How AI can save our humanity
Highlights from a 2018 TED talk by Kai-Fu Lee:
Deep learning is a technology that can take a huge amount of data within one single domain and learn to predict or decide at superhuman accuracy. For example, if we show the deep learning network a massive number of food photos, it can recognize food such as hot dog or no hot dog.
Or if we show it many pictures and videos and sensor data from driving on the highway, it can actually drive a car as well as a human being on the highway.
Deep learning has become the core in the era of AI discovery, and that's led by the US. But we're now in the era of implementation, where what really matters is execution, product quality, speed and data. And that's where China comes in. Chinese entrepreneurs, who I fund as a venture capitalist, are incredible workers, amazing work ethic.
The Chinese product quality has consistently gone up in the past decade, and that's because of a fiercely competitive environment. In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs compete in a very gentlemanly fashion, sort of like in old wars in which each side took turns to fire at each other.
But in the Chinese environment, it's truly a gladiatorial fight to the death. In such a brutal environment, entrepreneurs learn to grow very rapidly, they learn to make their products better at lightning speed, and they learn to hone their business models until they're impregnable. As a result, great Chinese products like WeChat and Weibo are arguably better than the equivalent American products from Facebook and Twitter.
And the Chinese market embraces this change and accelerated change and paradigm shifts.
Mobile payment technology is used by 700 million people to pay each other, not just merchants, so it's peer to peer, and it's almost transaction-fee-free. And it's instantaneous, and it's used everywhere. This market is large, which helps give entrepreneurs more users, more revenue, more investment, but most importantly, it gives the entrepreneurs a chance to collect a huge amount of data which becomes rocket fuel for the AI engine. So as a result, the Chinese AI companies have leaped ahead so that today, the most valuable companies in computer vision, speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation and drones are all Chinese companies.
So with the US leading the era of discovery and China leading the era of implementation, we are now in an amazing age where the dual engine of the two superpowers are working together to drive the fastest revolution in technology that we have ever seen as humans.
It will also bring immense challenges in terms of potential job replacements.
The creative jobs are the ones that are protected, because AI can optimize but not create.
What's more serious than the loss of jobs is the loss of meaning, because the work ethic in the Industrial Age has brainwashed us into thinking that work is the reason we exist, that work defined the meaning of our lives.
I was diagnosed with fourth stage lymphoma...it helped me reexamine my life. Knowing that I may only have a few months to live caused me to see how foolish it was for me to base my entire self-worth on how hard I worked and the accomplishments from hard work. My priorities were completely out of order.
I have changed my ways.
AI is taking away a lot of routine jobs, but routine jobs are not what we're about.
Humans are uniquely able to give and receive love, and that's what differentiates us from AI.
So how do we differentiate ourselves as humans in the age of AI?
As AI takes away the routine jobs, I like to think we can, we should and we must create jobs of compassion.
This graph is surely not perfect, but it points at four ways that we can work with AI. AI will come and take away the routine jobs and in due time, we will be thankful. AI will become great tools for the creatives so that scientists, artists, musicians and writers can be even more creative. AI will work with humans as analytical tools that humans can wrap their warmth around for the high-compassion jobs. And we can always differentiate ourselves with the uniquely capable jobs that are both compassionate and creative, using and leveraging our irreplaceable brains and hearts. So there you have it: a blueprint of coexistence for humans and AI.
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