For all its flaws, and there are many, we need Artificial Intelligence.
We need it for the same reasons we need computers. The world is growing increasingly complex, at an accelerating rate. You can’t stop it. You can’t even hope to contain it, because your competitor won’t and they will beat you.
We also face a demographic bust no one seems to be talking about. Workers are growing older. Fewer people are coming along to take our place. This is especially true for smart people, those who can be accused of education. It’s people who are accused of education who will have to manage the complexity we’re building.
They can’t do it with our present AI. The people who are saying otherwise are lying to you. Even if there is something called “Artificial General Intelligence,” we will still need people to manage it. It’s also clear there won’t be.
Instead, there will be point solutions that coordinate databases better than people do. These systems won’t be able to go outside their data, but we will need a lot of them. Which means we’ll need a lot of people to write them, and a lot of people to manage them, and to control them.
As I have said before, this is the PC revolution all over again. The one that brought prosperity to my generation.
Career Advice
The best career advice I can give young people today is to use AI, from the ground up, so you can understand what needs to be done to control AI. Be able to explain it and understand it using simple English. Adapt AI to your daily life, as millions of young people are already doing, using the tools available while constantly looking for more.
This is precisely what my generation did in the 1980s, during the PC revolution. Finding and explaining tools became my career. Because I was talking to experts, I seemed smarter than I was. I was, at least temporarily, considered an expert in a dozen different fields during my decades as a reporter, from retailing and telecommunications to education, e-commerce, and open source.
It was a great career. It would have been even better had I understood that reporting is a way station, like standup comedy. It’s a way to develop skills you can use in what you really want to do. But reporting was all I wanted to do. I rejected careers in PR, in management, in analysis, and in writing, pursuing the adrenaline hit of a byline. Had I turned anywhere on my path I could have been a whole lot of other things, but the point is that journalism was not a waste of time because I spent my life learning.
The goobers who are saying, become a plumber or a construction worker, these people are idiots. So are those who are measuring the value of a degree by the salary you earn on your first job. Education is a process, and we’ll need even more people who understand and adapt themselves to that process, to control the AIs needed to manage tomorrow’s society.
The Challenge
AI has a lot of work to do.
It is necessary to save the planet, to find and implement solutions that will reverse the fever Earth is going through.
AI is necessary to feed the world’s people, to increase our working lifespan, to bring the developed and developing world together, to fight wars and to end them.
I’m neither an AI doomsayer nor an AI optimist. The future with AI lies somewhere between those two poles. Anyone who can help AI with that work, who can train it, understand it, manage it, program it, and educate others about it, is needed. Badly.
