Hint: About The Future
What does the future hold?
What will the impact of artificial intelligence be on humanity, and more relevant, job seekers?
It seems like not a day goes by that doesn’t see some article, or a handful of articles about jobs lost to artificial intelligence, either with the impending smart car industry, or the erosion of jobs within the financial industry, or the increase of robotics in the manufacturing industry. If not ever, just about every sector of the economy is being impacted by AI, machine learning, and deep learning. Thought and industry leaders publish warnings. FUD – fear, uncertainty, and doubt abound. There are a handful of references at the end of this for your reference, and every day there is a new set of published articles on the subject.
Hey – FUD is nothing new. The term FUD has been around at least since the 80’s when back then, a leading technology company heavily leveraged that three-letter acronym to keep its customers within its ecosystem. The word processor works in the operating system, which works with the spreadsheet, etc. It’s been around in the press as long as I can remember. You would think by now we would be desensitized by FUD. And, quite possibly most people either are, or simply don’t care. And, the combination of these two factors mean that as automation and technology continue to integrate into our daily activities, the integration of technology and artificial intelligence will be, or has been, so subtle that it either will be, or is, fait accompli (fate complete). Doubts? Consider the health industry where we already have pace makers, images scanned for cancer by neural nets, artificial limbs that feel. This trend will only increase with time.
So, just what does the future hold?
Well, let’s start with what we think we know. First, we do know a lot about how the mind works. I’m not going into the plethora of neurological research to support this statement – it’s out there for anyone to do a Google search on. The bigger point here is, what does what we know about how our mind works tell us about us? Let’s start with a basic flight or fight reaction. This reaction is so core to who we are. How many of us live at the earth’s poles? Not many. Why? It’s cold. We tend to be attracted to comfort zones. That said, much of how we act is toward things that reinforce our existence – although we can get fooled by events at times. And this little bit of knowledge is key to how things might turn out in the future.
Consider reading something that you can relate to versus something that has either no impact to your life, or that you just don’t care about. Let’s say you are a marine biologist, and that is your passion. You would probably much rather be spending time in that endeavor than reading about the latest technologies that support kidney dialysis. Much more subtly, let’s say there are two books, one written by an AI and the other by, say, Maya Angelou. Only Maya Angelou could write “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” because of her unique experience. And many of us enjoy that book because it shares a uniquely human perspective. We can relate to the humanity within the story. Now, on the other hand, the story written by the AI may be good, but at the end of the day, it simply does not have the life experience that Maya Angelou has, and that will be reflected in the resulting story.
There is something uniquely human about the human condition. And, telling that story, in whatever form, whatever artifact that results, whether a story, music, sculpture, dance, play, whatever form, by humans, will have, by virtue of its source, will have something that relates to other humans that no machine will ever be able to produce, simply because a machine is not human. It may be a subtle difference, but it this is a self-evident truth.
What does this mean TODAY, to today’s labor force, to those working in manufacturing, finance, marketing, who fear being replaced by either a robot or AI? Great question. That is a tricky question. There are those that point to history, that say with every technical advancement more jobs have been created than were lost.
“There are many historical examples of this in weaving, says James Bessen, an economist at the Boston University School of Law. During the Industrial Revolution more and more tasks in the weaving process were automated, prompting workers to focus on the things machines could not do, such as operating a machine, and then tending multiple machines to keep them running smoothly. This caused output to grow explosively.” http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21700758-will-smarter-machines-cause-mass-unemployment-automation-and-anxiety
The counter to that is that the AI phenomena is different – and it is. So, let’s fall back to some hard evidence. First, and this is most important, current, and for the foreseeable future, the AI that is being build and used is really, really narrow. Humans are good at figuring out breadth and leveraging meaning, whereas the current AI technologies are all about pattern recognition and statistical analysis. For a very well explained primer on current AI – specific to machine and deep learning, reference Searle and the Chinese Room Argument.
Reading Searle should address any short-term AI fear. Yet, there will still be job impacts to today’s workforce. The takeaway is that, yes, change is happening. The impact is that we will learn about this change and where we can add value – which is the historical story of the labor force and human enterprise.
