Early Warnings About The Impact Of AI On Jobs And Using Facebook To Spread Fake News

A number of this week's milestones in the history of technology demonstrate society's reactions to new technologies over the years: A discussion of AI replacing and augmenting human intelligence, a warning about the abundance of misinformation on the internet, and government regulation of a mass communication platform, suppressing free speech in the name of the public interest. On February 20, 1947, Alan Turing gave a talk at the London Mathematical Society in which he declared that "what we want is a machine that can learn from experience." Anticipating today's enthusiasm about machine learning and deep learning, Turing declared that "It would be like a pupil who had learnt much from his master, but had added much more by his own work. When this happens, I feel that one is obliged to regard the machine as showing intelligence." Turing also anticipated the debate over the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs: Does it destroy jobs (automation) or does it help humans do their jobs better and do more interesting things (augmentation)? Turing speculated that digital computers will replace some of the calculation work done at the time by human computers.