AI - Reflections & Perspectives

* "AI is comparable in scale to the Industrial Revolution or electricity, or even the wheel". - Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of Deep Learning

* "Treat AI assistants as a slightly-drunk knowledgeable friend" - Richard Seroter

* "No matter how valuable your skills are in the market today, they may or may not be highly valued by the market over the course of your lifetime.

With artificial intelligence (AI) threatening to devalue entire categories of human work, we need to be more purposeful in recognizing a key distinction: the market value of a set of skills is not the same as its human value. 

...the US has become a service economy. 

Many people still don’t recognize caregiving, for example — whether for the very young or very old — as a particularly skilled profession. This is mistaken. Anyone who has ever had a teacher who changed the course of their life simply by listening knows that some people develop skills that are extremely valuable and hard to acquire. How do you listen to someone’s needs even when they’re not clearly articulated? How do you help children develop confidence and joy? How do you help people find calm in a chaotic world?

As we enter an era in which the value of “hard skills” may be diminishing due to automation, the value of “soft skills” — such as empathy and communication — will rise. The future of work may lie not in competing with machines on tasks they do better, but in embracing the human touch that technology can’t replicate.

The market has historically done a terrible job telling us how vital someone’s job is to the functioning of our society. 

The market might determine the price of labor, but it doesn’t define the dignity or value of that labor. 

As the world moves into a future where technology increasingly challenges the definition of skilled work, we must remember that our worth is not determined by a paycheck, an algorithm or a label. It is defined by our shared humanity, our ability to contribute in meaningful ways, and our capacity to care for and connect with each other in a world that is constantly changing."  

- Betsey Stevenson, Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of Michigan

* Data is the new oil, but models are the refineries. Who builds the best fine-tuning and deployment tools will own the next decade.  - Greg Isenberg

* "...human imagination is the bottleneck to leveraging LLMs" - S Anand

* “...ask smart to get smart. If you want to get a better answer, you have to know how to ask a better question.” -  Sam Schillace, Microsoft CVP and Deputy CTO 

W.I.P