men and women equally affected.
“Can the global economy adapt to greater than 50 percent unemployment?” he asked.
Automation and robotization have already revolutionized the industrial sector over the past 40 years, raising productivity, but cutting down on employment.
Job creation in manufacturing reached its peak in the US in 1980 and has been on the decline ever since, accompanied by stagnating wages in the middle class, Vardi said.
There are more than 200,000 industrial robots in the nation and their number continues to rise.
Research is focused on the reasoning abilities of machines and progress in this realm over the past 20 years has been spectacular, Vardi said.
“There is every reason to believe the progress in the next 25 years will be equally dramatic,” he said.
By his calculation, 10 percent of jobs related to driving in the US could disappear due to the rise of driverless cars in the coming 25 years.
According to Cornell University computer science professor Bart Selman, “in the next two or three years, semi-autonomous or autonomous systems will march into our society.”
He listed self-driving cars and trucks, autonomous drones for surveillance and fully automatic trading systems, along with house robots and other kinds of “intelligence assistance,” which make decisions on behalf of humans.
“We will be in sort of symbiosis with those machines and we will start to trust them and work with them,” he said.
“This is the concern, because we do not know the rate of growth of machine intelligence, how clever those machines will become,” he added.
Will the machines remain understandable for the humans? Will humans be able to control them? Will they remain a benefit for humans, or pose harms?
These questions and more are being raised anew due to recent advances in robotic technology that allow machines to see and hear, almost like people.
Selman said investment in artificial intelligence in the US last year was by far the highest ever since the birth of the industry about 50 years ago.
Business giants like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Tesla are at the head of the pack.
The Pentagon has requested US$19 billion for developing intelligent weapons systems.
What is concerning about these new technologies is their ability to analyze data and execute complex tasks, which raises concerns about whether humans might one day lose control of the artificial intelligence they once built, Selman said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing