Best-selling author of The Inevitable explains why he’s optimistic about the effect of AI on jobs and why small data trumps big data.
Kevin Kelly has spent decades analyzing technology trends, resulting in a tomb of influential blogs and books, the birth of Wired, and a screen credit for his work on the Tom Cruise-fronted sci-fi film Minority Report. Most recently, Kelly authored the New York Times best-selling book The Inevitable, which forecasts the most prominent technologies likely to impact society over the next 20 years—all powered by artificial intelligence.
In your book The Inevitable, you point out how in the early days of the web, we couldn’t imagine what it would eventually become—essentially today’s platform of sharing and commerce. What do you think we might be missing about what AI will become?
That's a good question. People expect AI to be human-like. I've been stressing the fact that there are different types of thinking and the chief benefit of AI is that it does not think like humans. As an example: Birds flap their wings to fly, but to make humans fly, we had to invent a different type of flying—one that did not occur in nature. And so, similarly, through AI, we’re going to invent many new types of thinking that don't exist biologically and that are not like human thinking. Therefore, this intelligence does not replace human thinking, but augments it.
You point out that AI will accelerate the many digital disruptions we’re seeing today. Is there one in particular you think AI will accelerate the most?
The conservational interface is not only one of the first places that people are noticing AI, but it also will be heavily dependent on AI to make it work.
“Every company these days is basically in the data business and they're going to need AI to civilize and digest big data and make sense out of it—big data without AI is a big headache.”
Which AI-powered area do you think will be the most disruptive for businesses specifically?
Throughout the business world, every company these days is basically in the data business and they're going to need AI to civilize and digest big data and make sense out of it—big data without AI is a big headache.
What do you think will catalyze another wave of advancement in AI akin to what we’re seeing today from the confluence of deep learning, more compute power and big data?
The breakthrough that has not yet happened that will completely rearrange the current landscape of AI is using an extremely small dataset to train AI systems. Right now, AI requires very large training data sets to learn. And we have proof in the human toddler that we can actually have learning with very small data sets. Somebody in the future will figure out how to do that well. That will be a really huge shift, and it will be very liberating in many ways.
I think another one in the future is unsupervised learning, where the machine learns largely on its own. We're only just beginning to deal with that.
Besides those, there’s a real need for symbolic reasoning and alternative routes to intelligence that I believe are going to be necessary to make more robust AI tools. We've been exploring how far you can go with deep learning and some people think we can go all the way. That may be so, but I think deep learning is just one mechanism that needs to be used with others, much in the way that a gear or a pendulum is just one mechanism that makes a clock work.
Thinking about the future of work, you’ve said you’re confident that while AI might cause some types of jobs to go away, others will be created. Why do you think this is so?
My optimism on jobs rests in history. Things incrementally improve by 1% a year, which is almost invisible except as it accumulates and is looked at retrospectively.
In the past we have undergone huge disruptions and revolutions in livelihood, the last one being the agricultural age where farmers lost their jobs. The jobs that replaced them were unimaginable to those farmers 150 years ago—their descendants became web designers, mortgage brokers.
“My optimism on jobs rests in history. Things incrementally improve by 1% a year, which is almost invisible except as it accumulates and is looked at retrospectively.”
What is the best way to prepare people for the types of jobs that may emerge as AI becomes more pervasive in our lives?
There's no silver bullet. But it's also important to remember that this is not a technical issue. We know how to retrain people en mass. We do it with the U.S. military all the time. This is a political issue. Are we collectively willing to invest the time and money in this? The market cannot do it alone. It needs government, too.
And we should start teaching it in our schools—the essential techno-literary skills of learning how to learn, learning how to relearn, and becoming a lifelong learner.
You’ve said that at some point we'll all have personal robots. How far away do you think that is?
Well, if the definition of a robot is an autonomous humanoid-shaped mobile robot with limbs, I think we're more than 30 years from that. And it’s not so much about the AI, which I think will be much sooner—it's that it’s an engineering challenge. A human brain runs on 100 watts and the human body is a quarter horsepower. And in terms of energy efficiency, we're not even within orders of magnitude near that efficiency. The kinds of AI we're running are incredibly inefficient compared to the brain’s energy.
What do you think personal robots will look like? In the end will we demand that they look like us?
I don't think it's so much that we require that they look like us. We require that they be like us. If we want them present in our lives in that sense, they have to match us in our mobility and actions. We are still many decades away from mobile robots that behave like us.
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