Gigaom AI Minute – February 8

Transcript

I'm one of those who believes that as technology progresses, it increases human productivity, and this is always good for humans because it raises our standard of living. And I further believe that there is no way machines can take all of the jobs, because there's no such thing as all the jobs. Human desires and wants are unlimited, and therefore, as technology and automation raises us to a new baseline, people want more, and human beings figure out ways to deliver that.

Is there any limit to this? Is there anything that a machine could reasonably acquire that would cause humans to be irrelevant? One idea is that, what if a machine could read something and understand it? This has been a recent fear, and Newsweek claims that if this happens, it puts, "millions of jobs at risk." I think, however, the opposite is true. Like most of the things that happen when technology lowers the cost of something to zero or near zero, and it ends up opening up an economic opportunity.

The thesis that says this is bad is that, well, once a computer can read a manual, they can do tech support, and they'll put all of the tech support people out of work. But think, instead, of the opposite side of that coin. What if a computer could read the entire Internet and could answer any question that you would want, any series of questions? What do you think entrepreneurs would do with that? What sorts of improvements do you think we would find in forecasting, or in medicine, or in psychology, or in economics, or in anything else? Think about a world in which knowledge could be propagated without having to play search engine bingo like we do now.

When you have a computer roughly of the same ability as the computer on the Starship Enterprise, imagine what the world would be like and what a profoundly good thing it would be. I don't understand how some people think that that would cause unemployment, or that the opportunities that that would open up don't far outweigh the few and simple jobs eliminated by that technology.