Sorry, Elon, You Are Joking, Aren’t You?
Elon Musk came out with a beauty when he turned up at the recent “AI Safety Summit” at Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes
His claim — expressed in a meeting he had with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak — was that Artificial Intelligence will eliminate the need for all jobs and give people robot friends who “know you better than you know yourself”.
According to Elon Musk:
“There will come a point where no job is needed. You can have a job if you want a job for personal satisfaction, but the Al will be able to do it.”
His thinking seems to be that computers will become able to do everything better than humans, who will no longer have any real work to do.
They will therefore need to find new meanings in life, which is where AI will come to the fore, in the form of robots that will offer companionship:
“If you have an Al that has memory and remembers all of your interactions … it will know you better than anyone, perhaps even yourself, and you can talk to it every day.”
The naivety of the man surely beggars belief!
For one thing, Elon Musk seems to have a bizarre view of what constitutes “work”. It is certainly true that machines of many kinds have taken a lot of the drudgery out of the work that people used to do in the past, and many occupations have disappeared because they are no longer needed, but the notion that there “will come a point where no job is needed” surely goes far too far.
It does not take long to think of all kinds of jobs that simply could not be done by an unsupervised machine. Midwifery comes to mind as a first example!
And presumably, there would have to be many jobs created simply by the need to maintain and repair all those computers and robots.
Another aspect to be considered is the psychology of working. At least Musk allows people might get “personal satisfaction” from doing a job, but does it not go a lot deeper than that? The satisfaction can come from the reward to be gained when a job is completed, and also from the job itself, which can in itself be pleasurable.
However, can the sense of making a contribution to the good of society as a whole, or being part of a larger enterprise, really be simply “personal satisfaction”?
So what about Elon’s idea that we will get our future companionship from robots? This can only suggest that he must lead a very deprived life himself, with no need for live entertainment or the pleasure to be had from walking a dog through beautiful landscapes or, it would appear, direct contact with other human beings.
Companionship, for many people, comes from the work they do. Why would their happiness be improved by depriving them of that and replacing it with an AI robot?
If this is really Elon Musk’s “Brave New World”, the longer it takes to appear the better!
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