Can AI replace Humans ?
Every millennial today feels that most of the things they learnt in school as part of ‘the syllabus’ now makes no difference in their lives.
And this problem is articulated well by a Chinese proverb, “The faintest ink is more powerful than the strongest memory.’’ Now, let’s admit it, silicon based systems (computers) are way better in storing information than any human brain (even all human brains put together :|).
So having a bunch of information sitting around in your brain is not something to be proud of. Let’s see where can we, as humans, play a role. Computers are great in complex calculations, storing information, serving millions of requests, etc. However, they have always performed poorly in human-like tasks. Tasks such as recognizing an object, making a conversation in natural language, understanding emotions etc.
Until recent times, such assumptions were true and we had a chance to be happy about ourselves. But then, we discovered few algorithms which are derived from the workings of the human brain and run on huge knowledge base across the internet. Not going to get very technical here, but you can see its power as it’s all round us. Google search is an example. Apple lovers, you know Siri already. Amazon has one of those which can detect if a strawberry is fresh just by looking at it. Alexa / Google home can understand natural language and reply. Banks use this to detect and prevent fraud. There are self driving cars built around the globe which can, as its name suggests, drive by itself. Uh oh! All our capabilities are not unique anymore.
Okay, machines can now drive, be a security guard, be a customer service agent, an assistant, a banker, a connoisseur, a manager .. and the list goes on. So, what is that we could do?
Storing raw knowledge and human-like quick decisions-making makes you no better. Machines can do this and are cheap, you, on the other hand, are expensive (with no reliability). But what machines cannot do is look at the bigger picture and strategize a plan. Machines cannot build solutions which serve humanity. Machines cannot think about strategies which will help our ecosystem sustain. And most important machines won’t be build or learn by itself.
So there are still some things we can be unique at. And that is raising our standard of work from being human and getting things done, to being human and really thinking about what needs to be done and asking machines to do it.
We can put a start to this by bidding adieu to rote learning in schools. Let children be exposed to information around them and experiment with it. Let them learn to be good human beings.
As they will be leading the machines of tomorrow.
Note: Assumptions are made till the time we don’t live in the world of Artificial General Intelligence or Singularity, which would need time, infrastructure and super-computing power to another scale.
@souvik. On behalf of team jubi.ai
