If there's one big takeaway from all this, it would have to be from Gregory Dudek, roboticist, director of McGill University's School of Computer Science and of the Canadian Field Robotics Network, and the founder of Independent Robotics, Inc., who we asked to break down the Terminator Genisys trailer.Dudek told my colleague Jordan Pearson that he thinks robots will have a significant impact on our world, much like computers, cars, asphalt, and electricity all did. That robotic impact is going to be "enormous," he said, but that's not because robots, which will appear ever more humanlike as stronger artificial muscles are developed, will become evil and annihilate humans."I think it's going to be [enormous] just because everything we do changes," Dudek explained. "Some things get easier, some things will get harder—not many things—and society will change. That's a lot more scary, in some ways."
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The one thing that likely won't change for the foreseeable future? Income disparity. And the robotics revolution could very well make the jobs outlook even more grim, with the rich and their robots set to make half the world's job disappear. (Bellhops and journalists can rest easy, for now.) So, yes: Robots are coming for your job, but only if you're poor.Then again, many tech evangelists will tell you that technological advances have historically only spurred job growth. Who's going to service all those 'bots? For this and a slew of other future robo-driven scenarios, including self-driving vehicles, my colleague Jason Koebler makes a nice argument for why the US government needs a federal robotics commission.
It's getting harder and harder to list a lot of things that we're way better at than machines
Which brings us back to Hawking and Tegmark's call to grapple with the future of artificial intelligence and deep learning now, before it's maybe too late.I recently had a chance to catch up with Tegmark, who told me that we're still quite far from a point at which machines are as intelligent, or more intelligent, than humans. "But it's really quite striking that it's getting harder and harder to list a lot of things that we're way better at than machines," Tegmark told me.Should I be concerned about AI then? I asked."Whenever a new and powerful technology comes along, it can bring fantastic new benefits, and also new pitfalls to avoid," he said. "That's not in any way unique to artificial intelligence."
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But it wasn't just Hawking and Tegmark, whose op-ed detailed both the promise and potentially species-ending pitfalls of tomorrow's AI, that felt compelled to speak out this year about superintelligence in machines. The United Nations, in a first, similarly warned of the specter of "killer robots." Elon Musk called AI an "existential threat" to humanity.Perhaps Musk was being a bit hyperbolic. The founder of one robot company, at least, thinks we need to "chill" about AI. Besides, the Web's smartest search engine apparently is dumber than a six-year-old.One thing is for sure: Whether or not AI run amok will snuff out the human race, this year the robots finally came.
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