Week 10 - Future of Artificial Intelligence

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Dr. Jay Richards provided a fresh and nuanced perspective on the future landscape of society, labor, and technology in regards to the development of increasingly intelligent machine learning algorithms. Dr. Richards did not take the ever common dystopian or utopian views of the future, but rather toed the line stating that the future will be different, we need to prepare for it, but not necessarily fear the changes awaiting our lives.

Richards touched on this idea briefly -- the advancement in technology is not entirely different from the changes that we have seen in the past. Industrialization, globalization, automation, and ever advancing technology are things that have been effecting the way that people work in the developed world for the past few centuries. These advancements did not replace humans, but rather reallot some time and resources back to us to invest in novel ideas or projects. Markets are not a zero sum game; the introduction of a new service or technology is not to be equated with the absolute loss of productivity of a certain faction of people. Dr. Richards used the example of the popular rideshare service UBER emerging in Washington D.C. in 2012. The service, finding loopholes in existing regulations that were implemented at the time, replaced a cab service that was exclusive to the D.C. airport -- the catch though is that those same cab drivers did'nt lose their job, but instead started driving UBER instead. This illustrates the idea that labor markets are responsive >> people are adaptive and will follow where opportunities arise.

Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Us
Dr. Richards articulated the idea of Moravec's Paradox a few times throughout his lecture, boiling it down to the idea that some tasks that seem inherently complex, chess for example, are surprisingly easy to program into machines, but simple tasks that can be performed by children are nearly impossible to integrate into algorithms. He expanded upon this giving examples of McDonalds kiosks being able to act as cashiers with the ability to count change and take orders... certainly a task that takes mental processing for humans. Contrasting this to rudimentary tasks that are not mentally taxing like coordinated movements, we see that robots are still unable to accurately emulate the skilled navigation necessary for daily functioning. Boston Dynamics has invested innumerous amounts of funds, time, and knowledge into the development of smart machines that are capable of such functions, but when watching demos for them few would characterize the bots movements as fluid, seamless, or efficient.

In certain realms, humans will always have a distinct advantage. Though computational power is growing exponentially, and is certainly capable of doing fascinating things in fractions of the amount of time it would take an individual, it lacks the characteristics necessary to compete in the labor market with humans and their interconnected neural networks and motor cortex. Dr. Richards gave the example of a hotel cleaner, a job often viewed as unskilled labor, and how it would be nearly impossible to replace them with a machine. He also notated trade skills in this category -- painting, roofing, plumbing, etc..

Maybe a key bit of insight here is that humans may lose the race in processing power to artificial intelligence, but AI lacks the ability to create, maintain, and execute in the world. Looking around at the infrastructure around us, much of it seems impossible, much of it would be magic to people living even a century ago, but it is all here because of humans. Though a future unaffected by AI is entirely unrealistic, saying that it will replace humans is a mischaracterization. AI may change the topography of available jobs and how we interface on a day to day basis, but so have technologies within the past. It is imperative that we are adaptive, and primed for the changes that face our society; however we must face those changes rather than cowering at them and viewing them as the dismantling of life as we know it.

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