"Humans Need Not Apply" 10 years later. Retrospective with CGP Grey about his legendary "Humans Need Not Apply" video, which is now 10 years ago.

CGP Grey wanted to make the point that computers are coming after everyone's job, and the guy he's talking to (Myke Hurley), but he says when he watched the video, he thought, "They'll never take my job."

A lot of the video concerned self-driving cars, which is what in retrospect, he looks the most wrong about.

He tried to turn the word "autos" into a word to refer to all "automatic" vehicles, but the term didn't catch on. But he wanted to get people to think about self-driving vehicles of all kinds.

He said "They don't need to be perfect, they just need to be better than humans", but he now considers himself totally wrong about that. People really require self-driving cars to be perfect. People demand perfection. They need to be as safe as airplanes. They talk about how people psychologically have a need to feel "in control", and if something bad happens, they need a human to blame, not some algorithm made of 0s and 1s. If you take the decision-making out of human hands, it needs to be perfect.

Tesla's recent "Drive Naturally" where everything is learned from neural networks and not hand-coded by humans, is remarkably like humans in how it drives.

The very last part of the "Humans Need Not Apply" video, which he called "software bots", has emerged dramatically in the last 2 years. He thought self-driving cars would advance faster, and "software bots" would come later, but "The last couple of years have been terrifyingly fast."

No mention of the horses? For me the most memorable thing about "Humans Need Not Apply" was the imaginary conversation between horses about how they had nothing to fear from this new invention, the automobile -- employment for horses had always gone up throughout history. But the horse population actually peaked in 1915 and has gone down ever since. So there isn't some rule of nature that says there always has to be employment for horses, that horses can't be automated. Likewise, CGP Grey invites us to consider that there's no law of nature guaranteeing employment for humans.

This video (which is really audio-only -- it's essentially an audio podcast) is 1.5 hours but only the first 30 mins is about the "Humans Need Not Apply" video. However, you might want to listen to the whole think as CGP Grey and Myke Hurley contemplate AI and the future of AI. CGP Grey talks about how he is of two minds regarding how to think about the future. The first mind says: the way to think about technological change, is, it's the same as it has always been, only faster. We've hand technological change since caveman days. So just extrapolate that out into the future. The second mind, is the "doom" mind: He really does think, there is some kind of boundary we are getting closer to, beyond which it is functionally impossible to try to think about the future, to the point where it is pointless to even try to plan or think. Where is that boundary? That boundary is there because this thing, AI, is different. Everyone thinks their time is different, but he really feels like AI is really "this time is different." "Humans Need Not Apply" was trying to get people to seriously engage with this idea.

Is AI still doom? (Humans Need Not Apply -- 10 years later) - Cortex Podcast

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