In The Age of A.I.

In this ever-growing new world, we are constantly trying to adjust and predict to what is coming next.  In this case we are adjusting to life with artificial intelligence.  For AI, what we have already achieved is likely just the beginning.  In our world that is now filled with technology, data has become the new oil.  Many people see this move towards AI as a bad thing, but would improve our lives in many ways.  

Deep learning "is a subset of machine learning where artificial neural networks, algorithms inspired by the human brain, learn from large amounts of data."  This is similar to how humans learn and improve from past outcomes/experiences.  The secret to all of this is mass amounts of data.  Forbes estimates that we generate about 2.6 quintillion bytes of data every day and this is what has led to the major growths in AI over recent years.  We are able to use deep learning to do things like deep learning to read scenes like traffic that leads to our development of smart cars.  The more AI is out being used, the more it will learn and be better developed.  It learns from experience. 

Harvard Medical School did a study comparing the accuracy of machine learning systems with human doctors when looking at scans to discover breast cancer.  Their findings showed that machine learning was 92% accurate while humans were 96% accurate, but when combined they were able to become 99.5% accurate.  This would reduce "the mistakes by almost an order of magnitude (from 40 per thousand to just 5 per thousand) and represents 56,000 fewer misread breast scans per year in the U.S. alone."  This is able to be done with an AI technology called deep learning.  

Although the U.S. was really the first to deploy AI, China has been the first to popularize the use of AI in everyday life.  AI has become the Sputnik movement of today according to the AI video.  It is the new struggle for power with the Chinese government.  Our world is realizing that we are able to overcome the limitations of our own minds with AI.  In 2017, China announced their bold new plans to advance their AI and incorporate it into everyday life.  There are now much less cashiers working in China and in certain places people are able to pay for things with facial recognition using Megvii.  They have been able to work this technology more into their lives.  For example, China has 300 times more shared bicycle riders and have 50% more mobile payments.  China has been so successful with implementing AI into their everyday lives because AI runs on data and they have collected an abundance of that using data from their citizen's lives.  China has more than 10 times the data that he U.S. has and they have set their sights on leading the world with AI by 2030.  China has already begun using a sort of social credit system that can be used with face ID to punish citizens by blacklisting them with things like travel bans when their credit score is bad.  Other punishment include "not paying fines, misbehaving on a train, standing up a taxi, or driving through a red light."

With the way that deep learning mimics the human brain, there is concern for people's jobs in the future.  It is estimated that 50% of jobs today will be threatened or terminated because of AI in the next 15 years.  Available jobs are constantly evolving with our new technologies.  There will be new jobs in the next 20 years that we could not even imagine having now.  With the integration of AI in the future, many aspects of our lives will be changed.  There will be benefits and challenges that come along with this.  Kai Fu Lee, the Taiwanese computer scientist who worked for Google and created speech recognition, is frank about the potential downsides that AI will bring.  AI is the ultimate tool for wealth creation and corporations are starting to realize this.  In the next couple of years 47% of jobs could be automated, but it is difficult to accurately predict this.  Although people assume AI will negatively affect blue collar jobs, it is the opposite.  White collar jobs are more at risk because AI's capabilities are more quantitative like these white collar jobs where as blue collar jobs still require manual labor that is more difficult for AI to do.  "AI is especially good at completing tasks that require planning, learning, reasoning, problem-solving, and predicting — most of which are skills required for white collar jobs." AI will also offer good assistance wot jobs like doctors and lawyers.  The argument that big tech presents to oppose this is that AI will take jobs, but also create new ones.  It is true that many of the jobs we had 40 years ago are gone today (ex. telephone operators), but AI is a much more severe change that is more comparable to electricity, the steam engine, or the computer revolution.  We do not have any idea what AI could really lead to in the job market and this uncertainty is concerning. 

In just the last fifteen years, the standard of living has dropped 10-15% which is a drastic shift in a negative direction.  Another time in history that there was such a drastic change was during the British Industrial Revolution where living standard declined as technology improved.  Productivity is no longer correlating with household incomes like they did in the past.  Many people blame job loss for offshoring, but really only 20% of job loss is due to offshoring.  Most of that real job loss is due to productivity growth.  "From 1979 to 2020, net productivity rose 61.8%, while the hourly pay of typical workers grew far slower—increasing only 17.5% over four decades (after adjusting for inflation)." Automation is the new substitute of capital for labor. 

It is difficult to know what will really come next.  The speed that we are making these technological advances is really unheard of and will come with many unexpected consequences.  Some of these consequences could be beneficial, but they will come with downsides.  We need to be aware of what information we are giving AI and these big tech companies.  In conclusion, we should be adaptable as to not get lost in this new world, but we should also be weary and inform ourselves what we are signing up for.