As artificial intelligence develops to become even better at learning what humans can do, I think it is even more important for us humans to think about what we should do. What are the things that humans are good at, and what are the things that will eventually become things left to machines?
First, the success of AI in learning single tasks, and the greater difficulties with integrating things from a wider range of fields mean that humans will probably continue to have to be the generalists that binds together different fields of specializations to achieve an overall bigger objective. So we probably will continue to need managers with people management skills able to bring together a team of people with different talents to work on a project.
But how about specialists, people who are good at doing certain things? Well, the recent success of deep learning has shown that machines can now be trained to do certain things much much better than humans. That's because people get better at these things by doing them, and machines are able to devote a lot more time to doing this things repetitively to become better at them than humans. So machines are likely to replace cucumber sorters, since they can learn to do this offline (by training on pictures of cucumbers, which requires a lot less time than actually finding cucumbers to look at and sort), and once trained, they can be put to the actual sorting task for hours and hours without having to worry about labor laws about working hours. Compared to humans, they take less time to train, and can work for much longer hours.
However, we will probably still need specialists in which ability is not just gained by repetitive learning, but also requires some form of creativity. Although there is on-going work to teach machines creativity, based on deep learning techniques, these are still limited to training using a big dataset to try and generate something from it. It is evolutionary, not revolutionary. For that revolutionary break, we still need human creativity, and that is where humans will continue to find a niche for them to specialize in.
In short, as computer become better and better at mimicking humans, through advances in AI, humans will need to find a place for themselves. These could be as generalists, where AI is still unable to adequately mimic, or as specialists in fields requiring human creativity.
First, the success of AI in learning single tasks, and the greater difficulties with integrating things from a wider range of fields mean that humans will probably continue to have to be the generalists that binds together different fields of specializations to achieve an overall bigger objective. So we probably will continue to need managers with people management skills able to bring together a team of people with different talents to work on a project.
But how about specialists, people who are good at doing certain things? Well, the recent success of deep learning has shown that machines can now be trained to do certain things much much better than humans. That's because people get better at these things by doing them, and machines are able to devote a lot more time to doing this things repetitively to become better at them than humans. So machines are likely to replace cucumber sorters, since they can learn to do this offline (by training on pictures of cucumbers, which requires a lot less time than actually finding cucumbers to look at and sort), and once trained, they can be put to the actual sorting task for hours and hours without having to worry about labor laws about working hours. Compared to humans, they take less time to train, and can work for much longer hours.
However, we will probably still need specialists in which ability is not just gained by repetitive learning, but also requires some form of creativity. Although there is on-going work to teach machines creativity, based on deep learning techniques, these are still limited to training using a big dataset to try and generate something from it. It is evolutionary, not revolutionary. For that revolutionary break, we still need human creativity, and that is where humans will continue to find a niche for them to specialize in.
In short, as computer become better and better at mimicking humans, through advances in AI, humans will need to find a place for themselves. These could be as generalists, where AI is still unable to adequately mimic, or as specialists in fields requiring human creativity.
