Billionaire Jack Ma Says CEOs Could Be Robots in 30 Years, Warns of Decades of 'Pain' From AI (cnbc.com) 287
Self-made billionaire, Alibaba chairman Jack Ma warned on Monday that society could see decades of pain thanks to disruption caused by the internet and new technologies to different areas of the economy. From a report: In a speech at a China Entrepreneur Club event, the billionaire urged governments to bring in education reform and outlined how humans need to work with machines. "In the coming 30 years, the world's pain will be much more than happiness, because there are many more problems that we have come across," Ma said in Chinese, speaking about potential job disruptions caused by technology. [...] Ma also spoke about the rise of robots and artificial intelligence (AI) and said that this technology will be needed to process the large amount of data being generated today, something that a human brain can't do. But machines shouldn't replace what humans can do, Ma said, but instead the technology community needs to look at making machines do what humans cannot. This would make the machine a "human partner" rather than an opponent.
Like what? (Score:2)
"But machines shouldn't replace what humans can do"
They can't do much apparently, even pushing juice-carts in planes are beyond some of them, humans are incapable of driving cars without getting intoxicated first and even if not, they kill thousands more than robots would.
It can only get better.
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But machines shouldn't replace what humans can do
If that was adhered to there would have been no progress in the last two thousand years!
Humans can clear and plant fields by hand! If we still did the bulk of our agriculture that way most of us would be over worked and badly nourished; and as far as art, culture, and entertainment go most of us would be lucky to see an EVERYMAN play on Sunday afternoon, having worked every other waking hour of the week.
Re:Like what? (Score:5, Insightful)
...It can only get better.
The problem being outlined here is specifically addressing the automation that will be obliterating human employment in the coming years. Without a drastic shift in how we enable a human to sustain themselves and survive (meaning employment), there will be considerable pain that no robots-do-it-better/faster/safer analysis will be able to overshadow.
In short, tell me how all it all gets "better" when you and the other 40% of the human race find yourselves unemployable.
The true problem to solve for is the Problem of Greed.
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> Yes, and this is a *much bigger* problem than "climate change" upon which trillions are being spent for very little demonstrable benefit.
Uh huh. Wanna show where these "trillions" are being spent?
And no, half the human race being unemployed is not worse than climate change at the extreme. 100,000 years ago primitive man had no 401k at all and was just fine, but if climate change killed off all his food he hunted and gathered he'd be in a far worse state than not having an employment contract.
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In short, tell me how all it all gets "better" when you and the other 40% of the human race find yourselves unemployable.
I gather you're an optimist, or you're thinking relatively short term, say 10-20 years out. Because I'm thinking we'll end up with close to 90% "unemployment". I put it in quotes because I'm sure we'll find ways to fill our time but it sure won't be slaving to make some corporate fuck rich. The 10 percent employed will be probably plumbers, and electricians to maintain the old infrastructure that can't be efficiently served by robots. That too will be short-lived (say 100 years max) as new infrastructur
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The true problem to solve for is the Problem of Greed.
The answer to this is taxes and redistribution of wealth to provide a basic income for everyone.
Ah, because taxation of course has always made sure that the billionaires of the world are completely honest and ethical about paying their fair share today, because tax havens are a myth and don't exist, right?
Greed will guarantee that those you wish to burden with taxation to sustain the unemployable masses will lobby, cheat, and lie to ensure "basic income" is nothing more than Welfare 2.0, and not a penny more. For many, that isn't an acceptable answer to this.
As I said before, Solve for Greed.
Re:Like what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Technology has always replaced what humans can do. You can hammer a block of hot iron into a knife; or you can have a drop forge do it 1,000 times each hour. It takes about a week to hammer out a proper knife by hand; that means, at minimum wage of $8.25/hr, that knife can cost no less than $330--and that doesn't even include the materials cost for the metal, the tools, the fuel, forge maintenance, and so forth. Much-better knives cost as much as $90 today (I got a Kai Shun Premier VG-10 bladed knife with hand-hammered finish for $99), and high-quality blades (e.g. the Kai Wasabi Black series) can deliver a good-quality, carbon-steel chef's knife for under $30 (you'll have to finish sharpening the blade yourself; they come pretty dull compared to a Kai Shun Premier).
