Google Plans Artificial Intelligence To Kill Human Jobs

(Picture credit: ibiblio.com)

Artificial intelligence, far from being a boon to humanity might easily lead to mass unemployment and social breakdown if computers continue in extending their capacity to replace humans in jobs, experts warned days after it emerged that Google had beaten competitors to buy a firm specialising in this kind of technology.

Dr Stuart Armstrong, from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, issued his warning after news that Google had paid £400m for the British artificial intelligence firm DeepMind was revealed.

While Dr. Armstrong welcomed the internet search and advertizing giant’s decision to set up an ethics board to supervise the development and application of artificial intelligence, saying that such advances in technology carried a number of risks. Armstrong said computers had the potential to take over people’s jobs at a faster rate than new roles could be created. He cited logistics and administration as professions that were particularly vulnerable to the development of artificial intelligence.

Machines have already largely replaced humans in manufacturing while more and more sales functions are being carried out online. Only a few years after community High Streets filled with empty shops, now office developments are full of empty call centres. Dr. Armstrong also warned about the implications for uncontrolled mass surveillance if computers were taught to recognise human faces. “There’s a variety of short term risks for artificial intelligence, everyone knows about the autonomous drones”, he added.

Such concerns are often swept aside by “computer scientists” and media “experts” who are really just nerds so besotted with technology they hail every advance as a major step forward for humanity and never pause to consider that there might be a downside.

Some studies carried out by social scientists however have been looking into which jobs are the most vulnerable and there’s quite a lot of them in logistics, administration, insurance underwriting but ultimately a huge swathe of jobs are potentially vulnerable to improved artificial intelligence.” The Daily Stirrer has previously reported in this in ‘Will Humans become Redundant In Your Lifetime‘.

Such concerns have been reiterated by Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London, who commented: “I think it is a very good thing that Google has set up this ethics board and I think there certainly are some short term issues that we all need to be talking about. “It’s very difficult to predict and that is of course a concern but in the past when we’ve developed new kinds of technologies then often they have created jobs at the same time as taking them over but it certainly is something we ought to be discussing.”

But will the nerds and the media wannabes allow discussion of what ought to be discussed? There’s an old adage that goes, “If you don’t use it you’ll lose it.” With a constant stream of propaganda from technology companies, academics and politicians brainwashing impressionable people into believing computers should be left to do the thinking because they are better at it than us, what will happen to our intelligence if we let computers do everything for us?

As computers become more intelligent while humans dumb down, they’ll stop being our slaves and become our competitors or worse. The race will be on to stay more intelligent than the machines and parents will have to select the right genes for their kids so that they stay ahead. Slaves to the machines, what a dystopian future we will be handing to future generations. We’re innovating ourselves into oblivion.

The DeepMind company was set up in 2011 by neuroscientist and former chess prodigy Demis Hassabis, along with partners Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. The company specialises in intellectual property, namely algorithms and machine learning techniques for simulation, e-commerce and games. Phew, games; that’s a relief, I was beginning to think these people were a serious business.

Like Google’s other recent acquisition Nest, a major player in developing The Internet Of Things we are told although while they talk about developing intelligent fridges, microwave ovens and flat screen television their product portfolio to date is a thermostat which does exactly what analogue thermostats have done for over a century. Still while the nerds dream of the day when algorithms rule the world, they are not doing any real damage like developing new weapons of mass destruction for tyrants and war criminals to play with.

Deep Mind is also working in an area called Deep Learning which involves machines being ‘taught’ (nerds love to humanize machines, they mean programmed) to recognise patterns in massive aglomerations of data so computers will begin to learn how to recognise mundane objects such as cars, food items and possibly human faces.

Google anticipate using DeepMind’s expertise to improve the functions of its current products such as the Google Glass, the project that will stick Google’s ads and ‘suggestions’ in your face and generally distract you while you are driving a car, rock climbing, skiing, making love to your Google robot fuck buddy having a dump. The company also plans to extend its current artificial intelligence work such as the development of self-driving cars (so yo can get jiggy with your robot friend and simultaneously respond to Google’s ads and ‘suggestions’, while being driven to work, to distraction or to insanity.

Mao Tse-tung once said it is better to employ 1000 men to dig a ditch than to use one JCB and one man to dig the ditch, because if you employ 1000 men you put 1000 chickens on the dinner table for 1000 families instead of 1 chicken on the JCB driver’s table, and a pile of money in the JCB owner’s bank – or something like that. The evil old tyrant was on the right track.]

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