Present Scenario
If you are someone who works for a billion dollar company or drives a truck to make a living, you might be familiar with the next technological revolution that is taking place in the very midst of our existence.Automation. Artificial Intelligence.
From driverless vehicles to robo-advisers in finances to automation in healthcare and manufacturing. Artificial Intelligence has cracked open the vulnerabilities to millions of job that provides for our families.
What you would hear from an 'Expert'
Imagine: You lost your job to automation and you find yourself questioning the very existence of AI and pointing out all its flaws to the expert next to you.
He would recollect the memories of past and will put you in the midst of Industrial Revolution. Even you will begin to wonder if he is actually right. You would see for yourself that Industrial Revolution created more jobs than it took away from us. If you are someone who cares about the long-term progress of mankind, you would convince yourself that maybe the job you lost is a small price to pay for the prosperity of mankind.
But wait..
Before you tell your little daughter that we can't afford this house anymore...Before you decide to quit...
An Alternate Point of View
Despite all the promises and wonders of AI, the very fundamental that it is built upon is flawed. It's not like Industrial Revolution where machines created would lift things that humans never can, would lower the cost of mass production of goods and make our lives comfortable.
At its core, AI helps to decide things faster; like millions of decisions per second. It acquires its ability to decide from its previous experiences. So basically, developers feed these machines thousands of dataset before it is rolled out to production.
If you noticed, you might have figured out the problem with this approach. It is based on what happened in the past. Let me present you with
an example:
An application is developed to automate the process of admission to universities. Developers of this app fed the data of thousands of students who were selected in that university from last 50 years. Everything seemed fine because there was no accident or mishaps and so nothing caught our attention. But something was horribly going wrong beneath the surface. It took a long time before someone realized that the number of student from a particular gender or a particular race was declining.What happened was, our mistakes from the past(here racial inequality) also got automated and there was no way of knowing if things were falling apart. There was no way of getting through the heartless machine and convincing it that despite the color of my skin or my gender, I am a worthy applicant.
Your Path, if you so decide
So, here's a chance for you to stand up for yourself and fight the odds. For yourself, for your family and for the mankind. I am not talking about protesting and forming organizations to bend the knees of corporations and government. That is one approach, but that won't do us much good in long run. A little change can make a huge difference. You can choose to outperform the machines if you decide. Because faster decision is not the goal, wiser decision is. Today, machines can make good decisions faster. But you can make it better. As long as your decisions are better than machines, you have nothing to worry about. Also, you would be paid in millions if you continue doing that.
To sum it up, AI revolution is an opportunity for you and for me. Once in a lifetime, kind of opportunity.
Hope to see you around.