The Evaluation of AI
AI’s influence on technology is due in part because of how it impacts computing. Through AI, computers have the ability to harness massive amounts of data and use their learned intelligence to make optimal decisions and discoveries in fractions of the time that it would take humans.
AI has come a long way since 1951, when the first documented success of an AI computer program was written by Christopher Strachey, whose checkers program completed a whole game on the Ferranti Mark I computer at the University of Manchester.
Since then, AI has been used to help sequence RNA for vaccines and model human speech, technologies that rely on model- and algorithm-based machine Learning and increasingly focus on perception, reasoning and generalization. With innovations like these, AI has re-taken center stage like never before and it won’t cede the spotlight anytime soon.
How AI Will Change Work
During a lecture at Northwestern University, AI expert Kai-Fu Lee championed AI technology and its forthcoming impact while also noting its side effects and limitations. Of the former, he warned.
“The bottom 90 percent, especially the bottom 50 percent of the world in terms of income or education, will be badly hurt with job displacement … The simple question to ask is, ‘How routine is a job?’ And that is how likely [it is] a job will be replaced by AI, because AI can, within the routine task, learn to optimize itself. And the more quantitative, the more objective the job is separating things into bins, washing dishes, picking fruits and answering customer service calls_those are very much scripted tasks that are repetitive and routine in nature. In the matter of five, 10 or 15 years, they will be displaced by AI.”
In the warehouses of online giant and AI powerhouse Amazon, which buzz with more than 100,000 robots, picking and packing functions are still performed by humans — but that will change.
Lee’s opinion was echoed by Infosys president Mohit Joshi, who told the New York Times, “People are looking to achieve very big numbers. Earlier they had incremental, five to 10 percent goals in reducing their workforce. Now they’re saying, ‘Why can’t we do it with one percent of the people we have?’”
On a more upbeat note, Lee stressed that today’s AI is useless in two significant ways: it has no creativity and no capacity for compassion or love. Rather, it’s “a tool to amplify human creativity.” His solution? Those with jobs that involve repetitive or routine tasks must learn new skills so as not to be left by the wayside. Amazon even offers its employees money to train for jobs at other companies.
“One of the absolute prerequisites for AI to be successful in many [areas] is that we invest tremendously in education to retrain people for new jobs,” said Klara Nahrstedt, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and director of the school’s Coordinated Science Laboratory.
She’s concerned that’s not happening widely or often enough. Marc Gyongyosi, founder of Onetrack.AI, is even more specific.
“People need to learn about programming like they learn a new language,” he said. “And they need to do that as early as possible because it really is the future. In the future, if you don’t know coding, you don’t know programming, it’s only going to get more difficult.”
While many of those who are forced out of jobs by technology will find new ones, Vandegrift said, that won’t happen overnight. As with America’s transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy during the Industrial Revolution, which played a big role in causing the Great Depression, people eventually got back on their feet. The short-term impact, however, was massive.
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