In many cases, you'll vastly-exceed the performance of a hand-made good with a high-tech industrial process. In most cases, you can sacrifice a small amount of performance to use a much-lower-labor process, making a good that's e.g. 90% as durable, much-more featureful (this tends to stack multiple times, so eventually it's literally tens or hundreds of times as featureful), and 10% as expensive. In some cases, you don't--industrial mills are better than hand-milling wooden planks, and engineered wood is even better. Even hand-made glass can't stack up to precisely-controlled industrial processes using high-grade glass feed stocks and precisely-controlled temperatures--fewer defective pieces, less cracking under temperature transitions.
You'll also see this pattern in some old companies failing out, e.g. power tools made in China using modern engineering tuned to modern manufacture processes for massive cost savings versus an old manufacturer going out of business because their tools also moved to Chinese manufacture but were then adjusted to manufacture more-cheaply instead of fully-reengineered. The tool designed the ground up cost $100 and lasts 6-8 months under professional use; the tool ported to cheap manufacture still costs $180 and lasts 8-10 months under professional use; and the original, made-in-USA tool cost $300 and lasted 8-10 months under professional use. You're going to save vast amounts of money getting the new Chinese one, which is why DIYers have DeWalt or Porter Cable tools, while professionals have cheap Ryobi tools even though they'll tell you a Porter Cable drill is a much better-made drill.
We've gone from watchmakers tapping on brass wheels all day to machines pumping out watch parts, and up to machines assembling large mechanisms. We still hand-assemble watches from the major mechanisms, and new machines will do that more-efficiently than humans.
That's technology. That's what it is. That's what it does. It activates an automated sprinkler so some guy doesn't have to walk all over a 3,000-acre farm with a bucket and a watering can.
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The problem is that in the past there has always been some new job to shift to. Blue collar work to white collar work. NOW the automation is hitting all across the board. In 30 years many of these jobs will be gone with nothing to replace them as AI will do the new jobs too. Comparing what is coming to what's happened before is useless because the old ways of automation were task specific and took considerable capital to set up. What's coming up is general purpose AI that can be trained to do a task in
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About 50% of the population has below average intelligence. So these jobs for things that Robots can and Cant do will be reserved for the people who are smart, creative and fit enough to perform such tasks. That leaves the other group of people who are not. Granted you can say Darwinism and ignore the plight of these people, but history has shone us, that things can get very violent when these people are left out to die. Even the Basic Income has its problems, where these people will live a life where th
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About 50% of the population has below average intelligence ... history has shone us
50%, you say?
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Right this is what the UBI folks don't see to get. I plays out in one of two ways.
1) You still end up with a large group of disaffected people who are unhappy with their lot in life because they have nothing to do but watch TV all day and see fancy people doing fancy thing they don't get income to support and have no path to get there. Hard work won't help them, there are no jobs left suitable for their talents. They get their check and their soviet style block apartment and that is their life and all th
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> humans are incapable of driving cars without getting intoxicated first and even if not, they kill thousands more than robots would.
Maybe if you can't get in a car without getting intoxicated first and kill thousands all the time, maybe you just shouldn't drive...
Unless of course you meant SOME humans, not all of them.
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humans are incapable of driving cars without getting intoxicated first
No, you stupid piece of shit, THAT IS JUST YOU. Stop pouding twelve-packs of Keystone Light every day you stupid alcoholic piece of shit! NEWS FLASH: Automobiles are MADE FOR HUMANS TO OPERATE and we've been doing so VERY SAFELY for a HUNDRED YEARS NOW. Accident figures are overblown by the media because PANIC SELLS ADVERTISING DOLLARS. We do not need 'self driving cars', they are a MEME, stop falling for it!
