Steering AI Beyond Automation
One of the most fundamental questions for the field of AI today is: to what extent is the project of AI purely about automating human labor?

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Key points
- By Gabriel Unger and Arvind Narayanan.
- The dominant Silicon Valley program for AI right now, with both industry and academic faces, answers: “almost entirely.”1 There is an implicit technological determinism: that AI has a deep internal logic that favors automation.
- In this essay, we briefly discuss what is at stake here, the history of this debate in CS, the status of this debate today in economics and elsewhere, and the automation agenda in the culture and curricula of CS in the university.
- Designing AI for true collaboration requires solving a very different set of technical problems than today’s models and agents, problems that are often ignored, or not even understood to be problems.
Sources (1)
- [1]Steering AI Beyond AutomationAI Snake Oil · Oct 14, 07:56 PM
One of the most fundamental questions for the field of AI today is: to what extent is the project of AI purely about automating human labor?
By Gabriel Unger and Arvind Narayanan.
Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.
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