Category: All articles

Bill Gates says we should tax the robot which will steal your job

Bill Gates has floated the idea of taxing robots which replace human workers. He said it in an interview (here) with Quartz, a media outlet owned by The Atlantic, and staffed by journalists from The Economist, the New York Times and other publications that Dirty Donald would label as fake news. They made a nice short video (here) to promote the piece, with Gates giggling at the end about the idea of paying more taxes. It’s a neat idea, and has got a lot of people online very excited. It could help to pay for Universal Basic Income, which is...

ATMs and Asilomar

The ATM automation meme In an engaging TED talk recorded in September 2016i, economist David Autor points out that in the 45 years since the introduction of Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), the number of human bank tellers doubled from a quarter of a million to half a million. He argues that this demonstrates that automation does not cause unemployment – rather, it increases employment. He says ATMs achieved this counter-intuitive feat by making it cheaper for banks to open new branches. The number of tellers per branch dropped by a third, but the number of branches increased by 40%. The...

Future Bites 3 – Abundance accelerated

The third in a series of un-forecasts* – little glimpses of what may lie ahead in the century of two singularities. As promised, this one is more optimistic. Most professional drivers have lost their jobs, and although many have found new ones, they rarely pay anything like as much as the drivers used to earn. A host of other job categories are becoming the preserve of machines, including call centre operatives and radiographers. A few people still cling onto the notion that new types of jobs will be created to replace the old ones taken by machines, but most accept...

Future Bites 2 – Populism paves the way for something worse

The second in what looks like becoming a series of un-forecasts* – little glimpses of what may lie ahead in the century of two singularities. The third one will be more optimistic. Honest. In the five years of President Trump, corporate taxes were slashed and federal spending on infrastructure projects was boosted. Companies and individuals were exhorted (and sometimes extorted) to buy American, and imports were cut by tariff and non-tariff barriers. The impact was profound. Initially, US GDP rose sharply as its firms repatriated hundreds of $billions of profits from their foreign subsidiaries, and jobs were created to carry...

Betting on technological unemployment

Daniel Lemire is a Canadian professor of computer science.  He believes that cognitive automotive will not cause lasting unemployment.  I believe the opposite, as I have written in various places, including this blog post and my book, The Economic Singularity. Neither Daniel nor I has a crystal ball, and we both recognise that we could be wrong.  But we have both thought long and hard about the prospect, and we are both fairly confident in our predictions.  So after chatting about the issue online for a while, we have agreed a bet. There are currently around 1.7m long-haul truck drivers in...

A dozen AI-related forecasts for 2017

Machines will equal or surpass human performance in more cognitive and motor skills. For instance, speech recognition in noisy environments, and aspects of NLP – Natural Language Processing. Google subsidiary DeepMind will be involved in several of the breakthroughs. Unsupervised learning in neural networks will be the source of some of the most impressive results. In silico models of the brains of some very small animals will be demonstrated. Some prominent AI researchers will predict the arrival of strong AI – Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI – in just a few decades. Speech will become an increasingly common way for...

AI in 2016: a dozen highlights

March: AlphaGo combines deep reinforcement learning with deep neural networks to beat the best human player of the board game Go.  [] April: Nvidia unveils a “supercomputer for AI and deep learning”. With a price tag of $129k, it delivers 170 teraflops, and is 12 times more powerful than the company’s 2015 offering. Nvidia’s share price continues its skyward trajectory.  [Article] April: Researchers from Microsoft and several Dutch institutions create a new Rembrandt. Not a copy of an existing picture, but a new image in the exact style of the master, 3-D printed to replicate his brush-strokes.  [] September: DeepMind...

Reviewing last year’s AI-related forecasts

This time last year I made some forecasts about how AI would change, and how it would change us. It’s time to look back and see how those forecasts for 2016 panned out. Not a bad result: seven unambiguous yes, four mixed, and one outright no. Here are the forecasts (and you can see the original article .) AlphaGo is the big one: it caught most people by surprise, and is still seen as one of the major landmarks in AI development, along with Deep Blue beating Kasparov in 1997 and Watson beating Jennings in 2011. Admittedly AlphaGo had already...

Future Bites 1

The first in what may or may not become a series of un-forecasts*, little glimpses of what may lie ahead in the century of two singularities. It’s 2025 and self-driving trucks, buses, taxis and delivery vans are the norm. Almost all of America’s five million professional drivers are out of work. They used to earn white-collar salaries for their blue-collar work, which means it is now virtually impossible for them to earn similar incomes. A small minority have re-trained and become coders, or virtual reality architects or something, but most are on welfare, and / or earning much smaller incomes...