Instead of simply addressing the alcoholics, perhaps you should be addressing the MUCH larger portion of the population who is addicted to their smartphones and cannot stop texting behind the wheel.
Autonomous driving is being driven far harder by that audience due to a constant need to address social media demand and not be bothered with that "driving" bullshit.
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According to the NHTSAM [wikipedia.org], deaths per traffic mile in the US have not increased appreciably in the past 10 years. All that texting is either not deadly, or suppressing further decreases in fatalities, which is unsupportable with the current data.
But year-to-year variability is so great it's hard to judge short-term trends, which is what so many try to use to blame smartphone use for deaths.
And try to get a clear picture of trends on non-fatal accidents. That data is not well broken out for the casual investig
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I text 'watch out' and the family usually get off the sidewalk befire I am there.
Now that's a great idea. I'd love for my car to be able to text the phone zombies stumbling into harm's way, since apparently that's the only thing that gets through.
Re: Like what? (Score:2)
That was true before smartphones.
They already are (Score:2, Funny)
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CEO's now... (Score:5, Funny)
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Just wait until they discover their golden parachute is actual gold metal i
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Doing their CEO thing leaves them with lots of free time in between screwing things up.
Re:CEO's now ... (Score:4, Informative)
If CEO's were actually replaced with robots, it would be because the "old boy's network" has been transitioned to a network of AI executives. The hardest thing to replace about executives is their existing network of contacts. Their decision making could be transitioned to machines, but they lose the ability to sidestep regulations, waiting queues, red tape, or whatever by calling their old Harvard college buddy. I work in the financial industry now, and just two weeks was in a meeting where the IRS was holding us up and we had to go to our CFO. It wasn't his knowledge which removed our problem, it was an old coworker who is now claiming we are at the top of the queue (we shall see). This happens quite frequently.
What will really make AI CEOs take over is when they start disliking working with companies not run by AI. Once they feel a meat bag cannot be trusted as a business partner, human CEOs are toast.
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How can artificial intelligence be expected to compete with real stupidity?
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Easy...
Feed Atlas Shrugged into a Markov generator, spit the output to text to speech via Siri/Alexa on a golf course while passing around cocaine and highballs and watch the contracts get signed.
What's the problem?
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Feed Atlas Shrugged into a Markov generator, spit the output to text to speech via Siri/Alexa on a golf course while passing around cocaine and highballs and watch the contracts get signed.
What's the problem?
All the CEOs in Atlas Shrugged were actively destroying their companies so ... yeah, who'd know the difference?
Robots are good (Score:3)
Of course, that won't happen for a long, long time, and when it does happen we'll have some political upheaval to create a 'Luxurious Income' program (at that point, "basic income" will be much cheaper and stingier than we need to be), but once the dust settles, it will be super great and the world will be a better place.
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Unfortunately, it's looking like they may be able to replace many/most jobs within a handful of, and that's not "a long time" in political terms. Especially not when we're talking about requiring major changes in a centuries-old social legend ("doing for yourself") embedded in most aspects of our social system.
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Cultural ethics won't allow work-free life (Score:4, Interesting)
Look at how bought into the "work ethic" we are and how many people justify what amounts to luck (if not outright criminality) as "hard work" and thus entitlement to moral superiority (up to and including control of others).
We already treat people who can't work for various reasons as worthless and disposable, I just can't see any transition to robotic work that requires fewer workers resulting in the people who own the robots willing giving away their added profit from automation to displaced workers.
"Surely they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, just as I pulled myself up by the straps on my hand-made Italian leather boots bought with my family inheritance money."
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Look at how bought into the "work ethic" we are and how many people justify what amounts to luck (if not outright criminality) as "hard work" and thus entitlement to moral superiority (up to and including control of others).
