I recently watched a video message on a paid forum that is run by Neil McCoy-Ward, a financial and lifestyle coach I found on YouTube. He is an interesting mix of humility and authority that I find appealing, and his advice has been personally useful to me. He is also, quite often, a futurist.
The topic of his video was the changing nature of work, and by extension society, as automation marches on. And it does march on, nearly exponentially it seems. One of the most aggressively pursued developments is that of the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI. That is AI that has a true human-like reasoning and intuitive capacity, as more or less an intellectual peer with the human mind.
Having synthetic helpmates like an AGI could be very useful as one might imagine. You could imbue the processes of the world with intelligence that performs tasks that humans might find distasteful, or perhaps fatiguing, and free up organic folks for other activities. Indeed, the search engines we use, the diagnostics of things such as our cars, and other factors are already being serviced in this way by computer algorithms less advanced than the AGI level. Beyond that, Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) could explore cogitations that our brains simply can’t process on their own, and whole new technologies and understandings could result. It could be glorious.
Of course, there is the more sinister end of that spectrum, where an AGI/ASI decides that humans are best superfluous, and decides we need to be controlled, redirected, or eliminated. Skynet, anyone?
Any intentionally malevolence aside, there is a different point to be made in the near term, and that is the transformation of work and human endeavor. The field of Machine Learning is growing explosively, and I intend on branching out, in the sad event that a computer learns my job and I find myself sidelined.