Day by day, Artificial Intelligence (AI) keeps getting more powerful, smarter, and imbedded in our daily lives. Last week I was in Amsterdam visiting the World Summit AI 2018, and got the chance to listen to fascinating companies, from Toyota to small companies, present their ideas and aims for a future with AI. Something that struck me is that in the past it has seemed as if AI was being developed to, and would, replace humans – however the speakers there focused on our future with AI not AI’s future. Emphasis was strongly placed on the fact that the aim was to train and produce AI that would not necessarily replace humans but increase safety far more for humans during their lives. As well as to allow us to focus on creative problem solving and not being swamped by the immense amount of tasks and information surrounding us on a daily basis.
This not only shows a shift away from fully replacing humans with machines – in my opinion a very positive shift – but also that the disruptive potential of AI is getting stronger. If as a consumer or employee you feel threatened by AI or deem it as not adding value to your life, you are more likely to resist its implementation. However, with this shift, more value is added to consumers and employees. For employees – and firms – it hopefully means that instead of implementing AI to merely cut costs and increase margins, AI will be implemented to reduce costs whilst boosting employee safety and productivity. For consumers, this shift will hopefully mean less information overload, by having helpful AIs handle the immense amounts of tasks and information we face on a daily basis (Accenture showed a very interesting – but still debatable due to privacy issues – solution [1]).
Nonetheless, time will show if AI truly enriches our lives, or will actually come to replace us. But I do like to think that the former will be the case; in the end the steam engine did not replace the human, it made the human more productive and efficient.
Also, on a quick end note, I can only highly recommend joining the World Summit AI whenever you get the chance to!
Endnotes
[1] Short video posted by Accenture about the solution: https://twitter.com/AccentureNL/status/1050729387182698497
Hey Jan, interesting post! AI is truly fascinating and is given a somewhat negative stamp through the media; robots replacing mankind and maybe even destroying mankind is some way. What you have highlighted here is what I believe the future of AI, since AI (or robots) cannot take over creativity of the human brains. AI should indeed be focused on efficiency/productivity, but also should focus on safety, hoping AI won’t make “human misstakes”. It would therefore be fascinating to see how this would develop!
Intriguing point of view Jan! It is good to see that they are still people that are positive about the upcoming chances with AI. What I wonder about the point that you make is what you definition is of ”fully replacing humans with machines”? As I think that machines will at some point atleast fully replace humans in the concept of labor/work. Every task that a human does that is valuable in paid work is actually composed of many different small tasks that are done in repetition. We know that with Machine Learning robots will be able to learn many different tasks and combine them to even compete more with humans in atleast the labor market. The video of Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell explains this really well (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSKi8HfcxEk). In my opinion, at some point machines will exceed us in work value and people don’t have to work anymore. At stage we should look into a concept such as universal basic income, another video of Kurzgesagt explains this as well (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl39KHS07Xc). Do you think as well that machines will completely replace us in work?