How A.I. Will Deliver Universal Basic Income, Better Jobs, and Kinder Corporations | Joscha Bach

How A.I. Will Deliver Universal Basic Income, Better Jobs, and Kinder Corporations

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To know whether or not we should fear A.I., we first have to understand how it will behave in the world. Cognitive scientist Joscha Bach believes A.I. has the potential to mistreat humans—but no worse than big corporations already do. The future won't filled with Roombas and anthropomorphized house-help robots, he says, so a physical threat is not the main concern. A.I. will take the form of intelligent systems that operate as corporations, and they will adopt the ethics of whatever company builds them. "If we want to have these systems built in such a way that they treat us nicely you have to start right now. And it seems to be a very hard problem to do so," Bach says. And yet he appears to be optimistic about society's other main A.I. fear: job automation. He frames it like this: if a job is you selling the best years of your life to a corporation, automating as many manual tasks as possible is really a release from that contract—but how will we afford to live, and what will we do with our days? Many think Universal Basic Income, but Bach sees it a little differently: mass public employment. Pay people to be good humans: good at teaching and at raising their children. Pay them to be good scientists, good philosophers, good architects and chefs — the things that make us most human. Job automation will also force us to confront one of our most difficult and uncomfortable problems: that we are living in an age of abundance, but fail to distribute resources so that everyone can live a decent life. "It might turn out to be a very good thing if you are forced... to address this problem," he says. Joscha Bach's latest book is Principles of Synthetic Intelligence.

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JOSCHA BACH:

Dr. Joscha Bach (MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics) is an AI researcher who works and writes about cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and multi-agent systems. He is founder of the MicroPsi project, in which virtual agents are constructed and used in a computer model to discover and describe the interactions of emotion, motivation, and cognition of situated agents. Bach’s mission to build a model of the mind is the bedrock research in the creation of Strong AI, i.e. cognition on par with that of a human being. He is especially interested in the philosophy of AI and in the augmentation of the human mind.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Joscha Bach: I think the question of whether we should be afraid of strong A.I. taking over and squashing us like bugs because it doesn’t need us for the things that it’s doing is exactly the same question as if we should be afraid of big corporations taking over and squashing us like bugs. Because big corporations are already agents: they are already intelligent agents in some sense. They’re not sentient. They borrow humans right now for their decision making. But they do have goals of their own that are different from the goals of the humans that they employ. They usually live longer. They’re much more powerful than people. And it’s very hard for a person to do anything against a corporation.

Usually if you want to fight a corporation you have to become some major organization or corporation or nation state yourself. So in some sense the agency of an A.I. is going to be the agency of the system that builds it, that employs it. And of course most of the A.I.s that we are going to build will not be little Roombas that clean your floors, but it’s going to be very intelligent systems—corporations, for instance—that will perform exactly according to the logic of these systems. So if we want to have these systems built in such a way that they treat us nicely you have to start right now. And it seems to be a very hard problem to do so.

The job loss because of automation has several aspects. I think the most obvious thing that we should be seeing is: if our jobs can be done by machines, that’s a very, very good thing. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

If I don’t need to clean the street, if I don’t need to drive a car for other people, if I don’t need to work a cash register for other people, if I don’t need to pick goods in a big warehouse and put it into boxes, it’s an extremely good thing.

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