Discussing AI with George Osborne

One of the many worrying aspects of the Brexit referendum in the UK and the Trumpularity in the US is that most politicians are not yet talking about the challenges posed by the coming impact of powerful artificial intelligence.  This needs to change. A conversation I had recently with George Osborne (until recently the UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer) gives grounds for hope. The video below (16 minutes) contains excerpts from a recent panel discussion called "Ask Me Anything About the Future".  Hosted by Bloomberg, it was organised by Force Over Mass, an early-stage investment fund manager.  It was very ably chaired...

It’s not the Fourth Industrial Revolution!

Industrie 4.0 Klaus Schwab is a clever man. After a rapid ascent through the ranks of German commercial life, he founded the World Economic Foundation (WEF) in 1971. The WEF is best known for organising a five-day annual meeting of the global business and political elite at the ski resort of Davos in Switzerland. He has a list of awards and honorary doctorates as long as your arm. Schwab has done much to popularise the notion that we are entering a fourth industrial revolution – not least by writing a book of that name. He didn’t invent the phrase: rather...
The Simulation Hypothesis: an economical twist (part 2 of 2)

The Simulation Hypothesis: an economical twist (part 2 of 2)

Offending Copernicus Of course this is all wild and ultimately pointless speculation, so I won’t be at all upset if you decide it is more worthwhile to go watch a game of baseball or cricket instead of reading the rest of this post. But if you’re still with me, then isn’t it a curious coincidence that you happen to be alive right at the time when humanity is rushing headlong towards the creation of AGI and superintelligence? And that you might very possibly be alive to see it happen? Doesn’t that situation offend against the Copernican principle, also known as...
The Simulation Hypothesis: an economical twist (part 1 of 2)

The Simulation Hypothesis: an economical twist (part 1 of 2)

Are we living in the Matrix? Are we living in the Matrix? This question seems futuristic, a theme from a science fiction movie. (Which of course it is.)  But the best science fiction is philosophy in fancy dress, and philosophers have been asking the question since at least the ancient Greeks. The question generated considerable interest in June this year when Elon Musk said the chance that we live in a “base reality” was “one in billions”. But as long ago as 380 BC, when the Greek philosopher Plato wrote “The Republic”, he included the Allegory of the Cave, which argued...

The Hawking Recursion*

A couple of years ago Stephen Hawking told us that (general) AI is coming, and it will either be the best or the worst thing to happen to humanity.  His comments owed a lot to Nick Bostrom's seminal book "Superintelligence" and also to Professor Stuart Russell.  They kicked off a series of remarks by the Three Wise Men (Hawking, Musk and Gates), which collectively did so much to alert thinking people everywhere to the dramatic progress of AI.  They were important comments, and IMHO they were r Journalists are busy people, good news is no news, and if it bleeds it leads.  For a year...
Book review: “Homo Deus” by Yuval Harari, (part 3 of 3)

Book review: “Homo Deus” by Yuval Harari, (part 3 of 3)

Week Three: Extreme Algocracy In the first third of Homo Deus, Harari claims that humanity has more-or-less conquered its traditional enemies of famine, plague and war, and has moved on to chasing immortality, happiness and divinity. He also urged us all to become vegetarian, if only to make us less contemptible in the eyes of a future superintelligence. In the second third of the book he offers a surprisingly cursory review of the two singularities – the economic and the technological. He seems to assume that most people already know about them, or at least won’t need much persuading to...
Book review: “Homo Deus” by Yuval Harari, (part 2 of 3)

Book review: “Homo Deus” by Yuval Harari, (part 2 of 3)

Week two: the two Singularities In the first third of his new book, Yuval Harari described how humanity escaped its perennial evils of famine, plague and war, and he claimed that we are now striving for immortality, happiness and divinity.  Now he enters the territory of the economic and the technological singularities.  Read on... Free will is an illusion Harari begins this section by attacking our strong intuitive belief that we are all unitary, self-directing persons, possessing free will. “To the best of our scientific understanding, determinism and randomness have divided the entire cake between them, leaving not even a crumb for ‘freedom’. … The...
Book review: "Homo Deus" by Yuval Harari

Book review: "Homo Deus" by Yuval Harari

Week One: ending famine, plague and war… Clear and direct Yuval Harari’s book “Sapiens” was a richly deserved success. Full of intriguing ideas which were often both original and convincing, its prose style is clear and direct – a pleasure to read.* His latest book, “Homo Deus” shares these characteristics, but personally, I found the first half dragged a little, and some of the arguments and assumptions left me unconvinced. I’m glad that I persevered, however: towards the end he produces a fascinating and important suggestion about the impact of AI on future humans. Because Harari’s writing is so crisp,...