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While there has been a lot of talk about super-smart artificial intelligence lately, one of the leaders in the field thinks there are more pressing problems for humanity to solve.
Andrew Ng, the cofounder of Coursera and former chief scientist at Chinese technology powerhouse Baidu, told an audience at a Harvard Business Review event today that we should be far more concerned about job losses that come about as a result of machine learning.
“As an AI insider, having built and shipped a lot of AI products, I don’t see a clear path for AI to surpass human-level intelligence,” he said. “I think that job displacement is a huge problem, and the one that I wish we could focus on, rather than be distracted by these science fiction-ish, dystopian elements.”
Ng has been involved with several leading AI projects, including the Google Brain team. While science and technology luminaries like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have cautioned against the rise of artificial intelligences that could surpass humans, Ng said that such an advance isn’t in the immediate future.
That’s not to say it’s impossible, but other issues are more pressing.
“I’ve been in a lot of private conversations with AI leaders, or business leaders who are working on new AI products that will wipe out tens of thousands of jobs in a single company, maybe more across multiple companies,” Ng said. “And the interesting thing is that a lot of people whose jobs are squarely in the crosshairs of the technologies, a lot of people doing the jobs that are about to go away, they don’t understand AI, they don’t have the training to understand AI. And so a lot of people whose jobs are going to go away don’t know that they’re in the crosshairs.
”Ng said that while technology and artificial intelligence has been great for creating wealth, we still have a lot of work to do if we want to…
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