Here's the thing: assume I live in rural Arkansas, and I work in a job every day. Is the job fun? No, but I get up every morning and I do it, and I pay taxes. Do I want my tax money to go to my neighbor who just plays video games all day? Of course not, taking money from me and giving it to him is not fair.
Now assume there is enough money for everyone. That means I get lots of free money, and so does my neighbor. Is that fair? Will I support it? Of course, I want free money. In fact, we've seen things li
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I agree with your logic, but the problem is that automation won't arrive all at once and the taxation burden isn't shifting to capital.
As long as the capital class continues to manipulate the tax code to fund government on the backs of wage earners, they will be able to continue to demonize people who aren't working as "stealing from working people." Capital will be successful at maintaining this Potemkin Village political economy because of lobbying and low political participation by the poor and unemploy
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As long as the capital class continues to manipulate the tax code to fund government on the backs of wage earners,
Did you just feed Marx into a Markov chain generator (Marxof generator!)? Short-term capital gains and dividends are taxed the same as income. Long term gets a discount, which is a hack to account for the fact we don't inflation-adjust capital gains taxes (and a hack that of course favors the powerful - every bit of complexity in the tax system exists to favor the powerful, in any economic system).
The sensible course is to inflation-adjust capital gains, then tax them exactly as income, no distinction. So
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Ahhh......so this explains your shit healthcare system.
No, there's no good explanation for that. It's vested interests trying to hold on to their piece, plus incompetence at the leadership level.
The people in Arkansas doesn't like the healthcare system either. Most people in the country want an improved healthcare system (which is why even McCain campaigned on that, and for that matter so did Donald Trump and Mitt Romney, even if they might have been lying in their campaign). There are disagreements on how to best change the healthcare system, and no really go
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The reason we have a shit healthcare system is that Americans are unwilling to embrace the obvious solution of single payer,
It's not clear that this will make things better. As likely as not it will increase payments to the friends of politicians while reducing service. A lot of people look at the VHA (which is a single-payer healthcare system in the US) and say, "I don't want that."
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It's clear that it has made things better in many countries that choose to implement it or something like it.
So what's different? Why is it so great in some countries, whereas the single-payer systems that exist in America (like the VHA) are so problematic?
I think healthcare is just a hard problem.
Re: Cultural ethics won't allow work-free life (Score:4, Insightful)
So what's different? Why is it so great in some countries, whereas the single-payer systems that exist in America (like the VHA) are so problematic?
I think healthcare is just a hard problem.
Visibility. It is quite easy for most of the population to just ignore how we treat our vets. There are less than 10 million VA enrolled veterans which is only around 3% of the population. And veterans are not spread evenly throughout all socio-economic groups, so many more affluent groups are quite separated from groups where veterans are more common.
This makes it much easier for problems to go unnoticed. If 350 million people were being serviced by a VA like organization, there would be far more pressure to improve.
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Nah. It's quite easy to ignore how we treat old and sick people, too. So what you're suggesting is we'll end up with a system that sure is good for people who have small illnesses (take an antibiotic, sleep a few days), but the truly sick might have several month delays in getting care.
Not really. There are slightly sick and truly sick, young and old, etc VA members too, so the order of magnitude difference between the VA and a universal single payer system still hold.
The only thing we know for sure is that on a global scale single payer systems perform better. On a dollar for dollar basis the difference is even more drastic, with single payer systems being an order of magnitude better than our system. We have worse health care outcomes than most OECD countries, but spend more than doubl
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All our problems are due to human obstruction. Remove that, and everything just works.
You might as well say, "All our problems are because people get sick. Remove that, and everything just works." Of course it's true, but it doesn't help with creating a good healthcare system.
Re:Robots are good (Score:4, Insightful)
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The problem isn't robots taking all our jobs, it's robots taking half of our jobs.
It's not a problem because the economy is a job creating machine. The robots have taken half our jobs (and more) multiple times in the last century, but the economy has created many more than it's taken. We more jobs now (in the US) than at any time in history.
