Turing trap
In plain wordsThe risk that by building AI mainly to imitate and replace people, rather than to extend what people can do, society ends up with less widely shared prosperity and weaker bargaining power for workers.
Erik Brynjolfsson's term for a situation in which technologists, business leaders and policymakers concentrate on AI that imitates and substitutes for human labor, taking the human-like performance of the Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out. as the benchmark, rather than AI that complements people by enabling new capabilities. He argues that substitution tends to depress wages and shift economic and political power from workers to the owners of technology, while complementation creates new tasks and spreads gains more widely; and that tax policy (which taxes labor more heavily than capital), managerial incentives and research benchmarks all tilt the field toward substitution. The prescribed escape is to redirect incentives toward augmentationaugmentation, n.: Using AI to help people do their work better or faster while they stay in charge, instead of having the AI do the job on its own..
Benchmarking agents only against human job performance risks walking straight into the Turing trap.
Origin
Introduced by Erik Brynjolfsson in 'The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence', in the Spring 2022 AI-themed issue of Dædalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Usage note
Critics respond that substituting and complementing technologies are hard to tell apart in advance, and that human-like general capability may be exactly what makes AI broadly useful.
Related
- augmentationaugmentation, n.: Using AI to help people do their work better or faster while they stay in charge, instead of having the AI do the job on its own.
- automationautomation, n.: Using machines or software to do work that people would otherwise do, from factory robots to programs that sort email or write reports.
- intelligence augmentationintelligence augmentation, n.: Using computers to make people smarter and more capable rather than building machines that think on their own: AI as a tool for human minds.
- Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out.
- technological unemploymenttechnological unemployment, n.: Joblessness caused by machines or software taking over work that people used to be paid for, faster than new kinds of work appear for them.
- concentration of powerconcentration of power, n.: The worry that AI will put enormous economic, political or military power in the hands of a few companies, governments or individuals, beyond the reach of ordinary checks and balances.
- human-centered AIhuman-centered AI, n.: An approach to AI that puts people's needs, abilities and control at the center: systems designed to help humans do things better rather than to replace or overrule them.
- augmentationaugmentation, n.: Using AI to help people do their work better or faster while they stay in charge, instead of having the AI do the job on its own.
Sources
- Brynjolfsson, E. (2022). The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence. Dædalus 151(2), 272–287.
Mentioned in
automationautomation, n.: Using machines or software to do work that people would otherwise do, from factory robots to programs that sort email or write reports., augmentationaugmentation, n.: Using AI to help people do their work better or faster while they stay in charge, instead of having the AI do the job on its own., centaurcentaur, n.: A human and an AI working as a team, each doing what it does best, like a chess player who consults a computer before every move. The name comes from the mythical half-human, half-horse creature., human-centered AIhuman-centered AI, n.: An approach to AI that puts people's needs, abilities and control at the center: systems designed to help humans do things better rather than to replace or overrule them., intelligence augmentationintelligence augmentation, n.: Using computers to make people smarter and more capable rather than building machines that think on their own: AI as a tool for human minds., Erik BrynjolfssonErik Brynjolfsson, prop. n.: An American economist who studies how digital technology and AI change productivity and jobs, and who warns against AI built to replace people rather than to augment them.