I just had a chat with a group of tech-savvy friends and realized that AI (artificial intelligence) has been progressing very fast. Alphago is probably one of the very famous examples. From what I know, AI can by itself acquire new knowledge and become more intelligent by a “deep learning” process like a human being. That’s why Alphago became more and more powerful as it went through the learning process by competing with professional players.
Further to the point, there is no doubt a computer learns much better than a human being. For instance, men can forget what they’ve learnt over time, computers don’t as everything can be well stored in a database. Conceivably, given enough time of training, AI will outperform humans in a vast number of areas.
Let’s see some news about how AI has been doing in 2017:
https://research.googleblog.com/2017/03/assisting-pathologists-in-detecting.html
Google used AI to detect cancers and is outperforming pathologists in terms of time and accuracy. There are still areas for the AI to improve though, like the current model is not yet trained to discover other abnormalities than the cancer under study. However, one can probably foresee this won’t take too long, given the increasing investment on the technology.
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/courts-using-ai-sentence-criminals-must-stop-now/
Courts across the US have been using AI technology to sentence criminals. Algorithms are used to access the level of threat of the prosecuted to the society, like the probability of committing another crime in the future. This in turn helped the court to determine how long the criminal shall be kept in prison.
Accountants are still under a great threat of being replaced by AI – not certainly saying that the whole industry will be replaced, but humans are playing a smaller and smaller role in it.
So on one hand, life is better with AI considering the convenience and timeliness of services they can render. On another one, we have to rethink about our roles as there will surely be one day machines can replace most of us in carrying out jobs – it’s just a matter of time. A friend of mine thinks that the less skilled workers will be the first to be replaced and the others will only need to be concerned about the problem later, but I see otherwise. The high salary paid to the skilled professionals probably offers the greatest incentive for companies to invest in AI development.
What would happen to society if many go jobless because of AI advancement? This could be a worrying social and economic problem we need to consider. What do you think?