Unemployment rates of 20% are problematic, but they are likely related to bad regulations (note: I didn't say all regulations are bad, some are quite good). If you want to specify a country in particular, we can discuss it more deeply.
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As recently as the 1950s, it was accepted that half the population (the female half, of course) "should" be unemployed. Except they didn't call it being unemployed, they called it being a homemaker. We'll need big social changes, but changes like that have happened before. Hopefully we'll pull it off without causing too much pain to too many people.
A UBI would be a good approach. Not enough to replace working, just to reduce the demand for jobs. So more high school and college students decide they don'
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A basic income works because it's basic. The reward has to be significant to provide for work. Some people believe this means a giant beating stick constantly hitting you (no work, no food, you die in the streets); it seems a big enough gap between "survival" and "luxury" would do it.
If you work on the idea of maximizing return for effort, then all you need is a middle-class level sufficiently beyond a basic income level. Because of how income works--if almost everyone is rich, that's essentially your
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It will never be possible to give a middle-class luxury income to everyone (because anyone with a job on top of that will be bumped up massively, and thus be "the middle class" and have an enormous income);
I think this is the main point of your post. It's wrong though: when robots take all our jobs, by definition, most people will not be working.
start caping OT / get rid of the salary pay exempt (Score:2)
start caping OT / get rid of the salary pay exempt part.
Maybe an hard X2 at 60-80 hours will help.
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Rick Schumann?
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How does purchasing power flow from the bot owners to bot users? Nobody has solved that, and most existing ideas use "socialism", which is a four-letter-word in USA.
The closest example we have right now is free oil money. We have examples of how to do it right, for example, Norway, or Alaska where they just mail everyone check. We also have examples of how to do it wrong, with the Saudi Arabian government basically taking the oil money for themselves.
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Remember we're talking about people who are excited to get a big tax return.
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But if it's just, "here, free money!" then Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Bachman will even start favoring it.
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Correction: "still stifle incentive for innovation"
Should be: "will stifle incentive for innovation"
Yes, I did proof-read it. My head kept interpreting it based on what I intended to say, blinding me to what it actually says. My head has a glitch that way and I don't know how to fix it. Repeat proofing rarely fixes it. I could wait a day or two to have a fresh perspective, but that's no good.
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We always suspected you lot were illiterate. Now we have the evidence!
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It's cute that you appear to really believe that. really it is.
In reality, they will continue to charge whatever price nets them the most profit, and if they think that lowering their price even has a chance of lowering the bottom line, forget about it.
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As has been throughout history, and yet automation always makes things cheaper.
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No... supply exceeding demand makes things cheaper. Self-checkouts, for instance do not offer any savings to consumers that use them over using a checkout with a human teller, for instance.
Automation only comes into play at possibly making things more affordable because it may make large enough supplies possible in certain industries, particularly in the area of luxury items, but the possibility of such an increase in supply does not translate to every industry.
CEO's fear (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'm curious how such a study would define the benchmark of what 'correct' decisions by those CEOs would have been - how could they know? Play out alternative universe simulations in which the CEOs took an alternative decision? That's not possible. Not being facetious, am seriously wondering ... the types of decisions CEOs make aren't easy, and are made with incomplete information - if the CEOs (who have the most information) can't easily make the "correct" decision then how can some random scientist doing s
Positive spin (Score:2)
It's better to have a horrible ending than to have horrors without end.
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Not in my America (Score:2)
But machines shouldn't replace what humans can do, Ma said, but instead the technology community needs to look at making machines do what humans cannot. This would make the machine a "human partner" rather than an opponent.
So we shouldn't replace a human with a robot that is more reliable and productive, and likely cheaper in the long run? Hogwash.
The corporatist culture is backed up by the law. The corporate officers' only legal responsibilities are their fudiciary duty to the shareholders.
Look at what you'll save. You trade wages, annual leave, health insurance, and taxes in exchange for a modest electrical bill and a maintenance contract. Toss out those meatbags and get yourself some literal cogs---as soon as possible.
