AI REVOLUTION IS HERE Pt.2

The Human Promise of the AI Revolution

Artificial intelligence will radically disrupt the world of work, but the right policy choices can make it a force for a more compassionate social contract.

Looking at this smaller data set, we have a mixed bag of economic impacts. The steam engine and electrification created more jobs than they destroyed, in part by breaking down the work of one craftsman into simpler tasks done by dozens of factory workers. But information technology (and the associated automation of factories) is often cited by economists as a prime culprit in the loss of U.S. factory jobs and widening income inequality.

The AI revolution will be of the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution—but probably larger and definitely faster. Where the steam engine only took over physical labor, AI can perform both intellectual and physical labor. And where the Industrial Revolution took centuries to spread beyond Europe and the U.S., AI applications are already being adopted simultaneously all across the world.

AI’s main advantage over humans lies in its ability to detect incredibly subtle patterns within large quantities of data and to learn from them. While a human mortgage officer will look at only a few relatively crude measures when deciding whether to grant you a loan (your credit score, income and age), an AI algorithm will learn from thousands of lesser variables (what web browser you use, how often you buy groceries, etc.). Taken alone, the predictive power of each of these is minuscule, but added together, they yield a far more accurate prediction than the most discerning people are capable of.

The Robot Revolution: Humanoid Potential | Moving Upstream

Humanoid robots are getting better at walking, talking and looking like humans. But as they continue to evolve, will us real humans want to spend time with them? And exactly how useful could they become? For this episode of Moving Upstream, WSJ’s Jason Bellini travels to Asia to meet some of the leaders in the humanoid robotics revolution.

For cognitive tasks, this ability to learn means that computers are no longer limited to simply carrying out a rote set of instructions written by humans. Instead, they can continuously learn from new data and perform better than their human programmers. For physical tasks, robots are no longer limited to repeating one set of actions (automation) but instead can chart new paths based on the visual and sensor data they take in (autonomy).

TO BE CONTINUED...