[computer science/machine learning] There is a reasonable chance that, within the next 10 years, computers that analyze large bodies of data and make statistical predictions will be able to make much better routine strategic decisions at almost every layer of society than actual humans. This means many of the decisions that pertain to economics, politics, etc. At some point this will likely start having a major impact on the structure of society, as there wont be all that much room for argument when the computer says that some decision is or is not optimal. Some current signs that point to this, for example, are the story about an automated Target marketing campaign that detected that a teenage girl was pregnant before her own father knew about it. Automated data analysis (when data is available) is simply better at predicting common events than real people. Why then would a corporation for example rely on human executives to make decisions about acquisitions and mergers? Why would a politician use human strategists to choose policy positions? And if a politician makes decisions by computer, why do we need the politician? This will raise some interesting questions. Should we still use human juries and judges when computers can determine guilt or innocence with much greater accuracy? What happens when a human jury convicts a man, and the innocence project makes an appeal on the basis that the judge-o-matic predicts that the mans chance of having actually committed the crime is 0.000001%? Should we have politicians set the tax rate, when computers can do it better to optimize both economic growth and government performance? I would emphasize that this has little to do with AI -- its not intelligence, just prediction. And well have to contend with this issue long before computers become intelligent in the conventional sense. It also doesnt apply to rare, unprecedented events (so a computer wont tell you whether well invent cold fusion), but it will very much apply to events that have happened before (recessions, political unrest, effect of taxation on the economy, etc).
Posted on: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 13:24:41 +0000
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