Deve
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That is indeed the ideal goal - automation and AI should allow us to achieve a post-scarcity 'Star Trek future' for mankind. However, to transition to this relatively more post-scarcity society requires significant and very careful changes to how society is structured politically. These changes can only be performed successfully by good quality political leadership (ha ha) that has both vision and a good understanding of technology. We simply do not have "good quality political leadership" anywhere in the w
Garbage In... (Score:2)
Unfortunately, the age old rule still applies. Garbage in, garbage out. Most corporate measurements of performance aren't reliable, and therefore the decisions made by upper management are
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CEOs may have all the data, but it often misses the important bits. They think in spreadsheets and powerpoint. If a concept cannot be expressed in ten words as a power point bullet then it is too complex for an important CEO to deal with. On a spreadsheet, I see this project needs more resources, we'll just move more warm bodies over to it from something else. Obviously when picking cotton, more man hours == mo
One aspect is safe from AI -bitching about it here (Score:2)
In all seriousness, if your job can be automated it will be automated. AI will be the new outsourcing in 2020s. Only it could work 24/7, needs no benefits, pension and can be scaled up by buying more cloud processing space. Creative and expert top 10% will still have jobs, the rest 90% of us will have to find other ways to earn living. Perhaps even with sustenance farming.
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At least one aspect is likely safe from AI automation - bitching about AI automation on Slashdot.
Nah, there will be automated bots, just like Twitter has, they'll just be smarter about their trolling/bitching.
I support this! (Score:2)
Replace all executives with an AI and you will get some actual brains behind the process.
Right now it's all about acting like freaking used car salesmen, and it's bullshit. At least an AI will make logical decisions.
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* I promise
* It will be the best
* Trust me
* You'll love it
* Everyone says that they just love it
* Believe me
* Nobody can do it better.
* Bigly
It's not only the language of a con man. It's the language that even a US president could use. Even when he is attempting to persuade someone to make love.
Already available - GNU libceo (Score:2)
int ceo()
{
while(1) {
int action = rand() % 100;
switch(action%6) {
case 0:
blame(previous_ceo);
case 1:
acquire(competitor);
break;
case 2:
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decades of pain? (Score:2)
I'm sure a bunch of masochists are getting off on that idea alone. ;)
good pain vs bad pain (Score:2)
That's the good kind of pain, like the pain you feel after a healthy workout or long run. It's the kind of pain people feel when they are being challenged intellectually and need to learn new skills.
It's much preferable to the other kind of pain, the pain you feel from stagnation, economic failure, and pover
The pain starts in 2030... (Score:2)
Decades of pain??? (Score:2)
Is this retroactive or does human artificial intelligence not count?
The post-scarcity economy is coming either way. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think what many people don't get is that the post-scarcity economy is coming, one way or the other.
Point in case: I do web development in an agency, and while my work isn't always all-out pointless like that of some of my peers who produce power-point presentations (no joke - they produce presentations for a living - we make quite an amount of money of this), I also see clearly that most of my work comes from LAMP and WordPress being so shitty that building something that resembles a useful model often requires hours of custom programming per project. I work part-time, 5 hours/day, so I don't go insane and even that remaining work is mostly a classic "bullshit-job" [evonomics.com].
We are moving into an all out cyberpunk post-scarcity economy - that's a plain and simple fact. Meanwhile the luxury problems I have come from cellphone manufacturers artificially inflating phone-storage prices or not offering the exact type of phone I'm looking for, the girls I meet often being to tied up in social media to be useful for quality time and me being to lazy to book my surfing vacation for late summer.
Money in it's current for is either becoming worhless (negative interest) or being removed alltogether (sharing economy, access culture).
The problems that await us will stem from people and societies who can't deal with a post-scarcity economy and turn fanatic - religiously, politically or otherwise. That is the problem Jack Ma is probably talking about.
