Since the last post, I thought I'd explain more.
Machine learning isn’t artificial intelligence, and artificial intelligence isn’t machine learning. People interchangeably misuse the two terms, which confuses people. What we’re witnessing isn’t the rise of the machines against the human race, but rather just clever algorithms developed by clever people running on powerful computational resources with abundant data.
Algorithms will change the types of jobs needed, change the way we work and live. I like the automobile analogy. When people invented cars, it might have made people on horses look obsolete at that time. People were probably freaking out about having no more horses, how fast these cars can go, how dangerous it is. (In England, when cars were first introduced, a person had to walk and hold flags a few meters ahead of a driving car to let others know there’s a car coming. True story.) But soon people realized, because of the new technology(cars), we needed to build roads, traffic lights, traffic laws, invent, make, build, sort out numerous other things, and it created “different” kind of jobs. It opened up a better life for everyone in general. And we still have horses.
In the world we live in (with cars, that is), most people in the developed world learns how to drive at some point in their lives. Even people who don’t have cars or plan to drive, they learn to drive anyways. It’s because we are well aware of the benefits that vehicles with wheels bring. Cars and its social derivatives are already parts of our society.
So I believe once this whole “AI” becomes pervasive in the developed world, more people will naturally pick up how to use some kind of AI technology in some way or another. (No, this does not mean everybody will learn to code, none of us drivers know how to build a car from scratch) But it could mean we'll learn to better understand the way "simple" things like SIRI, Google Assistant, chatbots, some statistical tools work. It requires different sets of learning and thinking.
Some parts of the world (surprisingly more than you’d think) do not have the privilege of paved roads, or public transportation systems, or abundance of passenger cars. And that part of the world is very likely to be in the same absence of the internet, computers and AI technologies.
So there’s the real challenge we’re faced with. It’s not AI making humans poker players useless. It’s not AI replacing taxis. It’s not AI replacing anything. How do we close this gap of privileges between countries, cultures, and continents? How can WE, the people with technological privileges, help bridge this gap? I'd like to see this kind of discussions more in the news outlets.
disclaimer: I've taken my blog post in Medium and revised for this post.