... bellissimo articolo, una sorta di bignami delle problematiche sollevate dalla AI nell'economia Bravi sia Stiglitz che il giornalista. e Grazie a te, Alberto, per la segnalazione 2018-09-09 10:44 GMT+02:00 Alberto Cammozzo <ac+nexa@zeromx.net>:
The technology could vastly improve lives, the economist says – but only if the tech titans that control it are properly regulated. ‘What we have now is totally inadequate’
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/joseph-s tiglitz-on-artificial-intelligence-were-going-towards-a- more-divided-society>
“Artificial intelligence and robotisation have the potential to increase the productivity of the economy and, in principle, that could make everybody better off,” he says. “But only if they are well managed.”
On 11 September, the Columbia University professor will be in London to deliver the latest lecture in the Royal Society’s You and AI series. Stiglitz will talk about the future of work, an area where predictions have been frequent, contradictory and unnerving. Last month, the Bank of England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, warned that “large swathes” of Britain’s workforce face unemployment as AI and other technologies automate more jobs. He had less to say about the new positions AI may create. A report from PricewaterhouseCoopers in July argued that AI may create as many jobs as it destroys – perhaps even more. As with the Industrial Revolution, the misery would come not from a lack of work, but the difficulty in switching from one job to another.
[...]
“These new tech giants are raising very deep issues about privacy and the ability to exploit ordinary people that were never present in earlier eras of monopoly power,” says Stiglitz. “Beforehand, you could raise the price. Now you can target particular individuals by exploiting their information.”
It is the potential for datasets to be combined that most worries Stiglitz. For example, retailers can now track customers via their smartphones as they move around stores and can gather data on what catches their eye and which displays they walk straight past.
“In your interactions with Google, Facebook, Twitter and others, they gather an awful lot of data about you. If that data is combined with other data, then companies have a great deal of information about you as an individual – more information than you have on yourself,” he says.
“They know, for example, that people who search this way are willing to pay more. They know every store you’ve visited. That means that life is going to be increasingly unpleasant, because your decision to shop in a certain store may result in you paying more money. To the extent that people are aware of this game, it distorts their behaviour. What is clear is that it introduces a level of anxiety in everything we do and it increases inequality even more.”
Stiglitz poses a question that he suspects tech firms have faced internally. “Which is the easier way to make a buck: figuring out a better way to exploit somebody, or making a better product? With the new AI, it looks like the answer is finding a better way to exploit somebody.”
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