“What Do You Do?”
Evolves into “What Did You Do Today?”
Evolves into “What Did You Do Today?”
Titles from The AI Race on http://www.abc.net.au/tv/programs/ai-race/
For the past 19 years, I have been developing and teaching courses for undergraduate college students. One such course is titled, “Intelligent Systems” and it was taught each Fall semester to Seniors until 2011 when it was cycled to every other year and taught to a cohort of both Juniors and Seniors.
I knew the course would center around “Artificial Intelligence” and I wanted to include topics such as human intelligence, algorithms, automation, and robotics, and themes from biology like swarming, neuroscience, and later, quorum sensing, and plant communication. The term “Intelligent Systems” was a better fit for the topic and our Systems Thinking — based curriculum.
In the Fall of 2004, I received a preview copy of the seminal work, “On Intelligence” by Jeff Hawkins and immediately incorporated it into the course. This was the same semester that allowed us to examine the self-driving vehicles of the DARPA Grand Challenge, however, watching the process and results on YouTube was still a few months away. The year 2011 saw the addition of IBM Watson and its Jeopardy! win and Google’s AlphaGo introduced the game Go to the course in 2015.
Fast forward to now, the conclusion of the 2017 version. I continually tease my students that perhaps we will need to start studying conscious strong-AI, as it may be developed before the conclusion of the course. This year that jest almost turned into a prediction as we needed to add news of AlphaGo Zero, Capsule Networks from Geoffrey Hinton, Atlas from Boston Dynamics, and Toyota’s Humanoid Robot T-HR3.
But short of developing the sentient Master Algorithm as described by Prof. Pedro Domingos, my soon-graduating Seniors can expect “AI” and its associated technologies to directly impact what jobs are available and what tools are available to assist in their performance of those positions.
We typically end the course discussing what comes next, and in 2017, this discussion has been radically different from previous years. Instead of thinking and talking about the next algorithm to be used by a hot startup or mega corporation, we are talking about how the terms automation and self-driving will simultaneously destroy and create innumerable jobs and careers.
This year’s material for discussion includes a recent 2017 documentary from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation titled, “The AI Race”. Among the excellent questions about our human future posited in the program is a discussion about what humans will do for employment in our near-future augmented world. Nathan Waters, Founder of Peerism.org, provided a prescient comment —
“We have all heard that question at a party, like, ‘What do you do?’ I think in the future you’ll be asked instead, ‘What did you do today?’ or ‘What did you do this week?’ because we all think of jobs as like ‘a secure, safe, thing’, but if you work one role, one job title, one company, then you are actually setting yourself up to be more likely to be automated.”
Regardless of how much design, variability, and human touch required in your career field, Augmentation may be the sole logical alternative to Automation. Perhaps the “AI Race” is not a race among machine intelligence algorithms to win technological dominance, but a race between humans and AI for employment.
I prefer to think that we are actually witnessing the merger and evolution of humans and AI into a Hybrid-Race of “Augmented Intelligence” beings. That “Race” would be a win/win/win for humans, AI, and our mutual future.
Thoughts?