Other than that I personally see no problem with the rise of robots.
If we play our cards right, we can have an utopia in a century. But probably the nutbags are going to screw this up again, using religion and/or totalitarianism, as usual.
My 2 eurocents.
You're being a bit naive (Score:3)
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It would be child's play to maintain artificial scarcity. If you're a member of the ruling class who's power, wealth and prestige depends on that scarcity it's in your best interests to maintain it.
That's where the Cyberpunk comes in. Tribes and groups building alternate societies and cultures utilitzing technology salvaged from the mainstream or built as an alternative to established ways of dealing wiht things. This always happens. Only the revolution in tech is rarely violent in a classic class-warfare s
We are already Cyborgs. (Score:2)
Sounds good but (Score:2)
instead the technology community needs to look at making machines do what humans cannot.
This is already happening, since humans cannot work 23 hours a day non stop without pay with just 1 hr a day average for downtime and maintenance. Jack Ma should stop making meaningless statements.
Embarrassement of riches... (Score:2)
Lots of people here are programmers and developers and engineers - basically the modern-day,real-life equivalent of genies, folks who can basically make anything happen, but with the cost of needing to REALLY draw out the exact desire so that the result isn't worse than the problem.
So, over time, the humble dish washer gets a bucket, then a sink, then a dish washing machine, and eventu
We overestimate what they do and what is needed (Score:4, Interesting)
Humans need food, water, air, warmth, plus an earth like environment. Everything else is just luxury. But almost no one actually works at providing food, water, air, and warmth. We've already automated those jobs away. 90% of what we work to get are luxuries. There is no limit to how much luxury we desire.
Basically, as we automate our way to more and more luxury, I guarantee we will find specific types of luxury that automation can not easily generate. Those will become more expensive, as they need human labor. Slowly more and more humans will move into those jobs.
That's how the jobs called: chef, clothing designer, wine sommelier, actor, game programmer, etc. were all created.
Here is a list of some of the very few luxury problems that I doubt automation can solve sufficiently to eliminate the jobs.
Medical research, anything related to dating determining which book to publish, and employment finding.
These are all things that we have tried to automate away and failed and MISERABLY. Medical research is an art, dating web sites barely even try to do more than hook you up for sex, Harry Potter was rejected by multiple book publishers for being too long, most people find work through friends.
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I'm not convinced by your list of luxury jobs. Chef? Most people want good food that doesn't cost too much, and don't care who or what is in the kitchen. Actor? We had them in ancient Greece, there's a limit on how many we want, and, besides, did you notice Princess Leia and Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One?
Scientific research of all sorts will require humans for the foreseeable future. Given enough money, it can absorb as many highly intelligent and motivated people who apply. That won't do much for
Low self-esteem? (Score:2)
Perhaps Jack Ma has such low self-esteem that he could be replaced by a robot. Or maybe he thinks that what CEOs do is nothing more than following a set of heuristics. Either explanation might explain why he thinks robots could do the job.
Oh no! (Score:2)
Save the CEOs!! Think of the children! How will trickle-down economics ever function if CEOs are made redundant?!?
The real reason (Score:2)
Finally A Man With Vision (Score:2)
I'll believe it when.. (Score:2)
A robot tanks the company and then still gets a 10 million dollar payout when they're ousted.
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You can't just blurt something asinine like that, without a reliable source.
This is Slashdot. You must be new around here.
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It can be no accident. It must be a deliberate, careful, calculated effort to always make the wrong decision.
If CEOs were to, or magic 8 ball were to sometimes make right decisions, this could have a serious impact on how corporations operate.
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A "right" decision is generally a function of perspective. Most people (including CEOs) make "right" decisions most of the time, but the reward function under which they evaluate "right" is not at all what you might expect and generally has very little to do with vendors, customers, employees, or shareholders.
Sadly, to the winner go the spoils...
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Prediction 2: robots will be banning all the robot predictions on slashdot one day soon.
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