This week I got to watch Dr. Jay Richards talk about artificial intelligence and how it is most likely going to shape the future of the our world.
I actually really enjoyed this talk! Artificial Intelligence is something so interesting to me, I am a big fan of the idea it and what it could possibly mean for our society. Big fan of innovation. I actually got to work a little bit with machine learning for one of my research projects last year! It was very confusing and super complicated (what I was doing wasn't complicated my brain just isn't wired like that) but really interesting.
I agreed with his take that Artificial Intelligence is just another form of progress from our society needs to take. Just like what Dr. Richards said about Uber, it didn't just erase a job market, it replaced it with a new one. Similarly, it's like when we were able to cut out switchboard workers and have phone calls automatically connect to who you were trying to call. It took out a whole career but it streamlined phones and the people who were out of a job then were able to pick something up somewhere else. It really is a give-and-take sort of thing, where jobs might be made obsolete but newer ones are opened up for the taking. Advancement is natural and typical, an IPhone 50 years ago would be as incredible and impossible as artificial intelligence seems now. It's important to take these steps of progression and push humanity to create more and better. Stagnation doesn't help anyone and by continuously pushing innovation, we are able to promote growth while combating new kinds of problems.
I also really liked his explanation addressing the fear that automation would replace humans. I personally don't see that ever happening, especially is the extreme that some movies portray, and his explanation really resonated with me. His explanation of Moravec's Paradox (which I had never even heard of before this) was super interesting to hear and learn about. The idea that it is easier to train computers to accomplish more "complex" tasks than to have them accomplish "easier" tasks. For example, getting a computer to be skilled at chess, something that is labeled "complex" and "difficult", is easier than training it to have perception skills, like hand-eye coordination. Getting machines to physically move and interact like humans do, having instincts and reactions, is very difficult to achieve. This means that it is very unlikely that these machines will ever be able to actually "replace" human people, they can cut down time computing stuff and make it easier for people to achieve tasks, but there just isn't anything that can successfully replace people power, it can't replace real physical labor.
Overall, I found the talk interesting and I agreed with basically all of it. I'm not a STEM major so I don't have the strongest sense of AI and the potential it has (like I said, I tried to learn Machine Learning and that was a wreck and a half) but I am excited for what's to come! It is also reassuring hearing actual professionals be confident in that AI will be very unlikely (I won't say impossible) to take over humans completely. Artificial Intelligence is just going to be another tool to help propel us into the next major innovation and eventually humanity is going to consider AI much how they consider the Internet, something that has always been there and always will. It is really interesting to see the slow acclimation and fears of people when it comes to things like this, as though their phones, computers, and cars wouldn't blow the mind of someone mere decades ago. I don't know how far we're going to get in my lifetime but I'm excited to see how far we get and the amazing things that come out of it. It's going to generate its own sort of issues, I'm sure, but overall, I think this is a big, and necessary, step in the right direction.