The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence

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Top Highlights

• The benefits of human-like artificial intelligence (HLAI) include soaring productivity, increased leisure, and perhaps most profoundly a better understanding of our own minds.

• an excessive focus on developing and deploying HLAI can lead us into a trap.

• workers lose economic and political bargaining power and become increasingly dependent on those who control the technology.

• when AI is focused on augmenting humans rather than mimicking them, humans retain the power to insist on a share of the value created.

• While both types of AI can be enormously beneficial, there are currently excess incentives for automation rather than augmentation among technologists, business executives, and policy-makers.

• Powerful AI systems are crossing key thresholds: matching humans in a growing number of fundamental taskssuch as image recognition and speech recognition, with applications from autonomous vehicles and medical diagnosis to inventory management and product recommendations

• We can expect record wealth creation as a result.

• HLAI could help us understand more about ourselves. We appreciate and comprehend the human mind better when we work to create an artificial one.

• The distributive effects of AI depend on whether it is primarily used to augment human labor or automate it.

• When AI augments human capabilities, enabling people to do things they never could before, then humans and machines are complements. Complementarity implies that people remain indispensable for value creation and retain bargaining power in labor markets and in political decision-making.

• In contrast, when AI replicates and automates existing human capabilities, machines become better substitutes for human labor and workers lose economic and political bargaining power.

• Entrepreneurs and executives who have access to machines with capabilities that replicate those of humans for a given task can and often will replace humans in those tasks.

• there are many tasks that are dangerous, dull, or dirty, and those are often the first to be automated.

• incomes would depend on the decisions of those in control of the technology. This opens the door to increased concentration of wealth and power.

• a path to unprecedented wealth, increased leisure, robust intelligence, and even a better understanding of ourselves.

• concentration comes the peril of being trapped in an equilibrium in which those without power have no way to improve their outcomes, a situation I call the ­Turing Trap.

• The grand challenge of the coming era will be to reap the unprecedented benefits of AI, including its human-like manifestations, while avoiding the Turing Trap.