Sunday, 4 March 2018

Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs [feedly]

a post by Kai-Fu Lee for the MIT Technology Review

No matter what anyone tells you, we’re not ready for the massive societal upheavals on the way.

I took an Uber to an artificial-­intelligence conference at MIT one recent morning, and the driver asked me how long it would take for autonomous vehicles to take away his job. I told him it would happen in about 15 to 20 years. He breathed a sigh of relief. “Well, I’ll be retired by then,” he said.

Good thing we weren’t in China. If a driver there had asked, I would have had to tell him he’d lose his job in about 10 years – maybe 15 if he was lucky.

That might sound surprising, given that the US is, and has been, in the lead in AI research. But China is catching up – if it hasn’t already – and that rivalry, with one nation playing off the other, guarantees that AI is coming.

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