I have listened to a few very smart people opine on AI. Sergey Brin, for example. It’s interesting to listen to them because they truly understand computer science and the programming it takes to run an AI system. For the rest of us, we can simply take in information and cogitate about it. Most people, due to their fear, think fatalistically and then dream up policies to handle the AI revolution. An example of that is universal basic income, which might be one of the most fatalistic and pessimistic polices I have thought about.
I am pretty excited about AI and what it will do for us. Already, instead of using a search engine, I use AI. It’s designed menus for me and even gave me wine matches. I input the characteristics of one person for career advice. It’s helped me sort through random lists of wine to find the best bottles at the best price. It’s super useful. Try it yourself.
I use an AI engine to help me write. It helps with spelling, punctuation, tense, etc. Sometimes it even rearranges sentences to make them clearer. If we look further, when quantum computing becomes usable by most people, the kinds of work we will be able to do are going to be phenomenal.
Here is one thought about AI.
In the next ten years, a lot of smart programmers think that AI will be smarter than humans. Not only that, but it will be able to generate ideas like the human brain. It will be creative.
That’s scary.
When you think about the kinds of occupations that will be replaced by AI, it gets even scarier. What will we do?
If I were advising someone on what to major in when they matriculated to college, I’d tell them to major in engineering if they were proficient at math. Engineering isn’t about the major per se, but it is about organizing a lot of things so problems can be solved. Engineering is a great major to learn problem solving, and since humans will always be confronted with problems, there will always be a use for an engineer somewhere.
What about people who aren’t proficient in math?
For them, I’d start with a good classical education. The problem with that path today is that instead of teaching objective classical liberalism, they indoctrinate. If you get a good classical education, you learn to think objectively and critically. That’s always going to be a useful skill for strategy and problem-solving.
Once you have a base in critical thinking, getting a degree in business isn’t a bad idea. Getting a degree in logic, philosophy, or psychology isn’t a terrible idea either. The best CEO’s aren’t experts in one specific thing. They are great leaders, know how to motivate, and understand how businesses work, so they ask great questions.
I have taken Operations Research in both undergrad and graduate business school. I hated the class. I didn’t score particularly well. But, I know enough about it to ask good questions and then keep asking questions of the expert until I understand.
Here is another thing I thought about AI.
Once AI machines start coming to come up with ideas, how will they do it? I assume that they will research data sets and come up with an idea based on some probability of success. They will spit out the idea, and then people combined with machines/robots can act upon it.
But the key is probability. You will be able to program the AI to spit out ideas based on different probabilities. I think the thing that comes to mind for most people is that they will want guaranteed success or probability levels approaching 95% or better.
That doesn’t take you very far, very fast.
Innovation raises human standards of living. It makes us wealthier. AI will make your life a lot better if you are poor, but because of the human condition, there will always be people who are poorer than others. I remember when Rush Limbaugh used to say, “America has the richest poor people in the world.” He is right because if you are a poor person in America, your standard of living is significantly higher than a lot of people who might appear to be wealthier in other countries.
The great innovations in human history are not linear. They jump the line or draw a new line. They are counterintuitive. They generally have very low probabilities of success, which is why there is so much failure when people innovate. Peter Thiel postulated the Venn Diagram of investible ideas. You invest in stupid ideas that would be super cool if they worked.
That’s why, at least in the near term, humans will be essential components for innovation.
The notion of AI being smarter than humans is already here. There are a ton of stupid people out there. Honestly, AI has made me smarter already.
The big void and the cause of almost all bad decisions is what we don't know we don't know. AI fills that void.
AI deals with reality. In the end, stupidity is rooted in some disregard for reality. The greatest leadership characteristic is assessing and acting in accordance with reality.
[I once read a private memoir that recounted the conversation wherein Gen Geo C Marshall told FDR for the very first it would take 200 divisions to defeat the Germans and the Japs in WWII. At the time, apparently, we had fewer than 6 divisions. From that moment on, FDR would never allow GCM to leave the US for a protracted period of time and denied him the command of the Normandy invasion because he relied so desperately on Marshall's anchor in reality. GCM was FDR's brain, his tether to reality.]
Let's take a very simple, but recognizable actual problem.
Joe Biden threw the Southern border wide open and every scumbag foreign political leader sent all their detritus, flotsam, and jetsam to our country and many million illegal aliens invaded the country.
When it was clear the American public did not embrace the concept, Joe Biden said he COULDN'T FIX THE PROBLEM without Congressional action.
This Trump fellow gets elected and in the first 24 hours shuts down the border. Tight. Tightest it's been since WWII. Tight. Changes the entire foreign policy of the United States in one bloody day.
Without Congressional action.
The difference? The realities of Joe Biden v Donald Trump. Sure there was some lying going on, but they dealt with different realities.
AI will benefit mankind because it will bring reality into focus and fill the void of what we don't know we don't know in more and more decisions we make.
Critical thinking is decisionmaking driven by data, facts, evidence, and analysis. The better quality data, facts, and evidence we have, the better our analysis will be and the better our decisions will become.
AI provides us with vastly superior data, fact, and evidence and we can then make better decisions.
The revolution in data, facts, evidence, analysis, and decisionmaking AI will drive will become as ubiquitous and omnipresent as air or water. It will be invisible and pervasive. Baked into every cake.
I was in business before the invention of the personal computer and the cell phone. I've won a few bucks using a slide rule in bars. It's been a wild ride and we're still in the early innings.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
The AI TODAY is a great researcher but a lousy thinker
and even a worse phone screener,but the AGI general intelligence will have neutral pathways that can do logic and they are starting to come out now. There is one in development that will take the AIs today and manage them and are now able to interface incompatible systems so they can communicate. Until then the AI today is about as interesting as the New York Times where they get their machine learning thoughts from.