Abyss Of Oblivion

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.    -N D T

When we grow up, we might not have a job-

We have no idea what the job market will look like in 2050. It is generally agreed that machine learning and robotics will change almost every line of work- from producing yoghurt to teaching yoga. In the recent past, we’ve already seen how a single biological virus can create a pandemic and caused a massacre. However, there are conflicting views about the nature of the change and its imminence. Some believe that within a mere decade or two, billions of people will become economically redundant. Others maintain that even in the long run automation will keep generating new jobs and greater prosperity for all.

So are we on the verge of a terrifying upheaval, or are such forecasts yet another example of ill-founded Luddite hysteria? It is hard to say. Fears that automation will create massive unemployment go back to the nineteenth century, and so far they have never materialized. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, for every job lost to a machine at least one new job was created, and the average standard of living has increased dramatically. Yet there are good reasons to think that this time is different, and that machine learning will be a real game-changer. 

Ironically jobs are easier to enjoy than free time because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate, and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.

Being human in the age of Artificial Intelligence-

Humans have two types of abilities- physical and cognitive. In the past, machines competed with humans mainly in raw physical abilities, while humans retained an immense edge over machines in cognition. Hence as manual jobs in agriculture and industry were automated, new service jobs emerged that required the kind of cognitive skills only humans possessed: learning and analyzing, communicating, and above all understanding human emotions. However, AI is now beginning to outperform humans in more and more of these skills, including in the understanding of human emotions. We don’t know of any third field of activity- beyond the physical and the cognitive- where humans will always retain a secure edge.

It is crucial to realize that the AI revolution is not just about computers getting faster and smarter. It is fuelled by breakthroughs in the life sciences and the social sciences as well. The better we understand biochemical mechanisms that underpin human emotions, desires, and choices, the better computers can become in analyzing human behaviour, predicting human decisions, and replacing human drivers, bankers, and lawyers. 

My opinion on AI vs Human Intelligence-

Intelligence is central to what it means to be human. Everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence

DNA passes the blueprints of life between generations. Evermore complex life forms to input information from sensors such as eyes and ears and processes the information in brains or other systems to figure out how to act and then act on the world, by outputting information to muscles, for example. At some point during our 13.8 billion years of cosmic history, something beautiful happened. This information processing got so intelligent that life forms became conscious. Our universe has now awoken, becoming aware of itself. I regard it a triumph that we, who are ourselves mere stardust, have come to such a detailed understanding of the universe in which we live.

In the last few decades research in areas such as neuroscience and behavioural economics allowed scientists to hack humans, and in particular to gain a much better understanding of how human makes decisions. It turned out that our choices of everything from food to mates result not from some mysterious free will, but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second. Vaunted ‘human intuition’ is in reality ‘pattern recognition’. Good drivers, bankers and lawyers don’t have magical intuitions about traffic, investment or negotiation- rather, by recognising recurring patterns, they spot and try to avoid careless pedestrians, inept borrowed and dishonest crooks. It also turned out that the biochemical algorithms of the human brain are far from perfect. They rely on heuristics, shortcuts and outdated circuits adapted to the African savannah rather than to the urban jungle. No wonder that even good drivers, bankers, and lawyers sometimes make stupid mistakes.

This means AI can outperform humans even in tasks that supposedly demand ‘intuition’. If you think AI needs to compete against the human soul in terms of mystical hunches- that sounds impossible. But if AI really needs to compete against neural networks in calculating probabilities and recognising patterns- that sounds far less daunting.