“But they are not good at abstractions, generalizations, cognitive reasoning. They’re not good at many things that we are so good at.” http://www.cfr.org/technology-and-science/robots-future-jobs-economic-impact-artificial-intelligence/p38475
Someone will fix the robots, understand where to point the AI to sift through the database representing “opportunities” and then how to interpret and what to do with the results. Someone will have to act as a technical consultant to the C level group that wants to move their infrastructure to the Cloud. Someone will be delivering personalized services. Someone has to conceive of, pitch, build, and distribute that next great video game as well as that next disruptive product. There is quite possibly an endless list of valuable activities that we can do for each other, and ones we haven’t even thought of.
“Focusing only on what is lost misses ‘a central economic mechanism by which automation affects the demand for labour’, notes Mr Autor: that it raises the value of the tasks that can be done only by humans. Ultimately, he says, those worried that automation will cause mass unemployment are succumbing to what economists call the ‘lump of labour’ fallacy. ‘This notion that there’s only a finite amount of work to do, and therefore that if you automate some of it there’s less for people to do, is just totally wrong,’ he says. Those sounding warnings about technological unemployment ‘basically ignore the issue of the economic response to automation’, says Mr Bessen.“ http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21700758-will-smarter-machines-cause-mass-unemployment-automation-and-anxiety
“We can’t predict what jobs will be created in the future, but it’s always been like that,” says Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University. Imagine trying to tell someone a century ago that her great-grandchildren would be video-game designers or cybersecurity specialists, he suggests. “These are jobs that nobody in the past would have predicted.” http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21700758-will-smarter-machines-cause-mass-unemployment-automation-and-anxiety
The point – armed with a little knowledge and desire, the are opportunities for the labor force looking forward.
Back to the future. As we find ourselves surrounded by artificial intelligence helping us to wake up, schedule our affairs, suggest appropriate diets based on our current biological state, etc. we will find a desire for artifacts uniquely human, whether stories, paintings, pictures, entertainment, or unique hand built cars. The more interesting question will be to see how we find this balance between AI produced goods and services and human produced goods and services in such a way as to make the balance economic. It is within that pendulum, between the economies of increasing mechanization and AI and the economies and demand for human artifacts, that we will find some interesting challenges.
Next week’s blog post will be about a specific opportunities that are a natural outcome from change. The blog will be notes for a business school lecture on opportunities for entrepreneurs – disruptive technologies.
Read the draft of Book 1: Ten @ https://sites.google.com/view/time-a-trilogy/
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References:
Google Deep Learning system diagnoses cancer better than a pathologist with unlimited time
https://9to5google.com/2017/03/03/google-deep-learning-cancer-diagnosis/
https://medium.com/@randieri/introduction-to-deep-learning-on-social-networks-how-to-learn-even-more-about-your-personal-life-cd1da6d67770#.k5j254jcm
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/analytics/artificial-intelligence/overview.html?cid=sem43700015621551538&intel_term=artificial+intelligence&gclid=Cj0KEQiAuonGBRCaotXoycysvIMBEiQAcxV0nEtlwz421NoEsodynK-kYzI2OtELr5SXq5kvo2QJLp8aAuu38P8HAQ&gclsrc=aw.ds
“AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs, Pew Research Center” http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/06/future-of-jobs/
“What’s AI, and what’s not” https://gcn.com/articles/2017/03/10/defining-ai.aspx
“Searle and the Chinese Room Argument” http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/searle_chinese_room/searle_chinese_room.php
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/robotics/artificial-intelligence/what-ai-experts-say-the-technology-will-do-to-jobs
http://www.cfr.org/technology-and-science/robots-future-jobs-economic-impact-artificial-intelligence/p38475
“Robots Will Steal Our Jobs, But They’ll Give Us New Ones”https://www.wired.com/2015/08/robots-will-steal-jobs-theyll-give-us-new-ones/
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/538401/who-will-own-the-robots/
http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/searle_chinese_room/searle_chinese_room.php
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21700758-will-smarter-machines-cause-mass-unemployment-automation-and-anxiety
