Jobs vs. Machines: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence

From StosselTV

The media tell us Artificial Intelligence will replace millions of jobs. They’re right, but that doesn’t mean we should fear it.

The Teamsters are protesting self-driving cars, asking government for more regulation, hoping to stop AI vehicles from taking delivery, taxi-driver and truck-driver jobs. That’s a fight that they can’t win.

Loom weavers, typists, telephone operators, bank tellers, and many other jobs were destroyed because of new technology. It won’t stop happening, and AI will make it happen faster. But as people lose jobs, remember that so far, this creative destruction has led to people finding new, better jobs.

Unemployment has been dropping, and wages keep going up! If history is any indication, AI will be a good thing.

** Technical advice from Mark Palmer **

After 40+ years of reporting, I now understand the importance of limited government and personal freedom.

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Libertarian journalist John Stossel created Stossel TV to explain liberty and free markets to young people.

Prior to Stossel TV he hosted a show on Fox Business and co-anchored ABC’s primetime newsmagazine show, 20/20. Stossel’s economic programs have been adapted into teaching kits by a non-profit organization, “Stossel in the Classroom.” High school teachers in American public schools now use the videos to help educate their students on economics and economic freedom. They are seen by more than 12 million students every year.

Stossel has received 19 Emmy Awards and has been honored five times for excellence in consumer reporting by the National Press Club. Other honors include the George Polk Award for Outstanding Local Reporting and the George Foster Peabody Award.

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Related Topics:#AI #JobsVsMachines #JohnStossel #RiseOfArtificialIntelligence #StosselTV

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Artificial Intelligence

Poll: Despite global pressure, Americans want the tech industry to slow down on AI

Published on July 11, 2024

Todayville

From The Deep View

A little more than a year ago, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. Of course, the pause never happened (and we didn’t seem to stumble upon superintelligence in the interim, either) but it did elicit a narrative from the tech sector that, for a number of reasons, a pause would be dangerous.

One of these reasons was simple: sure, the European Union could potentially instate a pause on development — maybe the U.S. could do so as well — but there’s nothing that would require other countries to pause, which would let these other countries (namely, China and Russia) to get ahead of the U.S. in the ‘global AI arms race.’

As the Pause AI organization themselves put it: “We might end up in a world where the first AGI is developed by a non-cooperative actor, which is likely to be a bad outcome.”

But new polling shows that American voters aren’t buying it.

The details: A recent poll conducted by the Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute (AIPI) — and first published by Time — found that Americans would rather fall behind in that global race than skimp on regulation.

75% of Republicans and 75% of Democrats said that “taking a careful controlled approach” to AI — namely by curtailing the release of tools that could be leveraged by foreign adversaries against the U.S. — is preferable to “moving forward on AI as fast as possible to be the first country to get extremely powerful AI.”
A majority of voters are also in favor of the application of more stringent security measures at the labs and companies developing this tech.

The polling additionally found that 50% of voters surveyed think the U.S. should use its position in the AI race to prevent other countries from building powerful AI systems by enforcing “safety restrictions and aggressive testing requirements.”

Only 23% of Americans polled believe that the U.S. should eschew regulation in favor of being the first to build a more powerful AI.

“What I perceive from the polling is that stopping AI development is not seen as an option,” Daniel Colson, the executive director of the AIPI, told Time. “But giving industry free rein is also seen as risky. And so there’s the desire for some third way.”
“And when we present that in the polling — that third path, mitigated AI development with guardrails — is the one that people overwhelmingly want.”

This comes as federal regulatory efforts in the U.S. remain stalled, with the focus shifting to uneven state-by-state regulation.

Previous polling from the AIPI has found that a vast majority of Americans want AI to be regulated and wish the tech sector would slow down on AI; they don’t trust tech companies to self-regulate.

Colson has told me in the past that the American public is hyper-focused on security, safety and risk mitigation; polling published in May found that “66% of U.S. voters believe AI policy should prioritize keeping the tech out of the hands of bad actors, rather than providing the benefits of AI to all.”

Underpinning all of this is a layer of hype and an incongruity of definition. It is not clear what “extremely powerful” AI means, or how it would be different from current systems.

Unless artificial general intelligence is achieved (and agreed upon in some consensus definition by the scientific community), I’m not sure how you measure “more powerful” systems. As current systems go, “more powerful” doesn’t mean much more than predicting the next word at slightly greater speeds.

Aggressive testing and safety restrictions are a great idea, as is risk mitigation.
However, I think it remains important for regulators and constituents alike to be aware of what risks they want mitigated. Is the focus on mitigating the risk of a hypothetical superintelligence, or is it on mitigating the reality of algorithmic bias, hallucination, environmental damage, etc.?

Do people want development to slow down, or deployment?

To once again call back Helen Toner’s comment of a few weeks: how is AI affecting your life, and how do you want it to affect your life?

Regulating a hypothetical is going to be next to impossible. But if we establish the proper levels of regulation to address the issues at play today, we’ll be in a better position to handle that hypothetical if it ever does come to pass.

Artificial Intelligence

Elon Musk is building the ‘most powerful Artificial Intelligence training cluster in the world’

Published on July 11, 2024

Todayville

News release from The Deep View

Elon Musk’s xAI has ended talks with Oracle to rent more specialized Nvidia chips — in what could have been a $10 billion deal — according to The Information.

Musk is instead buying the chips himself, all to begin putting together his planned “gigafactory of compute.”

The details: Musk confirmed in a post on Twitter that xAI is now working to build the “gigafactory” internally.

Musk explained that the reason behind the shift is “that our fundamental competitiveness depends on being faster than any other AI company. This is the only way to catch up.”
“xAI is building the 100k H100 system itself for fastest time to completion,” he said. “Aiming to begin training later this month. It will be the most powerful training cluster in the world by a large margin.”

xAI isn’t the only one trying to build a supercomputer; Microsoft and OpenAI, also according to The Information, have been working on plans for a $100 billion supercomputer nicknamed “Stargate.”

Why it matters: The industry is keen to pour more and more resources into the generation of abstractly more powerful AI models, and VC investments into AI companies, as we noted yesterday, are growing.

But at the same time, concerns about revenue and return on investment are growing as well, with a growing number of analysts gaining confidence in the idea that we are in a bubble of high costs and low returns, something that could be compounded by multi-billion-dollar supercomputers.