793 - Artificial Intelligence: What Happens As Machines Take Over?

 In this program, Hazel Henderson and NASA Chief Scientist Dennis Bushnell discuss the new alarms raised by Bill Gates, Google’s Eric Schmidt, Space-Ex and Tesla’s founder Elon Musk and physicist Stephen Hawking that intelligent machines like IBM’s Watson may soon outsmart humans. These computer pioneers believe this could pose existential danger to human civilization – because they may not share human values and may cause us great harm. Bushnell cites all the areas where computers are already smarter and more efficient than humans: in law, medicine, accounting and will be needed in NASA’s space program. Henderson worries about the societal impacts as ever more sectors of modern economies are digitized, now displacing white collar jobs beyond earlier manufacturing automation since the 1960s. While futurists envisioned “leisure societies,” shorter work weeks, guaranteed basic incomes and flowering of culture, art and human potentials – what we got was unemployment, stagnant wages and longer work hours.