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Last October, the program AlphaGo, developed by the Google division DeepMind, stunned the world by becoming the first AI agent to defeat a professional Go player — a decade ahead of experts’ predictions of such a feat. Then, in March, AlphaGo surpassed expectations yet again, winning a match against champion player Lee Sedol.
In his recent article “Robots Will Take Your Job” (Boston Globe), basic income advocate Scott Santens explores the implications of advanced AI — machines like AlphaGo — for employment and the economy. Thanks to advances in the branch of machine learning known as deep learning, artificial agents are now able to replicate increasingly complex cognitive tasks. A consequence is that automation now threatens not only routine, manual jobs but many highly-skilled, cognitively-demanding ones as well.
Backing his claims with quotes from leading AI researchers, such as Chris Eliasmith and Andrew Ng, Santens makes the case that this tide of ever-more-sophisticated automation demands that we “seriously start talking about decoupling income from work” and explore a universal basic income.
Read the article here:
Scott Santens, “Robots Will Take Your Job,” Boston Globe, February 25th, 2016.
Update:
Following AlphaGo’s victorious match against Lee Sedol, Santens updated and extended this article, publishing the new version in Medium. The new piece is available here:
Scott Santens, “Deep Learning Is Going to Teach Us All the Lesson of Our Lives: Jobs Are for Machines,” Medium, March 16th, 2016.
