We are all scared that machines will take our jobs.
I was at an exhibition at the De Young Museum last year — the Cult of the Machine.
A little iPad in the corner asked me, “what do you do for a living?”I typed, “partnerships”. It did not compute. I retyped, “sales”.
Bip, bip. “There is a 14% chance you will be replaced by a machine.”
Software engineers, as it turns out, are more prone — 42%.
It made me feel less bad about myself (suck it, computer scientists!) — but also realized how this little iPad made me vulnerable, less valuable, replaceable.
We are ultimately scared that AI will replace us, that it will replace our humanity.
By understanding what AI can and cannot do — I no longer feel threatened by AI. AI is a friend, not foe. AI is there, so that we can enhance our humanity. Do things that make us more human.
Caring for your family. Exploring other parts of the world and understand how other cultures live. Leaving a legacy behind for the next generation.
Imagine ensuring the safety of your family with a lock that unlocks only for people you know. Imagine sharing stories with a new local friend, who you just met on your backpacking trip through South East Asia, with your phone as a translator. Imagine if disasters can be detected earlier if we watch out for warning signs, no one has to lose their home ever again.
This is magic — made possible by AI.
At YML, our Innovation team saw the light too. Actively experimenting and publishing findings since 2016, we have built models that make expressing your ideas and thoughts easier by predicting the next word as you write.
We have even proven that patience does pay off.
So when the Google TensorFlow Lite team reached out and wanted to partner with YML to make machine learning more accessible — there was only one answer.
With the Google TFlite team, we built examples and documentation, so other developers may benefit from our experimentation and as a result, reduced the time they may need to deploy a solution to solve a human problem.
Our own experimentation in machine learning paid off.
Machines give us room to expand our human minds. It gives the mind much needed oxygen to birth a creative solution to a human problem.
Because if a machine with no consciousness (topic for another day) can do your job, wouldn’t you want to work on something more impactful and fundamentally worthy of your humanity?
Improving and evolving (albeit with help from our AI friends) — what is more human than that?
Originally published at https://ymedialabs.com on May 22, 2019.
